3rd February
I have spent the last quarter hour simply staring at this page. I must write down what happened that day in the king’s palace, but it is all such a tangle of horrors and impossibilities that it feels almost futile to try.
For the scene of a bloody assassination, the king’s gift-giving ceremony was a remarkably dull affair. I wonder if this is the context in which all such events unfold, whether all the great murders and intrigues of history were preceded by a series of moments in which dull grey men talked at length about nothing or large groups of people simply waited around, fiddling with their hair or picking lint off their clothes.
I sat fidgeting in my throne beside the king while a long procession of people approached one by one to lay their gifts at our feet, then went to join the crowd of spectators. The throne was made of delicate blades of ice, slotted together to resemble the rib cage of some enormous beast, and piled with furs to keep me comfortable. The king sat in an identical throne, though without the furs, his hands folded politely in his lap. We were in a throne room that wasn’t a room, but the vast courtyard in the heart of the palace, where sometimes there were two thrones, a dais, and a long avenue lined with ice statues of glowering Folk, and sometimes there were not.
The weather was a strange and lovely mixture of snow clouds and winter sky; whenever the clouds parted, still spilling their flakes, rainbows alighted upon the mountain peaks. The sunlight turned everything to silver and pearl.
I wore the green dress Wendell had made; he had sent it to me that morning with a note saying that he’d decided it was inappropriate for a
wedding, and so why didn’t I wear it today? There had been other things in the note, of course, and I had torn it to shreds and tossed it down the mountainside after I’d finished reading. The dress was perfect, every inch of it, covering me in emerald green drapery that flowed like the boughs of a weeping willow, the bodice embellished with crushed pearls that made a whispery sound when I moved. And with it was a matching veil which I wore pushed back from my face. My hair had been swept up by my servants and woven with jewels, but several pieces were already falling into my eyes, proving once again that even magic is not enough to keep me neat.
The pearls lining the veil brushed against my forehead, cold and hard.
A faerie woman as tall and slender as evening shadow placed a cage at the king’s feet. He motioned to a servant, who opened the cage door, and out sprang a white raven.
“An albino!” the king exclaimed, leaning forward onto his hand, his elbows on his knees. He had a childlike manner about him in such moments that made me wonder at Wendell’s description of him—older than the mountains. But I never wondered for long. These moments were only flashes, the drops of sunlight winnowed through the deepest and darkest woods. He settled back in his throne, growing far too still again, his magic enveloping us all like wind. He is more magic than person, that is the truth of it. Is this what happens to all the Folk as they age, their power hollowing them out like the fissures in an ancient glacier?
Many of the gifts were for me. There were jewels and gowns and furs and paintings—done on ice canvases that made everything bleed together far more than watercolours—and a strange, empty box with a base of some sort of pale velvet that the faerie claimed would sprout white roses with diamonds in them if left outside at midday, and blue roses with rubies if left outside at midnight. There were other nonsensical presents along these lines, including a saddle of shapeless grey leather that would allow me to ride the mountain fog, though no explanation was given as to why I should wish to do this. The only presents I truly appreciated came in the form of ice cream, which the Hidden Ones are obsessed with and cover with sea salt and nectar from their winter flowers.
The king turned to beam at me lovingly every few moments, and I forced a smile in return while my hands, hidden in my sleeves, clenched into fists. The brief clarity I had felt during Wendell’s visit was gone, and my thoughts were foggy. I always felt worse in the king’s presence, by which I mean that it was harder to stop my mind from being befuddled and to avoid those disquieting instances where I lost myself for entire chunks of time. It made sense, I suppose; he was the source of the enchantments that held the palace together, that shut his world away from mortal eyes, and that no doubt altered time to suit his fancy. I was like a small planet that, when it drifted too near a massive star, began to tear itself apart.
