An Enchantment of Ravens

by Margaret Rogerson

  Rose petals swept around us as we switched partners, disappearing with a ghost of heady fragrance. If I survived this, I thought, I’d never want to smell roses again.

  “I felt—” Rook began, but I cut him off with a sharp jerk of my head. I meant to wait until Gadfly and Foxglove had moved away from us to speak. Yet I found, as the seconds passed, that I couldn’t say the words. I didn’t know how to say them. They were too vast and terrible to fit on my tongue.

  Around and around we swirled. Lights glittered across Rook’s hair and the gold thread on his coat. Courtiers flowed past us, whirling but never touching, like flowers spinning on the surface of a lake. A wolf mask turned to stare at me as it passed; I felt countless eyes upon us, waiting for the first sign of the hunt’s climax. Two prey, one alert, the other unsuspecting, about to be flushed from a thicket toward a bloody end.

  “Isobel? What is it?”

  “I must ask you to do something for me,” I said.

  He replied quickly, “Anything.”

  I forced myself not to look away. “You must use the ensorcellment to change what I feel.”

  Rook almost missed a step. “What are you saying?”

  Nearby Foxglove tilted her head back, her silvery laugh splitting the masquerade.

  “I’m saying that I—”

  “No. Don’t.” He looked at me as though he were marooned and I were a ship he was watching sail out to sea, farther and farther away.

  A sickly odor of decay reached my nose.

  “Rook, I’m sorry,” I said. “I love you.”

  Our next turn brought the tables into view. A fair one lifted a pear to her lips, only for the fruit to blacken in her hand, oozing through her fingers, swollen with maggots. She ate it anyway, wearing an expression of sweet delight as juice and pulp dripped down her chin. On all the platters, the fruit had turned rotten. Dark putrefaction spilled over the china, soaked the tablecloths, and dribbled to the ground.

  “When?” he asked, his lips barely moving. The lower half of his face was masklike itself, ashen against his dark curls and high collar.

  A songbird dove down, tearing a butterfly apart in its beak. Whirling in circles, the revelers grew sallow and feverish in the fairy lights’ multicolored glow. Animal masks snarled. Flower masks boggled at us, inscrutable. They spun dizzily and with delirious abandon, no longer playing at being human, parodying a mortal ball like a nightmare masquerade.

  “Yesterday. But I didn’t know until . . .” I couldn’t bear to speak of it. “Please. We’re almost out of time.”

  “I can’t do it,” he said.

  A raven croaked overhead.

  “You have to!”

  He released my waist to pull on the trailing end of the ribbon holding his mask in place. It tumbled to the ground, lost among the dancers. “I gave my word,” he said, stripped bare.

  We took one step forward. Another back. Turned. I tasted the words like poisoned wine. “Then it’s over.”

  “Isobel,” Rook said. He stopped moving, so that we alone stood still. “I have never met anyone more frustrating, or brave, or beautiful. I love you.”

  A sob caught in my throat. Standing on my toes, I closed the gap between us and kissed him; I kissed him fiercely, bruisingly, as a cacophony of mocking wails and scandalized shrieks rose from the fair folk looking on. This was what they had been waiting for.

  A whisper of sound. Suddenly we stood alone, as though the courtiers had vanished like specters into the night. But no—they were still there—I caught the grotesque shapes of masks peering out at us from the bushes, from the trees, from every shadow, their hidden owners crouching in stiff anticipation like mantises waiting to strike.

  And we weren’t completely alone. A slender, white-haired figure clad in black armor stood at one of the tables. Her back faced us. I hadn’t seen her arrive; perhaps she’d already been standing there for some time. She picked up a spoiled pastry, examined it, and flung it away in disgust.

  A horn blast echoed through the forest. I felt it in the ground, reverberating up through my bones. Two other blasts answered its call, but those deep bellows did not belong to horns. In the misty darkness between the trees, a pair of towering shapes moved. They were so tall, crowned with branches, that I might have mistaken them for giant oaks had they not shifted, revealing themselves as massive thanes, both at least half again as large as the one Rook slew the day we’d met. Hounds leapt out of the woods as though fleeing from them, pale flames in the night, to boil sinuously around Hemlock’s legs, overturning the table as they vied for her affection, utterly ignored. Steam rose from their lolling scarlet tongues.

