“Indeed? Well, Her Highness need not concern herself with requests, but only demands, which surely she is accustomed to.”
As he spoke, he motioned for my servants, who were hovering as usual, to help the mute woman bring in yards upon yards of fabric. He selected a bolt, which—thank God—was neither black nor blue-white, but evergreen with black-and-white brocade.
“I desire a very particular veil,” I said, “I wish it to be woven from the white fur of a hare that I have shot with my own hands. You will weave it for me there in the forest, while the blood is still fresh on my hands, for I wish to make of my veil an offering to my dear husband.”
Now, I had calculated my request carefully, and knew it to be a sensible one for the Folk, who are given to such gruesome predilections. But the tailor only looked at me in silence, his sharp face unreadable.
“Well?” I demanded. “Is this beyond your capabilities?”
“No, my lady.”
“Then take me to the forest. I wish to hunt now.” I tried for an approximation of my fiancé’s thoughtless imperiousness, though I did not have his good humour to pair it with.
The tailor glanced briefly at my servants, who had removed a yard of fabric for his inspection. He took it and began pinning it to my chemise.
“His Highness cherishes my lady dearly,” he said, moving behind me to add more pins. “And what is cherished must be guarded closely, and protected with enchantments like golden chains.”
My chest tightened, and I reached out to the bedpost to steady myself. I understood the tailor’s careful words, though he would not speak openly, in case it were interpreted as criticism of the king.
The king had used his magic to shut me away in the palace. Each time I had tried to escape, I had found myself thwarted, and if I tried again, the results would be no different.
“If my lady would forgive her humble servant’s temerity,” the tailor said, “I have another proposition.”
“What is that?” I was barely listening. The room seemed to have grown cold and dreamlike, like the years stretching out before me, shut away in that ice palace.
“His Highness has declared tomorrow a day of gift-giving.” The tailor’s sewing needle flashed in the light as he added a sleeve to the gown, impossibly quickly. “Folk and mortals both have been invited from far and wide to pay their respects to the king and his new bride. I would like to offer you a veil patterned after one that my mother wore on her own wedding night. I believe you will like it better.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I began to say, then stopped. The sewing needle was unusually small and delicate, forged of a very pure silver that darted in and out of the fabric like a fish through a stream.
I gave a sudden, involuntary jerk, and my arm jabbed into the needle. I gave a hiss of pain. When I did, the other faerie tailor, who had been holding her companion’s sewing kit and scissors in woebegone silence, let out a growl.
“Shut up, you brainless mongrel,” the tailor hissed at her. “It was just a little prick. She’s fine.”
My faerie servants hadn’t noticed this bizarre exchange. They continued to hover, mostly unhelpfully, unrolling more fabric from the bolt so that it dragged on the ground and gathered unsightly wrinkles. I turned to them.
“Leave us,” I commanded in my best imitation of queenly arrogance. They exchanged puzzled glances and backed away a few paces.
The tailor looked at the ceiling, and then he turned to the attendants with a smile that somehow managed to be charming, despite his ugliness. “Her Highness is modest,” he said. “I must undress her now, and she’d rather we have some privacy.”
Oh, God. If I hadn’t known it was Bambleby before, I did now. Even through my shock and confusion, I couldn’t help glaring at him.
The servants tittered and drifted out, all but the senior of them, who said in a show of loyalty, “I must remain, for the king has decreed that my lady must at all times have someone to fulfil her every desire.”
“As thoughtful as that is,” the tailor said, “our lady’s desires are frequently nonsensical, and right now, she desires you not to fulfil them.”
He passed his hand over the servant’s face, and her expression grew dreamy and unfocused. With a sigh, she tumbled backwards onto the bed.
“Wendell!” I exclaimed, rushing forward. “You can’t murder my servants! The king will—”
“Much as I missed being berated by you, Em,” he said, “she is only asleep. We needn’t worry about your king’s wrath.”
I found the servant as he had said, drowsing with her eyes half closed. I was so relieved and happy and stunned, a rush of feelings all together, that I could have thrown my arms around him. Indeed, I almost did, but for some perverse reason, I found myself needing to argue with him instead. Truly, I sometimes wonder if some enchantment is at work to render him as disagreeable as possible. “He is not my king,” I said.
“No? But you freed him.” He shook his head. “How is it that you know how to befriend wild faerie dogs and ferret out Words of Power, yet you missed one of the fundamental rules of dryadology—namely, not cutting wicked kings out of trees.”
“I’ve learned my lesson, thank you,” I snapped. “Should you end up trapped in one, I won’t let you out.”
“You shall have to. I know you too well, Em. You could never survive without having someone around to snarl at.”
The other tailor had fallen onto all fours and was snuffling at my feet. I hugged her instead—or him, rather, for it was indeed Shadow under the glamour. He licked me, an unappealing experience, and I pushed his head back to ward off further attempts.
I stared at Wendell. He looked nothing like himself—he didn’t even sound like himself, his voice thickened and rough. Only now that I looked harder, I saw his familiar insouciant lean, the way he gazed at me with a mixture of bemusement and concern. He was several inches shorter than me now, and with his unprepossessing appearance and the palette of greys he wore, he could have faded into the background of any room.
“Oh,” I breathed in sudden understanding. “You have turned yourself into one of the oíche sidhe.”
“Naturally,” he said. “My grandmother’s blood flows through my veins, and so I may take on their appearance if it suits me—though the process was rather unpleasant.” He looked down at his formerly graceful fingers, now spindly with extra joints in them, and grimaced. “And worse than that, I have to look at myself every day.”
“Could you not have used a glamour?”
“Well, perhaps, but I thought our snow king’s enchantments might shred it. This place is stuffed full of them. I risked putting one on Shadow, because if anyone was to reveal him, it would not matter much. He is nobody’s enemy.”
I gazed at him. “And you are?”
“I have tried multiple times to free you by force, which didn’t go very well. I killed several of the king’s lords and ladies, though.”
My mouth fell open. “He never told me about that.”
“Why would he? Anyway, I eventually came up with this idea”—he gestured sourly at his unsightly self—“and after talking things over with Aud, we decided—”
“Aud!” I nearly yelped. “Aud is working to—to rescue me?”
“The whole village is working to rescue you, my dear. We’ve had almost a merry time, plotting it all out.”
I tried to picture this, Aud and Thora and Krystjan and the rest in the tavern, bandying about ideas to free me from Faerie, but my imagination failed me utterly—mainly because I could not picture them caring.
“Why?” I said softly.
“Why?” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You rescued three of their children—and scores more will be spared, no doubt, now that the changeling has been cast out.”
“I also freed a faerie king who is perfectly content to doom them to eternal winter.”
“Yes, but I managed to convince them that your intentions in that respect were noble.”
He said it in an offhand way, not caring if it was true or not. I shivered, though I hadn’t felt the cold in days. “They weren’t,” I said. “Not for the most part. I wanted—” I looked down at myself, at my ridiculous dress. “I wanted to understand the story. I suppose I thought about helping Aud and the others, but I won’t lie and say that I didn’t think about science first. They should not be risking their lives to help me.”
“Emily, Emily,” he said. “I’m positively astonished you decided to help these people, whether they came second, third, or fourteenth in your mind. Have you ever done something like that before? Thought of someone other than yourself and your research, I mean.”