A peddler had come to breakfast at the inn when Estienne and Thomas went downstairs in the morning. He was a wood-elf, pale-haired and pale-eyed, tall and filthy with mud-stains on his green leather jerkin, and blood stains on his striped linen trews. He looked haughtily down his high-bridged nose at the two young travellers and sniffed.

'Want adventure?'

'If it pays,' Estienne said with a shrug. ‘We have nowhere particular to be. Lay us out your terms.’

'This might pay. Adventure often does. Though what, I can't say. You have heard of my liege, Lord Hart?'

Thomas hid his mirth in his ale-mug.

Estienne's eyes sparkled. 'Oh no, no - we're not storming the castle and making off with his daughter.’ He laughed. 'How many have tried, after all? She's incarcerated behind a thicket of thorns a mile wide, so the tale runs.'

The elf grimaced, one eyebrow raised in disbelief. 'Oh, come now. Have you seen a thicket of thorns a mile wide?'

'No.' Estienne snorted into his ale and came up spluttering. 'So, what's this adventure?'

The elf swept an arm majestically round the room. 'Chop down the thorns and rescue the lady,' he said. His eyebrow climbed higher, this time in amusement, as the frosty silence became deafening.

Estienne was first to speak. He cleared his throat, took a sip of ale, and set his mug down. No longer did his eyes sparkle; now, they glinted dangerously. Thomas' heart thumped.

'Do you mock me?' Estienne said. His fist clenched on the bar.

The elf leaned forward. 'I asked you if you'd seen the thorns,' he said, his tone as deadly quiet as Estienne's. 'I did not say they were not there.’

The silence stretched taut between them again, and Thomas felt as if he could have drawn his knife and cut the air with it. Dust motes danced gold in the shaft of sunlight slanting through the high window, and the inn's patchwork cat rose, stretched, and settled back to sleep. Thomas held his breath.

Finally, the elf broke the tension, and sat back and laughed.

'I can show you if it's adventure you want,' he said. 'But one thing won is always one thing lost to regain the balance. Your lives, I can't answer for. I can only show you the way.'

'Typically cryptic, and unhelpful of the fey,' Estienne grumbled. 'If this is a trap of Lord Hart's...'

'No trap,' said the elf. 'Only...an adventure. An opportunity. Who know what may be won?' He looked thoughtfully over the rim of his mug at Thomas, his eyes deep and knowing.

Thomas refused to squirm, though the urge to do so was strong. He drained his mug and set it down with a decisive click.

'Count me in,' he said.

The elf smiled.

'You're braver than you look. And maybe you'll succeed where others have failed,' he said. He narrowed his eyes at Thomas. 'Where are you from?'

'The Northlands,' Thomas answered. He matched the elf stare for stare. 'Caer Goch, on the borders of Elmet. Is that enough information for you, or do you wish to know the colour of my brigs as well?'

The elf shrugged, breaking their eye contact and turning to Estienne. 'Touchy, isn't he? How did a highborn knight end up with a prickly boy like this?'

'Your name, sir: you must give it to us,' said Estienne stiffly. Thomas threw him a grateful look. He'd been wondering the same thing himself, feeling his temper beginning to rise at the elf's supercilious attitude. The words a highborn knight niggled at him. Did this fey nuisance mean Estienne?

'I am Henwyn.’ The elf began rummaging through a battered leather satchel. ‘A traveller, an adventurer, a peddler, a…well, a wanderer among dreams, you might say. I don’t think you have a word for it in your clunky, dust-strewn tongue.’

He drew out a barley loaf and tore a chunk off it, handing half to Thomas and half to Estienne, ignoring the landlord's indignant growl at the consumption of food not bought from him.

'You charge too much,' Henwyn told him bluntly. He stowed the remainder of the loaf back in the bag and stalked out of the inn, leaving the two young men staring in bewilderment at their rations.

Thomas shoved his down his shirt.

'Might need it later,' he said with a shrug, at Estienne’s incredulous look.

'You think? I doubt we'll need any food ever again if we go with that madman! You're out of your mind, Tom.'

Thomas rolled his eyes, his lips curving upwards in a smile. Something wild was prowling through him, padding silently through the closed-off silent places of his soul and sniffing in the nooks and crannies and making him want to throw his head back and howl at the wind. A wild beast, about to break free.

'You don't have to come,' he said. 'Follow whatever path you wish but don't turn me from mine.'

He drained the last of his ale and slapped the tankard back on the counter. Here, here was his chance. He inclined his head to Estienne and went out of the inn after the elf.

A little ahead of him in the road, Henwyn turned. A gust of wind crested the rise and blew a skirl of last winter's gorse around his ankles as he tapped his staff on the ground. A breath of strange mists reached Thomas' nostrils, and he fancied he could hear the harps of the Otherworld in that wind.

He started forward.

'I have no intention of coming back,' he muttered, and strode up the path towards the elf, barely aware of Estienne behind him with a strange look in his eyes.

They walked for what seemed years, the mists swirling up around them to shroud them in a cloak of silvery green. Thomas did not know if his feet touched the ground, and if they did, he did not know in which land that cold earth lay.

A dream, no more. I will wake, and I will be back in Sir Josce's tent trying to avoid Estienne. A dream. Nothing more.

He reached out for Estienne.

'Are you there?'

'Here, Tom,' came the herald's voice. 'Right behind you. And I still think you're insane. Perhaps I am, too.’

Thomas gripped a handful of soft wool, Estienne's cloak. Dewdrops clung to it, mist-drops of diamond and pearl. He knew about such things, though he did not know how, and took one, carefully sliding it from his finger into his pouch.

And then they stepped out of the mist onto a plain of golden grass, jewelled here and there with the ruby poppies and sapphire cornflowers common to all cornfields. In the distance, white towers glittered in the sun, pennants of grass green silk fluttering and snapping in the wind. And beyond that was the White Sea, though it was not white, but a deep azure speckled with silver.

Henwyn appeared from the mists, bloodied to his knees.

'So, you see beauty, do you, in the distance? Look closer to where you are.'

Thomas looked down.

'I've seen blood before,' he said, fighting the bile that rose in his throat. His feet were slick and red, the blood clotting brown on the surface, still sticky and bright below. He raised his knee.

'And I've seen bones before.'

'Yet your eyes say you have never seen such horror. What do you think of my fair land, boy?’

Thomas wrenched his gaze away from the ground and stared at the castle on the horizon.

Henwyn smiled a slow, wicked smile.

'You're on your own,' he said. 'I cannot help you on this quest. And neither can your friend, for he doesn't have the same kind of mind you do.'

Thomas looked round. There was no sign of Estienne. 'Where is he?'

'I sent him back to your land.'

He didn't want to come anyway. I knew from the first I would go alone. At least he’s out of my way now. I knew he was fickle. Fickle and false.

But his heart told him something different. He looked in despair at his feet.

‘Yes,’ Henwyn said, his eyes on the sky, ‘he’d be nothing but a hindrance to you. Rest assured, I have something else for him to do.’