“I wanted you to see the full expanse of our world,” Hyacinth said when I looked expectantly at him. “It was not always so. The kingdom was once prosperous, in harmony with the land around it. After the queen’s death, though, the king ordered the thorns grown around the river and cut it off from the kingdom within.”

I looked down to see the guard towers dotting the length of the river. They looked long abandoned, just as the villages had been, their turrets overgrown with thorns and black ivy. In the river itself swam something enormous and sinister, its fins billowing out of the dark water.

“You are the lost prince,” I said, turning to him.

His eyes had a faraway look now as he stared at the castle. “Over time, I have grown up with the faeries, and each year I spend with them, I become more like them.”

“Do the thorns keep you away from the castle?”

“The thorns and the river,” he replied sadly. “That is what I need your help with. There is an old sword so sharp that it can cut away the thorns around the castle. This sword can only be found in an estate”—here he paused to point out a house in a crescent-shaped clearing in the woods—“where a great ogre lives. He wears nothing but black, so he blends into the shadows, and if he finds you stealing his sword, he will slay you where you stand.”

I looked at him in horror. “An ogre?” I asked. “You expect me to get past such a creature?”

“You survived the Queen of the Night, didn’t you?” Hyacinth looked at me with his glowing eyes. “I have tried to reach the sword before, but the ogre has a particular nose for those of us from within the Kingdom of Back. He can smell the wind and night on me. You, though, are from another world, and he cannot recognize the scent of that world on you.”

I turned my attention back to the house in the clearing. Ivy draped its walls, while a puff of smoke floated lazily up from the home’s chimney. Not a single light glowed from the windows. I tried to imagine what the ogre would look like when he turned his eyes down toward me.

“We have a bargain,” Hyacinth said to me as he tilted his head. “Can I trust you?”

I nodded. “I will do it.”

He smiled at me warmly. As he did, a breeze picked up, combing its delicate fingers through my hair before it turned to blow in the direction of the ogre’s home.

“The west wind will carry you there,” he said to me. “The ogre sleeps very soundly, and if you keep your wits about you, you will find the sword without waking him and return on the wind’s back before he is any wiser.”

I tucked my nightgown tightly under my legs as the wind blew harder, the breeze turning into a gust until it finally lifted me from the clouds. I wanted to cry out, but all I could do was look back once at Hyacinth before the wind bore me away from the sky and swept me downward across the nightscape.

The ogre’s house was so quiet that the wind dropping me in the silver clearing sounded deafening to my ears. I crept toward the entrance, my heart pounding. The door itself was slightly ajar, as if the ogre knew that there was no one in the kingdom who would dare steal from him. Still, I stood there, unable for a moment to will myself to do it. What if I went in and never returned? Why would Hyacinth trust me with such a task?

But then I remembered the warmth of his smile, the promise between us. If I completed this task, I would have only one more to finish my end of the bargain. It would bring me that much closer to Hyacinth fulfilling my wish.

The world around me seemed to surge in response to my battling thoughts. I turned sideways, barely slipping through the open door, and disappeared into the shadows inside the house.

The home was a wreck. Broken things littered the lower floor: the seat of a large stool; the shattered porcelain from a former cup; an enormous table missing half of one leg, as if it had been chopped clean off. Cobwebs draped the inside of the fireplace, the wood in it layered with dust. A half-eaten loaf of hard bread sat on the kitchen counter. Even a rat had decided the bread was not worth taking, a few half-hearted nibbles visible on the edge of the crust.

There was no sword to be seen anywhere.

A gentle snore from the upper floor sent a tremor through me. I hurried into the shadows by the stairs before looking up. The steps were each twice as tall as the ones I knew in our home along the Getreidegasse, their middles sagging as if used to bearing a great weight. I waited until the snores were even. Then I climbed up the steps, one at a time.

They led into a bedchamber strewn with old clothes, open drawers, and discarded armor.

I could hardly see anything in the darkness, except for a shapeless mass lying in the enormous canopy bed, obscured behind translucent black drapes. From inside it came the snores, each so loud that it seemed to rattle the floorboards.

The sword. I looked at each discarded piece of armor on the ground. A breastplate, covered in old grime. A dented armguard, a shield emblazoned with a magnificent burning sun on its rusted surface. A forgotten belt, the scabbard at its side empty.

What if Hyacinth was wrong, and there was no sword here at all?

A particularly loud snore made me jump and whirl to face the bed. The figure behind its drapes stirred, rolling onto its side with a sigh that sounded half-labored, half-mournful, a sound full of tears. The creature was enormous, a fearsome shadow in the night that blocked out the moon.

As it moved, something metal glinted in the dim light. It was the sword, its hilt in the ogre’s massive clutches, steel still sharp enough to cut a line in the bed’s sheets.

The ogre suddenly gasped, and I ducked to the floor, certain he’d awakened and seen me crouching here. He asked a question I couldn’t understand, then continued muttering to himself without waiting for an answer.

A dream. As he shifted again, he let out another strangled gasp and sighed.

“I’ve searched for years,” he muttered this time, and in his voice was a song of mourning, the ache for summer when winter has already settled in. “Where are you?”

Hyacinth had been afraid of this ogre, and so was I, but even monsters must dream of fears and wants, and the sadness in his voice drew me closer. Now I could see the faint outline of his face in the night. What I’d imagined as the jutting jaw and ivory fangs of a beast, I now saw was a thick beard, aged and unkempt.

“Where are you?” he repeated.

Something told me I should answer, so I did. “Here,” I whispered.

He stilled, then turned his closed eyes toward the window, in my direction. I froze. “I heard you,” he said, wonder seeping into his voice. His lips, hidden beneath that hard beard, tilted into a hopeful smile. “There you are! Are you near the trees?”

I crept silently around his bed until I was on his other side. “Yes, near the tree line,” I answered.