“Oh yes, I remember—why wouldn’t I? And even if I didn’t, it’s not as if the forest keeps quiet about it, nor the snows. They were quite upset when His Majesty was locked away—of course, snow has a terrible memory, and forgot almost everything by the following year apart from the fact that it was angry, and so it covered everything in a nasty sleet instead of proper flakes. Everything was all turned to mud and grey sludge; it was horrid.”
Poe talked quite a lot more to me now than he had when we first met, and as informative as I found his ramblings typically, right now I didn’t have time. There would be no way to convince the king I was still enchanted if I tarried too long.
“How was it done?” I pressed. “Some complicated enchantment, I suppose.” Because of course, I needed to know how to trap him again if he proved entirely mad and wicked, not merely mad and wicked by the standards of the Folk.
“Not really,” Poe said thoughtfully. “The first queen gave him a cloak woven from all the seasons, and then when he fell asleep in it one night by the Lake of Dancing Stars, as he often did, she snipped out the winter and stitched the whole thing back together. Then she wrapped him up tight in the cloak and fastened all the buttons. That trapped him, you see—well, no one could escape a year without winter, not even the king. She planted the king’s feet in the woods and turned the silk and wool and gold thread she’d used to weave the cloak into bark and leaf. Since then the tree has grown very tall, and he is still inside it, trapped forevermore.”
“Oh,” I said faintly. “Is that all.”
* * *
—
My hand was throbbing ferociously by the time I reached the tree, every step sending a jolt of fire up my arm. My bandage was bloody, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, other than keep my hand stuffed into my glove and pray that the king didn’t notice.
I stood before the tree, which rustled and hummed musically to itself. I wasn’t enchanted anymore, but that didn’t much matter, for the tree was positively brimming with enchantment—I had noted that before, with Wendell. I think the king was asleep—probably he’d been asleep the whole time, but I’ve no doubt he was still aware of me, in his dreaming.
I shivered with excitement and terror. I kept my hand firmly wrapped around my coin, but I allowed a little of the enchantment to seep into my mind—merely by relaxing my focus, which wasn’t easy, as I was accustomed to fending off faerie enchantments, not inviting them in. Yet it was necessary, for I hadn’t the slightest idea how I was supposed to get the king out. The enchanted ring hadn’t cared whether or not I brought the axe, so there must be some other way.
The magic murmured at me to move my legs. I did so. It had me stride about the grove, making a pile of snow and then shaping it with my hands. I went down to the stream, broke the ice, then found a curl of bark and filled it with water. This I poured over the snowman—yes, the king had me building a snowman, which perhaps I will laugh over later, but was quite disturbing in the moment, twisting carefree childhood memories up with some huge and terrifying magic—and watched as it froze into silvery ribbons like the indication of hair.
I stood gazing at the ugly snowman I had made, feeling rather foolish and wondering if the king in the tree really meant to step inside the snowman and use it as a vessel. Wendell had said that the king’s body had decayed, so he needed to use something, but I couldn’t really imagine this. Of course, the king was still trapped, so what body he wished to step inside was something of a moot point.
I began to wonder if this was all a mistake. Perhaps the king had only meant to enchant Wendell, but since I’d turned up instead, he’d decided he might as well have some fun with me. Dragging a mortal out of bed to build snowmen in the middle of the night seemed like poor sport to me, but I supposed that being trapped in a tree for centuries didn’t afford much opportunity for entertainment. As I was thinking all this, though, a raven fluttered out of the trees and perched on the snowman’s shoulder.
Two more followed. They swirled around the snowman, pecking and clawing. When they were done, it looked more like a man—a little more. It was still strange, but no longer hideous. Then, to my horror, the birds fell to the ground dead, blood leaking across the snow from wounds I couldn’t see. They stained the snowman’s feet like an offering, which I suppose they were.
The tree murmured, and magic prodded me again. But it did not prod me to move, it prodded my mind. And that was when I realized—the king didn’t know how to free himself. He expected me to come up with a solution.
Well, that set my thoughts whirling. Though in truth, they had already been diving in and out of stories and academic papers, holding them up against what I knew of the Hidden Ones and their disgraced king.
The Word.
The useless, ridiculous, button-gathering Word, which I had long valued as a piece of esoteric trivia, a footnote, perhaps, in a paper I had yet to write. Well, footnotes in dryadology are sometimes like the Folk themselves, leaping out at you from nowhere.
A thrill rushed through me. Looking back, this would have been a very good moment to stop and think through the wisdom of what I was doing, but I was too full of the delight of scholarly discovery (and, I suspect, my own conceit) to stop. I turned to the white tree and spoke the Word.
And what do you know? A button came sailing out from somewhere among the branches. I caught it and examined it against my palm. It was white and desiccated, like old bone, shedding a fine powder against my skin, with an acorn carved into one side. The button began to melt against my palm, and I dropped it into the snow. The tree had given a shudder when the button came free, but now it was still once more.
I spoke the Word again, and out sailed another button. This one had a flower. The next button had a sailboat dreaming among gentle waves.
All told, I spoke the Word nine times, and as the ninth button sailed free, the trunk of the white tree split open like the front of a cloak, the bark billowing—for a moment, it became silk and fine wool churning in the wind that had filled the grove, and then it stilled. The tree gave a sigh and dropped its leaves, buds, and fruits onto the snow with a rustling thud.
I stared into the cavernous hollow that had opened in the tree, my heart going like a rabbit’s, waiting. When I heard a footfall behind me, I screamed.
“There’s no need for that,” a voice said. “I don’t mind, though. It’s been a very long time since anybody was afraid of me.”
The Hidden king was kneeling in the snow, tsking over the dead birds. He seemed at first to resemble the figure of ice and snow I had built with their aid, but with each breath he drew, life came into his body, and he grew more mortal in appearance. It was a little like watching someone rising towards the surface of murky water; one moment his face was little more than indistinct planes of ice, the next he was blinking his pale blue eyes at me and smiling. Of course he was beautiful—is it even necessary to say it? His hair was black with glints of white, his cheekbones sharp above a wide mouth with a natural smile in it. The white in his hair turned out to be small opal beads, and his clothing was a blackened blue with an overlay like ice, beaten thin with a lacy pattern, and he wore a white crown and layers of jeweled necklaces that glittered fetchingly in the dim light. And yet everything he wore was as tasteful as it was beautiful, precisely the amount of adornment one would expect on a king, no more and no less.
“Poor things,” he said. “This world is terribly unkind to beasts, is it not? Here we are.”
He touched them, and the ravens sprang to life—in a manner of speaking. Their movements were jerky, and they were still covered in blood—one had a broken neck, and its head was bent at a disquieting angle. This one landed on the king’s shoulder and pecked his finger when he stroked it, drawing blood. He laughed.
“Hello, my love,” he said, striding over to me. “My darling rescuer, who has given me back my body and my throne, and freed me from my eternal captivity.”
Before I could recover from my amazement, he kissed me. It was like pressing frozen glass to my lips, like breathing in pure winter. I staggered back a step, coughing, and for a long time after I felt as if I had ice in my lungs.
“I,” I began. “I’m not your love. I’m not anyone.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I know who you are. Years ago, when I was a boy, a seer told me I would one day be locked up by my own people, and only a mousy little scholar could get me out again. I would marry the mouse—which forms a very poetic contrast, don’t you think? And together we would rule over my kingdom.” He stretched. “Well! I am glad to be out of there. My first order of business, I think, will be a nice bath and a feast of salted plums with caviar. Do you like salted plums, dearest?”