22nd January
The moments that followed the housekeeper’s disappearance were spent in a state of agonized expectation.
For the faerie to reappear. For Wendell to reawaken. For something.
“What is happening?” I demanded of no one in particular, pacing back and forth. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more frustrated, for I had no stories to guide me now, no academic knowledge to fall back on whatsoever. Morning arrived, and it brought an improvement in the weather, the clouds beginning to break, the steady rain fading to a sunlit drizzle. Mourners came and went, bowing in my direction but otherwise ignoring me, none seeming to sense the significance of what was happening.
Lord Taran’s response, when I told him what I had done, was one of flat disbelief.
“There are no doors to Death,” he said. “The Lady was mistaken—or, more likely, she invented a story to allow herself time to flee. The housekeeper has gone somewhere else, perhaps another realm, and gotten himself lost. Perhaps he is too embarrassed to return.”
“Not Death, ” I corrected him. “The Lady told me there is a place, half in this world and half elsewhere, where the spirits of the Folk linger for a time before they are truly gone. Only a short time—she said that I must make haste if I wished to pull Wendell out. She had never done anything of that nature herself, but she believed it was possible.”
Lord Taran only gave me a pitying look. Fortunately, Niamh arrived shortly thereafter and I was able to lay the matter before her.
“Emily!” she exclaimed, holding up her hands. “I’m glad to find you have left your rooms. But you will need to slow down.”
I forced myself to go back to the beginning, trying to keep my voice steady. It was not easy. Not only because of my excitement, but I felt lightheaded—I could not remember the last time I had eaten anything. If Wendell had been with me, he would have been appalled and not left off nagging me until I’d had some toast at least.
“My grandfather believed that the Lady in the Crimson Cloak knew of a door to Death,” I finished. “I have hisjournal—though he was only a hobbyist, he was quite well-read. He cites several sources in arguing—well, essentially, for the existence of faerie ghosts. But I am not familiar with the names he references.”
Niamh took the journal from my hand, pausing to allow the braille enchantment to work, then ran her finger over the page I had marked.
“Robbins?” she said musingly. “I wonder if he means Archibald Robbins at the University of Amsterdam. He was seen as an iconoclast in my day; his theories concerned interactions between the Folk and the spirit world. A few reputable scholars still believed in ghosts back then and would debate whether some stories concerned ghostly or fae protagonists, but Robbins went further than many were comfortable with.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” I said with some indignation. I had thought myself familiar with the work of all dryadologists within the last century.
“He did not publish much before his death—which was nothing suspicious; he took a fall somewhere in Scotland. The Grampians, I believe. What little he did write was mostly retracted as scholarship evolved.” She paused. “Helen W.W. could be a reference to Helen Worthington-West. She was before even my time. Wasn’t she at Cambridge?”
I made a frustrated sound. “Of course! How did I not guess that? Bran Eichorn co-authored several papers with her. But then I have never bothered much with the writings of the spiritualists.”
“Not much value in it, except in tracing the development of dryadology itself,” Niamh agreed. “One might as well study phrenology. Still, my research supervisor—a lovely man, but very much the product of an older era—encouraged me to read Worthington-West. She had some intriguing theories about bogles, or bogeys as they termed them then, but on the whole I found her ideas outdated and rather sensationalist. She presented a paper at a conference in Paris—it may have been ICODEF, before it was called that—in which she claimed to have interviewed a household brownie who had visited the afterlife and spoken with her recently deceased mother. Apparently this matriarch provided her daughter with instructions on what to serve at her funeral reception, including a recipe for lemon scones.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “Where was this published?”
“It wasn’t, unsurprisingly. I only know about it because my supervisor was at the conference. There was quite the backlash.” Niamh paused thoughtfully. “All this is to say that the Lady’s claim regarding doors to some sort of spiritual limbo, your grandfather’s references to ghosts—such things are not entirely without context in the field of dryadology. Certainly the Worthington-West school would not have been surprised.”
I gave a weak laugh and sank back onto the bench, resting my head in my hands. “I had thought that reading the histories of great faerie monarchs would prepare me for whatever Wendell and I would encounter here. Instead I should have spent my time on ghost stories.”
