Wendell did not stir, and given his habits, I doubted he would anytime soon. I draped my own blankets overtop him, to further increase his comfort. In addition to his hair, an elbow, a cheekbone, and a dark-lashed eye were visible.
I brushed my fingers through his hair—partly because I’d always nursed a foolish desire to do so, and partly by way of apology. After all, I might not return from my errand, and if so, he would never forgive me. He might not forgive me if I did, but I could not risk taking him along after that display of his yesterday. Like all the Folk, Wendell is unpredictable, and I had no way of knowing if he would fly into another deranged fury if one of the courtly fae laid a finger on me, and land us in trouble from which we could not extricate ourselves. He had admitted before that he didn’t know if he was a match for them. Despite his power, there was only one of him—and that could easily be one too many, given his utter lack of self-control.
No, in this case, I needed levelheadedness, and for that, I could count only on myself.
I donned my snowshoes and set out with Shadow at my side. The leash kept the dog close to me, no farther than the space of three of my strides. I glanced back only once—one of the horses eyed me with a sort of relieved disgust—I was mad, but I hadn’t forced him to leave the warmth of the coals, at least. The murderous tree leaned itself over the tent like a doting mother, looking obscenely fat and somehow pleased with itself. The sight was enough to tamp down my doubts.
We walked and walked, my snowshoes softly crunching through the crust of ice laid over the drifts. The mountains slumbered, disturbed only by the fitful touch of the wind, which skimmed small fogs of snow from their slopes. The aurora tumbled to the ground in bursts like silver rain. It was falling into a valley between two great roots of a jagged mountain.
I became aware that we had been walking a long time without our destination growing any closer. We were outside the enchantment, and I needed a way in. I let the leash unfurl so that Shadow strode four paces away from me, then five. Slowly, the light grew near.
We had stepped into their realm.
As soon as I was certain, I drew Shadow to me again. As we moved deeper into the faerie world, Shadow had grown larger. He was now twice the size, his muzzle coming up to my chest. His snout was sharper, wolfish, his paws enormous. But he followed me as calmly as ever, his black eyes trusting.
I climbed carefully up the last slope, bending low. I found a volcanic boulder to crouch behind, and peeped out.
Below us was a frozen lake. It was perfectly round, a great gleaming eye in which the moon and stars were mirrored. Lanterns glowing the same cold white as the aurora dangled from lampposts made of ice, which framed paths from the lake’s edge to a scattering of benches and merchant-stands, draped in bright awnings of opal and blue. Delicious smells floated on the wind—smoked fish; fire-roasted nuts and candies; spiced cakes. A winter fair.[*1]
The Folk gliding upon the ice and strolling easily from stand to stand were not as strange as I had expected. In fact, when I fixed my eyes upon them directly, they looked perfectly mortal, if a little too lovely and graceful. But when viewed slantwise, they were figures of ice and ashes, ashes gone grey and frozen, knife-slender wraiths that at times were not even there, becoming features in the landscape, a phenomenon I had observed with Poe. Their hair was universally silky and white, not like human hair at all, but that of a snow fox or hare, and their eyebrows too, while some had a fine cover of the same hair, or perhaps it was fur, visible on the backs of their hands that disappeared beneath their cuffs.
I heard no music. The Folk upon the ice danced and glided to the same song, that much was clear, but Shadow’s presence made me oblivious to it. Naturally, there was a part of me that wished it were otherwise; that I could have been like Odysseus, tied to the mast of his ship. But I had no ship, and no sailors to stop me from drowning myself.
I itched for my notebook and camera. I suppose it was cold of me, with Lilja and Margret down there possibly being devoured, but I have vowed to be honest in these pages, even to the last. For some time, I simply watched the Folk and thought nothing about the girls. I thought of Bouchard’s discovery of a curious stone slab in Rosetta, and Gadamer peeping through the trees at the goblin city. Was this what they had felt? It was awe, of course, mingled with stunned disbelief. I suppose that when one spends their career working towards a goal, constructing all sorts of fantasies about what that goal will look and feel like, one is left a little senseless when the scaffolding comes crashing down around them.
Eventually, I forced my thoughts back to the missing girls. It did not take long to find two mortals among a sea of Folk alternately beautiful and horrifying—there they were, gliding together on the ice. They could have been two ordinary young people in love, Margret’s pretty head resting on Lilja’s shoulder. But they moved like dolls on strings, and their smiles were blank and insipid. Occasionally, Lilja would look up, and a frown of confusion would push through the smile. I took heart from this, that there might still be something of them to save.
I didn’t try to sneak into the fair—how utterly pointless that would have been. I simply plastered my own blank smile onto my face and wandered over.
Luck was with me, and I managed to find a faerie couple to trail behind at first like a child after its parents, so that the other Folk assumed these two had brought me. They smiled at me, and I smiled back as if I didn’t see the hunger in their eyes. In truth, it took my breath away, and I faltered a few times, feeling sick. I began to shake at one point, for there was no difference between this and strolling into a forest filled with tigers.
Shadow, prowling at my side, saved me in more ways than the obvious one. I counted his breaths as they fogged out and the swaying of his tail as he walked. It was an old trick I used to clear my head of enchantment; now I used it to stop myself from running screaming back into the wilderness.
Not one of the faeries glanced at Shadow, not even when he turned his head to nip at their finery out of pure dislike. Once, a man in a sea-grey gown encrusted with jewels with storm clouds in them (they all wore gowns under their cloaks, belted at the waist), jumped when Shadow snapped at his heel, but when he turned to look behind him, his gaze went right through Shadow and into the snow.
Now, there are few dryadologists who could resist the opportunity to sample faerie food, the enchanted sort served at the tables of the courtly fae—I know several who have dedicated their careers to the subject and would hand over their eye teeth for the opportunity. I stopped at a stand offering toasted cheese—a very strange sort of cheese, threaded with glittering mould. It smelled divine, and the faerie merchant rolled it in crushed nuts before handing it over on a stick, but as soon as it touched my palm, it began to melt. The merchant was watching me, so I put it in my mouth, pantomiming my delight. The cheese tasted like snow and melted within seconds. I stopped next at a stand equipped with a smoking hut. The faerie handed me a delicate fillet of fish, almost perfectly clear despite the smoking. I offered it to Shadow, but he only looked at me with incomprehension in his eyes. And, indeed, when I popped it into my mouth, it too melted flavourlessly against my tongue.
I took a wandering course to the lakeshore, conscious of the need to avoid suspicion. I paused at the wine merchant, who had the largest stand. It was brighter than the others, snow piled up behind it in a wall that caught the lantern light and threw it back in a blinding glitter. I had to look down at my feet, blinking back tears, as one of the Folk pressed an ice-glass into my hand. Like the food, the wine smelled lovely, of sugared apples and cloves, but it slid eerily within the ice, more like oil than wine. Shadow kept growling at it, as he had not with the faerie food, and so I tipped it onto the snow.
Beside the wine merchant was a stand offering trinkets, frozen wildflowers that many of the Folk threaded through their hair or wove through unused buttonholes on their cloaks, as well as an array of jewels with pins in them. I could not compare them to any jewels I knew; they were mostly in shades of white and winter grey, hundreds of them, each impossibly different from the next. I selected one that I knew, without understanding how, was the precise colour of the icicles that hung from the stone ledges of the Cambridge libraries in winter. But moments after I pinned it to my breast, all that remained was a patch of damp.