  The horn sounded again. Only then did she turn.

  With the movement, it was as though she pulled a dustcloth from the throne room. The air rippled, and the birches grayed and sagged, bark peeling, riddled with beetle holes. The moss underfoot atrophied to an unhealthy yellow-green, and flowers shriveled in the damp heat that rose from the earth, rank with the stench of decomposing vegetation. The summer court’s corruption had reached the springlands—or it had been here all along.

  “I am here to enforce the Good Law!” Hemlock cried in a clear voice. What she said next made the trees groan and whisper and all the waiting ravens take flight in a nervous, silent cloud. “By the order of our sovereign, the Alder King.”

  Eighteen

  HEMLOCK HALTED only a few paces away, her open hands held out to the sides as though to show us she didn’t have a weapon, or as if she were prepared to embrace us. Given the wicked claws on the ends of her long, knotted fingers, I didn’t try to guess which.

  Rook eyed her up and down, and in one smooth, contemptuous motion drew his sword. He angled his body in front of me. I seized the chance to bend and work the ring out of my stocking, and slipped it on while he spoke. “How long have you been the Alder King’s servant, Hemlock?” he spat. “I was unaware the winter court had fallen so low. Bending the knee on ceremony is one thing. Carrying out orders on his behalf is quite another.”

  Even with Rook between us, Hemlock’s unsettling, luminously green gaze fixed on my face. “Do try to be more polite, Rook,” she said. “Have a look around. Myself, Gadfly, even the winter prince—none of us do what we like now.” A smile twitched across her features. “I did tell both of you silly fools to run. I told you I’d be after you.”

  Rook’s sword sang through the air. It moved so swiftly I didn’t see it strike, or see Hemlock raise her arm to block it. They stood locked together, the blade lodged in her armor, Rook’s coat billowing around him as the wind settled. Her smile hardened. She dug her heels in, and her arm shook with the effort of holding him at bay. But Rook and I were outnumbered. We knew it, and so did she.

  She crooked one finger, beckoning the courtiers forward. “Make yourselves useful, please, and seize them. Do wipe your faces first.”

  The fair folk swarmed from the forest. Before I could react, they tore me away from Rook. Dozens of hands grasped my clothes, my arms, my hair, sticky from their feasting on putrid fruit. They jerked me this way and that, as though pretending to dance with me—leering faces spun around me like a carousel. I lashed out with my ring, and someone gave a bloodcurdling scream.

  “She has iron on her finger!” the fair one exclaimed. The voice was familiar—Foxglove. “Take it from her! Take the whole hand if you must!”

  An arm struck me across the back, slamming me to the ground. Gulping air in hoarse gasps, I pulled my arm underneath me and lifted my chin just enough to see that Rook had been overpowered too. Gadfly stood behind him with his elbow wrapped around Rook’s throat and his other hand squeezing Rook’s wrist, which no longer held a sword. Mask gone, he looked calm and amused as Rook thrashed with bared teeth in his grip. Their height difference was such that Rook was bent backward, unable to find footing, while Hemlock’s hounds snapped at his kicking boots.

  We had scored only two small victories. A chunk of bark armor hung loose from Hemlock’s forearm w
here she stood aside, nursing it. Sap dripped down, sharp with the smell of winter pine; the bark was already growing back over the wound. And Foxglove sat on the ground across from me, holding a hand to her cheek. An angry weal stood out on it where I’d struck her, already melting away to flawless skin behind the furiously trembling cage of her fingers.

  I knew her command had been serious and the fair folk wouldn’t hesitate to follow it through. I tugged the ring off and flung it away, past the pool of rose petals spreading around me like a bloodstain. The iron wouldn’t do me any good now.

  “You wicked, nasty creature,” Foxglove hissed, yanking me to my feet. I hadn’t seen her get up. I stifled a cry as she wrenched one of my arms out of its socket—tingling, lightning-bright sparks of pain shot through my shoulder, numbing me to every other sensation. I tripped forward, pushed from behind, barely managing to stay upright. The circlet hung askew on my head.

