Page 51 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)

He tossed another piece of ivy aside. “I barely remember! It seemed as if I were in the forest. But it was odd. It was dark as a winter’s night, and cold—worse than that bloody ice court.

I kept wandering, but nothing was familiar.

I passed Folk, but it was as if they did not see me.

And then—” His gaze fell upon the oíche sidhe, whom one of the servants had helped into an upright position.

“You sent him, didn’t you? He said you had. ”

“Yes,” I said. “In a way. Mostly he sent himself.”

The oíche sidhe staggered to his feet. He bowed to Wendell and myself, then brushed the wrinkles from his clothes before saying, “Forgive me, Your Highnesses. I failed. I found the king, but I could not find the way back out. I thought we would wander for eternity, until the beast arrived.”

“Was that Shadow?” Wendell gazed in astonishment at thedog, who was contentedly gnawing at a bit of gristle, slobber pooling below him. “Good Lord! I thought it was some eldritch monster come to feast upon my soul. When he pounced on us, I thought it was the end.”

He reached down and rubbed Shadow’s head. “Good boy!”

The dog licked him, then went back to his dinner.

“Can you stand?” I said. Wendell put his arm around me, and I helped him to his feet.

He wobbled a little at first, brushing leaves and flowers from himself, much of which fell away with little roots attached.

He knelt before the housekeeper, whose head was still bowed low, and murmured something, placing his hand on the side of the small faerie’s face.

Then he stood, shrugging off his tattered cloak, which I helped him with.

I felt a strong need to fuss over him, which I don’t think I’ve ever felt before.

If only it had ended there! Wendell gazing at me blissfully, those damned butterflies still in his hair, though many had departed, flitting off into the cooling twilight.

In a moment, we could summon Lord Taran and the other councillors—summon the entire court—to show them that all was well.

Their king had been returned to them. This could become a controversial anecdote in my book, one that my fellow scholars would praise and rage over, some accepting Wendell’s resurrection as a logical extension of the illogic of Faerie, others painting me as a twentieth-century de Grey, each according to their disposition and professional jealousies.

“I know that look,” Wendell said. “This will become a rather sensational paper, won’t it? I can see you already drafting the abstract.”

I was suddenly more furious with him than I had ever been. That he would make light of all this! “If you think,” I said, “that you can do something like this again—without consulting me, without even a thought —”

“I know,” he said quietly. His tone froze my anger, and I saw that his eyes were damp. “I would never have put you through—that—if I had seen a single alternative. But you are wrong in one thing: I was thinking of you, Em. You were my first thought, as well as my last.”

But then there came a surge of disquiet, mutters and gasps that rippled through the watching Folk like a stone thrown into a pond.

A motley crowd of Folk had gathered around Queen Arna’s body.

I hadn’t been paying her any attention, and at first, I thought they were attempting to move her somewhere, and was about to command them to leave her be.

And yet, no one was holding the queen upright—had she been placed into that odd slump, her hair all over her face?

Some of the common fae were poking her, or sniffing at her skin.

A brownie lifted her arm as if to examine it, and some of the moss fell away.

But the arm kept moving, and the creature leapt back with a startled squeak.

Queen Arna opened her eyes. At first, she gazed listlessly about, and then she gave a choked cry, hands fluttering as if she were trying to cover her naked body.

But she was fully clothed still in the soiled finery she had worn in the second castle.

Her face was drawn, and she looked, in that moment, neither human nor Folk, but like a frightened, slightly feral animal.

“She followed you out,” I murmured. “Somehow—but then, why not? You died in almost the same moment. Yes—why not?”

Wendell had gone still. Every ounce of his attention focused on his stepmother—it was as if the room were empty but for them.

“Let us put her in the dungeon,” I said with an urgency I did not fully understand.

I only knew on some fundamental level that we could not kill her.

It was the same certainty I had felt in the royal court of the Hidden Ones, when I had found myself at a crossroads: slay the wicked king, or choose a different ending to the story I was caught in.

Wendell appeared to consider. Dread settled over me, because I could see he had been overtaken by the darker aspect of his nature, and would at any moment erupt into some unhinged fit of violence.

The watching crowd seemed to sense this, too, and shrank back.

So it was a shock when Wendell replied calmly, “You’re right, Em. ”

I watched him warily. I do not particularly enjoy talking to him when he is like this, and almost would have preferred him to pull out his sword and start stabbing things. “I am.”

“I will not kill her,” he said, still with that terrible calm. “Instead, I will lock my stepmother away where she cannot harm you, or me, or the realm. But it shall be a cell with no door, in a land without paths. She deserves no less than that.”

He made a gesture I had seen once before, in St. Liesl, and had hoped never to see again, like brushing aside a cobweb.

And then it was as if the world had been ripped in two, and between the halves was a column of swirling darkness.

It was a narrow opening, a gap, but it seemed to have no beginning or end, disappearing through the floor and ceiling.

The gathered Folk wailed and shrieked, trampling one another in their haste to flee.

Wendell’s stepmother tried to run. But, as Wendell had been, she was unsteady on her feet. She fell, and he caught her. She opened her mouth, to scream or plead—I never found out. Before she had recovered her balance, Wendell spun her around and pushed her almost gently into the Veil.