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

12th February

It’s difficult to know precisely how long I spent in the Veil—certainly it seemed no more than an hour. But when I returned it was nearing twilight, which did not surprise me. I could see it was the same day, for a few tiny embers still lurked below the burnt wood of my campfire. The door to the Veil had vanished, and the grove was empty—the Hidden king had not bothered to wait for me, which was a relief. Most likely he assumed I was dead, but it was also possible that he simply was not interested enough in the outcome to trouble himself. After all, I had promised to return to him once I’d done away with Wendell, and what reason did he have to doubt me? He’d swallowed the story of my undying love for him.

Well! I do not think I shall be able to return to Ljosland, for I do not see him forgiving me a second time.

My exhaustion was beyond comprehension, and I could scarcely manage to build a fire. Arna lay insensible in the snow; I constructed the fire close to where she lay, left a little cup of melted snow beside her, draped her in a blanket from the tent, and hoped for the best. Then I staggered into the tent with Shadow and was asleep before my head touched my pallet.

Should I have been more concerned that Wendell’s stepmother would murder me as I slept? I don’t think so. Not only on account of her weakened state, but because she had nothing to gain by my death, and everything to lose should Wendell learn of what she had done. He had proven himself greater than she, for he could control the Veil, and she could not. I did not believe she would be in a hurry to return to the place.

Such bloodless calculations concerning my physical safety in the company of a vengeful faerie queen had not pleased Lilja and Margret when I described them before I left, but they were enough for me, and my sleep was untroubled.

My stomach woke me sometime before dawn, growling ferociously. I devoured half of Poe’s cakes and all my remaining water, then scribbled out the previous journal entry—yes, I am aware that making this a priority might sound strange. But I was in such scholarly terror of forgetting anything I had seen that I knew I would not sleep easy until I had written it down. I believe I fell asleep again with the pen in my hand. Oh, how Wendell would mock me if he knew! And yet I have so many ideas for the papers I will write about Dark Faerie, as I have decided to call it—indeed, I could write a book on the subject! That the Folk are in such terror of the place makes it inherently fascinating, and yet, now that I have ventured there, I am not convinced there is anything particularly exceptional about it. In fact, one of the O’Donnell brothers’ stories speaks of a faerie realm where it is always night, inhabited by monstrous Folk. As do several Russian tales—the names escape me at present—and one from the Welsh Marches.

Lord, I am rambling. The papers can wait—for now.

When I woke again, it was late morning, and Shadow was still asleep at my side, snoring lightly. It was a fine Ljosland day: the sun was out, setting little jewels of light amidst the snow, and the wind was still, the boughs quiescent. I found the old queen awake, but lying in a heap beneath her blanket. She had added wood to the fire at least once in the night, for it still flickered.

“We must return to the door,” I said, and explained to her about Poe and the key he’d given me. She made no reply, but pushed herself upright and sat looking very small and forlorn, as well as younger than she’d seemed to me before, at the height of her power—only a few years older than I. I couldn’t tell if she was in shock or contemplating some foolhardy plot to escape.

I returned to the tent to rouse Shadow, and was terrified to find that he would not wake immediately. I had to shake him several times, murmuring his name and rubbing at his ears in the way he liked, my voice increasingly desperate, because while I had known his time was approaching—oh, yes, I had known it, and woken in dread many a night to listen to his whistling snores at the foot of the bed—I could not accept that it would be now. But at last he gave a grunt and opened his eyes. Once he saw me, he heaved himself to his feet, as if determined to establish that he was as hale as ever, and licked my face.

I hugged him, my vision fogged with tears of relief. How I wished we were at the end of our journey! I murmured apologies and praise, rubbing Shadow’s neck. How dear he is to me. I cannot write this without feeling my eyes well again.

After I returned the tent to its former iteration and stamped the fire out, Arna allowed me to help her stand. I held out Poe’s key, and a heartbeat later we were in his grove again.

Poe was nowhere to be seen, nor was his mother, thank God, though the grove was filled with the smell of stewed apples.

“Would you care to bathe?” I asked the queen, motioning to the hot spring.

Again, she made no response, only watched me inscrutably. I found this unnerving—apparently, no amount of soot or stink will make me easy in the old queen’s company—but affected indifference. I helped her undress and step into the spring. I did the same, scrubbing myself quickly to end the awkwardness of the experience, then dried myself with one of the blankets. I’d brought one clean dress with me; the tent contained no spare clothes, but after fishing about for a while, I unearthed a stylish bathrobe of black silk and dense flannel that I supposed Arna could wear.

