Page 40 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)
“It’s a ruin,” the boggart said in a peevish voice that had a great deal of Lord Taran’s aristocratic tenor in it. “I like it that way. And I could not care less about silver—I am not of your realm.”
“As you wish,” Wendell said, and the mirrors vanished.
“As you say, you are not of my realm,” he went on. “So I cannot command you. But you have served my family for generations, as I understand it. And so I have come to beg a favour, placing my hopes in old loyalties.”
“Yes, yes,” the boggart said. “Let’s have a look at you, shallwe?”
He folded his arms and paced around Wendell, examining him from every angle with a frown, even bending to examine his knees from the back. At one point, the boggart brushed his golden hair from his eyes in a gesture that was so like Wendell’s that I felt briefly queasy.
“You have only grown more like your mother,” the boggart said at last, looking disappointed.
“The first one. I did not care for either of your mothers. The first was a dull little thing, the second a clumsy half mortal. This queen seems no better.” He came closer to me, looking me up and down as a glint of mischief came into his eyes.
“But mortals can be entertaining. And they do not break as easily as some think.”
Wendell’s expression went from one of bemusement to towering fury with such abruptness that both Taran and I fell back a step; Taran afterwards looked as annoyed as a cat following a moment of gracelessness.
There came a terrible rumbling sound, coupled with that same wet rustling with which I am all too familiar, as if the attentive oaks were uprooting themselves en masse and lumbering in our direction.
“You are speaking to a queen of Faerie,” Wendell said, and it seemed as if the rustling leaves were in his voice. I suppressed the urge to take another step away from him.
I don’t know what would have happened next if the boggart had not backed down, but back down he did. He held up his hands and laughed.
“I see it now!” he cried. “Yes, yes, you are your great-grandmother all over again. I was terribly fond of her. In fact, she has always been my favourite. A pity her eldest son slew her when he grew tired of waiting for the throne. Ah, but I came to love him too.”
The bloody rumbling noise had stopped, but given Wendell’s expression, I still felt it prudent to interpose myself between him and the boggart.
I tried to organize my scattered thoughts—I am well-read on the subject of boggarts, and have encountered them on two occasions myself, and thus I was not overly nervous to take the initiative in the conversation.
“You are indeed correct,” I said. “The king is like his great-grandmother in many ways.”
“Really?” The boggart looked even more delighted. “Does he have a fondness for iced pears? We would eat iced pears together on many an evening, the queen and I.”
I pretended to be astonished. “But there is nothing he likes better than iced pears! Unless it is music.”
Now, this was not exactly a stab in the dark, but I was betting on my understanding of boggarts, and their bone-deep yearning for kinship, to see me through.
“Music!” The boggart clapped his hands together, positively beaming.
“Yes, yes! She delighted in her harpists in particular—she would often steal gifted mortals and keep them even after she tired of their songs, for she would have them killed and stuffed, then put on display with their instruments in their hands. She had quite the collection by the time she was overthrown.”
In retrospect, I am pleased with how quickly I recovered from this. “How—alike indeed,” I said.
The boggart continued to look Wendell up and down. I was relieved, though not overly surprised, to see that his murderous rage had vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and he was now watching me with amusement.
“Iced pears,” he murmured.
“Yes,” I said, giving him a pointed look. “Were you not rhapsodizing about them at tea the other day?”
He smiled. “I was, wasn’t I?”
“Very well,” the boggart said. “I shall help you on two conditions. The first: that I shall be allowed to return to the castle and live among you.”
I did not like this condition at all, but Wendell replied before I had the chance to. “Of course you shall,” he said. “You were always welcome. I understood you left of your own accord when my father was slain and his bloodline overthrown.”
I could see this was exactly the response the boggart had desired. “Well, one prefers to be invited,” he said primly.
Wendell inclined his head. The boggart was so pleased he dematerialized for a moment, and when he reappeared he looked more like Wendell—he was even wearing his clothes.
“The second,” the boggart said, “is that you hold a great banquet to mark my return. This banquet must have at least two dozen harpists, as well as cannons you will fire when I enter the castle. At midnight, there should be a procession of the court’s finest drayfoxes, all adorned in silver and jewels. ”
“Good grief, but that’s a lot to remember,” Wendell said. “Very well, you will have your banquet. Once my stepmother is dead and the realm is healed. To do that—”
“Yes, I know,” the boggart said. Now that he had what he wanted, he seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. “You wish to know where she is. I can help you with one detail only: her hideaway is an island.”
