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is to know, I suppose, miss. The three Teague boys, all of them were changelings, now, weren’t they? Beautiful babes their mother had each time, and then the jealous fairies stole them, and look what she got in their stead—them barrel-faced boys thumping andclumping around, no sense in ’em. Changelings, every one.”
    So instead of Isabelle telling stories to the girl—Hen, she said her name was, not short for anything, just Hen—the girl told stories to Isabelle, and in this way they walked for another hour, before Hen noticed that the sky was beginning to darken.
    “It won’t do to keep traveling, miss,” she said, moving off the path and crouching beside a tree, hands on her knees. “Dark falls fast in these woods.”
    Isabelle hadn’t thought about night coming on. In the same way that she hadn’t worried about food until she got hungry, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would need to sleep until nighttime crept into view. She guessed it made sense that she would, but how do you sleep if you don’t have a bed? No sleeping bag? No pillow, no blanket, not the thinnest of quilts to come between you and the ground? And, come to think of it, no ceiling to come between you and the clouds?
    Hen seemed to sense Isabelle’s concern. “Not toworry, miss. I’ll make us a comfortable sleeping spot. I’m not good at much, but I’m good at setting up camp. If you’ll help me gather a thing or two before evening comes, we’ll get a good night’s sleep, save the witch don’t get us.”
    They entered the woods through a thin stand of trees. Hen told Isabelle to gather leaves while she went in search of vines and fallen branches. “You’ll need more than that, miss, if you want to have a good night,” Hen had chided her the first time Isabelle appeared with her arms only half full. Isabelle dumped the leaves where Hen told her to and went back for more. Soon there was a hump-backed mound at the edge of the woods. “We’ll make us a bed fit for queens out of that, miss,” Hen said, and Isabelle felt oddly pleased.
    While Isabelle collected more leaves, Hen built a lean-to out of sticks and vines against the trunk of a chestnut tree. She showed Isabelle how to pull live branches from young maples and sycamores, leaves still firmly attached, and lay them on top of the lean-to to make a roof. “It’ll be snug in there, you’llsee, miss,” Hen assured her. “And them leaves will make a good, green blanket.”
    Only a thin strip of light still lay on the horizon. “We should get water from the creek before we eat our bread rather than after,” Hen said. “In five minutes, there’ll be no light left for us to find our way back to camp.”
    Isabelle marveled at the girl. That Hen! So practical! So full of good ideas! She followed Hen to the creek and dipped her hands into the cold water. She gulped it greedily. How long had they walked? She’d been on the path at least two hours before meeting Hen, and they’d walked a good two hours after that. Four hours of walking. Isabelle smiled. Not bad for a girl who routinely got a cramp in her side after one lap around the track in PE.
    The bread they ate for dinner tasted twice as delicious as it had at lunch. “I guess we should save some for morning, shouldn’t we?” Isabelle asked regretfully. She could have eaten her portion and Hen’s and four more loaves besides.
    “I’d say so, miss,” Hen replied, sweeping thecrumbs from her lap. “I don’t know how far we are from the camps, but the journey will seem twice as long if we don’t start off with a bit of something to eat.”
    “Hen?” Isabelle leaned toward the girl. “Would it surprise you to know I don’t know what the camps are—or why the camps are?”
    Hen smiled a rueful smile. “It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t know
where
the camps are, that’s the truth of it.”
    Isabelle lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. “I’m not from here, Hen, and that’s the truth of it