Emily returns to the cottage with Shadow carrying the badly mauled Rose, avoiding the villagers. Ariadne panics at the sight of Rose and Emily angrily orders her to fetch Wendell from the café. While Emily clumsily tries to dress Rose’s bleeding wounds, Rose briefly regains consciousness and fights her, making Emily’s fear and shock spill into shouted frustration.

Wendell arrives and initially claims healing is not his usual work, which alarms Emily, who worries about dangerous faerie bargain-like consequences. Rose, terrified of Wendell and of Wendell’s “malignant” realm, begs Emily to stop him; Wendell silences Rose with an enchantment to sleep. With Ariadne assisting, Wendell washes the wounds and discovers a toxin that “washes right out,” then experiments clumsily—momentarily making a wound spill rose petals—before settling on a method that closes the injuries.

Rose’s wounds knit shut into uncanny silver, geometrical scars like stitched seams; Wendell even reattaches Rose’s ear backward, treating the mistake lightly. Wendell admits there will “probably” be side effects, making Rose potentially more vulnerable to some fae enchantments and immune to others, but insists Rose is healed as Emily asked. Emily is left shaken by the realization that her scholarship does not protect her in a world of real, sharp-edged faerie danger.

Wendell then demands Emily’s cloak and takes it outside, shaking and striking it until it twitches and two fox-like trooping faeries tumble out. He drives them off and tells Emily that, because he spared them, they now owe Emily a debt she can claim later. Wendell airs out the cottage, disgusted by the smell of blood and injury.

Later that night: Emily dozes in an armchair beside Rose, who lies sleeping on the table. Unable to sleep, she works on scholarly notes about the newly encountered trooping faeries and then on her mapbook research. A man suddenly appears in a chair opposite her: the ribbon-pocketed stalker, who speaks in riddles about wind and paths unravelling. Emily presses him for clarity and identifies him as Professor Bran Eichorn, a Cambridge scholar who vanished in 1862 while searching for Danielle de Grey; Eichorn slowly regains coherence and asks if Danielle ever escaped.

Eichorn explains he is trapped in Faerie’s borderlands, endlessly wandering overlapping realm-edges where time has lost meaning, sometimes tormented by common fae. He says Danielle pursued the “Trade Routes Theory” to prove faerie realms are connected and that she found a “nexus,” intending to observe it safely before returning—then vanished. Eichorn urges Emily to find Danielle because Danielle will lead her to the nexus; he begs Emily to try to free Danielle so she will not remain desperate and alone. When Ariadne comes downstairs after hearing Emily cry out, Eichorn vanishes, leaving an empty chair.