The old queen, meanwhile, after scrubbing herself from head to foot with some of the abrasive sand at the bottom of the spring, sat there, motionless and sweating, for a full ten minutes.

“Erm,” I said at last. “We must carry on. My friends are waiting for me. They will be worried terribly.”

“I thought I would never be warm again,” Arna murmured, and I realized she was weeping. She did not wail or blubber, merely let the tears flow down her cheeks. After a moment, she buried her face in her hands.

Now, I have never been skilled at responding appropriately to tears, and in this context I was completely at sea. Fortunately, the old queen collected herself and clambered out of the water. I helped her into the robe, and she murmured her thanks.

“Why did my son send you, instead of coming himself?” she asked. “Was it a test?”

This took me only a second or two to parse. “Ah,” I said. “You think he has demanded that I prove my worthiness to him as a wife by rescuing you from the Veil. That would indeed be a familiar tale. But, in fact, he had no knowledge of my plan.”

I explained the situation to her—my fear that Wendell’s story would follow the second Macan’s if he murdered her. I’m afraid I couldn’t help making the whole thing sound scholarly, referencing other tales and papers I’d read, as if I were defending myself against a skeptical peer reviewer; such is my impulse when I am nervous. I could not tell if she understood me or not. Ridiculously, her primary reaction was to look hurt by the news that Wendell had not forgiven her. “He wished to leave me in that place?”

I considered and discarded several blunt responses to this. Instead I replied simply, “He believes you will never stop seeking revenge.”

The former queen shook her head slightly. “I am done with vengeance,” she said. “I am done with thrones. I am reborn.”

I absorbed this dubiously. I had hoped she would be grateful to me—Folk rescued by mortals usually are, in the stories—but I’d expected to have to bargain with her to secure an end to her hostility. I said, “Let us go home.”

She acquiesced without argument, and I took out the key again. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to proceed from there. It was easy enough to arrive at Poe’s tree from somewhere else in the winterlands, but how did I tell the key I wished to return to that scrap of winter in County Leane? When I walked round the side of the tree, I found myself back in the foreboding quiet of the Hidden king’s grove, gazing at the smoking remnants of our fire and the indent in the snow where the tent had lain.

When I returned to Poe’s tree, I knocked upon the bole. I thought I saw a curtain twitch—sometimes I can see the windows in Poe’s tree, and sometimes I cannot. Then, abruptly, Poe was standing before us, bowing repeatedly in Arna’s direction and babbling apologies.

“You wish for me to show you the way?” he said in a squeak, without any prompting from myself. “Yes, yes—Mother and I shall miss you! But with royalty, naturally—important business cannot wait—a great many demands upon you—”

And he went charging around the side of the tree. Arna, Shadow, and I had to run after him, and between one step and the next, we were returned to the lonely Irish peak with the village of Corbann visible in the far distance.

—

We made it off the mountain before darkness fell, but only barely. Arna moved slowly, and frequently required me to assist her over obstacles and down steep sections of trail. It was not a bad thing, though, for I was still very worried about Shadow, who seemed so weary as to be almost in a daze: he would fall back on his haunches abruptly, panting and staring at nothing, before seeming to start back to himself and hobbling after me.

I had hoped that Arna would maintain a dignified silence, but there luck was not on my side. Much to my chagrin, after seeking a few more details about how precisely I had managed to follow her into the Veil—including my history with the Hidden king, about whom she seemed remarkably incurious—I found my relationship with Wendell interrogated.

Every particular was sought. The old queen wished to know where we had met; the development of our friendship and whether we had truly begun as academic rivals or if there had not been some feeling there from the start; whether he had met my family and friends and the nature of their opinions of him; how Wendell had proposed. She seemed scandalized that we had been married with so little ceremony, and I was forced to remind her that this had been necessitated by the direness of the circumstances, namely her having poisoned the kingdom and made designs on Wendell’s life. This landed with very little impact.

“Still, he must be planning a grand celebration,” she said. “When my late husband and I wed, the revelry lasted so many nights one forgot when it had begun.”

“I am not much for revelry,” I said irritably. We were descending a tricky slope, and I would have preferred to focus on my feet rather than on conversation, particularly this one. I could not help adding, “I wonder at your sudden interest in your son’s happiness, Your Highness.”

