26th November—late
I don’t know what to make of this development, which has unnerved me more than any changeling or faerie beast ever could. Perhaps putting my thoughts to pen and paper will help.
After my conversation with Aud and Thora, I went back to the cottage.
Wendell had still not returned, and after about an hour, I decided to search for him. We nearly ran into each other on the path leading up the mountain; he came strolling out of the twilight with his hands buried in his pockets and his gaze downcast, frowning and lost in thought. Crystals of snow nestled in his golden hair, which was very distracting. I am used to ignoring his good looks, but that hair of his is a difficult matter. I’ve observed that most people are taken in by his smile or his eyes, but for me, it’s that damned hair—one can’t help imagining what it feels like, is the problem.
He lifted his eyes when he heard my footfall, and his face lit. “There you are, Em! Slinking about in the half-light, how very like you.”
I didn’t bother asking where he’d been. If he wanted to be secretive, let him. Shoving aside my relief at his return, which filled me with an unaccountable feeling of lightness, I said, “I need your help.”
“Of course you do. Can we get out of this bloody cold, at least? You won’t believe it, but I have a hankering for one of Ulfar’s mutton chops—”
I grabbed his hand and dragged him back to the cottage. He seemed a little taken aback, but let himself be dragged, his graceful fingers closing around mine.
“I need his name,” I said as soon as we were indoors. “The changeling’s true name. How do I make him tell me what it is?”
He gave me a puzzled look. “If you haven’t figured that out by now, I
doubt you ever will.”
I threw up my hands. “Just tell me.”
“I don’t know how. That’s why I said that if you haven’t figured it out by now, I—”
“Oh, God.” I threw myself into one of the chairs. “You couldn’t be any less helpful if you tried. I think you are trying.”
“Not especially.” He sat opposite me. “Why does it matter what the creature’s name is?”
I told him what I’d told Aud and Thora. He groaned.
“So now we have to rescue the entire village, do we?” He folded his hands and scowled. “Thank you, but I’ve had my fill of philanthropy.”
“It isn’t philanthropy. We still know nothing about this changeling— where it comes from, why it’s here. It’s a gaping hole in our research. If we can fill it—”
He waved his hand. “We’ve made enough discoveries already to impress the entirety of academia. ‘Further research needed, blah blah blah,’ we will write in our conclusion.”
“This isn’t just about the paper! It’s about my book, Wendell. Our knowledge of changelings is inchoate—not just those of Ljosland. There is more to be learned here, and I cannot leave without turning over every stone.”
He made no response to that, only gave a tremendous sigh and put his head in his hand.
“In the stories, Folk are tricked into revealing their names,” I said. “The one of Linden Fell, for instance—his wife pretended to give birth and then brought him a lamb wrapped in swaddling clothes to look like a child, all so that he would write his name on the baptismal certificate.”
Wendell laughed. “I’d sooner freeze to death than write my true name in ink, even if my wife hurled a dozen brats at me. These things are not as easy as they are in stories.”
I got up and paced. “We could threaten him.”
“Threats must be buttressed with deeds. I’m not interested in tormenting children, no matter how much their parents deserve it.”
He frowned at me as he said it, which I ignored, as I was not about to be lectured by Bambleby on matters of morality. I felt little regret over my initial interrogation of the changeling, given the anguish he had inflicted upon his foster parents.
I stopped at the table, playing absently with one of the parcels Aud had delivered. “These are for you, by the way.”
He only sighed again. “I told you, I can’t accept their gratitude.”
“I chose them,” I said. “Not Aud. You may think of them as gifts from me.”
He looked intrigued and a little alarmed. “From you? Are they covered in thorns?”
He unwrapped the mirrors first, exclaiming over them. They were indeed handsome, as I had requested, with frames made from sun-bleached driftwood carved with intricate patterns of leaves complete with pearl dewdrops. Aud had been clever in her selections, I thought. Wendell spent nearly an hour working out where to hang them, first setting them in one location, then moving them elsewhere. Naturally, they looked beautiful everywhere, and when he was finally finished, the room was even cosier than it had been before.
