He bustled around, sweeping the snow into a pot, building the fire, and grimacing at the mess—for the place was a warren of unwashed dishes, ash, and bits of the outdoors scattering the unswept floor. Though he did little that I could see besides shake off a rug and straighten the jumble of plates and cups, the room seemed to brighten. Aslaug remained on her knees by the fire, gazing into the flames and taking no further notice of our presence. At least her shivering had stopped.
Meanwhile, I took up one of the cast iron pots and filled it with embers and kindling—I had been inspired, you see, by the bogles and their cookpots.
Poe had said that the tall ones feared only fire. Well, we would see how deep that fear ran.
I made my way to the staircase, from which a cold wind funnelled, somehow conspiring to bring darkness with it that fought against the new light in the sitting room.
“Will you stop faffing about?” I called over my shoulder, for we weren’t here to tidy. Casting a last scowl over his shoulder at the mess, Wendell followed me up the stairs.
The changeling was crouched in a corner this time, and as I entered the room he gave a horrible shriek and sent a pack of snarling white wolves charging at me from a wall of snow, their muzzles crusted with blood. Though I had expected frightful visions, the suddenness of the onslaught made me fall back a step. Bambleby caught me before I tumbled down the stairs.
“There there,” he said, stepping in front of me. The wolves vanished instantly. “Tantrums will get you nowhere with this one. She’s perfectly heartless and will take no pity on you whatsoever. I speak from experience.”
He spoke in Faie, words that vibrated in the air like a song, an effect I could never achieve, no matter how hard I worked on my accent. The changeling stilled, his pale face upturned like a baby bird’s, and I could see that he heard an echo of his own kin in Wendell’s voice.
“Go away,” he said, but there was a miserable hopefulness in it. Wendell turned to me with a look of woe that I ignored.
I drew the doll from my cloak. The air chilled further, and every line in the changeling’s body tensed. He whispered something that sounded like “Mersa.” Then, “Where did you get that?”
“Do you want it back?” I said. I placed the pot of flickering flames upon the floor. “You may have it, if you give us your name.”
The changeling seemed too stunned to speak. He still looked like a faerie, too pale and sharp, but there was more of the child in him now, all wide eyes and confused longing. But I paused only a moment before dropping the doll into the flames.
The changeling screamed. He lunged at me, and would possibly have torn me to shreds had not Wendell been there to hold him back.
“Emily!” Wendell said in a scandalized voice, because of course he could take pleasure in bloody decapitation, but something like this would distress him. He need not have feared, though, for I had snatched the doll from the flames before it could suffer serious damage. It was only melted a little.
“I’ll ask again,” I said over the creature’s wails. “What is your name?”
In the end, it was easy. The changeling sobbed and raged at us. He made the room darken and fill with snow that struck us like tiny blades. But then I held up the doll again, the only token of home he’d seen in all the miserable years he’d spent in Hrafnsvik, separated from his own family and world, and placed it in the flames, and he finally shrieked, “A?linduri!”
I removed the doll instantly and handed it to him. The faerie clutched it to his chest, still sobbing. The tears didn’t fall, but froze to his face in braided tracks like an icebound river.
Wendell was shaking his head at me. “You are even colder than I thought, Em,” he said, and yet mixed with his complaint was something like fondness. He made no argument as we went to retrieve two of Krystjan’s horses and even offered to ride with the changeling. Aslaug had not looked up from the fire as we left the house, other than to shudder as the door opened, and Mord had not returned, and so neither of them had the chance, should they have wanted it, to bid adieu to the creature they had housed and cared for during the darkest years of their lives.
A light snow fell as we rode into the mountains. A?linduri sniffled, and did not speak other than when we commanded him by name to direct our horses. But as we travelled farther, he sat up straighter and craned his neck to look in all directions. Misery mixed with a desperate sort of longing in his eyes.
“There you are,” Wendell said to him. “You indeed have cause for cheer. You are going home.”
