“You might have told me you knew I was enchanted,” I snapped. “You might have said something that very night, in fact, when we returned from the tree. Or at any other time—we only spent every day together.”
“What would have been the point? You would only have denied it—the enchantment would have forced you to. I dropped plenty of hints in that blasted journal of yours.”
I thought back to how the enchantment had thwarted me every time I opened my mouth to reveal it, how often I had forgotten that I was enchanted at all. I had to admit he was probably right—well, no, I didn’t have to admit it.
I tightened my hand into a fist. It was swathed in a white glove, cunningly tailored with elaborate folds and bunches to mask the absence of the third finger. It gave its ghost-ache, which was familiar to me by now.
“And what is to be the queen’s role in this?” I said.
“The king will not be worried about her, given that he thinks she was torn apart by wolves, and so she will sneak into the gift-giving ceremony in disguise. Once he has been distracted by the poison, she will kill him, aided and abetted by her allies among the nobility, of whom there are quite a few, though they’ve been temporarily cowed into subservience to their king.”
My mouth was dry. “How?”
He shrugged. “I’ve left that up to their fertile imaginations.”
I lowered my head onto my hands. My mind had stopped whirling since Wendell’s arrival—I wondered if he was doing something to counteract the king’s enchantments—but I still felt too light, as if I might at any moment fade away. “Well, you will never fool me again.”
“What?”
“I will never again believe you to be incapable of hard work.”
He shuddered. “Being capable is not the same as being inclined, Em.”
“Could you free me without killing him?” I said. “Could you imprison him again?”
“No,” he said, after a puzzled pause.
“You can turn back time,” I said, frustrated.
He shook his head. “Your belief in me is flattering. But at my age, most Folk have only begun to grasp the extent of their powers. This king is older than the mountains. And worse, we are in his realm, not mine. What does it matter? Surely you don’t pity him. He will starve everyone in Hrafnsvik, you know, burying them and their fields beneath yards of snow even at the height of summer, if left to his own devices.”
I shook my head slowly. “The old queen and her court will go back to abducting mortals. Aud and the others will once again hear their music calling to them on a winter’s night.”
“I daresay they’re used to that.”
I quickly abandoned this line of argument—it was silly of me to expect him to care about the wickedness of the Folk when his own people are guilty of worse than the Hidden Ones, if the stories are to be believed. I tugged at a loose strand of hair—the servants had secured it with some contraption of ribbons and pins, but it seemed not even faerie magic could tame it. “Did they really plan this—this rescue?”
He smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t believe it. Just because you have a heart filled with the dust of a thousand library stacks does not mean everybody does. Here.”
He handed me a small book with a leather cover, plain in an expensively crafted sort of way. His journal.
“I don’t bother writing in it often,” he began.
“I could count on one hand how often,” I said. “Were I missing half my fingers.”
He ignored me. “But I made an effort to document things more consistently after you ran off with the king. You are so obsessed with recording everything about our time here; I thought you would appreciate it. I have marked the entries detailing my conversations with the villagers.”
I was tempted to make some remark to answer his library dust comment, but in truth, I was a little humbled by his thoughtfulness.
“Thank you,” I said finally. “I will—I will confine my reading to the indicated entries only.”
He was only partly listening to me, his attention absorbed by the mirror that hung by my bed, in which he was frowning at his reflection and tugging his cloak this way and that.
“I thought you had only a little common fae ancestry,” I said, trying to suppress my amusement—though not very hard, I admit.
He scowled. “It is a little. I have three other grandparents, all highborn, including a king and queen.”
I nodded, pretending to ponder this. Then I said, “There’s a bump in your nose now.”
He glared at me. “There is not.”
“Your mouth is lopsided.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but then he just let out a weary groan. “What is the point? I am hideous. I can’t wait to change myself back again.”
“Don’t. I prefer you like this.”
He looked surprised, then he began to smile. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “You blend into the background. I could almost forget about you entirely. It’s refreshing.”
Naturally, he found a way to twist this into a compliment. “And am I ordinarily a distraction to you, Em?”
He rose to leave, flicking his fingers at the servant, who grumbled and began to stir. “Your attendants will become suspicious if I tarry much longer,” he said. “I will send you a note with your veil to clarify your role in tomorrow’s events. Perhaps it will soothe your conscience to know that it is a small one.”
As he retreated, he seemed to melt into the grey daylight shadows, and I felt a sudden stab of terror. I didn’t want him to leave.
Actually, I wanted him to stay, which was almost but not quite the same thing. I realized with a horrible sort of clarity that I had missed him.
“What is the date?” I said.
He paused, and told me.
“A month,” I murmured. “I was off by a month.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s not bad. Most mortals can watch years slip by in Faerie and think them mere days.”
“Wendell,” I said. “I should—I mean, everything you’ve done for me, I—”
“Oh dear,” he said. “That’s how I know you’ve really and truly been enchanted—you are getting mushy. You will kill me later if I enjoy the moment, so I’ll leave you to profess your gratitude to the walls. And anyhow, I must finish your dress.”
I did not see him and Shadow leave the room, though I knew they were gone. My servant propped herself up on one elbow, blinking her frosty eyelashes in confusion. Before she had a chance to open her mouth, I berated her for falling asleep and bid her to send in my next visitor.
30th January—later （presumably）
It was some time before I was able to escape from visitors and their interminable questions about my nuptials—which I do not recall answering, though I suppose I must have done. Then I banished my servants to the doorway of my bedroom and settled by the window in an overstuffed white chair that looked like a frozen cake to read Wendell’s journal.
The journal had a silk ribbon attached to the spine, naturally, with which he had marked the page. Though I had promised to confine my reading to the relevant passages, I could not help flipping back through his earlier writings. I had not underestimated him—there was little there to speak of: a few desultory descriptions of Poe’s tree home and various rock formations the villagers must have pointed out to him and which he probably only wrote down because said villagers were standing there watching him expectantly; a few passages he’d copied from my field notes, perhaps to remind himself to put them in our paper; a handful of local faerie stories I recalled him collecting from Thora. He’d only bothered to describe a few of his days towards the beginning of our stay, and I half expected to find these full of complaints about my tyrannical demands or the deprivations of our lodging, but I suppose he considered written expostulations a pointless effort, for these entries were factual if extremely abbreviated. He had a habit of doodling, marginalia I was inclined to ignore given that a full half of these sketches were of me, including one that made me still. In it, I was bent over my notebook, hair tumbling over my shoulders as it usually does in the evening, my chin on my hand and a small smile on my face. It was very detailed work, each stroke carefully chosen. I could see the places where he’d smudged the ink with a thumb to create shadow—the curve of my neck; the hollow between my collarbones.