I thought she would not reply at first. Then: “He is a different person than I thought he was.”

This confirmed something I had noted and wondered about: the former queen’s manner of speaking of her stepson had fundamentally altered. I knew from Wendell that his stepmother had been dismissive towards him in his youth, sometimes ignoring him entirely, other times doting upon him in a condescending manner more suited to a pet. It was as if, in foiling her plot and dooming her to torment and death, his character had acquired a new dimension, one that she might respect. If this might not seem an obvious foundation upon which to build some semblance of maternal affection, I can only note that maternal affection is often a complicated subject in faerie stories.

When it grew too dark to continue, we made camp within a little circle of standing stones. I was not worried about bogles now, for they would know Arna, just as Poe had.

“I meant what I said,” she told me as we hunched close to the warmth of the fire, each wrapped in a blanket. “I have no interest in the throne now. I wonder at my obsession with it before—what need has one for power, nor for anything besides the wind, so clear and sweet-smelling, and the green earth beneath one’s feet?”

She stopped and gazed at the sweep of the land. I noticed that she had missed a spot of ash below her right ear, and that her palms had blisters and scabs she was scratching absently at. “I will take up a small cottage, I think, and live alone, offering this wisdom to any Folk who visit me.”

I mulled this over. Naturally I suspected her vow might originate in practical considerations, not sincerity of feeling—she knew as well as I that the game was up. She had no hideout remaining where she could lurk and scheme, and no allies left in a realm she had tried to ruin, among Folk her magic had poisoned. More materially, she had no control over the Veil; Wendell could return her to it if she so much as spoke the word vengeance . But I decided that it mattered little whether her reformation was genuine; a self-serving motive would work for us just as well, Wendell and me, and I was not above flattering her for it, in the hopes that she would eventually come to believe in her nobility, and grow more zealous in its affectation.

“I have never heard of a monarch abdicating the throne of their own free will,” I lied. [*] “The Folk cling to power and rarely have the strength of character to put the needs of their servants before their own.”

She eyed me, and I reminded myself that she was half human, and thus not so easy to deceive as other Folk. “Or the sense of self-preservation,” I added.

She smiled at that. “Do you not recall our conversation the day we met?” she said. “I am not Folk, and neither am I mortal. I am only myself.”

She lay down beside the fire, wrapping herself in the blanket and drawing it over her mangled hair. I almost rolled my eyes—this sort of melodrama was clearly a family trait. But in truth, I was a little sorry for her. Not because of what she had suffered in the Veil—she had well deserved that—but because I could not imagine existence as a halfblood in Faerie to have been easy, and I sensed a litany of slights and injuries behind her refusal to identify with either of her parents’ bloodlines. It must be wearying to exist in such a state of permanent self-denial. This did not justify what she had done, but it made her company marginally easier to bear.

“You are welcome to share our tent,” I told her, for the wind was picking up, greedily snatching at what little warmth the fire gave off. After all, even singular beings are not immune to cold.

She made no response, only shivered and drew the blanket tighter to her. I sighed and went to bed, grateful for Shadow, who curled up against me—the dog is like a furnace with legs.

Sometime later, however, I started awake at the sound of rustling from the other side of the tent. The former queen spent a moment muttering curses at the pillows, which I had piled up on that side simply to have them out of the way, before she finally arranged her pallet to her satisfaction, and seemed to fall asleep. I regretted my kindness then, as her proximity made it easier to second-guess whether she might think twice about her newfound high-mindedness and strangle me in my sleep, but I had Shadow at my side, and as always, this gave me courage. I slept.

Skip Notes

* Though uncommon, a handful of stories feature faerie monarchs installing a chosen heir in their place. The Russian tale “The Snow-Wanderer,” for instance, tells of a queen who wishes to live among mortals, whom she imagines as having simple, carefree lives. This queen gives the throne to her daughter, who rules until longing for her mother sends her on a quest in search of her, which ends in bloodshed when she finds the queen slain by mortal hands. In the northeast region of Ardamia, a place particularly prone to avalanches, many locals believe that a specific cave in the alpine is occupied by a very peculiar hermit—a queen of the courtly fae who abandoned her war-torn realm to her squabbling children partly to punish them, and is presently occupied in building herself a private castle by tunnelling into the mountains, which is supposedly to blame for the unstable nature of the terrain.