He sucked in a breath and replied in a rasping, gusty voice, “No.”
“This isn’t the time to be stubborn. Surely your own court would be equipped to help you.” I didn’t say “better equipped,” because I had nothing at all to offer him. It didn’t escape me that he still hadn’t answered my earlier question. He hadn’t told me he wasn’t dying.
“No,” he said again.
I set my jaw and began walking us back the way we’d come. Rook pointed out a different direction, and I adjusted our path. Though I suspected he was lighter than a human man, he leaned more weight on me than I could comfortably bear, and the vast difference in our heights made lugging him along an awkward trial. I kept my eyes averted from his gaunt face, and after a time, his blood started soaking into my dress. It didn’t smell at all like human blood—it had a crisp, resiny scent like a tree bitten by an axe.
It was almost full dark now. It wasn’t as easy to see here as it was in the autumnlands, where the trees brought color to the night. Rook’s hand did something in the air, a twisting motion that made his glamourless fingers look even more insectile, and after a moment I realized he was trying, and failing, to summon a fairy light.
Dread trickled down my back, pooling at the base of my spine. What if we were attacked again? He had no power left.
“I cannot seek help from my own kind.” His breathy, gasping words startled me after so long a silence. “We retain our sovereignty not through the love or respect of our courts, but through power alone. To see me weakened so, by a mere Barrow Lord, my court would wonder whether I might be replaced, and whether any one among them might be the right person to do it. Already there has been doubt cast on my suitability as prince. Not once, but twice. I hoped to undo the second.” He paused, regaining his strength. I realized he was talking about the portrait and my trial. But what was the first? “A third show of weakness would mean my end, without question.”
I shook my head. “That’s cruel.” All of it was. Him to me, and them to him.
“Such is our nature. It may be cruel, but it is also fair.” He looked down.
My vision was fading, but in the hard lines of his profile I saw that he doubted himself. I recognized the rage when he had stolen me away for what it truly was—fear. Fear that his power was slipping. Fear that there was something wrong with him, that he wasn’t worthy of his crown, and that others could see it now too.
Because I had painted it in his eyes, as plain as day.
“I don’t think it’s fair at all,” I said, anger pitching my voice low.
“Only because you are a human, the strangest of all creatures.” He spoke in little more than a whisper. “What if I told you I could send you back to Whimsy? There is power in a fair one’s death, enough to show the way.”
“Don’t toy with me.” Tears started in my eyes.
“I’m not,” he whispered. “I’m not.”
Hoped to undo the second, he had said. Not hope.
I didn’t say a word after that, because I didn’t have any that would make sense to him. All I had were human emotions, no doubt as clamoring and riotous to a fair one as a flock of squabbling parrots, and no way to quiet them down. When I finally did speak, it was only to let him know I could walk no farther. At that point he barely clung to consciousness. He went to free himself, and slid from my shoulder like a sack of grain, his tall form crumpling down.
My heart leapt sideways before I saw that he had caught himself on his hands. With a groan, he turned over and sprawled onto his back. One hand was at his wound again, and I resisted the urge to tell him to stop touching it, as if he were a child.
I realized what he was doing when he pulled the hand away and held it over the ground. He waited, and I felt his regard.
“If I don’t leave you tonight?” I asked.
“The chance will have passed. The Hunt will pick up your scent too quickly.”
I swallowed once, twice. Surely I was mad. I glanced at his bloody hand. “We’re still in the summerlands.”
“I am a prince yet,” he said, and looking at that inhuman, sharp-boned face, lying in repose in a tangled nest of curls, those eyes feverish with resolve, I thought, Yes, you are, aren’t you.
I lifted the folds of my skirt and sat down on a rock.
It was all the answer Rook needed.
He plunged his hand into the soil, long fingers grasping down. This was no offering to the earth, but a command to it, and the forest surged around us. Bramble roots as wide around as kitchen tables heaved up from the ground, bristling with thorns longer and more wicked than any sword. When they reached their full height they branched, heaving higher, knotting together, until they gathered us up in a fortress like something out of an old tale, a place where a cursed princess slept imprisoned. I was gladdened by the sight of those vicious thorns more than I could say, and wondered whether the stories would have gone any differently if the princesses had been the ones telling them.