“So it appears,” Niamh said. I could tell that she was skeptical, if not outright disbelieving, but nevertheless her voice held a trace of hope. I noticed for the first time that her eyes were red and shadowed, and I recalled that she had known Wendell from his boyhood.
“And what does this old misanthrope have to say about your theory?” she said, adopting the familial, teasing tone she often used with Lord Taran, which always gave me a shiver of trepidation.
“Nothing whatsoever,” he replied. “I have no use for the arguments of scholars. And I am not so much a villain as to offer false hope.”
“That’s plain enough,” she said, her face falling a little. “How long has the little one been gone?”
Despair settled over me. “Two hours, perhaps.”
“You must eat,” Niamh said, placing a hand on my back. “You are trembling. Come with me.”
“I cannot.”
She sighed. “I will send for breakfast, then. And you will eat it, if I have to force it down your throat myself.”
—
Despite my weakness, I was sickened by the smell of breakfast when the servants placed it before me on a tray. Still, I made myself eat a few spoonfuls of egg and a piece of toast— Icould not countenance the strawberries or spiced porridge—knowing that Niamh was in the right.
The morning turned into afternoon. I sat and watched the dais, or wrote in my journal. More Folk flitted in and out. Lord Taran departed, then returned. I do not think he came to see if I would succeed, but rather how long I would hold on to hope. Not once did he press me, though. Callum came and sat with me, and though I knew he meant well, I found his presence hardest to bear. He looked at me with an understanding I wanted no part of.
Ivy continued to cover Wendell’s body. It was twining about his hair now, too, so thickly that only the odd clump of gold could be seen squeezed between the leaves. Moths fluttered about the flowers, a snail made its slow way across his chest, and I caught sight of the odd cocoon being spun and the dark skitter of a spider. I wanted to brush it all away, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t touch him.
As the day slipped into evening, I dozed off, Shadow snoring against my feet. I was startled awake by a cavalcade of flickering lights, which spun once around the room and were gone before I could even pinpoint what variety of faerie they were.
I lifted my head, trying to shake off the nebulous unease that accompanies awakening in an unfamiliar place. The room was empty apart from a solitary brownie upon a ladder, who was lighting the lanterns, but a few Folk were still gathered outside on the stone steps—I could hear the murmur of their conversation.
I reached down to pet Shadow. But at some point, as I dozed, the dog had gone to lie next to Wendell’s body. I felt my eyes begin to sting. But then I noticed that the beast was not dozing—though his head rested on one paw—but gazing fixedly at the corner of the dais.
The hair rose on my neck. And I realized something else.
Shadow had not howled.
I went to crouch beside him, placing my hand on his head. Black Hounds are known for their haunting howl, which they let loose in the presence of death—or, in some stories, around those who are soon to depart. Yet not once since we entered the room with Wendell’s body had Shadow made a sound.
“What, my love?” I murmured. Shadow was not staring atthe place where the oíche sidhe had vanished, but to the left, around the other side of the dais. Which was where Wendell’s shadow would have been now, were there light enough to seeit.
“The door is in his shadow,” I murmured. I had seen the housekeeper go that way, but it still felt impossible, even amongst the many impossibilities of Faerie. “Isn’t it?”
The dog took no note of me. His world was that of smells, not theories. And while he had never demonstrated any particular aptitude for locating faerie doors in the past, perhaps because he saw them as unexceptional features within the shifting tapestry of scent, his nostrils were twitching now. He stood.
“Shadow,” I said warningly.
He stood there for a moment, simply looking at nothing, and I thought that was the end of it and he would lie back down again, as he did whenever he sighted a rabbit on the campus lawn, remembering the effort it would require to catch it. Then the dog made a motion with his snout that was like lifting up the hem of a curtain. And then he stepped into the shadow, and was gone.
“Shadow!” I lunged forward, but caught only a few hairs of the dog’s tail. He could move quickly when he wanted to, which was not often.
I am not proud of this, but my immediate reaction was not to send for help, or to charge after him. Instead, I slumped against the dais and burst into tears.
I was crying like a child, heedless of the noise I was making. I heard the murmur of Folk around me, and felt small hands patting my face, my hands, caught the flicker of wet black eyes and leaf-woven hats. I ignored them.
