After Wendell Bambleby’s injury, Emily Wilde feels that Hrafnsvik has become a different place. Villagers begin visiting the cottage constantly with food, help, and stories about the Hidden Ones, leaving Emily little time to write or revisit Poe’s spring. Emily assumes this kindness comes from pity, but Wendell tells her that Auður has forgiven her because Emily finally allowed Auður to help. Wendell argues that Emily offended Auður not only by ignoring local authority, but by refusing hospitality itself, and that accepting kindness has changed how the village responds to her.

With villagers now speaking freely, Emily rapidly gathers more useful information than she had managed in all her earlier work. She learns that Ljosland’s common fae resemble those elsewhere in Europe in many respects: mortals leave them offerings, bargains with them are dangerous, and they accept gifts such as food, mirrors, and singing boxes. The major difference is that these fae do not dwell within households. Emily contrasts them with Ljosland’s courtly fae, who are far more elusive and distinct.

Emily records that the courtly fae move with the snows, haunt the mountains and frozen wilderness, love music and winter balls, and can overwhelm mortals with their songs. They prey especially on young lovers, leaving victims alive but emotionally emptied. Auður is the only surviving victim in Hrafnsvik, but several other local youths have been taken in recent winters and later found wandering or freezing to death after being drawn back into the winter night. From this pattern, Emily concludes that these “tall ones” are being drawn to Hrafnsvik with unusual frequency, a serious change from older village tradition, which treated such abductions as much rarer events.

Emily then turns to local folklore and records several tales. In “The Woodcutter and His Cat,” a man rejects and kills a faerie cat that was secretly protecting him, only to lose that protection against the tall ones. In “The Tree’s Bones,” a whaler helps prevent the release of a mad faerie king imprisoned in a white tree. In “The Ivory Tree,” a beautiful girl is lured into cutting a white faerie tree, goes mad, kills the man she loves, and is hunted down. Emily notes that villagers believe the white tree in the latter two stories is the same one and that some elders think it still stands in the Karrðarskogur.

When Thora offers directions to this possible white tree, Emily immediately decides she wants to find and photograph it for her encyclopaedia. Wendell objects and assumes, correctly, that Emily means to take him along. Emily ignores his complaints, leaves him at the cottage to work on their abstract, and dismisses his laziness and theatrics about the cold, already focused on the next stage of her research.