“I don’t know. Are you?” I whispered.
He started to nod and stopped, unable to complete the motion. How silly of us to ask that question of each other, knowing neither of us would ever be well again. Yet I had the strangest feeling, wrapped up in this cocoon of darkness and exhaustion, resting on the almost-uncomfortable stiff brocade of my settee, that nothing that had happened to us was real. The autumnlands, the Barrow Lord, the spring court, the Alder King—all of it impossible, vivid as a fever dream, contrary to the solid reality of home.
“You promised to bring me back,” I said.
“If only I had done so sooner. I—”
Still cupping his cheek, I brushed my thumb over his lips, and he fell silent.
“Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “We made that choice together. But we can’t stay. The Alder King is on his way, isn’t he? Emma and the twins are in danger. If anything were to happen to them . . . we must leave as soon as we can.”
“Isobel!” The lantern Emma held at the doorway illuminated her shock, both at my words and at the position in which she found us. “You are not leaving this house again, no matter what. Do you hear me?”
She rounded on Rook. His winded and disheveled appearance in the lantern light gave her pause. She narrowed her eyes. She suspected the same thing I would have until recently, that the only reason a fair one would present himself like this was to deceive us. Certainly, it would never occur to her that he was conserving every scrap of magic he could.
“Explain,” she said, voice hard. “In detail.”
To my surprise he rose, squared his shoulders, and did. He glossed over certain parts, for which I silently thanked him, but left out nothing of importance. My dreamlike trance faded as he went on. With every word, the memories returned with sharp-edged clarity, tearing holes in the insubstantial veil separating me from the night’s horrors. Emma’s face went whiter and whiter, until eventually she sat down with an expression like stone.
Humiliation prickled my skin in waves of hot and cold, warring with a tight knot of defiance in my chest. The thought of seeing judgment—or worse, disappointment—on her face when she next looked at me made me want to curl in on myself and never face the world again. I had no way to prove that the love Rook and I felt for each other was real and that we deserved every desperate, foolhardy inch of it, and I was already tired, so tired, of bearing its weight as a failure. A crime.
The minutes I waited for Emma’s reaction were the longest of my life. She listened without interrupting. When Rook neared the end her gaze drifted down to his left hand, and a line appeared between her eyebrows. She had never seen an injured fair one before. He shifted at her scrutiny, the only sign of nervousness he’d shown since beginning the story. Despite being a prince among fair folk, in that moment he looked awfully young, not so very unlike a human suitor meeting a girl’s family for the first time.
But usually, a suitor didn’t deliver news of his and his sweetheart’s impending demise.
“And that was why I arrived as a horse,” he finished, “and why we must leave soon.”
Emma turned to me. I braced myself, believing I was prepared for the worst, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t bear her pinched, ashen devastation. No judgment, no disappointment, and the fact that she didn’t blame me for any of this was the hardest thing of all.
“What of the enchantment on the house?” she asked.
“He’s the Alder King, Emma,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She looked at Rook.
He bowed his head. “I fear Isobel is right. Nothing will stand in the Alder King’s way.”
For a few seconds, none of us spoke. Emma rubbed the heels of her hands up and down her thighs as though easing a muscle cramp. Her expression betrayed little, but that tense, repetitive gesture was one of aimless despair, and I felt it too—a sick acceleration, a quickening slide, like someone had just tipped me over the crest of a hill in a wagon. There was no turning back. There was only the fall, and the inevitable crash at the bottom.
“Rook, thank you for bringing her home,” she said finally. “Isobel, I want you to know that I’m proud of you. Don’t leave yet, please. Is there anywhere you can go from here?”
Rook and I exchanged a glance. “We can make for the World Beyond,” he said, careful in his phrasing. It was a kindness to Emma, and nothing else. We’d never get that far.
A furtive shuffling came from the stairwell. Then two pairs of bare feet slapped down the steps.