Luck was with me, and I managed to find a faerie couple to trail behind at first like a child after its parents, so that the other Folk assumed these two had brought me. They smiled at me, and I smiled back as if I didn’t see the hunger in their eyes. In truth, it took my breath away, and I faltered a few times, feeling sick. I began to shake at one point, for there was no difference between this and strolling into a forest filled with tigers.
Shadow, prowling at my side, saved me in more ways than the obvious one. I counted his breaths as they fogged out and the swaying of his tail as he walked. It was an old trick I used to clear my head of enchantment; now I used it to stop myself from running screaming back into the wilderness.
Not one of the faeries glanced at Shadow, not even when he turned his head to nip at their finery out of pure dislike. Once, a man in a sea-grey gown encrusted with jewels with storm clouds in them （they all wore gowns under their cloaks, belted at the waist）， jumped when Shadow snapped at his heel, but when he turned to look behind him, his gaze went right through Shadow and into the snow.
Now, there are few dryadologists who could resist the opportunity to sample faerie food, the enchanted sort served at the tables of the courtly fae—I know several who have dedicated their careers to the subject and would hand over their eye teeth for the opportunity. I stopped at a stand offering toasted cheese—a very strange sort of cheese, threaded with glittering mould. It smelled divine, and the faerie merchant rolled it in crushed nuts before handing it over on a stick, but as soon as it touched my palm, it began to melt. The merchant was watching me, so I put it in my mouth, pantomiming my delight. The cheese tasted like snow and melted within seconds. I stopped next at a stand equipped with a smoking hut. The faerie handed me a delicate fillet of fish, almost perfectly clear despite the smoking. I offered it to Shadow, but he only looked at me with incomprehension in his eyes. And, indeed, when I popped it into my mouth, it too melted flavourlessly against my tongue.
I took a wandering course to the lakeshore, conscious of the need to avoid suspicion. I paused at the wine merchant, who had the largest stand. It was brighter than the others, snow piled up behind it in a wall that caught the lantern light and threw it back in a blinding glitter. I had to look down at my feet, blinking back tears, as one of the Folk pressed an ice-glass into my hand. Like the food, the wine smelled lovely, of sugared apples and cloves, but it slid eerily within the ice, more like oil than wine. Shadow kept growling at it, as he had not with the faerie food, and so I tipped it onto the snow.
Beside the wine merchant was a stand offering trinkets, frozen wildflowers that many of the Folk threaded through their hair or wove through unused buttonholes on their cloaks, as well as an array of jewels with pins in them. I could not compare them to any jewels I knew; they were mostly in shades of white and winter grey, hundreds of them, each impossibly different from the next. I selected one that I knew, without understanding how, was the precise colour of the icicles that hung from the stone ledges of the Cambridge libraries in winter. But moments after I pinned it to my breast, all that remained was a patch of damp.
At the lake was a little beach of frozen white sand upon which a number of spectators had gathered. I spied two other mortals in the crowd, a young man and woman draped over the shoulders of two lovely faerie ladies. I did not have to watch them long to know they were far beyond my aid, and turned from their blank stares with a shudder.
Despair overcame me as I gazed into the whirl of dancers. How on earth could I extract Lilja and Margret when I was deaf to the music they danced to? Stepping onto the ice would give me away immediately—I am flat-footed at the best of times, but I doubted even someone trained in the art of dance could fit their limbs into a rhythm they couldn’t hear.
As I stood going through my options, there came a rustling at my elbow. A beautiful lady was gazing at me, her rabbitish white hair cascading in a long braid past her waist, her blue-grey eyes perfectly matched to her many-layered gown, which was ornamented with icicles that I thought should have clinked together like bells, but didn’t—or I couldn’t hear them.
“What a lovely cloak,” she said in Ljoslander. I gave her a blank look and said, in English, that I could not understand, and she smiled and repeated herself in my language. Her gaze as she eyed my cloak was sharp with greed.
I thought at first that I had accidentally donned the cloak Bambleby had been working on—I realized, gazing down at myself, that it flowed fetchingly around my legs as I walked, and kept me warmer than any cloak I’ve ever owned. But it wasn’t; it was the same old cloak I’d worn yesterday, which meant he must have woken last night after I took it off, damn him, and fixed it up, just like one of his ridiculous ancestors creeping about the shoemaker’s shop and mending the boots.
“What is a little sparrow of a girl doing with an enchanted cloak?” the faerie lady asked, trailing one long finger down the sleeve. My arm ached with cold for hours after that touch.
I curtsied for her, thinking fast. Why not settle for a version of the truth? “It was a gift, my lady. From the oíche sidhe.”
I didn’t know if she would understand the Irish term, but she seemed to, I suppose in the same way that the Folk can understand and speak English even if they’ve never heard it before. “Fine workmanship, even for the little ones.”
Her attention was drawing a crowd—other faeries stopped to ooh and ahh over my cloak. They formed a ring around me, which was disconcerting; I could look at only one at a time, which meant that all the others, viewed from the corner of my eye, assumed their spectral halfway forms. Shadow growled deep in his throat. In the faeries’ eyes were hunger and avarice, and it occurred to me suddenly that whatever caused them to long for hot-blooded human victims might also lead them to view someone like Bambleby as a particularly rare treat.
Goddamn you, Wendell.
The only good to come of this was that Lilja noticed me too and skated slowly over with her hand linked in Margret’s. Margret was a slight, dark-haired girl, barely coming up to Lilja’s chin, and pretty in a delicate sort of way. She wore a crown of icicles that hung askew and slowly melted into her eyes so that she was always blinking, a nasty bit of mockery, I thought. Her gaze was blank, but a flash of comprehension dawned in Lilja’s eyes, and she stumbled towards me.
I held her gaze and shook my head ever so slightly, then curled my finger once. She seemed to understand, and slowed her stride. She and Margret drifted off the ice, graceful as birds, and wandered to my side, as if they too were merely interested in my cloak. The moment they neared, I made Shadow stand beside them, stretching his leash, so that his magic washed over them both and muffled the music in their ears.
Lilja came back to herself first. It was a strange thing to watch; as if she’d stepped back into her own eyes after cowering in some dark corner. Fortunately, the faeries were not looking at her, but continued pestering me with questions about the cloak, how long I’d had it and did I have any others like it and on and on, which all this time I had been answering in a carefully dull voice.
“Leave our dear guest be,” a quiet voice said. A man came forward, his eyes the violet-grey of a winter dawn. He was tall and slender and more beautiful than the others, and he wore a sword of ice at his waist. Though he was more simply attired—no jewels or icicles festooned his clothing—he moved with an arrogant, unhurried grace that I recognized all too well, as if the world was one vast divan for him to laze upon.