Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3)(88)

Perhaps I will come to Corbann tomorrow. If you will not at least write, I don’t think you can roast me for interrupting your labours. Or can you?

All my love,

Wendell

The rest of the letters continued in this vein, alternating between complaints, entreaties, and various attempts to bribe me into returning, generally by dangling some scientific discovery before me. I put them beneath my pillow, cursing him for his histrionics, and also for the effect they had upon me. That I should feel guilty for leaving him, when I had done so only to attempt, yet again, to save his ridiculous neck! I punched the pillow several times, then attempted to sleep, then dragged the letters out to read them again.

I worried I might have some trouble with bogles in the night, for I had noted several faint trails and holes in the ground that reminded me of the terrain below the boggart’s tower, as well as one of their discarded cookpots. But Shadow and I were left alone, and enjoyed a surprisingly restful sleep.

Lilja and Margret had told me there was a rambler’s path up The Bones from the eastward side, and I was relieved to come upon it without much trouble. The going was much easier after that, despite the steepness of the ascent, and we reached the snowpack by late afternoon.

I allowed myself a rest at that point, for I was sweating despite the cold gusts that swept across the height, and my legs protested the haste with which I had made the climb. Shadow had matched my pace throughout the day, hobbling along determinedly at my heels, and now he lay at my side with his paws on my leg, panting but still alert, as if determined to prove me right in bringing him along. I drank from my flask and ate a little bread, and slowly the pounding in my head subsided. I would have liked to admire the view, for I was half encircled by mountains, the land in the other direction tumbling down to green heathland and the village of Corbann, shrunk to tiny squares of white. However, there was something particularly precarious about the place, the mountain flank steep and slippery with scree that made me quake imagining the return journey. I had the sense that few ramblers ever came this way, and I wondered if this was owing to the pitiless wind, which nearly knocked me over when I tried to stand, or some faerie beast that haunted the place. Either way, I had little desire to linger.

My fingers trembled lightly as I withdrew the pendant I always wore from beneath my collar. It was a small coil of bone as far from key-shaped as possible, and yet that was precisely what it was.

I had no idea if my plan would work. I had to be in the winterlands to use Poe’s door—did this place count? It certainly had more winter in it than anyplace else in the vicinity of Wendell’s realm, and was far less hospitable, a characteristic shared by all places called winterland I’d yet encountered.

I held the key before me, pressed between my thumb and forefinger, and made my way up the snowy slope, feeling alternately hopeful and extremely foolish, particularly whenever my foot slipped and I was nearly sent tumbling back down the mountain. I wondered dolefully if anybody in the village would see me, a tiny speck, if I was to fall to my death, or if I would simply become another mysterious disappearance to add to the dryadology annals. What an inconvenient time to meet my end, given all that I was in the middle of! But then, what person who meets an untimely end is not in the middle of their own to-do list, all of which simply turns to dust after, whether the items consist of mundane errands or the preservation of a faerie kingdom.

I was wrapped up in morose thoughts of this nature when my foot slipped—not on ice; it felt as if the mountain slope itself shifted by a fraction of a degree. I stumbled forward, catching myself just in time, and when I looked up, I was no longer in Ireland.

There was the familiar spring, bubbling away, plumes of sulphurous mist dancing over the surface. There was the grove of trees at the edge of the forest, stunted by their northerly latitude, there the view of the winter-dark sea choked with ice.

I allowed my lightheadedness to overtake me, and sank to my knees upon the snow. Shadow, who had been close at my heels, sat beside me with a huff. For some reason, perhaps because I had been hunched forward for the last several hours, fighting the pull of gravity at my back, I still felt I could at any moment go tumbling down from a height.

I began to laugh. I was as lighthearted, in that moment, as if my quest were over, when in fact it had only begun. I looked about for Poe. His aspen was as fine as ever, its bark as pure a white as if someone had polished away any imperfections, and it was in leaf despite the season. A thin wisp of smoke drifted from one of the knotholes, and the winter glade smelled of baking bread. One of the villagers—Finn, I guessed—had cleared a little path in the snow from Poe’s tree to the spring.

Something made my gaze drift upwards, and I realized there was a face directly above me, peering down, belonging to a creature who sat perfectly still upon a bare bough. It was perhaps two foot in height, the grey face of a skeleton with an overlarge mouth and glistening needle-teeth, which were bared in my direction. In spite of its face, its body was quite fat, and was wrapped in something that resembled several stitched-together owl carcasses, poorly cleaned. Its fingers dangled from either side of the branch like thin black rapiers, ending in deadly points, twice as long as the faerie was tall.

I stared.

The thing stared back.

When it began to emit a horrifying hissing sound, like a rusted-out kettle boiling over, I screamed—most unlike me. Ordinarily I am better at controlling my nerves around the Folk, even such Folk as this, but the thing’s appearance was so hideous and so unexpected in this place where I had thought to find only an old friend.