“I find it awfully trying, you know, that you never take my good advice,” said Hemlock somewhere above and behind me. I wasn’t listening. I was gazing at Rook as he gazed back, bent double by the fair folk restraining him. I almost laughed when it occurred to me that we were at the same level, and I was nearly standing up straight.
He was panting with his teeth bared, and his breath stirred the loose locks of hair hanging in front of his face. “I made you a promise the last time we were in the summerlands. I still mean to see it through.”
“Are you saying that you have a plan?” I inquired, not feeling very well at all, which explained why I found this rather funny also. “And if so, is it arrogant, ill advised, and likely to result in both our deaths anyway?”
“Yes,” he replied, and gave me a quick half-smile in between catching his breath. “I’m afraid there isn’t time just now for you to come up with a better one. Otherwise, I would wait.”
“Go on, then. I know how much you love showing off.”
His expression sobered. “Impossibly, it seems I love you quite a bit more,” he said. He hesitated, gathering his strength. Then he made a sudden, sharp jerking motion, and his glamour came flooding back. Before I understood what he had done he’d thrown off his detainers, drawn himself up to his full height, and shouted in a voice that echoed across every corner of the hall, “I challenge the Alder King! I challenge him for sovereignty over the four courts!”
His severed finger, still wearing my ring, lay curled among the riven oak’s roots.
Twenty
THE FAIR FOLK surrounding us stepped back. My knees buckled, but Rook caught me by the elbow before I fell and threaded his arm through mine. I wondered why no one was attempting to stop him, until I saw his face. I hadn’t seen him like this since the night he confronted me about his portrait. He blazed, fiercely incandescent, somehow less human than ever even with his glamour returned, projecting that if anyone came near us, he would strike them down on the spot. One advantage of their horrible fairy customs, I supposed: strength was everything, and with the iron gone Rook was the most powerful fair one in sight. More than that—he didn’t have anything to lose. Even Hemlock looked wary.
“Your hand,” I said.
“It will bleed quite a lot, I imagine,” he replied in a satisfied tone. “Can you walk? I need you close.”
Right, the plan. The plan in which Rook tore off his own finger and, apparently, challenged the Alder King to a duel to the death. What could possibly go wrong?
I squeezed my eyes shut, searching inside myself, evaluating my reserves. “I think so. Not for long.”
“Then let us go.”
Together we descended, my dress leaving a trail of petals on the uneven steps. When we reached the bottom, I looked back once. The riven oak from which we had emerged grew suspended on a balcony, its dark roots entangled around the platform and its branches halfway grown into the wall. I saw no door, no archway, no other entry anywhere. The Alder King’s seat of power could only be reached through the fairy paths.
We strode forward arm in arm. The straight avenue stretching down the center of the room was lined by tall pillars of the same sparkling, translucent stone as the walls and balconies. The stagnant heaviness to the air and the absence of any hint of sky alerted me to the possibility that despite the brightness, we were underground. As we passed the first pillar I saw a bark pattern on its surface and realized they were not stalagmites or carvings, but rather petrified trees preserved so long beneath the earth they had turned to crystal. I took a deep breath and leaned on Rook, conscious of the chamber’s unfathomable age, and the claustrophobic weight that crushed down on it from above.
The hall’s end was lost in a haze of dazzling light, impossible to look at directly. The Alder King could be seated, watching us approach. Or perhaps he was yet to arrive. I did not know.
Sound carried far here. It reminded me of a cathedral between choral movements, when everyone sat down, whispered, shifted, and flipped through the pages of their hymnals, filling the vaulted ceiling with a noise like hundreds of birds rustling their wings. Rook’s hard-soled footfalls echoed. I could even hear the enchanted petals dropping from my dress, whispering silkily against the reflective floor. Individual words and phrases jumped out of the blur of voices, sometimes indistinctly, sometimes as clearly as though they’d been shouted in my ear.
“Rook,” a baritone said, and it took me a panicked moment to grasp that it was a spectator speaking to his companion up on a balcony, not addressing Rook firsthand. “Did you—” someone else murmured, followed by the sharp, carrying sibilance of “kiss.” “Isobel!” a girl’s voice yelped, and my heart kicked against my ribs like a spooked horse.