“Oh, Em,” he said, gazing into the mirror he’d hung behind the fireplace, which trapped the flickering light and turned it into something golden and summery—doubtless not an effect mortal hands could have achieved. “You do have a heart after all, somewhere buried deep. Very deep.”
“There are also these,” I said grudgingly, hoping to head off any mistiness. Unfortunately it was not to be, for Wendell was no sooner gazing at the silver sewing needles than he was brushing away a tear.
“They are like my father’s,” he said wonderingly. “I remember the flicker of them in the darkness as we all sat together by the ghealach fire, with the trees surrounding us. He would bring them everywhere, even the Hunt of the Frostveiling—that is the first hunt of autumn, the largest of the
year, when even the queen and her children roam through the wilds with spears and swords, riding our best—oh, I don’t know what you would call them in your language. They are a kind of faerie fox, black and golden together, which grow larger than horses. My brothers and sisters and I would crowd round the fire to watch him weave nets from brambles and spidersilk. And all the moorbeasts and hag-headed deer would cower at the sight of those nets, though they barely blinked at the whistle of our arrows.”
He fell silent, gazing at them with his eyes gone very green.
“Well,” I said, predictably at a loss for an answer to this, “I hope they are of use to you. Only keep them away from any garments of mine.”
He took my hand, and then, before I knew what he was doing, lifted it to his mouth. I felt the briefest brush of his lips against my skin, and then he had released me and was back to exclaiming over his gifts. I turned and went into the kitchen in an aimless haste, looking for something to do, anything that might distract me from the warmth that had trailed up my arm like an errant summer breeze, and settled for preparing a light repast from the remains of our provisions.
After we ate, I watched him play with the mirrors. When he touched them, strange things appeared—for an instant, I saw a green forest reflected back at me, boughs swaying. I blinked and it was gone, but some of its greenness lingered around the edges of the glass, as if a forest still lurked somewhere beyond the frame.
“Are those the trees you would see in your kingdom?” I asked.
He let out his breath and drew his hand away. “No,” he said quietly.
“That was merely a shadow of my world.”
I gazed at him a moment longer. His mourning was a tangible thing that hung in the air. I have never loved a place like he has, and felt its absence as I would a friend’s. But for a moment, I wished I had, and felt this as its own loss.
A strange surety flowed through me like a swallow of cold water. “Of
course.”
He turned. “What?”
But I was already moving. I fetched the faerie cloak from outside with trembling hands. The fire was high, as Bambleby liked it that way, and the cloak began its steady drip drip drip on the floorboards. I dug around in the pockets, fingers brushing against the edges of things that clanked or rustled.
Focus. I drew a breath, plunged my hand inside again, putting every ounce of will and thought into imagining what I needed. And finally, my hand closed on something.
I withdrew it. I was holding a doll. It was carved from whalebone and had hair of willow boughs. Its dress was of dirty, undyed wool the colour of snow, the old snow that is left behind in springtime. And yet the doll was clearly Folk, for it changed—just a little—from one moment to another, and in different lights. When I turned it to the firelight, it seemed to wash the pale dress with gold.
Wendell took it from me and turned it over and over in his hand, frowning.
“It’s a token of Ari’s home,” I said. “The changeling’s home, I mean. [*]Something he will recognize.”
Wendell blinked at it a moment longer. “Ah. I see. But I don’t think—”
“We shall have to find out,” I said in a cool voice, while my heart hammered madly.
—
Aslaug opened the door for us. Mord was out walking by the sea, she said, something that struck me as strange, for not only was it dark, but Mord does not like to leave his wife alone in the house. She did not admit us, only stood in the doorway, frowning as the winter wind gusted inside and ruffled her thin dress—far too thin for the time of year.
“May we come in, Aslaug?” Wendell said, wrinkling his eyes in a charming smile. He must have put magic into it, for she blinked as if hit with a gust of summer rain, and stepped back.
The house was so cold I could see my breath. Aslaug went back to lighting the fire. The floor before the fireplace was scattered with at least a hundred spent matches and kindling, and the fireplace itself was filled with snow. Despite this, Aslaug had piled firewood in it, as if she could not see the snow or expected it to light regardless.
“How long has she been at that?” Wendell wondered. “Aslaug, dear, come away from there. Let’s get you warm again.”
