Eight
THE FIRST thing I noticed upon dropping to my knees next to him was that his clothes were torn and dirty from the battle, and wrinkled by travel. I hadn’t gotten a good look at them when he’d lost his glamour earlier that afternoon, and the change was shocking: in an instant he’d gone from prince to vagabond. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that he might use his glamour to alter his clothing’s appearance, too. Most astonishingly of all, until now the enormous tear across his coat front where the Barrow Lord had struck him had been completely invisible to my eyes.
“How much magic do you waste on vanity? For heaven’s sake, you could barely stand.” My hands shook as I slipped off my ring, put it away, and undid the buttons down his front. “It wasn’t as though the Barrow Lord and I cared how you looked, you know.”
I spread his coat open, and his head lolled to the side. His mouth was slightly parted. I had decided not to look too closely at the sharp teeth showing behind his lips, but as it turned out I needn’t have even bothered thinking about it, because the wound on his chest demanded all my attention and then some.
I didn’t have a basis for comparison, but I could make an educated guess that with his glamour on, his chest wouldn’t look so gaunt, each of his ribs showing clearly through his skin. I just wished I couldn’t see that much of his ribs. Not all of the white showing amid the blood belonged to his torn-up shirt.
The wound was long and gruesome, running from his collarbone on the left side all the way down over his ribs to the right. A human with that injury would have been dying of blood loss. Thankfully he didn’t seem to be bleeding out, but I’d have felt a great deal more optimistic about the situation if he had been conscious, smugly informing me that the bone-deep gash in his chest was only a flesh wound.
“Rook,” I said, patting his cheek and trying not to cringe. His jutting bones and hollow face conjured an echo of the skeleton crawling up my legs. “You’re a prince, remember? Wake up and infuriate me, please.”
He turned his face toward my hand and moaned.
“You’ll have to try a little harder than that.” I balled up some of his coat and pressed it against his chest. Then, remembering the night before, I took his right wrist and turned his hand palm up. So he’d used his glamour to hide the cut after all. Yet his hand was healing quickly—if I hadn’t known otherwise I would have believed the wound a week old or more.
I started when I realized his eyes were slitted open. He was watching me. “You’re still here,” he murmured, half-delirious.
Quickly, I set his hand back down. “Where else would I be?”
“Running.”
“If you hadn’t noticed, this forest is full of things that want to kill me. Even their dismembered limbs want to kill me. As loath as I am to admit it, I’m better off taking my chances with you.”
“Perhaps,” he said. He tried to move, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“Don’t be cryptic. What do I need to do to get us out of here? Rook?” I patted his cheek again.
“Help me stand. No—fetch my sword first, and then . . .”
I got up and cast about for his sword. The clearing had transformed in just the short time I’d been kneeling. The Barrow Lord’s petrified remains were almost unrecognizable now, engulfed by a giant tree still unfurling new branchlets. Golden leaves rained down steadily, depositing a bright accumulation of foliage through which I shuffled on my quest to find Rook’s weapon. Finally I found it, only because its hilt poked out of the leaves.
When I came back, the falling leaves had nearly covered him. I ran the last few steps, stumbling once over a concealed root on the way, and brushed him off while he watched me in silence—too weak, I supposed, to remark upon the strangeness of my behavior. Even I couldn’t say for certain why the sight of him vanishing into the forest floor alarmed me so. Only that there was something funereal about it. Something final, as if the earth were swallowing him up.
When I was done he tried to take the sword from my hands, but there was no strength in his grip. I had to help him guide it back into its sheath.
A question ached on the back of my tongue, embedded like a fishhook, tugging forth the awful words. “Are you dying?” I blurted out in an odd tone of voice, almost an accusation.
He frowned. “Is that what you want?”
“No!” My vehemence seemed to surprise him, so much so that I felt I had to defend my answer. “If I wanted you dead, why would I have taken the stick from you this afternoon?”
“You gave it to me first.”
“Not knowing what would happen—nor did you.” I struggled for words. “What you’re doing to me, it isn’t right. Of course I don’t want to be your captive. But there’s a difference between that and wanting you dead.” Did he understand that? His wandering gaze suggested otherwise. Did human feelings matter to him at all? “Perhaps you ought to know,” I added harshly, “because it’s over and done with now, that two days ago I thought I was in love with you.”
His eyes sharpened, striving through the haze of pain to focus on my face. Then he looked aside and let his arm flop out on the ground, a futile movement, as though he were reaching for something just beyond his grasp. He looked so inhuman. It didn’t satisfy me to have gotten a reaction out of him at last—I just felt cold.
“Help me to my feet.” It was an effort for him to speak. The air wheezed in and out of his lungs, a quiet gasp with every inhale. I wondered if one of his ribs had broken and punctured a lung, a danger Emma had explained to me one night with a tincture in her hand, and if so, whether anything could be done about it.
