Twenty-two
BRING ME vermilion. And indigo, please. May, I know you aren’t talking to me right now, but you can still carry things, can’t you? Emma, would you mind finding something I can use to prop up my arm while I work? Rook, that’s not a paint palette, that’s a serving tray. Oh—never mind, bring it here. I suppose it’ll do.”
My parlor had transformed into a whirlwind of activity. I’d toppled over the second I tried to stand, so I was enthroned on the settee, propped up by half a dozen pillows, as everyone waited on me hand and foot, which would have been nice if they hadn’t all been tasks I’d rather have been doing myself. To their credit, no one tried arguing me out of my unhinged-sounding scheme. Emma and Rook had taken one look at the glint in my eyes, glanced at each other in sudden communion, and started fetching brushes.
I’d never done work like this before. I didn’t have time to draft it, for one. Morning light already stole across the room, setting my linseed oil jar aglow and casting a pink rectangle on the wallpaper. I’d decided not to look over my shoulder, because once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop, but Emma kept peeking out the window, and it wasn’t long before she gasped and dropped a pillow.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“Nothing.” She hurried over to stick the pillow under my elbow. “My nerves just got the better of me.” A blatant lie—Emma could mix deadly chemicals with someone playing the cymbals next to her head.
May stood on her toes and looked. “There’s something running around in the field,” she announced in a would-be-casual voice. She turned around with an exaggerated shrug to show she wasn’t afraid, even though I could see her shaking from across the room. “I bet it’s the Alder King and he’s here to kill you and eat you because you’re stupid.”
Emma reared up, clutching another pillow. “May, you will not speak to your sister like that!”
“Well, it’s true!”
“The Alder King has not yet arrived,” Rook reassured me. “It’s only a hound, and it won’t be able to enter your home, nor will any of the other beasts and fair folk who follow.”
I schooled my breathing, forcing myself to relax. The brush had left bloodless dents in my clenched fingers. “Why?” I asked in a low voice I hoped my family couldn’t hear. “The enchantment doesn’t prevent anyone from coming inside.”
His eyes flashed. “Because I will not let them.” He gave the window another cursory glance and then whirled toward the hallway.
“Rook,” I said, drawing him up short. “Thank you. Be careful.”
I wasn’t just thanking him for what he was about to do. I was thanking him for trusting me—for believing in me. It hadn’t been easy for him to set the dagger aside.
He gave a stiff nod before he left. The kitchen door bounced shut out of sight behind him. Forcing aside my gnawing fears, I focused on my canvas, losing myself in the glistening paint gliding over its textured surface, the quiet scrape of the brush’s dry bristles when I reached the end of a stroke. The background blended from dark burnt umber in the corners to luminous gold at the center, where it would outline the subject in a corona of light. Everything depended on this portrait. It needed to be the best work I’d ever done, completed in a single morning, in my least-polished method—wet on wet—since I didn’t have time to let any of it dry. My eyes burned with the effort of staying open, and my brush felt like it weighed twenty pounds. But stroke by stroke, the painting came to life.
Soon I had sunk too deeply into my work to notice anything going on around me. The world consisted only of my Craft. Like an old sailor’s map of the earth, nothing existed beyond my canvas’s flat borders. Until a great snapping crash came from outside, rattling the glasses on the table beside my easel, and jerking me headlong back into the light, sound, and clamor of real life.
I turned my head in a blinking stupor to find Emma and the twins plastered against the windows. Emma was at the southern window across the room; I hadn’t noticed March and May clambering onto the settee, bracketing me between them.
“He tore it in half!” May exclaimed gleefully.
March bounced up and down on her knees.
I spared a look over my shoulder. A tangle of giant, squirming thorn vines surrounded our house, each one taller and thicker than the oak tree, plunging our yard into deep shade. As I watched, one of the vines seized a white shape—a hound—and flung it back into the wheat field, so far into the distance I couldn’t tell where it landed. The wreckage of some much larger fairy beast strewn across our grassless chicken run explained the earthquake. I hunted for Rook among the chaos. The last time he’d created thorns of a similar size, he had been grievously injured by the Barrow Lord. How badly had he wounded himself to accomplish this reckless feat? I couldn’t find him anywhere. And I not only suspected, but knew for certain that he was motivated by a persuasive death wish. A shudder rippled over my shoulders and arms, abating to a fine tremble that seized my entire body. My skin felt tight and white noise rang in my head, crowding out all other thoughts.
