The Alder King’s compulsory return bow cut off his darkening expression.
“Quickly, to me,” Rook said, turning and holding out his uninjured hand. A wave of leaves crashed against him as Lark lifted me, hoisted me onto a stamping horse’s back, and pulled my arms around his neck. We took off in a bone-jolting lurch. Powerful muscles bunched beneath my cheek. Faces flashed past, gaping in surprise, shrinking away from the stone chips thrown up by his striking hooves. They stung my own legs, icy pinpricks of pressure without pain. I wondered if I bled.
We clattered up the stairs, Rook’s shoulders heaving as he conquered the too-small steps. The mirrorlike curtain of water grew closer and closer, reflecting his charge in rippling silver, and my own too-pale countenance as I clung astride. He was going to jump through it. I braced myself as best I could.
“This was your plan? Oh, Rook,” I mumbled half-conscious into his warm, rough mane. What he was doing was the last thing anyone would expect. “You’re running away.”
Twenty-one
OUR FLIGHT from the summer court passed in a blur. Only the shock of water streaming from my hair and dripping down my back kept me sensible enough to cling to Rook’s mane. My thoughts lapsed in and out of a stupor, my mind struggling to stay afloat.
At some point early on, Hemlock’s cold voice chased us down a dim hollow lined by half-dead pines. I quailed at their leaning shapes, whose stripped lower branches bent inward over the stream bed like they meant to pluck me from Rook’s withers.
“Oh, do come back!” she called. “We could have tried to take him together, you and I. We could still try. He’s after you, you know. Just think what a battle it would be!”
The horn sounded then, hollow and commanding in the night. Hounds bayed in the distance. The sharp spice of pine resin rose from the needles crushed beneath Rook’s hooves, and his unrelenting pace didn’t falter.
“Please!” Hemlock cried. “I failed him. He’s set them on me. Please—please—please—”
Her screams swirled down with me into the dark.
The next time I regained full consciousness it was to Emma standing in the doorway of our house, holding a skillet in a white-knuckled grip, about to swing it at Rook’s head.
“I don’t care who you are or why you’re here!” she shouted. “You put her down right now and leave.”
“Madam, I—”
“Do you want to know how many times I’ve shoved a man’s intestines back into his body? Fair one or not, I’m sure I can manage it the other way around.”
I tried to speak, but my throat was so dry it closed up. All I managed was a sort of gagging sound.
“Isobel!” Rook and Emma both exclaimed at once.
I coughed, saliva flooding my mouth at the surge of nausea that followed. “It’s all right. Don’t hit him. He’s”—another gut-wrenching cough—“he’s helping me.”
Grim and tight-lipped, Emma lowered the skillet. “Bring her inside and put her on the settee. And then explain yourself, please, beginning with why you were just a horse.”
The walls tilted crazily as Rook carried me through the kitchen and the hall to the parlor, the air redolent with linseed oil, the shapes of the props familiar even in the dark. Home. I was home. An ache swelled bigger and bigger in my chest. I hadn’t expected to be here again—I’d thought I’d die without ever coming back. When he laid me down on the settee, the hot tears spilled over. I had a great deal of other, more important things to say, but my miserable relief hijacked my brain, and all that came out was “Emma” in a strangled wail.
She pushed Rook aside, and he had the good sense to retreat to the foot of the settee and hover there like a scolded toddler. Her arm slid between my back and the settee’s cushions, pulling me against her. I clung weakly, sobbing into her shoulder.
“Oh, Bell, where are your clothes? Why are you wearing a dress that’s shedding petals all over the place? Are you hurt anywhere? Did they hurt you?”
“I’m all right,” I bawled against her nightgown, not because it was true, but because I wanted it to be.
Eventually I subsided into wracking gulps and hiccups, and she laid me back down. I was grateful I couldn’t see the enormous wet spot I’d left on her shoulder in the dark. “I’m going to fetch some water and a lantern. You,” she added, pinning Rook with her gaze, “behave yourself.”
