Page 62 of Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)

I had hoped that Arna would maintain a dignified silence, but there luck was not on my side.

Much to my chagrin, after seeking a few more details about how precisely I had managed to follow her into the Veil—including my history with the Hidden king, about whom she seemed remarkably incurious—I found my relationship with Wendell interrogated.

Every particular was sought. The old queen wished to know where we had met; the development of our friendship and whether we had truly begun as academic rivals or if there had not been some feeling there from the start; whether he had met my family and friends and the nature of their opinions of him; how Wendell had proposed.

She seemed scandalized that we had been married with so little ceremony, and I was forced to remind her that this had been necessitated by the direness of the circumstances, namely her having poisoned the kingdom and made designs on Wendell’s life. This landed with very little impact.

“Still, he must be planning a grand celebration,” she said. “When my late husband and I wed, the revelry lasted so many nights one forgot when it had begun.”

“I am not much for revelry,” I said irritably. We were descending a tricky slope, and I would have preferred to focus on my feet rather than on conversation, particularly this one. I could not help adding, “I wonder at your sudden interest in your son’s happiness, Your Highness.”

I thought she would not reply at first. Then: “He is a different person than I thought he was.”

This confirmed something I had noted and wondered about: the former queen’s manner of speaking of her stepson had fundamentally altered.

I knew from Wendell that his stepmother had been dismissive towards him in his youth, sometimes ignoring him entirely, other times doting upon him in a condescending manner more suited to a pet.

It was as if, in foiling her plot and dooming her to torment and death, his character had acquired a new dimension, one that she might respect.

If this might not seem an obvious foundation upon which to build some semblance of maternal affection, I can only note that maternal affection is often a complicated subject in faerie stories.

When it grew too dark to continue, we made camp within a little circle of standing stones. I was not worried about bogles now, for they would know Arna, just as Poe had.

“I meant what I said,” she told me as we hunched close to the warmth of the fire, each wrapped in a blanket.

“I have no interest in the throne now. I wonder at my obsession with it before—what need has one for power, nor for anything besides the wind, so clear and sweet-smelling, and the green earth beneath one’s feet? ”

She stopped and gazed at the sweep of the land. I noticed that she had missed a spot of ash below her right ear, and that her palms had blisters and scabs she was scratching absently at. “I will take up a small cottage, I think, and live alone, offering this wisdom to any Folk who visit me.”

I mulled this over. Naturally I suspected her vow might originate in practical considerations, not sincerity of feeling—she knew as well as I that the game was up.

She had no hideout remaining where she could lurk and scheme, and no allies left in a realm she had tried to ruin, among Folk her magic had poisoned.

More materially, she had no control over the Veil; Wendell could return her to it if she so much as spoke the word vengeance .

But I decided that it mattered little whether her reformation was genuine; a self-serving motive would work for us just as well, Wendell and me, and I was not above flattering her for it, in the hopes that she would eventually come to believe in her nobility, and grow more zealous in its affectation.

“I have never heard of a monarch abdicating the throne of their own free will,” I lied. [*] “The Folk cling to power and rarely have the strength of character to put the needs of their servants before their own.”

She eyed me, and I reminded myself that she was half human, and thus not so easy to deceive as other Folk. “Or the sense of self-preservation,” I added.

She smiled at that. “Do you not recall our conversation the day we met?” she said. “I am not Folk, and neither am I mortal. I am only myself.”

She lay down beside the fire, wrapping herself in the blanket and drawing it over her mangled hair.

I almost rolled my eyes—this sort of melodrama was clearly a family trait.

But in truth, I was a little sorry for her.

Not because of what she had suffered in the Veil—she had well deserved that—but because I could not imagine existence as a halfblood in Faerie to have been easy, and I sensed a litany of slights and injuries behind her refusal to identify with either of her parents’ bloodlines.

It must be wearying to exist in such a state of permanent self-denial.

This did not justify what she had done, but it made her company marginally easier to bear.

“You are welcome to share our tent,” I told her, for the wind was picking up, greedily snatching at what little warmth the fire gave off. After all, even singular beings are not immune to cold.

She made no response, only shivered and drew the blanket tighter to her. I sighed and went to bed, grateful for Shadow, who curled up against me—the dog is like a furnace with legs.

Sometime later, however, I started awake at the sound of rustling from the other side of the tent.

The former queen spent a moment muttering curses at the pillows, which I had piled up on that side simply to have them out of the way, before she finally arranged her pallet to her satisfaction, and seemed to fall asleep.

I regretted my kindness then, as her proximity made it easier to second-guess whether she might think twice about her newfound high-mindedness and strangle me in my sleep, but I had Shadow at my side, and as always, this gave me courage. I slept.

Skip Notes

* Though uncommon, a handful of stories feature faerie monarchs installing a chosen heir in their place.

The Russian tale “The Snow-Wanderer,” for instance, tells of a queen who wishes to live among mortals, whom she imagines as having simple, carefree lives.

This queen gives the throne to her daughter, who rules until longing for her mother sends her on a quest in search of her, which ends in bloodshed when she finds the queen slain by mortal hands.

In the northeast region of Ardamia, a place particularly prone to avalanches, many locals believe that a specific cave in the alpine is occupied by a very peculiar hermit—a queen of the courtly fae who abandoned her war-torn realm to her squabbling children partly to punish them, and is presently occupied in building herself a private castle by tunnelling into the mountains, which is supposedly to blame for the unstable nature of the terrain.