After a few moments, someone pulled me into their arms—not at all gently—and held me in a tight grip. Too tight. It was a faerie, which I knew from the way she smelled. Many people assume the Folk, the courtly fae in particular, will smell like roses, but in truth they smell like mortals, at least on the surface. I suspect it is a part of their glamour, for beneath this is the smell of rainforests and river reeds, moss and algae and leaves decaying into humus. A green smell, not always pleasant, noticeable only when one is very close.
The faerie held me so tight it was almost a wrestling match to get away. This was surprisingly effective at calming my sobs, for my misery was eclipsed by irritation. It was Deilah—but I had guessed that by her golden hair, which she had shoved my face into.
“Poor thing!” she cried. “I should have stayed to comfort you—we could have comforted each other.”
I made no response to this—she was still gripping my arms too hard and gazing at me with an excited sort of despair that I found more exhausting than pitiable. Deilah wore a mourning cloak, which for the Folk of this realm meant a cloak woven with thorns that pricked at your arms and throat, and her dress was a torn and filthy mess. Her hair, too, had pinecones and bits of mud stuck in it, as if she had hurled herself down on the forest floor multiple times. She was, on the whole, a pathetic sight, her eyes painfully swollen, as if she had not left off sobbing for days, though she would have been more pathetic if she did not give off the impression of having taken part in her dishevelment. The mud on her cheek, for instance, looked as if it had been smeared on by a finger, and as someone who had traversed the forests of Wendell’s realm several times now, I did not quite understand how one would come by so many tears in one’s dress, unless they went looking for blackberry bushes to fall into.
Still, she was here, and so I babbled what had happened. Her eyes grew wider and wider as I spoke.
“Where is the door?” she demanded, whipping around to scan the room. Her instantaneous belief in me did not inspire confidence—quite the opposite, in fact; I felt a shadowy premonition that Lord Taran’s skepticism would soon be proven right. With their only ally a querulous ragamuffin, anyone would doubt their cause.
“Somewhere here,” I said, pointing to the dark place where Shadow had vanished.
She patted the dais, then pounded on it, as if she might tear the stone apart. Finally she sagged back, panting. “Call him,” she demanded.
“What?”
“Call your dog!” she cried, looking at me as if I were the stupidest person on earth. “Perhaps he cannot find his way back! Have you just been sitting there?”
Much as I wished to, I did not bother pointing out that I had been far more occupied in saving Wendell than someone who had spent the last day staggering about in the forest, wailing. I saw no reason not to follow her advice, other than the fact that it was rather mad—a largely immaterial detail in Faerie.
“Shadow!” I cried.
“Louder!” she urged.
I called louder. I called until my throat was hoarse. I nearly fell over when I heard a distant, warbling howl.
Shadow.
“Here!” I yelled. “Shadow, here! Come!”
The howl came again—closer? I did not know. I could not tell exactly where the howl was coming from. Eerily, it seemed as if it were beneath us, reverberating through the floor.
“What does he like to eat?” the girl demanded, crouching at my side with her knees up in the lithe manner of a small child. We were both staring hard at the blank stone, and if that were not enough to make me feel I was going mad, the girl’s inane question was.
“I thought you were supposed to be clever,” she snapped in response to my expression. “Or is that just in comparison with my brother? Nobody thinks he’s smart, that’s for sure. Dogs see by smell.”
Of course they did—of course. No sooner had I told her about Shadow’s preference for raw meat—of any variety, but the smellier the better—than she was snapping her fingers imperiously at the servants, who ran off in disorderly haste, some crashing into each other. I became aware that a crowd had gathered behind us, common and courtly fae craning to see what we were fussing about. I don’t think they had any clue what was going on, but they were muttering excitedly among themselves nonetheless. The brownie selling nuts was back, which did not help my growing feeling of hysteria.
Several servants returned, thrusting plates of meat into our hands. I stacked them beside the dais like a gory offering at a sacrifice, and suddenly the howling was much louder. I shouted until my voice broke, and then I was toppling over backwards, knocked flat by the large and hairy shape that had plowed into my chest .
