“They are a danger to you, mortal, not I. You saw how I fared against the thane. How many times do I have to remind you? I am a prince.”
“Yes, I know!” I didn’t budge an inch. “It’s not as though you’ve given me a chance to forget it.”
He squared his shoulders and bared his teeth as if I’d just slapped him.
I schooled myself, resisting the urge to reach for my ring. “I just don’t understand any of this. Fairy beasts, the conflict between your houses, why on earth the Wild Hunt’s been after you for centuries if Hemlock knows she can’t win. I suppose it’s too much for my foolish mortal brain to take in.”
Rook relaxed. Annoyingly, he didn’t register the sarcasm.
“Hemlock is the Huntsman,” he replied. “She obeys the call of the winter court, which ever seeks to spread its frost across the autumnlands.”
“The horn,” I murmured. “It commands her. She doesn’t have a choice.”
He nodded. “For her, the Hunt is everything. It is her only purpose. She will hunt until she dies and at last must hunt no more.”
Wind rustled through the canopy, and leaves pattered like rain across the clearing. I thought of Hemlock’s ghastly face receding into the dark, the way she’d screamed at us to run. A shiver coursed through my body. The chill bite of the autumn air was finally catching up with me.
Or was it? For then I wondered if I had shivered at all, because the trembling went on and on, heaving the ground beneath my feet. I staggered back, but there was no escape from the peculiar quickening that followed. Beginning at the point where Rook had spilled his blood, a tide of moss starred with tiny, pale blue flowers no bigger than the tip of my little finger surged forward, unfurling across the glade, foaming partway up the tree trunks—and my own legs. I yelped and pulled my boots free, sending clumps of moss flying as I gave my skirts a vigorous shake.
“Turn around,” Rook said aloofly, watching me sidelong. For a moment he’d adopted his old tone, as though we were friends in my parlor again, and it seemed a correction was in order.
But turn I did, unable to help myself. The glade’s trees were growing, stretching higher and higher, their branches spreading toward one another overhead. Where they met in the center, they laced together under the glittering night sky. Smaller saplings struggled up from the moss between the larger trees to seal the gaps, putting forth trembling new leaves already resplendent in autumn colors. All of this happened nearly noiselessly, with only a quiet creaking, groaning, and snapping of expanding wood to mark the change.
It was as though I had watched the glade age a century in a matter of seconds. But no glade would age like this naturally: I stood in an open space in which the trees spread around and above me like a cathedral. Their branches were so tightly interwoven they resembled flying buttresses; no amount of craftsmanship could capture the majesty or wonder of this living antechamber. Looking straight up left me dizzy. Scarlet leaves drifted from the silent heights, passing through shafts of moonlight on their way down.
I whirled around. “Your blood did this.”
Rook stood watching me, a conflicting clamor of emotions in his eyes: fascination observing my human response. Hope that I would find what he had created beautiful. And beneath that, sorrow, as raw as an open wound.
Desperation flashed across his features. He struggled to compose himself, but couldn’t. Finally he turned on his heel and put his back to me with a dramatic billow of his coattails, drew his sword a few inches, and pretended to inspect the blade.
“You’ll be safe here tonight,” he said imperiously. “The Hunt won’t be able to sniff us out in a rowan glade, and even if Hemlock did chance upon this place by accident, no fairy beast, no fair one alive could breach the magic I have just wrought.”
The knowledge that he was only telling the bare, unembellished truth made the breath catch in my throat. He was arrogant verging on insufferable, but god—the power he possessed. And here he was, as confused as a child by his own emotions, dragging me to trial over a painting. I couldn’t believe that just that morning I thought I’d been in love with him. I shook my head. Incredible.
“Ten thousand verging on five years old,” I muttered to myself, testing the ground with my shoe.
“What did you say?” Rook inquired frostily.
Of course fair folk had impeccable hearing. “Nothing.”
“You did say something, but whatever it was, I’m certain it’s beneath me.” He slid his sword back in with a snap. “Now lie down and get some rest. We begin again at sunrise.”