Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(7)
The brownie gave a panicked squawk before going still again. She could not have been more than a foot high, with a cherubic face half covered in moss and the all-black eyes that are commonplace in creatures of her type.
“Your Highness!” the brownie cried in her small voice. “I did not see you! Forgive me!” As soon as Wendell set her down, she threw herself onto her face at his feet, jabbering something I could not make out—more apologies, I believe, only she also mentioned moss a great deal, making or mending it, I think, perhaps to give to Wendell as a present? The logic was difficult to glean.
“Please stand,” Wendell said. “I am not anybody’s Highness at present, so you needn’t—oh, this is tedious.”
The annoyance in his voice seemed to penetrate the faerie’s desperation more than his words. The creature stood, shivering.
“We are not going to harm you,” I repeated, but she only looked at me miserably. I felt a surge of pity.
Wendell swept his cloak to one side and crouched before the faerie. “Now,” he said, “answer me quickly, and you shall return to your moss-den all the sooner. What has happened to my realm?”
The faerie began to jabber again, coupling this with a great deal of hand-wringing and elaborate gesticulations. Again I could make out very little of what she was saying, despite my fluency in Faie; the brownie mumbled and spoke in a dialect that seemed to have a great deal of Irish mixed in. After listening for a moment, Wendell held up a hand.
“Nothing particularly useful,” he said to me, standing. “The little ones have been greatly troubled of late by Folk charging about on their steeds, trampling their burrows. Battles have been waged, and a great deal of magic expended, sending brownies like this one into a panic. Some have fled into the mountains, abandoning their homes altogether.” He looked genuinely upset. “But they do not know what is happening, nor the players involved, only that their lives have been made very unpleasant. What a mess!”
He rubbed his hand through his hair. “It began with my stepmother—her decision to enlarge her kingdom by conquering the neighbouring realms; not an event appreciated, it seems, by all the inhabitants, who send regular raiding parties to harass our Folk. Things have grown only more unstable since your visit.”
I addressed the brownie. “Does the queen live?”
More gesticulating and dense dialect. This time, even Wendell looked confused.
“Yes?” he said. “But there’s something else—she says my stepmother has fled. Though the little one uses an odd word for it. One that describes how a fallen leaf decays into soil, becoming part of the forest floor.”
We looked at each other, and I saw that we were in agreement; something in this boded ill. “Anything else?” I said.
“There is a battleground near—the little one offered to show us. We may learn something there.”
“All right,” I said, and we set off, the faerie a green ripple of movement on the path ahead.
SKIP NOTES
*1 Unfortunately, my paper on the subject—currently under consideration by the British Journal of Dryadology—is still held up in peer review. It seems many scholars are not yet willing to accept the existence of faerie doors that connect multiple places, and it is possible that I shall have to gather additional evidence to override the skeptics, or perhaps convince other scholars to venture to Austria themselves to test my findings.
*2 The Irish Monarchs: Tales of Fayerie Kings and Queens from the Pre-Christian to the Modern Era, by John Murphy, 1772; and The Mirror King: A Speculative Biography of Scotland’s Oldest Faerie Lord, by Douglas Treleaven, 1810.
*3 See, for example, Anna Queiroz’s recent article on the two faerie kingdoms of Madeira, one of which has long been depicted in local folklore as a grey and unpleasant land ruled by a rapacious king, while the other is ruled by a king and queen who, among other things, hold regular tribunals to resolve disputes and regularly abduct mortal musicians to write propaganda ballads about their reign; their kingdom is much larger, and home to some of the most fantastical revels known to scholarship, generally a marker of a prosperous faerie realm.
30th December
Well! I have a great deal to recount since I last opened this journal, and I scarcely know how to feel about any of it. Hardly a new sensation since taking up with Wendell.
The battleground was an area of moorland beside a marsh, an offshoot of Muckle Lake, I think. Small embers of light floated here and there—the remnants of magic expended during the battle, which looked a great deal like will-o’-the-wisps.[*1] There were also several inexplicable elements, foremost of which was an ivied staircase leading to nothing, and what I can only describe as a giant fox frozen halfway into the process of transforming into a tree. An attentive oak had been cleft perfectly in two, with a neat passage between, though this did not seem to have killed the thing, unfortunately. Occasionally there came a sort of roaring sound, which seemed to emanate from beneath the earth. On the whole I was content not to have witnessed the enchantments that had been cast during the heat of the fighting.
There were no bodies, either dead or wounded. The only movement came from the wind brushing calmly over the ferns that spilled out from the forest’s edge. A great many theories seek to explain what happens to the bodies of the Folk after they die; scholars have documented the remains of a fair few species of common fae—indeed, some are housed in Cambridge’s Museum of Dryadology and Ethnofolklore—but not of the courtly fae. The leading theory among mortuary dryadologists is that, for most of the courtly fae, there is an evanescence of some sort, perhaps after a period of time has elapsed. The stories do not agree on this point, however, and it remains one of the questions that, for reasons likely pertaining to my own weaknesses, I have avoided asking Wendell.