He bustled around, sweeping the snow into a pot, building the fire, and grimacing at the mess—for the place was a warren of unwashed dishes, ash, and bits of the outdoors scattering the unswept floor. Though he did little that I could see besides shake off a rug and straighten the jumble of plates and cups, the room seemed to brighten. Aslaug remained on her knees by the fire, gazing into the flames and taking no further notice of our presence.
At least her shivering had stopped.
Meanwhile, I took up one of the cast iron pots and filled it with embers and kindling—I had been inspired, you see, by the bogles and their cookpots.
Poe had said that the tall ones feared only fire. Well, we would see how deep that fear ran.
I made my way to the staircase, from which a cold wind funnelled, somehow conspiring to bring darkness with it that fought against the new light in the sitting room.
“Will you stop faffing about?” I called over my shoulder, for we weren’t here to tidy. Casting a last scowl over his shoulder at the mess, Wendell followed me up the stairs.
The changeling was crouched in a corner this time, and as I entered the room he gave a horrible shriek and sent a pack of snarling white wolves charging at me from a wall of snow, their muzzles crusted with blood.
Though I had expected frightful visions, the suddenness of the onslaught made me fall back a step. Bambleby caught me before I tumbled down the stairs.
“There there,” he said, stepping in front of me. The wolves vanished instantly. “Tantrums will get you nowhere with this one. She’s perfectly
heartless and will take no pity on you whatsoever. I speak from experience.”
He spoke in Faie, words that vibrated in the air like a song, an effect I could never achieve, no matter how hard I worked on my accent. The changeling stilled, his pale face upturned like a baby bird’s, and I could see that he heard an echo of his own kin in Wendell’s voice.
“Go away,” he said, but there was a miserable hopefulness in it. Wendell turned to me with a look of woe that I ignored.
I drew the doll from my cloak. The air chilled further, and every line in the changeling’s body tensed. He whispered something that sounded like “Mersa.” Then, “Where did you get that?”
“Do you want it back?” I said. I placed the pot of flickering flames upon the floor. “You may have it, if you give us your name.”
The changeling seemed too stunned to speak. He still looked like a faerie, too pale and sharp, but there was more of the child in him now, all wide eyes and confused longing. But I paused only a moment before dropping the doll into the flames.
The changeling screamed. He lunged at me, and would possibly have torn me to shreds had not Wendell been there to hold him back.
“Emily!” Wendell said in a scandalized voice, because of course he could take pleasure in bloody decapitation, but something like this would distress him. He need not have feared, though, for I had snatched the doll from the flames before it could suffer serious damage. It was only melted a little.
“I’ll ask again,” I said over the creature’s wails. “What is your name?”
In the end, it was easy. The changeling sobbed and raged at us. He made the room darken and fill with snow that struck us like tiny blades. But then I held up the doll again, the only token of home he’d seen in all the miserable years he’d spent in Hrafnsvik, separated from his own family and world, and placed it in the flames, and he finally shrieked, “Aðlinduri!”
I removed the doll instantly and handed it to him. The faerie clutched it to his chest, still sobbing. The tears didn’t fall, but froze to his face in braided tracks like an icebound river.
Wendell was shaking his head at me. “You are even colder than I thought, Em,” he said, and yet mixed with his complaint was something like fondness. He made no argument as we went to retrieve two of Krystjan’s horses and even offered to ride with the changeling. Aslaug had not looked up from the fire as we left the house, other than to shudder as the door opened, and Mord had not returned, and so neither of them had the chance, should they have wanted it, to bid adieu to the creature they had housed and cared for during the darkest years of their lives.
A light snow fell as we rode into the mountains. Aðlinduri sniffled, and did not speak other than when we commanded him by name to direct our horses. But as we travelled farther, he sat up straighter and craned his neck to look in all directions. Misery mixed with a desperate sort of longing in his eyes.
“There you are,” Wendell said to him. “You indeed have cause for cheer.
You are going home.”
The changeling burst into weeping again, and Wendell gave me a baffled look.
