30th January
That is the date.
I know the date. I feel as if I have touched solid ground for the first time after years at sea.
When the dressmakers announced themselves this morning, after the king and I had breakfasted and he had left me with a chaste kiss, I put my plan into motion.
I had observed that, unlike the servants who trail after me at all times, the craftspeople sent to construct my absurd wedding are not of the palace.
They come from far and wide—some are not even from the Ljosland mainland, but remote Arctic islands off the ice-choked northern coast.
These Folk are smaller and speak with strange accents. Given that they are not part of the palace and its many enchantments, I thought perhaps there was a way one of them could get me out.
“You are not from the king’s court?” I asked.
“Not at all, my lady,” the tailor replied. “We are—far too humble for that.”
There were two of them, but only one spoke—the man, who now bent to measure my feet. He was small with overlarge black eyes and a sharp face, his hair the colour of dust and his fingers many-jointed and far too long. His companion, an oafish sort of woman whose perpetual mien was an odd mixture of embarrassment and moroseness, handed him a pair of silver shoes. I kicked them aside.
“Her Highness makes it difficult to determine her size,” the tailor said in a dry voice.
“Her Highness has a request to make,” I replied coldly.
“Indeed? Well, Her Highness need not concern herself with requests, but only demands, which surely she is accustomed to.”
As he spoke, he motioned for my servants, who were hovering as usual, to help the mute woman bring in yards upon yards of fabric. He selected a bolt, which—thank God—was neither black nor blue-white, but evergreen with black-and-white brocade.
“I desire a very particular veil,” I said, “I wish it to be woven from the white fur of a hare that I have shot with my own hands. You will weave it for me there in the forest, while the blood is still fresh on my hands, for I wish to make of my veil an offering to my dear husband.”
Now, I had calculated my request carefully, and knew it to be a sensible one for the Folk, who are given to such gruesome predilections. But the tailor only looked at me in silence, his sharp face unreadable.
“Well?” I demanded. “Is this beyond your capabilities?”
“No, my lady.”
“Then take me to the forest. I wish to hunt now.” I tried for an approximation of my fiancé’s thoughtless imperiousness, though I did not have his good humour to pair it with.
The tailor glanced briefly at my servants, who had removed a yard of fabric for his inspection. He took it and began pinning it to my chemise.
“His Highness cherishes my lady dearly,” he said, moving behind me to add more pins. “And what is cherished must be guarded closely, and protected with enchantments like golden chains.”
My chest tightened, and I reached out to the bedpost to steady myself. I understood the tailor’s careful words, though he would not speak openly, in case it were interpreted as criticism of the king.
The king had used his magic to shut me away in the palace. Each time I had tried to escape, I had found myself thwarted, and if I tried again, the results would be no different.
“If my lady would forgive her humble servant’s temerity,” the tailor said, “I have another proposition.”
“What is that?” I was barely listening. The room seemed to have grown cold and dreamlike, like the years stretching out before me, shut away in
that ice palace.
“His Highness has declared tomorrow a day of gift-giving.” The tailor’s sewing needle flashed in the light as he added a sleeve to the gown, impossibly quickly. “Folk and mortals both have been invited from far and wide to pay their respects to the king and his new bride. I would like to offer you a veil patterned after one that my mother wore on her own wedding night. I believe you will like it better.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I began to say, then stopped. The sewing needle was unusually small and delicate, forged of a very pure silver that darted in and out of the fabric like a fish through a stream.
I gave a sudden, involuntary jerk, and my arm jabbed into the needle. I gave a hiss of pain. When I did, the other faerie tailor, who had been holding her companion’s sewing kit and scissors in woebegone silence, let out a growl.
“Shut up, you brainless mongrel,” the tailor hissed at her. “It was just a little prick. She’s fine.”
My faerie servants hadn’t noticed this bizarre exchange. They continued to hover, mostly unhelpfully, unrolling more fabric from the bolt so that it dragged on the ground and gathered unsightly wrinkles. I turned to them.
“Leave us,” I commanded in my best imitation of queenly arrogance.
They exchanged puzzled glances and backed away a few paces.
The tailor looked at the ceiling, and then he turned to the attendants with a smile that somehow managed to be charming, despite his ugliness. “Her Highness is modest,” he said. “I must undress her now, and she’d rather we have some privacy.”
