Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(48)

11th January




Well! I have poured myself a glass of wine to celebrate, for I have completed my work here, and sooner than I thought I would, thanks in large part to Farris and Ariadne. A light rain, mixed with sleet, is falling beyond the window, but I have not drawn the curtains, for my view of the lantern-lit campus is charming in the winter night’s gloom. I must be concise, for my train departs Dublin early on the morrow. I would return to Faerie tonight if I could, but the trains do not line up, and I would just end up spending the night in Limerick.

Ariadne and I spent most of the last two days in the library, while Farris came and went; he was of more use in leveraging his connections among the Trinity dryadologists, of which he has a fair few.

From one Professor O’Connell he managed to obtain a rare book so obscure there is no record of it in any academic library, an authorless volume of folklore from Counties Leane and Clare, likely dating to the early eighteenth century, which is merely called Village Tales. It contains another version of “King Macan’s Bees,” overly concise (Village Tales seems to have been written for children) but more complete than other iterations.

Farris even succeeded in identifying several scholars who are familiar with the tale, or have heard similar versions of it. The celebrated Professor Malik, who has been active in the field of Irish dryadology for the last half-century and is now semi-retired, was particularly helpful. Despite her age, her memory is impeccable, and she informed Farris that she had heard the tale some decades ago from an aged grandmother in a little village called Fenrow on the Leane coast. She had recorded it at the time, having thought perhaps to include it in one of her books, but the tale being so obscure—and, she suspected, invented by the grandmother in question, who according to her children had a habit of such things—she had culled it. Malik was able to provide Farris with the journal in which she had written the tale as it had been told to her by that now long-dead matriarch.

Ariadne, meanwhile, managed to win over the obstreperous head librarian with her unique combination of unconscious charm and youthful enthusiasm. Not only did he inform her that several relevant volumes of Irish tales were in the process of being re-bound, but he allowed her to peruse these at her leisure, provided she was careful to wear gloves and put everything back where she had found it (this last statement being delivered with a pointed look in my direction). In one of those volumes, we found another version of “King Macan’s Bees,” enigmatically titled “The King’s Revenge.”

And thus, in fits and starts, and after having been met with various dead ends and false signposts, we have managed to stitch the tale together, to the extent possible. Missing pieces remain: What motivated Macan’s wife to betray him? Was she mistreated, as mortals in Faerie so often are? What is the nature of the bees, and are they symbolic of anything in particular?

I could go on. But in any case, here is the fruit of our research, such as it is.

KING MACAN’S BEES

There was once a minor faerie lord who dwelt in a mound known locally as King Macan’s tomb for reasons no one could remember. The mound was a natural feature long inhabited by the Folk, who also used the flat top for their summer revels, not an ancient, mortal-made monument to some dead king. Over the generations, the faerie lord came to be referred to as King Macan by the mortal inhabitants of the nearest village, which pleased him greatly. The faerie was not a king, and his castle within the mound was strange and dilapidated, but like all Folk, he saw himself as perfectly deserving of mortal veneration.

King Macan, being even more vain than the average faerie, had a great love of guests, for they gave him the opportunity to show off both his castle (which he thought very fine, despite its topsy-turvy architecture) and his appropriated title, which he had inscribed upon every lintel. This would prove his undoing, for one winter’s night a wandering peddler came to his door. This peddler, despite his humble appearance, was in fact a faerie prince who had unsuccessfully challenged his older sister for her throne and been chased out of the kingdom in disgrace. Though he had fallen on hard times, even being forced to make his living peddling trinkets to puffed-up nobodies like King Macan (so the prince regarded him), this had not made him humble. The prince, in fact, still wanted a throne, and he decided that an imaginary one was better than none at all.

After welcoming the peddler prince into the castle and giving him a tour, King Macan invited him to dine at his table and sleep a night beneath his roof. The prince acquiesced happily, and after all had retired for the night, he snuck out of his room and into the king’s chamber. With the help of King Macan’s wife, a mortal woman called Mona, the prince tied King Macan to his bed and bludgeoned him with his crown, which the king had made himself and inscribed with his false title. Thinking the man was dead, the prince threw his body into the river that flowed past the castle, placed the bloodied crown upon his head, and declared himself King Macan the Second. Then he announced his marriage to Mona[*1] and they retired together without so much as changing the bedding.

Unfortunately for Macan the Second, Macan the First had not been killed, only grievously wounded. He crawled up onto the riverbank, and there he cast a powerful curse upon the mound and all who dwelt there, fed with his heart’s blood and tears. For as long as the old Macan lived, the river in which he had nearly drowned would eat away at the foundations of the castle, making it teeter and shake ominously, while the bed in which he had been beaten, along with every other bed in the castle, would fill their occupants with nightmares so foul that some were driven insane.