"And why did you bring her, then?"

"Called first into the gateway, she was! It couldn't be helped. Fate chose her."

"Rosey posey, she's got pretty skin. I'd like such skin, smooth and fair."

"Perhaps she'll give it to you--"

"Perhaps I'll take it from her."

"And her tiny sweet teeth, then! See them?"

"Human teeth."

"Lovely, lovely human teeth it is. String them round your neck for luck, for dancing."

"Hush now, both. You'll not touch this one. She's not for your deciding, then."

Emery heard the voices as she began to surface from an under-watery sleepiness, but even with her eyes open, she saw no one, nothing, just a sort of deep gray mistiness left to right, up to down. She flung her hands to her eyes and rubbed, but nothing changed. Thinking she'd gone blind, the girl began to panic, felt about and found herself sitting on a hard earthen floor.

"Don't fret, pretty," spoke one of the voices, so near that Emery startled and scooted backward.

"You haven't lost sight," said a slightly deeper though still rather pinched voice. "You see what we want you to see."

"What is this?" Emery asked, finding her words. "Where am I?"

A buzzing sounded at her right ear, followed by a thin drawl: "It was you who stepped into the ring, foolish soft one."

Something poked her bare neck, and Emery flung her hands up to cover herself. She hated being unable to see. These creatures, whatever they were, seemed malevolent or mischievous or both, and she was afraid. "C-can you send me back? Please I--I'm sorry for stepping into your mushrooms. I promise I won't do it again."

"Hear that, then? She's promising." This voice was, if Emery had to guess, female--or, at least, it sounded more feminine than the other two she'd so far distinguished, though all three were higher in pitch than a human voice.

The deepest voice replied, "You haven't anything to fear. We won't harm you."

"Yet . . ." said the mid-range, drawling voice.

"Oh, please please! Might I have one tooth? Or some of her soft hair? A fine nest it would make--"

"Quiet! Enough of your chittering." A fourth voice entered the fray, quite different from the other three. It was almost human in sound, though it seemed genderless, and there was a sort of regal quality to it, though Emery couldn't figure out why, exactly. Though everything remained gray mist, undulating rhythmically, and Emery saw nothing otherwise, she felt the presence of this fourth being drawing near to her. "She's meant to be here, and we're meant to leave her be. If you so much as touch her again, I'll have your throat out."

The authority of this fourth voice frightened Emery, even though it apparently wanted to protect her. She sat and waited for them to act, to speak, to give some indication of why she was there, the whole while her eyes staring blindly into the gray, wondering what these beings looked like and where she was.

After a tense moment, the authoritative voice sounded again: "We will speak, and then they will return," it said, and Emery assumed its words were meant for her because abruptly, all four of them were gone. She knew it without needing her vision. How long they'd take, she didn't know. They'd given no indication. Minutes? Hours? God forbid, days? What was she supposed to do while she waited? She was hungry and confused and blind—and she just wanted to be back with Cullen, trying to get out of the forest. He'd saved her so often . . . Could he do it, this time? She wasn't so sure. She didn't even know if she was still in the forest.

Putting her hands out, Emery felt a wall on one side, earthen, like the floor, and leaning a bit the other way, she reached wall there, as well. Above, if she rose up on her knees, she felt the ceiling. So she was likely in a cave of some sort, or underground at least. Forward and backward were a little more risky; if she scooted too far in either direction and the floor dropped out, she'd be in trouble. There was also the risk of moving too far into some open space and losing her way. But Emery's fears were unfounded—the entire space was enclosed, which she quickly realized with a bit more exploration. It was as if she were trapped in a bubble in the earth; there were no openings anywhere. She wasn't even sure how she could breathe, but of course, none of what was happening made any sort of logical sense. If she were dealing with faeries, it surely wouldn't.

Panic set in as impossible-to-measure moments ticked by. Her lack of sight became the least of her worries. What if those creatures had just left her and didn't intend to return? They'd said they would, but what if they didn't? She'd be stuck in this chamber, no way to escape except perhaps to try to dig her way out, and surely she'd go crazy before she managed to do that. Cullen would never find her here, either. She could be absolutely anywhere. Emery began to take deep breaths, to count slowly to ten, in order to calm her rising frenzy. Her mind was chaotic, but she did her best to still it, recalling all those moments in her false past where Neve and Deirdre, her sisters, had talked her into doing meditating. She tried not to think about what she would do if the faeries never returned . . . told herself of course they would.

