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aback by this answer from the Bear. Wait, the footsteps. The giggle. But who could command—? “The prince of the Summerwood, did he arrange such?”
    “ Whuff. ”
    “And this is our meal?”
    At another soft whuff from the Bear, Camille grinned and said, “Well, then, let us eat. I am starving.”
    “ WHUFF! ” agreed the Bear, loudly.
    Camille plucked the spit from the fire and gingerly—“ Ow, ow ”—pulled the rabbits from the wooden skewer. She held one out for the Bear, and with a great crackling and crunching, he ate it bones and all. Then he sat and watched longingly as Camille daintily ate of hers.
    It was delicious.
    But she could only eat one hind leg and a fore, and she gave the rest to the Bear, and snap, crunch, it was gone.
    She washed her face and hands in the rill running down, and scrubbed her teeth with a chew-stick, and then took to her bedroll, where she was lulled toward sleep by the ripple of water and the chirruping of small things nearby. But then she remembered the Bear’s implied warning that in Faery were monsters dire and other hazards herein, and this momentarily startled her back awake. But then she recalled Lisette’s words: As for things of peril, Camille will have the Bear for protection, and a finer guardian none could want. The last thing she remembered seeing was the great black Bear standing ward.
     
    The next morning tendrils of a misty fog wreathed among the trees as Camille stepped down to the spring-fed mere, and though the water was chill, she doffed her clothes and parted the reeds and slipped into the limpid pool, gasping at the bite of the water.
    Saving her precious soap for her hair, she scrubbed her skin with sand from the bottom. As she did so, again she heard the patter of tiny feet and the sound of a faint giggle. “Allo! Bonjour! Who is there?” she called, unable to see aught for the reeds. Once more came a giggle, and then the sound of wee feet running away.
    Camille sighed. If the Bear is correct, ’tis small Sprites you hear, ma fille.
    Working swiftly, soon she had scrubbed herself clean and had washed her golden tresses. As she clambered out through the reeds and into the chill morning air— Oh, no. How will I dry myself? —she found a soft cloth for a towel lying next to her clothing, and looked up to see the black Bear ambling away.
    And when she returned to the campfire, she found waiting a mug of hot tea and a meal of cold biscuits. They, too, were delicious.
     
    Her hair, though combed, was still wet when once more Camille mounted up, and the Bear headed through the forest again. As they padded onward, she could hear rustlings in the surround. In the morning light, Camille looked left and right, fore and aft, seeking to see what made the swash and swish among the undergrowth. Perhaps it’s whoever set the fire and spitted the rabbits last night, and who made the tea in the morn, and who may have been watching me bathe. Camille blushed at this last, yet she continued to search among the bracken and tall grass and the boles of the trees, where wisps of the morning mist yet threaded the greenery here and there. Finally, down within the early shadows, she thought she detected movement, for she caught glimpses of somethings or someones, small beings, perhaps, passing through the woods, though the sightings were so brief she could not be certain.
    The morning light waxed, and the sun shone aglance through the branches of the trees and down, and though it was daylight where trod the Bear, the distant twilight yet clung to the forest afar.
    Now Camille was certain she saw small beings keeping pace, for now and again one would pass through a shaft of sunlight, and it seemed they were riding small animals of some sort, lynxes she thought, though she was not certain.
    Onward went the Bear and onward she rode, yet scanning the surround; and then she gasped, for in the near distance and passing among the trees and keeping pace on a parallel track was a