But Rook spoke first, saying, “We must return to the autumnlands. I cannot heal myself here. There is something wrong with this place—a corruption I cannot explain.” He paused for breath. “With luck some good will have come of it all the same, and the Hunt will have been thrown off our trail.”
I gathered his slung-out arm over my shoulder and did my best to lift him. He managed to rise, but only by leaning on me heavily, and when his weight shifted he made an anguished sound, almost a sob, that sent a keen dart of sympathy lancing through my own chest.
“Shouldn’t you call for other fair folk?”
He sucked in a breath and replied in a rasping, gusty voice, “No.”
“This isn’t the time to be stubborn. Surely your own court would be equipped to help you.” I didn’t say “better equipped,” because I had nothing at all to offer him. It didn’t escape me that he still hadn’t answered my earlier question. He hadn’t told me he wasn’t dying.
“No,” he said again.
I set my jaw and began walking us back the way we’d come. Rook pointed out a different direction, and I adjusted our path. Though I suspected he was lighter than a human man, he leaned more weight on me than I could comfortably bear, and the vast difference in our heights made lugging him along an awkward trial. I kept my eyes averted from his gaunt face, and after a time, his blood started soaking into my dress. It didn’t smell at all like human blood—it had a crisp, resiny scent like a tree bitten by an axe.
It was almost full dark now. It wasn’t as easy to see here as it was in the autumnlands, where the trees brought color to the night. Rook’s hand did something in the air, a twisting motion that made his glamourless fingers look even more insectile, and after a moment I realized he was trying, and failing, to summon a fairy light.
Dread trickled down my back, pooling at the base of my spine. What if we were attacked again? He had no power left.
“I cannot seek help from my own kind.” His breathy, gasping words startled me after so long a silence. “We retain our sovereignty not through the love or respect of our courts, but through power alone. To see me weakened so, by a mere Barrow Lord, my court would wonder whether I might be replaced, and whether any one among them might be the right person to do it. Already there has been doubt cast on my suitability as prince. Not once, but twice. I hoped to undo the second.” He paused, regaining his strength. I realized he was talking about the portrait and my trial. But what was the first? “A third show of weakness would mean my end, without question.”
I shook my head. “That’s cruel.” All of it was. Him to me, and them to him.
“Such is our nature. It may be cruel, but it is also fair.” He looked down.
My vision was fading, but in the hard lines of his profile I saw that he doubted himself. I recognized the rage when he had stolen me away for what it truly was—fear. Fear that his power was slipping. Fear that there was something wrong with him, that he wasn’t worthy of his crown, and that others could see it now too.
Because I had painted it in his eyes, as plain as day.
“I don’t think it’s fair at all,” I said, anger pitching my voice low.
“Only because you are a human, the strangest of all creatures.” He spoke in little more than a whisper. “What if I told you I could send you back to Whimsy? There is power in a fair one’s death, enough to show the way.”
“Don’t toy with me.” Tears started in my eyes.
“I’m not,” he whispered. “I’m not.”
Hoped to undo the second, he had said. Not hope.
I didn’t say a word after that, because I didn’t have any that would make sense to him. All I had were human emotions, no doubt as clamoring and riotous to a fair one as a flock of squabbling parrots, and no way to quiet them down. When I finally did speak, it was only to let him know I could walk no farther. At that point he barely clung to consciousness. He went to free himself, and slid from my shoulder like a sack of grain, his tall form crumpling down.
My heart leapt sideways before I saw that he had caught himself on his hands. With a groan, he turned over and sprawled onto his back. One hand was at his wound again, and I resisted the urge to tell him to stop touching it, as if he were a child.
I realized what he was doing when he pulled the hand away and held it over the ground. He waited, and I felt his regard.
“If I don’t leave you tonight?” I asked.
“The chance will have passed. The Hunt will pick up your scent too quickly.”
I swallowed once, twice. Surely I was mad. I glanced at his bloody hand. “We’re still in the summerlands.”
“I am a prince yet,” he said, and looking at that inhuman, sharp-boned face, lying in repose in a tangled nest of curls, those eyes feverish with resolve, I thought, Yes, you are, aren’t you.
I lifted the folds of my skirt and sat down on a rock.
It was all the answer Rook needed.
He plunged his hand into the soil, long fingers grasping down. This was no offering to the earth, but a command to it, and the forest surged around us. Bramble roots as wide around as kitchen tables heaved up from the ground, bristling with thorns longer and more wicked than any sword. When they reached their full height they branched, heaving higher, knotting together, until they gathered us up in a fortress like something out of an old tale, a place where a cursed princess slept imprisoned. I was gladdened by the sight of those vicious thorns more than I could say, and wondered whether the stories would have gone any differently if the princesses had been the ones telling them.
