3rd December (?)
I just read over that again. It sounds irrational, if not insane—but I assure you, my mind was quite clear.
Of course I considered waking Wendell. But that would have given me away—the king in the tree would have known I wasn’t enchanted if I arrived with Wendell in tow. As a general rule, the Folk do not take kindly to mortals who find ways to break their enchantments—they see it as an affront to their craftsmanship—and so to travel there in an unenchanted state would have been a risky prospect indeed.
I suppose most would ask why I wished to go to the king at all. I cannot answer that adequately, other than by posing more questions. If you give an astronomer a telescope through which he can view an undiscovered galaxy, but allow him only a glimpse of a single star, will he be content? By freeing the king in the tree, I would witness not only the ascension of a faerie king, but the ending of a story I have heard told many times, in many ways.
Stories, after all, are so fundamental to their world; one cannot hope to understand the Folk without understanding their stories.
As for a secondary motivation, I admit that it pleased me to think that I could release Aud and Thora and all the others from their fear of the tall ones—for if the king had forbade the taking of mortal youths before, and been overthrown for it, I had no doubt he would do so again once he was freed, if only out of spite. The Folk are, by and large, blinded by pride and incapable of learning from their errors, and even if a mode of thought or behaviour lands them in trouble again and again, each time worse than the one before, they will simply carry on as they always did, which perhaps
explains a little of the chaos and absurdity that typifies many faerie stories, and indeed their realms.
I did leave Wendell a note, at least, informing him that I had gone to release the king in the tree, that I had broken the enchantment I had fallen under (I provided no details as to how, in case he flew into one of his homicidal rages and began decapitating the sheep or something), but that I was pretending that I hadn’t, and if I was still gone when he awoke, he had better not do anything to give the game away.
First, I went to see Poe. I walked quickly, or as quickly as I could through the knee-deep snow, with a parcel that had recently arrived at the cottage tucked under my arm.
He crept cautiously out of his tree, puzzlement written all over his sharp little face—I had never come to see him at night before. The spring and the grove were a different place now, full of little lights that might have been stars, reflected in the running water or the ice gilding the snow. But I didn’t think so, for as I approached the spring, they winked out and then reappeared much deeper in the woods.
“I’ve come for my third question,” I said.
He nodded, though his eyes kept drifting to the package under my arm.
To spare him the suspense, I placed it before him. He puzzled a little over the wrapping paper until I told him that it was meant to be torn open— which he did with one sharp and silent finger. He cried out at the sight of the black bearskin which my brother had finally—grudgingly and with many expressions of dismay at whatever faerie nonsense I had mixed myself up in this time, for it’s not as if he would believe I would want such an adornment for my personal use—sent from one of the furrier’s shops in London.
“This will delight my lady, for it will set off her beauty and dignity to great effect,” Poe said. And then he added, in the typical fashion of the Folk, who dole out information like a miser does his coin excepting the occasions when they provide more enlightenment than one would care for, “Though she prefers the skins of mortals.”
I chose to withhold my thoughts on the latter half of this characterisation. “Your lady?”
He blushed and lowered his eyes. “His Highness blessed me with a marvellous home. I have had Folk banging upon my door night and day, demanding to marry me. I chose the loveliest, of course.”
“Congratulations,” I said, genuinely pleased. “May I meet her?”
There came a whisper of movement at the edge of the spring. Poe’s sweetheart had been there all along, watching me. There was nothing to distinguish her from Poe, though she was perhaps a little taller, and she wore an odd, pale, filmy garment that I did not care to examine closely. She edged around me to Poe’s side, where she ran her fingers over the bearskin.
The two held a muttered converse.
“What do you want for such a gift?” Poe said.
“Nothing now,” I said. “I will claim my payment at a later date.”
Poe’s wife regarded me uneasily, no doubt fearing that I would come knocking at their door again with burdensome demands, but Poe murmured something to her, and she seemed to relax.
