4th February
I have read over my last entry, contemplating scratching it out and starting anew, out of some misguided desire to make it all sound more plausible. But Wendell and I will reach London tomorrow, and a day is insufficient time to accomplish that— a year would be insufficient, I suspect.
My memory of the journey back to Hrafnsvik is hazy. The snow, stirred up from the mountainside as we descended to form an icy fog, seemed somehow to mingle with the enchantments that bound me to the king. In one corner of my memory, the journey was one of hours; in another, we were trapped in those mountains for days, wandering haphazardly. I recall Wendell swearing in Irish and Faie as he tried to disentangle me; though we’d made it out of the palace, scraps of enchantment still clung to me like the broken filaments of a spiderweb. I don’t remember the others being there at all, and later Aslaug told me that Wendell would appear and disappear, leading them through the mortal realm as he gradually drew me out of the faerie one. I suppose they walked alongside me the whole time, a world away.
My first clear memory is awakening in the cottage—I was lying by the fire in a soft pool of blankets. I was confused by this at first, for my bed would have been more comfortable, until I realized that despite the blazing fire and the layers of furs, I was still shivering lightly. It was a chill that would not leave me for several days, and which I still feel at times when the sea wind picks its slippery way through the cracks in my cabin.
Shadow lay curled at my side and rolled upright with a delighted snort when he sensed I was awake. He shoved his huge muzzle into my face and
licked me, while I half patted, half swatted him away. I’m afraid his breath is immune to glamour and smells exactly as you’d expect a Black Hound’s breath to smell—rather deathly.
“There you are,” Wendell said, his head appearing above my little blanket nest. He looked cheerful and supremely smug. “And how are we
feeling?”
“Like I could sleep until spring.”
“No time for that, I’m afraid. We leave tomorrow morning—early—for
Loabær.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You wish to hang about for the aftermath of what happened at the palace yesterday?” Wendell shook his head. “No, much safer to make ourselves scarce. In Loabær, we will seek passage on a merchant ship to London captained by Ulfar’s brother—not ordinarily a passenger vessel, I’m afraid, so accommodations will be spartan, but it is our only option, as we have missed the freighter. Ulfar will accompany us to Loabær to arrange things.”
“What,” I said fuzzily. A hundred thoughts swam through my addled mind, and I grasped at the one that felt most familiar. “What about the paper?”
“I’m just fine,” he said, relaxing into the nearest armchair with his hands folded. “A little weary, from dragging you all down from that mountain, but beyond that I am simply glad to be leaving this land of ice. Aud, Aslaug,
and Finn are all well.”
I glared at him. “I was about to—”
“I’m sure you were.” He didn’t seem annoyed, though; there was a quality to his smile, as he gazed at me, that I couldn’t interpret.
“Aud’s gone back to the palace to request a favour from the king,” he said. “She should be back by nightfall, all going well.”
“A favour,” I repeated in disbelief. Then I thought about it. “Oh! Of course. She will ask him to put an end to this snow.”
He nodded. “He owes her, so I suspect he’ll give her whatever she wishes, though one can never be certain. Perhaps he’ll shove her onto the
throne in your stead.”
“That’s very nice,” I said. “And I’m the hardhearted one?”
He shrugged. “I did advise her against it. Anyway! I’ll get you some tea.”
I was thirsty, I realized, and hungry. He brought me a steaming cup and a plate of Poe’s bread, soft and fresh and slathered with marmalade. After I’d devoured the lot, he rose again, and I heard rustling, then he tossed something onto my lap. A stack of pages, neatly clipped together and covered in his elegant handwriting.
“We’ll pay someone to type it out when we reach Paris,” he said, waving his hand.
“You cannot work a typewriter?” I murmured distantly, staring at the
title.
“There are limits, Em.”
The title read:
Of Frost and Fire: An Empirical Study of the Folk of Ljosland
Emily Wilde, PhD, MPhil, BSc, DDe, and Wendell Bambleby, PhD, MSc. Hons.
“You finished it,” I said once I had regained the use of my voice.
“Read it over,” he said, somehow managing to look even more smug.
“I certainly will,” I said, so emphatically that he laughed.
“The bibliography is a bit of hodgepodge, but that’s your strong suit, isn’t it? And the whole middle section on the habits of the common fae is cribbed almost verbatim from your notes. But you might say,” he added, examining his hands, “that I did most of the work.”
“I would certainly not say that.”
He ignored me and began a long dissertation on his efforts while I was away as I skimmed the pages, only half listening. He had been honest in confessing his reliance on my notes—the majority of the paper was comprised of them. But he’d spun everything together in an unexpected
way, filled with lively speculation and effortlessly clever phrasings that I could not have hoped to achieve. The effect was scholarly yet glamourous, weightier than Bambleby’s usual fare yet much more engaging than my own writing.
