“Fine, fine,” I said, impatient. “How do we kill it?”
Asther flashed me a grin. “The hard part is getting it to manifest. Once it knows we’re here, it will try to play games with us. Not fun games, you understand.” He jammed the blade of his glaive into the earth and made a gesture with his hands, outlining a sphere in the air. “Say this is its sphere of influence. That’s how far it can project a glamor into our world. As we get closer to Broken Glass Rock, we’ll need to check continuously to make sure reality still makes sense.”
“Remember your checks?” my dad asked me.
“Count my fingers. Touch each fingertip together. Trace the lines on my palm,” I recited. We had gone over it all back at the cottage. Inside a fairy’s glamour, you couldn’t trust your own senses, but they couldn’t get everything right. Details were off. Patterns jumped and wavered.
“Good girl,” said Asther. “As soon as we’re in its glamour, we need to find it. Get it to take a shape, manifest. The only way to kill it is with iron, but first we need something to aim at.”
I nodded. So did my father. Standing next to him, I felt a rush of excitement. This was how things were supposed to be. Me and him, on the hunt together. After this hunt was over, I would try to convince him to take up the Sentinel life again — I was old enough now that he didn’t have to look after me all the time. Maybe he would even let me travel with Asther for a few weeks, so I could get a taste of the Sentinel life on my own. This was it, I thought. My chance to grow up the way I wanted.
“Are you ready?” asked my uncle. “Let’s go kill a fairy.”
They say a frog will sit in a pot of water as it’s heated, unaware of the danger until it boils alive. That was how I noticed the strangeness around me, by degrees, each tiny oddity insignificant even though I was on alert for oddities. There was a change in the wind. A small animal, probably a mouse, ran across our path. A bird called from behind us, although it was unusual for songbirds to be active so late in the evening. Later, I would learn things about the archfey of Hallowing Hill that might have saved my father and uncle from their fates, if only we had known them at the start of the hunt: of its age, which was ancient even by the standards of the Folk; of its apocalyptic boredom; and most importantly of its skill with glamour. The archfey enjoyed the art of subtlety, luring in its prey by pretending to be less powerful than it was. We crossed the valley farmstead looking for signs of glamour when we were already well within its reach. Maybe we had been all along.
I don’t like the idea that it was watching as we prepared for the hunt, as my uncle arrived, as he and my father talked about me in the study under the loft, but I think it was.
I think it saw everything.
