Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3)

12th January—Late

12th January—late

I arrived in County Leane after sundown, my last train having been delayed. With nothing to occupy meon the carriage ride to Corbann but my grandfather’s journal—or, rather, with plenty to occupy me, all of it worrying—I spent the time perusing its contents, reading the last entry first and then moving backwards to the beginning. I am not entirely certain why I did so, only that the idea of reading it sequentially made me uneasy. I suppose that when the ending is so unpleasant, one does not wish to leave it looming. I need not have feared, however, for it is as Farris said: my grandfather’s last entry merely describes a night of dancing and feasting, one of many he experienced among the Folk. He never recorded his abandonment, or anything that came after. The last words he wrote: To-morrow I shall walk down to the sea .

Interestingly, there is no point at which he chooses to run off with the woman in Exmoor—one day he encounters her bathing in a stream; the next, he is taking tea with her. After that comes a series of impossible banquets under the stars, complicated dances amongst the night mists whose patterns he can never remember afterwards, and nonsensical conversations with various Folk, all described in his ordinary, matter-of-fact tone, as if he were recounting a visit to the post office. Occasionally he mentions a mysterious “she” whom he describes as “beauty incarnate,” “ethereal wanderer,” and other fawning terms. But then in the next sentence he is looking forward to telling his wife about the “wondrous cakes” served at dinner, or to writing to Farris to tell him of some strange species of common fae he encountered. I think it likely that he was unconscious of the danger he was in.

I was not able to make sense of it all in the time I had, as the shorthand he employed is difficult. Also—need it be said?—it is an unsettling thing to read. I know Farris meant for me to be unsettled by it, which only increases my resentment. I threw the journal down several times, only to pick it up again, helplessly drawn in by the unfolding tragedy, the unanswered questions, and the uncanny echoes of myself. It was not just our handwriting or initials. My grandfather was as obsessive about his research as I, and seemed as skilled at giving offence. He was even quarrelling with a librarian!

Madame S— can write me all the letters she desires, he wrote at one point. I am not returning it until I have finished my research. Where is the need? Not one person borrowed it in over three years—Iconsulted the catalogue. That she would threaten to send the county sheriff after me! As if she does not have better things to do. Well, let her try to find me here. Ha!

I never did learn which book he was so determined to keep.

My first thought upon my arrival in Corbann was to return immediately to Wendell’s realm through the stepping-stone door; however, I could not pass by Lilja and Margret’s cottage without stopping to greet them. They invited me in to supper, so curious about my visit to Trinity that their enthusiasm was like a current sweeping me along, and I wondered how I could excuse myself.

Fortunately, before I had time to worry about it, there came a knock at the door, and there was Wendell, looking eager and impatient. I was so relieved to see him, alive and well and not somehow overcome by his stepmother’s curse in my absence, that when he stepped towards me, I beat him to it, flinging my arms around him and nearly knocking him over on the doorstep.

“Emily!” he exclaimed, laughing. “This is only the second time I can recall that you have greeted me with enthusiasm. Are you well?”

“Good grief,” I said, glowering to cover my embarrassment at my display. “Surely second is an exaggeration.”

“Now, that is a look I am more familiar with.” He placed a finger beneath my chin and tilted it up, then kissed me softly.

“Are you going to stand there letting in the cold, or are you staying for dinner?” Margret called from the kitchen, grinning at us and not looking at all embarrassed to be interrupting. Lilja wore a smile too, though hers was more guarded.

“Only if you will allow me to assist,” Wendell called back gallantly. He swept inside, as merry as I’d ever seen him—and, I thought, relieved, as if this were a welcome respite from something unpleasant.

That sent a shiver through me. What had he left out of his letters?

“Wendell?” I said, but he was already storming about, scooping up plates and cutlery. Shadow awoke with a snort and promptly leapt all over Wendell, and he paused to pet and coddle the dog into submission before helping Lilja set the table.

