Two
TOMORROW! GADFLY said tomorrow. You know how they are about mortal time. What if he shows up at half past midnight, demanding I work in my nightgown? And my best dress has a tear, I can’t get it mended by then—the blue one will have to do.” While I spoke, I massaged linseed oil into my hands and set at them with a washing cloth, scrubbing my fingers raw. Usually I didn’t bother cleaning the paint off myself, but usually I didn’t work for fair folk royalty, either, and I had little idea what trivial nonsense might offend him. “I’m low on lead tin yellow, too, so I’ll have to go into town this evening—shit. Shit! Sorry, Emma.”
I lifted my skirts away from the water spreading across the floor and dove for the fallen bucket’s handle.
“Heavens, Isobel, it’ll be all right. March”—my aunt lowered her spectacles and squinted—“no, May, would you clean that up for your sister, please? She’s having a hard day.”
“What does shit mean?” May asked slyly, flouncing down at my feet with a rag.
“It’s the word for when you spill a bucket of water by accident,” I said, aware she would find the truth perilously inspiring. “Where’s March?”
May gave me a gap-toothed grin. “On top of the cabinets.”
“March! Get off the cabinets!”
“She’s having fun up there, Isobel,” May said, slopping water over my shoes.
“She won’t be having fun when she’s dead,” I replied.
With a bleat of delight March hopped down from the cabinets, kicked a chair over, and went bounding across the room. She came toward us, and I lifted my hands to ward her off. But she was heading not for me but for May, who stood up in time to crack heads with her, which gave me a momentary respite while they tottered about in a concussed daze. I sighed. Emma and I were trying to break the habit.
My twin sisters weren’t precisely human. They’d begun life as a pair of goat kids before a fair one had had too much wine and enchanted them on a lark. It was slow going, but I reminded myself that at least it was going. This time last year they hadn’t been house-trained. And it worked in their favor that their transformative enchantment had rendered them more or less indestructible: I’d seen March survive eating a broken pot, poison oak, deadly nightshade, and several unfortunate salamanders without any ill effects. For all my concern, March jumping off cabinets posed more danger to the kitchen furniture.
“Isobel, come here a moment.” My aunt’s voice interrupted my thoughts. She watched me over her spectacles until I obeyed, and took my hand to scrub off a smudge I hadn’t noticed.
“You’re going to do well tomorrow,” she said firmly. “I’m sure the autumn prince is the same as any other fair one, and even if he isn’t, remember you’re safe inside this house.” She wrapped both her hands around mine and squeezed. “Remember what you earned for us.”
I squeezed her hands back. Perhaps at that moment I deserved being spoken to like a little girl. I tried to keep the whine out of my voice as I replied, “I just don’t like not knowing what to expect.”
“That may be so, but you’re more prepared for something like this than anyone else in Whimsy. We know it, and the fair folk do too. At market yesterday I heard people saying that at this rate you might be headed for the Green Well—”
I snatched my hand back in shock.
“Of course you aren’t. I know you wouldn’t make that choice. The point I’m trying to make is that if the fair folk see any human as indispensable, it’s you, and that’s worth a great deal. Tomorrow will be fine.”
I released a long breath and smoothed out my skirts. “I suppose you’re right,” I said, privately unconvinced. “I should go now if I want to get back before dark. March, May, don’t drive Emma mad while I’m gone. I expect this kitchen to look perfect when I come home.”
I gave the overturned chair a significant look as I left the room.
“At least we didn’t shit all over the floor!” May shouted after me.
When I was a little girl, a trip into town had been nothing short of an adventure. Now I couldn’t leave fast enough. My stomach wound a notch tighter every time someone passed by the window outside.
“Just lead tin yellow?” asked the boy behind the counter, neatly wrapping the chalk stick in a twist of butcher’s paper. Phineas had only been working here for a few weeks, but he already possessed a shrewd understanding of my habits.
“On second thought, a stick of green earth and two more of vermilion. Oh! And all your charcoal, please.” Watching him retrieve my order, I despaired at how much work awaited me tonight. I needed to grind and mix the pigments, select my palette, and stretch my new canvas. In all likelihood tomorrow’s session would only involve completing the prince’s sketch, but I couldn’t stand not being prepared for every possibility.
