I stood up so fast I knocked my chair over. It cracked like a musket shot against the floorboards, but I didn’t flinch. “Wait. Your portrait’s finished.”
He stopped with his hand on the half-open door. Awfully, he wouldn’t look at me. No—couldn’t. I knew then, without a speck of doubt, that he planned on vanishing from the human world once more, utterly and, as far as my own mortal life was concerned, permanently. Neither of us could afford to tempt fate. Once he left, we’d never see each other again.
“Have it prepared to be sent to the autumn court,” he said in a hollow voice. “A fair one named Fern will pick it up in two weeks’ time.” He hesitated. But then the horn sounded again, and he only added, “One raven for uncertain peril. Six for danger sure to arrive. A dozen for death, if not avoided. The enchantment is sealed.”
He ducked below the lintel and dashed out the door. Just like that, he was gone forever.
Now I have to tell you how foolish I am. Before that gray and lifeless time following Rook’s departure, I’d always scoffed at stories in which maidens pine for their absent suitors, boys they’ve hardly known a week and have no business falling for. Didn’t they realize their lives were worth more than the dubious affection of one silly young man? That there were things to do in a world that didn’t revolve solely around their heartbreak?
Then it happens to you, and you understand you aren’t any different from those girls after all. Oh, they still seem just as absurd—you’ve simply joined them, in quite a humbling way. But isn’t absurdity part of being human? We aren’t ageless creatures who watch centuries pass from afar. Our worlds are small, our lives are short, and we can only bleed a little before we fall.
Two days later, I made a mental inventory of Rook’s unfavorable qualities, prepared to indulge in some vicious criticism. He was arrogant, self-centered, and obtuse—unworthy of me in every way. Yet as I fumed over our first meeting, I couldn’t help but remember how swiftly he’d apologized to me, no matter that he hadn’t had the slightest idea what he was apologizing for. I recalled the look on his face exactly. By the end of the exercise, I only felt more miserable.
Three days later, I pressed the half dozen preparatory charcoal sketches I’d done of him between sheets of wax paper, bundled them up, and hid them at the back of my closet, resolving not to look at them again until I no longer craved seeing his face like prodding a fresh bruise. The golden afternoon was over. By the time Rook remembered me, if he ever did, I’d be long dead.
I ate. I slept. I got out of bed in the morning. I painted, I did dishes, I looked after the twins. Every day dawned bright and blue. During the hot afternoons, the buzzing of the grasshoppers blurred into a monotonous throb. It was for the better, I told myself, swallowing the mantra like a lump of bitter bread.
It was for the better.
Two weeks later, Fern arrived as promised and took the portrait away in a crate packed with cloth and straw. After the third week I’d started feeling a little like my old self, but there was something missing from my life now, and I suspected I’d never be exactly the same again. Maybe that was just part of growing up.
One night I went into the kitchen after dark to find Emma asleep at the table, her hand curled around a tincture bottle in danger of tipping over, with pungent half-ground herbs sitting in her mortar and pestle. It wasn’t an unusual discovery.
“Emma,” I whispered, touching her shoulder.
She mumbled indistinctly in reply.
“It’s late. You should go to bed.”
“All right, I’m going,” she said into her arms, muffled, but didn’t move. I took the tincture from her hand and sniffed it, then found its stopper and set it aside. I knew what I would find if I smelled Emma’s breath.
“Come on.” I draped her limp arm over my shoulders and pulled her upright. Her ankles turned before she found her footing. Going up the stairs proved as interesting as I expected.
People mistook Emma for my mother all the time. Children, mostly, and out-of-towners—people who didn’t know what had happened to my parents, or that as Whimsy’s physician Emma had been the one who’d tried to save my father’s life and failed. Unlike my mother, he hadn’t died instantly. To all accounts, it would have been better if he had.
So I suppose I couldn’t stay angry at Emma for her vices, even when they occasionally made me her keeper rather than the other way around. A patient must have died today, though I’d long ago stopped asking once I’d made the connection. Most of all, I could never forget I was the reason she was still in Whimsy. If it hadn’t been for me, the responsibility of raising her sister’s daughter, the child of the man who died in her arms, she would have left for the World Beyond as soon as she could. In a place where enchantments reigned supreme and the creatures who traded them had no use for human medicine . . . well, her ideal life lay elsewhere.