Four
SEPTEMBER PASSED so quickly I felt I’d dreamed it. I finished Gadfly’s portrait and soon afterward gained another patroness, Vervain of the house of summer. But it seemed to me my days were spent with Rook and Rook alone.
Halfway through the month, I’d delayed bringing up the matter of payment as long as I could. Usually my clients made the first move, eager to ensnare me in their thorniest temptations, but I suspected the prince hadn’t dealt with mortals in so long he’d fallen out of practice. Having to broach the subject myself left me unaccountably nervous. I pretended it was due to the anxiety of facing a deviation from my normal routine. But the real reason was that I didn’t want to listen to Rook offering me roses whose perfume would make me forget all my childhood memories, or diamonds that would make me care for nothing but gems ever after, or goose down that would steal away my dreams. I knew that part of him existed, but I didn’t want to see it. And that sentiment was more dangerous than all the enchantments he could offer me combined.
Three times I set down my brush and opened my mouth before finally, on the fourth try, I found the courage to speak. He looked up from the cup of tea he’d been analyzing—rather suspiciously, I thought—and listened.
“Yes, of course,” he said when I was done. Then he astonished me by asking, “What type of enchantment would you like?”
I paused to reevaluate. Perhaps he preferred watching mortals orchestrate their own undoings. In that case, I’d have to be extra careful. I weighed each word on my tongue. “Something to warn me if I or a member of my family is in danger.” I took a moment to review the request’s weaknesses and went on, “For the purpose of this enchantment my family includes my aunt Emma and my adopted sisters, March and May. The sign must be subtle, so as not to draw unwanted attention, but also clear, so I won’t miss it when it happens.”
He deposited the teacup on the side table, folded his arms, and gave me a crooked smile. I steeled myself. “Ravens,” he suggested, disarming me yet again.
Ravens? I couldn’t decide whether the idea owed itself to vanity, a depressing lack of creativity, or both.
“Pardon my directness,” I replied, “but ravens can be quite noisy. If I were running from a”—I wavered and changed course—“a highwayman, for example, I don’t believe a flock of birds squabbling over my hiding place would be to my advantage.”
“Ah, I see. In that case, well-behaved ravens. They will mind their manners.”
“You are strangely persistent, sir. Is there anything about these ravens I might come to regret?” Frustration hardened my voice. I couldn’t figure him out. There had to be some catch. God help me, I needed there to be one, to remind me what he was. “They won’t torment me with foreknowledge of my own death, or keep me sleepless at night, or descend in droves whenever I’m about to stub a toe?”
“No!” Rook exclaimed, rising halfway from his seat. He caught himself, shoved his sword out of the way, and sank back down looking unsettled. I stared. “I am not up to any mischief,” he went on, sounding equally frustrated. “You do not seem as though you would allow it, in any case, if I tried.”
My stranded words formed a lump in my throat. A fair one never lied. I tore my gaze away from him, away from that look in his eyes I couldn’t put to name—or canvas.
“No, I wouldn’t. Given your assurances, ravens would be—acceptable.” Mortified by how stiff I sounded, I clenched my fists until my fingernails dug into my palms. “We can discuss the remaining terms tomorrow.”
He brightened at the mention of “tomorrow” and bowed his head in assent. “I look forward to it,” he replied eagerly, and just like that, all was forgiven. Stifling a smile, I picked up a palette knife by accident before I found my brush.
After he left, I couldn’t shake the notion that he’d insisted on ravens for a reason. I was almost finished cleaning up by the time the explanation occurred to me. My cheeks warmed, and a wistful pang plucked a sweet, sad chord in my stomach. It was simple, really. He didn’t want me to forget him once he’d gone.
The remaining weeks blurred together. The season didn’t turn. Yet there in my parlor, while the fields outside simmered beneath a summer sun, a vital change swept through me. When Rook wasn’t there, I thought about him. During our sessions, my heart pounded as though I’d just run a mile. I tossed and turned half the night, tortured by the cipher of his unpaintable eyes, driven restless and half-wild by the moonlight spilling through my window, which I swore was brighter than any moon preceding it. This must be what the awakening of spring was like, I thought. I was alive in a way I never had been before, in a world that no longer felt stale but instead crackled with breathless promise.
