—? November
Much as I hate to sully these pages with melodrama, the reality is that these may be the last words I write. I don’t know how much time I have, nor how much longer I shall be able to hold this pen, so I will attempt to be concise.
Last night (if last night it was; the movement of time is impossible to gauge in Faerie), I woke to the sound of the accursed tree Bambleby summoned scraping at the fabric of the tent, and the echoes of the bogles in their death throes, as if the tree had gathered up their screams and kept them like souvenirs. Well, try sleeping after that.
I fumbled for my pocket watch, and found it was not yet six. Dawn was a long, long way off.
I looked round for Shadow, and found the turncoat curled up against Bambleby. The dog lifted his head, though, at the sound of my stirring.
Wendell was little more than a pile of blankets—he had the lion’s share of them, and still awoke complaining of the cold. I could just make out a tuft of gold sticking out from a crack between two quilts.
I went outside, thinking that I might rouse the fire and have an early breakfast. The horses were pressed up against each other, their rumps facing
the banked coals.
Above us, the aurora was bleeding.
I stood frozen. The long ribbons of white unfurled all the way to the ground, growing filmier as they went. The green and blue of the aurora was unaffected. It was as if something were drawing the silvery whiteness to earth, like fingers pulling paint down a canvas, to a place just beyond the curve of the mountain—less than a mile away.
For several minutes, I did nothing, merely stood there, carding through possibilities and plans. Once I had chosen a course, I thought on it for several minutes more. Then I ducked back into the tent and dressed, tucking my notebook into my pocket out of habit. I took out the golden chain I kept tucked at the bottom of my book bag, which I had managed to keep hidden from Bambleby this whole time. It has long been a source of amusement to me that he’s never had any suspicions about Shadow.
I placed the collar end of the chain around Shadow’s neck. He sat up, perfectly silent, understanding my intention in that uncanny way of his.
Wendell did not stir, and given his habits, I doubted he would anytime soon. I draped my own blankets overtop him, to further increase his comfort. In addition to his hair, an elbow, a cheekbone, and a dark-lashed eye were visible.
I brushed my fingers through his hair—partly because I’d always nursed a foolish desire to do so, and partly by way of apology. After all, I might not return from my errand, and if so, he would never forgive me. He might not forgive me if I did, but I could not risk taking him along after that display of his yesterday. Like all the Folk, Wendell is unpredictable, and I had no way of knowing if he would fly into another deranged fury if one of the courtly fae laid a finger on me, and land us in trouble from which we could not extricate ourselves. He had admitted before that he didn’t know if he was a match for them. Despite his power, there was only one of him—and that could easily be one too many, given his utter lack of self-control.
No, in this case, I needed levelheadedness, and for that, I could count only on myself.
I donned my snowshoes and set out with Shadow at my side. The leash kept the dog close to me, no farther than the space of three of my strides. I glanced back only once—one of the horses eyed me with a sort of relieved disgust—I was mad, but I hadn’t forced him to leave the warmth of the coals, at least. The murderous tree leaned itself over the tent like a doting mother, looking obscenely fat and somehow pleased with itself. The sight was enough to tamp down my doubts.
We walked and walked, my snowshoes softly crunching through the crust of ice laid over the drifts. The mountains slumbered, disturbed only by the fitful touch of the wind, which skimmed small fogs of snow from their slopes. The aurora tumbled to the ground in bursts like silver rain. It was falling into a valley between two great roots of a jagged mountain.
I became aware that we had been walking a long time without our destination growing any closer. We were outside the enchantment, and I needed a way in. I let the leash unfurl so that Shadow strode four paces away from me, then five. Slowly, the light grew near.
We had stepped into their realm.
As soon as I was certain, I drew Shadow to me again. As we moved deeper into the faerie world, Shadow had grown larger. He was now twice the size, his muzzle coming up to my chest. His snout was sharper, wolfish, his paws enormous. But he followed me as calmly as ever, his black eyes trusting.
I climbed carefully up the last slope, bending low. I found a volcanic boulder to crouch behind, and peeped out.