March bleated exuberantly as another hound went soaring across the field. The twins’ reaction, at least, assured me that if we escaped today intact, I’d have no trouble getting them to like Rook.
Shouldn’t we keep them from watching this? I asked Emma with a rather crazed glance.
Emma shot back an equally crazed look that said, Oh, believe me, I’ve tried.
A creaking, groaning noise came from outside. I returned my attention to the window. The thorn vines were freezing in place from the base upward, their heavily spiked tendrils zigzagging into sharp angles as they stiffened, forming a dense, impenetrable-looking thicket. Vertigo swooped through my stomach. I abandoned my efforts at searching the yard and focused inward instead, concentrating on the ensorcellment bond between us. Surely if something had happened to Rook, I would have felt his reaction. The vines weren’t dead, just motionless. Whatever was going on out there, he’d done it on purpose—hadn’t he?
The kitchen door banged open and boots thudded through the hallway, Rook’s long stride unmistakable. I briefly pressed my eyes closed, riding out the relieved dizziness that washed over me. But I didn’t have a chance to indulge in the sensation.
“He’s coming,” Rook said as soon as he entered the room. “We have little time.”
His chest heaved like a bellows, and his hair was so rumpled he looked as though he’d been standing in the middle of a storm. One of his sleeves was rolled up, with a dishrag from our kitchen messily bound around his forearm. I tried not to consider the implications of this—he’d never needed to bind his wounds before. Maybe he just didn’t want to make a mess with his blood indoors.
Grimly, Emma and I met each other’s eyes across the parlor.
“Can you take the twins to the cellar?” I asked.
This might be the last time we ever saw each other alive. The knowledge made holding her gaze like staring into the sun. She had sworn to raise me and keep me safe, but now faced losing me to the same force that had already shattered our lives once. And suddenly I knew with terrible clarity that if she lost me, she didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pick herself back up again. In that moment there were two Emmas transposed over each other—the Emma who had raised me, and the Emma she kept hidden from me, an Emma I’d barely even met before. An Emma I might never have the chance to get to know as I grew older.
The spell broke.
“You heard your sister,” Emma said briskly, though she sounded very tired. She came over and picked March up. May slid off the settee, subdued. Both twins watched me uncertainly. I couldn’t start crying again. Not now.
“I love you all and I’ll be done by lunchtime,” I declared in my best Isobel’s-a-busy-perfectionist voice. When May opened her mouth I interrupted, “May, I know you don’t hate me.” If I gave her the chance to say it herself, I wouldn’t be able to maintain my composure. “Now hurry up.”
Before they went, Emma pressed a kiss to the top of my head. I set my jaw and tilted my face toward the ceiling, and waited until I heard their feet thumping down the stairs to let the tears fall. Sniffing industriously, I swiped the wetness away on my wrists, stabbed my paintbrush into a whorl of vermilion and lead tin yellow, and got back to work. It was just finishing touches now. A handful of flaws glared at me from the canvas—a patch of shadow that needed more purple light reflected on it, a slab of the crown that could use more highlights for dimension—but I didn’t have time to fix them all. The most important part, I told myself, was done.
Fabric swished as Rook moved to stand beside me. As he absorbed what I had wrought, a profound stillness settled over him. That stillness told me everything I needed to know. A pause, and then I set my brush down. Confidence swelled within me as surely and calmly as the rising tide, filling in every cavernous doubt.
My Craft was true.
A horn sounded, rattling the windows in their frames, low-pitched and sonorous with disdain. Sunlight speared through the parlor as crystal shattered outside—the thorns had fallen to the Alder King. Buoyed by a giddy certainty as intoxicating as wine, I looked up at Rook and smiled.
He tore his gaze from the portrait, startled. At some point his glamour had fled from him. His hair hung in a wild snarl around the disquieting planes of his face. He scrutinized me with inhuman eyes, cruel eyes that weren’t made to show kindness or tenderness or love, but they still spoke clearly to the fact that I was behaving oddly, even for a mortal, and especially for me.
“You’ve run out of magic,” I said softly, touching his wrist. Amber-colored blood had soaked through the makeshift bandage.
He flinched, and his expression shuttered. He raised his hand and looked at it front and back, taking in the long, spidery, oddly jointed fingers as if the sight disturbed him as much as it would a mortal.