I glanced out the window while Phineas ducked out of sight. A patina of dust coated the glass, and the shop’s location in a corner between two larger buildings gave it a dark, shabby, out-of-the-way air. Not even a single, simple enchantment brightened its lamps, sang out when the door opened, or kept the corners free of dust. Anyone could see that the fair folk never gave this place a second glance. They had no use for the materials used to make Craft, only the finished product itself.
The establishments across the street were a different story entirely. A woman’s skirts vanished into Firth & Maester’s, and I knew from that brief sighting alone that she was a fair one. No mortal could afford the lace gowns sold there. And no humans shopped at the Confectionary next door, whose sign advertised marzipan flowers, sweets made from almonds imported at great cost and danger from the World Beyond. Enchantments, and enchantments alone, were worthy payment for Craft of such caliber.
When Phineas straightened, his eyes shone in a way I recognized all too well. No—“recognized” wasn’t the right word. I dreaded it. He shyly brushed a lock of hair away from his forehead as my heart sank, and sank, and sank. Please, I thought, not again.
“Miss Isobel, would you mind taking a look at my Craft? I know I’m not like you,” he added in a rush, scrambling to keep his nerve, “but Master Hartford’s been encouraging me—it’s why he took me on—and I’ve practiced all these years.” He held a painting to his chest, self-consciously concealing the front side as though it weren’t a canvas but his very soul he feared exposing. I knew the feeling intimately, which didn’t make what came next any easier.
“I’d be more than happy to,” I replied. At least I had a great deal of experience in faking a smile.
He handed it to me, and I turned the frame over, exposing a landscape to the shop’s dim light. Relief flooded me. Thank god, it wasn’t a portrait. I must sound horribly arrogant saying so, but my Craft was held in such high esteem that the fair folk wouldn’t commission anyone else until I was dead and gone—and until they actually realized I was dead and gone, which might take several additional decades. I despaired for every new portrait artist cropping up in the wake of my fame. Perhaps Phineas stood a chance.
“This is very good,” I told him honestly, passing his painting back. “You have an excellent grasp of color and composition. Keep practicing, but even in the meantime”—I hesitated—“you might be able to sell your Craft.”
His cheeks flushed, and he grew an inch taller right in front of me. My relief went cold. Often, the part that followed was worse. I braced myself as he asked the exact question I feared. “Could you . . . do you think you could refer one of your patrons to me, miss?”
My gaze wandered back to the window, where Mrs. Firth herself was arranging a new dress for Firth & Maester’s shopfront display. When I was young, I had thought her a fair one for certain. She possessed flawless skin, a voice sweeter than a songbird’s call, and a tumble of chestnut curls too lustrous to be natural. She had to be verging on fifty but barely looked a day over twenty. Only later, when I learned to read glamours, did I realize my mistake. And as the years passed I grew disenchanted with enchantments, which were just as much a lie. No matter how cleverly they were worded, all but the most mundane, practical spells soured with age. Those that weren’t cleverly worded ruined lives. In exchange for her twenty-two-inch waist, Mrs. Firth couldn’t speak any word beginning with a vowel. Last October the Confectionary’s head baker had accidentally bargained away three decades of his life for bluer eyes, and left his wife a widow. Yet still the allure of wealth and beauty swept Whimsy along, with a vision of the Green Well hovering at the very end like the promise of heaven itself.
Sensing my reluctance, Phineas hastened to add, “Not anyone important, mind. That Swallowtail looks like he might be the right sort of fair one. I see him in town sometimes, buying Craft on the street. And they always say fair folk of the spring court are kinder in their dealings.”
The truth of the matter was that no fair one was kind, whatever house they came from. They only pretended to be. The thought of Swallowtail coming within ten yards of Phineas made me taste bile. He wasn’t the worst fair one I’d met by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d twist words until he convinced the poor boy to bargain away his firstborn child for fewer pimples.
“Phineas . . . you’re probably aware my Craft means I spent more time with fair folk than anyone else in Whimsy.” I met his eyes across the counter. His face fell; he was doubtless thinking I was about to turn him down, but I forged onward through his unhappiness. “So believe me when I say that if you want to deal with them, you must be careful. Not being able to lie doesn’t make them honest. They’ll try to deceive you at every turn. If something they offer sounds too good to be true, it is. The enchantment’s wording must leave no room for mischief. None.”
He brightened so much I feared all my efforts were in vain. “Does that mean you’re going to recommend me?”
