“You give it a try, if you’re so bored,” I said, handing over the skewer. He took it between his thumb and forefinger. After examining the meat, turning it to and fro, he flippantly lowered it toward the fire.
Instantly, a change came over him. At first I thought he had spied something awful in the forest behind me, and I jerked around with my skin crawling. There was nothing there. Yet he still wore the same expression: his eyes wide and stricken, his features utterly still, as if he’d just received news of someone’s death, or was dying himself. It was terrible in a way I cannot describe. I’ve painted a thousand faces and never seen such a look.
What was happening? I scrabbled for an answer until I realized—Craft. We could transmute substances as easily as we breathed, but for fair folk, such creation did not exist. It was so contrary to their nature it had the power to destroy them. Astonishingly, even something as simple as roasting a hare over an open flame seemed to count as Craft according to whatever force governed his kind.
No more than a second or two had elapsed before Rook’s glamour began flaking away like old paint, revealing his true form, but not the way I remembered it. His skin was desiccated and gray, his eyes fading to lifelessness. It was as though I watched lights go out within him one by one, dimming with every heartbeat.
And I knew that if I did nothing, in another moment he’d be gone.
I would be free. I could escape—or at least try. But I thought of the forest cathedral, the scarlet leaves sifting down in silence. The look on his face when he’d transformed into a raven in my parlor. The smell of change on the wild wind, and the way he had let me turn his head, his eyes on mine full of sorrow. All those wonders crumbling to dust, without a trace of them left in the world.
So I lunged across the fire and tore the stick from his hands.
Seven
HE CRIED out when the stick left his grasp, a sharp, haunting sound of anguish—pain, but also loss. Color flooded back into him, his glamour following behind, though he still slumped to the side and had to catch himself with a hand against the ground before he fell.
“Isobel,” he croaked uncertainly, looking up at me.
My voice came from far away, swept downstream by the blood rushing in my ears. “It was Craft. Cooking. When I offered it to you, I didn’t know. I had no idea.”
His attention fell to the stick I held, a piece of wood with a lump of rabbit flesh smoldering on the end. I shared his disbelief. Almost impossible, that something so ordinary could harm him.
“We should—we should go.” He was so out of sorts he nearly sounded human. He staggered to his feet and turned first one way and then another, unable to get his bearings. “We haven’t covered nearly enough . . . have you eaten? Are you still hungry?”
“I can eat as we walk,” I said quietly, stunned to see him reduced to this. From Emma’s instruction, I recognized the symptoms of shock.
“You aren’t going to die?” he asked.
I shook my head. Toying with him didn’t seem nearly as amusing now.
“Good.” His hand went to his sword, perhaps seeking out its reassuring solidity. He next patted his pockets with a disquieted air until he found the raven pin on his breast and squeezed it. “In that case—”
He cut himself off and whipped around, every muscle in his body tensed. At first I thought he’d gone mad. Then I heard it too: a high, unearthly sound in the distance. Howling.
“I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Wild Hunt caught up with us,” I said reasonably, suddenly feeling strongly that someone ought to behave in a reasonable and reassuring way, even if that person, unfortunately, had to be me. “It sounds like we have a good head start, at least.”
“No, it was not only a matter of time. We are deep in my domain, my realm. Hemlock should not have been able to track us this far so easily.”
“Perhaps the difference is that I’m with you now. As you might have noticed, I do have a bit of a, um. Smell.”
He barely spared me a glance, passing up the ripe opportunity to criticize my mortality. The longer he remained rattled, the more apprehensive I became. He didn’t see the Wild Hunt as a serious threat. So was it just his recent near-death experience making him act like this, or something more—something I didn’t know about?
Coming back to himself, he released his raven pin as though it had scalded him. “We need to be out of the autumnlands before dusk.” And with that, he fixed on a direction and set off.
I snatched up as much of the cooked meat as I could carry, sloshing after him through the ankle-deep leaves. “Wait, out of the autumnlands? What do you mean? I thought we were traveling to the autumn court.”
