“He will do,” I declared. I placed my coins on the counter and shouldered my satchel, avoiding the new heights of elation dawning on Phineas’s face. “Gadfly is my most esteemed patron, and he enjoys being the first to discover new Craft. Your odds are best with him.”
I meant that in more ways than one. Phineas would be safest with Gadfly. Had I not dealt with him first at the tender age of twelve, even with Emma’s help, I likely wouldn’t have lived to see my seventeenth birthday. Even then, I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was doing Phineas a double-edged favor, granting him a dearest wish that was bound to either destroy or disappoint him in the end. Guilt chased me toward the door without a word of good-bye. But with my hand on the knob, I froze.
A painting hung on the wall beside the entry. Faded with age, it depicted a man standing on a knoll surrounded by oddly colored trees. His face was obscured, but he held a sword that glinted brightly even in the gray light. Pale hounds swarmed up the knoll toward him, suspended in midleap. The hair stood up on my arms. I knew this figure. He was a popular subject of paintings done over three hundred years ago, when he stopped visiting Whimsy without explanation. In every remaining work he was always standing in the distance, always battling the Wild Hunt.
Tomorrow, he’d be sitting in my parlor.
I shoved the door open, curtsied to Gadfly, and hurried through the throng of curious bystanders with my head down. Exclamations followed in my wake. Someone called my name, perhaps hoping for the same favor as Phineas. Now that Emma had said it, I saw the truth written all over everyone. They were watching, waiting for me to accept an invitation I would rather die than spend half a second considering. I could never explain to any of them that to me, the Green Well’s reward wasn’t heaven. It was hell.
The sun hung low in the sky as I made my way home. My shoes tapped along the path through a wheat field to the rhythmic buzzing of grasshoppers, and the light’s steep angle intensified the summer heat until the back of my neck grew sticky with sweat, cool every time the breeze blew my hair aside. The town’s crooked, brightly painted rooftops descended out of sight behind me, concealed by rolling hills my narrow path split like the part in a woman’s hair. If I walked quickly, I could make it back in precisely thirty-two minutes.
It was always summer in Whimsy. Here the seasons didn’t change according to the passage of time as they did in the World Beyond, an idea I could barely fathom. While I walked my walk that never changed, the painting’s oddly colored trees haunted me like a recent dream. Autumn was to all accounts a dreary time, a withering of the world when birds vanished and the leaves discolored and fell from their branches as though dying. Surely what we had was better. Safer. Endlessly blue skies and eternally golden wheat might be boring, but I told myself, not for the first time, that it was foolish to long for anything else. A person could suffer worse things than being bored—and in the World Beyond, they did.
A whiff of decay jogged me from my frustrated thoughts. This part of the path wove near the forest’s edge, and I cast a wary glance into its shadows. Dense honeysuckles and briars flourished like a barrier beneath the branches. In days long past, during the less friendly time before iron was outlawed, farmers had risked their lives driving iron nails into the outermost trees to ward off fairy wickedness. The sight of the old, bent nails, rusted and twisted almost beyond recognition, always gave me a prickle of unease.
Sweeping my gaze across the undergrowth again, I saw nothing amiss. No doubt I was being paranoid about a dead squirrel rotting somewhere nearby. Reluctantly reassured, I checked my satchel for the fourth or fifth time just to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind at the store—an odd habit of mine, as I never made such mistakes. When I looked up, something was wrong. A creature stood on the rise of the next hill, beside the lone oak that marked the halfway point home.
My first thought was that it was a stag. A tremendously big one, but it was the right shape, more or less: four legs, two antlers. Then it turned to look in my direction, and right away I understood it wasn’t.
Just like that the wrongness spread. The breeze dropped away, and the air grew still and oppressively hot. The birds stopped singing, the grasshoppers stopped buzzing, and even the wheat drooped in the stagnant air. The stench of decay grew overwhelming. I dropped down to my hands and knees, but it was too late.
The not-a-stag stood watching me.
Despite the heat, a fever chill shivered over my skin and crystallized in my stomach. I knew what it was, this not-a-stag. I also knew I was dead. No one could run or hide from a fairy beast. This creature had risen from a barrow mound, a grotesque union of fairy magic and ancient human remains. Some acted as servants and guards to their masters. Others crept from the earth unbidden. One such monster killed my mother and father when I was a little girl, so terribly Emma hadn’t let me see their bodies, and I was going to die the same way. I don’t think my mind could quite process this, because my next thought was that I shouldn’t have wasted money buying pigments; I was never going to use them now.