Oh, God. If I hadn’t known it was Bambleby before, I did now. Even through my shock and confusion, I couldn’t help glaring at him.
The servants tittered and drifted out, all but the senior of them, who said in a show of loyalty, “I must remain, for the king has decreed that my lady must at all times have someone to fulfil her every desire.”
“As thoughtful as that is,” the tailor said, “our lady’s desires are frequently nonsensical, and right now, she desires you not to fulfil them.”
He passed his hand over the servant’s face, and her expression grew dreamy and unfocused. With a sigh, she tumbled backwards onto the bed.
“Wendell!” I exclaimed, rushing forward. “You can’t murder my servants! The king will—”
“Much as I missed being berated by you, Em,” he said, “she is only asleep. We needn’t worry about your king’s wrath.”
I found the servant as he had said, drowsing with her eyes half closed. I was so relieved and happy and stunned, a rush of feelings all together, that I could have thrown my arms around him. Indeed, I almost did, but for some perverse reason, I found myself needing to argue with him instead. Truly, I sometimes wonder if some enchantment is at work to render him as disagreeable as possible. “He is not my king,” I said.
“No? But you freed him.” He shook his head. “How is it that you know how to befriend wild faerie dogs and ferret out Words of Power, yet you missed one of the fundamental rules of dryadology—namely, not cutting wicked kings out of trees.”
“I’ve learned my lesson, thank you,” I snapped. “Should you end up trapped in one, I won’t let you out.”
“You shall have to. I know you too well, Em. You could never survive without having someone around to snarl at.”
The other tailor had fallen onto all fours and was snuffling at my feet. I hugged her instead—or him, rather, for it was indeed Shadow under the glamour. He licked me, an unappealing experience, and I pushed his head back to ward off further attempts.
I stared at Wendell. He looked nothing like himself—he didn’t even sound like himself, his voice thickened and rough. Only now that I looked harder, I saw his familiar insouciant lean, the way he gazed at me with a mixture of bemusement and concern. He was several inches shorter than me now, and with his unprepossessing appearance and the palette of greys he wore, he could have faded into the background of any room.
“Oh,” I breathed in sudden understanding. “You have turned yourself into one of the oíche sidhe.”
“Naturally,” he said. “My grandmother’s blood flows through my veins, and so I may take on their appearance if it suits me—though the process was rather unpleasant.” He looked down at his formerly graceful fingers, now spindly with extra joints in them, and grimaced. “And worse than that,
I have to look at myself every day.”
“Could you not have used a glamour?”
“Well, perhaps, but I thought our snow king’s enchantments might shred it. This place is stuffed full of them. I risked putting one on Shadow, because if anyone was to reveal him, it would not matter much. He is
nobody’s enemy.”
I gazed at him. “And you are?”
“I have tried multiple times to free you by force, which didn’t go very well. I killed several of the king’s lords and ladies, though.”
My mouth fell open. “He never told me about that.”
“Why would he? Anyway, I eventually came up with this idea”—he gestured sourly at his unsightly self—“and after talking things over with Aud, we decided—”
“Aud!” I nearly yelped. “Aud is working to—to rescue me?”
“The whole village is working to rescue you, my dear. We’ve had almost a merry time, plotting it all out.”
I tried to picture this, Aud and Thora and Krystjan and the rest in the tavern, bandying about ideas to free me from Faerie, but my imagination failed me utterly—mainly because I could not picture them caring.
“Why?” I said softly.
“Why?” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You rescued three of their children—and scores more will be spared, no doubt, now that the changeling has been cast out.”
“I also freed a faerie king who is perfectly content to doom them to eternal winter.”
“Yes, but I managed to convince them that your intentions in that respect were noble.”
He said it in an offhand way, not caring if it was true or not. I shivered, though I hadn’t felt the cold in days. “They weren’t,” I said. “Not for the
most part. I wanted—” I looked down at myself, at my ridiculous dress. “I wanted to understand the story. I suppose I thought about helping Aud and the others, but I won’t lie and say that I didn’t think about science first.
They should not be risking their lives to help me.”
