Page 36 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)
I attempted to describe it as best I could, conscious that this was the sort of discovery that would make a dryadologist’s career, even if they were to accomplish nothing else. I felt another wave of dizziness.
“Now what?” Callum said. Wendell was tapping the toe of his pointed boot against the floor.
“Give her a moment to settle in,” I said. “She’s had a fright. She probably thought you were going to torture her. Is that not what your father would have done, Wendell?”
Now that the milk was returned to its proper place, the little faerie seemed much calmer.
She went over to a cupboard with a lock upon it, fishing about in her pockets until she located a key.
From within she drew out another block of butter wrapped in cloth, which looked to me like all the others on the shelves, only the faerie handled it as tenderly as if it were her child.
She went to Wendell and held it out, bowing deeply.
Wendell’s mood had shifted, as it was wont to do, or perhaps he had taken my admonishment to heart.
He knelt before the faerie and said in a light voice, “Thank you, little one, but I will not deprive you of your prize handiwork. I need only one thing, which you know. You need not fear the wrath of the old queen, for I shall protect you. Will you help me?”
It was an image that made me wish for my notebook and sketching pencils.
Wendell wore only a few silvered leaves in his golden hair, his tunic was cut simply and his cloak was an ordinary aristocratic-looking thing—not the one with the beast living in it—yet any who beheld him would have known him as a monarch of Faerie.
It had been happening gradually after he returned to his realm, and now that we had been apart a few days, I could see it clearly: not only was he more at ease in himself, to an extent that was not remotely human, but there was a sense that everything around him, the air included, seemed to bend in his direction.
I suppose that, if Barrister is correct, [*2] it had something to do with Wendell no longer being entirely Wendell —or not only Wendell—but the source of every enchantment that held his realm together.
And there he was, kneeling before a trembling, dirt-stained faerie barely as tall as my knee, who was clutching a block of butter.
The faerie seemed to feel some of this as well, for her entire attitude towards Wendell changed.
Her red face became even redder, and she bowed many times, looking suddenly more eager than afraid.
She put away her butter first, then rummaged about on one of her overcrowded shelves, shoving aside several glass jars of honeycomb.
Shyly, she moved back towards Wendell, head lowered, and placed a small tin in his hand.
She muttered something in a rapid patter of Faie and Irish.
He stood and handed the tin to me. Nervously, I lifted the lid, and found within a handful of empty snail shells about the length of my thumb. They were highly distinct, leaf-green with pointed domes that made them look almost aquatic. Each whorl included a stripe of pure silver.
“She says they were my stepmother’s favourite,” Wendell said. “She would deliver them to the little one to be cooked in butter.”
I nodded slowly. “Have you seen this species before?”
“As a child, yes. They have long been considered a delicacy by the nobility, and for this reason they have gone extinct—or so I thought. They are cousins of the snails we have around here, in the forest, and can be just as vengeful, in their way.”
I shuddered. “Where are they found?”
“They are island-dwellers exclusively. The little one knows not how my stepmother came by them.”
“Islands,” I repeated. A little shiver went down my back, as if a ghost stood just behind me. “But there are no islands nearby.”
Wendell shook his head slightly. “My realm extends to the edge of the land and the shallows of the sea. There we have a scatter of many islands—hundreds of them, if one counts the shoals and rocks. The trouble is, I know little of the coast, other than that it stretches for miles.”
Wendell went back to speak to the butter faerie, and Niamh pulled me aside.
“There is one thing in all this that concerns me,” she said in a low voice.
I knew what she was about to say, but affected not to. “Yes?”
“King Macan’s successor,” she said. “The new king, the one who defeats the curse upon his kingdom and marries the mortal woman. He dies in the end.”
“Yes,” I said. “But there is no reason to suppose every detail will be repeated in our situation—for it is not so, is it? The curses are different; the setting. Besides, I discovered an iteration of the tale in which Macan the Second lives. There is no consistency on that point.”
Niamh worried her lip. “ One iteration?”
My composure cracked a little further. Niamh seemed to sense this from my silence and put a hand on my arm.
“We will not let her take him down with her,” she said. “We will just—keep an eye out for bees, hm?”
Skip Notes
*1 A broad category of brownie that goes by various names in different cultures, always described as hunchbacked and grandmotherly in appearance.
Faeries of this type are so unnervingly cheerful they are used to frighten children into good behaviour in some parts of Eastern Europe (“Go to bed, or I’ll send you to grandmother iele to mind,” is the refrain in the well-known Romanian tale “The Youngest Brother’s Folly”).
Spriggans often serve the courtly fae as personal attendants or bodyguards.
*2 Letitia Barrister’s article “The Lost Kings of Sardinia,” published in the European Journal of Dryadology (1895), argues that the collapse of the Faerie realm located in one of Sardinia’s mountain ranges resulted from the death of its monarch, who had no heir.
While several of the nobility attempted to claim the throne, they were, for reasons unknown, unsuccessful, and the realm slowly disintegrated.
Perhaps this is why so many Sardinian tales depict the courtly fae as dangerous vagabonds more likely to steal the preserves in your cellar in the night than carry you off into Faerie.