17th November
I woke some hours before dawn in the quiet of a winter night, snow pattering against the window. Shadow was curled against my back, his favourite position, nose whistling.
I lit the lantern upon my bedside table (both lantern and table had appeared earlier in the week, despite my objections) and held my hand up to the light.
For a moment, I saw something—a shadow upon my third finger. It was visible only from the corner of my eye, and only then when I let my mind wander and did not think of it. My hand was very cold. I had to hover it above the lantern for some minutes before it warmed.
I curled the hand into a fist and pressed it to my chest as an unpleasant shiver ran through me. I lifted the covers, intending to go to Wendell immediately and admit my foolishness. But no sooner had the thought entered my mind than it drifted away again. Even now as I write these words, I must hold tight to my coin to keep them from slipping from my memory. Each time I open my mouth to tell Wendell, a fog arises in my thoughts, and I know that if he were to ask me whether I have been enchanted, I would lie quite convincingly.
“Shit,” I said.
I took out my coin and pressed it to my hand. I did not know what manner of enchantment the king in the tree had ensnared me with. What was clear was that I was ensnared. Now, there are faerie enchantments that fade with time and distance if they are not renewed. I could only hope it was of this nature.
If I found my feet taking me back to the tree, I would have to cut off my own hand.
Naturally, I spent the rest of the night in a misery of shame and worry, cursing myself. The worst of it was that Bambleby had warned me away from the tree—if I descended into a murderous rage, or turned into a tree myself, he would be very smug about it.
As soon as the winter dawn ghosted over the snowpack, I dressed and hiked up to the spring in my snowshoes, Shadow at my heels. He does not require snowshoes, nor protection from any weather.
The forest has a different quality now, girded with winter. It no longer dozes among its autumn finery like a king in silken bedclothes, but holds itself in tension, watchful and waiting. In moments like that, I am reminded of Gauthier’s writings on woodlands and the nature of their appeal to the Folk. Specifically, the forest as liminal, a “middle-world” as Gauthier puts it, its roots burrowing deep into the earth as their branches yearn for the sky.
Her scholarship tends towards the tautological and is not infrequently tedious (qualities she shares with a number of the continental dryadologists) yet there is a sense to her words one only grasps after time spent among the Folk.
I was happy to reach the spring. I’m afraid to say that I have abandoned propriety and taken to bathing in it, a necessity given the awkwardness of heating water in the cottage. After having a scrub, I dried myself quickly with the towel I had brought along and dressed again, balancing myself on one of the heated rocks.
Usually, I waited for Poe to appear before clearing the snow from his tree, as is only polite, but he was unusually tardy. I donned my snowshoes and trudged to his tree, where I stopped. The tree had been scorched. Not from without, but within, as if struck by lightning. Several of the boughs lay broken upon the snow.
I was surprised by the grief that came over me, scattering my thoughts.
Yet there was hope. If Poe had run into the woods, he may have become lost. It was a theory supported by anecdotal evidence of the Spanish anjana, a tree-dwelling species of the common fae, who rarely stray beyond the
land compassed by their roots, and may never find their way home if need drives them from their territory. And so I plunged into the woods, calling for my small, needle-fingered friend. No easy feat, not knowing Poe’s true name and being unable to use his language, for fear of what else might hear me. But happily, he showed himself within a few moments of hearing my voice, creeping out from under a root.
“I am lost,” he said, wringing his sharp hands. My old hat, now a cloak that he took much pride in brushing and steaming over the spring, was bedraggled and grimed with soot. “They came in the night. I tried to hide from them, for I did not wish to dance. They did not like that, and burned my tree.”
Fortunately, I did not have to ask him whom he meant—it was clear from his look that he meant the tall ones.
“There, there,” I said. “I will show you the way home.”
He hesitated. “For what price?”
I understood his fear; I had to name a price, of course, and he expected it to be great, given his need. This is often how the Folk operate. I had already prepared a reply, however.
“You will answer three questions about the tall ones,” I said.
He winced. I knew he hated to tell a “noser” such as myself his secrets, but as this was not concerning him specifically, but his world, it was not a crushing burden. He agreed, and I guided him through the woods. He was perfectly silent at my back, and a very strange Eurydice he made to my [*]Orpheus, or de Grey to my Eichorn.