We rode for perhaps an hour with the snow tapping at our cheeks before we came to a little gully where the mountainside folded itself around a grove of misshapen willows. Even if the changeling hadn’t directed us there, I would have taken it for a faerie door of some sort; though there are many sorts of doors, they all have a similar quality which can best—and quite inadequately—be described as unusual. A round ring of mushrooms is the obvious example, but one must additionally be on the lookout for large, hoary trees that dwarf their neighbours; for twisted trunks and gaping hollows; for wildflowers out of sync with the forest’s floral denizens; for patterns of things; for mounds and depressions and inexplicable clearings.
Anything that does not fit. The willows before us leaned into one another like fingers interlacing, with a narrow gap at either end. They had a sickly aspect, skeletal and half covered in some sort of lichen.
Wendell dismounted and then lowered the changeling down to the snow.
He was still clutching his doll tight to his chest—some of its hair seemed to have refrozen, but not all. Guilt nudged at me, and I could not quash it this
time, so I did what I was used to doing with troublesome feelings and shoved it down deep until it was buried by other things.
“Where are we?” I said, for I was struck by an inexplicable certainty that we had come farther than we should have in an hour’s time. I had not noticed when the mountains stopped being familiar, when we came into this valley between two long, blue glaciers. Behind us was a seam in the landscape through which the earth breathed out its sulphurous smoke, warm and wet against my cheek. “We are not in the Karrðarskogur?”
“Not for some time,” Wendell said absently, as if this fact were of no material importance. And I suppose it wasn’t—provided we could get back.
The changeling stood hesitating before the willow grove. For a shadow of a second, I thought I saw a hallway between the boughs, lit with moon- coloured lanterns, beyond which a stair led into the earth and another spiralled up towards a tower made of ice. Then a faerie stepped out of the grove.
She was both like and unlike the Folk I had seen at the winter fair. She was tall and lovely and sharp-edged, and the starlight reflected off her strangely as she moved, like a lake with pebbles dropped into it. But her shoulders were bowed as if beneath a weight, and her grey clothing was tattered and so indistinct she might have been wearing a many-layered sack.
Her black hair was tied up and thick with frost.
Her astonished gaze took in the child first, and then swept to Wendell, who was closer than I. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why have you brought this sorrow upon us?”
“Mother,” the changeling sobbed, and rushed forward. The faerie woman caught him up in her arms and covered him in kisses. “There, there, my love. There, there.”
“My apologies, lady, if I have overstepped.” Wendell swept her a bow.
“My friend and I thought it best to return your child, who was, I’m sorry to say, quite unhappy where you left him.”
“Idiot,” she spat. “Who are you, to involve yourself in our doings? Some feckless wanderer from the summerlands, with little more than moss between his ears. You were bored, is that it?”
“You have company in characterizing me so,” Wendell said, unperturbed. “And yet why make such a to-do about this? You would have had to fetch him back yourself, eventually.”
Her hands tightened on her son’s small back. She murmured to him, and he ran between the trees without a backwards glance. A whisper of music filtered through the grove, and I fell into a momentary daze. The faerie woman faced Wendell with cold fury in her eyes, and then—I cannot describe what happened next, other than to say that it was like being struck by something, a wave perhaps. Though not physically—I know, I am making little sense. Already disoriented by the music, I staggered about in a trance of some sort, and came back to myself in Wendell’s arms—he had caught me before I could fall, and held me upright.
The faerie woman, meanwhile, had collapsed gracefully to her knees.
She placed both hands in the snow and pressed her whole face into it.
“Forgive me, your highness,” she murmured.
“No, no, no,” Wendell said. “None of that. I’m not anybody’s highness anymore.”
She gazed at him with confusion in her eyes, which slowly cleared.
“You are only a child.”
“Good grief!” he said. “I will have you all know that, by the measure of the mortal world, I am quite advanced in years.”
She glanced at me for the first time, her nose wrinkling. Then, to my horror, she said, “And who is this, a pet of yours?”
Wendell gave a nervous laugh. “I would not recommend pursuing that line of inquiry.”
“Well, what do you want?” she said, shifting in the uncanny way of the Folk from humility to rudeness in the space of a breath. “Are you here on business of theirs?”
“I don’t know who you mean, but regardless, the answer is no. This business with your son is part and parcel of my plan to return to my kingdom, from which I have been banished.”
