I shook you awake, and you said, “Wendell!” in a way that I quite liked, nothing at all like your usual tone. But of course, instead of thanking me for pulling you out of some desperately unpleasant otherworld, you began immediately to harry me with demands, namely that I heal young Margret.
“I can heal her,” I told you, “but I can’t make her whole again,” to which you only gave me a look as if to say, that’s good enough, get on with it. Perhaps it was good enough for you, but Lilja was watching me with shadows like bruises under her eyes, and I could tell by her expression that she would give me anything for my assistance, even her own soul, if I meant to be petty and make demands of her, which I did not. As she told me later, she had not slept a wink, but had spent the hours chafing her beloved’s arms and blowing warmth into her hands. I spoke to her quietly, and she gave her assent, and then I touched Margret’s forehead and melted the crown that the Hidden Ones had placed there. It left behind a rather pretty scar across her forehead and cheekbones, a pattern of jagged snowflakes that gleams like ice when the moonlight shines upon it.
Now, I thought this exceedingly gracious of me, healing the lover of the only woman who has ever spurned me, but I was not foolhardy enough to expect praise from your direction. Lilja, however, pressed my hand hard enough to bruise it as Margret buried her teary face in Lilja’s neck, and the charming picture they made was thanks enough for me.
“How?” I enquired, and you must have known from the disbelief in my face that I was helplessly amazed by your feat, marching into some ice faerie realm and making off with two captives, and all that without sustaining a scratch. But you looked away, and seemed to be avoiding looking at Shadow too, so that I immediately began to think about how it had been him who had led me to you, and then about all of his uncanny ways, not least of which is his choice of a creature like you for a master. I patted his head, feeling about for the glamour, as I have never bothered to do before—and why should I; I do not make a habit of looking beneath people’s pets to see if there is a monster hiding there—and sure enough, there it was, and when I moved the magic aside, a bloody Black Hound stared back at me, all glowing eyes and glistening fangs.
You looked worried, for some reason, but you calmed down when I started laughing. “Where did you get him?” I said.
“In Scotland,” you replied. “He’s a Grim. I rescued him from a boggart, who was tormenting him for sport.”
Then you told me how you had tricked the boggart into thinking you a long-lost relative of his last master—a feat which had required extensive research into local lore—then bribed him with exotic seashells, for you remembered some obscure story about a boggart whose secret fantasy was to travel the world, boggarts being bound to their crumbling ruins, while I half listened in astonishment. I say half, because I was mostly just watching you, observing the way your mind clicks and whirrs like some fantastical clock. Truly, I have never met anyone with a better understanding of our nature, and that anyone includes the Folk. I suppose that’s partly why—
Ah, but you really would kill me if I desecrated your scientific vessel with the end of that sentence.
Anyway. We strolled out of the cave into the purpling light; it was getting on for evening by that time, and I was thinking longingly of supper. In truth, I was also thinking longingly of my apartments back at Cambridge: the fire crackling in the hearth, my servants hard at work preparing my repast, and one of my mistresses, fetchingly attired, to share it all with—everything as it should be, in other words. You said something in a sharp voice about the blasted aurora, which seemed to be falling to the ground right in front of us, and then I was suddenly on my back with an arrow through my chest.
Now, I have never been shot before, so we will have to add it to the list of pleasures I have experienced since making your acquaintance. You screamed, which I appreciated, and Shadow went berserk, also kind but not much more helpful, but fortunately, Lilja had her wits about her and yanked the arrow out, then threw herself and Margret to the ground.
It was a faerie-made arrow, of course, a shard of pure ice and magic, and with it removed I was able to use my own magic again. Fortunately, the edge of the Hidden Ones’ realm was rolling over us again as the wind picked up—I suppose it’s intriguing, this travelling faerie realm, as little as it is to my taste—and like all monarchs, I can bend the rules when I am in Faerie, if only a little. Through the agony, I managed to pull at the pocket of time I was in and unravel a few threads. I’m not explaining it well enough for you to understand, I’m sure, but essentially I turned back time, returning to the moment the arrow flew towards me, where I caught it. It’s a talent of limited compass, I’m afraid; I can affect time only within a small area—anyone standing much more than an arm’s length away is unaffected—and I’ve only ever managed to undo a handful of seconds. Quite helpful, though, in this instance.
The faerie who had shot the arrow soon made his presence known, striding arrogantly out of the wind to smirk at me. I could tell right away that he hadn’t seen my little trick; he’d only seen me catch the arrow. He had eyes like the dawn, and he was wearing some sort of dreadful grey thing that hung from him like a sheet—very much your style—and a cloak made of dead animals of some sort—hideous but perfectly practical attire, I suppose, for an icicle like him.
“You’re a long way from home, child,” he said to me in Faie, with a condescending tone that I did not appreciate. Unfortunately, he was very old, older even than some of my court’s most tedious councillors, so I suppose he had reason to condescend to me. No reason at all to put an arrow in my chest, though.
You were at my elbow then, rapidly recounting the whole story of the cloak and the Hidden Ones’ interest in me—unnecessary, really, for I had already gathered that the man had been drawn to the great hole I’d put in his realm, and that he meant to make a meal out of me, hollowing me out like an orange, as he’d done to Au?ur. My, what an ignominious fate that would have been! I can imagine my stepmother’s reaction; I think she would have injured herself laughing. It would not have surprised her.
Anyway, I did not much want to fight him—he looked a mean sort, and I was resentful that after all the effort I’d expended, here was yet another trial to keep me from my supper—so I simply explained to him who I was and gave him a little demonstration of my power to put him off, summoning a very pretty rose garden in the middle of his desolate winter, complete with a handful of bees.
“You were cast out?” he said with distaste, and looked me up and down. “Yes, we have children like you at our court. Indolent peacocks, strutting about with their jewels and their perfumes, teasing one another with vacuous enchantments. Your stepmother did your realm a great favour.”
I did not have any time to be angry at that, for before he’d even ended his sentence, he was charging at me with his sword.
I shoved you out of the way first, which cost me; a slash through the arm of my cloak. Then I had to vanish into the landscape, a trick I hate very much here, because even the trees feel like ice when I step into them. He shadowed me everywhere I went, so that I was endlessly spinning and leaping and dodging his sword, and generally making myself ridiculous. I tried to throw my own magic at him, but the sword swallowed it. Of course it was no ordinary enchanted sword—it was enchantment, a powerful one at that, probably honed through all the years he’d been alive, just my luck.
“Wendell!” you were yelling, trying for some ungodly reason to get my attention as I dodged and weaved, as if I needed another thing to think about. “Wendell, what do you need?”
I think I replied something ungracious about shutting up; it’s all a bit hazy. I managed to get an ordinary blow in when the faerie was looking for me in a hazel tree I’d summoned—I was summoning all sorts of trees and shrubberies, more to distract him than anything else, and the icy mountainside was beginning to look like the domain of some mad hedgewitch. My hand still stings from that blow as I write this; it was like punching solid ice.
You just kept yelling, though. “Think of the stories, Wendell—there’s always a loophole, a door! I can find it, if you’d just tell me what you need!”