There’s a scene in The Wild Hunt where our main character, Lily, gets lost and wanders a faerie path. Her adventure is based on personal experience!
Once, I made a school trip to a historical city that’s built on top of a hill, for strategic reasons (city’s Toledo, if you’re curious). After a short organized visit, our teachers let us loose and a friend and I tried to find our way to various interesting spots. We only ever managed to get to the Jewish quarter, though. From then on, any street we took would wind back again and bring us, full circle, into the Jewish quarter.
The freaky thing began when we decided that our best bet to get anywhere—to get away, really—was to follow streets that had a down slope. There was a river by the city, so at the very least we would get lost and end up in the river, which we counted as an improvement over being locked in the same place.
So, we began to walk, always down. Every turn we took, we made sure to go down the slope. And then we’d end up in the Jewish quarter, always in front of the same building, though we always went down and never up.
When I began writing about faeries and faerie paths, many years later, I knew I had to use that anecdote—and back the scene up with the very real sense of befuddlement we had back then!