“A quest?” she said, remarkably unconfused by the illogic of his statement.
“Of a sort.” He cast me a brief glower. “A rather winding, meandering one, but one cannot always be fortunate in these cases.”
“Who has cursed your trees?” I cut in. It was not what I wanted to ask first, but many of the Folk value indirectness. I was pleased by the coolness in my voice, for I was still wobbly from whatever enchantment the faerie had blasted us with, and also my pride was smarting from the pet nonsense.
“It’s not only the trees,” she said, after eyeing me curiously for a moment. “We are all of us cursed. Root and branch, flake and frost, young and old. All allies of the old king share in his downfall and his misery.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Would that I had been trapped in a tree, like my lord. It is a kinder fate than watching your children wither like ice in the summer sea.”
“Then that is why you sent him away,” I murmured. My mind flicked through the stories one after another, trying to fit it all into a pattern I recognized. “Then Ari—your son—he is the old king’s child?”
Wendell, who had been only half listening, stamping his feet and blowing warmth into his hands, stared at me open-mouthed. The woman gave a short laugh.
“Your mortal lover has a mind like crystals,” she said. “Sharp and cold. I would like her for my own.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” was all he said in reply to this statement, which was appalling on a great many levels.
“Truly,” the woman pressed. “Would you trade her? Your power is of the summerlands, but I will gift you with the hand of winter.”
“Thank you,” Wendell said; he seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter. “But I am satisfied with my hands as they are. And unless you have a key to my forest kingdom across the sea, I will not be trading my
mortal lover today.”
I was going to kill him.
“Em,” he said, “perhaps you could explain this all to me, as you seem to have instantly grasped the situation with your crystalline mind.”
“It’s not difficult to grasp,” I said in as icy a voice as I had in me. “She is loyal to the king in the tree. The Folk who overthrew him have cursed her
and her home, and so she sent her child away to keep him safe. But she has told us that she has more than one child, and thus it would follow that she would wish to preserve the most valuable of her brood—and why else would he be of greater value than the others? Perhaps he is also in greater danger too—the changeling bond would keep him safe.”
The woman nodded. “He is a bastard. Still, the queen has slain many of her husband’s bastards in order to safeguard her claim to the throne.”
I frowned. “Then the present monarch is—or was—married to the king in the tree?”
“She was his first wife. He put her aside and married someone else. She sought revenge, and got it, for much of the nobility preferred her to both the second queen and the king. She locked him away forever and had his bride slain.”
My head spun, sorting through all this, though I was used to hearing tales of the complicated tangle of murder and intrigue of faerie courts.
Wendell did not appear particularly interested in this information. He had turned up the collar of his cloak and was back to blowing into his hands. “Well, we will take back the mortal child now, if you would be so kind. I am afraid my blood is too thin for lengthy convocations in this weather.”
The faerie woman, with characteristic changeability that I suspected I would never grow used to, now seemed to view the unwanted return of her son after a years-long absence as something akin to a minor inconvenience.
Her initial fury forgotten, she shrugged and turned towards the grove.
“Wait,” I said. The faerie woman paused at the edge of the trees, fixing me with her grey-blue gaze. “Why did the nobility side with the queen?”
She watched me a moment longer, and I could no more read her expression than I could name all the colours in the snow. “The old king was chivalrous,” she said at last. “He abided by the ancient laws set down by our ancestors. Namely: we must have fair dealings with the mortals of this land. Kindness is met with kindness, evil with evil. He forbade us from taking them for our entertainment.”
My hands clenched. “And the present queen does not.”
“The queen?” She smiled. “Oh, the queen and her children have— peculiar appetites. They pluck mortals from their homes like apples ripe from the tree, then drain them dry. It is the sort of sport that suits the fancy of many of the nobility.”
—
We made good time on the return journey, for I had noted and memorized every direction given to us by the changeling, even the smallest commands he gave to the horse, taking her left around a frozen puddle rather than right, for instance. Ari—the true Ari—had been returned to us in an enchanted daze, and soon slipped into sleep swaddled in blankets against Bambleby’s chest. He was pale and had clearly been underfed, as is common with human children kept by the Folk, for time is not the same in faerie realms, and also the Folk are thought to be irresponsible child minders. But he appeared well otherwise, clad in a dress and cloak of finely woven lambswool and boots stuffed with straw.
