She glanced at me for the first time, her nose wrinkling. Then, to my horror, she said, “And who is this, a pet of yours?”
Wendell gave a nervous laugh. “I would not recommend pursuing that line of inquiry.”
“Well, what do you want?” she said, shifting in the uncanny way of the Folk from humility to rudeness in the space of a breath. “Are you here on business of theirs?”
“I don’t know who you mean, but regardless, the answer is no. This business with your son is part and parcel of my plan to return to my kingdom, from which I have been banished.”
“A quest?” she said, remarkably unconfused by the illogic of his statement.
“Of a sort.” He cast me a brief glower. “A rather winding, meandering one, but one cannot always be fortunate in these cases.”
“Who has cursed your trees?” I cut in. It was not what I wanted to ask first, but many of the Folk value indirectness. I was pleased by the coolness in my voice, for I was still wobbly from whatever enchantment the faerie had blasted us with, and also my pride was smarting from the pet nonsense.
“It’s not only the trees,” she said, after eyeing me curiously for a moment. “We are all of us cursed. Root and branch, flake and frost, young and old. All allies of the old king share in his downfall and his misery.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Would that I had been trapped in a tree, like my lord. It is a kinder fate than watching your children wither like ice in the summer sea.”
“Then that is why you sent him away,” I murmured. My mind flicked through the stories one after another, trying to fit it all into a pattern I recognized. “Then Ari—your son—he is the old king’s child?”
Wendell, who had been only half listening, stamping his feet and blowing warmth into his hands, stared at me open-mouthed. The woman gave a short laugh.
“Your mortal lover has a mind like crystals,” she said. “Sharp and cold. I would like her for my own.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” was all he said in reply to this statement, which was appalling on a great many levels.
“Truly,” the woman pressed. “Would you trade her? Your power is of the summerlands, but I will gift you with the hand of winter.”
“Thank you,” Wendell said; he seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter. “But I am satisfied with my hands as they are. And unless you have a key to my forest kingdom across the sea, I will not be trading my mortal lover today.”
I was going to kill him.
“Em,” he said, “perhaps you could explain this all to me, as you seem to have instantly grasped the situation with your crystalline mind.”
“It’s not difficult to grasp,” I said in as icy a voice as I had in me. “She is loyal to the king in the tree. The Folk who overthrew him have cursed her and her home, and so she sent her child away to keep him safe. But she has told us that she has more than one child, and thus it would follow that she would wish to preserve the most valuable of her brood—and why else would he be of greater value than the others? Perhaps he is also in greater danger too—the changeling bond would keep him safe.”
The woman nodded. “He is a bastard. Still, the queen has slain many of her husband’s bastards in order to safeguard her claim to the throne.”
I frowned. “Then the present monarch is—or was—married to the king in the tree?”
“She was his first wife. He put her aside and married someone else. She sought revenge, and got it, for much of the nobility preferred her to both the second queen and the king. She locked him away forever and had his bride slain.”
My head spun, sorting through all this, though I was used to hearing tales of the complicated tangle of murder and intrigue of faerie courts.
Wendell did not appear particularly interested in this information. He had turned up the collar of his cloak and was back to blowing into his hands. “Well, we will take back the mortal child now, if you would be so kind. I am afraid my blood is too thin for lengthy convocations in this weather.”
The faerie woman, with characteristic changeability that I suspected I would never grow used to, now seemed to view the unwanted return of her son after a years-long absence as something akin to a minor inconvenience. Her initial fury forgotten, she shrugged and turned towards the grove.
“Wait,” I said. The faerie woman paused at the edge of the trees, fixing me with her grey-blue gaze. “Why did the nobility side with the queen?”
She watched me a moment longer, and I could no more read her expression than I could name all the colours in the snow. “The old king was chivalrous,” she said at last. “He abided by the ancient laws set down by our ancestors. Namely: we must have fair dealings with the mortals of this land. Kindness is met with kindness, evil with evil. He forbade us from taking them for our entertainment.”
My hands clenched. “And the present queen does not.”
“The queen?” She smiled. “Oh, the queen and her children have—peculiar appetites. They pluck mortals from their homes like apples ripe from the tree, then drain them dry. It is the sort of sport that suits the fancy of many of the nobility.”
* * *
—
We made good time on the return journey, for I had noted and memorized every direction given to us by the changeling, even the smallest commands he gave to the horse, taking her left around a frozen puddle rather than right, for instance. Ari—the true Ari—had been returned to us in an enchanted daze, and soon slipped into sleep swaddled in blankets against Bambleby’s chest. He was pale and had clearly been underfed, as is common with human children kept by the Folk, for time is not the same in faerie realms, and also the Folk are thought to be irresponsible child minders. But he appeared well otherwise, clad in a dress and cloak of finely woven lambswool and boots stuffed with straw.
Nobody answered our knock at Mord and Aslaug’s door—it was then nearing midnight—but it was unlocked, and so we went inside and laid the child down upon the changeling’s bed, which had also been Ari’s, long ago.
As we were arranging the blankets, Mord came home. He was shivering and unshaven, and he carried a long knife in his belt, and I wondered how many nights of late he’d been given to wandering the fields and cliffs after dark. He didn’t seem to understand what he was seeing, and while he stood blinking at us in the doorframe, Aslaug appeared, still clad in her day clothes. Something in her face shattered, and she threw herself upon the bed, erupting into sobs, which woke Ari, who began to wail in confusion. His crying, though, was a wonderfully mundane sound, unlike anything the changeling had ever uttered. Mord gave a cry and tried to pry them apart, perhaps assuming this was all another horrible faerie trick, but Wendell and I managed to stop him. He sat down heavily on the floor, legs tucked beneath him like a child, and simply stared at his wife and son as Aslaug had stared into the fire. I think he had already decided inside himself that his son was lost, and perhaps his long walks had something to do with the knife he carried with him, ready to be put to a purpose he could never bring himself to actualize.
Wendell gave the room a good sweep with a broom he found somewhere or perhaps conjured up himself, knocking icicles and frost from the walls, which he later explained to me were the remnants of enchantments woven by the changeling, left behind like cobwebs. I had little idea of what to do, so I simply gave Mord an awkward pat on the shoulder and made to leave. At that, he suddenly rose to his feet and wrapped me in a very strange hug (my back was to him, my arm somehow trapped between us—I have no instinct for this sort of thing) and then, still without speaking a word, he released me and went to his son’s bedside.
“Well!” Wendell said after we had returned to the cottage. “What a heartwarming scene! I could get a taste for this philanthropy nonsense.”
I snorted. “You will get a taste for it on rare occasions, when it suits your whims, and if you needn’t exert yourself too greatly.”
He shook his head, smiling. “We are not all alike, Em. You cannot simply compare me against what you know of the Folk.”
“I was comparing you against you.”
He laughed and handed me a glass of wine. I froze, my gaze falling on the mirror behind him.
“You’ve enchanted it!” I exclaimed, stepping forward. The mirror was filled with trees, a twilight forest that bent in the wind, tossing its branches. Leaves flickered across the glass like bright birds, and lights flashed here and there amongst the shadows. I could have been looking through a windowpane, and for a moment my head swam with the dissonance of it.