At the lake was a little beach of frozen white sand upon which a number of spectators had gathered. I spied two other mortals in the crowd, a young man and woman draped over the shoulders of two lovely faerie ladies. I did not have to watch them long to know they were far beyond my aid, and turned from their blank stares with a shudder.
Despair overcame me as I gazed into the whirl of dancers. How on earth could I extract Lilja and Margret when I was deaf to the music they danced to? Stepping onto the ice would give me away immediately—I am flat-footed at the best of times, but I doubted even someone trained in the art of dance could fit their limbs into a rhythm they couldn’t hear.
As I stood going through my options, there came a rustling at my elbow. A beautiful lady was gazing at me, her rabbitish white hair cascading in a long braid past her waist, her blue-grey eyes perfectly matched to her many-layered gown, which was ornamented with icicles that I thought should have clinked together like bells, but didn’t—or I couldn’t hear them.
“What a lovely cloak,” she said in Ljoslander. I gave her a blank look and said, in English, that I could not understand, and she smiled and repeated herself in my language. Her gaze as she eyed my cloak was sharp with greed.
I thought at first that I had accidentally donned the cloak Bambleby had been working on—I realized, gazing down at myself, that it flowed fetchingly around my legs as I walked, and kept me warmer than any cloak I’ve ever owned. But it wasn’t; it was the same old cloak I’d worn yesterday, which meant he must have woken last night after I took it off, damn him, and fixed it up, just like one of his ridiculous ancestors creeping about the shoemaker’s shop and mending the boots.
“What is a little sparrow of a girl doing with an enchanted cloak?” the faerie lady asked, trailing one long finger down the sleeve. My arm ached with cold for hours after that touch.
I curtsied for her, thinking fast. Why not settle for a version of the truth? “It was a gift, my lady. From the oíche sidhe.”
I didn’t know if she would understand the Irish term, but she seemed to, I suppose in the same way that the Folk can understand and speak English even if they’ve never heard it before. “Fine workmanship, even for the little ones.”
Her attention was drawing a crowd—other faeries stopped to ooh and ahh over my cloak. They formed a ring around me, which was disconcerting; I could look at only one at a time, which meant that all the others, viewed from the corner of my eye, assumed their spectral halfway forms. Shadow growled deep in his throat. In the faeries’ eyes were hunger and avarice, and it occurred to me suddenly that whatever caused them to long for hot-blooded human victims might also lead them to view someone like Bambleby as a particularly rare treat.
Goddamn you, Wendell.
The only good to come of this was that Lilja noticed me too and skated slowly over with her hand linked in Margret’s. Margret was a slight, dark-haired girl, barely coming up to Lilja’s chin, and pretty in a delicate sort of way. She wore a crown of icicles that hung askew and slowly melted into her eyes so that she was always blinking, a nasty bit of mockery, I thought. Her gaze was blank, but a flash of comprehension dawned in Lilja’s eyes, and she stumbled towards me.
I held her gaze and shook my head ever so slightly, then curled my finger once. She seemed to understand, and slowed her stride. She and Margret drifted off the ice, graceful as birds, and wandered to my side, as if they too were merely interested in my cloak. The moment they neared, I made Shadow stand beside them, stretching his leash, so that his magic washed over them both and muffled the music in their ears.
Lilja came back to herself first. It was a strange thing to watch; as if she’d stepped back into her own eyes after cowering in some dark corner. Fortunately, the faeries were not looking at her, but continued pestering me with questions about the cloak, how long I’d had it and did I have any others like it and on and on, which all this time I had been answering in a carefully dull voice.
“Leave our dear guest be,” a quiet voice said. A man came forward, his eyes the violet-grey of a winter dawn. He was tall and slender and more beautiful than the others, and he wore a sword of ice at his waist. Though he was more simply attired—no jewels or icicles festooned his clothing—he moved with an arrogant, unhurried grace that I recognized all too well, as if the world was one vast divan for him to laze upon.
My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know what he was, prince or lord or something in between, but it didn’t much matter. The crowd fell away, some with bows or murmurs of respect, and we were alone with him.
“Walk with me,” he said in a voice that was near enough to music that I surely would have been caught in it without Shadow there. He led us along the lakeshore, summoning little icicle flowers to carpet our feet, as if the symmetry between him and Wendell wasn’t already striking enough. Once we’d left the crowd behind, he turned to face me.
Even though I was looking directly at him, at times it felt as if I were staring right through to the stars and mountains at his back. I could read only mischief in his gaze, which frightened me more than the malevolence I saw in many of the others, though I couldn’t have said why. Everything about this man made me feel utterly insignificant, like a trinket his gaze had been caught by, which he might at any moment choose, idly, to crush between his fingers.
“You are not enchanted,” he said calmly. “I won’t bother asking how—why would you tell me? And in truth, I don’t care. Humans have their tricks, just as dogs do. All I want is that cloak.”
This was a lot to take in all at once, but I paused for only a moment to steady myself before saying, “If so, why bother asking? Why not just take it?”
I had already guessed the answer; I just wanted him to think me ignorant and even more uninteresting than he already did. He answered in just the sort of bored voice I’d hoped for, “It is of little value to me like that. I want it willingly given.”
Of course he did; faeries steal when the fancy takes them, but most prefer gifts.[*2] “And in exchange—”
“I will not reveal you,” he finished, his tone adding an obviously at the end.
I gave him a long look. I will not lie, I was absolutely terrified of him, standing there with dawn-coloured eyes and his ice sword with the starlight reflecting in his face (I mean that literally; his face was at least partly made of ice, and caught reflections of the stars like a smattering of freckles). I think that, for all my experience with the Folk, I would have cowered before him or perhaps simply given in to my instincts and fled, if he hadn’t reminded me so much of Wendell. And somehow, that steadied me enough to say, “You will also place a path before us to lead us from your world.”
For the first time, he looked at me as if I had surprised him. I guess he’d never had much reason to bargain with mortals when he could simply sing them senseless and then drain their hearts dry. He smiled slightly and bent to pluck one of the flowers he’d made. He shook it a few times, and the petals unfurled like water melting through his hand. When the water solidified, he was holding a white fur cloak. The fur was coarse—perhaps from a bear?—and as thick as my fist.
He offered it to me, and held out his other hand for my cloak. I was so surprised that I didn’t think before I blurted, “That’s not what I asked for.”
He gave me a look as ancient and unyielding as winter, and suddenly there was nothing about him that was like Wendell. “What use do you have for a path, if you are frozen to death? Your chances of escape are low enough already. Take it and be grateful.”
* * *
—
We left the lake as quickly as we could, weaving our way back through the stands. We ducked behind one, and I helped Lilja and Margret turn their cloaks inside out. I didn’t bother reversing my faerie-made one.
I taught them the Word next, though it works only temporarily on the common fae, which didn’t inspire confidence that it would be effective against these creatures. Lilja looked like herself again, calmer than I in the face of peril, doing what I said without question. Margret was still blank-eyed, though now there was at least a furrow of confusion upon her brow. Her ice crown melted and melted but never got any smaller, and when I tried to take it off her, it nearly froze to my skin.
“Can you help her?” It was the only question Lilja asked me. I saw Au?ur when I looked at Margret, and knew Lilja did too.