—to his face. His countenance was ghastly, contorted with agony. Translucent shadows ringed his eyes and darkened his sunken cheeks. It wasn’t until I realized that I could faintly make out his sharp teeth through his closed mouth that it occurred to me the light came from within, burning from his very bones. He barely resembled himself. He looked like a revenant that had just crawled from the soil, clinging to life only through desperate hunger.
“Is my ring killing you?” I asked.
Ever so slightly, he shook his head. Even that small motion cost him. Not dying, perhaps, but in unspeakable pain. “I would not have you see me this way.”
“I’m still not afraid of you,” I whispered, and finally closed my eyes.
“What a peculiar mortal you’ve found.” Hemlock’s voice buffeted me as an icy, howling wind. “A pity. I do like them better when they’re frightened. They’re so pink, and so small. It suits them better.”
I couldn’t say how long the journey lasted. Even without my vision, I got a sense of what was happening around me. Branches creaked and rustled as though the trees were alive. Roots squirmed through the soil beneath my feet. The mushrooms, ferns, moss, and buds flourished and died with a damp squishing sound, like someone stirring a bowl of congealed pudding. The cruel laughter of a fair one occasionally rose above the cacophony, but as time drew on the forest grew louder and louder until I feared my eardrums would burst. I became aware of stranger noises then: a low, shuddering groan emanating from deep within the earth itself. A crystalline ringing I knew must be the stars.
I almost lost sense of who I was—I became a blind animal stumbling along senselessly, cowed by the ageless, implacable enormity of the universe pressing down on me.
Until suddenly, it all stopped.
Only Hemlock’s hands beneath my armpits kept me upright. My eyelids fluttered, golden light flickering through my lashes. A dull roar buffeted me. It was the sound of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of voices speaking at once, but compared to the symphony of time passing it was quiet and faraway, muffled by wads of cotton. I couldn’t bring myself to care about whatever was happening. The earth spun quickly enough that by the stars’ reckoning, I was already dead. It didn’t matter if I survived today, or tomorrow, or the next month. My life was more trivial than that of a single leaf in a forest. A golden afternoon, I remembered, and smiled, with no thought to how I must appear.
My head lolled. Through a crack in my eyelids, I registered that we stood on a platform raised a story or so above the ground. Knotted roots coiled around my feet, blackened by an ancient fire or lightning strike and glistening with beads of hardened sap. The roots descended, forming an uneven spiral stair, to a shining, crowded hall that awaited us below, suffused in what appeared to be bright evening sunlight, but couldn’t possibly be that, since it was night. Rook had said seconds, and I believed him. A struggling thought came to me: the light was reflected by mirrors. Great mirrors stood behind the balconies crowded with fair folk, which surrounded us in tiers like a huge theater, or a courthouse . . . no, not mirrors—sheets of water cascading down, perfectly smooth, reflecting the room into gilded, gleaming infinity.
I tried to focus on the stooped figure beside me. He was saying something, but I couldn’t comprehend its meaning. Clinging to the memory of us so long ago, I pushed a scattering of words past my lips. “That’s why you . . . inadvisable.”
“Yes. You remember! Come back, Isobel. Come back to me.”
“Oh, Rook, just leave her alone. It doesn’t matter if she’s gone mad or not—and if she has, she’s better off staying that way. I’m the one who has to hold on to her, after all.”
“Isobel,” he said again, and pressed his lips to mine.
It was a rushed kiss, his chapped mouth bumping hard and chaste against my own, but it felt like inhaling a breath of fresh air after hours of suffocating underground. I blinked rapidly, the blur around me shifting into focus. Nausea burned a trail up my throat, and every sparkling jewel and pillar and fairy light threw off a dizzying halo, but I remembered I had things to live for after all. If I was going to die, I would do so remembering how much I cared about Rook, and Emma, and March and May, whose fleeting lives mattered terribly, the truths of the fairy paths be damned.
All the fair folk in the audience hall gaped at us. Most clung to the rails, craning their heads as though they’d been watching a familiar play only for an actor to burst in unscripted from the rear doors. Having witnessed Foxglove’s disgust at his earlier display, and having served as an intimate witness to the depths of Rook’s shame, I knew that kissing me in front of the entire summer court was one of the most courageous things he’d ever done.