Emily tries repeatedly to write after a harrowing day, beginning with a quiet morning in the cottage as she tends Shadow’s stiff joints and notes that Professor Rose is healing, while Wendell sleeps excessively and seems increasingly affected by poison. Emily, Wendell, Rose, and Ariadne hike back to the Grünesauge to continue searching for Danielle de Grey’s missing faerie door and the rumored nexus, despite Wendell doubting they will find anything there.

They search the forest and then follow an unfamiliar scree trail where Wendell tests a door embedded in the path, finding only abandoned brownie houses. Soon they discover a small painted door in the mountainside; Wendell opens it without knocking and is driven back by a furious tiny faerie in a snow-robe (which Wendell calls a “winter Folk”), pelted with cups and threatened with a frying pan. As thick fog closes in during their descent, Emily glimpses a horned figure watching from the trees, and Wendell quietly urges Emily—in Faie—not to alarm the others but to turn back because he distrusts the clouds.

The clouds become unnatural and take horse-headed shapes. Emily identifies the threat as the elder huntsmen, and Wendell confirms they can track him far beyond Ireland and that his stepmother likely bargained for their aid. The huntsmen coalesce and charge; Wendell kills the first rider and horse brutally, then insists Emily is in the line of attack and tries to remove the group from danger by using his magic to step “into the landscape.” Emily refuses to abandon Shadow, but Wendell insists the huntsmen will not harm a grim, and he pulls Emily, Ariadne, and Rose through a freezing passage.

Wendell’s escape attempts misfire: they emerge first in a frigid alpine bog filled with sweet-smelling flowers, where the huntsmen’s clouds spill in after them, and then in a lakeside village square that Rose thinks may be Banns, far from St. Liesl. With villagers gathering and the huntsmen’s cloud approaching again, Wendell drags them through once more to an icy summit ridge above the clouds. There, Emily realizes the poison has “curdled” Wendell’s magic and causes him pain when he uses enchantment.

As the huntsmen rise again, Wendell splits the mountainside open and conjures a small, doorless castle into the rock, warning Emily to avoid the turrets because of a void within. Rose hauls Emily and Ariadne to safety through a window while Wendell goes down a newly made path to fight. From inside, Emily witnesses Wendell’s detached, vicious efficiency as he kills the huntsmen and their leader, while Rose watches in horror; Emily, shaken and angry at Wendell’s self-destructive risk-taking, turns away and tends to Ariadne.

After Wendell returns, Emily and Ariadne lay him by the fire, where he immediately sleeps. Through the night Emily stays beside him and finds the dark, flickering “bird shadows” in his chest have worsened, with a faint thrumming beneath the skin. By mid-morning he is still weak but manages to pull them closer to St. Liesl; they finally hike back on foot, and Shadow returns safely to the cottage. Later, Emily consults Rose’s Beidelmann volume and finds a tale linking shadowy birds in a faerie’s chest to an iron sliver migrating to the heart—an explicit omen of death—deepening Emily’s fear for Wendell.