Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(41)

“Here.” Hiccupping a little, Deilah pressed a silk handkerchief to my head.

“Thank you,” I said.

Her lip trembled. “I want to go home,” she said. Then she burst into tears.

“Shh,” I said, patting her back. Guilt pricked at me; I had been the one to bring her here. And yet her mother was the cause of this. Shouldn’t she witness it? Hadn’t that been my intention?

I gave up arguing with myself and simply huddled there with Deilah as Wendell fought. The guard seemed to possess some skill with a sword—or perhaps it was the curse that lent her strength—for she managed to deliver a shallow slash across Wendell’s side. Only the one, though, for in the next instant, Wendell knocked the wraith’s weapon aside and drove his sword into her chest. Then he drove it in again. And again.

“Wendell!” I shouted, but he seemed not to hear me. Eventually, Lord Taran, who had been distracted by another wraith, simply kicked the thoroughly dead guard out of Wendell’s reach.

The earth shuddered.

I had been in the process of picking myself up, because it was abundantly clear that, as poor Lord Wherry had noted, there was no need for Deilah or me to be there, getting in the way, but the tremor threw me to my knees. A new spectre had risen from the mist, towering over the others. It was a drayfox—which, I have since learned, can grow as large as cottages in their old age. The mist swirled about it and through it, only half obscuring the scabs poking through its spectral fur. It was then that my mind cleared.

The scabs were like those on the tree fauns’ horns.

My thoughts took off at a gallop. I remembered what Callum had said about Queen Arna—that she had taken the poison within herself and somehow infected the realm with it, as a mortal might pass on a cold. It was a mad idea, of course, and yet simultaneously—as is often the case in Faerie—there was a sort of logic to it. Monarchs of Faerie do not merely inhabit their realms; they are thought to be intricately entwined.[*] It was both a threat to Wendell’s rule and the perfect revenge against him. He who had evaded the same poison was now forced to watch it consume his realm.

The theories kept churning. The poison that had sickened this grove had come from the tree fauns. Had the common fae possessed by it also been possessed by the fauns’ malice?

Wendell crouched at the edge of the darkness, leaning on one hand; the other he pressed against his side, blood dripping through his fingers. When he looked up, I saw that he was lost. His expression was devoid of anything other than the all-consuming fury I had witnessed only a handful of times, and had rather hoped I would not see again.

“Brother, do not touch it,” Deilah cried through her tears. She ran towards him, and I seized her arm and dragged her down the hill, or tried to—she fought me, her elbow connecting with my stomach, and the breath left me in a wheeze.

Wendell, still possessed by his mindless fury, marched into the swirling mist as if we had not just watched it possess everything that it touched. Horrified, I screamed at him to turn back, which produced absolutely no effect. But the mist did not rise to cover him as it had Lord Wherry; it shrank back. It closed behind him, but not in the places where his blood fell upon the earth. There the grasses and underbrush of the forest grew lush and green, shaking off the curse.

This I noted.

The curse did not seem to appreciate Wendell’s determination. Dozens of wraiths rose out of the darkness—it sickened me, the sight of so many small Folk destroyed by this dark magic, even as I quaked in terror of them.

Lord Taran had no such conflicted feelings, and even seemed to be enjoying himself. His sword flashed as he hewed and stabbed, often moving so fast that he was little more than a dark wind to my eyes. I clutched Deilah to me—to comfort the child, who was still crying, though I suspect it was as much to comfort myself.

Wendell, meanwhile, had neither slowed nor slackened his pace, no matter how many monsters the mist threw at him. Two of the guardians swooped in to help him—not Razkarden; no doubt he was too wise—and he killed them without pause, or any sign of recognition.

When he reached the spectral drayfox, which had only grown in size, he drew back his sword and hurled it in a glittering arc. It plunged into the spectre’s eye, and a gust of wind enveloped the grove, the ground trembling beneath our feet. The spectre sagged backwards, and then it collapsed.

Wendell had caught his sword, or summoned it somehow, and was now hacking at the mist itself, there being no more wraiths to challenge him. Eventually, Lord Taran, stepping gingerly through the mist, which was beginning to dissolve, met Wendell’s sword with his own, disarming him with a series of impossible strikes. At that, the fury seemed to leave Wendell like an exhaled breath, and he gave Lord Taran a puzzled look, as if there had been nothing at all strange about his murderous rampage, nor any reason for him to stop.

The disintegrating mist expanded towards Deilah and me, and the girl tore herself out of my grasp and ran pell-mell into the forest, shrieking. Wendell swore and took off after her, vanishing into one tree and then stepping out of another, where he caught his sister and hauled her back towards our mounts. She seemed torn between beating her fists against his chest and sobbing into his neck, which slowed their progress somewhat. The grove was brightening, and I coughed on the smoke clogging the air. One of the guards came hurrying towards Lord Taran, soot smeared across her cheek.

“We’ve surrounded the grove with pyres, my lord,” she said. “These trees will soon be up in flames.”