“Er, yes, madam,” he said.
The moment Emma left the room he was before me like a shot, gathering my wet fingers into his hands. He hissed in pain and pulled his left hand back, fumbling around for a handkerchief to cover up his slip. I touched his cheek, and he stilled, the gleam of his eyes intent on my face in the shadows. I marveled at how hot his skin felt, which meant I must be very cold indeed.
“Isobel,” he asked, “are you well? Truly?”
I considered the question. Though I lay motionless, every muscle in my body jumped with overexertion. My heartbeat rocked me slightly, the shell of my ear scraping a rhythmic shuff, shuff, shuff against the cushions, as though I had burned up to a husk as light and frail as paper.
“I don’t know. Are you?” I whispered.
He started to nod and stopped, unable to complete the motion. How silly of us to ask that question of each other, knowing neither of us would ever be well again. Yet I had the strangest feeling, wrapped up in this cocoon of darkness and exhaustion, resting on the almost-uncomfortable stiff brocade of my settee, that nothing that had happened to us was real. The autumnlands, the Barrow Lord, the spring court, the Alder King—all of it impossible, vivid as a fever dream, contrary to the solid reality of home.
“You promised to bring me back,” I said.
“If only I had done so sooner. I—”
Still cupping his cheek, I brushed my thumb over his lips, and he fell silent.
“Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “We made that choice together. But we can’t stay. The Alder King is on his way, isn’t he? Emma and the twins are in danger. If anything were to happen to them . . . we must leave as soon as we can.”
“Isobel!” The lantern Emma held at the doorway illuminated her shock, both at my words and at the position in which she found us. “You are not leaving this house again, no matter what. Do you hear me?”
She rounded on Rook. His winded and disheveled appearance in the lantern light gave her pause. She narrowed her eyes. She suspected the same thing I would have until recently, that the only reason a fair one would present himself like this was to deceive us. Certainly, it would never occur to her that he was conserving every scrap of magic he could.
“Explain,” she said, voice hard. “In detail.”
To my surprise he rose, squared his shoulders, and did. He glossed over certain parts, for which I silently thanked him, but left out nothing of importance. My dreamlike trance faded as he went on. With every word, the memories returned with sharp-edged clarity, tearing holes in the insubstantial veil separating me from the night’s horrors. Emma’s face went whiter and whiter, until eventually she sat down with an expression like stone.
Humiliation prickled my skin in waves of hot and cold, warring with a tight knot of defiance in my chest. The thought of seeing judgment—or worse, disappointment—on her face when she next looked at me made me want to curl in on myself and never face the world again. I had no way to prove that the love Rook and I felt for each other was real and that we deserved every desperate, foolhardy inch of it, and I was already tired, so tired, of bearing its weight as a failure. A crime.
The minutes I waited for Emma’s reaction were the longest of my life. She listened without interrupting. When Rook neared the end her gaze drifted down to his left hand, and a line appeared between her eyebrows. She had never seen an injured fair one before. He shifted at her scrutiny, the only sign of nervousness he’d shown since beginning the story. Despite being a prince among fair folk, in that moment he looked awfully young, not so very unlike a human suitor meeting a girl’s family for the first time.
&nbs
p; But usually, a suitor didn’t deliver news of his and his sweetheart’s impending demise.
“And that was why I arrived as a horse,” he finished, “and why we must leave soon.”
Emma turned to me. I braced myself, believing I was prepared for the worst, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t bear her pinched, ashen devastation. No judgment, no disappointment, and the fact that she didn’t blame me for any of this was the hardest thing of all.
“What of the enchantment on the house?” she asked.
“He’s the Alder King, Emma,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She looked at Rook.
He bowed his head. “I fear Isobel is right. Nothing will stand in the Alder King’s way.”
For a few seconds, none of us spoke. Emma rubbed the heels of her hands up and down her thighs as though easing a muscle cramp. Her expression betrayed little, but that tense, repetitive gesture was one of aimless despair, and I felt it too—a sick acceleration, a quickening slide, like someone had just tipped me over the crest of a hill in a wagon. There was no turning back. There was only the fall, and the inevitable crash at the bottom.
