Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(63)

The courtyard was empty, just a lot of stones with moss and wildflowers growing between them, and a high ceiling where the wind groaned. I wondered if the upper stories of the tower were furnished, and then I thought, And what sort of furnishings does a bodiless entity require? Baths and wardrobes?

“Perhaps we should—knock?” I said dubiously.

“He knows we’re here,” Wendell said.

“He wants you to grovel, no doubt,” Lord Taran said. “A boggart’s arrogance knows no bounds; they fancy themselves above kings and queens.”

This was so rich that I actually snorted. Lord Taran gave me a narrow-eyed look.

“Grovel, hm?” Wendell said. “Well, it’s all one to me. But what manner of grovelling would such a creature prefer? I know.”

He lifted a hand, and the space was abruptly filled with silver mirrors, flashing from every wall, with some even set into the floor like tile.

“It’s just a glamour,” he said. “Pretty, though, isn’t it? What do you think? Too much?”

“A bit,” I said, eyeing my hundreds of reflections.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Lord Taran said, with a smirk in my direction. “You know, Your Highness, Callum and I had a great many mirrors at our reception—they are lovely as wedding décor.”

“Really?” Wendell said thoughtfully, and Taran went on to describe their placement and framing at length. I gritted my teeth and pointedly ignored him.

“Stop that,” said the boggart. Because, abruptly, there was a boggart standing before us.

At least, I assumed he was a boggart. A boggart’s guises are so convincing that there is little to distinguish them from whatever creature they have counterfeited, apart from one thing: like my Shadow, they leave no footprints. The person before us appeared to belong to the courtly fae, but the longer I gazed at him, the more disturbed I grew. For he was not his own person, but an assemblage of Wendell’s and Lord Taran’s features—the one’s golden hair, the other’s sharp cheekbones—as well as some I eventually recognized in the faces of the guards standing outside. It was as if the boggart had been formless for so long he had forgotten the shapes he had once worn, and so, in a pinch, had borrowed from the faces he saw before him. Or perhaps that had always been his habit. I noticed he had not deigned to sample my features, surprising me not at all.

Wendell, either not noticing or not caring about this deeply unsettling form of appropriation, swept his cloak to one side in his usual dramatic fashion and bowed to the boggart. “Forgive me,” he said. “Only I thought you would appreciate a little adornment for your tower.”

“It’s a ruin,” the boggart said in a peevish voice that had a great deal of Lord Taran’s aristocratic tenor in it. “I like it that way. And I could not care less about silver—I am not of your realm.”

“As you wish,” Wendell said, and the mirrors vanished.

“As you say, you are not of my realm,” he went on. “So I cannot command you. But you have served my family for generations, as I understand it. And so I have come to beg a favour, placing my hopes in old loyalties.”

“Yes, yes,” the boggart said. “Let’s have a look at you, shall we?”

He folded his arms and paced around Wendell, examining him from every angle with a frown, even bending to examine his knees from the back. At one point, the boggart brushed his golden hair from his eyes in a gesture that was so like Wendell’s that I felt briefly queasy.

“You have only grown more like your mother,” the boggart said at last, looking disappointed. “The first one. I did not care for either of your mothers. The first was a dull little thing, the second a clumsy half mortal. This queen seems no better.” He came closer to me, looking me up and down as a glint of mischief came into his eyes. “But mortals can be entertaining. And they do not break as easily as some think.”

Wendell’s expression went from one of bemusement to towering fury with such abruptness that both Taran and I fell back a step; Taran afterwards looked as annoyed as a cat following a moment of gracelessness. There came a terrible rumbling sound, coupled with that same wet rustling with which I am all too familiar, as if the attentive oaks were uprooting themselves en masse and lumbering in our direction.

“You are speaking to a queen of Faerie,” Wendell said, and it seemed as if the rustling leaves were in his voice. I suppressed the urge to take another step away from him.

I don’t know what would have happened next if the boggart had not backed down, but back down he did. He held up his hands and laughed.

“I see it now!” he cried. “Yes, yes, you are your great-grandmother all over again. I was terribly fond of her. In fact, she has always been my favourite. A pity her eldest son slew her when he grew tired of waiting for the throne. Ah, but I came to love him too.”

The bloody rumbling noise had stopped, but given Wendell’s expression, I still felt it prudent to interpose myself between him and the boggart. I tried to organize my scattered thoughts—I am well-read on the subject of boggarts, and have encountered them on two occasions myself, and thus I was not overly nervous to take the initiative in the conversation.

“You are indeed correct,” I said. “The king is like his great-grandmother in many ways.”

“Really?” The boggart looked even more delighted. “Does he have a fondness for iced pears? We would eat iced pears together on many an evening, the queen and I.”