Page 68 of The Moorwitch
The dress is exquisite in the same faded way everything in this strange palace is; the skirt is gray silk, covered in gauzy, layered petals, like a wilted rose, dusted with glittering flecks of silver. The bodice, embroidered with tiny silver stars, is tight and low cut, leaving my shoulders and collarbone bare. The slippers are stippled with white beads. Finally, I pull silk gloves up to my elbow. It all fits perfectly.
I feel like a doll, a plaything, to dress up before the queen cracks me open.
She studies me with a strange little smile for a long moment. Her fingers idly twist her spider threads, hypnotically graceful as they twirl and bend.
Then she says, “Come.”
She rises and presses a mirror; it opens outward, a hidden door. Morgaine does not wait to see if I follow, but I do, on trembling legs, my borrowed, opulent gown whispering along the floorboards.
I step into a curved corridor paneled in white wood, Morgaine several steps ahead. I run my hand over the wall, feeling in the grooves and whorls that same pulsing warmth that lived in the trees of the Wenderwood. Shivering, I move on. On and on I walk, with only glimpses of Morgaine to guide me—a slither of her silk dress, a flash of black curls.
Her court contains many hallways and many closed doors, all of which look as if they were stolen from a different time and place. One might look like any humble wooden door from any poor alley in London; the next might be gilded and decorated with a crumbling mural, as if plucked from some continental palace. The hallways bend and twist in impossible ways, at times slanting downhill or up, or spiraling in seemingly infinite loops. Many of the walls are covered in mirrors, throwing my own distorted reflection back at me. In some of these, I appear to be smiling a mad, horrible smile. In others, I am screaming. Shuddering, I try to look directly at none.
Finally, a great doorway looms in front of me, arches of white wood carved like delicate trees. Morgaine waits beneath it, watching me approach. Her expression has turned solemn and aloof, and somewhere along the way, she picked up a crown. It is tall and made of many jagged, asymmetrical points of silver, and between these slender prongs her spiders weave their glistening webs.
“Well, little witch?” she whispers. “Would you look upon a faerie realm?”
I nod, breathless, my skin crawling with terror. But I didn’t come this close to turn back now. Perhaps I will find an opening when her attention is diverted and I can slip away, find the tree, and escape.
She leads me down a wide, shallow stair that opens to a vast, mossy floor. Looking up, I see no sky, only a great roof of white branches all woven together. Among those branches hang spheres of light, lanternswhite and lavender and gold. They flood the faerie court with a soft twilight glow.
The fae enclave is spread below in a cradlelike valley, ten times the size of Blackswire, almost a small city. The houses are like nothing I’ve ever imagined; they rise from the mossy earth in white domes and hills, irregular shapes with circular doorways carved into them, and childlike handprints and patterns are stamped across the walls. From these black openings, I see hints of faces—pale, inhuman, with bulbous black eyes and sharp teeth. These fae are even less human than their queen, even less than the ones attending Lachlan outside the great ward. We walk among their houses, and I hear them chitter their teeth.
I stick close to Morgaine, fearing what would happen if I were left alone out here, with those dark, glinting eyes watching me hungrily.
The Wenderwood borders the fae enclave on three sides; looking back, I see her palace rising over it all, a jumble of towers and walls and impossibly thin spires, all white wood. It looks like something from a dream, a house of melted wax, or what you’d get if you splashed white paint onto a canvas and then let it run. It doesn’t look as if it could truly be real; certainly it doesn’t seem capable of standing on its own, but there it is.
Then we turn around a bend, and I see what stands on the other high end of Elfhame, a tower to mirror the palace, and yet no tower at all.
“Oh,” I breathe. “Oh.”
Morgaine looks back, coming to a stop. “Is it not magnificent?”
It is a tree, a tree taller than any structure I’ve ever seen in my life, its trunk curved naturally into the shape of a woman. It is white, like the smaller ones in the Wenderwood, and it arches high over the enclave. Its arms are lifted up, morphing into the branches which form the canopy overhead, thick and tangled and shivering with scarlet leaves. Its head is tilted so that the face gazes down at the dwellings of the fae, and the eyes are blank white wood. Vines trail over its trunk, forming a kind of stringy gown. Its limbs arch over the whole of Elfhame, until they reach the borders and there droop low like the branches of a greatwillow tree, forming a scarlet curtain of leaves that encircles the whole of this little queendom. I sense if I were to push through that curtain, I would tumble into the void beyond the earth, the nothing between the worlds. At its base, new growth springs up, branches clustering at the ankles and calves and knees, slender young stalks gradually melding into the greater tower of the main trunk.
The Dwirra Tree isn’tinElfhame.
Elfhame is in the Dwirra Tree.
Everything around me, all the odd shapes and patterns, now begin to make sense. The fae houses are roots protruding from the ground, and into which they’ve burrowed to create homes. Even Morgaine’s palace is part of the tree. All the little paths tracing through the enclave seem to lead here, up a slight incline, toward the main trunk.
I feel very, very small before it.
Thisis the tree I must take a branch from?
“Come,” Morgaine says, watching me. It occurs to me that she never blinks. “They are waiting for us.”
“Who?” I walk forward in a daze, my pulse a hammer in my temples.
We follow a narrow track through the thick moss; it weaves up the hill and ends at a wide green clearing. There are odd shapes there, hidden by blankets of moss and ivy—tables and chairs, a broken loom, a spinning wheel. Morgaine walks through them, her head high, but her expression seems ... sad.
“This is where they came,” I whisper. “The moorwitches.”
The moorwitches who were, according to the legend Sylvie told me, slaughtered by the queen of the fae. I glance sidelong at her, my skin clammy, my throat sticky with dread.
“Yes.” She presses the tip of her finger to a broken spindle. “This is where they came.”
“Why did you bring me here?”