Page 54 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)

“Oh, he has well understood that!” she said with one of her heartiest laughs.

“I have never known him in such a state. He alternates between declarations that he will set forth after you without delay—armed with numerous silly presents to convince you to return—and moaning that you will only burn him to cinders for his presumption. I believe he has worn several grooves in the castle floor from all the pacing he does, and he routinely terrifies the servants by snatching dustcloths and scrubbing at things himself, or refusing to let the tailors mend his clothes—he is up half the night, hunched over those sewing needles of his.”

I put my head in my hands. “I feel terrible,” I said honestly. “I did not realize that I would be away so long, by his reckoning. He must think I am furious with him.”

Niamh waved this away. “The Folk, most especially the nobility, can endure a little disappointment in love now and then. It is good for them, for they are far too used to getting their way on that front. Anyway! He told me to pretend that I wanted to aid in your scholarly research—which is, in fact, very much my desire; I have no intention of sending back any reports about you.”

“You may rethink that,” I said, and explained the nature of my disagreement with Wendell.

“Ah,” she said, nodding calmly. “It was a grim fate Liath doomed his stepmother to. I would not be surprised if there are consequences.”

I let out a slow breath. “I was worried you would take his side.”

“Whatever for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose because I have no actual evidence to support my concerns. Only an—an instinct.”

“ Instinct is often all we dryadologists have to go on,” Niamh said. “Ours is one of the least-understood fields of scientific study.”

I shook my head. “It is unscientific to rely on gut feelings. Wendell was right in refusing to release his stepmother.”

Niamh gave a bark of laughter. “Emily, the king is behaving exactly like every faerie monarch in every story. He will do as he pleases, particularly if that pleasure involves some nasty form of revenge, and pretend as if consequences is not a word that exists in Faie. This is why their realms are so often in chaos, governed by patterns and cycles from which they cannot escape, despite all their magics. It is plain to any dryadologist worth their salt, but he cannot see it, because it is not in his nature. We must help him in this, you and I.”

And just like that, I had three assistants, one of them a celebrated expert in Irish folklore.

Niamh had brought her own stack of books, and together we settled in for a day of research.

Lilja had been examining what she termed “the Macan story with the happy ending,” which was contained within a Victorian anthology of tales from Ireland’s southwest, paired with scholarly commentary.

[*1] After another hour or so, she handed me the book, saying, “What do you think about this one?”

I glanced at the page. “That’s a story fragment—the early Victorian dryadologists loved collecting such scraps of faerie lore, mostly from decaying Dark Age manuscripts, and putting them together like puzzle pieces.

It was a popular pastime for a decade or two. Little of scientific value came of it.”

“Really?” Lilja said. “Because there’s a footnote—Professor Smith thought this was the true conclusion of the Macan story, though no names are given to the protagonists.”

“What?” I snatched the book away from her and scanned the page. She was right—ordinarily I read footnotes, but in my haste, I had ignored most of Smith’s.

“Bloody footnotes!” I muttered.

After considering Dr. Smith’s reasoning, and cross-referencing the fragment with another version of the Macan story, I was able to confirm to my own satisfaction that her theory was correct.

In the end, we pieced it together, though I almost wish we hadn’t.

What follows is the second and final act of the “happy” Macan story, or what I have formally termed the Smith variant of “King Macan’s Bees.

” It picks up after the second Macan slays the first.

King Macan the Second ruled for many seasons with his mortal wife, who vastly preferred him to her previous husband, and for a time, all was well.

But as the years passed, Macan grew increasingly convinced that he had not, in fact, killed his predecessor.

He heard Macan the First’s voice in the rustle of the river reeds, and whenever a bee went past, he would say, “There is another servant of the old king, sent to spy on me.”

Macan’s wife grew worried about him, and so she tried to prove that Macan the First was, indeed, dead.

She brought her new husband several of her old husband’s teeth, which were all that remained of his body, and even took to wearing them about her neck, so that Macan might remember each time he looked at her.

At first he was soothed, but then he said, “And yet, cannot a man live without his teeth? This proves nothing.” She then captured several bees and commanded them to speak, so that they might tell her husband they were not spies, merely the last of the summer honeybees.

But the king only praised them as excellent liars, and ordered his servants to kill every bee in the mound.

Now, one cannot kill every insect in any place, and thus the only result was that the bees grew to hate the new Macan, and took every opportunity to sting him.

This only solidified his belief that the old Macan lived, and had sent his servants to torment him.

Eventually, Macan the Second grew so terrified of the dead king that he began to suspect that every visitor, no matter how humble, was in league with Macan the First. Initially, he turned them away, but his wife was afraid of the old laws and ordered that every wayfarer be welcomed into the castle.

Unbeknownst to her, Macan the Second had each guest slain in the night, then ordered the servants to tell his wife that they had decided to leave early.

When eventually his wife learned the truth, it was too late; she had grown old, despite the magics the king had employed to slow her decline, and she no longer had the strength of mind to alter the currents of the king’s humours.

One morning, he woke to find her cold at his side.

King Macan’s grief only worsened his paranoia, and he became convinced that his wife had died not of her own mortality, but from some poison administered by Macan the First or his allies.

