Poe answered my questions with something approaching good nature, his black eyes a little damp as his fingers lovingly stroked the roots of his tree. They were simple enough: Where had the tall ones taken the girls? (To the place where the aurora bleeds white.) What do the tall ones fear most? (Fire.)
“Waste of a question,” Bambleby said as we departed. “They are of the ice and snow. What else would they be afraid of?”
“Thank you for your advice,” I said. “Though I note you waited to volunteer it until after its usefulness had passed. What do you think is the place where the aurora bleeds white?”
“I don’t know, but I simply cannot wait to find out. You did not ask your third question.”
“How observant you are.” In truth, I couldn’t have articulated why I withheld the third question, apart from an intuition that it would be important later. It is an intuition I have come to trust, for if you spend enough time studying the Folk, you become aware of how their behaviour follows the ancient warp and weft of stories, and to feel the way that pattern is unfolding before you. The third question is always the most important one.
The laden sleigh drawn by two of the hardy, shaggy Ljoslander horses awaited us in the village. The horses were white, which struck me as an omen of something, though I could not guess if it was good or bad. These were no ordinary horses, but beasts used to picking their way over open countryside laden with drifting snow, and even clambering up mountains.
Aud surprised me before our departure by giving me a hug and kissing me on both cheeks. I flushed and mumbled my way through the experience. She drew Bambleby aside and spoke to him quietly. When he returned to the sleigh, he was frowning.
“What?”
“Aud seems to think I will leave you for dead at the first sign of trouble,” he replied. “Either that or devour you myself. She offered me a boon in exchange for your safety.”
“I hope you said yes,” I said unperturbedly. “You may keep the money. I claim the silver sheep.”
He rolled his eyes. Moments later, after another round of tedious goodbyes, we were on our way.
The sleigh glided smoothly over the snow. We followed the road for the first hour. Two of the villagers went before us on horses, men who had been part of the first search party. They showed us the place where Lilja and Margret had left the road, a spot where the Karr?arskogur rolled down from the mountains and cast blue shadows over the wheel ruts and footprints. There the men took their leave, as Bambleby and I would continue on alone, having refused Aud’s offer of a guard.
The forest seemed to make a path for us as we followed the clear marks of trampling in the snow, as if the trees had shuffled aside to make way for whoever or whatever had passed there before. Only in places was our way blocked, once by a tall birch that I could have sworn, from a distance, stood to the side of the clearing. The boughs creaked and groaned, and it felt as if the forest was slowly closing the path again, like the healing of a jagged wound.
I got out and walked with Shadow whenever the ground climbed over a hill, to give the horses some relief. I looked back at my footprints in the snow, deriving some primitive form of satisfaction in seeing the mark I’d made on that unfamiliar world. Shadow, loping at my side, left no tracks. He never does.
Bambleby stayed put in the sleigh, wrapped in two blankets and speaking only to complain about the cold. His nose turned a brilliant red from blowing it, the sound of which always seemed to coincide with moments when I was spellbound by the quiet loveliness of the snowy wood. Finally I demanded that he eat one of Poe’s cakes, and was relieved by his acquiescence, which spared me the effort of shoving it down his throat.
The cake was warm to the touch, so soft it might have just emerged from the oven, and it transformed Bambleby’s mood. He strode alongside the sleigh for the rest of the afternoon without his blankets or scarf, face flushed with warmth, absently brushing his hands through the boughs of this tree or that. Whatever he touched burst into bloom, scattering the snow with leaves like beaten emeralds, red berries, pussy willows and seed cones, a riot of colour and texture crackling through that white world. Soon enough our little wilderness path could have been a grand avenue decked out for a returning general’s triumphant procession. Birds hunkered down for the long winter crept out of their burrows, chirruping their alarmed delight as they grew drunk on berries. A narrow fox darted across our path, a starling clutched in its mouth, sparing us a dismissive glance as it slunk back into the velvet shadow.
I tried very hard not to be awed by this flamboyant display of Wendell’s. It was the first time I’d seen him be free with his magic, and it left me feeling unsteady and on edge; I realized that I was used to ignoring that part of him, or at least looking past it. As we crested a rise, I turned to see all that colour unfurled across the sleeping landscape, trees jaunty and defiant even as the chill winds snatched at their leaves like nipping wolves.
Towards evening, we came to a mountain pass. The first search party had stopped here—we could tell by the perturbation in the snow, a confusion of hoofprints and boot treads. We carried on a little farther, following the ominous outline of a single set of hooves. The mountains on either side were volcanic-sharp and larger than any earthbound thing should have a right to be, their iced peaks surely closer to the stars than they were to us trudging specks.
“Were they alone at this point?” I wondered aloud.
Bambleby shrugged, perfectly unconcerned. He had donned his scarf and gloves again, but some of the ruddy warmth lingered in his face. “Shall we stop for the night? I’m famished.”
I made him continue for another hour, until we came to the heart of the pass. Bambleby sighed heavily, but helped me unload the tent and tuck it into a fold in the mountain’s skirts, where we would be protected from the weather. More sighing ensued as we made our fire and our supper, a mix of dried meat, spices, and vegetables that we were to boil with melted snow. He stood staring at the pot as if he had never seen one before until I enquired whether he had ever once in his life cooked his own food—for certainly he would have been waited on even more ostentatiously in his faerie kingdom than he was used to in the mortal realm—and he snapped that he didn’t see what difference it made, which was enough of an answer for me. I left him to it, and the burned taste of the stew was worth the enjoyment I derived in watching him flounder about, alternately burning and spattering himself. Afterwards, he retreated in a moody huff to the tent to shroud himself in the blankets Aud had provided, where he withdrew needle and thread and proceeded to mend minute tears in his cloak, muttering to himself and generally making a picture that was like some bizarre inversion of one of the hags of Fate, weaving the future into their tapestries. His seemed like pointless industry to me, with nobody to see us but the foxes and the birds, but the task appeared to lift his spirits, or at least shut him up, so I refrained from commentary.
19th November
I spent today alternating between scholarly excitement at this uncharted scientific territory we were entering and dread that we would be too late—or worse, that we had never had a chance to start with. Lilja and Margret would have travelled more swiftly than us, unladen as they were, but still I worried that perhaps we had stumbled into a faerie trap without realizing it and were now doomed to wander the wilderness, chasing shadows and accomplishing exactly nothing.
“This is no trap,” Bambleby said, with such certainty in his green gaze that much of my dread melted away. “Only godforsaken cold, and miles and miles of uninhabitable wastes.”
He seemed unable to enjoy the stark beauty of it all, the wild terror of the mountains, the towering glaciers, the little ribbons of time that clung to the rock in the form of frozen cataracts. The aurora danced above us both nights, green and blue and white undulating together, a cold ocean up there in the sky, and even that he barely glanced at. On the second night, he used his magic to summon a thick green hedge of prickly holly and a trio of willow saplings that enfolded our tent in drapery like bed curtains to keep out the chill wind.
“Will you look at that!” I couldn’t help but exclaiming as I sat by the fire, gazing up at the riot of light. I will admit, I wished for him to share the sight with me and was disappointed when he only sighed.
“Give me hills round as apples and forests of such green you could bathe in it,” he said. “None of these hyperborean baubles.”