“Emily, Emily,” he said. “I’m positively astonished you decided to help these people, whether they came second, third, or fourteenth in your mind.
Have you ever done something like that before? Thought of someone other than yourself and your research, I mean.”
I glared at him. “You are calling me self-centred? You?”
He shrugged, unruffled by a slight against something he put little stock in, namely, his character. “In any event, these are practical people, and they care more about what you did than the why of it all. You should have seen Thora’s face when I told them you’d been taken. And Lilja and Margret were ready to declare war for you. Not to mention Aud—she loves that boy you rescued like her own child. And as for Ulfar, he swore on his mother’s grave they’d get you back—he only let out about a half dozen words in total before retreating into that gloomy mug of his, but still that is more than I’ve gotten from him in weeks.”
I felt an unexpected tightness behind my eyes, picturing the tableau he painted for me. I had been imagining myself all alone in this ice palace, with only my wits between me and eternal enchantment, while they all sat in the tavern as Ulfar’s stew bubbled in the back and the wind whistled through the crack in the windowsill that Aud never got round to patching, debating how best to rescue me. As when I had sobbed over Wendell’s injury, my reaction alarmed me. I can’t recall the last time I cried before coming to Hrafnsvik—likely I had been a small child. I won’t be maudlin, yet I couldn’t help but feel that something inside me had loosened— something small but troublesome, like a pebble caught in a shoe.
“And—and what did you decide?” I said.
“Aud and the others will pay the king a visit on the morrow, during the gift-giving. Mortals have been invited, so the king will lift the veil on his realm temporarily. They will present him and his bride-to-be with a wedding gift containing a poison that will render him senseless. Things will
get rather messy after that, but not to worry—we will use the chaos as cover as we flee.”
I sat heavily on the bed, next to my enchanted servant, who dreamed so soundly that she appeared to be drooling. “And this winter will end. Is it bad out there, in Hrafnsvik?”
“Utterly dreadful.” He rolled the faerie out of the way and sat beside me.
“It snows all day and night, which is very tedious. My own clothes no longer suffice, so I’ve had to borrow a sealskin cloak of Ulfar’s. I suppose it’s warm enough, and I’ve tailored it adequately, but I cannot get the smell of fish stew out. And then, of course, there are the boots.”
I have no doubt he would have gone on at length about the degradations of his wardrobe had I not interrupted, “But this poison will not kill the king?”
“Hmm? No.” He gave me a smile ill-suited to a discussion of regicide.
“Sneaking poison in amongst the gifts was Aud’s idea. We make quite a good team. I tracked down the old queen, who was hiding out in the mountains with her firstborn son. Her allies at court faked her death.”
“You tracked her down?” I repeated faintly.
“Yes. Well, I’ve been looking ever since the king enchanted you during our delightful expedition to his tree-prison.”
“You knew!” I exclaimed.
“Of course I knew. Give me a little credit. Anyway, I thought that the queen might know how to break her former husband’s hold on you, so I went searching for a door to her court. I found one, a narrow, ancient door high on a forgotten peak, which would not open for me, but coincidentally it was the same door she eventually fled through after you freed the king. I guessed she might make use of it then, and indeed, I found her hiding quite nearby.”
“You might have told me you knew I was enchanted,” I snapped. “You might have said something that very night, in fact, when we returned from the tree. Or at any other time—we only spent every day together.”
“What would have been the point? You would only have denied it—the enchantment would have forced you to. I dropped plenty of hints in that
blasted journal of yours.”
I thought back to how the enchantment had thwarted me every time I opened my mouth to reveal it, how often I had forgotten that I was enchanted at all. I had to admit he was probably right—well, no, I didn’t have to admit it.
I tightened my hand into a fist. It was swathed in a white glove, cunningly tailored with elaborate folds and bunches to mask the absence of the third finger. It gave its ghost-ache, which was familiar to me by now.
“And what is to be the queen’s role in this?” I said.
“The king will not be worried about her, given that he thinks she was torn apart by wolves, and so she will sneak into the gift-giving ceremony in disguise. Once he has been distracted by the poison, she will kill him, aided and abetted by her allies among the nobility, of whom there are quite a few, though they’ve been temporarily cowed into subservience to their king.”
My mouth was dry. “How?”
He shrugged. “I’ve left that up to their fertile imaginations.”
