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

18th January—Late

18th January—late

Night has fallen, bringing with it a gentle scatter of rain. I do not mind the rain here, at least not anymore, for Wendell has woven some new enchantment into my poor old cloak that renders it impervious not only to rain but to damp, so that I am untroubled by either sweat or condensation. I sometimes picture the garment as an overstuffed couch, liable to burst at the seams if yet another enchantment is crammed into it.

The Gap of Wick lies in the hinterlands of Wendell’s realm, rather like the nexus used by the fauns, but farther to the north, where the Blue Hook mountains cluster together in a confusing topography of peaks and escarpments. No barrows lead there, but Orga found us several shortcuts—I believe she knows Wendell’s realm better than anyone, including its king—doors within Faerie through various groves and standing stones, which cut the distance in half. Thus we will only need to spend tonight out-of-doors; tomorrow we will make haste for the queen’s hideout, and put an end to her.

If the creature did not deceive us. If the other clues we have gathered prove true.

If I am not leading Wendell to his doom.

I brought my grandfather’s journal with me on our journey— I am not certain why. I feel uneasy whenever I open the thing, and it is not as if I do not already have enough to be uneasy about.

As I have been unable to ignore the parallels between my grandfather and me, so too do I find myself seeing echoes of Wendell in my grandfather’s mysterious “she.” Like Wendell, “she” is golden-haired, her tresses impossibly soft, more like the fur of some delicate animal. She is vengeful in a way that puts me in mind of the Macan story; any and all who offend her are slain. When angered, she becomes a “storm of wrath” and cannot be reasoned with.

My skin prickles when I come to this part.

So many have died by her hand that she is haunted by avenging ghosts wherever she goes, my grandfather writes, quite conversationally. So familiar is she with Death that she has seen its door, felt its wintry chill. She can kill so swiftly that her enemy has no knowledge of what has befallen them, or so slowly they feel as if they have died a dozen times before the end comes.

He carries on in this disturbingly poetical vein for several paragraphs, complimenting his dearest’s murderous temper with the same warmth as his praise for her golden tresses. This “she” is violent; unfathomable; capricious.

No, she is not like Wendell. But are they entirely unalike?

—

The Gap of Wick is a pass between two mountains, jagged and green with patches of bare sandstone, their peaks shrouded in cloud. The surrounding countryside is open, with only a few groves of yew scattered here and there, and most of these contain several attentive oaks, as if the ghastly things also enjoy the isolation. It is a desolate place that feels less empty than forgotten. A great many standing stones dot the landscape, some singular, others running in parallel lines. It is unusual for a boggart to choose such a place to settle; most of their ilk crave companionship.

The clouds parted ahead, revealing a stone tower atop the nearest foothill. It was tall with a tessellated roof and an odd miscellany of windows, and the lowest floor was an open courtyard with immense arches of no architectural period I could recognize. If I gazed at it long enough, the structure seemed to shift slightly.

“We’ll need to walk from here,” Wendell said, swinging down from his enormous horse. With us we had brought only Lord Taran and two guards, and they followed his lead, leaving their mounts to browse the heather. I reluctantly dismounted Red Wind—while I am still half in terror of the creature, I have grown to appreciate her smooth pace over the course of our journey. I patted her nose and she rewarded me with a tremendous snort; my hand came away wet.

The ground was pockmarked with oddly-shaped holes. They were cut vertically into the lumpy ground, and sloped down into blackness. More worryingly, the turf was scattered with bones—animal, I hoped. I could make out a number of whitish lumps in the distance that I took for sheep, though there were no farmsteads in the vicinity.

“Bogles,” Wendell explained. “They’ve made tunnels beneath the heather. Bloody pests! And look, there is a door to the mortal realm over there.” He pointed to a tall standing stone like a jagged fang, which was bent at a strange angle.

“Their visit to Faerie was of short duration,” Lord Taran said, eyeing the bones.

I was aghast. “These are all human remains?”

“So it appears,” Lord Taran said. To my surprise, he looked irritated by the sight—hardly the appropriate response to murder, but incongruous with my perception of him.

