Six
I DIDN’T protest. I didn’t scream. Whatever he was doing, I was neither willing nor able to stop him.
He didn’t look at all weary or disheveled as he knelt with his right sleeve rolled up to the elbow, the sword laid across his hand. A curl of damp hair clinging to his forehead was the only sign that remained from our reckless flight, the sweat that had previously soaked his neck and shoulders. Calmly he looked aside, and then he drew the blade across his palm in one vicious stroke. Blood spattered the moss below. It was a paler color than human blood, and thicker, as though mixed with tree sap.
Once the shock wore off I understood Rook was working some fairy magic. Whatever it was, I hoped it hurt. Perhaps it would even weaken him in a way I might use to my advantage.
“You said there were only two other fair ones as powerful as you,” I said, curtsying for his attention. “I thought you meant the regents of the spring and winter courts. But is Hemlock one of them?”
He wiped his hand off on the moss, bent over his knee in a seamless bow, and stood. The cut had vanished—though I had no way of knowing whether it was truly healed or merely disguised by his glamour. The latter struck me as something he would do out of pride.
“All of us have different gifts, some more than others. I can change my shape and as prince I command the power of my season. Hemlock is known for her prowess in battle, but she is no winter lord. Perhaps—if all my magic were exhausted, or if I chose not to use it—I might meet her in physical combat as an equal.” His lip curled. I wondered how often he wished he could lie.
“Her fairy beasts must be a danger to you, then,” I ventured, sensing an opportunity to learn more about his weaknesses. “If not one or two at a time, the entire pack fighting at her side.”
He sheathed his sword in a violent motion and strode over to me, stopping only when we almost touched, staring down. I felt his breath on my upturned face. My heart skipped a beat. He was a little winded, after all.
“They are a danger to you, mortal, not I. You saw how I fared against the thane. How many times do I have to remind you? I am a prince.”
“Yes, I know!” I didn’t budge an inch. “It’s not as though you’ve given me a chance to forget it.”
He squared his shoulders and bared his teeth as if I’d just slapped him.
I schooled myself, resisting the urge to reach for my ring. “I just don’t understand any of this. Fairy beasts, the conflict between your houses, why on earth the Wild Hunt’s been after you for centuries if Hemlock knows she can’t win. I suppose it’s too much for my foolish mortal brain to take in.”
Rook relaxed. Annoyingly, he didn’t register the sarcasm.
“Hemlock is the Huntsman,” he replied. “She obeys the call of the winter court, which ever seeks to spread its frost across the autumnlands.”
“The horn,” I murmured. “It commands her. She doesn’t have a choice.”
He nodded. “For her, the Hunt is everything. It is her only purpose. She will hunt until she dies and at last must hunt no more.”
Wind rustled through the canopy, and leaves pattered like rain across the clearing. I thought of Hemlock’s ghastly face receding into the dark, the way she’d screamed at us to run. A shiver coursed through my body. The chill bite of the autumn air was finally catching up with me.
Or was it? For then I wondered if I had shivered at all, because the trembling went on and on, heaving the ground beneath my feet. I staggered back, but there was no escape from the peculiar quickening that followed. Beginning at the point where Rook had spilled his blood, a tide of moss starred with tiny, pale blue flowers no bigger than the tip of my little finger surged forward, unfurling across the glade, foaming partway up the tree trunks—and my own legs. I yelped and pulled my boots free, sending clumps of moss flying as I gave my skirts a vigorous shake.
“Turn around,” Rook said aloofly, watching me sidelong. For a moment he’d adopted his old tone, as though we were friends in my parlor again, and it seemed a correction was in order.
But turn I did, unable to help myself. The glade’s trees were growing, stretching higher and higher, their branches spreading toward one another overhead. Where they met in the center, they laced together under the glittering night sky. Smaller saplings struggled up from the moss between the larger trees to seal the gaps, putting forth trembling new leaves already resplendent in autumn colors. All of this happened nearly noiselessly, with only a quiet creaking, groaning, and snapping of expanding wood to mark the change.
