Hazel blinked at him. She’d been so good at shutting out memories she didn’t like, so good at locking them away. None of what he said should have surprised her; they were only facts about her life, after all. But she found herself surprised anyway. All that stuff was so long ago that she’d felt like it didn’t matter anymore. “My parents are fine now. They grew up. They got better at stuff.”

He nodded. “I know. I just also know you always think it’s down to you to fix things, but it doesn’t have to be. Some people are trustworthy.”

“I was going to save Fairfold.”

“You can’t save a place. Sometimes you can’t even save a person.”

“Can you save yourself?” Hazel asked. It felt important, as though his answer would be the answer, as though somehow he might really know.

He shrugged. “We’ve all got to try, right?”

“So do you believe me? That I like you?” she asked. But he didn’t get to answer.

Ben strode into the room triumphantly, holding a book up in the air. “I found it. I found it! I am a genius! A memory genius. I am like one of those people who count cards in Vegas!”

Hazel stood up. “Ainsel?”

He nodded. “And by the way, Hazel, this was in your room.”

She recognized it with alarm. The spine read, FOLKLORE OF ENGLAND. It was the book she’d found in the trunk underneath her bed. Had she not understood its significance?

Her brother flipped it open. “There’s this story from Northumberland about a little kid who won’t go to bed. His mother tells him that if he stays up, the faeries are going to come and take him away. He doesn’t believe her, so he keeps on playing anyway as the hearth fire burns down. In time, a faerie does show up, a pretty little faerie kid who wants to play with him. The boy asks the faerie’s name, and she says, “Ainsel.” Then she asks the boy’s name and he says “my ainsel” with a wicked grin.

“So they play a little more, and the boy tries to get the fire going. He stokes it, but one of the dying embers rolls out and burns the faerie child’s toe. She howls like crazy, and the huge, scary faerie mother barrels down the chimney. The boy hops into bed, but he can still hear the faerie mother demanding her child name the one who burned her. ‘My ainsel! My ainsel!’ the faerie girl howls. Apparently, ‘my ainsel’ is what ‘my own self’ sounds like when said with a Northumbrian accent, so hearing that, the faerie mother becomes very stern. ‘Well, then,’ she says, grabbing the faerie child by the ear and dragging her up into the chimney, ‘you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.’ And that’s the whole story. Ainsel. My ainsel. My own self.” Ben bowed exaggeratedly.

“But what does that mean?” Jack asked.

Myself. My own self.

“Give me a pen,” Hazel said, in a voice that trembled only slightly. She opened the book to a blank page in the back.

Ben got a Sharpie out of the kitchen junk drawer and handed it over. “What’s wrong?”

Taking the marker in her right hand, she wrote seven years to pay your debts. Then, switching hands, she wrote the words with her left.

It was the same handwriting she’d seen on the walnut messages, the same handwriting that had marked AINSEL on her wall. For a long moment, Hazel just stared at the page in front of her. The word scratched in mud on her wall wasn’t the name of a conspirator or enemy. It was a signature. Her own.

There was no one else. No shadowy figure pulling the strings, leaving clues, guiding her hand. Just herself, discovering the way to open the casket, figuring out the value of the sword she had. Just herself, realizing what the Alderking intended to do to Fairfold and trying to stop it.

My Ainsel. My own self.

A coded message, because the Alderking had forbidden her from revealing the nature of their bargain to her daylight self, so all she’d been able to do was leave a few desperate riddles and hints.

She recalled what Severin had said about being woken. He’d heard her voice, but by the time I came awake—truly awake—the sky was bright and you were gone. Of course she’d been gone; she’d had to rush to her bed and become day Hazel. She must have barely made it there—not with enough time to even clean the mud off her feet. Panicking, writing on the wall, dumping a book into the newly empty trunk. She’d smashed the case with some plan in mind, some idea of bargaining with Severin or returning his sword to him. Whatever she’d intended, when he hadn’t woken, she must have realized that her ownership of Heartsworn would be discovered.

So she’d hidden it somewhere no one would think to look, someplace where the Alderking couldn’t find it, even if he found her.

And then—well, Hazel had stayed up through the whole next night, following Ben into the woods and being menaced by Severin. She’d slept for only a few moments, near dawn. Only long enough for her night self to write the note that Hazel had found in her book bag: Full moon overhead; better go straight to bed.

But Hazel hadn’t obeyed. She’d stayed awake throughout a whole other evening, giving night Hazel no time to retrieve the sword, no time for an alternate plan, no time for anything.

The first note—the one in the walnut, the one she found at Lucky’s—might have been her night self’s test, to see if she could send a message to her day self without being caught by the Alderking. And the next one would have been at the height of her panic, when she wasn’t sure whether she was about to be discovered and wouldn’t want to leave anything incriminating in case one of the Folk saw it. She wouldn’t want to give her day self so many clues that she’d put herself in danger without knowing all of the story, either.

What a mess she’d made of things.

Severin came down the stairs, holding a spear-like thing he’d made from saw blades and a wooden shaft of a rake. “Someone’s outside,” he said.

Hazel went to the window and saw them circling the house. Knights on faerie steeds, Jack’s mother behind one of them in a green-and-gold gown that swirled through the air. Eolanthe swung down from the horse, striding toward the house.

“Mom,” Jack said, and went to the door, throwing it open.

“Wait,” called Hazel. “She doesn’t have it.”

But Ben had already scattered the salt and berries with his foot so that the faerie woman could step inside. Her eyes were silver and her hair was the green of new grass. She looked toward Severin and her smile turned frosty.

“I thought I might find you here,” she said.

He made a small, courtly bow. “My lady Eolanthe. To what do we owe this pleasure? Those are the king’s guards with you and I do not hold favor with the king.”

“You must understand,” she said, turning toward Jack, who was standing, frozen, his hand still on the doorknob. “When I told him where his son was, he promised to spare mine. He has guaranteed your safety. Jack, you don’t know what this means.”

Hazel already suspected they’d been wrong, grievously wrong, about Eolanthe having Heartsworn. Now she realized they’d also been wrong about her loyalties. They’d been wrong about everything.

“How could you do this?” Jack spat out the words. He was shaking all over, as though he was going to shake apart. “How could you call yourself my mother and bargain away my friends’ lives?”