The more I thought about our plan, the more wrong it seemed, and the more that wrongness curdled inside me. It wasn’t just that it would mean replacing one vicious faerie king with a more vicious queen; it didn’t feel at all like the proper ending to such a story. Mortal maidens forced to marry faerie kings never just lop their heads off and walk away—they are cleverer than that. I thought of the Gottland tale of the hairdresser who wove curses into her braids, so that every time her husband touched her, one of his cherished hunting dogs—who had been menacing the peasants of the countryside—would turn into a fox or some such (the transformations grow progressively more ludicrous as the story unfolds, culminating in a cricket); also of the long-winded epic that is a popular fireside tale in Yorkshire of the shepherdess who enlisted the help of the common fae of the fields to torment her wicked husband by spinning scraps of wool into dolls so uncanny they eventually drove him mad.
The plan Wendell had devised with the others felt like taking the story I’d fallen into and folding it to suit me, putting ugly creases down the middle. And yet, as much as I was convinced that there was another door out of the tale somewhere, I couldn’t see it.
My gaze floated over the assembled Folk—they glimmered like a lake full of sunlight, even more shapeshifting as a crowd than they are individually. Where was the queen?
There were a few Folk from elsewhere, from beyond Ljosland, which did not seem to surprise anyone. To my eyes, they seemed even less distinct
than the Hidden Ones, barely more than shadows in lovely gowns and fur cloaks, though I don’t know if that was my faulty mortal sight or something the king had done to elevate the splendor of his own people.
I itched for my notebook. Whether or not the Folk have regular dealings with Folk of other realms is the sort of question scholars argue over for hours at conferences, and there I was, casually watching the answer stroll up and give me presents.
The next guest drove all such thoughts from my mind. Wendell swept up to the dais, short and drab and indistinct, and gave me and the king a bow.
The lords and ladies who had been watching the proceedings turned back to their whispered gossip, dismissing him entirely. I saw the king frown briefly, as if some memory had been triggered. Wendell appeared perfectly at his ease, even a little bored, as he set at my feet a pair of shoes.
I sucked in my breath. The shoes were of white leather and fur, with impractical heels that would add half a foot to my height, but unlike every other adornment I had been presented with, they did not sparkle with frost or ice-encrusted jewels. Somehow, he had woven the fur with the petals of cherry blossoms, as if the pale beast who had owned the pelt had rubbed its back against a tree. When I touched them, a spring breeze fluttered against my fingers, and I smelled rain and green, growing things.
“If you would allow me the honour, Your Highness?” Wendell said. In one quick, graceful motion, he slid the boots from my feet and replaced them with the shoes. They fit perfectly, and oh, they were so warming. I felt astonished that I hadn’t realized how cold my feet had been before.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to read the meaning of this gift on his unfamiliar face. But he gave me no assistance, only smiled, bowed again to the king, and faded back into obscurity.
The king was watching me with a frown between his lovely blue eyes.
“Are you all right, my darling? Your heart is thundering as if it wishes to escape from you.”
I swallowed—it would be an understatement to call his knowledge of my heart rate an unpleasant surprise. “The shoes are beautiful.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling. I didn’t think him an idiot, only his expectations of me were so limited that I never found him difficult to lie to. I had the sense that he viewed all mortals as akin to his pet ravens, whose lives revolve around the treats he tosses their way, which made me wonder if he’d ever had a comeuppance before, and I don’t mean by a fellow monarch. The literature is, after all, strewn with examples of arrogant faerie lords given their due by artless maidens and practical rustics.
“I should have guessed,” he said. “I’ve been wrong to spoil you with jewels and servants, haven’t I? Never fear. After our wedding, I will have my shoemakers fill your rooms to bursting with boots of calfskin and rabbit fur, all covered in diamonds, flowers, and frost; you shall have a different pair for each day of your life.”
I didn’t care for the way he said this, as if the life of a mortal, measured in ridiculous shoes, was so puny a thing that there was nothing at all extravagant about such a present. He turned his attention to the three guests approaching our thrones.
If my heart had been suspiciously thundering before, now it was a racehorse spooked to a gallop. The mortals stood out against the lovely watercolour gathering of Folk like accidental splotches of ink on a canvas.
Aud, Finn, and Aslaug walked steadily, staring in front of them, though as the thrones loomed closer, I could see their resolution falter.
Aud was the bravest. She kept a little ahead of the others, dressed simply but well in her furs with her hair intricately braided. Given her smallness, it was all the more impressive, and I could see the king start to smile. Finn was pale, but I could see that, alongside his fear, there was amusement, as if he could see no other way to react to such an impossible situation.