Supper was a noisy affair, for Margret likes to talk almost as much as Wendell when in familiar company, and Shadow was delighted by the presence of so many of those he loved, and snuffled up to each of us by turns, whining excitedly. Wendell was off on one tangent after another, mostly amusing stories about Folk he had known in his youth who were, apparently, still getting themselves into a variety of adolescent troubles, including one individual who had made herself so drunk one night that, on a dare, she cast an enchantment upon herself that turned her into a patch of lichen whenever she sneezed. I did not volunteer to explain my findings at Trinity, nor did Wendell mention his stepmother’s curse, and nobody asked; we had all made an unspoken agreement to speak only of lighter things.

I had little appetite, which Wendell must have noticed, for he did not tarry after the plates were empty, as he would ordinarily have done, but made our excuses and offered to clean the kitchen before we departed. Margret chased after him with a dish rag, good-naturedly protesting this indulgence—which, I sensed from the despairing look Wendell had given the moderately disordered countertops, was less an indulgence than a necessity on his part. Shadow trailed after, for this was also the route the plates with their scraps had taken, and Lilja and I were left alone.

“Would you care to see my carvings now?” Lilja said, and I agreed. She took me to the little workspace she had created at the back of the cottage, a long table facing a window with a view of the waterfall, its glass damp from the mist. Upon the table was a pile of untouched wood as well as a series of carved figures in varying stages of completion. A hobby from her youth, she had told us, which she had not had time to practice until now.

“But these are marvellous!” I said with perfect sincerity. My eye was drawn first to the raven, an intricate construction of proud beak, talons, and windswept feathers, before I noticed she seemed to be attempting to conceal something from me.

“Is that—?” I began, astonished. Laughing, she handed me the carving.

“It’s not finished,” she said. “I forgot to put it away. I was hoping to surprise you with it.”

I was holding a life-sized carving of Poe—or the top half of him, at any rate; the rest was unworked wood. His face was rough but recognizable, skeletal with a great deal of teeth. Somehow, in its roughness, Lilja had managed to suggest something of Poe’s ethereal quality, the sense that he is both here and not here. She had made a start on his needle fingers, several deep scores in the wood as long as his arms.

“I will admit,” she said, “I am not as fond of the creature as you are. Much as I wish it were different, I cannot stop having nightmares about him! And I am always worried he will accidentally slice off one of my toes and not even notice.”

I laughed and set the carving down. How I miss Poe! He gave me a key so that I might visit him, but it is a magic that works only in lands where winter is more at home than it is in Ireland.

Lilja showed me the rest of the carvings, which were also very fine, though she claimed each needed various improvements. Watching her, I realized it was not my imagination—she was distracted, but whether this pertained to myself or something else entirely, I couldn’t have said. Ordinarily I attempt to suppress the impulse to be blunt, but Lilja does not take offence to me. “I think you are upset,” I said. “I would like to know what has caused it.”

She gave a small laugh. “Oh dear! I’m sorry, Emily. I have been trying to find the words, but—I’m afraid I would be interfering where I shouldn’t.”

“You needn’t worry,” I said. “I am not the best judge of the bounds of friendship; therefore you are unlikely to overstep with me. You are concerned for my safety—is that it?”

She looked troubled. “That is putting it mildly. Dear Emily—you have taken one of their thrones. Can you truly not guess how worried I have been? Thora too, and Aud—she writes me weekly to ask for news of you.”

I felt relieved. Not to be having this conversation, but to know that I had not angered her somehow, or otherwise caused her to question our friendship. “You know that I am one of the foremost living experts on the ways of the Folk,” I said. I was not worried about bragging, for this was a simple statement of fact.

“That is the problem,” Lilja replied. “Yes, I know that you know the Folk, but there is a difference between knowing and feeling. Those of us who live among them would never trust the tall ones. For all you have read about and studied the Folk, you have never truly lived with them, dear. They are like—like nature. Can you understand the feeling of a winter night, or a spring wind, if you have only read about it?”

This was an uncomfortable echo of something Farris had said to me once. I pursed my lips and replied, “All right. Let us accept for the sake of argument that you possess a truer understanding of the Folk than I, that books and academic knowledge are secondary to lived experience. What then would you have me fear?”