“We are. Just not the same way we were before.”
“May I ask where we’re going, then?”
“To the place where Hemlock’s power wanes, farthest from the winter court. It will be harder, perhaps impossible for her to track us in the summerlands.”
The landscape changed gradually. The sun sank behind the hills, casting long, straight shadows behind the trees and saturating everything in russet light. Thicker-trunked oaks, elms, and alders crowded out the slender birches and ashes. A melancholy air hung over this part of the forest: the leaves were brown or a dull rust red, and fungus mottled the roots and marched up the trunks, yellow and fleshy in character. Out of curiosity I placed my hand on the bark next to one of these mushroom colonies, only for the bark to peel away in my hand. The exposed wood beneath was pale and spongy, and wood lice scampered away into its crevices.
I dropped the bark, which burst rotten on the ground, and hurried to catch up with Rook several paces ahead.
“We should be reaching the summerlands soon, shouldn’t we?” I asked, just for conversation’s sake. The quiet here bore down like a physical weight. I couldn’t help but feel as though something might be listening, an impression that intensified the longer we remained silent.
“We are in the summerlands. We have been for some time.”
“But the trees—”
“Are not of autumn,” Rook replied. “No, these trees are dying.” Tension narrowed his eyes and set his jaw. “I have heard . . . whispers, that in some places, the summerlands have gone—amiss. I’ve never had occasion to see the blight with my own eyes. I confess it’s worse than I expected.”
“Surely the forest can be healed. I watched you raise an entire glade with a few drops of your blood.”
“Here, only one person holds such power.” His gaze flicked to me, the warning in their amethyst depths clear as a length of exposed steel. “And he uses his lifeblood as he sees fit.”
The trees grew larger and farther apart. The knotted roots bulging across our path reminded me of diseased veins. Immense stones thrust up from the ground at intervals, standing higher than I was tall, draped in thick mantles of moss and bloodred ivy. The late sunlight produced one last burst of gold that sparkled through the failing leaves, and in this light I saw a face staring out at me from the next stone we passed.
I halted. My blood froze.
It wasn’t an actual face. It was carved into the rock. But such was its realism that my mind registered the being as a living thing before logic caught up with me. Speckled with moss and bearded with vines, his grave visage was both ancient and pensive, his closed eyes sunken into webs of wrinkles. A crown of interwoven antler tines rested upon his unforgiving brow. At that moment I seemed to look upon an ailing king laid out on his deathbed, a sovereign whose cruel, mirthless conscience ruminated on all the wrongdoings of his long life without remorse. But no, I knew instantly my impression was wrong. This king did not know death. He slept, perhaps, but did not die. He never would.
I looked around, and found the same face on every stone. Without a shadow of a doubt, these engravings were Craft. Humans hadn’t been permitted in the forest for thousands of years. I couldn’t imagine the age of them, and what might drive the people of that forgotten era to carve, over and over again, the terrible coun
tenance of the Alder King.
The Alder King.
Drooping motionlessly since we’d arrived, the leaves rattled in a hot, stale breeze.
The Alder King, my traitorous thoughts whispered again, naming the nameless fear clutching at me from all sides. The Alder King. Now that I’d started it was impossible to stop.
“Isobel.” Rook strode out of a thicket, pushing aside the branches of a buckthorn shrub. I hadn’t noticed he’d gone anywhere. He went to grab my shoulder, but his hand froze a hairsbreadth above my dress. “We need to leave. Quickly.”
“I didn’t mean to—” The thicket drew my gaze and what I saw there silenced me. Beyond the wild buckthorn hedge lay a clearing with more of the carven stones arranged in a circle. At the center of the circle, a hill bulged from the ground. It was perhaps fifteen feet long and half that wide, and its rounded back stood taller than the tops of the stones. A barrow mound. Rook had been talking about a different danger entirely.
A flap and flutter of wings sounded in the stillness. A croak, and then another. I looked up. An entire flock of shiny-eyed ravens roosted in the trees above us, watching, waiting.
A dozen ravens for death. What about a score—a hundred—more?
