“No,” said Fable. And she opened the trap.
“Fable, wait!” said Evie, a moment too late.
Someone screamed. The whole crowd leapt back, and a woman toward the front tripped over her own legs and fell. Old Jim threw his hands over his face as a blue blur exploded out of the opening and careened over the rooftops until it vanished into the trees beyond.
“You wanted to know what crazy looks like?” Old Jim barked. “That!”
“I was right,” said Fable. “She went home.”
“If all that miniature monster wanted was to be home,” growled Old Jim, “then what was she doing way out here in the first place?”
Fable had no answer.
Mr. Zervos helped the fallen woman to her feet, and all around them faces looked visibly shaken.
“Brazen,” somebody said.
“You think that thing caused the paper fire, too?” another voice mused.
“Not big enough to be the one left those marks on the stable,” added a third.
“What about the broken pots in my garden?”
Fable tried to ignore them. Her brow crinkled. Smashed drills, frightened horses, burned-up buildings—admittedly, there were plenty of creatures in the wood capable of this kind of mayhem, but there was no way that one little pixie was the cause. The poor thing couldn’t even open a window.
“You’ve got your grumpy face on,” said Cole. “What are you thinking about?”
“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “So, there might be some creatures from my forest running amok. What I can’t figure out is why.”
TWENTY-ONE
Kallra was gone. Her reflecting pool sat still and empty, disturbed only by the occasional gentle wind. The queen stood over it anyway, her cloak brushing the soft grass at the water’s edge. She gazed into the glistening pool, wishing for answers she knew it would not surrender.
She closed her eyes. In her mind, the Grandmother Tree came crashing to earth for the hundredth time, and with it came those spiteful words: She does nothing.
She did not mean to think about it, but it was like a hand brushing over a scar. It was as if she had allowed a piece of herself to be lopped off. And she had done nothing.
A piercing buzz broke the stillness of the morning and drew the queen away from the glittering waters and her own thoughts. She brushed aside the curtain of leaves and emerged back into the thick of the Wild Wood.
Not far off, a cloud of angry pixies swarmed a grumbling bogle. He was a grubby thing, his hair coarse and thin, his hide a blotchy gray. He didn’t even bother batting the pixies away as he went about plucking toadstools from their ring one by one and stuffing them into a tattered sack on his side. The pixies screamed and bombarded the creature with scratches and kicks and bites, none of which fazed the bogle.
“What do you think you are doing?” said the queen. The bogle glanced up, unimpressed.
“They wasn’t eating them,” he grunted, gesturing at the screaming figures around his head.
“You know perfectly well that fairy circles denote sacred ground. Step out of that ring at once and return their property.”
For several long seconds, the bogle just stared at the queen, scowling, his eyes half-lidded but sharp. She found something in his expression disquieting. For a fraction of a second, his gaze flickered upward, and then back to the queen. She looked up. On a tree branch hanging over them perched a single pale brown spriggan. The figure watched in stony silence through narrowed eyes. She noted the tiny pouch hanging from the creature’s neck—a war satchel. Her shoulders tensed.
The last thing she needed with spriggans literally hanging over her head and humans pushing their limits on all sides was a drawn-out conflict between forest factions.
The bogle watched her expression through keen, beady eyes as circling pixies screeched. The queen felt the blood rush to her face. She was being tested. Here, in her own forest, she was being tested by a grubby little bogle!
She arched an eyebrow. It was an expression that had cowed far more dangerous beasts in the past. She held her breath. If the bogle did not relent, she did not want to think about what she would need to do to him to regain the fear and respect she had once held over the Wild Wood. As if coming to this thought himself, the bogle finally took two very slow, deliberate steps out of the ring and turned his filthy bag upside down. The toadstools landed in the grass with a quiet plut-plut-plut. He did this without taking his eyes off of the queen, and then he gave her an exaggerated bow.
The queen breathed.
“Wise choice,” said a voice from behind them both.
With a flash of red cardinal feathers, a familiar weathered top hat peeked out of the ferns, followed by an even more weathered face.
“Thief King. You have been spending an awful lot of time away from Hollowcliff of late.”
“Just keepin’ a weathered eye on things, Yer Majesty.”
“Are you? Then tell me,” said the queen, “what exactly is happening in my forest? Something has changed. I don’t like it.”
“Cogs are turnin’,” Nudd said. “Big ones.”
“Your weathered eye leaves a lot to be desired.”
Nudd shrugged. “My goblins is on hand ta help turn the tides if need be,” he said.
“If you want to be helpful, then you could try to talk them”—she gestured up at the spriggan still perched above them—“out of getting everyone overexcited and inciting an all-out war.”
“I dinna think so,” said Nudd. “That sorta politicking isn’a really goblin style.”
The queen rolled her eyes. “Won’t commit to a side. Won’t broker peace. How exactly do you expect your horde to turn the tides? By standing back and watching the flood?”
“Doin’ an important thing doesn’a always mean bendin’ a whole forest ta yer will,” Nudd said. “We canna all be Witchies o’ the Wood. Sometimes a small thing just