Oh, I knew that how I felt toward Rook was dangerous. Incredibly, the danger made it better. Perhaps all those lonely years of keeping a polite smile frozen on my face had driven me a bit off-balance, and the madness just didn’t kick in until I’d had a taste of something new. Walking on a blade’s edge every time we exchanged a curtsy and a bow, knowing one misstep could topple me into mortal peril, made the blood sing in my veins. I exulted in my own cleverness. Of all the Crafters in Whimsy, I knew fair folk best. As the days trickled through my fingers like water, slipping past no matter how fiercely I held on to them, hurtling me toward the inevitable end of a moment I wanted to last forever, my assurance that I could handle Rook strengthened to iron.
And I might have continued believing that if I hadn’t figured out what was wrong with his eyes during our very last session.
“Gadfly told me the first time you painted him, your feet didn’t reach the floor,” Rook said, which was how it started. “He spoke as though it was merely . . . Isobel, how old are you? I’ve never thought to ask.”
“Seventeen,” I replied, breaking free from the painting to watch his reaction.
During our first few sessions he’d sat stiff as a board, apparently under the impression he’d interfere with my work if he moved so much as a hair. Now that I’d assured him I was far enough along that his posture didn’t matter, he sprawled sideways on the settee so he could glance out the window constantly, as though it pained him to miss even one cloud or passing bird. But even so he spent most of his time looking back at me. The rapport between us had grown perilously casual.
His reaction wasn’t quite what I anticipated. For a long moment he only stared, his expression close to shock or even loss. “Seventeen?” he repeated. “Surely that’s too young to be a master of the Craft. And you’re already fully grown, aren’t you?”
I nodded. I would have smiled if it hadn’t been for the look on his face. “It is young. Most people my age don’t perform at this level. I started painting as soon as I could hold a brush.”
He shook his head. His gaze drifted to the floor. Preoccupied, he touched his pocket.
“How old are you?” I inquired, perplexed by the air of melancholy that had fallen over him.
“I don’t know. I can’t—” He looked out the window. A muscle moved in his jaw. “Fair folk hardly pay years any mind, they pass so quickly. I don’t believe I can tell you in a way you’d understand.”
What must it be like? To meet someone, to forge a connection, all in the span of one golden afternoon—only to find out that for her, each passing minute was a year. Each second, an hour. She would be dead before the sun rose the next day. A keen, quiet pain twisted my heart.
That was when I saw the secret hidden deep within his eyes. Impossibly, it was sorrow. Not a fair one’s ephemeral mourning, but human sorrow, bleak and endless, a yawning chasm in his soul. No wonder I hadn’t been able to identify the flaw. That emotion didn’t belong to his kind. Couldn’t belong.
Time stopped. Even the dust motes glowing in the air seemed to go still.
I had to be sure of what I’d seen. I crossed the room in a trance and brought my hand to his cheek so lightly I barely touched him. He hadn’t been paying attention, and he made the smallest movement—almost a flinch—before he looked at me. Yes, the sorrow was truly there. Along with it, hurt and confusion, to a degree that I wondered whether he even understood what he felt, or whether it was as alien to him as so many aspects of the fair folk were to us.
“Have I offended you?” he asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply . . .”
“No, you haven’t.” Somehow my voice sounded normal. “I’ve just noticed something I need to work on before your portrait’s finished. Could you hold your head like this for a few minutes?”
Aware that I was taking an immense liberty, I raised my other hand, cupped his face, and gently turned it toward my easel at just the right angle for the light to strike his eyes. He allowed me to handle him in silence, his breath warming my wrists, watching me all the while.