“You thought his name,” Rook said, after a pause. “You’re thinking it even now.”
I dragged my attention back to him; I knew dread gripped every inch of my expression.
He didn’t seem angry with me. His expression was neutral, a layer of ice under which fearsome currents raced unseen. I wished he’d looked angry. This was worse. It meant that whatever was about to happen was so awful he couldn’t afford to waste time feeling anything at all.
“Prepare to ride,” he said, stepping back.
Just as it had when he’d transformed the night before, a wind gusted through the trees carrying forth a whirlwind of leaves. I braced myself for his shape to shift as soon as it struck. But this time the wind died as it approached, and the leaves wafted uselessly the last few feet, scattering around his boots. Rook scowled. He stood straighter, and soon another, stronger wind roared up from the depths of the forest. But it too petered out before it reached him.
The barrow mound drew my gaze again and again. All those ancient stones, all of them facing inward, like wardens standing guard over a prisoner. For millennia they had watched it, unable to look away.
By now the heat felt oppressive. A faint smell of putrefaction hung in the air. One of the ravens gave a single, grating call, harsh as a saw rasping against metal.
“Why can’t you change?” I asked, without ever taking my eyes from the mound.
Rook dismissed his latest attempt at transformation with a flick of his hand, though a defiant glint shone in his eyes and he looked none the worse for wear.
“This place won’t allow me to. It appears we have stumbled upon the resting place of a Barrow Lord.”
Well, that was that. I wasn’t waiting around to introduce myself to something called a Barrow Lord, capitalized. I gathered up my skirts, preparing to run. Then something about the way he’d said “appears” caught up with me. “Oh, god. This is the first time you’ve come across one, isn’t it.”
“They are seldom encountered,” he said grudgingly. Noticing my stance, he added, “No, do not flee. It is already awake beneath the earth—it knows we are here. It cannot be outrun, and would only overtake us with our backs turned. This time, we stand and fight.” His gaze flicked to me again. “Or rather, I do, while you do your best to stay out of the way.”
He’d dispatched a thane with a single sword thrust. He’d called destroying the Wild Hunt’s hounds child’s play. But that knowledge was cold comfort with an entire flock of ravens roosting over my head, and the fact that this time, Rook had been willing to retreat without a word of complaint.
“What is a Barrow Lord, exactly?” I asked.
“In this matter, you might prefer ignorance.”
“Believe me, I never do.”
“If you insist,” he said, reluctant. “Most fairy beasts rise with a single mortal’s bones lending them life.” I nodded; I had known as much already. “Barrow Lords are aberrations—each one a mass of remains, entangled with one another in death. They are tormented creatures, enraged, at odds with themselves. We do not nurture their growth. They quicken on their own, in places where the mortals of ages past buried victims of war or plague.”
As if hearing itself spoken about, the mound quivered. Soil shifted and tumbled to the ground. A grotesque sound emanated from within: the damp sucking of something moist coming apart deep below the earth. Whatever this thing was, it was bigger than a thane. Bigger than all the hounds combined.
Rook unsheathed his sword and strode toward the mound, projecting a casual ease and confidence that struck me as being as fake as his glamour. Whether he was wearing it for my benefit or his own, I couldn’t guess.
As soon as he reached the stone circle’s outer edge, the mound heaved in earnest. It bulged first in one place and then another like a larva attempting to split its cocoon. Carrion beetles poured from the earth in rivulets, along with some sort of dribbling fluid. The stench of wet decay struck me like a punch to the gut. Helplessly, I doubled over and retched.
One last straining swell, and the mound disgorged its contents. A lopsided form burst forth, slumping over Rook at twice his height, lumps of dirt cascading off its sides. No illusion softened this monstrosity. It had the correct number of appendages in more or less the expected places, but that was all I could say in its favor. Its flesh was the skin of a decomposing log, riddled with disease and fungus. Its head, a hollow bark cave with two empty sockets from which a pair of mushroom clusters grew, wiggling about on long stalks with a life of their own. Right away the stalks twisted simultaneously, pointing the mushrooms’ caps down at Rook. Eyes. Those were its eyes.