And they did, though not before Emery had begun to try to claw at the ceiling (fortunately, she hadn't been at it long, or her nails would've been torn to shreds; the walls were hard as stone). They said nothing to announce their presence, but Emery again felt that they had returned, and relief rushed through her, though she no more trusted them now than she had at first. She was just happy not to be alone. She also knew, though, that the fourth one--the one that had seemed concerned for her safety--was not amongst them. "Please let me go," Emery begged, sitting up again, staring unseeingly at them. "Please."

"Please, please! If you please, as we please!" whined the maybe-feminine one, nearer Emery than the girl had known she was. "Pleased to please you, knock-a-knees!"

Emery shook her head, confused. Hadn't Oonagh told her about someone who'd encountered the fae folk and gone mad, who'd run off to eat grass in the fields with the cattle? Was that her fate, as well? Madness?

"No touching!" chimed the lowest of the three voices. This one had seemed somewhat rational, if Emery remembered properly. She turned her face in its direction. "Human," it said to her, "we are to free you."

"Oh, thank you!" Emery hadn't felt such gratitude in all her life and to beings that probably didn't even deserve her thanks.

"To the hall of trinkets. Hall, hall, hall--the crystal wall. Oh, but--just a toe? No one need know; a pretty little pearl it's sure to be! Pluck and hang it on a willow tree?"

"A toe for your throat, then? Is it?" the middling, drawling voice interjected, and Emery pulled her feet under her body.

"Stop it, the pair of you!"

Some grumbling ensued, during which Emery debated whether she should try to say or do anything, but she ultimately kept silent and still, zeroing in instead on the sudden change in atmosphere; she no longer felt the closeness of the earthen walls, though she dared not reach out to see if they were still there. Instead, a sort of airiness replaced it, a freshness against her skin as if she actually were in a cavernous space and not a hole in the ground. Sounds reached her ears, as well--running water, somewhere in the distance, perhaps falling into itself. And strange echoes of banal though unidentifiable noises, the noises of large open spaces, not confined chambers.

And then, without warning, Emery's eyes cleared; the gray mists pulled to the side as curtains, and she found herself at the top of a stairway carved out of the side of a rock wall. Behind her was nothing other than the wall, no door, no other room, nothing. But around her was a vast open area, a huge, underground space, lit with something that resembled sunlight and yet couldn't possibly be. Far across the way, in the wall opposite her but about level with her height, a stream of water poured out of the mouth of a huge, dark hole and fell hundreds of feet into a deep aquamarine pool below. The left and right walls of the cavern were equidistant from where she sat and were shrouded in shadow. Green and blue and white mosses grew everywhere, across the walls, the ceiling, the ground, sprouting vines and sheets of tiny flowers, which hung in great beards from above. Teeny specks of light, much like those that had enveloped her in the forest faerie ring, blinked on and off as they slowly moved through the open air like starry dust. The whole place was a terrestrial cosmos, lush and twinkling and spectral.

But what intrigued Emery more than the space itself was what lay below, on the ground. Everywhere on the floor of the cave--absolutely covering everything--were piles and piles of items. It was no ordinary treasure hoard; there were no mountains of gold and gemstones. There was instead an incalculable amount of both ordinary and obscure objects amassed and displayed. From her perch at the top of the stairs, Emery had a difficult time making out the smaller artifacts, but she saw weapons, for sure, some clearly made for giants; and there were massive stones, colorful and carved and arranged in various geometrical shapes; exotic plants in cages and looms with half-sewn tapestries and mounds of fabric, shimmery and gold. There were wooden logs and sheets of what resembled iridescent glass, enormous doors right off some castle, no doubt, and rolls of animal furs and so, so many more things, like sculptures and pottery and occult objects and mirrors. Artifacts of varying smaller sizes, nestled in and out of the larger items, glittered and reflected the little pinpricks of light blinking everywhere.

As interesting as it all was, Emery was confused as to its purpose. The beings that had been speaking to her and around her were, as far as she could see, nowhere to be found. And here she was in a massive cave full of stuff, no obvious place to go except down. So, rising, she began the precarious descent, being careful to remain as close to the cave wall as possible, as the rock-carved stairs were slick.

There must have been hundreds of them, too--stairs. Emery didn't count, but she had to be careful not to look too far ahead of herself or she grew dizzy. Down, down, thoughts spiraling, the girl went on until she couldn't go any farther and stood firmly on the cavern floor. What should she do from there, though?

