Snowpepper was growing exhausted. She felt as though she’d been flying forever and she longed for a safe place to rest. Ever since they’d left Quickfoot, it seemed there was danger everywhere. She didn’t want to be alone with Sylvie anymore. She felt dreadfully lost and bereft. She began to moan softly to herself as she flew aimlessly about, perfectly at a loss. Her moans intensified until she cried out involuntarily, “Please, I need a place to rest. I’m tired, and I’m lonely, I want somebody to talk to, somebody to trust, somebody who will make me safe, oh, somebody to help me…” The words came straight from her heart’s desire, and they felt potent, like spells.

Sylvie heard Snowpepper’s plaintive wails with a sharp pang of hurt. Why wasn’t she enough? Couldn’t Snowpepper talk to her? Didn’t she trust her? Then, like an icy needle of guilt freezing her mind, she admitted to herself, I’m not being honest with her, and she must sense that somehow. She felt horrible about herself beyond belief. She wished she could vanish from the faerie’s head and magick herself back to the city, on the streets where she deserved to be, begging for scraps from strangers.

She felt so awful that she hardly noticed when Snowpepper abruptly veered off the aimless path she had been pursuing. She didn’t even want to look out there anymore. Her attention stayed focused within, on her own misery.

Snowpepper had spotted a stone cabin on a tiny knoll. It was a snug-looking place, tidy, if a bit odd-looking. A flagstone walk led from the front door and meandered through a riotous yet well-tended vegetable garden to a strange, rickety-looking gate made of assorted odd-shaped pieces of wood, shell and what appeared to be bone, tied tightly together with bits of coloured rags and scraps of twine.

This cozy dwelling drew Snowpepper to it like a magnet draws iron. Her heart swelled and lifted, and her flight straightened and gained strength. There she would go. It felt right, it was right, she knew it the way she knew up from down. She forgot, for the moment, that Sylvie existed.

She landed outside the gate, feeling it would be rude to alight within the garden. As she approached the gate to open it, a sleepy-looking eye opened directly below the latch and blinked at her. The orb was large and brown-irised, with thick bristly lashes and yellowish whites.

“Oh, hello,” she said shyly. “I’m lost and tired and all alone and please, may I come in?”

As Sylvie heard the faerie speak these words, she suddenly awoke to what was happening. Oh no! That brainless nutbar faerie was about to blunder into another trap! Would she never learn? Snowpepper, what are you doing? she shrieked in her mind.

You be quiet now, Sylvie, the faerie shot back with surprising sharpness. I know what I’m doing–I do! Just please don’t bother me now, okay?

Taken aback by her tone, Sylvie curled up into a tight ball in the back of Snowpepper’s mind. She was useless, horrible, a burden. She didn’t know why she was allowed to live anyway, even this abbreviated, impotent half-life in the back of a faerie’s ditzy mind. Despair yawned like a void, ready to swallow her, and she would give herself to it if she could.

A faint, morbid curiosity kept her going. She wanted to know what form their doom would take. She peered out now and then without paying too much attention. She only wanted to know what the monster looked like and when it was going to eat them. Of course there would be a monster, there had to be a monster. It was only a question of when.

The gate blinked again and yawned, revealed a wet red mouth full of gleaming snaggle teeth.

“Oh, another one, is it?” it spoke drowsily in a creaky but kindly voice. “Sorry, dearie, you caught me napping. Well, there’s no point waiting, is there? Go on in.”

“Thank you ever so much, I can’t tell you what this means to me, I’ve been at my wit’s end,” Snowpepper began. “It’s so kind of you to let me in without even knowing anything about me! I’ve been lost for so long and I was just really getting desperate, you know?” She might have continued, but the gate interrupted her.

“That’s clear, or you wouldn’t be here, would you?” it said. “Thanks are well and good, and you’re welcome of course, but dear me, child, what are you waiting for? I’d like to get back to my nap. Save your thanks for herself, and run along now.”

“Oh… of course! Sorry.”

Snowpepper lifted the latch and slipped through the gate. As she did so, the gate said in a confidential tone, “Oopsie, dear, I almost forgot to say. Do be very careful to stay on the path. We wouldn’t want to lose you, now, would we?”

“I will,” Snowpepper said. She stepped onto the stone flags and drifted down the walk, in a daze of happiness. Everything was so beautiful, so perfectly right! As she passed, the flowers and plants in the garden nodded and smiled at her sociably, but kept their fronds to themselves, which she greatly appreciated.

“Ooh, look” she heard a whisper, “It’s a new one! Isn’t she adorable, the witch will love her…”

Sylvie would have made a face, if she’d had one. So that was it. The foolish, trusting faerie had led them right to a wicked witch’s cabin, who would doubtless turn them into a toad or a newt and boil them up in her cauldron to make her witch’s brew. She couldn’t muster the energy to care much at this point, though. One dire fate seemed to her as good as another.

Snowpepper paid no attention. She had never felt more assured of the rightness of her choice. She knew what she knew. She had asked for help, and there could be no question that this was the help that had manifested in response to her plea. Sylvie couldn’t be expected to understand, of course; she was only an othersider. It was as though she had discovered a sense organ her otherside self lacked, and the information she received through this sense was unimpeachable.

As she approached the door, she felt lighter and lighter until she was no longer walking but floating along with her toes brushing the flagstones of the walkway. Her arms spread wide as she grew closer, as if to embrace the cabin and its contents. She wanted to sing! To shout with joy! But her heart was too full. Once at the door she waited, breathing deeply, expectantly. Her eyes shone with a radiance that might have made Sylvie wonder, if she could have seen.

But she couldn’t. Sylvie waited like prey for a predator in the back of a cave.

The cabin door was made of many overlapping and interwoven pieces of different colours and grains of wood, fused together in a random yet beautiful and perfectly balanced way. It was oval in shape, like an egg. The cabin itself was made of flagstones very like those in the walkway, with grasses and tiny wildflowers sprouting between the stones. There was a round clear bubble of a window in the door and several others, like glass blisters, randomly located on the cabin’s walls. The walls curved oddly, rippling slightly at the base like a seashell, appearing to have grown rather than been built with a plan or design in mind.

The roof was sod, an extension of the garden, with the same varieties of flowers and vegetables, squashes and tomatoes and lettuces growing in rampant profusion yet without crowding. Each plant had room to spread and receive nourishment. The vegetables were at varying stages of bright-coloured ripeness, while the flowers were all in perfect bloom. It was a picture of serene harmony within chaos.

Snowpepper gazed raptly about her as she waited for the door to open, as she knew it must. Shortly, it began to slide silently to the left, into the stone wall.

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