  “No,” Aster’s wispy voice said nearby. “Don’t hurt her—don’t hurt them more than you have to, please—” Her touch alit on my arm before someone swatted it away.

  “I’ll reach down her throat and tear her heart out if I so choose,” Foxglove snapped. “What is wrong with you, Aster? You would seek mercy for those who have broken the Good Law? This human wielded iron against me.”

  Aster’s answer seemed to come from afar this time. “I’m sorry . . .”

  “And stop looking at her like that,” Foxglove added, vehemently. I thought she was still addressing Aster until she went on, “How disgusting. Have some dignity, and die like one of your own kind.”

  I raised my head to find Rook watching me, his agonized affections written plainly on his face. Some fair folk stared in revolted fascination. Others cringed away, unable to bear the sight. But Gadfly looked down at him, and then over at me, with a subtle, almost regretful smile shading the edges of his mouth. I was reminded of his many portraits, a hundred versions shifting in the firefly glow.

  “Foxglove, while I appreciate your enthusiasm, let us not begin tearing hearts out quite yet,” he said. “Now that our masquerade has been cut so tragically short, I find myself unprepared for the evening’s diversions to end.” He sent a quelling look at Hemlock, who had started forward. “Oh, I insist. This is still my court, after all, isn’t it? Well, then—that’s settled. First, we shall take them to the Green Well. And we will give Isobel one last chance to save the prince’s life, and undo all the harm she has inflicted.”

  The clamor that followed drowned out my scream. I slumped in Foxglove’s grasp, stars bursting across my vision.

  “Now, everyone,” Gadfly said. “It’s only fair. And I promise it will be a memorable spectacle.” As Rook twisted against him, shouting incoherently with fury, he gave a cheerful wink.

  The fairy host drove us forward, across the glade, through thickets and meadows, past the riven stone and the bluebells. The moonlight frosted everything like a dream. My head hung, but from time to time I caught glimpses of the thanes keeping pace with us on either side, colossal shadows striding through the wood, terrible in their immense and silent majesty. Hounds leapt among the fair folk like nobles’ dogs in a hunting party. And of course, Rook and I were the game. Perhaps it was fitting that the place where Rook had confessed his love to me would be the place where we died.

  When we reached the Green Well it was just as I remembered it, even in the dark. The squat circle of mossy stones filled me with the same lurching horror as before, but Foxglove propelled me inexorably forward when my body stiffened and my steps shortened into halting, balking scuffles. She didn’t stop until the tips of my boots stubbed against the rocks. She tore the circlet from me while I writhed in her grip, and thrust my shoulders forward over the edge. Freed from its braids, my hair fell loose over the well’s shadows.

  Gadfly brought Rook up short across from me on the other side. It was grimly satisfying to see that Rook had clipped his nose at some point on the short journey over. Blood smeared his mouth, and ferns and flowers sprouted around him where some of it had dripped to the ground.

  “Isobel—” Rook began.

  Hemlock stalked into view, kicking aside the overgrowth as it spread. She drove an elbow into Rook’s gut, and he doubled over, silenced. A few fair folk jeered. That was when I knew our death would be many things, but it wouldn’t be swift.

  Swallowtail came forward with a winning smile. He stole Rook’s crown, placed it on his own head, and strutted around pretending to swing a shuttlecock racket as everyone laughed. Emboldened, another fair one approached, seized the lapel of Rook’s coat, and ripped the garment half off him. The raven pin went spinning into the flowers. Rook staggered. Then he lunged at the offender, only to go sprawling when Gadfly lifted a foot and neatly swiped his legs out from under him.

  A sob caught in my throat. Rook climbed back to his feet, his clothes torn and his chest heaving. I never could have imagined him so humiliated.

  “Do what you will with me,” he said, “but don’t make her watch. Let her go.”

  Gadfly sighed. With a fatherly hand, he brushed twigs and leaves from Rook’s hair. Rook didn’t react. His head was lowered, hiding his face. I ached with the knowledge that if anything like trust existed between fair folk, he had felt it toward Gadfly.