“Rook, thank you for bringing her home,” she said finally. “Isobel, I want you to know that I’m proud of you. Don’t leave yet, please. Is there anywhere you can go from here?”
Rook and I exchanged a glance. “We can make for the World Beyond,” he said, careful in his phrasing. It was a kindness to Emma, and nothing else. We’d never get that far.
A furtive shuffling came from the stairwell. Then two pairs of bare feet slapped down the steps.
Oh, god. The twins must have heard everything. They’d probably been eavesdropping since Rook and I came in. My stomach clenched at the sight of their wide eyes as they crept around the corner. March hesitated in the doorway, wringing her long linen nightshirt against her legs. May had a squarish object tucked under her arm. They both looked petrified to see me lying on the settee half dead in an enchanted ball gown.
May recovered first. Scowling, she stomped over to Rook and thrust the thing she was carrying up at him. Next she cleared her throat, commanding the room’s undivided attention.
“A creepy stranger gave us that while we were playing outside.” (“What?” Emma exclaimed, shooting to her feet.) “He told us to hide it and not open it, since it’s a present for you and Isobel. We tried anyway,” she added, narrowing her eyes, “but the lid’s stuck.”
It was a slender box about the length of a man’s forearm, like a box one might store hat ribbons in, but I was well aware that it wasn’t a hat ribbon box, even disregarding the way Rook held it as though it might explode at any moment. My insides gave an uneasy flip.
May glanced at me, feigning indifference. Then she gathered up her courage and declared, “I hate you.”
“May—”
Her hands balled into fists. “Don’t say you’re sorry, because it won’t change my mind!”
I knew she didn’t mean it. She was confused and betrayed and frightened, and being angry at me was her only way of seizing control of the situation. But that didn’t stop my heart from sinking to the floor as she whipped around and stomped into the kitchen. March shot me a skittish look and scampered after her sister. Emma gave us a long, fraught stare—its meaning clear, stay—before she hurried after the twins.
Through it all Rook wore an expression of aloof perplexity, as a cat might watching its favorite furniture get moved about without its permission.
His bewilderment was the last straw. I didn’t have the energy to translate our humanity for him. Grief smashed through my final defenses like a battering ram. I gave a strangled sob, so tired I couldn’t tell if my scratchy, aching eyes owed themselves more to exhaustion or tears.
Rook sank onto the end of the settee. He hesitated, then peeled his coat off and laid it over me. It was warm and smelled of him. Overwhelmed by his gentleness, I began weeping again in earnest. He drew back in alarm, clearly thinking he’d made things worse.
“Er,” he said. He patted the nearest part of me he could reach, which was my foot. “I apologize for . . . that. If you would stop crying now,” he added, a trifle desperately, with a note of princely command.
It was no use. Just then, a random thought renewed my anguish. “Oh, I destroyed your raven pin!” I choked out. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well, I think I’ve found that I don’t need it anymore.”
Because he loved me. I covered my face with my hands.
“Isobel, I appear to be . . . shall I leave the room?”
“No, it isn’t you.” Muffled by my fingers, my voice was smudged pitifully with tears. “I’m just, I’m being really human right now, all right? Give me ten seconds.”
I sucked in a deep, shaking breath and counted to ten. When I reached it, I had stopped crying. Mostly. After a shuddering exhale, I rubbed my face on my sleeve, which turned out to be a bad idea; the lace scraped my swollen eyelids like sandpaper. Reaching out, I enlisted Rook’s help in wedging myself up into the corner of the settee, because I wasn’t sure I could sit upright on my own, and determinedly pretended I didn’t have a bright red face and a snotty nose.
Good enough. “There. Now, let’s open the box.”