She hesitated. “Power,” she said at last. “In our stories, it is the great ones—the lords and ladies, the monarchs and generals, that one must avoid above all else. They are the true monsters lurking in the night.”

This again! I thought. Aloud I said, “I have heard a similar opinion recently from another friend of mine, who seems to think Wendell will abandon me to die of exposure or some such, I suppose when he becomes tired of me.”

“Oh, no!” Lilja said. “That is not what I meant—I don’t believe for a second that Wendell would harm you. But I worry there will come a day when you no longer recognize him. And what hurt is worse than that?”

I could not reply to this. There was something in her gentle manner that sent a spear of panic through me that Farris’s words had not, much as he’d clearly been trying to make me uneasy. Somehow, it laid bare the many times I’d voiced a similar fear to myself, before immediately burying it beneath other things.

Lilja seemed to regret her words, which naturally only made them keener. “Don’t mind me,” she said quickly. “You are the best judge of your heart, and of his. I am your friend, but that does not make me all-knowing.”

She seemed upset, but I did not know how to correct this; the conversation had gone beyond my ability to navigate. I could only say, “I will think on what you have said.”

She nodded, and we went back to the carvings. A few moments later, we heard Wendell calling me, and made our way to the front door with Shadow. There we took our leave. Lilja, I thought, hugged me longer than she ordinarily did.

The night was cold, the wind tossing sheets of mist from the waterfall into our faces. Wendell and I crossed the stepping-stones, but I stumbled in surprise when we emerged into the Silva Lupi, nearly tripping over Shadow.

“Where are we?” This was not the castle; we stood in the forest, possibly near the royal gardens—the grass held a scattering of daisies, whose seeds drifted from their beds into the neighbouring woods.

Wendell grimaced and looked about him. “The door has returned to its original location. A number of enchantments have been going awry like that. My stepmother’s curse is spreading—this way.”

Shadow and I followed him through the trees—it was a deer trail, nothing more, but he widened it with a gesture, opening and then closing his hand. “I must tell you what I’ve discovered,” I said.

“Yes,” he said over his shoulder. “Momentarily, Em.”

I felt a flicker of annoyance that he had so little interest in my research. Did he assume I had failed? “But I’ve found a solution to your stepmother’s curse.”

“I know you have,” he said, a little question in his voice, as if wondering why I’d bother to state something so obvious. “But you will only have to tell the story again for Niamh, and my uncle, I suppose, so let us wait until we can summon them.”

I was mollified.

“Wait,” I said. “You were skeptical before about whether I might find an answer in the old stories.”

“Not really,” he said, sighing. “I only didn’t want you to go away. I never do, but I feel especially guilty in this circumstance. I thought I would be showing you everything my realm has to offer—the lakes, the gardens, the brightest and the darkest parts of the forest. I thought I would be summoning strange and terrible Folk to dance before you, or give you presents, while you scribbled away in your notebook…Instead, we are forced to contend with my stepmother’s treachery. I’m sorry.”

“You say that as if you have dragged me into something,” I said. I regretted the change from his good mood, and added, “I’ll have you know that I find all of this—your stepmother’s treachery included—fascinating. I am making good progress on my book.”

He laughed, and the forest around us seemed to brighten. “Read me some of it later, Em.”

The leaves rustled as some small creature, faerie or otherwise, made its way through the canopy. My attention was caught by a line of flickering lights drifting along the forest floor, parallel to our path—initially I thought they were fireflies, but upon closer inspection I saw that they were trooping fae the size of my thumbnail, each carrying a lantern. Warm hearthlight glimmered from knotholes in the trees, and occasionally I heard distant, rowdy voices, as from a packed tavern. The branches in this part of the forest, near to the castle, where the concentration of common fae was greatest, looked as if they were strung with innumerable glittering spiderwebs, but these were only the small bridges used by brownies and suchlike, which clinked softly like bells whenever one of the creatures dashed across, moving so quickly I saw only the bridge swaying afterwards.