The changeling burst into weeping again, and Wendell gave me a baffled look.
We rode for perhaps an hour with the snow tapping at our cheeks before we came to a little gully where the mountainside folded itself around a grove of misshapen willows. Even if the changeling hadn’t directed us there, I would have taken it for a faerie door of some sort; though there are many sorts of doors, they all have a similar quality which can best—and quite inadequately—be described as unusual. A round ring of mushrooms is the obvious example, but one must additionally be on the lookout for large, hoary trees that dwarf their neighbours; for twisted trunks and gaping hollows; for wildflowers out of sync with the forest’s floral denizens; for patterns of things; for mounds and depressions and inexplicable clearings. Anything that does not fit. The willows before us leaned into one another like fingers interlacing, with a narrow gap at either end. They had a sickly aspect, skeletal and half covered in some sort of lichen.
Wendell dismounted and then lowered the changeling down to the snow. He was still clutching his doll tight to his chest—some of its hair seemed to have refrozen, but not all. Guilt nudged at me, and I could not quash it this time, so I did what I was used to doing with troublesome feelings and shoved it down deep until it was buried by other things.
“Where are we?” I said, for I was struck by an inexplicable certainty that we had come farther than we should have in an hour’s time. I had not noticed when the mountains stopped being familiar, when we came into this valley between two long, blue glaciers. Behind us was a seam in the landscape through which the earth breathed out its sulphurous smoke, warm and wet against my cheek. “We are not in the Karr?arskogur?”
“Not for some time,” Wendell said absently, as if this fact were of no material importance. And I suppose it wasn’t—provided we could get back.
The changeling stood hesitating before the willow grove. For a shadow of a second, I thought I saw a hallway between the boughs, lit with moon-coloured lanterns, beyond which a stair led into the earth and another spiralled up towards a tower made of ice. Then a faerie stepped out of the grove.
She was both like and unlike the Folk I had seen at the winter fair. She was tall and lovely and sharp-edged, and the starlight reflected off her strangely as she moved, like a lake with pebbles dropped into it. But her shoulders were bowed as if beneath a weight, and her grey clothing was tattered and so indistinct she might have been wearing a many-layered sack. Her black hair was tied up and thick with frost.
Her astonished gaze took in the child first, and then swept to Wendell, who was closer than I. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why have you brought this sorrow upon us?”
“Mother,” the changeling sobbed, and rushed forward. The faerie woman caught him up in her arms and covered him in kisses. “There, there, my love. There, there.”
“My apologies, lady, if I have overstepped.” Wendell swept her a bow. “My friend and I thought it best to return your child, who was, I’m sorry to say, quite unhappy where you left him.”
“Idiot,” she spat. “Who are you, to involve yourself in our doings? Some feckless wanderer from the summerlands, with little more than moss between his ears. You were bored, is that it?”
“You have company in characterizing me so,” Wendell said, unperturbed. “And yet why make such a to-do about this? You would have had to fetch him back yourself, eventually.”
Her hands tightened on her son’s small back. She murmured to him, and he ran between the trees without a backwards glance. A whisper of music filtered through the grove, and I fell into a momentary daze. The faerie woman faced Wendell with cold fury in her eyes, and then—I cannot describe what happened next, other than to say that it was like being struck by something, a wave perhaps. Though not physically—I know, I am making little sense. Already disoriented by the music, I staggered about in a trance of some sort, and came back to myself in Wendell’s arms—he had caught me before I could fall, and held me upright.
The faerie woman, meanwhile, had collapsed gracefully to her knees. She placed both hands in the snow and pressed her whole face into it. “Forgive me, your highness,” she murmured.
“No, no, no,” Wendell said. “None of that. I’m not anybody’s highness anymore.”
She gazed at him with confusion in her eyes, which slowly cleared. “You are only a child.”
“Good grief!” he said. “I will have you all know that, by the measure of the mortal world, I am quite advanced in years.”