“I told her that you are my fjolskylda,” he said. “She understands this.
She too had fjolskylda in another village, before she came here, and they always made fair exchanges with her and her kin. You will be fair too.”
He said all this without any particular warmth, merely as if he were stating something self-evident. I felt tears spring to my eyes nevertheless.
I’ve made bargains with the Folk before, and I can’t say why his words affected me so, but they did.
“I will depart these shores before the winter is out,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be best for you to find a—fjolskylda among the Ljoslanders?”
“It doesn’t matter where you are,” he said simply.
I closed my fist around the bearskin, and then I let the brownie woman take it away. It melted into the forest as easily as a living bear.
“How was the king imprisoned in the tree?” I said.
Poe went still. “It was a long time ago,” he said in a hushed voice, “I [*] was only an icicle on a boughthen.”
“Ah,” I said, disappointed. “So you don’t remember.”
“Oh yes, I remember—why wouldn’t I? And even if I didn’t, it’s not as if the forest keeps quiet about it, nor the snows. They were quite upset when His Majesty was locked away—of course, snow has a terrible memory, and forgot almost everything by the following year apart from the fact that it was angry, and so it covered everything in a nasty sleet instead of proper flakes. Everything was all turned to mud and grey sludge; it was horrid.”
Poe talked quite a lot more to me now than he had when we first met, and as informative as I found his ramblings typically, right now I didn’t have time. There would be no way to convince the king I was still enchanted if I tarried too long.
“How was it done?” I pressed. “Some complicated enchantment, I suppose.” Because of course, I needed to know how to trap him again if he proved entirely mad and wicked, not merely mad and wicked by the standards of the Folk.
“Not really,” Poe said thoughtfully. “The first queen gave him a cloak woven from all the seasons, and then when he fell asleep in it one night by the Lake of Dancing Stars, as he often did, she snipped out the winter and stitched the whole thing back together. Then she wrapped him up tight in the cloak and fastened all the buttons. That trapped him, you see—well, no one could escape a year without winter, not even the king. She planted the king’s feet in the woods and turned the silk and wool and gold thread she’d used to weave the cloak into bark and leaf. Since then the tree has grown very tall, and he is still inside it, trapped forevermore.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Is that all.”
—
My hand was throbbing ferociously by the time I reached the tree, every step sending a jolt of fire up my arm. My bandage was bloody, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, other than keep my hand stuffed into my glove and pray that the king didn’t notice.
I stood before the tree, which rustled and hummed musically to itself. I wasn’t enchanted anymore, but that didn’t much matter, for the tree was positively brimming with enchantment—I had noted that before, with Wendell. I think the king was asleep—probably he’d been asleep the whole time, but I’ve no doubt he was still aware of me, in his dreaming.
I shivered with excitement and terror. I kept my hand firmly wrapped around my coin, but I allowed a little of the enchantment to seep into my mind—merely by relaxing my focus, which wasn’t easy, as I was accustomed to fending off faerie enchantments, not inviting them in. Yet it was necessary, for I hadn’t the slightest idea how I was supposed to get the king out. The enchanted ring hadn’t cared whether or not I brought the axe, so there must be some other way.
The magic murmured at me to move my legs. I did so. It had me stride about the grove, making a pile of snow and then shaping it with my hands. I went down to the stream, broke the ice, then found a curl of bark and filled it with water. This I poured over the snowman—yes, the king had me building a snowman, which perhaps I will laugh over later, but was quite disturbing in the moment, twisting carefree childhood memories up with some huge and terrifying magic—and watched as it froze into silvery ribbons like the indication of hair.
I stood gazing at the ugly snowman I had made, feeling rather foolish and wondering if the king in the tree really meant to step inside the snowman and use it as a vessel. Wendell had said that the king’s body had decayed, so he needed to use something, but I couldn’t really imagine this.
Of course, the king was still trapped, so what body he wished to step inside was something of a moot point.