“I must remain like this for the present, it seems,” he said heavily, rubbing his hand over his face. “It’s a long and tiring process, changing shape, and I’m not sure I have the patience to start today. But I will be myself again in time for the conference.”
“What?” I said, giving him a blank look. Then I blinked, taking in his plain appearance, unchanged from before. “Oh, yes, of course.”
He stared at me. “You didn’t notice?”
I said that I hadn’t, and he stomped off to the kitchen in high dudgeon.
In fact I had noticed, in a drowsy sort of way, when I’d first awakened, that his hair hadn’t returned to its golden waves, and felt a pinch of disappointment. But why would I tell him that?
My encyclopaedia was exactly where I had left it, neatly arranged on the table beneath the faerie stone paperweight, as if it too had spent the last weeks in a separate pocket of time. I rested my hand upon the stack, pressing slightly, relishing the familiar rustle of the paper. Then I noticed something.
I removed the paperweight. There in the margin of page one was Wendell’s familiar scrawl. I flipped through the rest of the manuscript, mouth hanging open slightly. He had not added his opinions to every page, but he had clearly read it front to back. He had even taken the liberty of rearranging certain sections and crossing others out.
I opened my mouth to call him back to the room, intending to register my displeasure—for I did not require a co-author for something I had spent much of my adult life compiling. But then I closed it again as I flipped through the notes. Some of his ideas were quite good. Well—I supposed that there was nothing wrong with a little feedback, even if it was of the heavy-handed variety.
A knock came, and I shuffled over to answer it, one of the blankets wrapped around me. Lilja and Margret stood on the threshold, and on the
path below were Mord, Aslaug, and Finn. I blinked, startled by so many faces on my doorstep.
Lilja gave me a brief, light hug. “I know you leave in the morning, and haven’t the time for farewell parties,” she said. “So we thought we’d just come round with some baking and help you pack.”
“Marvellous,” Wendell said, flopping back into his chair with a cup of tea. “I despise packing. Do come in.”
I realized that I should have said this by now, and stepped back to let them all tromp inside, banging the snow off their boots. Mord and Aslaug had brought an almond cake called a hvitkag, while Finn had a loaf of the dark Ljoslander bread, baked in the hot earth, as well as some salted chocolates.
Mord looked around the cottage. “Krystjan’s fixed the place up since I last saw it. Calling it a shack would have been generous, then.”
He paused before the forest mirror, gazing open-mouthed into the swaying greenery. “This looks like the forest I used to play in as a boy, just outside Loabær. Look! There is the willow with the face in the trunk.”
“Where are the tea things, Wendell?” Aslaug asked. “I’ve brought a bottle of red, too, in case anyone cares for something stronger.”
“I’ll start with the books,” Finn said.
And that was that; suddenly the place was as noisy and bustling as a train station. Finn went back to the main house to fetch spare luggage, returning with Krystjan and several wooden crates. Wendell and I had accumulated a variety of things over the course of our stay, from Aud’s gifts to the faerie cloak, which prompted a great deal of curiosity and discussion.
Wendell floated about the room, chatting with this person and that, giving off the impression of contributing while doing no actual work at all.
The whole time, I worried that Aslaug or Mord would burst into tears of gratitude or offer some extravagant thank-you gift, and tried to come up with a strategy for how I might respond. Fortunately, they did no such thing, only cheerfully stormed around with the others, folding and packing and calling out questions to me and to Wendell. Eventually I began to worry
if perhaps I should be the one making some grand gesture of thanks. They had all saved me, after all, as surely as Wendell and I had saved little Ari.
“What’s with you?” Lilja hissed at me as we manoeuvred the enchanted mirror into a crate stuffed with wool. “Didn’t Wendell heal you?”
“No, I—” I paused. Had Wendell healed me? I felt perfectly myself, apart from the chill. “It’s not that. I can’t think what I should say.”
“Why must you say anything?”
“Well—” I hadn’t been expecting this. “Because you rescued me. All of you, but especially Finn and Aslaug—”
“What?” Aslaug had come up behind me without my realizing. “Did you call me?”
“Emily feels bad because she wishes to thank us, but doesn’t know how,” Lilja said, and I went red and began to sputter, to hear it all spelled out so bluntly.
“Oh! Don’t be silly,” Aslaug said simply, and gave me a hug. “We are as good as family now.” Then she went back to bustling about as if nothing had changed. As if it was nothing, what she’d said.
Lilja smiled and squeezed my arm. “Some cake?”
I nodded dumbly. Lilja pushed me into a chair and passed me a plate of cake, and I ate it. It was very good.