Aslaug surprised me the most. She had gained weight, and her gaze had lost its cloudiness—she looked like an altogether different person. When she met my gaze, she smiled—a quick, fierce thing that was also a promise.
“Do you know them?” the king enquired, politely nodding at the villagers as they bowed and curtsied.
“Yes,” I said, for there was no reason to lie about it. “They are—friends of mine.”
“You honour us, Your Highness,” Aud said, and swept me another note- perfect curtsey. “And we are honoured to be invited here to pay our humble respects to His Majesty and his bride-to-be, as well as to welcome what I hope will be a new era of friendship between mortals and Folk. It has been too long since we have been honoured with an invitation to your realm.”
“I quite agree,” the king said. “And you put it prettily too—I know very well there were no invitations made to mortals during the interregnum— only abductions. Rest assured such occurrences will no longer be tolerated.”
He gave her one of his kind, beautiful smiles, and I could see that Finn and Aslaug were dazzled; Aud smiled back, though I knew her well enough now to detect a certain opacity about it.
“If I might be so bold as to present His Highness with a token of the mortal realm,” Aud said. “It is nothing so fine as the gifts you have so far received.”
“Then I’m sure I shall like it all the more,” he said with such graceful condescension that several ladies in the audience swooned.
Aud held up the bottle she was carrying. “This is our finest honey wine, which has been maturing for nearly a century of our years. I can attest that there is no choicer vintage in the mortal world.”
The king looked positively charmed by such a humble gift. Glasses were brought out by faerie servants, and Aud filled them all, emptying the bottle among the king’s nearest courtiers. They drank politely, and showed no ill effects beyond a few grimaces—and why should they? The wine in the bottle was not poisoned.
Aud moved to offer the king a glass, paused, smiled, and handed it to me first. My hand shook as I gripped the stem, splashing wine on my sleeve.
The wrongness of what we were doing overwhelmed me then, leaving me lightheaded. Those other stories flickered through my mind like dark birds.
I had to be resolute. If I did not go through with our plot, I would be trapped forever, slowly losing more and more of myself, while Hrafnsvik and all the other villages watched their animals die and their shovels break against their frozen farmland.
My fingers white against the glass, I took a sip, and as I did so, I brushed my hair back. A habitual gesture, to keep it out of the drink—my hair, of course, is forever flopping all over the place. But I also brushed the veil Wendell had made for me, loosening a single pearl. The pearl landed in the wine with an insubstantial splash, and dissolved.
I should have felt relief. That was it—my part was done. I had only to pass the poisoned wine to my betrothed. To wait for him to sag forward in convulsions, for the queen and her son and whatever other allies they had among the courtiers to spring forward and finish him. Wendell was already moving—he strolled along the edge of the crowd, moving closer to the thrones as if to improve his view. He would grab me as the king died, and we would flee with Aud and the others in the ensuing chaos.
And yet there I sat, still holding the wine.
Finn and Aslaug began to look worried. Aud alone was at ease, a warm smile still hovering on her lips. But it was not her usual smile, I knew, which was cool and brisk; this smile was a performance.
I leaned forward under the pretense of offering Aud a grateful kiss. She mirrored me, calmly pressing her cheek to mine, though I felt her stiffen slightly with disquiet.
“I can’t do it,” I murmured. My thoughts blurred together, and I had to dig my nails into my palms to keep myself from slipping through time again. “It’s not how it’s supposed to end.”
I believe I babbled something else, about stories or patterns or I don’t know what, for my memory is patchy. I know that Aud kissed me, and I felt her lips trembling. I held her eyes with mine, trying to convey to her that I wished her to tell me what to do, to help me. But she only stared back in baffled silence. And why wouldn’t she? She had planned this whole intricate scheme out with Wendell, and now here I was, threatening to bring it crashing down upon us.
Aud quickly mastered herself, hiding her shock under polite surprise.
“Her Highness’s praise is far too kind.”
