Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(84)
She tilted her head. “Then why bother? Are you not a queen of Faerie, to dress as you please?”
I toyed with Poe’s needle-fingers, wondering how to respond. Yes, I was a queen of Faerie—and I wished to appear so. To match. For where had I ever matched before? At Cambridge, yes—I matched with the old stones, and the dusty libraries. I suppose that, in Faerie, I had wished to match with the Folk. A foolish aim indeed! I wondered at myself now. Yet I suppose that one cannot spend one’s life half in love with Faerie without wishing to be part of it, to wonder if it might feel like home in a way no mortal place ever had.
Instead of burdening Lilja with all this, I simply said, “The Folk love glamour and beauty.”
Lilja nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose. Although in our stories, they love—what is the word in English? Misfits? Yes, they love misfits just as well. Hermits and tinkers, wanderers and poets—more tales revolve around such people than the glamourous ones. Is this only in Ljosland?”
“Misfits?” I echoed, smiling slightly. “No—it is not only there.”
Lilja shrugged. “Well—you know the Folk best.” She turned to show me another carving, and then Margret called from the kitchen that lunch was ready, sparing me from further rumination.
As the afternoon advanced, I was startled out of my perusal of a story fragment by a knock at the door. To my astonishment, it was Niamh. At her side was a strange little grinning woman I recognized as her spriggan attendant, under a glamour.
“He sent you to spy on me,” I said.
Niamh shrugged. “Of course.”
I groaned. Lilja came to the door then, followed by Margret, and gave a delighted cry to find Niamh there, whom I had told them so much about. This was followed by a round of introductions, as well as the usual commiserations about the weather and offers of refreshments, and together we retreated inside to the kitchen.
“You needn’t have bothered to close that faerie door,” Niamh said once we were settled with coffee and some of Margret’s spiced bread in front of us. “There is another not far from the castle that opens onto a village on the coast called Dunmare. The journey to Corbann took me two hours.”
“I surmised as much,” I said. “But I did not want to make it easy for him to follow me. I wished to emphasize my desire to be left alone.”
“Oh, he has well understood that!” she said with one of her heartiest laughs. “I have never known him in such a state. He alternates between declarations that he will set forth after you without delay—armed with numerous silly presents to convince you to return—and moaning that you will only burn him to cinders for his presumption. I believe he has worn several grooves in the castle floor from all the pacing he does, and he routinely terrifies the servants by snatching dustcloths and scrubbing at things himself, or refusing to let the tailors mend his clothes—he is up half the night, hunched over those sewing needles of his.”
I put my head in my hands. “I feel terrible,” I said honestly. “I did not realize that I would be away so long, by his reckoning. He must think I am furious with him.”
Niamh waved this away. “The Folk, most especially the nobility, can endure a little disappointment in love now and then. It is good for them, for they are far too used to getting their way on that front. Anyway! He told me to pretend that I wanted to aid in your scholarly research—which is, in fact, very much my desire; I have no intention of sending back any reports about you.”
“You may rethink that,” I said, and explained the nature of my disagreement with Wendell.
“Ah,” she said, nodding calmly. “It was a grim fate Liath doomed his stepmother to. I would not be surprised if there are consequences.”
I let out a slow breath. “I was worried you would take his side.”
“Whatever for?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose because I have no actual evidence to support my concerns. Only an—an instinct.”
“Instinct is often all we dryadologists have to go on,” Niamh said. “Ours is one of the least-understood fields of scientific study.”
I shook my head. “It is unscientific to rely on gut feelings. Wendell was right in refusing to release his stepmother.”
Niamh gave a bark of laughter. “Emily, the king is behaving exactly like every faerie monarch in every story. He will do as he pleases, particularly if that pleasure involves some nasty form of revenge, and pretend as if consequences is not a word that exists in Faie. This is why their realms are so often in chaos, governed by patterns and cycles from which they cannot escape, despite all their magics. It is plain to any dryadologist worth their salt, but he cannot see it, because it is not in his nature. We must help him in this, you and I.”
And just like that, I had three assistants, one of them a celebrated expert in Irish folklore.
Niamh had brought her own stack of books, and together we settled in for a day of research. Lilja had been examining what she termed “the Macan story with the happy ending,” which was contained within a Victorian anthology of tales from Ireland’s southwest, paired with scholarly commentary.[*1] After another hour or so, she handed me the book, saying, “What do you think about this one?”
I glanced at the page. “That’s a story fragment—the early Victorian dryadologists loved collecting such scraps of faerie lore, mostly from decaying Dark Age manuscripts, and putting them together like puzzle pieces. It was a popular pastime for a decade or two. Little of scientific value came of it.”