Below us was a frozen lake. It was perfectly round, a great gleaming eye in which the moon and stars were mirrored. Lanterns glowing the same cold white as the aurora dangled from lampposts made of ice, which framed paths from the lake’s edge to a scattering of benches and merchant-stands, draped in bright awnings of opal and blue. Delicious smells floated on the wind—smoked fish; fire-roasted nuts and candies; spiced cakes. A winter [*1]fair.
The Folk gliding upon the ice and strolling easily from stand to stand were not as strange as I had expected. In fact, when I fixed my eyes upon them directly, they looked perfectly mortal, if a little too lovely and graceful. But when viewed slantwise, they were figures of ice and ashes, ashes gone grey and frozen, knife-slender wraiths that at times were not even there, becoming features in the landscape, a phenomenon I had observed with Poe. Their hair was universally silky and white, not like human hair at all, but that of a snow fox or hare, and their eyebrows too,
while some had a fine cover of the same hair, or perhaps it was fur, visible on the backs of their hands that disappeared beneath their cuffs.
I heard no music. The Folk upon the ice danced and glided to the same song, that much was clear, but Shadow’s presence made me oblivious to it.
Naturally, there was a part of me that wished it were otherwise; that I could have been like Odysseus, tied to the mast of his ship. But I had no ship, and no sailors to stop me from drowning myself.
I itched for my notebook and camera. I suppose it was cold of me, with Lilja and Margret down there possibly being devoured, but I have vowed to be honest in these pages, even to the last. For some time, I simply watched the Folk and thought nothing about the girls. I thought of Bouchard’s discovery of a curious stone slab in Rosetta, and Gadamer peeping through the trees at the goblin city. Was this what they had felt? It was awe, of course, mingled with stunned disbelief. I suppose that when one spends their career working towards a goal, constructing all sorts of fantasies about what that goal will look and feel like, one is left a little senseless when the scaffolding comes crashing down around them.
Eventually, I forced my thoughts back to the missing girls. It did not take long to find two mortals among a sea of Folk alternately beautiful and horrifying—there they were, gliding together on the ice. They could have been two ordinary young people in love, Margret’s pretty head resting on Lilja’s shoulder. But they moved like dolls on strings, and their smiles were blank and insipid. Occasionally, Lilja would look up, and a frown of confusion would push through the smile. I took heart from this, that there might still be something of them to save.
I didn’t try to sneak into the fair—how utterly pointless that would have been. I simply plastered my own blank smile onto my face and wandered over.
Luck was with me, and I managed to find a faerie couple to trail behind at first like a child after its parents, so that the other Folk assumed these two had brought me. They smiled at me, and I smiled back as if I didn’t see the hunger in their eyes. In truth, it took my breath away, and I faltered a few
times, feeling sick. I began to shake at one point, for there was no difference between this and strolling into a forest filled with tigers.
Shadow, prowling at my side, saved me in more ways than the obvious one. I counted his breaths as they fogged out and the swaying of his tail as he walked. It was an old trick I used to clear my head of enchantment; now I used it to stop myself from running screaming back into the wilderness.
Not one of the faeries glanced at Shadow, not even when he turned his head to nip at their finery out of pure dislike. Once, a man in a sea-grey gown encrusted with jewels with storm clouds in them (they all wore gowns under their cloaks, belted at the waist), jumped when Shadow snapped at his heel, but when he turned to look behind him, his gaze went right through Shadow and into the snow.
Now, there are few dryadologists who could resist the opportunity to sample faerie food, the enchanted sort served at the tables of the courtly fae —I know several who have dedicated their careers to the subject and would hand over their eye teeth for the opportunity. I stopped at a stand offering toasted cheese—a very strange sort of cheese, threaded with glittering mould. It smelled divine, and the faerie merchant rolled it in crushed nuts before handing it over on a stick, but as soon as it touched my palm, it began to melt. The merchant was watching me, so I put it in my mouth, pantomiming my delight. The cheese tasted like snow and melted within seconds. I stopped next at a stand equipped with a smoking hut. The faerie handed me a delicate fillet of fish, almost perfectly clear despite the smoking. I offered it to Shadow, but he only looked at me with incomprehension in his eyes. And, indeed, when I popped it into my mouth, it too melted flavourlessly against my tongue.