"A parting gift, for the lady," drawled the thin voice so near her ear that Emery spun about, only to find no one and nothing around her.

"Calm it down!" chirruped the female. "It might hurt itself!"

"I'm--I'm sorry," Emery stuttered. "I can't see you."

"We're seen when we want to be seen," the protracted voice added, still near enough to send chills down her neck. Were these things invisible? Or were they very tiny? She couldn't tell.

"Any gift," added the deepest of the three voices. "Choose your gift, and you may go."

"Be choosy in the choosing or your heart you'll go a'losing! A tooth I'll have if wrong you be--"

"You will not!"

"Please!" Emery cried, confused at all that they were saying. "You--you want me to choose something? From all of this? Is that right?"

"Yes choose, choose!"

Emery was most disturbed by the highest of the three voices, the one that seemed a little too interested in her teeth and toes and whose strange rhyming and excitability were an odd contrast to the other two more sedate voices. She looked out at all the artifacts in front of her. "Is there a wrong answer? Is there a way to choose wrong? She said--"

"I," the highest voice insisted. "I says wrong answer trades for a bit of hair."

"There is no wrong," the lowest one said firmly, somewhat to the front left of Emery, though she saw nothing. "Only most right."

Emery sighed. "Ok, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'll see what catches my eye." She stepped forward, out into the hall of objects and away from the strange voices, hoping they didn't intend to follow her. There were so, so many things there; Emery didn't know what on earth to select. She also didn't know what "most right" meant but assumed it was some sort of faerie trickery. If she wanted to get out of this place, she'd better choose well, not just grab a random object and hope.

So she wandered, and she waited for something to speak to her, to cause her to want it. Quickly enough, Emery was able to exclude anything too big to carry out of the forest, but while that helped a little, there were still thousands of objects to look through. Pretty crystals and egg shells, diadems and pearls, golden torques and dresses so intricately embroidered that they shone as if with dewy spider webs. There were items that must've been from other parts of the world, as well--Roman busts and books, Viking helmets and Grecian urns. Emery wandered through all of it mindfully at first, then quite mindlessly. There were myriad lovely and intriguing items, but none spoke to her. None drew her in.

Until, as she approached a barrel full of swords and arrows and sabers, a particularly long, slender item stood out. Its handle was as long as a broomstick-and-a-half and made of the richest, shiniest red wood. Its tip was gleaming silver, as if it'd never seen a battle. "That," she said after studying the weapon for a moment. "He got one and saved me with it; now I can have one, too and maybe start saving myself from time to time."

"Touch--touch!" came the excitable voice, startling Emery, as she'd almost forgotten the fae folk might be watching her.

Emery opened her lips to ask something but figured she should just listen to the voice and reached a hand toward the polished shaft, beginning to shake a little as she did so, as if something momentous might come from touching it. And indeed, the moment Emery's fingertips brushed the wood, her fingers slid forward to grasp it, the bright spearhead was engulfed in a languorous, fluttering blue flame, an ethereal, otherworldly fire. But Emery had little time to consider this development, as a hand again began to pull at her insides, this time so fast that before she could even identify the familiar sensation, she was being turned inside out and found herself standing above ground, the day-bright forest stretching in all directions around her.

The girl blinked her eyes several times, shook a little, and turned her head this way and that; no one was in sight. Looking down, she saw that she was standing in the ring of black mushrooms, but the fungi were crumpled and withered, and she was able to step out of the trap quite easily. A momentary disappointment filled Emery as she realized Cullen must have left, but before she could think much on it, she recalled that her right hand was wrapped around the beautiful spear, and gazing up at it in wonder, she saw that it kept its soft flame, hovering around the spearhead a good three feet above her. Even holding the weapon gave her courage.

A footfall sounded from behind, and Emery turned to see a white stag slowly approaching her, stepping gingerly over roots and around the moss draping from above. Its antlers were absolutely enormous, probably as tall as she was. In all its majesty, the deer was familiar, and when it reached her, Emery stood gazing into its glistening black eyes. "I know you," she said, recalling a time not so long ago in another world. The stag tipped its head in deference. Emery watched it, then asked, "Will you help me?" And, as the animal bent down onto his front knees, the girl gently climbed onto his back, and the stag moved off through the blue-green and golden shades of the forest.