HE CRIED out when the stick left his grasp, a sharp, haunting sound of anguish—pain, but also loss. Color flooded back into him, his glamour following behind, though he still slumped to the side and had to catch himself with a hand against the ground before he fell.
“Isobel,” he croaked uncertainly, looking up at me.
My voice came from far away, swept downstream by the blood rushing in my ears. “It was Craft. Cooking. When I offered it to you, I didn’t know. I had no idea.”
His attention fell to the stick I held, a piece of wood with a lump of rabbit flesh smoldering on the end. I shared his disbelief. Almost impossible, that something so ordinary could harm him.
“We should—we should go.” He was so out of sorts he nearly sounded human. He staggered to his feet and turned first one way and then another, unable to get his bearings. “We haven’t covered nearly enough . . . have you eaten? Are you still hungry?”
“I can eat as we walk,” I said quietly, stunned to see him reduced to this. From Emma’s instruction, I recognized the symptoms of shock.
“You aren’t going to die?” he asked.
I shook my head. Toying with him didn’t seem nearly as amusing now.
“Good.” His hand went to his sword, perhaps seeking out its reassuring solidity. He next patted his pockets with a disquieted air until he found the raven pin on his breast and squeezed it. “In that case—”
He cut himself off and whipped around, every muscle in his body tensed. At first I thought he’d gone mad. Then I heard it too: a high, unearthly sound in the distance. Howling.
“I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Wild Hunt caught up with us,” I said reasonably, suddenly feeling strongly that someone ought to behave in a reasonable and reassuring way, even if that person, unfortunately, had to be me. “It sounds like we have a good head start, at least.”
“No, it was not only a matter of time. We are deep in my domain, my realm. Hemlock should not have been able to track us this far so easily.”
“Perhaps the difference is that I’m with you now. As you might have noticed, I do have a bit of a, um. Smell.”
He barely spared me a glance, passing up the ripe opportunity to criticize my mortality. The longer he remained rattled, the more apprehensive I became. He didn’t see the Wild Hunt as a serious threat. So was it just his recent near-death experience making him act like this, or something more—something I didn’t know about?
Coming back to himself, he released his raven pin as though it had scalded him. “We need to be out of the autumnlands before dusk.” And with that, he fixed on a direction and set off.
I snatched up as much of the cooked meat as I could carry, sloshing after him through the ankle-deep leaves. “Wait, out of the autumnlands? What do you mean? I thought we were traveling to the autumn court.”
“We are. Just not the same way we were before.”
“May I ask where we’re going, then?”
“To the place where Hemlock’s power wanes, farthest from the winter court. It will be harder, perhaps impossible for her to track us in the summerlands.”
The landscape changed gradually. The sun sank behind the hills, casting long, straight shadows behind the trees and saturating everything in russet light. Thicker-trunked oaks, elms, and alders crowded out the slender birches and ashes. A melancholy air hung over this part of the forest: the leaves were brown or a dull rust red, and fungus mottled the roots and marched up the trunks, yellow and fleshy in character. Out of curiosity I placed my hand on the bark next to one of these mushroom colonies, only for the bark to peel away in my hand. The exposed wood beneath was pale and spongy, and wood lice scampered away into its crevices.
I dropped the bark, which burst rotten on the ground, and hurried to catch up with Rook several paces ahead.
“We should be reaching the summerlands soon, shouldn’t we?” I asked, just for conversation’s sake. The quiet here bore down like a physical weight. I couldn’t help but feel as though something might be listening, an impression that intensified the longer we remained silent.
“We are in the summerlands. We have been for some time.”
“But the trees—”
“Are not of autumn,” Rook replied. “No, these trees are dying.” Tension narrowed his eyes and set his jaw. “I have heard . . . whispers, that in some places, the summerlands have gone—amiss. I’ve never had occasion to see the blight with my own eyes. I confess it’s worse than I expected.”
“Surely the forest can be healed. I watched you raise an entire glade with a few drops of your blood.”
“Here, only one person holds such power.” His gaze flicked to me, the warning in their amethyst depths clear as a length of exposed steel. “And he uses his lifeblood as he sees fit.”
The trees grew larger and farther apart. The knotted roots bulging across our path reminded me of diseased veins. Immense stones thrust up from the ground at intervals, standing higher than I was tall, draped in thick mantles of moss and bloodred ivy. The late sunlight produced one last burst of gold that sparkled through the failing leaves, and in this light I saw a face staring out at me from the next stone we passed.
I halted. My blood froze.
It wasn’t an actual face. It was carved into the rock. But such was its realism that my mind registered the being as a living thing before logic caught up with me. Speckled with moss and bearded with vines, his grave visage was both ancient and pensive, his closed eyes sunken into webs of wrinkles. A crown of interwoven antler tines rested upon his unforgiving brow. At that moment I seemed to look upon an ailing king laid out on his deathbed, a sovereign whose cruel, mirthless conscience ruminated on all the wrongdoings of his long life without remorse. But no, I knew instantly my impression was wrong. This king did not know death. He slept, perhaps, but did not die. He never would.
I looked around, and found the same face on every stone. Without a shadow of a doubt, these engravings were Craft. Humans hadn’t been permitted in the forest for thousands of years. I couldn’t imagine the age of them, and what might drive the people of that forgotten era to carve, over and over again, the terrible countenance of the Alder King.
The Alder King.
Drooping motionlessly since we’d arrived, the leaves rattled in a hot, stale breeze.
The Alder King, my traitorous thoughts whispered again, naming the nameless fear clutching at me from all sides. The Alder King. Now that I’d started it was impossible to stop.
“Isobel.” Rook strode out of a thicket, pushing aside the branches of a buckthorn shrub. I hadn’t noticed he’d gone anywhere. He went to grab my shoulder, but his hand froze a hairsbreadth above my dress. “We need to leave. Quickly.”