“The bogles will not trouble us,” Wendell said. With that, he unsheathed his sword and stomped up the hill. I half expected him to start slashing at bogles left and right, but instead he simply tapped on the ground with the tip as he went, like someone politely knocking at a door. This had the opposite effect of knocking, however; not one bogle emerged. Indeed, as I followed him up the hill, I heard several soft clicks and creaks, as of small doors closing, and caught the occasional glimpse of a little hunching figure with long, grabby arms disappearing into the landscape like some form of scuttling insect. There was something uncanny about the creatures that put me in mind of the tree fauns, or the sheerie Wendell and I fought last year, and I was happy not to get a good look at them, though less than pleased to be tramping about inches from those grasping limbs.

“Bloody mountains!” Wendell exclaimed after we had been hiking uphill for perhaps forty-five seconds. “I had my fill of them in the Alps. Well, we are in my realm, so I may do as I like with the tedious things.”

Before I could ask what this meant, Wendell made a gesture that was like patting an invisible dog. I felt absolutely nothing, but the wind lessened. I thought this was all he had done, until I looked up and found the tower immediately before us. The foothill we had been ascending now barely deserved the name, and was little more than a rise in the landscape.

“The boggart may not thank you for that,” I said, in my usual attempt at nonchalance in the face of his impossible power.

Wendell made a face. “I would not thank him for my sore ankles. If he likes mountains so much, he can relocate to some godforsaken, glacier-infested height. Wait out here,” he added to the guards, then he wandered through one of the arches, gazing about himself like a tourist. Even after what I had just seen, I had to tamp down an urge to caution him, for this was a boggart we were about to confront, not some household brownie. [*] Lord Taran grimaced and followed more slowly, his sword drawn at his side, so at least one of them had some sense.

The courtyard was empty, just a lot of stones with moss and wildflowers growing between them, and a high ceiling where the wind groaned. I wondered if the upper stories of the tower were furnished, and then I thought, And what sort of furnishings does a bodiless entity require? Baths and wardrobes?

“Perhaps we should—knock?” I said dubiously.

“He knows we’re here,” Wendell said.

“He wants you to grovel, no doubt,” Lord Taran said. “A boggart’s arrogance knows no bounds; they fancy themselves above kings and queens.”

This was so rich that I actually snorted. Lord Taran gave me a narrow-eyed look.

“Grovel, hm?” Wendell said. “Well, it’s all one to me. But what manner of grovelling would such a creature prefer? I know.”

He lifted a hand, and the space was abruptly filled with silver mirrors, flashing from every wall, with some even set into the floor like tile.

“It’s just a glamour,” he said. “Pretty, though, isn’t it? What do you think? Too much?”

“A bit,” I said, eyeing my hundreds of reflections.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Lord Taran said, with a smirk in my direction. “You know, Your Highness, Callum and I had a great many mirrors at our reception—they are lovely as wedding décor.”

“Really?” Wendell said thoughtfully, and Taran went on to describe their placement and framing at length. I gritted my teeth and pointedly ignored him.

“ Stop that,” said the boggart. Because, abruptly, there was a boggart standing before us.

At least, I assumed he was a boggart. A boggart’s guises are so convincing that there is little to distinguish them from whatever creature they have counterfeited, apart from one thing: like my Shadow, they leave no footprints. The person before us appeared to belong to the courtly fae, but the longer I gazed at him, the more disturbed I grew. For he was not his own person, but an assemblage of Wendell’s and Lord Taran’s features—the one’s golden hair, the other’s sharp cheekbones—as well as some I eventually recognized in the faces of the guards standing outside. It was as if the boggart had been formless for so long he had forgotten the shapes he had once worn, and so, in a pinch, had borrowed from the faces he saw before him. Or perhaps that had always been his habit. I noticed he had not deigned to sample my features, surprising me not at all.

Wendell, either not noticing or not caring about this deeply unsettling form of appropriation, swept his cloak to one side in his usual dramatic fashion and bowed to the boggart. “Forgive me,” he said. “Only I thought you would appreciate a little adornment for your tower.”

“It’s a ruin,” the boggart said in a peevish voice that had a great deal of Lord Taran’s aristocratic tenor in it. “I like it that way. And I could not care less about silver—I am not of your realm.”

“As you wish,” Wendell said, and the mirrors vanished.