“Maybe, but not Swallowtail. Don’t trade with him until you’ve learned their habits.” Chewing on the inside of my cheek, I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a man emerging from Firth & Maester’s. Gadfly. Of course that was where he would have gone for his embroidery. Though I must have been nearly invisible standing inside the dark shop across the way, he looked unerringly toward me, beamed, and raised a hand in greeting. Everyone on the street—including the gaggle of young women who’d been waiting for him outside—eagerly craned their necks to find out who was important enough to merit his attention.
“He will do,” I declared. I placed my coins on the counter and shouldered my satchel, avoiding the new heights of elation dawning on Phineas’s face. “Gadfly is my most esteemed patron, and he enjoys being the first to discover new Craft. Your odds are best with him.”
I meant that in more ways than one. Phineas would be safest with Gadfly. Had I not dealt with him first at the tender age of twelve, even with Emma’s help, I likely wouldn’t have lived to see my seventeenth birthday. Even then, I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was doing Phineas a double-edged favor, granting him a dearest wish that was bound to either destroy or disappoint him in the end. Guilt chased me toward the door without a word of good-bye. But with my hand on the knob, I froze.
A painting hung on the wall beside the entry. Faded with age, it depicted a man standing on a knoll surrounded by oddly colored trees. His face was obscured, but he held a sword that glinted brightly even in the gray light. Pale hounds swarmed up the knoll toward him, suspended in midleap. The hair stood up on my arms. I knew this figure. He was a popular subject of paintings done over three hundred years ago, when he stopped visiting Whimsy without explanation. In every remaining work he was always standing in the distance, always battling the Wild Hunt.
Tomorrow, he’d be sitting in my parlor.
I shoved the door open, curtsied to Gadfly, and hurried through the throng of curious bystanders with my head down. Exclamations followed in my wake. Someone called my name, perhaps hoping for the same favor as Phineas. Now that Emma had said it, I saw the truth written all over everyone. They were watching, waiting for me to accept an invitation I would rather die than spend half a second considering. I could never explain to any of them that to me, the Green Well’s reward wasn’t heaven. It was hell.
The sun hung low in the sky as I made my way home. My shoes tapped along the path through a wheat field to the rhythmic buzzing of grasshoppers, and the light’s steep angle intensified the summer heat until the back of my neck grew sticky with sweat, cool every time the breeze blew my hair aside. The town’s crooked, brightly painted rooftops descended out of sight behind me, concealed by rolling hills my narrow path split like the part in a woman’s hair. If I walked quickly, I could make it back in precisely thirty-two minutes.
It was always summer in Whimsy. Here the seasons didn’t change according to the passage of time as they did in the World Beyond, an idea I could barely fathom. While I walked my walk that never changed, the painting’s oddly colored trees haunted me like a recent dream. Autumn was to all accounts a dreary time, a withering of the world when birds vanished and the leaves discolored and fell from their branches as though dying. Surely what we had was better. Safer. Endlessly blue skies and eternally golden wheat might be boring, but I told myself, not for the first time, that it was foolish to long for anything else. A person could suffer worse things than being bored—and in the World Beyond, they did.
A whiff of decay jogged me from my frustrated thoughts. This part of the path wove near the forest’s edge, and I cast a wary glance into its shadows. Dense honeysuckles and briars flourished like a barrier beneath the branches. In days long past, during the less friendly time before iron was outlawed, farmers had risked their lives driving iron nails into the outermost trees to ward off fairy wickedness. The sight of the old, bent nails, rusted and twisted almost beyond recognition, always gave me a prickle of unease.
Sweeping my gaze across the undergrowth again, I saw nothing amiss. No doubt I was being paranoid about a dead squirrel rotting somewhere nearby. Reluctantly reassured, I checked my satchel for the fourth or fifth time just to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind at the store—an odd habit of mine, as I never made such mistakes. When I looked up, something was wrong. A creature stood on the rise of the next hill, beside the lone oak that marked the halfway point home.
My first thought was that it was a stag. A tremendously big one, but it was the right shape, more or less: four legs, two antlers. Then it turned to look in my direction, and right away I understood it wasn’t.
Just like that the wrongness spread. The breeze dropped away, and the air grew still and oppressively hot. The birds stopped singing, the grasshoppers stopped buzzing, and even the wheat drooped in the stagnant air. The stench of decay grew overwhelming. I dropped down to my hands and knees, but it was too late.
The not-a-stag stood watching me.