Nobody answered our knock at Mord and Aslaug’s door—it was then nearing midnight—but it was unlocked, and so we went inside and laid the child down upon the changeling’s bed, which had also been Ari’s, long ago.
As we were arranging the blankets, Mord came home. He was shivering and unshaven, and he carried a long knife in his belt, and I wondered how many nights of late he’d been given to wandering the fields and cliffs after dark. He didn’t seem to understand what he was seeing, and while he stood blinking at us in the doorframe, Aslaug appeared, still clad in her day clothes. Something in her face shattered, and she threw herself upon the bed, erupting into sobs, which woke Ari, who began to wail in confusion.
His crying, though, was a wonderfully mundane sound, unlike anything the changeling had ever uttered. Mord gave a cry and tried to pry them apart, perhaps assuming this was all another horrible faerie trick, but Wendell and I managed to stop him. He sat down heavily on the floor, legs tucked beneath him like a child, and simply stared at his wife and son as Aslaug
had stared into the fire. I think he had already decided inside himself that his son was lost, and perhaps his long walks had something to do with the knife he carried with him, ready to be put to a purpose he could never bring himself to actualize.
Wendell gave the room a good sweep with a broom he found somewhere or perhaps conjured up himself, knocking icicles and frost from the walls, which he later explained to me were the remnants of enchantments woven by the changeling, left behind like cobwebs. I had little idea of what to do, so I simply gave Mord an awkward pat on the shoulder and made to leave.
At that, he suddenly rose to his feet and wrapped me in a very strange hug (my back was to him, my arm somehow trapped between us—I have no instinct for this sort of thing) and then, still without speaking a word, he released me and went to his son’s bedside.
“Well!” Wendell said after we had returned to the cottage. “What a heartwarming scene! I could get a taste for this philanthropy nonsense.”
I snorted. “You will get a taste for it on rare occasions, when it suits your whims, and if you needn’t exert yourself too greatly.”
He shook his head, smiling. “We are not all alike, Em. You cannot simply compare me against what you know of the Folk.”
“I was comparing you against you.”
He laughed and handed me a glass of wine. I froze, my gaze falling on the mirror behind him.
“You’ve enchanted it!” I exclaimed, stepping forward. The mirror was filled with trees, a twilight forest that bent in the wind, tossing its branches.
Leaves flickered across the glass like bright birds, and lights flashed here and there amongst the shadows. I could have been looking through a windowpane, and for a moment my head swam with the dissonance of it.
“There is nothing green in this place,” he said in a complaining tone.
“Even the forest is rendered in black-and-white; I feel as if I am in a movie.
I must have something to rest my eyes upon.”
I gazed at the forest a little longer, the sway and glimmer of it. It was— well, mesmerizing. It had a powerful resemblance to my favourite wood in the south of Cambridgeshire, where Shadow and I were wont to escape on
fine summer days. Beyond the familiar curving oak at the edge of the frame should be a little stream. “Is it a faerie forest?”
“Oh—I don’t know,” he said. “It is leaf and bole and the scent of pine.
That’s all I care about.”
Indeed, I did catch the faintest aroma of needles, now that I was thinking about it. Summer needles on a forest floor, warmly fragrant as they snapped underfoot.
I settled beside the fire, even though I was exhausted; in truth, I felt a little giddy. The snowy ride through that wild country; the conversation with the faerie woman—in and of itself a greater triumph than most dryadologists could hope for in their entire career. The things I had learned in a single night would give me material for a year’s worth of papers. I downed the wine and sank back into my chair, my mind already dancing through the additions I would make in my encyclopaedia.
He sat with me, chattering away about our triumphant return to Cambridge and ICODEF, and myriad other things, and not expecting anything substantial in reply, which is one of my favourite qualities about him. It sounds odd to admit that I find the company of such a boisterous person restful, but perhaps it is always restful to be around someone who does not expect anything from you beyond what is in your nature.
