Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(53)
“Would you care to see my carvings now?” Lilja said, and I agreed. She took me to the little workspace she had created at the back of the cottage, a long table facing a window with a view of the waterfall, its glass damp from the mist. Upon the table was a pile of untouched wood as well as a series of carved figures in varying stages of completion. A hobby from her youth, she had told us, which she had not had time to practice until now.
“But these are marvellous!” I said with perfect sincerity. My eye was drawn first to the raven, an intricate construction of proud beak, talons, and windswept feathers, before I noticed she seemed to be attempting to conceal something from me.
“Is that—?” I began, astonished. Laughing, she handed me the carving.
“It’s not finished,” she said. “I forgot to put it away. I was hoping to surprise you with it.”
I was holding a life-sized carving of Poe—or the top half of him, at any rate; the rest was unworked wood. His face was rough but recognizable, skeletal with a great deal of teeth. Somehow, in its roughness, Lilja had managed to suggest something of Poe’s ethereal quality, the sense that he is both here and not here. She had made a start on his needle fingers, several deep scores in the wood as long as his arms.
“I will admit,” she said, “I am not as fond of the creature as you are. Much as I wish it were different, I cannot stop having nightmares about him! And I am always worried he will accidentally slice off one of my toes and not even notice.”
I laughed and set the carving down. How I miss Poe! He gave me a key so that I might visit him, but it is a magic that works only in lands where winter is more at home than it is in Ireland.
Lilja showed me the rest of the carvings, which were also very fine, though she claimed each needed various improvements. Watching her, I realized it was not my imagination—she was distracted, but whether this pertained to myself or something else entirely, I couldn’t have said. Ordinarily I attempt to suppress the impulse to be blunt, but Lilja does not take offence to me. “I think you are upset,” I said. “I would like to know what has caused it.”
She gave a small laugh. “Oh dear! I’m sorry, Emily. I have been trying to find the words, but—I’m afraid I would be interfering where I shouldn’t.”
“You needn’t worry,” I said. “I am not the best judge of the bounds of friendship; therefore you are unlikely to overstep with me. You are concerned for my safety—is that it?”
She looked troubled. “That is putting it mildly. Dear Emily—you have taken one of their thrones. Can you truly not guess how worried I have been? Thora too, and Aud—she writes me weekly to ask for news of you.”
I felt relieved. Not to be having this conversation, but to know that I had not angered her somehow, or otherwise caused her to question our friendship. “You know that I am one of the foremost living experts on the ways of the Folk,” I said. I was not worried about bragging, for this was a simple statement of fact.
“That is the problem,” Lilja replied. “Yes, I know that you know the Folk, but there is a difference between knowing and feeling. Those of us who live among them would never trust the tall ones. For all you have read about and studied the Folk, you have never truly lived with them, dear. They are like—like nature. Can you understand the feeling of a winter night, or a spring wind, if you have only read about it?”
This was an uncomfortable echo of something Farris had said to me once. I pursed my lips and replied, “All right. Let us accept for the sake of argument that you possess a truer understanding of the Folk than I, that books and academic knowledge are secondary to lived experience. What then would you have me fear?”
She hesitated. “Power,” she said at last. “In our stories, it is the great ones—the lords and ladies, the monarchs and generals, that one must avoid above all else. They are the true monsters lurking in the night.”
This again! I thought. Aloud I said, “I have heard a similar opinion recently from another friend of mine, who seems to think Wendell will abandon me to die of exposure or some such, I suppose when he becomes tired of me.”
“Oh, no!” Lilja said. “That is not what I meant—I don’t believe for a second that Wendell would harm you. But I worry there will come a day when you no longer recognize him. And what hurt is worse than that?”
I could not reply to this. There was something in her gentle manner that sent a spear of panic through me that Farris’s words had not, much as he’d clearly been trying to make me uneasy. Somehow, it laid bare the many times I’d voiced a similar fear to myself, before immediately burying it beneath other things.
Lilja seemed to regret her words, which naturally only made them keener. “Don’t mind me,” she said quickly. “You are the best judge of your heart, and of his. I am your friend, but that does not make me all-knowing.”
She seemed upset, but I did not know how to correct this; the conversation had gone beyond my ability to navigate. I could only say, “I will think on what you have said.”
She nodded, and we went back to the carvings. A few moments later, we heard Wendell calling me, and made our way to the front door with Shadow. There we took our leave. Lilja, I thought, hugged me longer than she ordinarily did.
The night was cold, the wind tossing sheets of mist from the waterfall into our faces. Wendell and I crossed the stepping-stones, but I stumbled in surprise when we emerged into the Silva Lupi, nearly tripping over Shadow.