“But we knew that already,” I interjected. “Because of the snails.” This wasn’t how the story went—the boggart was supposed to give us a different clue, not one we already had.
Wendell’s brow was furrowed. “How do you know this?”
The boggart burst out laughing, as if he’d been suppressing it before. “Your face!” he crowed as I glowered at him.
He disappeared for a moment, flitting through some crevice in the ceiling to the upper levels of the tower, and when he reappeared, he had a piece of fabric in his hand.
“The queen told the king that she liked to wander the realm,” he explained.
“But she always came back smelling of the same thing: sedges and mossy stones. I knew she was sneaking away to some secret fortress. One day, she returned with a bloody knee—the queen was clumsy, as all mortals are. She bandaged it with this.”
“Sailcloth,” Wendell murmured. He showed it to Lord Taran, whose eyebrows shot up.
“Sailcloth?” I repeated, nearly beside myself with impatience.
Wendell turned towards me, but he seemed lost for words. Finally, he said, “This is from—one of the boats. Our boats. Uncle?”
“Yes,” Lord Taran said, handing the cloth to me. “Many of the nobility take to the lake on warm summer days.” He saw my blank stare and clarified, “Silverlily.”
“ What? ” I snatched at the cloth—it was of purest white, with tiny silver stitchery. “How is that possible?”
The boggart began to laugh again. “Under your nose!” he crowed. “All this time, right under your nose. Oh, I begin to like your mother a little better.”
“But—the first clue. The snails. Silverlily has no islands,” I protested, angry and indignant.
It could not be. Surely I would have worked it out by now, if Queen Arna was hiding on the bloody lake.
The lake I had been gazing out at each day, furrowing my brow, expending all of my mental energies searching for hidden clues to her whereabouts.
“True,” Lord Taran said. “And yet, the creature must be correct—that is where we shall find her.”
Wendell, characteristically untroubled by paradoxes, clenched the sailcloth in his fist and bowed to the boggart again.
“Many thanks, old one,” he said. It was difficult to read his reaction: anticipation, certainly, and something else I couldn’t name, but that was very near to the fury he had shown earlier, honed to a point sharp as a faun’s horn.
“So long as I have my banquet,” the boggart said, and then he was simply gone.
“Wendell,” I said, because I still couldn’t tell what he was feeling, and it made me nervous. He appeared lost in thought and didn’t reply, simply put his arm around my waist, and we left the tower.
I had to suppress a scream when we stepped outside, for there was an oak not five feet from the door now, glaring at me, and three more beyond it in the garden. Oh, how I had hoped I had mistaken that rumbling noise.
Lord Taran, behind me, was muttering curses under his breath. He drew his hood over his hair and gave the oak a black look. “Hurry up,” he muttered at me, and together we made haste to pass beneath the overhanging branches and regain the sunlight.
Skip Notes
* The scientific debate over the classification of boggarts has raged for decades.
At present, the most widely accepted systems place them with the common fae, though many among the younger and more forward-thinking generation of dryadologists contest this, with Louis Meyers proposing an alternative system that classes both boggarts and Faeroese hessefolk with the courtly fae.
Consider that the primary distinction between courtly and common is one of appearance: courtly fae can pass for mortals, while brownies and trooping faeries cannot.
Yet most dryadologists also accept that the courtly fae possess magics the small Folk lack, and here we arrive at the crux of the debate, for boggarts are immensely powerful.
Though the true limits of their magics are unknown, the Balfour boggart once relocated an entire village, while the rival boggarts in the medieval Falkirk tale “The Blind Hens” performed various escalating feats, including making a forest burst into song, the sound of which could be heard all the way to Glasgow.
I know of not one bogle or brownie who has ever cast an enchantment of a similar scale.
Indeed, Meyers argues that a boggart’s powers may equal those of some faerie kings and queens, and that they should be considered “free-ranging monarchs.” Given this, and the fact that boggarts may assume mortal guises when they choose, and often do, it seems self-evident to place them among the courtly fae.
And yet! They are in nature very close to household brownies, given their attachment to mortal (or, in some cases, faerie) families, which they hold very dear and will protect with their lives.
In this I am reminded of Poe and the Ljosland brownie concept of fjolskylda .
Amidst these complexities, our classification systems begin to feel outdated and parochial. Thus boggarts are another example of the blurred boundaries that exist between the Folk, much as we scholars try to herd them into tidy categories.