This was our last day together. The first and final time I’d ever touch him. The knowing of it pulsed between us like a heartbeat. With our gazes locked, another truth became unmistakable. I felt a connection between us as tangibly as a hand-shake or a grip on my shoulder. I knew he felt it too.
Dizzy, I stepped back and slammed the door on it before it could take form. Dark spots swam around the edges of my vision and cold panic squeezed the air from my lungs. Whatever this was, it had to end. Now.
Walking along a blade’s edge was only fun until the blade stopped being a metaphor.
Mortals cared little for the Good Law’s cryptic edicts, but one of its rulings applied to us all the same: fair folk and humans weren’t permitted to fall in love. Almost a joke, honestly. The sort of thing Crafters wrote songs about and wove into tapestries. It never happened, never could happen, because despite their flirtatiousness and their fondness for attention, fair folk couldn’t feel anything as real as love. Or so I’d thought. Now I doubted everything I’d been told about Rook’s kind, everything I’d observed, the neat, sensible rules I’d taken for granted my entire life. Laws didn’t exist without reason—or precedent.
And its penalty? Oh, you know how these stories go. Of course it’s death, with one exception. To save her life—to save both their lives—the mortal must drink from the Green Well. But only if the fair folk don’t catch them first.
“If you would remain still for me, please,” I said. My request came out coolly, and my chair’s creak sounded miles away. As I lifted my paintbrush, I dared not look at Rook and witness his reaction to my changed demeanor.
When the world failed me, I could always lose myself in my work. I withdrew into this sanctuary, where all my other concerns faded beside the demanding compulsion of my Craft. I narrowed my focus to Rook’s eyes, the full, mellow aroma of oil paint, the sensual gleaming trail my brush spread across the textured canvas, and nothing more. This was my Craft, my purpose. We were here for Craft alone. His veiled expression was something only a master could achieve, and I was determined to do it justice. The technique lay in the shadows of his irises—deep, mysterious, and clouded, like the darkness a boat cast onto the bottom of a clear lake. Not the thing itself, but the shape of the ghost it left behind.
And while I worked the fever filled me, the thrill of my talent, an awareness that I was about to complete a portrait unlike any painted before. I forgot who I was, swept up in this force that seemed to surge through me from both within and without.
The light faded, but I didn’t notice until the room grew dim enough to leach the color from my canvas. Emma was home; she made quiet sounds moving about in the kitchen, trying to keep her presence unobtrusive as she smuggled the twins upstairs. My wrist ached. Stray hairs clung to my sweaty temples. Without warning, I paused to shape my brush and realized I was finished. Rook looked back at me, his soul captured in two dimensions.
A horn blast sounded in the distance.
Rook leapt up across the shadowy room, tension in every line of his body. His hand went to his sword. My first muddled thought was that it was another fairy beast, but the sound wasn’t right: high and nasal, pure of tone. I became sure of this when the horn sounded a second time, shivered, and dropped away.
A chill rippled across my back. Though one rarely hears it in Whimsy, one never forgets the Wild Hunt’s call.
“Isobel, I must go,” Rook said, belting on his sword. “The Hunt has intruded on the autumnlands.”
I stood up so fast I knocked my chair over. It cracked like a musket shot against the floorboards, but I didn’t flinch. “Wait. Your portrait’s finished.”
He stopped with his hand on the half-open door. Awfully, he wouldn’t look at me. No—couldn’t. I knew then, without a speck of doubt, that he planned on vanishing from the human world once more, utterly and, as far as my own mortal life was concerned, permanently. Neither of us could afford to tempt fate. Once he left, we’d never see each other again.
“Have it prepared to be sent to the autumn court,” he said in a hollow voice. “A fair one named Fern will pick it up in two weeks’ time.” He hesitated. But then the horn sounded again, and he only added, “One raven for uncertain peril. Six for danger sure to arrive. A dozen for death, if not avoided. The enchantment is sealed.”
He ducked below the lintel and dashed out the door. Just like that, he was gone forever.