I took a wandering course to the lakeshore, conscious of the need to avoid suspicion. I paused at the wine merchant, who had the largest stand. It was brighter than the others, snow piled up behind it in a wall that caught the lantern light and threw it back in a blinding glitter. I had to look down at my feet, blinking back tears, as one of the Folk pressed an ice-glass into my hand. Like the food, the wine smelled lovely, of sugared apples and cloves, but it slid eerily within the ice, more like oil than wine. Shadow kept
growling at it, as he had not with the faerie food, and so I tipped it onto the snow.
Beside the wine merchant was a stand offering trinkets, frozen wildflowers that many of the Folk threaded through their hair or wove through unused buttonholes on their cloaks, as well as an array of jewels with pins in them. I could not compare them to any jewels I knew; they were mostly in shades of white and winter grey, hundreds of them, each impossibly different from the next. I selected one that I knew, without understanding how, was the precise colour of the icicles that hung from the stone ledges of the Cambridge libraries in winter. But moments after I pinned it to my breast, all that remained was a patch of damp.
At the lake was a little beach of frozen white sand upon which a number of spectators had gathered. I spied two other mortals in the crowd, a young man and woman draped over the shoulders of two lovely faerie ladies. I did not have to watch them long to know they were far beyond my aid, and turned from their blank stares with a shudder.
Despair overcame me as I gazed into the whirl of dancers. How on earth could I extract Lilja and Margret when I was deaf to the music they danced to? Stepping onto the ice would give me away immediately—I am flat- footed at the best of times, but I doubted even someone trained in the art of dance could fit their limbs into a rhythm they couldn’t hear.
As I stood going through my options, there came a rustling at my elbow.
A beautiful lady was gazing at me, her rabbitish white hair cascading in a long braid past her waist, her blue-grey eyes perfectly matched to her many- layered gown, which was ornamented with icicles that I thought should have clinked together like bells, but didn’t—or I couldn’t hear them.
“What a lovely cloak,” she said in Ljoslander. I gave her a blank look and said, in English, that I could not understand, and she smiled and repeated herself in my language. Her gaze as she eyed my cloak was sharp with greed.
I thought at first that I had accidentally donned the cloak Bambleby had been working on—I realized, gazing down at myself, that it flowed fetchingly around my legs as I walked, and kept me warmer than any cloak
I’ve ever owned. But it wasn’t; it was the same old cloak I’d worn yesterday, which meant he must have woken last night after I took it off, damn him, and fixed it up, just like one of his ridiculous ancestors creeping about the shoemaker’s shop and mending the boots.
“What is a little sparrow of a girl doing with an enchanted cloak?” the faerie lady asked, trailing one long finger down the sleeve. My arm ached with cold for hours after that touch.
I curtsied for her, thinking fast. Why not settle for a version of the truth?
“It was a gift, my lady. From the oíche sidhe.”
I didn’t know if she would understand the Irish term, but she seemed to, I suppose in the same way that the Folk can understand and speak English even if they’ve never heard it before. “Fine workmanship, even for the little ones.”
Her attention was drawing a crowd—other faeries stopped to ooh and ahh over my cloak. They formed a ring around me, which was disconcerting; I could look at only one at a time, which meant that all the others, viewed from the corner of my eye, assumed their spectral halfway forms. Shadow growled deep in his throat. In the faeries’ eyes were hunger and avarice, and it occurred to me suddenly that whatever caused them to long for hot-blooded human victims might also lead them to view someone like Bambleby as a particularly rare treat.
Goddamn you, Wendell.
The only good to come of this was that Lilja noticed me too and skated slowly over with her hand linked in Margret’s. Margret was a slight, dark- haired girl, barely coming up to Lilja’s chin, and pretty in a delicate sort of way. She wore a crown of icicles that hung askew and slowly melted into her eyes so that she was always blinking, a nasty bit of mockery, I thought.
Her gaze was blank, but a flash of comprehension dawned in Lilja’s eyes, and she stumbled towards me.
