23rd December (?)
The worst part of my day is when the king receives visitors. These are supplicants, mostly, faeries both courtly and common who come with gifts and congratulations expressed in varying degrees of desperation. Occasionally, such gifts include the heads of the king’s enemies, who conspired to shut him away in the tree or turned a blind eye to the queen’s machinations. The heads do not bleed—I am spared that, at least—but they do melt, which might sound easier to bear the sight of, but should you ever witness a corpse whose nose or eyes have simply melted away, you will know what nonsense that is.
Each time, the king exclaims over the cruelty of it. Once he exclaimed for so long that several of the servants began shuffling their feet, their eyes gone glassy with boredom. The lords and ladies bear his displeasure remarkably well, bowing their heads humbly and murmuring apologies, all the while looking pleased with themselves. Invariably, I will find the head turned into some ghastly decoration somewhere, usually placed upon a pedestal and decorated with jewels to make it beautiful, while the lord or lady who so angered the king with their barbarity is suddenly being invited to dine at the king’s table and granted tokens of his favour in the form of furs, minstrels, or minor enchantments. When I pointed out that this hardly set a good example, he shook his head and smiled at me.
“The ability to forgive is a great virtue,” he said. “Indeed, there are few qualities that are more exquisite or more rare.”
He was also given to expatiating on the dire punishments he would dole out to his former wife, the now-deposed queen, who I understood was in hiding somewhere, if his nature was not so magnanimous. As it was, he
said, he wished only that she be brought before him so that he could forgive her publicly and gift her with a little land to heal the wound between them. I began to dread the arrival of every messenger, certain that they would bring news that the ex-queen had been disposed of in a dozen stomach-churning ways, perhaps even bringing as proof something worse than her severed head—I did not know what could be worse than that, but I had no doubt the king’s courtiers would work it out. I was almost relieved when word finally came that she had been torn apart by the king’s wolves, who had mysteriously escaped their kennel one starless night. The king wept for more than an hour, and then at his next banquet, the lady who had gifted him the wolves was seated at his right hand, smirking victoriously at the assembled guests, many of whom fixed her with scowls betraying a grudging admiration.