“The ensorcellment draws upon my strength,” he said. “I cannot protect you from him any longer.”
“You won’t need to,” I replied.
A tremor shook the floor. Though I sensed no further movement, the whole house groaned as though lifted several inches from its foundations by brute force. When it settled with a resounding thud, all the boards shook and plaster dust trickled down from the ceiling. Rook glanced around, seeing something I could not. I didn’t need to ask. The enchantment on my home was broken. The Alder King had come here for only one reason, after all—to kill us both. And he wasn’t wasting any time.
I pushed aside the pillows and stood. My knees gave way for the third time in twenty-four hours, and Rook caught me again, holding me up as though I weighed nothing. I reached for the portrait.
“Isobel,” he said. My hand paused. “I am not very good at—declarations,” he went on, after a hesitation. And then he hesitated some more, looking down at me, absorbing the sight, and seeming to forget whatever it was he had on his mind.
“I know,” I assured him fondly. “I seem to remember you insulting my short legs the first time, among other things.”
He drew up a bit. “In my defense, they are very short, and I cannot tell a lie.”
“So what you’re trying to say is that you love me, short legs and all?”
“Yes. And—no. Isobel, I love you wholly. I love you eternally. I love you so dearly it frightens me. I fear I could not live without you. I could see your face every morning upon waking for ten thousand years and still look forward to the next as though it were the first.”
“I think we disparaged you too much,” I breathed. “That was a fine declaration indeed.”
I seized his collar and pulled him down for a kiss, ghoulish countenance and all, ignoring his muffled sound of protest, which did not remain on his lips for long. His teeth were sharp, but he kissed me with such tenderness and care it didn’t matter. A flower blossomed inside me, a soft, rare bloom aching for light and wind and touch. In another world, it might have been our last kiss. In this one, I wouldn’t allow it.
We broke apart as a shadow crossed the window. Reluctantly Rook released me, and I tottered forward on legs as weak as a newborn fawn’s. I took up the portrait like a shield and turned around.
Something was happening to my door. Dark, glistening spots spread across it like an ink spill soaking through a page, or a candle flame blackening a piece of paper from beneath. It wasn’t until the sweet stench of decay hit me, and white mold fuzzed over the surface, that I realized the door was rotting. It sagged on its hinges, wood warping. The boards peeled away in strips, disintegrating into spongy lumps as they fell. The brass doorknob clattered to the floor and rolled into a corner. And the Alder King ducked inside, bending at the waist and turning his broad shoulders sideways to fit through the now-empty doorway. The light eclipsed him from behind, transforming him into a black silhouette too bright to see. Heat rolled across the room.
I had had many fair folk in my parlor, yet never one like him. As he straightened, the sun of a different age kindled fire in his beard and glowed on his emerald surcoat, striking him at an angle and intensity for which the room’s windows were not responsible. He was from a time that was not our time, and the weight of it enveloped him like a cloak. Conscious that I was so small standing in front of him I might as well have been a child, I took a step forward. He didn’t look at me. It was as though he didn’t even see me. Beneath the heavy brows his eyes searched through an eternity of years, seeking the present, looking for an hour and a day less significant to him than a single mote of dust suspended in the air among uncountable thousands.
My confidence faltered. My plan had one flaw—it wouldn’t work unless he looked down. So I cleared my throat to speak.
“We worshipped you once, didn’t we, Your Majesty? I saw the statues in the forest. They were carved by human hands.”
He tilted his head as though listening to a distant thread of birdsong.
“I have never heard a tale or read a book in which it was not summer in Whimsy,” I continued. “Before you punish us, will you tell me how long you have ruled?”
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.
A gust of wind blasted us. Rook shifted, a shingle scraping beneath his boot. Then he stumbled and fell. Panic clutched me. I had a vision of a wooden splinter impaling his back while he protected me with his body. I dropped to the ground beside him, seizing his arm, wondering if he could survive a grievous wound without magic.
He looked more stunned than hurt, however, and as I ran my hands over him, searching for any sign of injury, his glamour flooded back over him. He caught my hand in his. “Look,” he said, but it was the expression on his face that made me turn around.