I made a strangled sound, half sob and half shriek, burying my face in his fur. The dog was pulling something large and grey behind him, which turned out to be the housekeeper faerie, whom Shadow had been dragging along by the ankle. The dog dropped him as unceremoniously as he would a bone he’d tired of and leapt on me again, his tongue swiping at my face. Something strange happened next, and it is only by looking back at the memory that I am able to smooth it out, to see the details. The oíche sidhe had been pulling something, too—I thought it was a lantern, in the moment, or nothing at all, just a reflection off one of the room’s silver mirrors. But whatever it was, it vanished when the faerie came spilling out of Wendell’s shadow and tumbling across the room.
“What happened?” I demanded of the housekeeper when Shadow had calmed somewhat and noticed the vast pile of his favourite victuals, to which he delightedly applied himself. The faerie was moaning—no wonder, for Shadow had not been gentle, and his leg seemed to be bleeding.
“The king,” the faerie murmured. “Where—? I lost him—”
I knew I should have been paying more attention to his injury, but I could not help demanding, “What do you mean? Did you see Wendell?”
Deilah screamed. She surged to her feet and threw herself upon the dais, where Wendell—
Where Wendell was sitting up.
He had pulled the ivy from his face—there was still a great deal in his hair, along with a small flock of butterflies and moths—and was looking very cross. He shoved Deilah away with a cry of “Ah! You’re filthy!” and began yanking at the vegetation at his chest, vines that speared his cloak and twined round his fingers.
“Look at this!” he exclaimed to no one in particular. “My poor cloak! Bloody thorns have ruined it. I cannot mend what has been reduced to threads.”
He gave up with a curse and looked around, blinking confusedly at the crowd staring at him in frozen awe, before his gaze finally landed on me, whereupon his face lit up. “Em! What on earth has happened?”
I leapt on him then, babbling nonsensically, and a roar arose among the gathered Folk—mostly positive, I believe, though as before, some were less than pleased by Wendell’s return, for a few went stampeding down the steps, shrieking. The forest erupted in lantern light and a cacophony of melody that hurt my ears, as various musicians began jostling with one another for the right to celebrate Wendell’s return the loudest.
Wendell did not ask any more questions, merely held me in his arms as I babbled and cried—perhaps I was making more sense than I thought, or, more likely, his memory was returning to him. Several of the moths were crushed between us, their dry wings leaving streaks of dust against my cheek. At some point, Shadow managed to hop up on the dais, slobbering all over us both, and then he sprinted from the room like a pup. He returned moments later with Orga dangling from his mouth by her scruff, hissing and spitting and generally promising imminent pain to her captor. She managed to get in a slash across Shadow’s face, and the poor dog dropped her.
“Orga!” Wendell exclaimed. “Leave him be, dear.”
She started comically at the sound of his voice, and I expected her to leap at him as Shadow had done, but naturally she had to express her fury and indignation first, and circled the dais, yowling at her master at the top of her lungs. Wendell reached for her, but she only swiped at him with a hiss.
“You miserable brute!” I exclaimed in disgust, but Wendell only laughed. I could not stop myself from touching him, as if from one moment to the next he might vanish—his face, his chest, where now there was no wound, only a greenish discolouration, like a grass stain upon a piece of cloth.
Razkarden alighted soundlessly at Wendell’s side, making me jump, and rested one of his hideous legs upon Wendell’s knee. Wendell smiled and rubbed the creature’s beak. “Happy to see me again, old friend?”
I examined him, looking for some sign of difference, but he seemed entirely himself, and as fresh as if he’d awoken from a nap. And if there was a certain enigmatical quality to his gaze, it was no more pronounced than before, and I was used to it anyway.
“What happened?” I murmured.
He tossed another piece of ivy aside. “I barely remember! It seemed as if I were in the forest. But it was odd. It was dark as a winter’s night, and cold—worse than that bloody ice court. I kept wandering, but nothing was familiar. I passed Folk, but it was as if they did not see me. And then—” His gaze fell upon the oíche sidhe, whom one of the servants had helped into an upright position. “You sent him, didn’t you? He said you had.”
“Yes,” I said. “In a way. Mostly he sent himself.”
The oíche sidhe staggered to his feet. He bowed to Wendell and myself, then brushed the wrinkles from his clothes before saying, “Forgive me, Your Highnesses. I failed. I found the king, but I could not find the way back out. I thought we would wander for eternity, until the beast arrived.”
“Was that Shadow?” Wendell gazed in astonishment at thedog, who was contentedly gnawing at a bit of gristle, slobber pooling below him. “Good Lord! I thought it was some eldritch monster come to feast upon my soul. When he pounced on us, I thought it was the end.”