“As you say, you are not of my realm,” he went on. “So I cannot command you. But you have served my family for generations, as I understand it. And so I have come to beg a favour, placing my hopes in old loyalties.”

“Yes, yes,” the boggart said. “Let’s have a look at you, shallwe?”

He folded his arms and paced around Wendell, examining him from every angle with a frown, even bending to examine his knees from the back. At one point, the boggart brushed his golden hair from his eyes in a gesture that was so like Wendell’s that I felt briefly queasy.

“You have only grown more like your mother,” the boggart said at last, looking disappointed. “The first one. I did not care for either of your mothers. The first was a dull little thing, the second a clumsy half mortal. This queen seems no better.” He came closer to me, looking me up and down as a glint of mischief came into his eyes. “But mortals can be entertaining. And they do not break as easily as some think.”

Wendell’s expression went from one of bemusement to towering fury with such abruptness that both Taran and I fell back a step; Taran afterwards looked as annoyed as a cat following a moment of gracelessness. There came a terrible rumbling sound, coupled with that same wet rustling with which I am all too familiar, as if the attentive oaks were uprooting themselves en masse and lumbering in our direction.

“You are speaking to a queen of Faerie,” Wendell said, and it seemed as if the rustling leaves were in his voice. I suppressed the urge to take another step away from him.

I don’t know what would have happened next if the boggart had not backed down, but back down he did. He held up his hands and laughed.

“I see it now!” he cried. “Yes, yes, you are your great-grandmother all over again. I was terribly fond of her. In fact, she has always been my favourite. A pity her eldest son slew her when he grew tired of waiting for the throne. Ah, but I came to love him too.”

The bloody rumbling noise had stopped, but given Wendell’s expression, I still felt it prudent to interpose myself between him and the boggart. I tried to organize my scattered thoughts—I am well-read on the subject of boggarts, and have encountered them on two occasions myself, and thus I was not overly nervous to take the initiative in the conversation.

“You are indeed correct,” I said. “The king is like his great-grandmother in many ways.”

“Really?” The boggart looked even more delighted. “Does he have a fondness for iced pears? We would eat iced pears together on many an evening, the queen and I.”

I pretended to be astonished. “But there is nothing he likes better than iced pears! Unless it is music.”

Now, this was not exactly a stab in the dark, but I was betting on my understanding of boggarts, and their bone-deep yearning for kinship, to see me through.

“Music!” The boggart clapped his hands together, positively beaming. “Yes, yes! She delighted in her harpists in particular—she would often steal gifted mortals and keep them even after she tired of their songs, for she would have them killed and stuffed, then put on display with their instruments in their hands. She had quite the collection by the time she was overthrown.”

In retrospect, I am pleased with how quickly I recovered from this. “How—alike indeed,” I said.

The boggart continued to look Wendell up and down. I was relieved, though not overly surprised, to see that his murderous rage had vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and he was now watching me with amusement.

“Iced pears,” he murmured.

“Yes,” I said, giving him a pointed look. “Were you not rhapsodizing about them at tea the other day?”

He smiled. “I was, wasn’t I?”

“Very well,” the boggart said. “I shall help you on two conditions. The first: that I shall be allowed to return to the castle and live among you.”

I did not like this condition at all, but Wendell replied before I had the chance to. “Of course you shall,” he said. “You were always welcome. I understood you left of your own accord when my father was slain and his bloodline overthrown.”

I could see this was exactly the response the boggart had desired. “Well, one prefers to be invited,” he said primly.

Wendell inclined his head. The boggart was so pleased he dematerialized for a moment, and when he reappeared he looked more like Wendell—he was even wearing his clothes.

“The second,” the boggart said, “is that you hold a great banquet to mark my return. This banquet must have at least two dozen harpists, as well as cannons you will fire when I enter the castle. At midnight, there should be a procession of the court’s finest drayfoxes, all adorned in silver and jewels.”

“Good grief, but that’s a lot to remember,” Wendell said. “Very well, you will have your banquet. Once my stepmother is dead and the realm is healed. To do that—”

“Yes, I know,” the boggart said. Now that he had what he wanted, he seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. “You wish to know where she is. I can help you with one detail only: her hideaway is an island.”

“But we knew that already,” I interjected. “Because of the snails.” This wasn’t how the story went—the boggart was supposed to give us a different clue, not one we already had.

