I ate. I slept. I got out of bed in the morning. I painted, I did dishes, I looked after the twins. Every day dawned bright and blue. During the hot afternoons, the buzzing of the grasshoppers blurred into a monotonous throb. It was for the better, I told myself, swallowing the mantra like a lump of bitter bread.
It was for the better.
Two weeks later, Fern arrived as promised and took the portrait away in a crate packed with cloth and straw. After the third week I’d started feeling a little like my old self, but there was something missing from my life now, and I suspected I’d never be exactly the same again. Maybe that was just part of growing up.
One night I went into the kitchen after dark to find Emma asleep at the table, her hand curled around a tincture bottle in danger of tipping over, with pungent half-ground herbs sitting in her mortar and pestle. It wasn’t an unusual discovery.
“Emma,” I whispered, touching her shoulder.
She mumbled indistinctly in reply.
“It’s late. You should go to bed.”
“All right, I’m going,” she said into her arms, muffled, but didn’t move. I took the tincture from her hand and sniffed it, then found its stopper and set it aside. I knew what I would find if I smelled Emma’s breath.
“Come on.” I draped her limp arm over my shoulders and pulled her upright. Her ankles turned before she found her footing. Going up the stairs proved as interesting as I expected.
People mistook Emma for my mother all the time. Children, mostly, and out-of-towners—people who didn’t know what had happened to my parents, or that as Whimsy’s physician Emma had been the one who’d tried to save my father’s life and failed. Unlike my mother, he hadn’t died instantly. To all accounts, it would have been better if he had.
So I suppose I couldn’t stay angry at Emma for her vices, even when they occasionally made me her keeper rather than the other way around. A patient must have died today, though I’d long ago stopped asking once I’d made the connection. Most of all, I could never forget I was the reason she was still in Whimsy. If it hadn’t been for me, the responsibility of raising her sister’s daughter, the child of the man who died in her arms, she would have left for the World Beyond as soon as she could. In a place where enchantments reigned supreme and the creatures who traded them had no use for human medicine . . . well, her ideal life lay elsewhere.
Emma was missing something too, and I’d do well to remember that.
“Can you take your shoes off?” I asked, lowering her to the edge of her bed.
“ ’M all right,” she replied with her eyes closed, so I did it anyway, and tucked them under the bed skirt so she wouldn’t trip on them if she got up during the night. Afterward, I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
Her eyes squinted open. They were dark brown, almost black, like mine—large and intense. She had the same freckles spattered across her fair skin and the same thick, wheat-colored hair. Before everything happened, I remember her and my mother joking that the women in our family reigned supreme: they passed their looks down without any input from the men whatsoever.
“I’m sorry about Rook,” she said, reaching up to give a strand of my identical hair an affectionate tug.
I froze. My mind reeled, teetering at the edge of a precipice. “I don’t know what—”
“Isobel, I’m not blind. I knew what was going on.”
Acid soured my stomach. My voice came out thin and tight, prepared to rise stridently in defense. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Her hand flopped down to the coverlet. “Because I couldn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. I trusted you to make the right choice.” Lanced with guilt in the face of Emma’s understanding, my hostility deflated. Somehow the emptiness it left behind felt far, far worse. “Also, I worry about you. Your Craft keeps you so busy and isolated you haven’t had a chance to experience . . . well, so many things. We’d have a hard time getting by without the enchantments. But I wish—”
A thump shook the ceiling, followed by a maniacal cackle. I welcomed the interruption. The more Emma spoke, the harder I wrestled with the tears prickling the backs of my eyes.
“Oh, hell. The twins.” Her voice scraped like sandpaper. She gave the rafters a resigned look.
I rose swiftly. “Don’t worry. I’ll check on them.”
The old stairway to the attic creaked beneath my weight. When I entered the twins’ bedroom, a tiny slope-ceilinged nook barely large enough for two beds and a dresser, they’d already initiated a pretend sleep routine, which wouldn’t have fooled me even without the stifled giggling.
