Unable to sleep after finishing Wendell’s cloak, Emily keeps watch in the cottage and realizes their refuge is likely within reach of Wendell’s stepmother. She concludes the urgent problem is not only future assassins but Wendell’s poison, since his condition threatens their ability to find the nexus or challenge the queen. Before dawn, she prepares to leave quietly with Shadow, hesitates at the door after sensing something outside, and waits for daylight.

At dawn, Emily finds a new, deeper gash slashed into the cottage door, and the outer knob is unnervingly warm, as if someone has just let go of it. Despite fear, she goes to the misty spring by the lake and calls in the favour owed by the fox faeries whose lives Wendell spared. One fox faerie emerges, irritated at being woken; Emily insists on her debt and shows the bone “key” pendant Poe once gave her, asking for a path out of these lands.

The fox faerie leads Emily and Shadow through a faerie door into a snowy, glacier-filled place with small houses, then onward along a shifting route that compresses distance and direction. Following the fox faerie while holding the bone key out “like a lantern,” Emily abruptly arrives at the familiar spring in the Kyrrðarskogur of Ljosland. She reunites with Poe, who is thriving in the beautiful aspen tree Wendell enchanted for him, and she writes a quick letter for Lilja and Margret, leaving it under a stone at Poe’s spring.

While Poe chatters about guests and improvements to his home, Emily questions him about the key and learns the unsettling truth: the bone key is Poe’s own door, taken down and folded up, and it functions only through the winterlands and borderlands where Faerie mingles with the mortal world. Poe confirms that common Folk know more about inter-realm doors than the high ones, and he becomes frightened when Emily notes he did not fully share this knowledge with Wendell.

Emily explains that Wendell is gravely ill and asks for help—not a cure for high fae poison, but relief or strength. Poe, believing Wendell wants Poe as fjolskylda, eagerly bakes triangular cakes meant to ease many ailments. Emily also asks Poe to discreetly question visiting wanderers and gossipy Folk for news of Wendell’s court; Poe promises to do so and gives Emily three leaves as proof of his tree’s health. Emily wakes the fox faerie, and through a confusing sequence of glacier paths and doors, she returns to the lake below the cottage in St. Liesl with the cakes—while the fox faerie vanishes from sight.