When the last tendrils snarled into formation beneath the moon, shattering it like a broken mirror, Rook sighed and went still.
Waking up that morning was worlds different than the morning previous. The jagged scraps of sky showing through the brambles were so overcast I couldn’t tell whether it was before dawn or after. Dew had settled on me overnight, leaving my clothes sodden and my skin so clammy my fingers and toes had gone numb. I was immediately conscious of how sore I felt, and how disgusting a state I was in. Of my entire body only my shoulder felt warm, but in a moist, disagreeable way that set my skin crawling. I found it covered in moss where Rook’s blood had soaked through my dress, and hastily peeled the growth off in clumps.
Then I rolled over, and found Rook dead beside me.
He lay sprawled a few feet away in exactly the same position I’d last seen him. His hand was still buried in the dirt, and his face was sepulchral. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to grow any paler overnight, but he seemed to have done so.
I went to him, my damp, grimy skirt flapping against my legs as I moved. I stood over his body and for a moment just looked. I’d gambled everything on his survival—more than was wise, I admitted to myself, as a gray bleakness engulfed me, chased by a weak flutter of hope.
Because I was wrong. He had to be alive. His spilled blood had turned to moss overnight, but his body remained whole. If he were dead, I wouldn’t be looking at him now, not intact, not like this.
I dropped to my knees and splayed my hand across his chest. When I felt it rise and fall shallowly beneath the rags of his coat, I breathed out an uneven laugh, shaken by relief. I reached for the coat’s edge to peel it back from his wound. My sleeve caught on his raven pin, and cold metal sprang against my wrist. I pulled away. I’d tripped a catch. The bird had a hidden compartment inside.
I would be lying if I claimed the secret it revealed surprised me. There were precious few explanations for Rook’s behavior, and this was proof of the most likely one: a curl of blond human hair nested inside the compartment, carefully tied together with blue thread.
I remembered how he’d insisted on removing the pin for his portrait. Even then he had fumbled to protect himself, his reputation, from his damningly mortal grief. He wore it still, though the pin’s tarnish and antique craftsmanship gave it away as two or three hundred years old.
Gently, I closed the pin, but I had to press down on his chest to secure the latch, and I think it hurt, because his eyes flew open. Their unearthliness in the light of day gave me an unpleasant jolt. They were glassy, burning with fever. He tried to move and started panting.
“I feel strange,” he announced, struggling to focus on the empty air beside me.
“You look strange.” I steeled myself and touched his forehead, which proved hot as an oven against my chilled fingers. “I was under the impression fair folk didn’t get fevers,” I said, concerned.
“What’s a fever?” he demanded with a scowl, which didn’t improve my fears.
“It happens when a wound goes bad. I’m going to touch this.” I indicated his clothes and he tensed, but nodded. While he waited for me to do my work he took his hand out of the dirt, inspected it, then cast about for something to wipe it off on. I had the annoyed suspicion he considered my dress before he victimized a patch of moss instead.
I peeled his coat open, and my stomach flopped over. The flesh around the wound had turned black. Black veins spiderwebbed out of it, vanishing beneath the edges of his clothes. How extensively had the poison spread? I dragged his coat and the shirt underneath open farther, undoing buttons toward his waist without a care for preserving his modesty. Or my own, for that matter, as while I’d educated myself thoroughly on the subject, I’d never seen a man undressed.
Rook propped himself up on an elbow. Despite his weakness, he suddenly looked very interested in whatever I might be doing. Then his eyes alit on his chest. He cried out in disgust and seized his clothes from my hands, fastened the buttons back up, and stood with more alacrity than I would have thought possible. I evaluated him warily. In some ways he had greatly improved. But as fevers went, this could be the final blaze before his body burned itself to ashes.
“You can’t just pretend it isn’t there,” I told him, climbing to my feet.
“But it’s hideous,” he replied, as though this were a reasonable objection.
“Festering wounds are always hideous.” I ignored the affronted look he gave me at the word “festering,” perhaps under the impression that I’d just insulted him. “Do you have any idea why this is happening?”
He turned his back to me, lifted his collar rather squeamishly, and peered under it. “That land wasn’t . . . right. The Barrow Lord shared its affliction, and appears to have passed it on to me. Temporarily, of course.”
That didn’t sound good at all. “Rook, I think you need medical treatment.”
“And you know how to treat me? No. So I thought. We resume our course toward the autumnlands, which should not take long now that I can walk unaided.” He avoided my eyes as he said this. Last night clearly wasn’t one of his proudest moments. “Whatever turn my wound has taken, it won’t matter once I can properly heal. Therefore we’re better off leaving without delay.”
I grudgingly admitted that in this matter, he knew better than I. He strode to the edge of the brambles, weaving only a little, and set his hands on one of the thorny coils. They began wriggling like worms, and retracted to form a doorway. I hastened after him, wincing at the chafe of my soiled skirts against my legs.