Despite the heat, a fever chill shivered over my skin and crystallized in my stomach. I knew what it was, this not-a-stag. I also knew I was dead. No one could run or hide from a fairy beast. This creature had risen from a barrow mound, a grotesque union of fairy magic and ancient human remains. Some acted as servants and guards to their masters. Others crept from the earth unbidden. One such monster killed my mother and father when I was a little girl, so terribly Emma hadn’t let me see their bodies, and I was going to die the same way. I don’t think my mind could quite process this, because my next thought was that I shouldn’t have wasted money buying pigments; I was never going to use them now.
The fairy beast lowered its head and bellowed across the field, a deep, rousing, and putrid sound, as though someone had blown into an ancient, once-exquisite hunting horn stuffed full of rotting moss. It swung its heavy body around, antlers first, and sprang down the hill.
I lunged from my crouch and ran. Not toward the safety of my house half a mile in the distance, but away from it, into the field. If I was going to do anything of value in my last moments alive, I might as well try to lead the thing as far away from my family as I could manage.
The wheat parted around my hiked-up skirts. Stems crunched beneath my boots, and prickly seed heads scratched welts across my bare arms as they whipped past. My satchel bounced against the backs of my thighs, cumbersome, slowing me down. Grasshoppers shot out of the way as if flicked from the field by an invisible hand. At first I heard nothing but the rasping of my own breath. None of it felt real. I might as well have been running through a field for the fun of it, on a lovely day beneath a flawless blue sky.
Then a shadow’s coolness touched my sweaty back, and darkness enveloped me. The wheat thrashed like waves in a storm-tossed ocean. A hoof slammed down beside me, burying itself deep in the soil. I threw myself backward, stumbled, and fell, floundering among the shafts. The fairy beast loomed over me.
A proud stag’s guise rippled over it like the reflection of sun on water. In the dark spaces between the illusion lay a skeletal form of decomposing bark held together by vines that shifted like tendons, a hollowed skull-like face, antlers that were not truly antlers but instead a pair of crooked branches wound tight with thorny briars, each one as long as a man was tall. A sickness lay over it; as it snorted and raised a quivering leg, bark sloughed away and tumbled across the ground. Shiny beetles swarmed out of the pieces, skittering over my stockings as they fled in every direction. I retched at the taste of rot coating the inside of my mouth.
The fairy beast reared up, blocking out the sun. I thought my last sight on earth was going to be the constellation of maggots weaving in and out of its belly. Therefore I wasn’t certain how to react when the monster simply collapsed in front of me into a soft, tumbling heap of worm-eaten wood. Centipedes longer than my hand spooled out into the grass. Two huge, spotted moths took wing. The grasshoppers began buzzing again right away as though nothing had happened, but still I lay clammy and trembling on the ground, blood pounding in my ears. With a repulsed cry, I kicked at the pile. Bone fragments scattered along with the bark. The human corpse that gave it life had been destroyed.
“I’ve been tracking that beast for two days, and I might not have caught up to it if you hadn’t drawn its attention,” said a warm, lively voice. “It’s called a thane, in case you’re interested.”
My gaze snapped up from the fairy beast’s remains. A man stood before me, so eclipsed by the sun I couldn’t make out his features, only that he was tall and slender and in the process of sheathing a sword.
“Drawn its—” I stopped, baffled and more than a little offended. He spoke as if this were sport, as though my life mattered not at all; which of course told me everything I needed to know. This figure might look like a man, but he wasn’t one.
“Thank you,” I backtracked, choking down my protests. “You’ve saved my life.”
“Have I? From the thane? I suppose I have. In that case, you’re most welcome—oh. I don’t know your name.”
A frisson of unease rattled me like a thunderclap in the dead of night. He didn’t recognize me, which meant he didn’t visit Whimsy often, if at all. Whoever he was, he was bound to be more dangerous than the fair folk I normally dealt with. And like all of his species he couldn’t resist seeking my true name. I paused, evaluating my mind and senses, and came to the relieved conclusion that he hadn’t put me under a malicious charm, one that might make me speak more freely or reveal secrets I ought not. Because no one used their birth name in Whimsy. To do so would be to expose oneself to ensorcellment, by which a fair one could control a mortal in body and soul, forever, without their ever knowing—merely through the power of that single, secret word. It was the most wicked form of fairy magic, and the most feared.
“Isobel,” I supplied, scrambling to my feet. I dropped him a curtsy.