Now I have to tell you how foolish I am. Before that gray and lifeless time following Rook’s departure, I’d always scoffed at stories in which maidens pine for their absent suitors, boys they’ve hardly known a week and have no business falling for. Didn’t they realize their lives were worth more than the dubious affection of one silly young man? That there were things to do in a world that didn’t revolve solely around their heartbreak?
Then it happens to you, and you understand you aren’t any different from those girls after all. Oh, they still seem just as absurd—you’ve simply joined them, in quite a humbling way. But isn’t absurdity part of being human? We aren’t ageless creatures who watch centuries pass from afar. Our worlds are small, our lives are short, and we can only bleed a little before we fall.
Two days later, I made a mental inventory of Rook’s unfavorable qualities, prepared to indulge in some vicious criticism. He was arrogant, self-centered, and obtuse—unworthy of me in every way. Yet as I fumed over our first meeting, I couldn’t help but remember how swiftly he’d apologized to me, no matter that he hadn’t had the slightest idea what he was apologizing for. I recalled the look on his face exactly. By the end of the exercise, I only felt more miserable.
Three days later, I pressed the half dozen preparatory charcoal sketches I’d done of him between sheets of wax paper, bundled them up, and hid them at the back of my closet, resolving not to look at them again until I no longer craved seeing his face like prodding a fresh bruise. The golden afternoon was over. By the time Rook remembered me, if he ever did, I’d be long dead.
I ate. I slept. I got out of bed in the morning. I painted, I did dishes, I looked after the twins. Every day dawned bright and blue. During the hot afternoons, the buzzing of the grasshoppers blurred into a monotonous throb. It was for the better, I told myself, swallowing the mantra like a lump of bitter bread.
It was for the better.
Two weeks later, Fern arrived as promised and took the portrait away in a crate packed with cloth and straw. After the third week I’d started feeling a little like my old self, but there was something missing from my life now, and I suspected I’d never be exactly the same again. Maybe that was just part of growing up.
One night I went into the kitchen after dark to find Emma asleep at the table, her hand curled around a tincture bottle in danger of tipping over, with pungent half-ground herbs sitting in her mortar and pestle. It wasn’t an unusual discovery.
“Emma,” I whispered, touching her shoulder.
She mumbled indistinctly in reply.
“It’s late. You should go to bed.”
“All right, I’m going,” she said into her arms, muffled, but didn’t move. I took the tincture from her hand and sniffed it, then found its stopper and set it aside. I knew what I would find if I smelled Emma’s breath.
“Come on.” I draped her limp arm over my shoulders and pulled her upright. Her ankles turned before she found her footing. Going up the stairs proved as interesting as I expected.
People mistook Emma for my mother all the time. Children, mostly, and out-of-towners—people who didn’t know what had happened to my parents, or that as Whimsy’s physician Emma had been the one who’d tried to save my father’s life and failed. Unlike my mother, he hadn’t died instantly. To all accounts, it would have been better if he had.
So I suppose I couldn’t stay angry at Emma for her vices, even when they occasionally made me her keeper rather than the other way around. A patient must have died today, though I’d long ago stopped asking once I’d made the connection. Most of all, I could never forget I was the reason she was still in Whimsy. If it hadn’t been for me, the responsibility of raising her sister’s daughter, the child of the man who died in her arms, she would have left for the World Beyond as soon as she could. In a place where enchantments reigned supreme and the creatures who traded them had no use for human medicine . . . well, her ideal life lay elsewhere.
Emma was missing something too, and I’d do well to remember that.
“Can you take your shoes off?” I asked, lowering her to the edge of her bed.
“ ’M all right,” she replied with her eyes closed, so I did it anyway, and tucked them under the bed skirt so she wouldn’t trip on them if she got up during the night. Afterward, I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
Her eyes squinted open. They were dark brown, almost black, like mine—large and intense. She had the same freckles spattered across her fair skin and the same thick, wheat-colored hair. Before everything happened, I remember her and my mother joking that the women in our family reigned supreme: they passed their looks down without any input from the men whatsoever.
