Page 50 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)

I was crying like a child, heedless of the noise I was making. I heard the murmur of Folk around me, and felt small hands patting my face, my hands, caught the flicker of wet black eyes and leaf-woven hats. I ignored them.

After a few moments, someone pulled me into their arms—not at all gently—and held me in a tight grip.

Too tight. It was a faerie, which I knew from the way she smelled.

Many people assume the Folk, the courtly fae in particular, will smell like roses, but in truth they smell like mortals, at least on the surface.

I suspect it is a part of their glamour, for beneath this is the smell of rainforests and river reeds, moss and algae and leaves decaying into humus.

A green smell, not always pleasant, noticeable only when one is very close.

The faerie held me so tight it was almost a wrestling match to get away. This was surprisingly effective at calming my sobs, for my misery was eclipsed by irritation. It was Deilah—but I had guessed that by her golden hair, which she had shoved my face into.

“Poor thing!” she cried. “I should have stayed to comfort you—we could have comforted each other.”

I made no response to this—she was still gripping my arms too hard and gazing at me with an excited sort of despair that I found more exhausting than pitiable.

Deilah wore a mourning cloak, which for the Folk of this realm meant a cloak woven with thorns that pricked at your arms and throat, and her dress was a torn and filthy mess.

Her hair, too, had pinecones and bits of mud stuck in it, as if she had hurled herself down on the forest floor multiple times.

She was, on the whole, a pathetic sight, her eyes painfully swollen, as if she had not left off sobbing for days, though she would have been more pathetic if she did not give off the impression of having taken part in her dishevelment.

The mud on her cheek, for instance, looked as if it had been smeared on by a finger, and as someone who had traversed the forests of Wendell’s realm several times now, I did not quite understand how one would come by so many tears in one’s dress, unless they went looking for blackberry bushes to fall into.

Still, she was here, and so I babbled what had happened. Her eyes grew wider and wider as I spoke.

“Where is the door?” she demanded, whipping around to scan the room.

Her instantaneous belief in me did not inspire confidence—quite the opposite, in fact; I felt a shadowy premonition that Lord Taran’s skepticism would soon be proven right.

With their only ally a querulous ragamuffin, anyone would doubt their cause.

“Somewhere here,” I said, pointing to the dark place where Shadow had vanished.

She patted the dais, then pounded on it, as if she might tear the stone apart. Finally she sagged back, panting. “Call him,” she demanded.

“What?”

“Call your dog!” she cried, looking at me as if I were the stupidest person on earth. “Perhaps he cannot find his way back! Have you just been sitting there?”

Much as I wished to, I did not bother pointing out that I had been far more occupied in saving Wendell than someone who had spent the last day staggering about in the forest, wailing.

I saw no reason not to follow her advice, other than the fact that it was rather mad—a largely immaterial detail in Faerie.

“Shadow!” I cried.

“Louder!” she urged.

I called louder. I called until my throat was hoarse. I nearly fell over when I heard a distant, warbling howl.

Shadow.

“Here!” I yelled. “Shadow, here! Come!”

The howl came again—closer? I did not know. I could not tell exactly where the howl was coming from. Eerily, it seemed as if it were beneath us, reverberating through the floor.

“What does he like to eat?” the girl demanded, crouching at my side with her knees up in the lithe manner of a small child. We were both staring hard at the blank stone, and if that were not enough to make me feel I was going mad, the girl’s inane question was.

“I thought you were supposed to be clever,” she snapped in response to my expression. “Or is that just in comparison with my brother? Nobody thinks he’s smart, that’s for sure. Dogs see by smell.”

Of course they did—of course. No sooner had I told her about Shadow’s preference for raw meat—of any variety, but the smellier the better—than she was snapping her fingers imperiously at the servants, who ran off in disorderly haste, some crashing into each other.

I became aware that a crowd had gathered behind us, common and courtly fae craning to see what we were fussing about.

I don’t think they had any clue what was going on, but they were muttering excitedly among themselves nonetheless.

The brownie selling nuts was back, which did not help my growing feeling of hysteria.