I held her gaze and shook my head ever so slightly, then curled my finger once. She seemed to understand, and slowed her stride. She and Margret drifted off the ice, graceful as birds, and wandered to my side, as if they too were merely interested in my cloak. The moment they neared, I
made Shadow stand beside them, stretching his leash, so that his magic washed over them both and muffled the music in their ears.
Lilja came back to herself first. It was a strange thing to watch; as if she’d stepped back into her own eyes after cowering in some dark corner.
Fortunately, the faeries were not looking at her, but continued pestering me with questions about the cloak, how long I’d had it and did I have any others like it and on and on, which all this time I had been answering in a carefully dull voice.
“Leave our dear guest be,” a quiet voice said. A man came forward, his eyes the violet-grey of a winter dawn. He was tall and slender and more beautiful than the others, and he wore a sword of ice at his waist. Though he was more simply attired—no jewels or icicles festooned his clothing—he moved with an arrogant, unhurried grace that I recognized all too well, as if the world was one vast divan for him to laze upon.
My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know what he was, prince or lord or something in between, but it didn’t much matter. The crowd fell away, some with bows or murmurs of respect, and we were alone with him.
“Walk with me,” he said in a voice that was near enough to music that I surely would have been caught in it without Shadow there. He led us along the lakeshore, summoning little icicle flowers to carpet our feet, as if the symmetry between him and Wendell wasn’t already striking enough. Once we’d left the crowd behind, he turned to face me.
Even though I was looking directly at him, at times it felt as if I were staring right through to the stars and mountains at his back. I could read only mischief in his gaze, which frightened me more than the malevolence I saw in many of the others, though I couldn’t have said why. Everything about this man made me feel utterly insignificant, like a trinket his gaze had been caught by, which he might at any moment choose, idly, to crush between his fingers.
“You are not enchanted,” he said calmly. “I won’t bother asking how— why would you tell me? And in truth, I don’t care. Humans have their tricks, just as dogs do. All I want is that cloak.”
This was a lot to take in all at once, but I paused for only a moment to steady myself before saying, “If so, why bother asking? Why not just take it?”
I had already guessed the answer; I just wanted him to think me ignorant and even more uninteresting than he already did. He answered in just the sort of bored voice I’d hoped for, “It is of little value to me like that. I want it willingly given.”
Of course he did; faeries steal when the fancy takes them, but most [*2] prefer gifts.“And in exchange—”
“I will not reveal you,” he finished, his tone adding an obviously at the end.
I gave him a long look. I will not lie, I was absolutely terrified of him, standing there with dawn-coloured eyes and his ice sword with the starlight reflecting in his face (I mean that literally; his face was at least partly made of ice, and caught reflections of the stars like a smattering of freckles). I think that, for all my experience with the Folk, I would have cowered before him or perhaps simply given in to my instincts and fled, if he hadn’t reminded me so much of Wendell. And somehow, that steadied me enough to say, “You will also place a path before us to lead us from your world.”
For the first time, he looked at me as if I had surprised him. I guess he’d never had much reason to bargain with mortals when he could simply sing them senseless and then drain their hearts dry. He smiled slightly and bent to pluck one of the flowers he’d made. He shook it a few times, and the petals unfurled like water melting through his hand. When the water solidified, he was holding a white fur cloak. The fur was coarse—perhaps from a bear?—and as thick as my fist.
He offered it to me, and held out his other hand for my cloak. I was so surprised that I didn’t think before I blurted, “That’s not what I asked for.”
He gave me a look as ancient and unyielding as winter, and suddenly there was nothing about him that was like Wendell. “What use do you have for a path, if you are frozen to death? Your chances of escape are low enough already. Take it and be grateful.”
—
We left the lake as quickly as we could, weaving our way back through the stands. We ducked behind one, and I helped Lilja and Margret turn their cloaks inside out. I didn’t bother reversing my faerie-made one.
I taught them the Word next, though it works only temporarily on the common fae, which didn’t inspire confidence that it would be effective against these creatures. Lilja looked like herself again, calmer than I in the face of peril, doing what I said without question. Margret was still blank- eyed, though now there was at least a furrow of confusion upon her brow.
