That was when the land broke open, showering us in snow and dirt. Roots wormed their way out from the soil, white and smooth as bone. They twined themselves around Bambleby and yanked him onto his back, then dragged him towards the white tree in an uncanny mirror of what I had undergone.
“Wendell!” I lunged forward, trying to wrench the roots away from him. They showed no interest whatsoever in me, nor Shadow, who pounced and worried at them until they fell away. But more rose to take their place.
“Why does it want you?” I cried.
“Why do you think, you cold-blooded lunatic of a woman?” he yelled, clawing at the ground. This was followed by a series of curses in what I assumed to be Irish.
I stabbed at the roots with my pocketknife. At the same moment, though, my mind was racing through stories, texts, journals. “Can you not—can you not say it?”
He gave me one of his impossibly green glares. We were nearing the base of the tree, where a hollow like a mouth had yawned open, black and writhing with roots like white worms. “No!”
“Oh,” I breathed. My pocketknife was having little effect, but I kept up the stabbing nevertheless—I believe I stabbed him once, accidentally, for I had gone back into my mind. “You can’t reveal to me that you’re Folk—it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world. Isn’t that it? I’ve heard of that—yes, that account of the Gallic changeling. And isn’t it a peripheral motif within the Ulster Cycle?[*] Bryston’s theory was that—”
“Oh, God,” he moaned. “She wants to discuss theory at a moment like this. I am doomed, aren’t I?”
The roots were pulling him deeper. I grabbed at his shoulders and yanked, but I only slipped in the snow and thumped onto my side. Shadow gripped Bambleby’s sleeve with his teeth and put his own back into it. Neither of us had the slightest effect.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” I cried. “I know what you are, Wendell—I said it, so you needn’t reveal yourself! Can’t you use your magic now? Can I help you?”
“Yes, you can stop pontificating at me for half a second so that I can concentrate,” he yelled over the lashing roots. “I haven’t done this in a very long time. I don’t even know if I remember how. And if you would please encourage your fanged familiar to stop mauling my cloak!”
I drew Shadow back. It took all of my strength, for he kept howling and lunging at Bambleby’s disappearing body. I don’t know what I expected him to do, but something loud and impressive, certainly. What actually happened was both underwhelming and utterly terrifying: he folded himself into the earth and was gone. I have seen brownies and trows do this, of course, but they are brownies and trows, creatures of leaf and moss; they are not Wendell. And then he did worse than that, stepping out of a tree on the other side of the river, creating a horrible confusion within me as my mind tried to convince my eyes that he had come from behind the tree, but of course he had not.
Shadow grabbed at my cloak and started pulling again, but I was already running, and so we ran across the mostly frozen river like a bride from a nightmare, her train supported by a servant. The ice cracked near the far bank but did not break, and Bambleby grabbed me before I fell.
He tried to pull me on, but I dug in my heels and turned to watch the spectacle unfolding on the opposite shore. The white tree itself was still, dreamlike, while beneath it the roots writhed with impotent rage. The river ran too deep; they could not burrow beneath it.
“I want a piece of the bark,” I said suddenly.
He gave me such a look of disbelief that I pressed on, “For the paper! We need illustrations, Wendell. Exhibits. How else do you expect people to understand—”
“We can go back there, and you can watch that thing crack my skull open and fill it with monstrosities,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll sit for an illustration after—what do you think?”
“If I went alone, given that it paid me no mind before—”
He took me by the shoulders and shook me. “What is the matter with you? You are many things, which I will be happy to enumerate later, but obtuse is not one of them.”
At that, my old habit, carefully honed, reasserted itself, and I gripped the coin in my pocket. The strange desire that had filled me receded, and I knew that, of course, if I went back, the white tree would seize me, and Wendell would have to come to my aid.
I withdrew my hand from my pocket. But I saw no evidence of the chill that had gripped me when my fingers brushed the leaf. Only—my third finger trembled. I put the hand away again before Bambleby noticed.
“What does the king want with you?” I said, not needing an answer but merely voicing my thoughts as they thumbed through the well-worn stories. “Of course—to possess you. He has no substance left that is not tree.”
“No doubt.” He was shivering so with the cold that I was a little sorry for him. “I felt him reaching for me the moment I stood above his roots. He is very ancient. His people locked him up in that tree because—well, I don’t know. He believes it horribly unjust, naturally. He has been sitting in there fantasizing about revenge and murder and all the rest of it for centuries.”
I wondered that he could be so dismissive, when he was exiled royalty himself, but his lack of sympathy seemed quite genuine.
“Fascinating.” I watched the roots writhe, already piecing together the entry in my encyclopaedia. Note to self: I must needs enquire after this manner of faerie gaoling; is it a feature in other tales of the Hidden Ones? “No doubt the Folk of Ljosland stay far away from him.”
Bambleby was gazing at the tree with an unreadable look. “He is very powerful. He would let me use that power, after whatever bloody rampage he has been plotting.”
“You are not thinking of going back?” I said, terror gripping me. “You are bewitched.” Oh, God—how would I stop him if he was?
“No,” he said, and it seemed to answer more than my question. He turned away, a strange sort of melancholy in his eyes. “No. Let’s go home.”
* * *
—
Bambleby was nearly silent on the long, tedious journey back, which was most unlike him. I wondered if he was self-conscious after revealing himself to me, but of course that wasn’t it. I don’t think Bambleby would be self-conscious if he were stripped naked and paraded through the streets of London.
As soon as we got through the door of the cottage, he collapsed into one of the armchairs, nearly insensible. I got his boots off him and discovered that his feet were so white as to be shading into blue. His face, too, was white, and he could not move his fingers. His eyes were very dark, barely any green in them at all now—an interesting phenomenon that I had a mind to examine further, but I managed to quell the scholarly impulse. Only when I had built the fire to roaring and helped him into three blankets did he become himself again, and begin moaning about tea and dinner and chocolate. I would not have obliged his veiled demands, only I was genuinely worried about him, and so I put together an adequate dinner for both of us from the leftover stew Aud had donated in the morning and Poe’s latest confection. I even, against my better judgment, gave him the last of the sheep cheese that I had been saving for my own supper—I’ve grown rather fond of it.