It was as though I had watched the glade age a century in a matter of seconds. But no glade would age like this naturally: I stood in an open space in which the trees spread around and above me like a cathedral. Their branches were so tightly interwoven they resembled flying buttresses; no amount of craftsmanship could capture the majesty or wonder of this living antechamber. Looking straight up left me dizzy. Scarlet leaves drifted from the silent heights, passing through shafts of moonlight on their way down.
I whirled around. “Your blood did this.”
Rook stood watching me, a conflicting clamor of emotions in his eyes: fascination observing my human response. Hope that I would find what he had created beautiful. And beneath that, sorrow, as raw as an open wound.
Desperation flashed across his features. He struggled to compose himself, but couldn’t. Finally he turned on his heel and put his back to me with a dramatic billow of his coattails, drew his sword a few inches, and pretended to inspect the blade.
“You’ll be safe here tonight,” he said imperiously. “The Hunt won’t be able to sniff us out in a rowan glade, and even if Hemlock did chance upon this place by accident, no fairy beast, no fair one alive could breach the magic I have just wrought.”
The knowledge that he was only telling the bare, unembellished truth made the breath catch in my throat. He was arrogant verging on insufferable, but god—the power he possessed. And here he was, as confused as a child by his own emotions, dragging me to trial over a painting. I couldn’t believe that just that morning I thought I’d been in love with him. I shook my head. Incredible.
“Ten thousand verging on five years old,” I muttered to myself, testing the ground with my shoe.
“What did you say?” Rook inquired frostily.
Of course fair folk had impeccable hearing. “Nothing.”
“You did say something, but whatever it was, I’m certain it’s beneath me.” He slid his sword back in with a snap. “Now lie down and get some rest. We begin again at sunrise.”
Loath as I was to follow orders, I wouldn’t do myself any good staying awake out of sheer stubbornness. I wandered around the glade until I found a lump in the moss I could put my back against—an engulfed tree stump, I thought—and curled up on my side facing Rook, who remained standing, facing away. I worked my ring back onto my finger, grateful to have at least some measure of protection, however small. But now I faced a different problem. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to sleep.
Emma and the twins probably hadn’t noticed I was gone. They would in the morning, when they found my bed empty. What would Emma do? She’d given everything up to raise me. She’d promised on my father’s deathbed to take care of me. And now I’d vanished in the night without a word. Unless I was very lucky, and very clever (I had to remain honest about my odds), she’d never know what had happened to me. She’d wait for me forever. It seemed too cruel to bear.
She had enchanted chickens guaranteed to each lay six eggs a week, I reminded myself. A cord of firewood magically appeared outside the house every other month. Another fair one delivered a fat goose once per fortnight; and oddly, due to an awkwardly worded agreement, a pile of exactly fifty-seven walnuts materialized on the doorstep whenever a thrush sang in our oak tree. The twins would give her trouble, but she’d be all right. Wouldn’t she?
Several paces away, Rook had finally sat down. He sat elegantly with one arm propped up on his knee. Perhaps he knew I was watching and arranged himself in his handsomest pose accordingly. No—he thought I was asleep. Somehow I knew this to be the case, because he’d taken off his raven pin and was turning it over in his hands. Beyond him the scarlet leaves continued sifting down through the moonlight, like rose petals illuminated by silvered stained glass.
Heartsick, I wondered if Emma would think I’d run off with him on purpose. Just hours ago she had proven how well she knew me. If that was the case, she had to realize that no matter how wary I was of fair folk, I’d wanted to see Rook again more than anything else in the world. Maybe she’d be tortured forever by the possibility that her regretful words had encouraged me to run away. That I’d decided taking care of my family was a burden after all, and I’d abandoned her and the twins without bothering to say good-bye.
It occurred to me then that my imagination was conjuring up increasingly unrealistic, maudlin scenarios, but wallowing neck-deep in misery, I was powerless to stop it from happening. I thought of Emma taking too much of her tincture and collapsing. I thought of the twins going through my room, searching for any sign of where I’d gone, and finding Rook’s drawings in my closet. A hot tear spilled over. I breathed through my mouth so Rook wouldn’t hear me snuffling through my clogged nose. Eventually, I cried myself to exhaustion. My eyelashes drooped and my vision blurred. I didn’t remember falling asleep.