  “It takes two to violate this particular tenet of the Good Law, I’m afraid,” Gadfly said.

  “She is ensorcelled.”

  “Ah, but her will remains her own. It seems you love her so much that you’ve resisted enthralling her.” This time, no one jeered. The whispers sounded unsettled, confused. “And in any case, as both you and I know, the breach of the Good Law occurred beforehand.”

  “Do hurry up, Gadfly.” Hemlock’s smile looked pasted on. “I hate to keep the king waiting.”

  “Then kill me!” Rook snarled, twisting around to face Gadfly. “We can hardly break the Good Law if one of us is dead. What is a mortal’s life to the Alder King? She will have returned home, married, borne children, perished, and turned to dust before he takes his next breath. She is noth—” He drew up short with a painful gasp, caught in a lie. “She is nothing to him,” he said instead, anguish wracking his words. “Kill me and be done with it!”

  “Rook, stop!” I shouted. I might as well have been a bird twittering for all the attention the other fair folk paid me. Only Rook reacted, flinching as though I’d struck him.

  “I suppose we could do that.” Gadfly paused. “But it wouldn’t be fun at all, would it? And it isn’t as though we aren’t giving Isobel a choice in the matter.”

  Unceremoniously, he released Rook, who had been leaning so heavily against Gadfly’s restraint that he fell, catching himself on his hands and knees. He threw one arm over the edge of the well and pulled himself up to meet my eyes, panting, though I could tell he wanted to look away; it took everything he had to look at me.

  “I was not strong enough to protect you,” he said, at a volume pitched to me alone.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  We looked desperately into each other’s eyes. It wasn’t.

  “Now, I apologize for spoiling the moment, but Hemlock has a point—we’re dallying. So.” Gadfly pulled his gloves off, one after the other, and slipped them into his pocket. “Isobel, Rook is quite correct about one thing: the two of you only violate the Good Law in the state you’re in presently. That is, both alive, a mortal and a fair one, and in love. Ah,” he said at my expression. “Yes, if either of you could stop loving the other, we would have to release you. Go on, give it a try if you like.”

  All these years, how hadn’t I realized what a monster Gadfly was? But god, I had to at least make the attempt. I squeezed my eyes shut so hard lights exploded across the insides of my eyelids. I thought of Rook stealing me away in the dead of night; his arrogance; his tantrums; how foolish I was for loving him. I imagined Emma tucking March and May into bed alone. Yet my traitorous heart wouldn’t surrender. I could no more change my feelings
than I could command the sky to rain or demand that the sun rise at the stroke of midnight.

  I released the breath trapped in my chest with a sound that was half a gasp, half a scream. Gadfly knew. Damn him, he knew that for me, not being able to rein in my own heart was the greatest torment of all.

  “But there’s another way.” His mild voice insinuated itself into the following quiet. “It is not a crime for two fair folk to be in love.” Someone snickered. Love among fair folk—a grand joke indeed. “All you must do is drink of the Green Well, and you will save your own life, and Rook’s. The two of you can be together for eternity.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. Perhaps you’d let me live, but not Rook, not for long.”

  “Oh . . . I’ve had a bit of wine, I’m in a generous mood.” I opened my eyes in time to see Gadfly nudge Rook with his boot. Rook seemed to have given up entirely; his forehead rested on the well’s stone edge. “He will have to have his power stripped from him, of course, remaining a prince is out of the question, but—I would see to it that he lives. No doubt a part of him wouldn’t want to, after that. He has always been proud. But he would do it for you.”

  I was trembling so hard my hair shivered around me. “No,” I whispered.

  “No? Truly? You value your mortality so highly that you would condemn not only yourself to death, but Rook as well? He has so many thousands of years left to him. And they say my kind is cold.”

  My gaze fell on the raven pin, glinting among the bluebells. “I will never become like you,” I said. “Never.”

  Gadfly smiled down at me sadly. “What of your family?”

  I raised my head, trembling now with rage as well as fear. How dare he.

  “Surely,” he went on, “it would be a comfort to your aunt Emma, and your little sisters March and May, if they could see you again. Just imagine how much you could help them as a fair one.”