Nineteen
THERE CAME a collective gasp, a strange sound in the meadow’s silence, like a flock of birds all taking flight at once. Several fair folk lunged toward the well with their hands outstretched. But though they reacted with unnatural speed, none of them was fast enough to catch the raven pin before it descended, twirling and sparkling, into the well’s murky depths.
A tremor shook the ground. Instinctively everyone backed away, except Gadfly, who didn’t move. He simply stood and watched. He looked terribly old and strange, like a statue of himself. Perhaps he was replaying the things he’d said to me back in the clearing, recalling the moment he’d furnished me with the idea that Craft could destroy the Green Well.
The stones wobbled, and then loosened, tumbling inward one by one. As each row crumbled more stones shoved up to take its place, pouring from the earth in an endless fountain. The percussion of clattering rocks drowned out every other sound, and chalk dust billowed like smoke. Rook reached my side, and we staggered away together just as the clearing heaved, throwing everyone to the ground. I felt, rather than saw, the final eruption of stones. One as large as a wagon wheel rolled past us, leaving a trail of crushed ferns and bent saplings behind.
When the air cleared an immense cairn sat where the Green Well had been, a brooding tumble of rock that already looked a thousand years old. Regardless of what happened to us now, I took a fierce satisfaction in knowing that the hateful thing was ruined, that no mortal would face its torment after me. No one would meet Aster’s fate ever again.
The place where Gadfly had stood was buried beneath enough rubble to crush a man ten times over. He was gone.
Foxglove was the first to react. “She has destroyed the Green Well!” she howled, scrambling toward us on her hands and knees. Rook dealt her a blow across the face with an out-swung forearm, flinging her aside. Her head struck the cairn with a wet, hollow crack. Moss surged over the stones, covering them halfway, followed by a riot of purple wildflowers springing up between the cracks. Of Foxglove’s body, nothing remained. She was dead. I’d just seen a fair one die.
The other fair folk descended upon us. This time it was Hemlock who seized me and hauled me to my feet. It took four to overwhelm Rook; he threw each of them off before they managed to subdue him together, restraining his arms in wary tandem, shooting glances at Foxglove’s remains over their shoulders.
Amid the exclamations of horror and wordless keening, one person laughed. Senses dulled by pain, it took me a moment to identify the source. Aster lay on the ground, running her hand across the moss in front of her, as though feeling it again for the first time after a long imprisonment. Tears streamed down her face, and she laughed and laughed deliriously. I stared at her without comprehension until I realized what was different. She was human again.
“That was awfully clever of you, mortal,” said Hemlock into my ear. Her mouth was so close I heard her lips part to speak. Her breath brushed against my face, cold as frost. She smelled more frightful than any other fair one I’d encountered: I had a vision of endless, ice-locked pines, and mountains rising in the distance with snow dusting their peaks, and wolves leaping through the drifts with fresh blood soaking their jaws. Her armor’s rough bark scraped against my back. “Or, it wasn’t clever at all. It’s ever so hard to tell sometimes. Hold still.”
I expected her to kill me there on the spot. I wasn’t prepared for her to seize my dislocated arm and wrench it back into its socket with a brutal twist. I was so taken by surprise I didn’t even cry out. The pain in my shoulder faded to a dull throb.
“There you are. I simply cannot stand the sound of humans whimpering. Come along, everyone! Stop moaning. Get up.”
At Hemlock’s call, the trees surrounding the clearing thrashed, snapped, and rustled. A thane stepped forth, bowing its head to free its antlers from the branches. Its glamour streamed from it in ragged pennants. One moment it was a handsome stag of majestic proportions; another it was a monstrous forest growth skittering with insects, its eyes dark knotholes weeping rivulets of decay. When it turned and looked at me I felt something else, ancient and implacable, gazing through it.
“This mortal has just earned us an audience with the Alder King,” Hemlock finished. And she whirled me around before I’d processed the words, marching me back the way we had come. The fair folk picked up and followed us, clutching their disheveled clothes, gazing around wide-eyed. They left Aster behind as though they’d forgotten she even existed.
At first I had not a clue where Hemlock meant to take us, until I spied the riven stone in the distance. Rook lurched upright nearby. He’d thrown off two of his detainers and made it halfway to us by the time they managed to get him down again. One received an elbow to the chest for his trouble. Rook thrashed beneath them, spitting out dirt. “Do not take us this way,” he said to Hemlock. “You know mortals aren’t meant to walk the fairy paths.”