After a while, though, I felt an unexpected guilt. “You don’t have to stay with me,” I said. “You can go down to the tavern and regale the villagers with the tale of our success.”
“Why would I do that? I prefer your company, Em.”
He said it as if it were obvious. I snorted again, assuming he was teasing me. “Over the company of a tavern filled with a rapt and grateful audience?
I’m sure you do.”
“Over anyone else’s company.” Again, he said it with some amusement, as if wondering what I was doing speculating about something so evident.
“You are drunk,” I said.
“Shall I prove it to you?”
“No, you shan’t,” I said, alarmed, but he was already sweeping to the floor, bending his knee and taking my hand between his.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” I said between my teeth. “And why are you doing it now?”
“Shall I make an appointment?” he said, then laughed. “Yes, I believe you would like that. Well, name the time when it would be convenient for you to receive a declaration of love.”
“Oh, get up,” I said, furious now. “What sort of jest is this, Wendell?”
“You don’t believe me?” He smiled, all mischief, a look I’d seen from other Folk, enough to know not to trust him one inch. “Ask for my true name, and I’ll give it to you.”
“Why on earth would you do that?” I demanded, yanking my hand back.
“Oh, Em,” he said forlornly. “You are the cleverest dolt I have ever met.”
I stared at him, my heart thundering. Of course, I am not a dolt in any sense; I had supposed he felt something for me and had only hoped he would keep it to himself. Forever. Not that a part of me didn’t wish for the opposite. But that was when I assumed his feelings in that respect were equivalent to what he felt for any of the nameless women who passed in and out of his bed. And why would I lower myself to that, when he and I already had something that was vastly more valuable?
But he was offering me his name?
Once, while following a trail of blue foxberries in the woods east of Novosibirsk, I had tripped over a root and gone tumbling end-over-end down the side of a gully, landing with a great splash in the little stream at the bottom. Luckily, I fell into a pile of sodden leaves trapped in a side channel by the current, and not upon the sharp rocks only inches to my left.
But the breath was knocked out of me entirely, and I simply lay there aching from innumerable bruises for several minutes—and yet even then, I hadn’t been stunned like this.
He sighed. “Well, I don’t expect you to do anything with this information. I have grown rather used to pining, so it won’t put me out to keep at it, I suppose.”
“I would order you to do all sorts of terrible things,” I managed, though my voice sounded very far away.
“You seem to have a talent for that already.”
“I would have you accompany me on every field study,” I said. “I would have you rising at six and carrying my cameras and equipment everywhere.
You would never escape a day of hard work again. And you would certainly have to retract all of the studies you faked.”
He glared at me. “Yes, you would do all that, wouldn’t you? Well then, instead, why don’t you just marry me?”
I said nothing for several minutes. The only sounds were the crackle of the fire and the pit-pat of snow upon the windows. “That’s a more sensible suggestion,” I said.
He burst out laughing. By the time he finished, he was wiping at his eyes. “Sensible, she says. Sensible.”
“Well, it is,” I snapped. “I didn’t say we would marry. But why would I want your name? I don’t wish to order you about like a servant. You may keep it, and your mad faerie logic, to yourself.”
“Very well,” he said. “Is that it, then? Your answer is no?”
“I didn’t say that,” I snapped, irritated and hopelessly flustered. I thought inanely that this sort of thing would never have happened with Leopold. Leopold had been predictable in every way, and as transparent as spring water. “I’m going to leave,” he would announce at a dinner party he wasn’t enjoying, and then he would. “I have stopped listening,” he would say to a longwinded colleague, and then go back to his book. I was aware that people found him peculiar because of this, but it suited me very well. A kiss would always be preceded by “I’m going to kiss you.” I don’t know why anyone would mind this—it’s very relaxing to know what other people are about to do. I suppose that’s why we got on so well. Of course, Wendell has as much in common with Leopold as a rock has with a rooster.
The fire was suddenly far too hot, so hot I’d nearly sweated through my shirt. “Well—I—how on earth am I supposed to answer?”
He threw his hands up in exasperation. “Do you want to marry me?”