I lowered my head onto my hands. My mind had stopped whirling since Wendell’s arrival—I wondered if he was doing something to counteract the king’s enchantments—but I still felt too light, as if I might at any moment fade away. “Well, you will never fool me again.”
“What?”
“I will never again believe you to be incapable of hard work.”
He shuddered. “Being capable is not the same as being inclined, Em.”
“Could you free me without killing him?” I said. “Could you imprison
him again?”
“No,” he said, after a puzzled pause.
“You can turn back time,” I said, frustrated.
He shook his head. “Your belief in me is flattering. But at my age, most Folk have only begun to grasp the extent of their powers. This king is older than the mountains. And worse, we are in his realm, not mine. What does it matter? Surely you don’t pity him. He will starve everyone in Hrafnsvik, you know, burying them and their fields beneath yards of snow even at the height of summer, if left to his own devices.”
I shook my head slowly. “The old queen and her court will go back to abducting mortals. Aud and the others will once again hear their music
calling to them on a winter’s night.”
“I daresay they’re used to that.”
I quickly abandoned this line of argument—it was silly of me to expect him to care about the wickedness of the Folk when his own people are guilty of worse than the Hidden Ones, if the stories are to be believed. I tugged at a loose strand of hair—the servants had secured it with some contraption of ribbons and pins, but it seemed not even faerie magic could tame it. “Did they really plan this—this rescue?”
He smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t believe it. Just because you have a heart filled with the dust of a thousand library stacks does not mean everybody does. Here.”
He handed me a small book with a leather cover, plain in an expensively crafted sort of way. His journal.
“I don’t bother writing in it often,” he began.
“I could count on one hand how often,” I said. “Were I missing half my fingers.”
He ignored me. “But I made an effort to document things more consistently after you ran off with the king. You are so obsessed with recording everything about our time here; I thought you would appreciate it.
I have marked the entries detailing my conversations with the villagers.”
I was tempted to make some remark to answer his library dust comment, but in truth, I was a little humbled by his thoughtfulness.
“Thank you,” I said finally. “I will—I will confine my reading to the indicated entries only.”
He was only partly listening to me, his attention absorbed by the mirror that hung by my bed, in which he was frowning at his reflection and tugging his cloak this way and that.
“I thought you had only a little common fae ancestry,” I said, trying to suppress my amusement—though not very hard, I admit.
He scowled. “It is a little. I have three other grandparents, all highborn, including a king and queen.”
I nodded, pretending to ponder this. Then I said, “There’s a bump in
your nose now.”
He glared at me. “There is not.”
“Your mouth is lopsided.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but then he just let out a weary groan.
“What is the point? I am hideous. I can’t wait to change myself back again.”
“Don’t. I prefer you like this.”
He looked surprised, then he began to smile. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “You blend into the background. I could almost forget about you entirely. It’s refreshing.”
Naturally, he found a way to twist this into a compliment. “And am I ordinarily a distraction to you, Em?”
He rose to leave, flicking his fingers at the servant, who grumbled and began to stir. “Your attendants will become suspicious if I tarry much longer,” he said. “I will send you a note with your veil to clarify your role in tomorrow’s events. Perhaps it will soothe your conscience to know that it is a small one.”
As he retreated, he seemed to melt into the grey daylight shadows, and I felt a sudden stab of terror. I didn’t want him to leave.
Actually, I wanted him to stay, which was almost but not quite the same thing. I realized with a horrible sort of clarity that I had missed him.
“What is the date?” I said.
He paused, and told me.
“A month,” I murmured. “I was off by a month.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s not bad. Most mortals can watch years slip by in Faerie and think them mere days.”
“Wendell,” I said. “I should—I mean, everything you’ve done for me, I —”
“Oh dear,” he said. “That’s how I know you’ve really and truly been enchanted—you are getting mushy. You will kill me later if I enjoy the moment, so I’ll leave you to profess your gratitude to the walls. And anyhow, I must finish your dress.”
I did not see him and Shadow leave the room, though I knew they were gone. My servant propped herself up on one elbow, blinking her frosty eyelashes in confusion. Before she had a chance to open her mouth, I berated her for falling asleep and bid her to send in my next visitor.