She aimed a dangerous smile down at him. “Do you propose we keep the king waiting?”
“The Huntsman always strove for a clean kill. A fair death.”
The smile froze in place. “She used to,” she replied, so low I barely heard it. Then without another word she dragged me forward. The others heaved Rook, resisting, to his feet.
“Isobel,” he panted.
I couldn’t turn far enough in Hemlock’s grasp to look at him. “What’s going to happen?”
“I cannot say. Some mortals fall ill, and others go mad. Do not dwell on the things you see. Keep your eyes closed if you can.”
Most of the other fair folk reached the riven stone before we did. They slipped into the space between the cracked boulder and simply didn’t emerge on the other side. I strained for any hint of what was about to befall me, but saw nothing other than a perfectly ordinary stone.
“Do be dears and watch him closely,” Hemlock said to Rook’s detainers over her shoulder. “He is still a prince, with a prince’s power, and I shall be quite cross if he attempts something on the way. Put this on him.” She tossed a crumpled-up handkerchief to Swallowtail, who cried out and almost dropped it.
“This is iron!” And indeed, gleaming coldly within Gadfly’s monogrammed linen was my own ring.
“Oh, cease your whining. You needn’t touch it yourself. Just slip it on, quickly now.”
“But—”
Hemlock’s smile widened. Swallowtail hurriedly seized Rook’s sword hand and crammed the ring onto his little finger, the only one it would fit. Rook braced himself, his chin raised defiantly. At first he didn’t react. He stood glaring at Hemlock, proud despite having his arms twisted behind his back and his glamour melting away, hollowing the planes of his face, making a wild, feral tangle of his hair. I had grown used to his false appearance again, and felt a visceral shock at the sight. Just as I began to hope that he could somehow bear the iron’s touch, a muscle moved in his cheek. He wavered on his feet, listing forward drunkenly. A moan tore from his throat, a deep, raw, almost animal sound.
I couldn’t bear seeing him in such agony. I jerked toward him, but Hemlock used my own momentum to swing me around and shove me bodily through the riven stone.
I did not have time to close my eyes.
The first thing I saw, staring upward, was stars. There were too many of them. Pinwheels of light, burning cold and vast, spiraled in a black void without end. The longer I stared, the more I felt I’d never truly been aware of the night sky before, nor had I possessed an accurate understanding of my own insignificance in the face of its enormity. The void between the stars wasn’t empty as it first appeared, but rather filled with more and more stars, and each gap in those had more and more, too, and then—
“Don’t look.” The words grated painfully beside me, such a wretched sound that at first I didn’t recognize Rook as the speaker. I surfaced as though dragged up from drowning, and groped blindly in the direction of his voice until he took my hand. I lowered my gaze from the terrible, infinite sky. But I could not obey him. I could not look away from what I saw next.
A road stretched before us and behind us. The fair folk cavorted along it in a line, pale forms flickering like sepulchral flames, a procession of ghosts. The forest rose on either side of the path, but it wasn’t the same forest that existed in the world we had been in before. The trees were as big around as houses. Roots rose from the ground at such a height I wouldn’t have been able to climb them if I’d tried. The fair folks’ white luminosity cast flitting shadows across the bark.
While I stumbled forward, years raced around me. Mushrooms erupted from the soil, withered, and tumbled over. More grew in their place. Leaves swarmed onto the branches and fell, new buds already twitching and swelling in their place. Moss raced across the ground like sea-foam, surging and retracting in different shades of green. A fawn picked its way shyly from the undergrowth, only to undergo a strange spasm and then fall dead to the ground, a stag with a gray-furred muzzle and full set of antlers. By the time I passed it, its skeleton was half sunk into the ground, absorbed by layers of decaying leaves that rippled as they consumed it, like devouring maggots.
How many years had passed already? Twenty? Thirty? Fear overtook me. I rounded upon my hand in Rook’s, expecting to find my skin wrinkled and spotted with age. But it was the same. Wasn’t it? The light was so odd—I couldn’t trust anything I saw . . .
“Think of it,” Rook forced out, “as an illusion. When we leave the path, only seconds will have passed. You will not be changed. Not in any physical way.”
His hand shone with eerie light. I almost thought I saw the outline of my own showing through it, and the ring seemed to cast a shadow through his finger. I dragged my gaze upward—
“No,” he rasped.
—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.
“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.