“That’s—that’s beside the point.” A nonsensical reply, but it came the closest to expressing how I felt. I had never even considered marrying Wendell—why on earth would I? Wendell Bambleby! Certainly I’d
imagined being with him in other ways, particularly since I’d grown used to having him around—travelling with him across the continent, no doubt arguing half the time; conducting research; scouring woodland and heath for lost doors to the faerie realms. And yes, I liked the prospect of being with him often, or even all the time, and felt a sort of hollowness fill me when I thought about us parting ways. But I couldn’t marry one of the Folk, particularly not a faerie king, even if he was Wendell.
“It’s the point in its entirety, you madwoman,” he said. “Do you not find me handsome? I can change my appearance to suit whatever direction your tastes run.”
“Oh, God.” I pressed my face into my hands. “You are not helping.”
I said nothing for a while, and he let me think without interruption. Part of the problem, I realized, was that I was not accustomed to thinking about him in such a way. And so I took his hand—tentatively, as one might reach for a ladle they thought might be hot. Then I lowered myself onto the flagstones by the fire so that we were next to each other, our knees touching.
“What are you doing?” he said, half hopeful and half alarmed. Well, I was glad that I’d unsettled him—served him right, after throwing all that at
me out of nowhere.
“I am only conducting a test.”
He sighed. “Of course. I should have guessed you’d want to be bloodless
about this.”
“I am not trying to be!”
“You’ve done nothing but talk at me since I told you I loved you.”
“Is that a problem?” For he hadn’t said it as if it were. “Were you expecting me to throw myself at you? Would you have then said a dozen pretty things about my eyes or hair?”
“No, it would have been, ‘Get off me, you imposter, and tell me what you did with Emily.’ ”
“All right, be quiet.” The bloody fire hissed and crackled away, and a bead of sweat trickled down my neck. Wanting to be through with this quickly, I leaned forward and kissed him.
Almost. I lost my nerve halfway there, somewhere around the moment I noticed he had a freckle next to his eye and wondered ridiculously if that was something he would remove if I asked it of him, and instead of a proper kiss, I merely brushed my lips against his. It was a shadow of a kiss, cool and insubstantial, and I almost wish I could be romantic and say it was somehow transformative, but in truth, I barely felt it. But then his eyes came open, and he smiled at me with such innocent happiness that my ridiculous heart gave a leap and would have answered him instantly, if it was the organ in charge of my decision-making.
“Choose whenever you wish,” he said. “No doubt you will first need to draw up a list of pros and cons, or perhaps a series of bar plots. If you like, I will help you organize them into categories.”
I cleared my throat. “It strikes me that this is all pointless speculation.
You cannot marry me. I am not going to be left behind, pining for you, when you return to your kingdom. I have no time for pining.”
He gave me an astonished look. “Leave you behind! As if you would consent to that. I would expect to be burnt alive when next I returned to visit. No, Em, you will come with me, and we will rule my kingdom together. You will scheme and strategize until you have all my councillors eating out of your hand as easily as you do Poe, and I will show you everything—everything. We will travel to the darkest parts of my realm and back again, and you will find answers to questions you have never even thought to ask, and enough material to fill every journal and library with your discoveries.”
And that is where we left things. I don’t even know why I am including this, for God knows I do not wish to preserve the details of my romantic life for posterity (and a very short footnote that would be), only I find that writing it all out has made me somewhat calmer. Perhaps I will tear up this entry later.
I know that if I put this notebook aside and attempt to sleep, I will simply run over every argument and counterargument in my head, but what else can I do? Shadow is gazing up at me from his forepaws in a woebegone sort of way, as if I have somehow disappointed him. Traitor.
SKIP NOTES
* Such tokens are a motif of changeling folklore. In the stories, they are commonly found in the possession of the changeling; if wrested away, he or she weakens or vanishes entirely, but they can also be used to threaten or cajole the creature into good behaviour. It was commonplace in early- to mid-nineteenth century Britain for museums to maintain collections of supposed “changeling tokens,” most of which were of questionable provenance; Danielle de Grey wrote a scathing paper on the subject. Unfortunately, to make her point, she also stole a number of tokens from the University of Edinburgh and replaced each with a cap and bells. The rector was unamused, and the result was a short stay in Edinburgh Prison for de Grey, her second but, sadly, not her last brush with incarceration.