The entire incident—my hesitation; Aud’s embrace—had lasted only seconds. The king was still smiling, perfectly unsuspecting as he murmured
to one of his courtiers. He turned to me, holding out his graceful hand—the nails very white and narrower at the tips, as if they would form points if left untrimmed—to accept the wine.
Aud’s gaze bored into me. I could see she hadn’t understood a word I’d said—unsurprising, given my nonsensical prattling. No doubt she thought I’d gone mad. And perhaps I had, shut away so long in that winter world, encased in enchantments like layers of dreams. Yet in that moment I knew —I knew—that if I went through with our plot, it would be to the ruin of us all. I had no evidence to support this, and yet the conviction had its roots in reason, somehow; not in anything specific, but in my accumulated knowledge of the Folk, the resonance of hundreds of stories. This murder was discordant; a snapped string.
I made some motion with the wineglass—I don’t know what it was.
Probably I would have dropped the glass, shattering it, or perhaps in my agitation I was motivated enough for drama and would have hurled it away.
But at that slight motion, Aud sprang forward, knocking the glass from my hand.
The surprise of it launched me to my feet, an inarticulate cry on my lips —it was as if I had awakened from slumber, and a great terror at what I had been about to do rose within me. The king stared at me, then at Aud, then at the wine soaking into the ice. It bubbled and frothed, and then a tendril of smoke went up, as if in the wine there had lurked a flame, now snuffed out.
A murmur of horror went up among the courtiers.
“Forgive me, Your Highness,” Aud said with her usual cool calm. “But as Her Highness moved the glass into the light, I noticed that the wine had turned an odd colour—I know our vintage well. I believe the glass itself was lined with poison. No doubt a foul plot hatched by allies of the former queen.” She paused as if to process a shock, yet I saw the wheels turning in her mind. “It is fortunate that your betrothed is mortal—no doubt her blood is too warm to have been affected.”
Aud gave me a brief, sharp look, and I collapsed back into my throne, still staring at her. She hadn’t understood my hesitation—I could see that written plainly on her face. But far from thinking me mad, she had trusted
me wholeheartedly, and she had acted, twisting the story into a new shape.
An inarticulate sound rose within me, close to a sob.
And yet—it almost didn’t work.
The king looked from Aud to the spilled wine, still smoking, then his gaze swept over the assembled courtiers and guests, whose shock quickly turned to terror. As one, they shuffled away from him, bumping into one another. I didn’t blame them—the king’s expression was contorted, and all the sunlight and playful rainbows had dissolved in a swirl of ice crystals.
He looked at me, and I knew my shock showed plainly on my face, while my mouth hung open in an idiotic way—unintentional, but in retrospect, it was the best possible alibi I could have given him. His face softened, and he squeezed my hand.
“There, there, my love,” he said. “I’m quite unharmed. You needn’t worry.”
Then it all began to unravel. There came a series of screams, and a drab, black-haired faerie woman was hauled through the gathering and thrown at the king’s feet.
“The traitor queen, Your Highness,” one of her captors declared. “She has disguised herself!”
The king made a sharp gesture, and suddenly the huddled faerie was drab no more, but unspeakably beautiful, all sharp lines and frost-glittering skin and white hair that flowed all the way to the ground. At her side she carried a sword, nearly as tall as she and wonderfully incriminating. It struck me that the two faeries who had dragged the queen before the king should not have been able to identify her through her glamour, if the king could not, and I also noted the way their outraged tones contrasted with how they kept swallowing and darting looks at the king. But he did not spare them a glance. His gaze never strayed from the queen.
“I thought I had killed you, my darling,” he murmured to the queen in a voice that was almost a caress. I cowered away from him, not caring how I looked.
“You thought, you thought,” she spat. Her voice was as lovely as her face, even in her fury. “Your power is matched only by your stupidity, my
husband. Twice now I have played you for the fool. I shall rise and play you a third time.”
I could not help admiring her self-possession, though her threat struck me as unlikely, particularly as there were suddenly a great many hands upon the queen, striking and shoving her, stripping her of her sword and handing it to the king.
By this time, a number of Folk were running for the doors. Some of the king’s guards were mowing them down with their ice swords, though it was impossible to know if their flight was the result of guilt or simple panic.