Wendell’s brow was furrowed. “How do you know this?”

The boggart burst out laughing, as if he’d been suppressing it before. “Your face!” he crowed as I glowered at him.

He disappeared for a moment, flitting through some crevice in the ceiling to the upper levels of the tower, and when he reappeared, he had a piece of fabric in his hand.

“The queen told the king that she liked to wander the realm,” he explained. “But she always came back smelling of the same thing: sedges and mossy stones. I knew she was sneaking away to some secret fortress. One day, she returned with a bloody knee—the queen was clumsy, as all mortals are. She bandaged it with this.”

“Sailcloth,” Wendell murmured. He showed it to Lord Taran, whose eyebrows shot up.

“Sailcloth?” I repeated, nearly beside myself with impatience.

Wendell turned towards me, but he seemed lost for words. Finally, he said, “This is from—one of the boats. Our boats. Uncle?”

“Yes,” Lord Taran said, handing the cloth to me. “Many of the nobility take to the lake on warm summer days.” He saw my blank stare and clarified, “Silverlily.”

“ What? ” I snatched at the cloth—it was of purest white, with tiny silver stitchery. “How is that possible?”

The boggart began to laugh again. “Under your nose!” he crowed. “All this time, right under your nose. Oh, I begin to like your mother a little better.”

“But—the first clue. The snails. Silverlily has no islands,” I protested, angry and indignant. It could not be. Surely I would have worked it out by now, if Queen Arna was hiding on the bloody lake. The lake I had been gazing out at each day, furrowing my brow, expending all of my mental energies searching for hidden clues to her whereabouts.

“True,” Lord Taran said. “And yet, the creature must be correct—that is where we shall find her.”

Wendell, characteristically untroubled by paradoxes, clenched the sailcloth in his fist and bowed to the boggart again. “Many thanks, old one,” he said. It was difficult to read his reaction: anticipation, certainly, and something else I couldn’t name, but that was very near to the fury he had shown earlier, honed to a point sharp as a faun’s horn.

“So long as I have my banquet,” the boggart said, and then he was simply gone.

“Wendell,” I said, because I still couldn’t tell what he was feeling, and it made me nervous. He appeared lost in thought and didn’t reply, simply put his arm around my waist, and we left the tower.

I had to suppress a scream when we stepped outside, for there was an oak not five feet from the door now, glaring at me, and three more beyond it in the garden. Oh, how I had hoped I had mistaken that rumbling noise.

Lord Taran, behind me, was muttering curses under his breath. He drew his hood over his hair and gave the oak a black look. “Hurry up,” he muttered at me, and together we made haste to pass beneath the overhanging branches and regain the sunlight.

Skip Notes

* The scientific debate over the classification of boggarts has raged for decades. At present, the most widely accepted systems place them with the common fae, though many among the younger and more forward-thinking generation of dryadologists contest this, with Louis Meyers proposing an alternative system that classes both boggarts and Faeroese hessefolk with the courtly fae. Consider that the primary distinction between courtly and common is one of appearance: courtly fae can pass for mortals, while brownies and trooping faeries cannot. Yet most dryadologists also accept that the courtly fae possess magics the small Folk lack, and here we arrive at the crux of the debate, for boggarts are immensely powerful. Though the true limits of their magics are unknown, the Balfour boggart once relocated an entire village, while the rival boggarts in the medieval Falkirk tale “The Blind Hens” performed various escalating feats, including making a forest burst into song, the sound of which could be heard all the way to Glasgow. I know of not one bogle or brownie who has ever cast an enchantment of a similar scale. Indeed, Meyers argues that a boggart’s powers may equal those of some faerie kings and queens, and that they should be considered “free-ranging monarchs.” Given this, and the fact that boggarts may assume mortal guises when they choose, and often do, it seems self-evident to place them among the courtly fae. And yet! They are in nature very close to household brownies, given their attachment to mortal (or, in some cases, faerie) families, which they hold very dear and will protect with their lives. In this I am reminded of Poe and the Ljosland brownie concept of fjolskylda .

Amidst these complexities, our classification systems begin to feel outdated and parochial. Thus boggarts are another example of the blurred boundaries that exist between the Folk, much as we scholars try to herd them into tidy categories.