Wind swept across the field, bending the wheat in shimmering waves. As it spread outward, the colors changed. The leaves on the trees turned golden and scarlet and fiery orange. Soon the transformation set the whole forest ablaze. Stretching far into the distance, the only green that remained belonged to the grass verges bordering the fields and a handful of lone, tall pines poking through the canopy. I laughed out loud imagining how confounded the people of Whimsy must be—Mrs. Firth scrambling out of her shop, appalled; Phineas considering the painting hung beside the door. A single red leaf drifted down from the kitchen oak.
“It’s so quiet,” I marveled. The breeze ruffled my dress, its sweet, longed-for coolness raising gooseflesh on my arms. Birds sang sweetly in the trees. From the edges of the forest, crickets chirped a liquid melody. But the grasshoppers had all gone silent.
A lone figure distinguished itself from the wreckage in the yard, fastidiously picking through the thorns strewn across the ground. His blond hair shone silvery in the sun, and he had changed his clothes since I had seen him last—he wore an eggshell-blue waistcoat and an immaculate, freshly tied cravat.
My gut clenched. Buried somewhere in my parlor, I still had an iron dagger.
Gadfly called out to us in a mild, pleasant voice. “And so the rule of summer is ended, and autumn has come to Whimsy. I do regret that spring is so far away, but that’s simply how the world works, and I trust that one day the seasons will turn again. Good afternoon, Rook. Isobel.” He halted several yards away and bowed.
Frowning, Rook returned the courtesy. I was bound by no such obligation, and glared.
“What a happy welcome,” Gadfly said. “I merely wanted to congratulate you both on a job well done.” His gaze shifted to me alone, and he smiled, a warm, courteous smile that wrinkled his eyes while revealing nothing. “You made all the right choices. How splendid. How singular. The moment you slew the Alder King, you destroyed every mandate he has ever made. You and Rook are free to live as you please, unburdened by the Good Law. The fairy courts will never be the same.”
Somehow I found my voice. “But you—you wanted . . .”
What had he wanted? Abruptly, everything fell into place.
Before I’d made my first bargain with him all those years ago, perhaps even before I’d been born, he’d already begun scheming. Placing my home under a powerful enchantment to gain my trust and ensure that no harm came to me before he set his plan into motion. Arranging Rook’s portrait. Bringing us to the Green Well. Planting the iron dagger, which was never meant for Rook after all, but for the Alder King all along. And worse—knowing exactly what to say that would make him my bitter enemy, and set me crashing through the woods, away from my predestined path toward the impossible course of destroying the Alder King. Astonishment and fury washed over me in equal measure. My voice hardened, choked with emotion. “I don’t appreciate being used as a pawn in your game, sir.”
He looked at me a long moment in silence. “Ah, but you were not a pawn. All along, you have been the queen.”
I took a breath. His inflection was laden with some hidden meaning I didn’t have the patience to decipher. “And you are treacherous, and I’ll never forget the pain we endured by your design, no matter what came of it in the end.”
“Spoken, if I may say so, like a true monarch.” He smiled again. But a shadow passed over his countenance, and this time, his eyes didn’t crinkle. His portrait room sprang to my mind unbidden. All those patient centuries of collecting portraits—not out of desire for them, but because he was waiting for me, for my Craft, a spider at the center of a vast web he’d spun for hundreds of years in solitude.
“I do believe that is for the best,” he went on, watching me intently. “Trusting one of my kind is quite enough foolishness for a lifetime. Mortals are always better off not forgetting what we are, and that we only ever serve ourselves.”
“Gadfly,” Rook said, in a tone that suggested the spring prince was overstaying his welcome.
“Just one last thing, if I may.” Gadfly brushed some invisible dust off his sleeve and raised his eyebrows at Rook. “You are aware, I trust, that you are not yet named king? That there is a certain something you must—”
“Yes, I know!” Rook interrupted crossly.
I shot him a curious glance and discovered that he was nervously avoiding my eyes. He looked relieved when tentative footsteps crunched within the house, liberating him of the burden of explaining this “certain something” to me, and for the moment I was happy to forget all about it.
“Emma!” I called. “We’re safe! We’re in the . . . parlor.”
“I can see that,” Emma said calmly, picking her way into the room with the twins clutching both her hands. “There are holes in the walls. March, whatever you just picked up, don’t eat it.”
“Too late,” said May.
Emma shook her head. She scanned the parlor, and then the yard, and saw Gadfly, whereupon her eyes narrowed appraisingly. “Now who’s going to clean up this mess?”
“Oh, dear,” said Gadfly. “I’m afraid I must be off.”