The bottle of wine was polished off by Mord, who had spent most of the evening quietly beaming at everyone, particularly when they asked after his son, and telling the same story over and over, about how Ari had taken to putting unexpected objects into his mouth, including the tail of their long- suffering cat. No one seemed to mind.
By the time all the hvitkag was gone, I was quite weary, and the clamour of so much company was not helping matters. To my relief, Wendell chose that moment to begin herding everyone out of the cottage, and one by one they went, donning cloaks and boots and wading out cheerfully into the blowy weather, curls of snowflakes spinning through the cottage in their wakes. Wendell glared at the snow and pressed the door closed with a grimace.
“One more,” he said grimly, and I didn’t have to ask what he meant.
Though I was not as relieved to be leaving Ljosland as he was—what I felt was a complicated tangle of things, topmost of which was melancholy. I would miss Lilja and Margret and the others. When had that ever happened before? I was beginning to wonder if the faerie king had changed me somehow.
“Wendell,” I said as he neurotically adjusted the doormat, “I believe I know why the king’s spell—why it took when it did.”
He raised his eyebrows. It was interesting—he was not exactly unattractive in this form, when you actually stopped to parse his appearance. It was mostly that he was muted, yet this did nothing to affect his natural grace, or indeed his ego.
“Well.” I fumbled the words as I thought back to that night. “I was going to— After you asked me about—well—”
“After I asked you to marry me,” he said in a tone I thought louder than necessary.
“Yes,” I said, trying my hardest to keep my voice ordinary, as if we were talking about our research. I felt ridiculous. Any sane person would have already turned down his proposal. If there is one thing about which the stories, regardless of origin, agree, it is that marrying the Folk is a very bad idea. Romance generally is a bad idea where they are concerned; it hardly ever ends well. And what about my scientific objectivity? It is looking very tattered of late.
“I—that night—I was thinking about it. And I suppose that’s my answer.
That I would like to—well, continue thinking about it.”
He gazed at me with an unreadable expression. Then, to my
astonishment, he smiled.
“What?” I said suspiciously.
“I was just thinking that the fact that you have neither roasted me alive for my presumption nor rejected me outright is something to marvel at.”
“Well, if you’re just going to tease me about it,” I muttered, turning away. I was surprised to feel his hand brush against mine—he’d crossed the room without a whisper of sound—his grip feather-light.
I froze, realizing that he was about to kiss me only a second after I knew I was going to kiss him. I leaned forward, but he put a hand on the side of my face, very gently, his fingers brushing the edge of my hair. A little shiver went through me. His thumb was by the corner of my mouth, and it made me think of the time when I had touched him there, when I’d thought he was dying from loss of blood. For a heartbeat, all the other moments we’d shared faded away, leaving behind only the small handful of times we’d been close like this, connected somehow like a bright constellation.
He brushed his lips against my cheek, and I felt the warmth sink all the way to my bones, chasing out the ice of the snow king’s court.
“Good night, Em,” he murmured, his breath fluttering against my ear and sending a river of goosebumps down my neck.
And then he went into his room and closed the door.
I stared at it for a moment as if it were going to explain itself to me. I came back to myself with a start and picked up the blankets on the floor, then wandered in a daze to my own bedroom.
Naturally, I found it ridiculously clean.
—
Wendell and I stood shivering by the dock the next morning, watching the fishing boat captained by one of Thora’s innumerable grandsons pull against its tether as the two sailors readied it for our journey to Loabær. Shadow was flopped at my side, yawning big doggish yawns and looking none too pleased to have been roused from his warm bed at such an hour. The world was a blur of shadow and ice, from the heaving sea to the scowling mountains framing the village. Aud had told us that the weather was fair enough to make the journey safely, and that the winds would drop on the other side of the headland, an assessment I could accept intellectually while all my instincts assured me that we would be drowned.
Aud, who had returned as planned the previous evening, called out instructions to the sailors in Ljoslander, looking cheerful. As well she
should, for Aud had saved her village—indeed, her entire country. The king, who had only just finished glorying in the vengeance we had left for him like a wedding gift, and was in an exceptionally pleasant mood, had immediately granted her request for an end to the vicious winter and an early spring.
As to my whereabouts, Aud had given the king few clues, apart from offering that she had seen me fleeing the palace in the direction of the valley, in a panic at the thought of pursuit by the queen’s minions. Shaking her head, she had remarked that if I had succumbed to the elements or tumbled off a cliff, poor witless waif that I was, it was yet another crime to be lain at the doorstep of the queen’s treasonous ambition. The king had seemed barely able to hide his glee at this notion, and had immediately taken up my death as justification for another round of executions, which had no doubt sent even more nobles—those still in possession of their heads —into hiding in the wilderness. As for myself, I was more than happy for my death to be accepted as a boon by my fiancé, particularly as it gave him ample incentive to give up the search for me. Nevertheless, it was well that we were leaving quickly—I wished to prevent any hint of my survival from reaching his court.
