“No? But you freed him.” He shook his head. “How is it that you know how to befriend wild faerie dogs and ferret out Words of Power, yet you missed one of the fundamental rules of dryadology—namely, not cutting wicked kings out of trees.”
“I’ve learned my lesson, thank you,” I snapped. “Should you end up trapped in one, I won’t let you out.”
“You shall have to. I know you too well, Em. You could never survive without having someone around to snarl at.”
The other tailor had fallen onto all fours and was snuffling at my feet. I hugged her instead—or him, rather, for it was indeed Shadow under the glamour. He licked me, an unappealing experience, and I pushed his head back to ward off further attempts.
I stared at Wendell. He looked nothing like himself—he didn’t even sound like himself, his voice thickened and rough. Only now that I looked harder, I saw his familiar insouciant lean, the way he gazed at me with a mixture of bemusement and concern. He was several inches shorter than me now, and with his unprepossessing appearance and the palette of greys he wore, he could have faded into the background of any room.
“Oh,” I breathed in sudden understanding. “You have turned yourself into one of the oíche sidhe.”
“Naturally,” he said. “My grandmother’s blood flows through my veins, and so I may take on their appearance if it suits me—though the process was rather unpleasant.” He looked down at his formerly graceful fingers, now spindly with extra joints in them, and grimaced. “And worse than that, I have to look at myself every day.”
“Could you not have used a glamour?”
“Well, perhaps, but I thought our snow king’s enchantments might shred it. This place is stuffed full of them. I risked putting one on Shadow, because if anyone was to reveal him, it would not matter much. He is nobody’s enemy.”
I gazed at him. “And you are?”
“I have tried multiple times to free you by force, which didn’t go very well. I killed several of the king’s lords and ladies, though.”
My mouth fell open. “He never told me about that.”
“Why would he? Anyway, I eventually came up with this idea”—he gestured sourly at his unsightly self—“and after talking things over with Aud, we decided—”
“Aud!” I nearly yelped. “Aud is working to—to rescue me?”
“The whole village is working to rescue you, my dear. We’ve had almost a merry time, plotting it all out.”
I tried to picture this, Aud and Thora and Krystjan and the rest in the tavern, bandying about ideas to free me from Faerie, but my imagination failed me utterly—mainly because I could not picture them caring.
“Why?” I said softly.
“Why?” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You rescued three of their children—and scores more will be spared, no doubt, now that the changeling has been cast out.”
“I also freed a faerie king who is perfectly content to doom them to eternal winter.”
“Yes, but I managed to convince them that your intentions in that respect were noble.”
He said it in an offhand way, not caring if it was true or not. I shivered, though I hadn’t felt the cold in days. “They weren’t,” I said. “Not for the most part. I wanted—” I looked down at myself, at my ridiculous dress. “I wanted to understand the story. I suppose I thought about helping Aud and the others, but I won’t lie and say that I didn’t think about science first. They should not be risking their lives to help me.”
“Emily, Emily,” he said. “I’m positively astonished you decided to help these people, whether they came second, third, or fourteenth in your mind. Have you ever done something like that before? Thought of someone other than yourself and your research, I mean.”
I glared at him. “You are calling me self-centred? You?”
He shrugged, unruffled by a slight against something he put little stock in, namely, his character. “In any event, these are practical people, and they care more about what you did than the why of it all. You should have seen Thora’s face when I told them you’d been taken. And Lilja and Margret were ready to declare war for you. Not to mention Aud—she loves that boy you rescued like her own child. And as for Ulfar, he swore on his mother’s grave they’d get you back—he only let out about a half dozen words in total before retreating into that gloomy mug of his, but still that is more than I’ve gotten from him in weeks.”
I felt an unexpected tightness behind my eyes, picturing the tableau he painted for me. I had been imagining myself all alone in this ice palace, with only my wits between me and eternal enchantment, while they all sat in the tavern as Ulfar’s stew bubbled in the back and the wind whistled through the crack in the windowsill that Aud never got round to patching, debating how best to rescue me. As when I had sobbed over Wendell’s injury, my reaction alarmed me. I can’t recall the last time I cried before coming to Hrafnsvik—likely I had been a small child. I won’t be maudlin, yet I couldn’t help but feel that something inside me had loosened—something small but troublesome, like a pebble caught in a shoe.
“And—and what did you decide?” I said.
“Aud and the others will pay the king a visit on the morrow, during the gift-giving. Mortals have been invited, so the king will lift the veil on his realm temporarily. They will present him and his bride-to-be with a wedding gift containing a poison that will render him senseless. Things will get rather messy after that, but not to worry—we will use the chaos as cover as we flee.”
I sat heavily on the bed, next to my enchanted servant, who dreamed so soundly that she appeared to be drooling. “And this winter will end. Is it bad out there, in Hrafnsvik?”
“Utterly dreadful.” He rolled the faerie out of the way and sat beside me. “It snows all day and night, which is very tedious. My own clothes no longer suffice, so I’ve had to borrow a sealskin cloak of Ulfar’s. I suppose it’s warm enough, and I’ve tailored it adequately, but I cannot get the smell of fish stew out. And then, of course, there are the boots.”
I have no doubt he would have gone on at length about the degradations of his wardrobe had I not interrupted, “But this poison will not kill the king?”
“Hmm? No.” He gave me a smile ill-suited to a discussion of regicide. “Sneaking poison in amongst the gifts was Aud’s idea. We make quite a good team. I tracked down the old queen, who was hiding out in the mountains with her firstborn son. Her allies at court faked her death.”
“You tracked her down?” I repeated faintly.
“Yes. Well, I’ve been looking ever since the king enchanted you during our delightful expedition to his tree-prison.”
“You knew!” I exclaimed.
“Of course I knew. Give me a little credit. Anyway, I thought that the queen might know how to break her former husband’s hold on you, so I went searching for a door to her court. I found one, a narrow, ancient door high on a forgotten peak, which would not open for me, but coincidentally it was the same door she eventually fled through after you freed the king. I guessed she might make use of it then, and indeed, I found her hiding quite nearby.”