He reached down and rubbed Shadow’s head. “Good boy!”
The dog licked him, then went back to his dinner.
“Can you stand?” I said. Wendell put his arm around me, and I helped him to his feet. He wobbled a little at first, brushing leaves and flowers from himself, much of which fell away with little roots attached. He knelt before the housekeeper, whose head was still bowed low, and murmured something, placing his hand on the side of the small faerie’s face.
Then he stood, shrugging off his tattered cloak, which I helped him with. I felt a strong need to fuss over him, which I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. If only it had ended there! Wendell gazing at me blissfully, those damned butterflies still in his hair, though many had departed, flitting off into the cooling twilight. In a moment, we could summon Lord Taran and the other councillors—summon the entire court—to show them that all was well. Their king had been returned to them. This could become a controversial anecdote in my book, one that my fellow scholars would praise and rage over, some accepting Wendell’s resurrection as a logical extension of the illogic of Faerie, others painting me as a twentieth-century de Grey, each according to their disposition and professional jealousies.
“I know that look,” Wendell said. “This will become a rather sensational paper, won’t it? I can see you already drafting the abstract.”
I was suddenly more furious with him than I had ever been. That he would make light of all this! “If you think,” I said, “that you can do something like this again—without consulting me, without even a thought —”
“I know,” he said quietly. His tone froze my anger, and I saw that his eyes were damp. “I would never have put you through—that—if I had seen a single alternative. But you are wrong in one thing: I was thinking of you, Em. You were my first thought, as well as my last.”
But then there came a surge of disquiet, mutters and gasps that rippled through the watching Folk like a stone thrown into a pond.
A motley crowd of Folk had gathered around Queen Arna’s body. I hadn’t been paying her any attention, and at first, I thought they were attempting to move her somewhere, and was about to command them to leave her be. And yet, no one was holding the queen upright—had she been placed into that odd slump, her hair all over her face? Some of the common fae were poking her, or sniffing at her skin. A brownie lifted her arm as if to examine it, and some of the moss fell away. But the arm kept moving, and the creature leapt back with a startled squeak.
Queen Arna opened her eyes. At first, she gazed listlessly about, and then she gave a choked cry, hands fluttering as if she were trying to cover her naked body. But she was fully clothed still in the soiled finery she had worn in the second castle. Her face was drawn, and she looked, in that moment, neither human nor Folk, but like a frightened, slightly feral animal.
“She followed you out,” I murmured. “Somehow—but then, why not? You died in almost the same moment. Yes—why not?”
Wendell had gone still. Every ounce of his attention focused on his stepmother—it was as if the room were empty but for them.
“Let us put her in the dungeon,” I said with an urgency I did not fully understand. I only knew on some fundamental level that we could not kill her. It was the same certainty I had felt in the royal court of the Hidden Ones, when I had found myself at a crossroads: slay the wicked king, or choose a different ending to the story I was caught in.
Wendell appeared to consider. Dread settled over me, because I could see he had been overtaken by the darker aspect of his nature, and would at any moment erupt into some unhinged fit of violence. The watching crowd seemed to sense this, too, and shrank back. So it was a shock when Wendell replied calmly, “You’re right, Em.”
I watched him warily. I do not particularly enjoy talking to him when he is like this, and almost would have preferred him to pull out his sword and start stabbing things. “I am.”
“I will not kill her,” he said, still with that terrible calm. “Instead, I will lock my stepmother away where she cannot harm you, or me, or the realm. But it shall be a cell with no door, in a land without paths. She deserves no less than that.”
He made a gesture I had seen once before, in St. Liesl, and had hoped never to see again, like brushing aside a cobweb. And then it was as if the world had been ripped in two, and between the halves was a column of swirling darkness. It was a narrow opening, a gap, but it seemed to have no beginning or end, disappearing through the floor and ceiling. The gathered Folk wailed and shrieked, trampling one another in their haste to flee.
Wendell’s stepmother tried to run. But, as Wendell had been, she was unsteady on her feet. She fell, and he caught her. She opened her mouth, to scream or plead—I never found out. Before she had recovered her balance, Wendell spun her around and pushed her almost gently into the Veil.