When I woke up, everything was golden. The light caressing my face was golden, and the warmth was golden too. I felt like I was suspended in honey or amber. An autumn fragrance surrounded me, engulfed me, underlain with a wild, masculine but not-quite-human smell that at once comforted me and settled like molten gold deep in my body, melted and poured into a crucible.
Also, someone was combing my hair with his fingers.
“Stop that!” I cried, bolting upright in alarm. Rook’s coat fell from my shoulders and I cast around until I found him behind me, wearing a self-satisfied smile. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“You have a few twigs left in your hair,” he said, and reached toward me again.
I intercepted his hand with my own ring-wearing one, or at least tried to, because he was up like a shot before I managed it, glaring down at me.
“Rook,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, “before I get up, you have to promise to never touch me again without my permission.”
“I can touch whomever I please.”
“Have you ever stopped to think that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should?”
His eyes narrowed. “No,” he said.
“Well, this is one of those things.” I saw he didn’t understand. “Among humans it’s considered polite,” I added firmly.
A muscle jumped in his cheek, and his smile had faded. “Well, that doesn’t sound in the least reasonable. What if you were being attacked, and I had to touch you to save your life, but I couldn’t because I needed to request your permission first? Letting you die wouldn’t be polite.”
“Fine. You can touch me in that case, but every other time you need to ask.”
“And why do you suppose I shall agree to your absurd mortal demands?” Peevishly, he snatched his coat from me and flung it back on himself without bothering to put his arms through the sleeves.
“Because I can make your life miserable all the way to the autumn court, and you know it,” I replied.
He stalked off across the glade. I got the feeling he needed to throw a tantrum before giving in. Sure enough, he soon returned with a stormy expression as the land changed all around him. The moss wilted brown while thorny brambles erupted forth at his heels, grasping like fingers until they grew into an eldritch-looking tangle as high as my waist. I hadn’t expected something quite so dramatic: each thorn was as long as my finger, so sharp it glistened in the morning light. All my instincts shrieked at me to get up and run before they reached me. But that was the reaction Rook wanted, so I remained where I sat.
The brambles writhed up all around my body, stretching crooked, twitching tendrils toward my clothes. Their thorns rattled together threateningly. I gave them a stern look. I knew a bluff when I saw one. Eventually the brambles subsided, rather sulkily, and froze in place. Rook stood over me encased within his bramble sea in a white-lipped state of high dudgeon, the final proof that I had won.
“Well?” I asked.
“I give my word that I will never touch you without your permission, except if I need to spare you from harm,” he declared. To his credit he said it in a regal tone, with none of the petulance I expected.
I sighed in relief. “Thank you, Rook.”
“You’re welcome,” he said automatically, and frowned. This was like bowing; he had to respond to common courtesies whether he liked it or not. He recovered from the indignity by flinging his arm out theatrically. Two of the trees hiked up their roots and shuffled aside, in a rather hasty, anxious way, as though they were a pair of bewildered matrons at whom he’d just hurled a billiard ball. Their bent trunks formed a new archway to the forest beyond.
“Hurry along, then.” He swept toward the archway. A leftover root whisked solicitously out of his path. “Not only do I expect your little mortal legs will cover a disappointing amount of ground, we’re already an hour delayed.”
And whose fault is that? I thought.
However, as I crunched after him through the brambles, which disintegrated at a touch, my eyes fell on the neat pile of twigs and leaves he had taken from my hair—and despite myself I smiled.
We passed slender, white-barked birches, their yellow leaves shimmering and clattering like gold coins in the breeze. We passed stony brooks that wended between hillocks of moss, their water the color of milk with snowmelt. We passed ash trees that had shed half their foliage at once, pooled about their roots as a maiden might drop a shift. A stag and doe paused to watch us go by before they leapt away through the light-filled mist, casting their shadows against the air like a paper screen.
The first unpleasant landmark we came to was a riven oak. It had been struck by lightning sometime long ago, and sections of its trunk were charred black, the bark raised and glittering with beads of hardened sap. A few brown leaves still clung to its lower branches. Rook stopped to examine it. It looked out of place among the birches, watchful, malevolent. A prickle of unease warned me to keep my distance.
