His voice creaked like living wood. “I have ruled an age. I was king before mortals made the word. First I was admired. Then I was feared. Now, I am forgotten. Strange. I do not recall whether I sleep or wake, or what the difference is between them.” His gaze descended, sharpening with comprehension, and my muscles locked as I resisted the urge to flee like a hare from a plummeting hawk. “One day, I came to punish a mortal girl named Isobel and a prince named Rook for breaking the Good Law.”
“Yes,” I replied, my throat dry as bone. “That day is today, Your Majesty. But first I have made you a gift, just as mortals did before me.”
I raised the portrait. His gaze fell to it, and lingered. My heart quailed. He studied my work without recognition, as if it meant nothing to him—I might as well have held up a portrait of Rook or Gadfly, or even a blank canvas. But then he let out a long, slow breath, like the final rattle of a dying man, that filled my parlor as a draft. The otherworldly sunlight gilding his shoulders faded behind clouds, leaving his features shadowed. Once more he became the old man in the throne room. Dust still clung to his features. Revealed by shade, a cobweb hung between two prongs of his antler crown. “What is this?” he asked in a low, hoarse voice.
“It is you, Your Majesty.”
He looked at himself. He saw his own face as it wasn’t, and yet was: a ruler who had sat on the throne for countless millennia, but who had felt every loss great and small, endured every burden of his interminable lifetime. A being who had loved once, and was perhaps even loved in return. His mouth trembled. A tear tracked a gleaming trail through the dust on his cheek.
“You said that you dreamed, Your Majesty. You said you wished for something. What is it?” I adjusted my grip on the back of the canvas. Metal, warmed by my body, shifted against my palm.
His face contorted. “How dare you . . . how dare you show this to me?” His words rose in volume until he howled in a broken voice like a storm tearing through trees. The walls shook, and branches whipped against the house outside. “I do not dream. I care nothing for trifles, this dust you call Craft.” He raised his hand, preparing to strike me down. Yet still he couldn’t take his eyes from his portrait.
Now. I threw myself forward. The Alder King did not see the threat in a mortal girl flinging herself against him, armed with only a canvas and wet paint. What he did not see was his undoing. With the full force of my weight behind it, the iron dagger slid through the painting, between his ribs, and pierced his heart.
I leapt back into Rook’s waiting arms as the Alder King dropped to his knees. The portrait tore and fell away—the best work of my life lying in a pile of twisted canvas frame, tattered fabric, and smeared paint on the floor. My pulse pounded like a hammer striking an anvil as I imagined him pulling the dagger from his chest and rising unharmed. But he only put his hand to the yellow paint on his surcoat, as though it surprised him more than his own blood. His glamour began flaking away, and I made a strangled sound at what it revealed.
The Alder King’s height remained, but he was gaunt and emaciated as a corpse, his moth-eaten robes swaddling his withered frame like the raiments of a once-great man eaten away by sickness. His eyes were sunk into deep hollows, and his colorless skin had a soft, frayed quality like rotten cheesecloth. The antler crown turned black with tarnish, hideously spiked where pieces of it had broken off over time, its rim grown into the flesh of his forehead. A nauseating stench rolled from him. When he toppled over, a carrion beetle scurried from his ear and vanished into his beard.
His lips moved. “I am afraid,” he whispered, in a tone of dawning wonder. “I feel—”
His eyes drooped shut. Moss foamed up from the rug to engulf him. He’ll ruin the floor, I thought, strangely practical. We ought to move the body. But as soon as the idea occurred to me Rook threw us both aside, shielding me with his back and arms. The world heaved. A barrel-thick root bulged from the floorboards beneath me, splintering the wood like an axe. Flowers surged across the rug and the easel and the settee, over me and Rook, crashing like a wave against the far wall. Glass shattered. Branches scraped the ceiling. Nails creaked, giving way beneath the strain, and then the house shook with a wrenching crash, and loose shingles pelted down all around us. Light sheared through the devastation, blindingly bright.
That seemed to be the end of it. Rook lay atop me a moment longer before he looked over his shoulder, bits of plaster dropping from his hair, and rolled off. He helped me to my feet amid the ruin of my parlor. It was more forest than parlor now: a colossal alder tree had grown in the center of it, breaking through half the roof and felling the southern wall. Dappled light shimmered on an undergrowth of moss and ferns and flowers that gave no hint of the furniture beneath aside from oddly shaped bulges here and there. We had won, but for the moment I felt utterly numb. It was strange standing right in the middle of my parlor, looking out across the wheat field beyond the sagging remnants of Rook’s thorn barricade. In the distance, figures fled back into the forest—moving faster than any human, some of them on all fours.