Any inclination I felt to revel in the excitement of my situation faded quickly. For I soon realized that the castle summoned by the Hidden king had caused an avalanche that buried several far-flung farmsteads at the edge of one of the neighbouring villages.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said sympathetically when I told him. “Well, I will give the mortals a great feast to make up for it. It will last for days and days until they are all nearly too fat to move. Will that serve?”
“I should think not,” I said, “given that they’re probably dead.”
“Oh, dear.” He seemed very sorry for a moment, but then one of the servants arrived with a trio of white wolves on a leash made of bone and moonlight (a gift sent from the lord of one of the faerie holdings on the northern coast), and he forgot everything else, including me, as they leapt all over him to lick his face.
I tried not to think too hard about how quickly the faerie servants had arrived. I was half afraid that he had conjured them out of the snow, and for some reason, this disturbed me more than anything else. Though there was a lot to be disturbed about, the palace not the least of it.
We hadn’t had to walk the long avenue to the palace, which was paved with ice-bound flowers. A carriage had appeared made from black wood covered in slippery frost and drawn by two graceful faerie horses, one white and one black, who seemed to change slightly from one moment to the next—I swear, at one point they even swapped colours. The driver and footman leapt from the carriage and threw themselves at the king’s feet in such violent haste one cut himself on the ice.
“Brethilde, Deminsfall,” the king said slowly, as if savouring their names. “Where have you been? Not tending to my tree after my queen locked me away, that’s certain. Oh, a few servants stayed, but their numbers dwindled, and for a very long time I have been alone.”
The servants opened and closed their mouths, trembling, but he only smiled and laid a hand on their heads. “I forgive you,” he said warmly, then helped me into the carriage.
“How do your servants know you’ve been freed?” I said as the horses whisked us along the road.
He gave me a puzzled look. “How do mortals know winter has arrived?” He turned his face towards his castle, and his pale eyes shone. The undead ravens flew ahead, occasionally swooping down to peck at the servants, despite the king’s admonishments (though these were few and far between). “My courtiers will soon arrive—I look forward to introducing them to my betrothed.” He kissed my hand.
Through my terror, a part of me was fascinated. “Then you don’t believe any of your people will remain loyal to the current queen?”
“The pretender? No.” He didn’t seem annoyed by my question, nor did I notice any bitterness in him to belie his confidence. “The winter knows me, the mountains and glaciers, the aurora and the birds. I can be confined temporarily, but I can’t be overthrown, not in the way mortals might think of it.”
I noted that he didn’t say he couldn’t be killed—for certainly the stories suggest faerie monarchs can be gotten rid of that way, not that it isn’t a difficult undertaking. I said quickly, “Forgive my ignorance of your ways, Your Highness. I had thought your people might prefer the queen. Only because I was informed that you had forbade them from having a particular kind of sport with mortals, and many Folk resented you for it.”
“I’m sure they resented me for a dozen different reasons,” he said. “The point of being king is not to be liked. It is to demonstrate a nobility of character which your people will take as a template upon which to model their own behaviour.”
I digested this. “Then you will once again forbid them from stealing mortals from their homes?”
He gave me his beatific smile. “I will do more than that, my dearest. I will have them release every mortal currently in their possession. Poor things! Mortals are terribly weak, and it is a dishonourable thing for the strong to prey upon the weak, I’ve always felt.” He squeezed my hand. “Does this make you happy?”
I assured him that it did, and he kissed me again and said, “Your nature is a generous one, that you would ask me about this before demanding jewels or other gifts. I will be happy to call you my wife.”
Well, that exchange gave me some measure of relief, though I heard Wendell’s voice in my head, mocking my philanthropy. And in my present situation, chilled to numbness and facing eternal imprisonment in Faerie, I found my supposed good deed hard to appreciate.
The horses brought us through the tremendous white doors of the palace, into a courtyard lined with galleries of black stone. The palace was a deeply disquieting thing—I found I could see it only out of the corner of my eye; if I looked at it straight on, its lines dissolved into the mountainside’s jagged pattern of snow and rock. Fortunately, once we were inside, my vision settled somewhat.
The palace itself was surprisingly simple in its architecture; I had anticipated a warren of grand staircases and corridors that I might locate once and then never again. But it was like a Ljosland winter, stark and minimally adorned, but painfully beautiful. The scale of it, though, was enormous. The courtyard, tiled in ice, could have fit all of Hrafnsvik, and the opposite gallery was so far away that its outline was softened by the ice crystals in the air. A few Folk were there to greet us, and they were like flowers floating upon a vast sea.
It is at this point that my memory begins to warp. I recall the king introducing me, all smiles, while the Folk paid their respects, which they did with a brittle, obsequious politeness. But then, suddenly, I was in the rooms the king has given me, gazing out over the valley, with no memory of how I got there. The view is magnificent but terrifying, as my chamber is housed in the southern gallery, which faces the open expanse of sky and fog between the mountain and the valley floor far below. I can see the snowbound glitter of the forest, and somewhere beyond it, a grey smear that is like wet paint drawn over a canvas, which I guess to be the sea. The mountains stare back at me, grim and uncaring.
17th December (?)
I am never without servants, I don’t think. It seems there is always something being pressed into my hands, be it food or drink or warming furs, though I stopped being cold the moment I stepped into the faerie palace, which is how I knew for certain that I was sealed up in the enchantments that bind their world.
Naturally, I have made several attempts at escape. I try to be systematic about it, which is not easy when your mind is being constantly muddled by magic. But I cling to my coin at all times, which helps, as does writing in this journal.
First I tried simply walking through the gates—not because I thought it would be so simple, but out of a desire for thoroughness, to exhaust all possibilities. As soon as I did so, I found myself in my chamber again, and not only that but seated in a hot spring bath that had not been there before, scooped out of the floor in a series of broad steps paved in seashells. Two faerie women were seated beside me, one weaving strands of opalescent seaweed into my hair, which undulated like snakes, the other prattling on about arrogant bards teaching the snow to sing their songs, which it did now at all hours. My muscles were limp, as if I had been there a long time.
I tried asking my servants to take me into the mountains, or the forest—anywhere that wasn’t the palace. They never protested, but I have no recollection of them obeying me; it seemed that no sooner had I made the request than I found myself in a bath again, or at breakfast with the king while he merrily recounted his progress in making improvements to the palace.
The king sends a steady stream of craftspeople my way in preparation for our wedding. I was questioned about the menu by two harried Folk who smelled of cake and had icicles spiking their beards—whether I preferred, for instance, star-brewed wine or ale spiced with salt from the sea beneath the sea, and similar nonsensical queries.
I maintained my equanimity as best as I could, knowing that panic was the surest way of losing one’s mind in any faerie realm, but I admit that I lost patience a few times.
“I despise wine,” I snapped at one of the poor faerie chefs, who leaned back from me as if I’d breathed fire at him. “You will serve beer from barley that grows only during the new moon, which has been brewed together with the bones of singing fish fed a diet solely consisting of honey.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” the faerie whispered over and over, bowing low, and went away weeping. I refused to speak to the dressmakers who swept into the room after he left and ordered them away before they could even take my measurements.
22nd December (?)