I began to wonder if this was all a mistake. Perhaps the king had only meant to enchant Wendell, but since I’d turned up instead, he’d decided he might as well have some fun with me. Dragging a mortal out of bed to build snowmen in the middle of the night seemed like poor sport to me, but I supposed that being trapped in a tree for centuries didn’t afford much opportunity for entertainment. As I was thinking all this, though, a raven fluttered out of the trees and perched on the snowman’s shoulder.
Two more followed. They swirled around the snowman, pecking and clawing. When they were done, it looked more like a man—a little more. It was still strange, but no longer hideous. Then, to my horror, the birds fell to the ground dead, blood leaking across the snow from wounds I couldn’t see.
They stained the snowman’s feet like an offering, which I suppose they were.
The tree murmured, and magic prodded me again. But it did not prod me to move, it prodded my mind. And that was when I realized—the king didn’t know how to free himself. He expected me to come up with a solution.
Well, that set my thoughts whirling. Though in truth, they had already been diving in and out of stories and academic papers, holding them up against what I knew of the Hidden Ones and their disgraced king.
The Word.
The useless, ridiculous, button-gathering Word, which I had long valued as a piece of esoteric trivia, a footnote, perhaps, in a paper I had yet to write. Well, footnotes in dryadology are sometimes like the Folk themselves, leaping out at you from nowhere.
A thrill rushed through me. Looking back, this would have been a very good moment to stop and think through the wisdom of what I was doing, but I was too full of the delight of scholarly discovery (and, I suspect, my own conceit) to stop. I turned to the white tree and spoke the Word.
And what do you know? A button came sailing out from somewhere among the branches. I caught it and examined it against my palm. It was white and desiccated, like old bone, shedding a fine powder against my skin, with an acorn carved into one side. The button began to melt against my palm, and I dropped it into the snow. The tree had given a shudder when the button came free, but now it was still once more.
I spoke the Word again, and out sailed another button. This one had a flower. The next button had a sailboat dreaming among gentle waves.
All told, I spoke the Word nine times, and as the ninth button sailed free, the trunk of the white tree split open like the front of a cloak, the bark billowing—for a moment, it became silk and fine wool churning in the
wind that had filled the grove, and then it stilled. The tree gave a sigh and dropped its leaves, buds, and fruits onto the snow with a rustling thud.
I stared into the cavernous hollow that had opened in the tree, my heart going like a rabbit’s, waiting. When I heard a footfall behind me, I screamed.
“There’s no need for that,” a voice said. “I don’t mind, though. It’s been a very long time since anybody was afraid of me.”
The Hidden king was kneeling in the snow, tsking over the dead birds.
He seemed at first to resemble the figure of ice and snow I had built with their aid, but with each breath he drew, life came into his body, and he grew more mortal in appearance. It was a little like watching someone rising towards the surface of murky water; one moment his face was little more than indistinct planes of ice, the next he was blinking his pale blue eyes at me and smiling. Of course he was beautiful—is it even necessary to say it?
His hair was black with glints of white, his cheekbones sharp above a wide mouth with a natural smile in it. The white in his hair turned out to be small opal beads, and his clothing was a blackened blue with an overlay like ice, beaten thin with a lacy pattern, and he wore a white crown and layers of jeweled necklaces that glittered fetchingly in the dim light. And yet everything he wore was as tasteful as it was beautiful, precisely the amount of adornment one would expect on a king, no more and no less.
“Poor things,” he said. “This world is terribly unkind to beasts, is it not?
Here we are.”
He touched them, and the ravens sprang to life—in a manner of speaking. Their movements were jerky, and they were still covered in blood —one had a broken neck, and its head was bent at a disquieting angle. This one landed on the king’s shoulder and pecked his finger when he stroked it, drawing blood. He laughed.
“Hello, my love,” he said, striding over to me. “My darling rescuer, who has given me back my body and my throne, and freed me from my eternal captivity.”