Wendell stopped here and there to examine a tree, pressing a hand to those he thought sickly or dull-looking and unleashing a burst of new growth, while worrying aloud about the state of the cottage in Corbann. It seemed he had been much perturbed by the disarray he had seen—wood shavings from Lilja’s carvings scattered about, rugs left unshaken—and wondered if he should assign a few of the oíche sidhe to put things back in order. At least, I think that’s what he was on about—I was too busy admiring the forest, which at night is such a perfect match for my childhood fantasies of what a faerie forest should look like that it left me breathless.

“What is it?” Wendell said after I again failed to respond to one of his silly complaints with more than a hm!

“What is what?” I said peevishly. My annoyance was not directed at him in particular, only I was wearied from the long day of travel and talk, not to mention worrying. “I’m merely thinking. Why do you assume something is the matter?”

“Em,” he said, “I am quite accustomed to the cadence of your silences by now. I know the difference between thinking and brooding. You may hoard your misgivings in your usual dragonish manner if you wish, but I will work them out eventually, you know. Spare me the trouble?”

I eyed him sidelong. It seemed wrong to confide in him what Lilja had said—and yet, now that I thought about it, I no longer saw why. This was Wendell, not some wicked faerie in a story. So I told him all.

I did not know how he would react, but I certainly wasn’t expecting him to look pleased. “It’s a kindness that she shares her concerns with you,” he said. “Lilja is a good friend.”

“A kindness!” I repeated. “Is that really what you think? She is not much better than Farris, who thinks you will have me strung up in a tree.”

“Naturally she worries about my feelings for you,” Wendell said, passing his hand absently over the tall ferns that bordered the path. “Think of the source. Lilja suffered greatly at the hands of the Hidden Ones—it would be strange for her to trust me.”

I did not find this a satisfying answer, particularly given the disquiet Lilja’s words had aroused in me. “That is all you have to say? You yourself told me that you were worried the throne would change you. And it does seem true that, in many tales, power corrupts those Folk who wield it.” I did not mention my ambivalence regarding this interpretation, for it has always seemed to me more likely that power only draws out the amorality inherent in all Folk, giving it free rein, rather than instilling a preference for wickedness.

“Yes.” Wendell came to a stop, frowning as he rubbed at his hair. “I do wish you would allow me to give you my name. Then if one day I do turn into a vengeful monster, as my stepmother has—or that bloody ice king of yours, wasn’t he a terror!—you can simply speak one word, and I will be under your command, free to become whatever you want me to be. Would it not ease your worries?”

Well, how on earth was I supposed to respond to this? After blinking at him in silence for a moment, I said, “I would prefer you not to turn into a monster in the first place. One murderous fiancé is enough for me.”

“ More than enough,” Wendell said with such passionate resentment that I snorted with laughter. His expression changed as abruptly as sun breaking through cloud.

“Where would I be without you, Em?” he said. It was an old joke of ours, but it wasn’t a joke now, the way he said it. I did not reply, merely straightened the hair he had mussed, brushing it back into place. He took my hand and we kept going. Soon, the castle came into view—its light was visible first, a glow that silhouetted the nearby trees. Wendell stilled.

“What?” I said, instantly on my guard.

“It wasn’t here when I left,” Wendell murmured.

“ What? ” I repeated.

He hurried forward, and I followed him, Shadow giving a huff of displeasure at the length of this walk, when by rights he should have been abed already. It was several moments before the trees thinned enough that I could see what Wendell did.

In the forest behind the castle, stretching all the way to the brow of the hill, and laterally for as much as an acre, perhaps, was the same dark mist we had seen in the yew grove. The trees seemed shrunken and indistinct, and the silver bridges that draped this part of the forest, crowded with common fae, had vanished entirely.

What was more, the curse had consumed part of the castle grounds. At least two of the gazebos had been reduced to dark, skeletal things, like slashes of ink put to canvas by an impatient artist. The path that had led to the Monarchs’ Grove was gone—and was the Grove as well? I couldn’t be certain.

“The gardens,” Wendell murmured.

“What is the extent of it?” I said. My voice was shaking. “Is it growing?”

“I don’t know.”

I took his hand before he could fly into a temper—violence would not serve us now; there was nowhere to direct it.

We needed to find the queen.

“Let us see for ourselves,” I said. “Quickly.”