As Emily and Wendell travel deeper into the frozen mountains after Lilja and Margret, Emily swings between scholarly excitement and fear that they may already be too late. Wendell insists they are not caught in a trap, only crossing a vast, brutal wilderness. At camp he uses magic to raise protective hedges and trees against the wind, while Emily notices how deeply he misses his own home. At the same time, Emily keeps the shadow-ring enchantment on her hand hidden, terrified that Wendell will notice it and unable to speak openly about it.

When Emily leaves camp alone, a grey light and bell-like music warn her that faeries are near. She recognizes the attackers as bogles, ravenous common fae of a cruel and animal-like sort, and resists their enchantment by gripping metal. Emily's scholarly curiosity briefly competes with her danger, but that ends when one bogle seizes her neck and tries to bite her. Emily uses a Word of Power that grants temporary invisibility, but because the spell is short-lived and the bogles keep closing in, she calls for Wendell.

Wendell appears at once and kills the bogle holding Emily. After he sees the mark on Emily's neck, his anger becomes something far more feral. He summons a monstrous thorned tree from the snow, pins the bogles on its branches, and tears them apart one by one with cold, methodical brutality. The spectacle horrifies Emily, not only because of the violence itself, but because Wendell seems fully inhuman while doing it. When he leaves to clean himself, Emily walks alone for some time, shaken and sickened.

During that walk, Emily forces herself to think clearly about why she was so disturbed. She concludes that the real problem is that she still has not fully accepted Wendell as one of the Folk, despite everything she knows. When she returns to camp, Wendell is outwardly calm again and admits he feared he had frightened her. He apologizes for losing his temper, and Emily, though still unsettled, tells him he does not need to apologize for protecting her.

Wendell then says he has already begun making amends by altering Emily's clothing with magic. Emily is outraged to discover that he has transformed her jumper into a finer, more flattering garment, and her irritation partly replaces her fear. In the middle of this argument, Wendell casually reveals a crucial fact about his past: he was once crowned a faerie king, but only for a single day before an assassination attempt, after which his stepmother drove him into exile in the mortal world. He falls asleep after mentioning he also remade Emily's other cloak, leaving Emily with a sharper understanding of both his power and his history.