Page 33 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)
This was an uncomfortable echo of something Farris had said to me once.
I pursed my lips and replied, “All right. Let us accept for the sake of argument that you possess a truer understanding of the Folk than I, that books and academic knowledge are secondary to lived experience. What then would you have me fear?”
She hesitated. “Power,” she said at last. “In our stories, it is the great ones—the lords and ladies, the monarchs and generals, that one must avoid above all else. They are the true monsters lurking in the night.”
This again! I thought. Aloud I said, “I have heard a similar opinion recently from another friend of mine, who seems to think Wendell will abandon me to die of exposure or some such, I suppose when he becomes tired of me.”
“Oh, no!” Lilja said. “That is not what I meant—I don’t believe for a second that Wendell would harm you. But I worry there will come a day when you no longer recognize him. And what hurt is worse than that?”
I could not reply to this. There was something in her gentle manner that sent a spear of panic through me that Farris’s words had not, much as he’d clearly been trying to make me uneasy.
Somehow, it laid bare the many times I’d voiced a similar fear to myself, before immediately burying it beneath other things.
Lilja seemed to regret her words, which naturally only made them keener. “Don’t mind me,” she said quickly. “You are the best judge of your heart, and of his. I am your friend, but that does not make me all-knowing.”
She seemed upset, but I did not know how to correct this; the conversation had gone beyond my ability to navigate. I could only say, “I will think on what you have said.”
She nodded, and we went back to the carvings. A few moments later, we heard Wendell calling me, and made our way to the front door with Shadow. There we took our leave. Lilja, I thought, hugged me longer than she ordinarily did.
The night was cold, the wind tossing sheets of mist from the waterfall into our faces. Wendell and I crossed the stepping-stones, but I stumbled in surprise when we emerged into the Silva Lupi, nearly tripping over Shadow.
“Where are we?” This was not the castle; we stood in the forest, possibly near the royal gardens—the grass held a scattering of daisies, whose seeds drifted from their beds into the neighbouring woods.
Wendell grimaced and looked about him. “The door has returned to its original location. A number of enchantments have been going awry like that. My stepmother’s curse is spreading—this way.”
Shadow and I followed him through the trees—it was a deer trail, nothing more, but he widened it with a gesture, opening and then closing his hand. “I must tell you what I’ve discovered,” I said.
“Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “Momentarily, Em.”
I felt a flicker of annoyance that he had so little interest in my research. Did he assume I had failed? “But I’ve found a solution to your stepmother’s curse.”
“I know you have,” he said, a little question in his voice, as if wondering why I’d bother to state something so obvious. “But you will only have to tell the story again for Niamh, and my uncle, I suppose, so let us wait until we can summon them.”
I was mollified.
“Wait,” I said. “You were skeptical before about whether I might find an answer in the old stories.”
“Not really,” he said, sighing. “I only didn’t want you to go away.
I never do, but I feel especially guilty in this circumstance.
I thought I would be showing you everything my realm has to offer—the lakes, the gardens, the brightest and the darkest parts of the forest. I thought I would be summoning strange and terrible Folk to dance before you, or give you presents, while you scribbled away in your notebook…
Instead, we are forced to contend with my stepmother’s treachery. I’m sorry.”
“You say that as if you have dragged me into something,” I said. I regretted the change from his good mood, and added, “I’ll have you know that I find all of this—your stepmother’s treachery included—fascinating. I am making good progress on my book.”
He laughed, and the forest around us seemed to brighten. “Read me some of it later, Em.”
The leaves rustled as some small creature, faerie or otherwise, made its way through the canopy.
My attention was caught by a line of flickering lights drifting along the forest floor, parallel to our path—initially I thought they were fireflies, but upon closer inspection I saw that they were trooping fae the size of my thumbnail, each carrying a lantern.
Warm hearthlight glimmered from knotholes in the trees, and occasionally I heard distant, rowdy voices, as from a packed tavern.
The branches in this part of the forest, near to the castle, where the concentration of common fae was greatest, looked as if they were strung with innumerable glittering spiderwebs, but these were only the small bridges used by brownies and suchlike, which clinked softly like bells whenever one of the creatures dashed across, moving so quickly I saw only the bridge swaying afterwards.
