The morning was dark, the wind clawed with frost crystals. I was unsurprised to find Bambleby still asleep at the appointed hour. He was near impossible to wake, and I began to fear I would have to drag him from the bed. I could not determine if he was wearing anything, that was the problem.
“I see now why you faked the Schwarzwald study,” I said. “And here I thought it was ruthlessness!”
“Laziness, Em,” he intoned from his pile of blankets. “Do you know how dense that bloody forest is? And you’re well aware what sort of ground trooping faeries can cover in a single afternoon. Horrid, self-involved Folk.”
“You would know,” I said blandly. He roused himself eventually amidst a volcanic cloud of grumbles and remonstrances, and we set out.
In the end, it was easy.
In my earlier rambles, I had stumbled across the river that the tree grew beside, and as Thora had said it could be found downstream, past an elbow-bend, downstream we went, albeit slowly. The snow was too shallow to warrant snowshoes, but the partial melt had created unpleasant little ice streams atop which the snow sat like a bridge made of feathers. Our feet remained dry, courtesy of the furred Ljoslander boots we had purchased prior to departure, but the going was awkward over such cumbersome terrain.
It was Bambleby who saw the tree first.
He came to a sharp halt, his brow furrowing. I caught a gleam of white through the trees ahead, different in quality to the surrounding snow. Shadow began to whine.
“Is that it?” I marched onward, cursing as my boot broke through another rind of ice. I pushed a branch aside and drew in a sharp breath.
There was no doubt that the tree before us was the tree; it could have stepped from the tales into the forest. It was centred in an oddly round clearing, as if the other trees had all felt inclined to back away, and was towering but skeletal, its trunk only a little wider than I was and its many, many branches arching and tangling overhead, like a small person propping up a tremendous, many-layered umbrella.
But the strangest thing about the tree was its foliage. There were leaves of summer-green mixed in with the fire and gold of autumn; tidy buds just opening their pink mouths, and, here and there, red fruits dangling in clusters, heavy with ripeness. These fruits could not be easily identified; they were roughly the size of apples, but furred like peaches.
I felt a happy little glow start in my chest, for the tree—though utterly terrifying, when viewed from an objective standpoint—was so evidently, obviously Folk, while at the same time it was like nothing I had seen before. Oh, I wished to learn everything about it.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” I called to Bambleby, who had not moved from the riverbank. “Come and tell me if you think there really is a king trapped in here.”
I could see him only in parts, through the forest: a smear of gold; a hand on one of the trees; the edge of his black cloak. “Emily,” he said, “come away from there.”
A dreaminess fell over me, and I almost took a step. But then my hand clenched reflexively on the copper coin I carried in my pocket—it’s something I’ve practiced many times whenever a faerie has tried to bewitch me.
He had never done that to me before. It was him doing it, not the tree—I could hear it in his voice. I was suddenly filled with a fury of such force my vision swam, and which drove away the last vestiges of his enchantment.
“I will not,” I replied, a dagger in each word.
He seemed to start back. “Please, Em,” he said in his ordinary voice. “Please come here.”
“Why?”
He seemed to think. “Don’t you trust me?”
That threw me. But only for a moment. “Of course not.”
He fell to irritated muttering, chafing his arms and pacing back and forth. I turned back to the tree, keeping a hold on my coin. Despite my anger at Wendell, his reaction made me cautious. I paced slowly around the circumference, taking photos. I did not touch the tree, and I kept an eye out for errant leaves that might fall upon me, bewitching me in some ghastly way. When the branches moved against each other, an odd, high sound was produced, like someone whistling out of tune.
“Well, that’s a perfectly ordinary sound for a tree to make,” Bambleby called. “Nothing at all to worry about.”
“Have you ever considered,” I said, removing my measuring tape from my bag, “that I might be more capable than you think? I have written dozens of papers, read hundreds of analyses. I’ve also had numerous firsthand dealings with the Folk, from hobs to bogles to an extremely self-entitled aristocrat.”
“I don’t doubt that most of your success to date is the result of cleverness. But have you ever considered how much you owe to luck?”
My hand clenched. I finished the measurements without replying—base and canopy. Then I withdrew my field book and began taking notes. I scraped at the snow and found, trapped beneath it, a thin carpet of leaves. As I worked, Bambleby’s grumbling and stomping reached a volume one normally associates with teams of horses.
“If you would only tell me what you’re so worried about,” I said calmly. If I am being honest, I was rather enjoying myself.
“I can’t,” he said through his teeth.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I literally and physically cannot tell you.”
“Stop being dramatic.”
“I am not,” he said, with the most dramatic groan I have heard him utter. Shadow seemed to take inspiration from his histrionics and whined louder.
I turned back to the tree. I could almost hear him stewing. Well, let him. I fetched a pair of metal tweezers from my pack and carefully plucked a leaf from the frost. It was lovely, segmented like a maple and white as the trunk and boughs, though it also had a coating of short white hairs, like some sort of beast. I placed the leaf within a small metal box I habitually use to collect such samples, many of which have found their place in the Museum of Dryadology and Ethnofolklore at Cambridge. Unfortunately, the wind chose that moment to stir the leaves I had uncovered. I leapt aside as quickly as I was able, but one of them brushed my bare fingertips. I felt a shock of cold, as if I had plunged my hand into ice melt.
“Dammit,” I muttered. I pressed the coin to my hand immediately, and the pain lessened.
“What?” Bambleby said. His hearing is inconveniently sharp.
“Nothing. I thought you’d gone, but then I saw that you hadn’t.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Shadow, go and collect your suicidal mistress.”
I laughed. “Shadow only responds to me. You think—”
Shadow burst from the trees and leapt upon me. I fell into a snowbank, and before I even knew what was happening, he had grabbed my cloak in his teeth and was dragging me.
“Shadow!”
The dog seemed not to hear my shrieks. I slid over snow and roots, and my backside barked painfully against a rock. The land sloped a little towards the river, and with one final tug, Shadow slid me the rest of the way like an ungainly sledge to land in a heap at Bambleby’s feet.
I gathered myself, panting. “Shadow!” I snapped, full of fury and betrayal, and he hung his head low, that terrible doggish guilt in every line of his body. But he did not move from his position between me and the tree.
“Good boy.” Bambleby seized my hand and dragged me along the riverbank. Oh, I was going to kill him. I wrenched him so hard that he stumbled but did not fall, catching himself with that infuriating grace that he often tries to conceal. I yanked him again so that we were facing each other and grabbed his other arm, the better to shove him into the river. His green eyes widened with outrage when he realized what I was intending, his golden hair falling into them—horrendously unfair that he should look beautiful even when he’s angry, instead of going blotchy and beady-eyed like a normal person. If I hadn’t been decided on sending him into the river before, I was now.
That was when the land broke open, showering us in snow and dirt. Roots wormed their way out from the soil, white and smooth as bone. They twined themselves around Bambleby and yanked him onto his back, then dragged him towards the white tree in an uncanny mirror of what I had undergone.
“Wendell!” I lunged forward, trying to wrench the roots away from him. They showed no interest whatsoever in me, nor Shadow, who pounced and worried at them until they fell away. But more rose to take their place.
“Why does it want you?” I cried.
“Why do you think, you cold-blooded lunatic of a woman?” he yelled, clawing at the ground. This was followed by a series of curses in what I assumed to be Irish.
I stabbed at the roots with my pocketknife. At the same moment, though, my mind was racing through stories, texts, journals. “Can you not—can you not say it?”