The forest we emerged into wasn’t as ominous as the place with the standing stones, but it still had an ill look about it that I hadn’t noticed in the dark and couldn’t easily explain. The green leaves were too glossy and glittering, almost as though a fever lay upon them, too. The sun labored to burn away the soupy mist I’d mistaken for clouds.
While we traveled, I couldn’t shake my memories of last night. Whiffs of imaginary decay dogged my steps. Inspecting myself, I found a smear on my left stocking where the corpse had seized my ankle. It was all I could do not to stop and tear the stocking off right then and there. In the way of minor discomforts, now that I’d noticed it I couldn’t put it out of my mind, maddened by the way it itched in the summer heat.
And with that thought, something occurred to me.
“The thane was from the summerlands too, wasn’t it?” I asked Rook. “The one you destroyed the day we met. The temperature changed when it appeared, same as the Barrow Lord. But nothing like that happened with the Wild Hunt’s hounds.”
Reluctantly, he nodded.
I narrowed my eyes. “And what about the unusual number of wild fairy beasts you told me about? Were the rest of those coming from the summerlands as well?”
“Ah,” Rook said. “A strange coincidence indeed, now that you mention it.”
“I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with coincidence!” I grabbed fistfuls of my skirt and trundled up next to him, feeling dirtier and more disgusting by the minute. Good. He deserved it. “You mean the connection’s never occurred to you before? Do you have any critical thinking skills at all?”
He stared straight ahead in full hauteur. “Of course I do. I am a—”
“Yes, I know. You’re a prince. Never mind.” I got the distinct feeling he’d never heard the term critical thinking before in his life. “Have any of the other courts been talking about it, then?” I pressed on.
He tore his crown off and ruffled his hair. “Why is this so important to you?” he exclaimed, vexed.
“Why is it . . .” I halted in my tracks. He turned around when he noticed I’d fallen several paces behind. “Why? Because a fairy beast from the summerlands probably killed my parents. Because one almost killed me, twice. Because they’re going to kill more humans if nobody figures out what’s going on. You know—just stupid, mortal reasons.”
He paused. I clenched my fists against the unhappiness stealing across his expression. I didn’t want him to feel bad and apologize, I wanted him to understand.
“We do not speak of such things,” he said finally. “At all. Because we cannot. We cannot think of such things. Even this conversation puts you and me in grave danger.”
Like bile, the forbidden words crept up the back of my throat. Shuddering, I swallowed them down.
Rook wasn’t responsible for the fairy beasts. And while he was, to be fair, entirely at fault for dragging me into the forest in the first place, he had nearly died last night protecting me. This I couldn’t deny. He drooped in his ragged clothes, and the crown shook between his fingers. He labored for breath. Arguing had obviously taxed him.
“I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time, in identically grudging voices.
A startled smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. It was my turn to avoid his eyes. I took a deep breath, determined to address one more thing before we went on.
“We need to talk about what you said last night.”
“I hate it when people tell me that,” he replied. “It’s never good.”
“Rook. You aren’t still taking me to trial, are you? You’ve changed your mind.”
I’m not sure what reaction I anticipated. Perhaps for him to draw himself up and say, You claim to know the mind of a prince? Anything but the way he looked aside and uneasily toyed with his raven pin.
“I realize now that I—made a mistake,” he confessed. “You did not intentionally sabotage me. What you did with your Craft was . . .” He struggled to find words, incapable of describing that which he didn’t understand. “When I came to fetch you,” he went on instead, “I told no one of my plans. We won’t be missed in the autumn court. Once I have healed, I promise to return you to Whimsy.”
The strength went out of my knees, and I steadied myself on a tree trunk. I was going home. Home! To Emma and the twins, my safe warm house filled with the smell of linseed oil, the work I already missed so much. And yet—back to the endless summer, and the way things were before—a life that crept along to the endless buzzing of grasshoppers in the wheat. I’d leave the autumnlands’ wonders behind forever. My heart soared and plummeted by turns like a bird buffeted by a storm. If I felt like this too long, I’d tear myself apart. But what could I do? How could I stop?
And what exactly had finally gotten the truth through to Rook?
I studied him. His expression was impassive. But the way he ran his fingers over the raven pin, his eyes getting duller and duller, worsened the turbulence battering my spirits.
“What of you?” I asked. “Your reputation? What will you do next?”
He mustered himself and replied, “I will think of some—” Just like that he stopped. His jaw worked. “Let us not speak of it,” he finished oddly. “Do you see that hill ahead? Once we reach the top we’ll be back in the autumnlands.”
I squinted. The hill looked no different to me than the forest behind us. While I puzzled over this, I realized why Rook hadn’t been able to finish his sentence.
It had been a lie.