Despite the early hour, the entire village came to see us off as we boarded the ship, even little Ari, who buried his head in Mord’s shoulder when I said goodbye, as shy as he would be with any stranger.
“Here you are,” Aslaug said, handing me a basket of the sheep cheese I’d come to favour. “It’s a silly gift, isn’t it? After all you’ve done.”
I mumbled my way through the goodbyes and thank-yous, but nobody seemed to mind anymore. Lilja and Margret hugged me tight.
“Here,” Lilja said, pressing a basket into my hands. I lifted the cloth covering and found five neatly stacked apple tarts. “Finn says you have a liking for them.”
“Ah,” I began, wincing a little—each tart weighed as much as a brick.
“That’s very kind, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to—”
“Please,” Lilja said, a gleam of desperation in her eyes. “That tree, it just —it doesn’t stop. I’ve already got preserves to last a decade. The
neighbours are so sick of apples they hide when I knock.”
I shook my head. Naturally, Wendell, in typical faerie fashion, had given Lilja a “gift” that created more problems than it solved. I knew that Lilja would be terrified of wasting a single apple for fear of him taking offence.
“Throw the surplus to the pigs,” I suggested, because wouldn’t that just serve him right?
She looked so horrified that I felt guilty. “Or trade them,” I said.
“Perhaps to a sailor or wandering merchant. You might be surprised by what you get in return.” Indeed, I knew half a dozen stories of that ilk— poor, long-suffering mortal gives away a troublesome faerie-made gift in exchange for something mundane, but which reveals unexpected uses.
Sometimes that is then traded for something even more wondrous, and on and on it goes. I hoped Lilja would end up with a wheel that spun straw to gold.
Aud’s embrace was the longest, and when she drew away, her face was wet with tears. Fortunately, Thora stumped up before I had to work out how to respond. (How does one respond to tears?) “Two things,” she said, taking me by the shoulders. “One, look out for yourself. Wise men make bargains with the Folk. Only idiots make friends with them—or whatever he is to you.”
Lord help me, I went red in the face at that. “You think I’m an idiot?”
“Even the smartest among us are idiots in one way or another,” she said.
“Two, I expect you back here in the spring for Lilja and Margret’s wedding.
My granddaughter does not like to impose on people, but your being there would make her happy, and so I will say it for her.”
I smiled. “Of course I’ll be there.”
“Good girl.” She patted me. “Run along, then. I will mail you my—what did you call it? Peer review?”
“Thank you,” I said. Thora had promised to read through a draft of the final chapter in my encyclopaedia and provide her thoughts and additions.
“And please don’t worry about being polite with your criticism.”
She blinked at me, and then, as a smile crept over my face, she gave me a surprisingly firm shove. “You’ve a mouth on you like one of my
grandchildren.”
My gaze drifted to the village, huddled into the night shore, as my hand went to the little trinket Poe had given me as a farewell gift. He had called it a key, though it looked nothing like one, and was in fact a small, impossible coil of bone. In some lights, it seemed to curve counterclockwise; in others clockwise. I had put it on a chain around my neck.
Wendell appeared at my side, having finished giving instructions to the sailors, and twisted his misshapen face into a smile. He’d fixed his uncanny hands and added a few inches to his height, but he was still a long way from his former dazzling self. “Ready?” he said.
The villagers shuffled back a little. They’d all accepted that this strange, grey faerie was the dashing Wendell Bambleby, but that didn’t make them any less frightened of him, even though the face he wore now was far less intimidating than his old, painfully handsome one.
As for myself, I barely noticed the difference. I’d never had any use for his beauty, and he was unchanged in every other respect, including his ability to antagonize—he’d tailored all of my dresses whilst I was trapped in Faerie.
We said our last goodbyes, and then we stepped onto the rocking deck.
Wendell took his time waving to the villagers and admiring the sight of Hrafnsvik fading into the night. I turned away as soon as I could and did not wave or look back. If I had, I would have seen Aud and Lilja brushing away their tears. I would also have seen the outline of our little cottage, which ordinarily had a curl of smoke drifting from the chimney, but now sat quiet and dark, dreaming. Shadow gave a huff, looking back at me as if certain there had been some mistake. My eyes were wet, and I had to dab at them with my sleeve, turning so that Wendell wouldn’t see. Damn this wind, I thought.
I hugged Lilja’s apple tarts to my chest as I gazed at the grey-white sea, my hand tight around Poe’s trinket. The ship sailed on as the sun began to tip its light over the horizon.