Wendell stopped here and there to examine a tree, pressing a hand to those he thought sickly or dull-looking and unleashing a burst of new growth, while worrying aloud about the state of the cottage in Corbann.
It seemed he had been much perturbed by the disarray he had seen—wood shavings from Lilja’s carvings scattered about, rugs left unshaken—and wondered if he should assign a few of the oíche sidhe to put things back in order.
At least, I think that’s what he was on about—I was too busy admiring the forest, which at night is such a perfect match for my childhood fantasies of what a faerie forest should look like that it left me breathless.
“What is it?” Wendell said after I again failed to respond to one of his silly complaints with more than a hm!
“What is what?” I said peevishly. My annoyance was not directed at him in particular, only I was wearied from the long day of travel and talk, not to mention worrying. “I’m merely thinking. Why do you assume something is the matter?”
“Em,” he said, “I am quite accustomed to the cadence of your silences by now. I know the difference between thinking and brooding. You may hoard your misgivings in your usual dragonish manner if you wish, but I will work them out eventually, you know. Spare me the trouble?”
I eyed him sidelong. It seemed wrong to confide in him what Lilja had said—and yet, now that I thought about it, I no longer saw why. This was Wendell, not some wicked faerie in a story. So I told him all.
I did not know how he would react, but I certainly wasn’t expecting him to look pleased. “It’s a kindness that she shares her concerns with you,” he said. “Lilja is a good friend.”
“A kindness!” I repeated. “Is that really what you think? She is not much better than Farris, who thinks you will have me strung up in a tree.”
“Naturally she worries about my feelings for you,” Wendell said, passing his hand absently over the tall ferns that bordered the path. “Think of the source. Lilja suffered greatly at the hands of the Hidden Ones—it would be strange for her to trust me.”
I did not find this a satisfying answer, particularly given the disquiet Lilja’s words had aroused in me.
“That is all you have to say? You yourself told me that you were worried the throne would change you. And it does seem true that, in many tales, power corrupts those Folk who wield it.” I did not mention my ambivalence regarding this interpretation, for it has always seemed to me more likely that power only draws out the amorality inherent in all Folk, giving it free rein, rather than instilling a preference for wickedness.
“Yes.” Wendell came to a stop, frowning as he rubbed at his hair.
“I do wish you would allow me to give you my name. Then if one day I do turn into a vengeful monster, as my stepmother has—or that bloody ice king of yours, wasn’t he a terror!
—you can simply speak one word, and I will be under your command, free to become whatever you want me to be. Would it not ease your worries?”
Well, how on earth was I supposed to respond to this? After blinking at him in silence for a moment, I said, “I would prefer you not to turn into a monster in the first place. One murderous fiancé is enough for me.”
“ More than enough,” Wendell said with such passionate resentment that I snorted with laughter. His expression changed as abruptly as sun breaking through cloud.
“Where would I be without you, Em?” he said.
It was an old joke of ours, but it wasn’t a joke now, the way he said it.
I did not reply, merely straightened the hair he had mussed, brushing it back into place.
He took my hand and we kept going. Soon, the castle came into view—its light was visible first, a glow that silhouetted the nearby trees. Wendell stilled.
“What?” I said, instantly on my guard.
“It wasn’t here when I left,” Wendell murmured.
“ What? ” I repeated.
He hurried forward, and I followed him, Shadow giving a huff of displeasure at the length of this walk, when by rights he should have been abed already. It was several moments before the trees thinned enough that I could see what Wendell did.
In the forest behind the castle, stretching all the way to the brow of the hill, and laterally for as much as an acre, perhaps, was the same dark mist we had seen in the yew grove.
The trees seemed shrunken and indistinct, and the silver bridges that draped this part of the forest, crowded with common fae, had vanished entirely.
What was more, the curse had consumed part of the castle grounds. At least two of the gazebos had been reduced to dark, skeletal things, like slashes of ink put to canvas by an impatient artist. The path that had led to the Monarchs’ Grove was gone—and was the Grove as well? I couldn’t be certain.
“The gardens,” Wendell murmured.
“What is the extent of it?” I said. My voice was shaking. “Is it growing?”
“I don’t know.”
I took his hand before he could fly into a temper—violence would not serve us now; there was nowhere to direct it.
We needed to find the queen.
“Let us see for ourselves,” I said. “Quickly.”