“I know you’re plotting something. Out with it.” I went over to May and tickled her. Rarely did she confess without torture.
“March!” she shrieked, thrashing beneath the covers. “March wants to show you something!”
I relented, and regarded March with my hands on my hips, trying to look stoic. Judging by the way her cheeks were ballooned out, she was about to squirt water all over my face or possibly something even less pleasant. I couldn’t show weakness. I tapped my foot and raised an impatient eyebrow.
“Bleeeghhh,” she said, and ejected a live toad onto her quilt.
I shook my head at May’s hysterical laughter. “Well, at least you didn’t swallow it,” I reasoned, lunging after the moist and traumatized creature. I snatched it before it made a bid for freedom down the stairwell. “Now settle down, all right? Emma’s having one of her nights.” They didn’t know what this meant, only that it was serious, and I’d think of some way to bribe them for being on their best behavior.
“Fine,” May sighed, flopping over in bed. She watched me with one eye. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Put it somewhere far away from March’s mouth.” And hope it recovers from the nightmares, I thought, shutting the door behind me.
I drifted through the house, moonlight making foreign shapes of the parlor’s clutter. A half-finished Vervain smiled at me coldly from the easel, wearing an expression that might as well have been carved onto a wigmaker’s mannequin. Working with her came as a shock after Rook, even though I knew she was only a return to normality, whatever that meant in my case.
I crept through the kitchen and outside onto the damp grass, where I set the toad free. It sprang away into the weeds, toward the forest. From here, across the moon-silvered field, the tops of the trees poked above the horizon like a cloud bank.
A breeze stirred the wheat and sighed through the grass, chilling the dew on my toes. The wind blew from the forest’s direction and for a moment I imagined I caught a whisper of that crisp, wild, wistful smell, Rook’s smell, the one that seized my heart and wouldn’t let go. I knew what it was. Autumn.
All at once my chest swelled with unnameable longing, an ache lodged at the base of my throat like an unvoiced cry. Lives to be lived awaited me out there, far from the safety of my familiar home and confining routine. The whole world waited for me. I felt pierced through with longing. Oh, if only I were the type to scream.
I wiped my toady hands off on the grass and stepped back.
A fluttering of wingbeats came from the old oak.
I turned, the breeze lifting my hair, and saw a raven in the tree. But which was it—a raven for peril, or a raven I loved?
Before I could move, Rook stood over me. I only had time to think, Both. For this wasn’t the Rook I knew. As the feathers shed from his form and gathered into a sweeping coat, they revealed a face livid with fury. No half-smile softened this hard, frozen mask, those amethyst eyes burning like conflagrations.
“What did you do?” he snarled.
Five
ROOK’S BEWILDERING question chilled me to the core. Mutely, I shook my head. I needed to get inside.
Anticipating my move, he crowded me against the side of the house and pinned me there. He didn’t touch me, but a clear threat radiated from the arms bracketing my shoulders, the strong hands gripping the wood beside my face. With escape elimin
ated as an option I found I couldn’t look away from him. His normally expressive mouth was compressed into a thin, bloodless line as he waited for me to answer. I would have welcomed any change in his icy expression, even for the worse, to give me some indication of what was going through his head.
“Rook, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, sounding as daunted as I felt. “I haven’t done anything.”
He drew up to his full height. I’d forgotten how tall he was—I could barely tip my head back far enough to see him. “Stop playing the fool. I know you sabotaged the portrait. Why? Are you working for another fair one? What did they give you to betray me?”
“Give—what are you talking about?”
In his eyes, a flicker. But if I’d gotten through to him, he steeled himself quickly against his doubts. “You did something to it, between the last session and when it was sent to me. There’s a wrongness to it now. Anyone who looks at it can tell.”
“I painted you. That’s all. That’s all my Craft involves, how could it be . . .” Oh. Oh, no.
“You did do something,” he hissed, his fingers curling against the wall.