Pressure built at the back of my skull. In the distance, or behind a closed door, voices argued. A little girl sobbed. Impatiently, someone scolded her. A man bellowed in wordless agony. The Barrow Lord gave a convulsive ripple, almost overbalancing itself. Its frame was bearlike, but its front legs—its arms, I found myself thinking—were overlong, and it struggled to maintain its drooping upright stance. It was trying to make itself human again, I realized, in the only way it could.
Rook’s sword flashed, opening a slice along the beast’s underbelly. Its putrid skin split without effort. He stepped back just in time to avoid the slippery cascade of fungus that spilled from the wound, halting one neat inch from the tips of his boots.
The voices stopped. Then they all screamed in unison. The Barrow Lord’s arm lashed out, scoring the statue in front of which Rook had stood a split second earlier, spraying chips of stone and moss. It slashed at him again and again, senseless and unpredictable in its maddened violence, forcing him to retreat beyond its reach. His back touched the hedge, and he began circling it, his steps easy, a cat circling a hound unafraid.
It shambled after him, lunging clumsily over the standing stones. Rook was trying to draw it away from me. But as soon as I had that thought the little girl’s voice called out, strident, and the Barrow Lord paused. In a sudden, wet contraction, the mushrooms rolled backward to look at me instead. I stumbled back blindly. I heard the groan and crash of trees toppling, my gaze fixed only on the horror hurtling in my direction—it was so rotten pieces of its body peeled away as it ran, dislodged by the concussive force of its stride.
Rook appeared between us. His sword flashed once, twice. The arm the Barrow Lord had raised to cut me down exploded porously on the forest floor. Beetles swarmed in the cavity left behind. Missing a limb, its unbalanced weight dragged it backward, and it collapsed against a pair of the carven stones, skin rupturing, pushing the monuments aslant.
For a moment I thought Rook had won. The fall had left the beast in ruins. Mucus glistened, seeped from the wreckage of its hide. But already it struggled back upright, wet fungus-slimed roots slopping out of its stump to form a new ar
m. Its head weaved from side to side, dripping. The voices consulted one another in an agitated murmur.
Rook adjusted his grip on his sword as he stalked back into the fray, crushing debris beneath his heels. Out flashed the blade. Chunks of wood flew. He could go on like this for days, chipping away at the monster without rest. If it hadn’t been for the need to keep me alive, I suspected, the Barrow Lord wouldn’t have posed much of a threat to him at all.
Something grabbed my ankle.
I looked down.
A human skeleton, held together with vegetable sinew, had clawed free from the Barrow Lord’s severed limb. Shuddering nightmarishly, it flung its other hand up to seize my skirt in its bony fingers. Tumorous mushrooms bulged between its ribs, forced its jaw ajar. It clutched at me, dragging itself higher grip by hard-won grip. Closer than all the other voices, a woman sobbed and pleaded.
“I can’t help you,” I whispered, turned inside out and shaken empty by horror. “I can’t . . .”
Rook was there. He seized the corpse by its skull and wrenched it off me, crushing the brown, age-brittled bone like an eggshell. Then he looked over his shoulder. Without hesitation, he seized me by the shoulders and pushed me aside. I landed in the bushes, the breath dashed from my lungs, just in time to see the Barrow Lord swat him. Rook slammed against a tree trunk several yards away and slumped to the ground, his sword skittering across the clearing.
Oh, god.
The Barrow Lord only had eyes for me now. It lumbered forward until I lay in the fetid darkness of its shadow. Ravens launched themselves shrieking from the trees to claw and peck at its back, flap wings in its face, but their calls soon turned to shrill squawks of desperation as their feathers stuck to the Barrow Lord’s hide. Skeletal hands surfaced, clutching at them greedily, pulling them inside. The birds struggled and thrashed, but soon all that remained was a beak here, a wing there, protruding at random from the monster’s rancid flesh. Some of them kept twitching.
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