Before I could recover from my amazement, he kissed me. It was like pressing frozen glass to my lips, like breathing in pure winter. I staggered
back a step, coughing, and for a long time after I felt as if I had ice in my lungs.
“I,” I began. “I’m not your love. I’m not anyone.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I know who you are. Years ago, when I was a boy, a seer told me I would one day be locked up by my own people, and only a mousy little scholar could get me out again. I would marry the mouse— which forms a very poetic contrast, don’t you think? And together we would rule over my kingdom.” He stretched. “Well! I am glad to be out of there. My first order of business, I think, will be a nice bath and a feast of salted plums with caviar. Do you like salted plums, dearest?”
It wasn’t easy, in that moment, for me to think like a scholar again. To think at all, really. How was it that I suddenly had faerie kings, plural, demanding to marry me? But I forced myself to be rational and to answer in the way I guessed he would like—yes, I loved salted plums, thank you— and to enquire about the seer.
“I don’t know anything more,” the king said. “I never got a good look at her—she was all dressed in rags. She was not from here, but was one of the wandering Folk, who go all over.”
I thought carefully before saying, “It is kind of you to offer to marry me, Your Highness. But I am not your equal, nor even close.”
He gave me an indulgent look, as if I were a child who had correctly counted to ten. “But I must fulfil your every desire, dear one—starting with our marriage. Your modesty does you credit, though—I have a great love for modesty. But what is this?” He touched my wounded hand, swathed in a bandage that was now leaking dark blood upon the snow.
Terror gripped me. There was no way to pretend I was still under his spell now. “I—I wished to release you of my own free will, Your Highness.
As a sign of my respect for you.”
He looked puzzled at that, but, fortunately, he seemed to take little interest in prodding my motivations. With a shrug, he unwrapped the bandage—I gave a sharp gasp as the pain rolled up my arm—and then, like a magician pulling flowers from a handkerchief, he revealed my hand, fully healed and spotless. The finger was still missing, and its absence was an
ache—but it felt like an old one. I wondered if he, too, had some power to manipulate time.
“I—I desire to remain unmarried,” I stammered. “As I said, Highness, I freed you out of respect, not because I wished for anything in return. I have a betrothed, you see.”
“Oh, well, that’s no concern,” he said, waving one ringed hand. “I’ll see that we adequately replace his dowry. He won’t sorrow, then, for it will free him up to marry someone prettier than you.”
I could see that the idea that I might prefer not to marry him was completely incomprehensible to him. There was some logic in it, I suppose, given what he had been told by the seer; though I know enough of the self- obsession of the Folk to guess that he would have assumed my devotion either way. So I abandoned that approach.
“As you say, I’m not beautiful.” It was a solid objection, for the Folk never marry mortals who aren’t beautiful unless they have been forced into it by trickery (and even then, the mortals are often revealed to be beautiful in the end, having been enchanted to look ugly). He could find nothing appealing in my ordinariness, especially now, with my plain shift stained with blood and sweat and my hair in exceptional disarray, even for me, most of it hanging loose down my back.
“That’s true enough,” he said, looking me up and down with a pained expression. He looked down at himself after, as if he needed to soothe his eyes with his own beauty. “But let’s see what we can do.”
Before I could say anything, my clothing gave a rustle, and a new gown and cloak spilled from my shoulders like water. It was all in dark blue to match with him, the cloak the darker of the two, patterned with the same iced lace and opals like swirling constellations. My boots grew up past my knees and became a pure white lambskin with jet buckles.
I immediately began to shiver—he hadn’t bothered to make anything warm; the cloak was fur, but it was thin and better suited to a spring day than a winter night. He took his time with it, wandering around to see me from the back and place additional pearls in my cloak, or add another pair
of earrings—I wore two, one pair a long dangle of emeralds and the other a cluster of pearls shaped like a dove.
He declared himself finished, looking pleased. “There—you are almost pretty now.”