“Is that an entrance to a fairy path?” I asked, crunching along parallel to it.
He spared me a glance and resumed walking. “Yes. But we won’t travel that way.”
“You can’t bring humans on them?”
“Oh, we certainly can. I merely find it inadvisable.”
By that he could mean anything. Perhaps the effort would be a drain on his power, or it would alert the wrong fair folk to our presence. He didn’t seem open to further questions, and I didn’t see how learning more might help my cause, so I didn’t bother asking.
Midday came and went. The sun shimmered through the leaves, freckling the ground in dappled patterns I would have found captivating if I’d been less preoccupied by my growing discomfort. My thighs and buttocks ached from last night’s ride. I was dirty; I had mud all over my legs, and my skirts were stiff with burs and dried horse sweat. I knew for a fact I smelled abominable. And god, I was starving.
Meanwhile Rook looked exactly as he had when he’d come to fetch me the night before. His boots shone and not a single wrinkle marred his coat. The only thing disheveled was his hair, but that didn’t count, since it always looked that way.
We arrived at a long embankment descending into a ravine. Rook descended gracefully as I shuffled and skidded through the leaf litter until I finally considered the possibility of giving up and sliding down on my rear. While I frowned at the ground, Rook’s hand extended into my field of vision. I didn’t want his help, but it was better than making a fool of myself, so I placed my fingers in his. We seemed able to touch each other without a word as long as I was the one who initiated it.
His skin was cool and his grip deceptively light. He helped me down the embankment and back up the hill on the other side as though I weighed no more than a feather. My stomach rumbled when we crested the top. To my dismay it wasn’t an ordinary rumble, either: my innards summoned forth a booming growl, followed by a series of long, drawn-out squeals.
Rook started back in alarm. Then, catching on to my condition, he gave me a knowing smile. Which was interesting—most fair folk didn’t understand the concept of human hunger, not truly. And earlier, he’d spoken as if he’d already tried taking a human on the fairy paths himself. Had he traveled with a human before?
Honestly, I should have suspected even earlier. He had human sorrow in his eyes, after all, and there was only one way he could have learned it.
“I haven’t eaten since supper yesterday,” I said when my stomach finally, mercifully went quiet. “I don’t think I can go on much longer without food.”
“Only yesterday?”
“I assure you, most humans aren’t accustomed to going a full day without a meal.” He continued looking deeply skeptical, so I added in a steadfast tone, “I’m feeling quite poorly. In fact, I can’t take another step. If I don’t eat soon, I may die.”
His hair practically stood on end. I almost felt bad for him. “Stay here,” he said urgently, and vanished. The leaves he’d been standing on eddied as though stirred by a draft.
I looked around. My stomach somersaulted, and my mouth went dry. The sparse, mossy undergrowth afforded a clear view into the far distance. I saw no tall figure, no raven winging through the forest. Rook truly did appear to be gone.
Run, I thought. But trying to urge my feet to move was like being four years old again, shifting at the foot of my mother’s bed after a nightmare, unable to speak a word to wake her. The forest slumbered too. How easily would I draw its attention, and was I really prepared for that nightmare?
As it turned out I needn’t have even bothered thinking about it. Something thumped into the leaves behind me, and I turned to find Rook standing over a dead hare.
“Go on,” he said when I didn’t move, glancing between me and the animal.
I shuffled forward and picked it up by the scruff of its neck. It was still warm, and watched me with its shiny black eyes. “Um,” I said.
“Is there something wrong with it?” His expression became guarded.
I was ravenous. I was sore. I was terrified. And yet looking at Rook I imagined a cat proudly bringing its master dead chipmunks, only to watch the two-legged oaf lift these priceless gifts by the tail and fling them unceremoniously into the bushes. Before I knew it I’d dissolved into laughter.
Rook shifted, torn between uneasiness and anger. “What?” he demanded.
I sank to my knees, the hare on my lap, gulping in air.