The more guests King Macan killed, the more he came to enjoy the game of it; he liked playing the role of dutiful host, spoiling his guests, only to find novel ways of killing them ere the morning came.

He began not only welcoming visitors but luring them in, using all manner of faerie tricks to entice mortals and wandering Folk to his castle, telling himself each time that they were spies of Macan the First, and thus deserving of their fate.

He also had many of his servants and relations executed, until all but the stupidest and the most depraved dared remain at his side.

The forest, poisoned by the king’s enmity, withered as the years passed, and the river dried up, and all small Folk perished or fled.

Thus the realm of Macan the Second became a cold place, cruel and desolate, like so much of Faerie. And if any mortal should stumble into King Macan’s mound, they must go back the way they came, and ignore the tempting lights of the castle, lest they remain there evermore.

After I pieced the story together and smoothed the edges, I gave it to Lilja to read first. She was quiet for a long moment afterwards, and then said, “This is what will happen to him?”

“I doubt Wendell’s story will follow precisely the same course as Macan the Second’s,” I said.

“But yes, I think it quite likely that this act of vengeance towards his stepmother has set Wendell—and the realm itself—upon some path to ruin. Perhaps it will lead to madness; probably he will grow more and more vengeful, finding excuses to hurl other enemies into the Veil. It is also possible that Wendell’s story will play out differently, and he may escape Macan the Second’s fate. ”

“But you do not think so,” Margret said, watching me.

I made no reply, and Lilja nodded grimly. “What is to be done?” she said.

“We must change the story somehow,” I said.

“I have found a version of the Macan story that has given me an idea—in it, the mortal queen seeks aid from the boggart, asking him to heal the bee stings inflicted upon the second Macan. The boggart refuses her, but it makes me think: perhaps I should consult with the creature. Who can say what insight he may possess? He has known Wendell’s family for generations. ”

Niamh leaned back in her chair, folding her arms with a slight huff. I waited, recognizing this as a universal precursor of scholarly objection.

“You place too much importance on the Macan story,” she said bluntly.

“Too much!” I exclaimed. “Has it not been remarkably predictive? The three servants, the second castle—”

“I do not deny its usefulness,” Niamh said, “but attending too closely to a single story to understand a Faerie realm or its Folk is, as Bennett has argued, fruitless parochialism. Do dryadologists these days ignore his treatise on comparative histories? [*2] We must look for patterns .”

I digested this. “Very well,” I said, leaning back in my own chair. “What pattern do you see?”

“A great many—I have, after all, spent years immersed in the folklore of this part of the world,” she said. “One might say I have become the folklore now—ha! But one element in particular stands out. You are not going to like it.”

“Go on.”

“A great deal of the tales concerning the Irish Folk centre on the heroism of ordinary mortals,” she said.

“I can think of five originating in County Leane alone in which a mortal travels to a foul realm to rescue some faerie lord or lady who is held prisoner thereat. And this is just off the top of my head. Imprisonment, rescue, a journey into darkness—you see it everywhere, even in the most ancient of tales.”

“But Wendell does not need rescuing,” Lilja said. “You’ve already rescued him. Or that housekeeper did.”

“She doesn’t mean Wendell,” I murmured, gazing at Niamh. I could see only one way to interpret what she was saying.

She tapped her fingers against her cup and eventually added, as the silence stretched on, “I warned you that you wouldn’t like it.”

“Then I must rescue Wendell’s stepmother,” I said. “Well, no difficulty there. I shall simply march off to the Veil and do it now.”

“ Could you?” Margret said, looking horrified.

“Your cloak,” Lilja said.

I shook my head. “Wendell removed the piece of the Veil from my cloak. He was afraid his stepmother might escape through it.”

We had another moment of silence, mulling over the image of a deranged faerie queen creeping out of my hem.

“Is there a door?” Margret said. “Like the other faerie doors, perhaps?”

Niamh was already shaking her head. “There are no doors to the Veil, and no paths. Only a monarch of Faerie can summon an edge of it, through which one may pass. Thank God for that—it is a hellscape, a wasted desert of nightmares.” She paused, a longing look stealing over her face.

“Also enormously fascinating, from a scholarly perspective.”

“Only a monarch,” I murmured. A terrible realization settled over me like a layer of frost. “Yes—I recall Wendell saying that.”

Lilja’s eyes widened. “I see what you are thinking,” she said. “ You are a monarch of Faerie! Does this mean you can find a way there yourself?”

“That is not what I was thinking,” I said slowly.

“I am a monarch, yes, but I am mortal. Look at Queen Arna herself—she cannot escape the Veil, despite her royal title; it must be because of her mortal blood. No—to rescue Queen Arna, I would need the assistance of a faerie monarch. Not a mortal, nor a halfblood.”

Niamh shook her head. “Liath will not release his stepmother. He is adamant on that subject.”

I gazed at them, wondering how on earth I could convince them of my sanity after what I was about to say. I have my own doubts on that score, I’m afraid. But what else am I to do? What other avenue is there? And indeed, there is a neatness to it—a return to a beginning.

It is madness in every other respect, of course.

“Wendell is not the only faerie king of my acquaintance,” I said.

Skip Notes

*1 Dr. Enid Smith, Folk Legends and Wonder-Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1812.

*2 Francis Bennett, A Protohistorical Approach to Folk-Lore, 1849.