“Almost isn’t good enough, though, is it?” I said through chattering teeth, my mind racing. “A king as beautiful as yourself should not be marrying the likes of me.”
“Oh, no! You see, beauty of mind and spirit is what is most important to me in a wife,” he said. “I adore poetry, and the poets say this is the sort of beauty that matters most. Kindness. Generosity. Forgiveness.” He winced.
“I admit, I struggle with these things myself. Even now, I am filled with a desire to visit many vengeances upon the ones who put me in that tree, including my first wife, whose blood I would very much like to feed to my wolves, cup by cup. But—” He gave me a smile that lit up his entire face.
“—I will resist. For I hate cruelty and all other forms of ugliness, and will not abide them in myself.”
Behind him, one of the ravens he’d reanimated had begun worrying a rabbit, which shrieked alarmingly—the raven seemed to have little interest in killing it and merely amused itself by tearing at the rabbit’s fur. I’ve never seen a bird behave that way, but the king took no notice.
“What sort of palace would you like, my love?” he said, taking my hand.
“We must have somewhere to greet our courtiers. They will know I am free, and will be on their way to pay their respects.”
I don’t think I could have responded if he had held a sword to my throat.
I had imagined many possibilities after freeing him from his prison—this had not been one of them. I felt terror, but mixed into it was something that felt ridiculously like exultation. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a queen, or any of the rest of it. But try devoting your life to a field of study so elusive it is almost entirely made up of hearsay and speculation, and then have someone say to you casually, all right, I will now give you a book that will answer every question you ever had, and see if you don’t feel the same.
I felt ill. I was beginning to wonder if getting myself into danger had become something of an addiction.
The Hidden king patted my hand indulgently, thinking me either too humble or too stupid to answer. He turned towards the mountains, which peeked their snow-streaked faces through the winter trees, and tilted his head to one side.
A great rumbling started, and then came a series of cracks so loud I nearly threw myself to the ground, fearing lightning. A mist of ice crystals had descended upon the nearest mountain, and within it, a castle had appeared. It looked like a ghost for a moment, a huge, sprawling ghost made of glittering ice, built in levels to fit the slope, and then the mist split open, and it was real.
It took up almost half the mountainside. The king made a dissatisfied noise, squinting at it, and several of the turrets rearranged themselves and a row of outbuildings appeared where there had been none. Another squint, and suddenly there was a road leading up to the castle, broad and paved in huge cobblestones of ice, each with a different flower trapped inside it. I could see the flowers, because he brought the road all the way to our feet, sending trees crashing to the forest floor. The impact shook the ground so that I almost fell over, and I was soon coughing on the swirl of snow the fallen trees had raised. The avenue was lined with lanterns all gleaming with the same moonlight glow as those of the winter fair.
I didn’t watch only the castle as it reared up out of nothing—I also watched the king, terrified and fascinated. When he is not speaking or moving, he becomes perfectly still. I mean that—perfectly. I speculate that, in those moments, he returns to what he is, a piece of winter given form. It is the same stillness one finds in a frozen lake or trees weighted by heavy snow.
In one last gesture of extravagance, he lifted his hand and, with a sort of brushing motion, moved aside the smattering of clouds in the sky. The aurora shone through, mostly green tonight, or perhaps he summoned it along with everything else, I don’t know.
“Yes,” he said, examining the monstrous spectacle before us. “Yes, it’s a start, I suppose.”
His voice seemed far away; my hearing had been deadened by the
tumult of
SKIP NOTES
* What an intriguing comment this was. Initially I took it as a win for Blythe, to hear one of the common fae link his existence to the natural world (in this case, an icicle). Upon reflection, however, I believe this interpretation to be a tenuous one. The Folk often speak in metaphor. In fact, several years ago I had a conversation with one of the German kobolds in which she referred to herself as a “bud,” meaning a child. Yet I know that she did not originate from this form, as I met her parents several days later. And, indeed, Poe has referenced his own mother numerous times during our conversations.