If he realized I’d given him my false name, he showed no sign. He stepped right over the pile in one long-legged stride, bowed deeply, and took my hand in his. He raised it, and kissed it. I hid a frown. Supposing he had to touch me, I rather wished he’d helped me up instead.
“You’re most welcome, Isobel,” he said.
His lips were cool against my knuckles. With his head ducked before me I only saw his hair, which was unruly—wavy, not quite curly, and dark, with just the slightest red tint in the sun. Its fierce unkemptness reminded me of a hawk’s or raven’s feathers blown the wrong way in a strong wind. And like Gadfly, I could smell him: the spice of crisp dry leaves, of cool nights under a clear moon, a wildness, a longing. My heart hammered from terror of the fairy beast and the equal danger of meeting a fair one alone in a field. Therefore I beg you to excuse my foolishness when I say that suddenly, I wanted that smell more than anything I had ever wanted before. I wanted it with a terrifying thirst. Not him, exactly, but rather whatever great, mysterious change it represented—a promise that somewhere, the world was different.
Well, that simply wouldn’t do. I hoisted my annoyance back up like a flag on a mast. “I’ve never known a kiss on the hand to last so long, sir.”
He straightened. “Nothing seems long to a fair one,” he replied with a half-smile.
By my reckoning he looked a year or two my elder, though of course his real age might have been more than a hundred times that count. He had fine, aristocratic features at odds with his unruly hair, and an expressive mouth I instantly wanted to paint. The shadows at the corners of his lips, the faint crease on one side, where his smile became crooked—
“I said,” he remarked, “nothing seems long to a fair one.”
I looked up to find him staring at me in perplexed fascination with the smile still frozen on his face. There was his flaw: the color of his eyes, a peculiar shade of amethyst, striking against his golden-brown complexion, which put me in mind of late-afternoon sunlight dappling fallen leaves. His eyes instantly bothered me for a reason other than their unusual hue, but try as I might I couldn’t put my finger on why.
“Forgive me. I’m a portrait artist, and I have a habit of looking at people and forgetting about everything else while I’m doing it. I did hear what you said. I just don’t have an answer.”
The fair one’s gaze flicked down to my satchel. When he returned his attention to me his smile had faded. “Of course. I imagine our lives are beyond human comprehension, for the most part.”
“Do you know why the thane came out of the forest into Whimsy, sir?” I asked, because I got the sense he was waiting for some sort of validation regarding his mysteriousness, and I wanted to keep the conversation both short and practical. Fairy beasts were rarely glimpsed here, and its presence was beyond troubling.
“This I cannot say. Perhaps the Wild Hunt flushed it out, perhaps it merely felt like wandering. There have been more of them about lately, and they’re causing an awful mess.”
“Lately” could mean anything to a fair one, my parents’ deaths included. “Yes, dead humans do tend to be messy.”
His eyebrows shifted minutely, creating a furrow in the middle, and his gaze sharpened to scrutiny. He knew he’d upset me somehow, but in typical fair folk fashion wasn’t able to divine why. He was no more able to understand the sorrow of a human’s death than a fox might mourn the killing of a mouse.
One thing I knew for certain: I didn’t want to linger long enough for him to decide that his confusion offended him and the cause of it deserved revenge in the form of a nasty enchantment.
I ducked my head and curtsied again. “Whimsy’s people are grateful for your protection. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me today. Good day, sir.”
I waited until he’d bowed again before I turned back toward the path.
“Wait,” he said.
I froze.
Behind me, the sound of wheat shifting. “I said something wrong. I apologize.”
Slowly I looked over my shoulder to find him watching me, looking oddly uncertain. I had no idea what to make of it. Fair folk were known to extend apologies on occasion—they valued good manners highly—but most of the time they followed a double standard according to which they expected humans to be the polite ones, while doing everything in their power to avoid acknowledging their own misbehavior. I was flabbergasted.
So I said the only thing that came to mind: “I accept your apology.”
“Oh, good.” His half-smile reappeared, and in an instant he went from looking uncertain to looking quite pleased with himself. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then, Isobel.”
I’d already started walking by the time his words sank in and I realized what they meant. I whirled around again, but the fair one, who could be none other than the autumn prince, was gone: wheat swayed around the empty path, and the only sign of life in the entire field was a single raven winging away toward the forest, with a red sheen on its feathers where they caught the fading light.