He exclaimed over his poor tree, disappearing through a little door I have glimpsed but once, and only then out of the corner of my eye. Soon the snow was darkened with the soot he was scooping from the interior.
“I have broken our bargain,” he said glumly, handing me a burnt loaf.
“Mother would be very disappointed.”
I assured him that our bargain was intact, for the bread was not so burnt that a little scraping would not render it edible. He brightened visibly and settled himself beside me.
“They did not harm my cloak,” he said proudly, his long fingers stroking the beaverskin. “It is only a little dirty.”
I assured him that the cloak was still most magnificent, and he began the process of steaming it over the spring, hanging it upon a branch that dangled low. Then he turned to his tree, fetching a little shovel from some cranny I couldn’t perceive, and began scraping the soot from within. He talked as he worked, an irritated and fearful muttering, and from this I perceived all I needed to know. Promising to return for my three questions, I took my leave of him.
—
I ran full tilt down the mountainside, slipping and sliding all the way. By the time I wrenched open the door I was red-faced and panting, my nose running horribly.
I nearly collided with Bambleby, who stood by the table in his dressing gown, looking forlorn. “Finn hasn’t been by with breakfast,” he told me.
Rumpled golden hair completed the picture of indolence as his gaze swept over my pack. “Oh! Our sylvan pâtissier has made bread. Have you seen the marmalade?”
“They’ve taken someone,” I said, somehow managing not to beat him over the head with Poe’s concoction. “Someone from the village.”
“Yes, I rather thought so,” he said.
That brought me up short. I did not waste breath asking how he knew, as I would not waste it questioning Poe as to why he wanted a mortal to shovel his lawn, when I have seen him tiptoeing nimbly over the snows. “When?”
“In the night,” he said unhelpfully. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know who it was. God, but I do hate singing Folk. Did you not hear it? Hm, perhaps Aud’s fiendish candles work after all. Bloody caterwauling racket.
Give me the bells and lutes of my own halls, and hang any pompous minstrels who open their mouths to sully them.” He looked at me. “The marmalade, Em.”
Something of my feelings must have shown in my face, for he fell back a step, hands raised in a warding motion. Abandoning the bread, I turned and ran back into the winter.
When I crashed through the doors of the tavern, I found nearly half the village gathered there, with Aud fielding questions in Ljoslander. None of them had any interest in foreign bystanders in a moment of crisis, and my arrival was largely ignored. Cursing my lack of fluency, I managed to find Finn in the crowd, and he pulled me aside to translate the situation.
It was Lilja. But of course it was Lilja, the village beauty who could fell trees and cleave firewood as easily as draw breath. They said she had been travelling back to Hrafnsvik with her beloved, a milliner’s daughter named Margret who lived in the town of Selabær. They had been taken together, the horse they rode wandering back to its yard before dawn, saddle empty and askew. The other horses had been sent into a frothing panic when it had been stabled among them, a telltale sign of a brush with the tall ones. A search party was being organized, grimly. Lilja’s mother, Johanna, who had lost her husband to drowning only a year previous, was being looked after by Thora and her helpers, being near insensible with grief.
Finn then asked me, quietly, if there was anything I could do, given my vast knowledge of the Folk. Unfortunately, Aud chose that moment to conclude her address and join us by the fire, and with the two of them gazing at me with a desperate shadow of hope, I could only promise to think about it.
As I left, Aud entreated me to confer with Bambleby. I could tell from the look she gave me that she was not foolish enough to hope for disinterested aid from one of the Folk, but was willing to offer in exchange whatever was within her power. The loss of two youths, both barely turned twenty, weighed that heavily upon the village.
Indeed, when I returned to the cottage, I found Bambleby dressed and breakfasted (victuals having been delivered by one of Krystjan’s farmhands) but far from raring to join the search. I recounted what I had learned at the tavern, and he listened politely (a result, I suspect, of my earlier mood rather than some newfound benevolence on his part).
“Aud is willing to pay for your assistance,” I said bluntly.
“Oh?” He looked amused. “Am I to take this as an offer of monetary value, or will she deliver to my door a sheep born of a cow whose wool turns to silver in the moonlight, or some such thing?”
“I think she will give you whatever you want, if it is hers to offer and will not endanger herself or others.” I spoke in the careful style in which I am given to negotiate with the Folk, which he seemed to recognize with a kind of weary amusement. He gave a dismissive lift of his eyebrows and turned his gaze back to the fire.