“I’m sorry about Rook,” she said, reaching up to give a strand of my identical hair an affectionate tug.
I froze. My mind reeled, teetering at the edge of a precipice. “I don’t know what—”
“Isobel, I’m not blind. I knew what was going on.”
Acid soured my stomach. My voice came out thin and tight, prepared to rise stridently in defense. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Her hand flopped down to the coverlet. “Because I couldn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. I trusted you to make the right choice.” Lanced with guilt in the face of Emma’s understanding, my hostility deflated. Somehow the emptiness it left behind felt far, far worse. “Also, I worry about you. Your Craft keeps you so busy and isolated you haven’t had a chance to experience . . . well, so many things. We’d have a hard time getting by without the enchantments. But I wish—”
A thump shook the ceiling, followed by a maniacal cackle. I welcomed the interruption. The more Emma spoke, the harder I wrestled with the tears prickling the backs of my eyes.
“Oh, hell. The twins.” Her voice scraped like sandpaper. She gave the rafters a resigned look.
I rose swiftly. “Don’t worry. I’ll check on them.”
The old stairway to the attic creaked beneath my weight. When I entered the twins’ bedroom, a tiny slope-ceilinged nook barely large enough for two beds and a dresser, they’d already initiated a pretend sleep routine, which wouldn’t have fooled me even without the stifled giggling.
“I know you’re plotting something. Out with it.” I went over to May and tickled her. Rarely did she confess without torture.
“March!” she shrieked, thrashing beneath the covers. “March wants to show you something!”
I relented, and regarded March with my hands on my hips, trying to look stoic. Judging by the way her cheeks were ballooned out, she was about to squirt water all over my face or possibly something even less pleasant. I couldn’t show weakness. I tapped my foot and raised an impatient eyebrow.
“Bleeeghhh,” she said, and ejected a live toad onto her quilt.
I shook my head at May’s hysterical laughter. “Well, at least you didn’t swallow it,” I reasoned, lunging after the moist and traumatized creature. I snatched it before it made a bid for freedom down the stairwell. “Now settle down, all right? Emma’s having one of her nights.” They didn’t know what this meant, only that it was serious, and I’d think of some way to bribe them for being on their best behavior.
“Fine,” May sighed, flopping over in bed. She watched me with one eye. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Put it somewhere far away from March’s mouth.” And hope it recovers from the nightmares, I thought, shutting the door behind me.
I drifted through the house, moonlight making foreign shapes of the parlor’s clutter. A half-finished Vervain smiled at me coldly from the easel, wearing an expression that might as well have been carved onto a wigmaker’s mannequin. Working with her came as a shock after Rook, even though I knew she was only a return to normality, whatever that meant in my case.
I crept through the kitchen and outside onto the damp grass, where I set the toad free. It sprang away into the weeds, toward the forest. From here, across the moon-silvered field, the tops of the trees poked above the horizon like a cloud bank.
A breeze stirred the wheat and sighed through the grass, chilling the dew on my toes. The wind blew from the forest’s direction and for a moment I imagined I caught a whisper of that crisp, wild, wistful smell, Rook’s smell, the one that seized my heart and wouldn’t let go. I knew what it was. Autumn.
All at once my chest swelled with unnameable longing, an ache lodged at the base of my throat like an unvoiced cry. Lives to be lived awaited me out there, far from the safety of my familiar home and confining routine. The whole world waited for me. I felt pierced through with longing. Oh, if only I were the type to scream.
I wiped my toady hands off on the grass and stepped back.
A fluttering of wingbeats came from the old oak.
I turned, the breeze lifting my hair, and saw a raven in the tree. But which was it—a raven for peril, or a raven I loved?
Before I could move, Rook stood over me. I only had time to think, Both. For this wasn’t the Rook I knew. As the feathers shed from his form and gathered into a sweeping coat, they revealed a face livid with fury. No half-smile softened this hard, frozen mask, those amethyst eyes burning like conflagrations.
“What did you do?” he snarled.