“Stop that.” Rook looked around, as if concerned someone might witness him mismanaging his human. I howled even louder. “Isobel, you simply must control yourself.”
He might have traveled with humans, but he most assuredly hadn’t dined with us.
“Rook!” I half-wailed his name. “I can’t just eat a rabbit!”
“I don’t see why not.”
“It’s—it needs to be cooked!”
For an instant, before he slammed the door shut on his expression, horror and confusion gripped him. “You mean to say you can’t eat anything at all without using Craft on it first?”
I took a shuddering breath, calming down, but knew I’d go off again at the slightest provocation. “We can eat fruit as it is, and most nuts and vegetables. But everything else, yes.”
“How can this be,” he said to himself quietly. That was all it took; I gave a strangled sob. He crouched and scrutinized my face, which I’m sure at that moment looked anything but attractive. “What do you require?”
“A fire, to start with. Some . . . some branches to make a spit out of, I suppose. Or maybe we could cut it up and skewer it? I’ve never cooked a rabbit outdoors before.” I might as well have started reciting an incantation. “Wood,” I revised for him. “Some kindling about this size”—I spread my hands—“and a long, thin, sturdy stick with a pointy end.”
“Very well.” He rose. “I will bring you your sticks.”
“Wait,” I said, before he could vanish again. I held up the hare. He tensed. “Can you skin this for me? You know, remove the fur? And it needs to be in pieces, too. I can’t do any of that without a knife.”
“How very mortal you are,” he said disdainfully, and seized the hare from my hand.
“Oh, and take the insides out first, please,” I added, undeterred.
He halted just as he was about to disappear, shoulders stiff. “Will that be all?”
A devilish part of me wondered how far I could push him. If I pretended it was necessary for my Craft, could I command him to stand on his head or turn in a circle three times while he prepared the hare? Only my empty stomach’s increasingly urgent demands prevented me from having some fun at his expense. “For now,” I replied.
Less than twenty minutes later we sat in front of a badly smoking fire, which had seemed hopeless until Rook tired of watching me rub two twigs together and set the kindling ablaze with a flick of his long fingers. He cast impatient glances at the sun while I turned a haunch (at least I think that’s what it was—fair folk weren’t scrupulous butchers, as it turned out) over the flames. Grease dripped from the meat, hissing when it struck the smoldering wood. My mouth watered, and I tried not to dwell on the likelihood that under better circumstances, I would find the odor rank rather than appetizing. I’d never known rabbit to smell quite like this. But as long as I kept charring it by accident, at least it probably wouldn’t make me sick.
Waiting for me to finish, Rook gave his seventh dramatic sigh. I’d started counting.
“You give it a try, if you’re so bored,” I said, handing over the skewer. He took it between his thumb and forefinger. After examining the meat, turning it to and fro, he flippantly lowered it toward the fire.
Instantly, a change came over him. At first I thought he had spied something awful in the forest behind me, and I jerked around with my skin crawling. There was nothing there. Yet he still wore the same expression: his eyes wide and stricken, his features utterly still, as if he’d just received news of someone’s death, or was dying himself. It was terrible in a way I cannot describe. I’ve painted a thousand faces and never seen such a look.
What was happening? I scrabbled for an answer until I realized—Craft. We could transmute substances as easily as we breathed, but for fair folk, such creation did not exist. It was so contrary to their nature it had the power to destroy them. Astonishingly, even something as simple as roasting a hare over an open flame seemed to count as Craft according to whatever force governed his kind.
No more than a second or two had elapsed before Rook’s glamour began flaking away like old paint, revealing his true form, but not the way I remembered it. His skin was desiccated and gray, his eyes fading to lifelessness. It was as though I watched lights go out within him one by one, dimming with every heartbeat.
And I knew that if I did nothing, in another moment he’d be gone.
I would be free. I could escape—or at least try. But I thought of the forest cathedral, the scarlet leaves sifting down in silence. The look on his face when he’d transformed into a raven in my parlor. The smell of change on the wild wind, and the way he had let me turn his head, his eyes on mine full of sorrow. All those wonders crumbling to dust, without a trace of them left in the world.
So I lunged across the fire and tore the stick from his hands.