“No! I mean, I did, but it wasn’t some sort of—scheme, or—or sabotage. I swear. I painted you exactly as you are. I saw it, Rook. I saw everything, though you might try to keep it hidden away.”
Well. I may be an artistic prodigy, but I’ve never claimed to be a genius. Only at that moment did it occur to me that Rook’s secret sorrow might be secret for a reason. It could be a secret even to him.
“You saw everything?” His voice grew menacingly quiet. He leaned over me, caging me in with his body from all angles. “What do you think you saw, Isobel, with your mortal eyes? Have you ever seen the splendors of the summer court, or witnessed fair folk as old as the earth itself slain in the glass mountains of the winterlands? Have you watched entire generations of living things grow, flourish, and die in less time than it takes you to draw a single breath? Do you recall what I am?”
I shrank against the boards digging into my spine. “I could change it for you,” I said, wondering if I’d just lied to him. Even though my life might very well depend on it, I found the prospect of destroying my perfect work unimaginable. It was the only example of its kind in the entire world.
Rook barked a bitter laugh. “The portrait was unveiled publicly before the autumn court. All my house has seen it.”
My mind went blank. “Shit,” I agreed eloquently, after a pause.
“There is only one way to repair my reputation. You’re coming with me to stand trial in the autumnlands for your crime. Tonight.”
“Wait—”
Rook withdrew. Dazzled by the moon shining directly into my eyes, I found myself marching after him across the yard toward the shoulder-high wheat. My legs moved in fits and jerks, like a marionette’s legs controlled by a puppeteer. Senseless panic seized me. No matter how fiercely I railed against my body’s betrayal, I couldn’t stop walking.
“Rook, you can’t do this. You don’t know my true name.”
He didn’t bother turning around as he spoke. The sweep of his coat was all I had to go on. “If you were ensorcelled, you wouldn’t know it—you would follow me willingly, believing you’d made the decision on your own. This is nothing more than a trifling charm. You seem to have forgotten what I am after all. There is only a single fair one in all the world stronger than I, and two others my equal.”
“The Alder King,” I murmured. In the distance, the trees swayed.
Rook stopped in his tracks. He turned his face to the side, presenting me with a view of his profile, though he didn’t quite look at me, as if unwilling to take his eyes off something else. “Once we’re in the forest,” he said, “do not speak those words. Do not even think them.”
A chill gripped me. The only thing I knew about the Alder King was that he was the lord of the summer court and he had ruled fairykind forever. His influence spread far, locking Whimsy in its eternal summer. In that moment it seemed the trees were leaning together, whispering. Waiting for me to walk past those rusty, crooked nails and walk beneath their boughs, so they could watch and listen. I’d almost reached the edge of my yard, and felt as though I were about to step beyond a pool of lantern light into an endless darkness crawling with horrors. No, I didn’t just feel like it—I was.
I couldn’t scream. If Emma ran outside I had no idea what might happen to her, and the idea of the twins seeing this sickened me. But I couldn’t just march after him like an unresisting puppet, either, straight into the shadowy forest ahead.
Swallowing hard, I bunched my skirts in my hands and gave his back an awkward top-only curtsy.
He spun on his heel and bowed, glaring as though he might kill me on the spot. As soon as he’d turned around and taken another step, I curtsied again. We repeated this odd ritual four times, his expression growing increasingly furious, before I felt the charm controlling my legs creep farther up my body, petrifying my waist to the rigidity of a porcelain doll’s. So much for that plan.
We plunged into the field. Wheat swished all around me, tickling and scratching, catching on the rough fabric of my clothes. When I looked over my shoulder I saw no lights on in the house. Was this the last time I’d ever see my home? My family? The silver-lined shingles and eaves, the big old oak by the kitchen door were suddenly so dear to me that tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. Rook didn’t notice my distress. Would he care at all if he saw me weeping? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, it couldn’t hurt to find out.
I flexed my fingers. Good—my arms were still free. I found the pocket hidden among my skirts’ loose folds and started picking at a seam with my fingernails.