Guests were screaming, and there came the intermittent noise of clashing weaponry. It was chaos—that part of the plan, at least, had come off.
Suddenly, Wendell was at my side with one of the king’s guards. “We must get Her Highness to safety,” he told the king. He might as well not have spoken, for the king took no heed of him whatsoever, nor of me. He stood before the queen, tapping her sword against the ground, drawing the moment out for the enjoyment of it.
“The show is over, Your Highness,” Wendell murmured, dragging me off the throne as he threw a cloak over my shoulders. “Time to put your notebook away.”
Aud, Aslaug, and Finn fell into step behind us as we ran. At one point, Wendell drew the king’s guard behind a wall, whereupon he brushed the guard’s face with his fingers as he’d done to my maid, and the guard collapsed almost comically, as if he were a puppet whose strings had been cut.
I stopped suddenly. We had just run through the first set of doors, beyond which was a hallway that should have led us to the outermost doors of the palace. But instead, we found ourselves in my horribly familiar chambers.
“I’m still caught in the king’s enchantments,” I told Wendell. “Take the others—you’ll be able to escape if I’m not with you.”
“Shut up,” Aud said, and she gave me a brief, painful hug. She looked at Wendell. “Is there anything you can do?”
“Possibly,” he said. “Yes, you’re still caught, and this would be a lot easier if he were dead.” He glared at me and Aud. “But he’s quite distracted right now, which means that his enchantments are wavering. I may be able to find us a way through.”
“Here.” I hardly recognized Aslaug’s voice. She pulled off my cloak, turned it inside out, and put it back on me again. “He’s a great lord, I know, but perhaps this will help a little.”
Wendell nodded approvingly. He paced back and forth in front of the door, examining it as if it were—well, something other than an empty stretch of air. I watched Aslaug.
“I suppose you’re wishing you hadn’t come along now,” I said.
She snorted. “I’ve been wishing it ever since I saw that horribly beautiful creature on his throne. How did you keep your hands off him?”
She gave me a sly look that I never could have imagined on her face before.
“Or did you?”
“Please,” Wendell said. “I ask to be excused from any descriptions of marital intimacy. This whole thing is unfair: I asked you to marry me first.”
“Oh, that’s rich!” I exclaimed, and was about to remind him of his many dalliances, which he’d never hesitated to make me aware of, but he seemed to sense the storm coming, and said, “Mustn’t tarry. Come, I think I’ve found a door.”
He dragged me from the room, the others following close behind. We came out in a vast cavern full of little hot spring pools where the courtiers liked to bathe. Wendell muttered to himself, and we ran on, until we left the cavern behind and came to a room I’d never seen before, filled with ice statuary.
“I thought you found the door!” I called, panting.
“I have,” he said over his shoulder. “But it’s a very narrow one, a gap between many layers of enchantment, and it requires some manoeuvring.
Come on!”
We came next to a side door that led us back to the courtyard, where the ice now ran red with blood, then he made us all leap through a window that brought us to a winter garden, filled with flowers the colour of twilight
punctuated with violent hedges, their leaves black and spiky and their berries bright with poison. Another door brought us to the banquet hall, which had a dozen more doors leading off it. Wendell hesitated only briefly, then made a run for the third door to our left. It looked to be a servants’ egress, but once we were through, I tripped over a snowdrift and would have tumbled all the way down the mountainside had not Wendell been holding on to me.
“There,” he said, smug and satisfied. “Now shall I explain your gift?”
I wanted to tell him to hang his gift, for we were standing on a narrow ledge with only the raging wind and the fall of the mountainside all around us, and I could see no way down, but my teeth were chattering too hard to force any words through them.
He smiled and lifted the hem of my skirt. The shoes he’d given me had transformed—now they were boots going all the way up to my knees, the fur so thick and warm they doubled the diameter of my calves, ending in sturdy wooden snowshoes.
He looked so smug now that I wanted to send him over the side of the mountain, but instead I said, “Thank you,” and kissed his lopsided mouth. It had the effect of stunning him into silence, which I enjoyed almost as much.
“This way,” he said, looking flustered for the first time since I have known him, and then he led us down into the valley.