Several servants returned, thrusting plates of meat into our hands.

I stacked them beside the dais like a gory offering at a sacrifice, and suddenly the howling was much louder.

I shouted until my voice broke, and then I was toppling over backwards, knocked flat by the large and hairy shape that had plowed into my chest .

I made a strangled sound, half sob and half shriek, burying my face in his fur.

The dog was pulling something large and grey behind him, which turned out to be the housekeeper faerie, whom Shadow had been dragging along by the ankle.

The dog dropped him as unceremoniously as he would a bone he’d tired of and leapt on me again, his tongue swiping at my face.

Something strange happened next, and it is only by looking back at the memory that I am able to smooth it out, to see the details.

The oíche sidhe had been pulling something, too—I thought it was a lantern, in the moment, or nothing at all, just a reflection off one of the room’s silver mirrors.

But whatever it was, it vanished when the faerie came spilling out of Wendell’s shadow and tumbling across the room.

“What happened?” I demanded of the housekeeper when Shadow had calmed somewhat and noticed the vast pile of his favourite victuals, to which he delightedly applied himself. The faerie was moaning—no wonder, for Shadow had not been gentle, and his leg seemed to be bleeding.

“The king,” the faerie murmured. “Where—? I lost him—”

I knew I should have been paying more attention to his injury, but I could not help demanding, “What do you mean? Did you see Wendell?”

Deilah screamed. She surged to her feet and threw herself upon the dais, where Wendell—

Where Wendell was sitting up.

He had pulled the ivy from his face—there was still a great deal in his hair, along with a small flock of butterflies and moths—and was looking very cross.

He shoved Deilah away with a cry of “Ah! You’re filthy!

” and began yanking at the vegetation at his chest, vines that speared his cloak and twined round his fingers.

“Look at this!” he exclaimed to no one in particular. “My poor cloak! Bloody thorns have ruined it. I cannot mend what has been reduced to threads.”

He gave up with a curse and looked around, blinking confusedly at the crowd staring at him in frozen awe, before his gaze finally landed on me, whereupon his face lit up. “Em! What on earth has happened?”

I leapt on him then, babbling nonsensically, and a roar arose among the gathered Folk—mostly positive, I believe, though as before, some were less than pleased by Wendell’s return, for a few went stampeding down the steps, shrieking.

The forest erupted in lantern light and a cacophony of melody that hurt my ears, as various musicians began jostling with one another for the right to celebrate Wendell’s return the loudest.

Wendell did not ask any more questions, merely held me in his arms as I babbled and cried—perhaps I was making more sense than I thought, or, more likely, his memory was returning to him.

Several of the moths were crushed between us, their dry wings leaving streaks of dust against my cheek.

At some point, Shadow managed to hop up on the dais, slobbering all over us both, and then he sprinted from the room like a pup.

He returned moments later with Orga dangling from his mouth by her scruff, hissing and spitting and generally promising imminent pain to her captor.

She managed to get in a slash across Shadow’s face, and the poor dog dropped her.

“Orga!” Wendell exclaimed. “Leave him be, dear.”

She started comically at the sound of his voice, and I expected her to leap at him as Shadow had done, but naturally she had to express her fury and indignation first, and circled the dais, yowling at her master at the top of her lungs.

Wendell reached for her, but she only swiped at him with a hiss.

“You miserable brute!” I exclaimed in disgust, but Wendell only laughed. I could not stop myself from touching him, as if from one moment to the next he might vanish—his face, his chest, where now there was no wound, only a greenish discolouration, like a grass stain upon a piece of cloth.

Razkarden alighted soundlessly at Wendell’s side, making me jump, and rested one of his hideous legs upon Wendell’s knee. Wendell smiled and rubbed the creature’s beak. “Happy to see me again, old friend?”

I examined him, looking for some sign of difference, but he seemed entirely himself, and as fresh as if he’d awoken from a nap. And if there was a certain enigmatical quality to his gaze, it was no more pronounced than before, and I was used to it anyway.

“What happened?” I murmured.