My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know what he was, prince or lord or something in between, but it didn’t much matter. The crowd fell away, some with bows or murmurs of respect, and we were alone with him.
“Walk with me,” he said in a voice that was near enough to music that I surely would have been caught in it without Shadow there. He led us along the lakeshore, summoning little icicle flowers to carpet our feet, as if the symmetry between him and Wendell wasn’t already striking enough. Once we’d left the crowd behind, he turned to face me.
Even though I was looking directly at him, at times it felt as if I were staring right through to the stars and mountains at his back. I could read only mischief in his gaze, which frightened me more than the malevolence I saw in many of the others, though I couldn’t have said why. Everything about this man made me feel utterly insignificant, like a trinket his gaze had been caught by, which he might at any moment choose, idly, to crush between his fingers.
“You are not enchanted,” he said calmly. “I won’t bother asking how—why would you tell me? And in truth, I don’t care. Humans have their tricks, just as dogs do. All I want is that cloak.”
This was a lot to take in all at once, but I paused for only a moment to steady myself before saying, “If so, why bother asking? Why not just take it?”
I had already guessed the answer; I just wanted him to think me ignorant and even more uninteresting than he already did. He answered in just the sort of bored voice I’d hoped for, “It is of little value to me like that. I want it willingly given.”
Of course he did; faeries steal when the fancy takes them, but most prefer gifts.[*2] “And in exchange—”
“I will not reveal you,” he finished, his tone adding an obviously at the end.
I gave him a long look. I will not lie, I was absolutely terrified of him, standing there with dawn-coloured eyes and his ice sword with the starlight reflecting in his face （I mean that literally; his face was at least partly made of ice, and caught reflections of the stars like a smattering of freckles）。 I think that, for all my experience with the Folk, I would have cowered before him or perhaps simply given in to my instincts and fled, if he hadn’t reminded me so much of Wendell. And somehow, that steadied me enough to say, “You will also place a path before us to lead us from your world.”
For the first time, he looked at me as if I had surprised him. I guess he’d never had much reason to bargain with mortals when he could simply sing them senseless and then drain their hearts dry. He smiled slightly and bent to pluck one of the flowers he’d made. He shook it a few times, and the petals unfurled like water melting through his hand. When the water solidified, he was holding a white fur cloak. The fur was coarse—perhaps from a bear?—and as thick as my fist.
He offered it to me, and held out his other hand for my cloak. I was so surprised that I didn’t think before I blurted, “That’s not what I asked for.”
He gave me a look as ancient and unyielding as winter, and suddenly there was nothing about him that was like Wendell. “What use do you have for a path, if you are frozen to death? Your chances of escape are low enough already. Take it and be grateful.”
* * *
—
We left the lake as quickly as we could, weaving our way back through the stands. We ducked behind one, and I helped Lilja and Margret turn their cloaks inside out. I didn’t bother reversing my faerie-made one.
I taught them the Word next, though it works only temporarily on the common fae, which didn’t inspire confidence that it would be effective against these creatures. Lilja looked like herself again, calmer than I in the face of peril, doing what I said without question. Margret was still blank-eyed, though now there was at least a furrow of confusion upon her brow. Her ice crown melted and melted but never got any smaller, and when I tried to take it off her, it nearly froze to my skin.
“Can you help her?” It was the only question Lilja asked me. I saw Au?ur when I looked at Margret, and knew Lilja did too.
I didn’t know what to say, so I simply motioned them on. Murmuring the Word, we slipped past the last stands. While the Word might not have made us invisible to these creatures, it certainly made us less interesting. We kept our pace slow and aimless, as if we were merely off for a stroll. There was no reason for these Folk to think differently—apart from the one with the stars in his face, it was clear that none of them had ever considered the possibility that a mortal could evade their magic. Perhaps none ever had.
At first I was relieved to put the fair behind us. But we hadn’t been walking through the wilderness for long before I realized that it wasn’t right. The footprints I had left petered out, as if someone had followed behind me with a broom and swept them away, and though we walked for an hour or more, we saw no sign of the little camp Wendell and I had made. The dawn didn’t come. The aurora shone above us in all its colours, the stars clustered like swarms of bright bees in an undulating garden.
I walked with my hands shoved in the pockets of my ridiculous faerie cloak. At one point, my fingers brushed something cold and smooth. I drew it out, and found myself holding a compass.
In all honesty, I was too weary to appreciate this impossible magic. “I suppose the cloak gives the wearer what they need,” I told Lilja, my voice almost dismissive—well, after all, what we really needed was a door, and you couldn’t fit that in a pocket. She took the compass and used it to guide us south and east, from whence Bambleby and I had come.
“Is there anything else in there?” she said.
I dug around in the pockets again, but my hands were empty when I withdrew them. She swallowed and turned back to the compass.
I made us keep going, even as hours passed and it became clearer and clearer that we were still tangled up in the faerie world, like a fly struggling in a web. Shadow felt it too. He growled and paced ahead of us and then back again, his nose snuffling at the snow, searching for a way out, like a fold in a stage curtain he might slide beneath.
We had to rest after a while, if only out of sheer exhaustion. I drew Lilja and Margret into my ridiculous cloak, which had an itchy, prickly sort of warmth, as if the garment were irritated by the use I made of it. It made me yearn all the more for my old cloak, even though Bambleby had made it ostentatious. But at least I found a flask of water in the pocket of the faerie cloak, which we shared among the three of us. It seems clear that the cloak was indeed enchanted to supply its owner with whatever he or she requires, though it doles out those gifts in a most miserly way—some food would have been nice, along with the water, or a lantern and some flint. Perhaps it is only miserly when forced to serve mortals.
Margret was stumbling more and more, and we could walk only another hour or two before we had to stop again. And here we are, tucked into a cave in the mountainside. Lilja and Margret are huddled in the cloak, Lilja furiously rubbing at poor Margret’s arms, while Shadow continues his search outside for a door to the mortal realm. I have faith in him, my oldest, most loyal friend—if there is a way out, he will find it. I have had to force myself to consider the alternative—that we may need to go crawling back to the Hidden Ones merely to stay alive; how many hours of life that will buy us is not something I wish to contemplate. I will put the pen aside for now and rest briefly.