Her ice crown melted and melted but never got any smaller, and when I tried to take it off her, it nearly froze to my skin.
“Can you help her?” It was the only question Lilja asked me. I saw Auður when I looked at Margret, and knew Lilja did too.
I didn’t know what to say, so I simply motioned them on. Murmuring the Word, we slipped past the last stands. While the Word might not have made us invisible to these creatures, it certainly made us less interesting. We kept our pace slow and aimless, as if we were merely off for a stroll. There was no reason for these Folk to think differently—apart from the one with the stars in his face, it was clear that none of them had ever considered the possibility that a mortal could evade their magic. Perhaps none ever had.
At first I was relieved to put the fair behind us. But we hadn’t been walking through the wilderness for long before I realized that it wasn’t right. The footprints I had left petered out, as if someone had followed behind me with a broom and swept them away, and though we walked for an hour or more, we saw no sign of the little camp Wendell and I had made.
The dawn didn’t come. The aurora shone above us in all its colours, the stars clustered like swarms of bright bees in an undulating garden.
I walked with my hands shoved in the pockets of my ridiculous faerie cloak. At one point, my fingers brushed something cold and smooth. I drew it out, and found myself holding a compass.
In all honesty, I was too weary to appreciate this impossible magic. “I suppose the cloak gives the wearer what they need,” I told Lilja, my voice almost dismissive—well, after all, what we really needed was a door, and you couldn’t fit that in a pocket. She took the compass and used it to guide us south and east, from whence Bambleby and I had come.
“Is there anything else in there?” she said.
I dug around in the pockets again, but my hands were empty when I withdrew them. She swallowed and turned back to the compass.
I made us keep going, even as hours passed and it became clearer and clearer that we were still tangled up in the faerie world, like a fly struggling in a web. Shadow felt it too. He growled and paced ahead of us and then back again, his nose snuffling at the snow, searching for a way out, like a fold in a stage curtain he might slide beneath.
We had to rest after a while, if only out of sheer exhaustion. I drew Lilja and Margret into my ridiculous cloak, which had an itchy, prickly sort of warmth, as if the garment were irritated by the use I made of it. It made me yearn all the more for my old cloak, even though Bambleby had made it ostentatious. But at least I found a flask of water in the pocket of the faerie cloak, which we shared among the three of us. It seems clear that the cloak was indeed enchanted to supply its owner with whatever he or she requires, though it doles out those gifts in a most miserly way—some food would have been nice, along with the water, or a lantern and some flint. Perhaps it is only miserly when forced to serve mortals.
Margret was stumbling more and more, and we could walk only another hour or two before we had to stop again. And here we are, tucked into a cave in the mountainside. Lilja and Margret are huddled in the cloak, Lilja furiously rubbing at poor Margret’s arms, while Shadow continues his search outside for a door to the mortal realm. I have faith in him, my oldest, most loyal friend—if there is a way out, he will find it. I have had to force myself to consider the alternative—that we may need to go crawling back to the Hidden Ones merely to stay alive; how many hours of life that will buy us is not something I wish to contemplate. I will put the pen aside for now and rest briefly.
SKIP NOTES
*1 Outside of Russia, almost all known species of courtly fae, and many common fae also, are fond of fairs and markets; indeed, such gatherings appear in stories as the interstitial spaces between their worlds and ours, and thus it is not particularly surprising that they feature in so many encounters with the Folk. The character of such markets, however, varies widely, from sinister to benign. The following features are universal: 1) Dancing, which the mortal visitor may be invited to partake in; 2) A variety of vendors selling food and goods which the visitor is unable to recall afterwards. More often than not, the markets take place at night. Numerous scholars have attempted to document these gatherings; the most widely referenced accounts are by Baltasar Lenz, who successfully visited two fairs in Bavaria before his disappearance in 1899.
*2 While it is considered settled fact that the common fae are strengthened by mortal gifts, whether the more powerful courtly fae experience the same benefit is a matter of much conjecture. For my part, I have never seen any reason why this should not be so; that it defies human logic is not a sufficient counterargument where the Folk are concerned.