His fingers tightened around the box’s edges. Its varnish gleamed in the lantern light. A gift, May had said. My best guess was that it was some sort of cruel joke, a prank played on the two of us for breaking the Good Law. But that didn’t make much sense, did it? One didn’t play pranks on people who were supposed to be dead. No one had expected us to survive the night, much less return . . . return to my house. Unless . . .
Gadfly.
A chill rippled up my legs, over my arms, and into my scalp.
There was something going on here I didn’t know about. Something, I suddenly felt certain, that like most things I didn’t know about, I wasn’t going to like at all. The room shrank away, its familiar odds and ends blending into an ominous clutter.
Rook passed his hand over the locked latch. I forced myself not to look away from the stump of his little finger. He had already used his glamour to make it appear healed, and for the sake of his pride I would not dispute him in the matter. The wound must have hurt terribly, but aside from that single noise he’d made earlier, he revealed nothing.
He snapped his fingers, and the lid sprang open. Inside, upon a pillow of black velvet, lay a newly forged dagger. Its point glinted, needle-sharp.
I asked, even though I didn’t need to, “Is it iron?”
“Yes,” he said.
Whether it was due to the ensorcellment, or simply that we had grown familiar with each other, I knew we had the exact same thought simultaneously. Gadfly, standing over us at the Green Well, describing the terms of our violation and the limited means by which we might escape punishment. The way Rook had pleaded with him to end his life, and thus spare mine. He played games with us even now.
Without another word, Rook passed the box over. I wouldn’t take it, so he set it down on the cushion beside me. Our eyes locked. A silent argument raged between us. When he drew a breath to break the stalemate, I emphatically shook my head.
“No,” I said. “Stop it.”
He leapt up from his seat and knelt on the floor in front of me. He took the dagger from the box and turned it against himself. It shook so badly in his grasp he’d drop it before long, and I took cold comfort in the assurance that he couldn’t use it without help. But when his glamour flowed away I wasn’t prepared for the sight of his true self. His skin held a terrible pallor; his overlarge, queer-looking eyes were shadowed by exhaustion and pain. Sweat had left streaks in the dirt on his face.
“Listen to me,” he croaked. “Both of us need not die tonight. Isobel, you cannot break the Good Law alone. If the fair folk sense I am no more—”
I seized the dagger from him. Having no idea what to do with it afterward, I lifted the cushion I was lying on and shoved it underneath, then threw my weight back on top. “Stop being
melodramatic! I am not going to kill you in my parlor!”
He stared at me in disbelief. “Did you just sit on it?”
“Yes,” I said mutinously.
“But there is no other way.”
I must have gotten quite a ferocious look on my face, because he leaned back a little. “Have you considered what it would be like for me to go on with my life after murdering you? Imagine if it were the other way around!”
He paused, and looked ill.
“Exactly!”
“No—yes—you are right. I should not have asked it of you.” His eyes flicked toward the hallway. Emma. A vise squeezed the air out of my lungs. If Rook asked Emma, she would certainly slay him to spare me, just as she would have killed the fairy beast to save her sister, if only she had had the strength. She wouldn’t let another family member die because of the fair folk.
My pulse roared in my ears. I no longer felt the settee’s cushions or the tears drying on my face. In the stories, maidens drank poison and jumped from high towers upon hearing of their princes’ deaths. But I wasn’t one of them. I still wanted to live, and in fact I had lived seventeen perfectly functional years before I’d ever met Rook. I had a family who loved me and needed me. I couldn’t ask Emma and the twins to suffer through the pain of my loss. If this was the only option . . . if this was what we had to do . . . but I couldn’t countenance it; I ached to think of him gone, a vast empty ache I couldn’t face head-on for fear of drowning in it.
His fingers stroked a strand of hair behind my ear. “It would not be like a mortal dying,” he said. “You have seen it. I will leave no body behind. There will be a tree, perhaps. A bigger one than that absurd little oak outside your kitchen.”
I couldn’t stand it. I choked on a laugh. “Show-off.”
“Yes.” He gave me half a smile. “Always.”
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