“Rook, wait,” I said. Another hot tear skated down my cheek and dripped inside my collar. “If you care anything for me at all, or ever did, stop for a moment and let me compose myself.”
His pace slowed, dwindled to a halt. My own marching didn’t wear off until I stood close behind him, which was exactly what I’d hoped for.
“I—” he began, but I didn’t get a chance to hear what he’d been about to say.
I seized his hand and squeezed it tight, making sure the ring I’d picked out of my pocket seam pressed against his bare skin. It wasn’t just any ring. It was forged from cold, pure iron.
He swayed where he stood, as though the ground had dropped out beneath him. Then he tore his hand from mine and started back, rounding on me with his teeth bared in a feral snarl. My stomach lurched. Over the years, observing the individual imperfections in each fair one’s glamour, I’d put together a picture of what they looked like underneath. As it turned out, I still wasn’t prepared for the sight.
In his true form Rook resembled some hellish creature spawned from the forest’s heart—not hideous, precisely, but terrifyingly inhuman. The life had leached from his golden skin, leaving him a sickly tallow gray, with hollow cheeks and hair that tangled about his face like the shadows cast by a briar thicket. His luminous eyes reminded me of a hawk’s, soul-piercing and devoid of mercy or feeling. His fingers were uncanny in their length and jointedness, and I could tell by the way his clothes hung from him that he had grown gaunt as a skeleton beneath them. Worst of all were his teeth, each one needle-sharp behind his peeled-back upper lip.
Almost instantly his returning glamour filled in his cheeks, tamed his hair, and brought color to his ashen face, but the frightful image had been seared into my memory forever.
“How dare you use iron against me,” he rasped, agony strangling each syllable. “You know as well as I that it’s outlawed in Whimsy. I should kill you where you stand.”
I struggled to keep my voice steady while my heart flung itself against my ribs. “I know your kind is bound by your word. You value fairness highly. If you were to slay me for carrying iron, would it not be fair and necessary to carry out the same punishment toward anyone else guilty of an identical offense?”
He hesitated. Staring at me, he nodded.
&nb
sp; “Then if I’m to be killed, so must everyone in Whimsy down to the last child. We all secretly carry iron from the day we’re born until the day we die.”
“You dreadful—” Under other circumstances his consternation would have been comical. “First you betray me, and now—now you tell me—” He groped for words. Clearly he wasn’t accustomed to being beaten at his own game. Because of course the fair folk couldn’t go about killing everyone in Whimsy; they coveted Craft too much to even consider it.
I drew a fortifying breath. “I know I can’t escape you. Charming me to walk makes no difference, aside from using energy you could spend on something else.” This, I admit, was a complete gamble, but the way Rook pressed his lips together told me I’d struck close to the mark. “So let me walk freely, let me keep my iron, and I’ll go with you willingly—in body if not in spirit.”
He stepped back from me once, twice, three times through the wheat, then pivoted and stalked off toward the trees. I stumbled after him, the charm’s evaporation his only answer.
My mind clamored for escape. But I knew I’d harm my chances, perhaps destroy them for good if I tried running now. I had no choice but to follow him through the field, through the weeds, and into the forest waiting beyond, where only a handful of humans had set foot before—and not one among them returned.
Every muscle in my body clenched with the expectation of more fairy devilry, but my initial obstacles proved surprisingly, unpleasantly mundane. My breath blew harshly in my ears and my skirts clung to the sweat on my legs as I trudged through the undergrowth. Burs burrowed their way into my stockings, and I tripped over roots and stones every other step. Meanwhile Rook might as well have not existed, he slipped through the vegetation so smoothly. Every once in a while a branch did catch on his shoulder, only to pull back, release, and smack me in the face, but I think he was doing that on purpose.
“Rook.”
He said nothing.
“It’s getting too dark—the moonlight’s gone. I can’t see.”
An Enchantment of Ravens Page 5