Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(29)
I thought I could guess who Lord Wherry was from the greyish pallor his already pale face took on. The Lady East Wind—she of the radiant white tresses—stood and offered me her hand. When I placed my palm against hers, she bowed her head and kissed my fingertips. “Your Highness,” she said gravely.
“Emily,” I corrected her inanely, my surprise getting the better of me.
“Queen Emily,” she said, gazing at me with a hungry sort of interest that made me wish to run away. I found myself longing for the dismissive looks of the courtiers in the Grove. Fortunately, Wendell took my hand and drew me away.
“I shall await you in the garden, Your Highnesses,” the Lady East Wind said. “I grow more weary of confinement with each passing year.”
“As you wish,” Wendell said, flashing her a charming smile. She smiled back, and then abruptly vanished. A heartbeat later, a wind stirred our hair and blasted the window open, rustling the branches beyond as it went.
“Wait a moment,” I said, staring at the window, which swayed gently on its hinges. “Is that—is she really the East Wind?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Wendell replied, as if he had never given the matter much thought.
Another prospective councillor stepped forward and inclined her head. She, too, seemed to take more interest in me than I was used to, which I disliked even more than the Lady East Wind’s attention. Because I had noticed this immensely intimidating faerie before—at the banquet last night, and this morning, watching Wendell and me in the Grove. According to Wendell, she was an exile from another court, and her name was unknown to him, even in part; she was referred to by her usual attire, a crimson cloak. This cloak left a trail of what looked like blood behind it wherever the Lady went, as if she had recently come from a gruesome murder scene. Her skin was the variegated colour of birch bark, her hair waves of burnt gold, and she was as beautiful as a summer’s twilight, though she would have been more so, in my opinion, if she did not also have blood in her hair, and upon her hands.
“It would be an honour to serve you both, Your Highnesses,” the Lady in the Crimson Cloak told us, her gaze lingering upon me.
I nodded in reply, silently willing her to turn back to Wendell. He meanwhile smiled at the Lady as if she were not at present leaving ghastly stains upon the carpeting and said, “It is dull work, but you have our gratitude. Excuse us.”
He led me from the room. I muttered, “I doubt I will ever associate the feeling of gratitude with that horror. Must we put her on the Council?”
“Not if you object,” Wendell said. “Do you?”
“No,” I said, after a pause. There were a great many monsters in Wendell’s court—I was going to have to get used to them at some point. “Only you know so little about her. What court is she exiled from? What was her crime? And what about this Lady East Wind—why did she stare at me so?”
“I know little about most of them,” Wendell replied with a sigh. “As I said, I did not spend my youth in the most productive manner. Those old and venerable enough to serve on our Council were not exactly part of my social circle.”
I opened my mouth again, but before I could get another word out, Wendell continued in a warning tone, “It was thoughtful of you to praise my uncle, Em. But if you believe him to possess a kindly nature beneath all that spite, you are much mistaken. As general, he took great pleasure in torturing my grandparents’ enemies—not for reasons of loyalty, but because he relished the opportunity to invent creative forms of pain. I may not be well acquainted with many of the respectable Folk of my realm, but he at least I can warn you against befriending.”
A little chill went through me. “Noted,” I said.
Wendell pulled me on, through a room filled with crates and a jumble of furniture, and down a corridor that ended at a door I recognized.
“The bookbinders!” I said. This was not the bookbinders’ door, but it made me remember my illfated exploration that morning. “Wendell, all those journals—did you—”
“Ah, you found them!” He turned to smile at me. “You needn’t thank me, Em. That was but a small wedding gift.”
“Small!” I exclaimed, remembering the dozens of journals, all beautiful beyond measure—so beautiful, in fact, that I could scarcely imagine despoiling them with my inelegant handwriting.
“I mean for you to have everything you could ever want,” he said. “While we’re on the subject.”
He gave me a smile that filled me with foreboding, it was so mischievous. But he was already opening the door and pulling me through, Shadow at my heels.
The view was as I remembered—the misty waterfall, the treed hillside, the little stone cottage. But I had only had a quick glance that morning, and I realized that I made an incorrect assumption on one rather key point.
“This isn’t Faerie,” I murmured. “It’s—”
“Corbann,” Wendell said. “Well, the edge of Corbann, in County Leane. It’s a pretty village, as mortal villages go. This door was once located in the woods beyond Silverlily Lake. I used it myself once or twice when I was a teenager. I couldn’t have opened it from this side, for my stepmother had used an enchantment to seal it against me, but that was easy to undo last night, from the Faerie side. And then I simply moved the door into the castle.”