I abandoned caution and spoke to him in my usual manner. “Wendell, be more forthcoming, please. Are you barred somehow from interfering in the sport of your kind?”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “And they are not my kind, Em, particularly; all these silly categorizations devised by mortal minds are about as useful as names given to the wind. If you want the truth, I don’t know if it’s in my power to rescue our young lovers, and I have no desire to risk my neck trying. Why do you wish to risk yours? You don’t care about these people.”
Surprise dawned in his face. “Or do you? You feel something for Mord and Aslaug, I think. Can it be my cold-blooded friend has come to value the society of these people?”
I opened my mouth to give him the retort he expected, to say that I was motivated by scholarship, pure and simple, that the opportunity to investigate this bizarre ritual was of a magnitude greater than any I had been presented with before, in terms of the ramifications for our understanding of the Folk. It was entirely true, but for some reason, it made me feel unaccountably lonesome.
I looked out over the yard. I could see the axe where Lilja had left it, impaled in the stump—she had taken to coming by nearly every day to restock our supplies. It was such a bleak sight that I quickly looked away.
Yes, I felt something—I am no monster. But would I go after them for their sakes alone, if there were no scientific discoveries to be had?
No. No, I wouldn’t.
My life has been one long succession of moments in which I have chosen rationality over empathy, to shut away my feelings and strike off on some intellectual quest, and I have never regretted these choices, but rarely have they stared me in the face as bluntly as they did then.
“Why don’t we just pretend?” he said, sparing me from articulating any of this.
I blinked at him. He went on, “We would not have to go anywhere. Let us take a sled a little distance into this godforsaken wilderness, camp out for a night or two, and return with tales of fantastical revelry. Together we could invent a convincing narrative, I’ve no doubt. The villagers will not sorrow much over our failure—surely they’ve already guessed that their daughters are lost. We will accept their gratitude for trying, and then we shall go to ICODEF and be showered with praise for being the first scholars to empirically document an encounter with the courtly fae of Ljosland. I shall get my funding. You will make a name for yourself—your cherished tenure will follow soon thereafter. Do you know who was recently appointed to the hiring committee?” He folded his hands and smiled at me.
I held his gaze. I will not lie and say I was not tempted by his suggestion. It would be an easy scheme to carry out, an exceptionally easy one to get away with. I was too practical not to talk through my concerns before ruling the idea out. “You have already earned a reputation for falsifying research,” I said. “Would such dramatic claims not fall under suspicion?”
“Ah, that’s where you come in, my dear Em. Your reputation is spotless.
No one would believe you would participate in a ruse of this magnitude. Of any magnitude. You will launder my reputation most efficiently.”
I believed him. But it did not take me more than a moment to make my decision. Perhaps I did not care—could not care—as much as I should for the fate of two youths. But I was also not someone who would put glory before discovery, empty praise before enlightenment. This was about the encyclopaedia, but it was also about something greater than that—the thing that drove me to create the encyclopaedia in the first place.
“We don’t know for certain that Lilja and Margret are lost,” I said.
He gave a groan and pressed his hands to his face. I waited.
“If you wish it,” he said from between his fingers, “I will help you.”
I examined him carefully, for I am used to dealing in faerie bargains, and could recognize one in his voice. Yet it was a faerie bargain with only one side, a singular thing indeed. I could not comprehend his motivations.
“I wish it,” I said. “Shall I say it three times?”
“I suppose you might as well, you infernal creature.”
I did.
“Wonderful,” he replied sourly. “Well, don’t expect me to help with the packing. I am doing this against my own better judgment. And if the provisions prove inadequate, I am turning the whole mad expedition around.”
SKIP NOTES * Of course, I refer here to de Grey’s disappearance whilst investigating the sinister goat-footed mountain faeries of Austria in 1861, and Eichorn’s subsequent vanishing act a year later during one of his many rescue attempts. (Eichorn was convinced de Grey was abducted into Faerie, discounting the commonly accepted narrative of her having taken a fall during a nasty storm.) Decades later, villagers throughout the Berchtesgaden Alps claim to hear Eichorn’s voice calling “Dani! Dani!” during winter tempests, though whether this amounts to evidence that one or both remain trapped in some liminal alpine realm is the subject of much conjecture. See When Folklorists Become Folklore: Ethnographic Accounts of the Eichorn/de Grey Saga by Ernst Graf.
