He wove us around the other dancers, steering us toward where Rook stood out like a sore thumb, unwillingly requisitioned into a dance with Foxglove. Gadfly maintained an expectant air, but I had nothing left to say to him.
“Fear not,” he said to my silence. “This business will be unpleasant while it lasts, but it will be over soon enough.” As his silk glove slipped from my shoulder, he brought his mask close to my ear. “Remember: for all my meddling, your choice is the one that matters in the end. Hello, Foxglove! Rook! May I steal this dance?”
Rose petals swept around us as we switched partners, disappearing with a ghost of heady fragrance. If I survived this, I thought, I’d never want to smell roses again.
“I felt—” Rook began, but I cut him off with a sharp jerk of my head. I meant to wait until Gadfly and Foxglove had moved away from us to speak. Yet I found, as the seconds passed, that I couldn’t say the words. I didn’t know how to say them. They were too vast and terrible to fit on my tongue.
Around and around we swirled. Lights glittered across Rook’s hair and the gold thread on his coat. Courtiers flowed past us, whirling but never touching, like flowers spinning on the surface of a lake. A wolf mask turned to stare at me as it passed; I felt countless eyes upon us, waiting for the first sign of the hunt’s climax. Two prey, one alert, the other unsuspecting, about to be flushed from a thicket toward a bloody end.
“Isobel? What is it?”
“I must ask you to do something for me,” I said.
He replied quickly, “Anything.”
I forced myself not to look away. “You must use the ensorcellment to change what I feel.”
Rook almost missed a step. “What are you saying?”
Nearby Foxglove tilted her head back, her silvery laugh splitting the masquerade.
“I’m saying that I—”
“No. Don’t.” He looked at me as though he were marooned and I were a ship he was watching sail out to sea, farther and farther away.
A sickly odor of decay reached my nose.
“Rook, I’m sorry,” I said. “I love you.”
Our next turn brought the tables into view. A fair one lifted a pear to her lips, only for the fruit to blacken in her hand, oozing through her fingers, swollen with maggots. She ate it anyway, wearing an expression of sweet delight as juice and pulp dripped down her chin. On all the platters, the fruit had turned rotten. Dark putrefaction spilled over the china, soaked the tablecloths, and dribbled to the ground.
“When?” he asked, his lips barely moving. The lower half of his face was masklike itself, ashen against his dark curls and high collar.
A songbird dove down, tearing a butterfly apart in its beak. Whirling in circles, the revelers grew sallow and feverish in the fairy lights’ multicolored glow. Animal masks snarled. Flower masks boggled at us, inscrutable. They spun dizzily and with delirious abandon, no longer playing at being human, parodying a mortal ball like a nightmare masquerade.
“Yesterday. But I didn’t know until . . .” I couldn’t bear to speak of it. “Please. We’re almost out of time.”
“I can’t do it,” he said.
A raven croaked overhead.
“You have to!”
He released my waist to pull on the trailing end of the ribbon holding his mask in place. It tumbled to the ground, lost among the dancers. “I gave my word,” he said, stripped bare.
We took one step forward. Another back. Turned. I tasted the words like poisoned wine. “Then it’s over.”
“Isobel,” Rook said. He stopped moving, so that we alone stood still. “I have never met anyone more frustrating, or brave, or beautiful. I love you.”
A sob caught in my throat. Standing on my toes, I closed the gap between us and kissed him; I kissed him fiercely, bruisingly, as a cacophony of mocking wails and scandalized shrieks rose from the fair folk looking on. This was what they had been waiting for.
A whisper of sound. Suddenly we stood alone, as though the courtiers had vanished like specters into the night. But no—they were still there—I caught the grotesque shapes of masks peering out at us from the bushes, from the trees, from every shadow, their hidden owners crouching in stiff anticipation like mantises waiting to strike.
And we weren’t completely alone. A slender, white-haired figure clad in black armor stood at one of the tables. Her back faced us. I hadn’t seen her arrive; perhaps she’d already been standing there for some time. She picked up a spoiled pastry, examined it, and flung it away in disgust.
A horn blast echoed through the forest. I felt it in the ground, reverberating up through my bones. Two other blasts answered its call, but those deep bellows did not belong to horns. In the misty darkness between the trees, a pair of towering shapes moved. They were so tall, crowned with branches, that I might have mistaken them for giant oaks had they not shifted, revealing themselves as massive thanes, both at least half again as large as the one Rook slew the day we’d met. Hounds leapt out of the woods as though fleeing from them, pale flames in the night, to boil sinuously around Hemlock’s legs, overturning the table as they vied for her affection, utterly ignored. Steam rose from their lolling scarlet tongues.
The horn sounded again. Only then did she turn.
With the movement, it was as though she pulled a dustcloth from the throne room. The air rippled, and the birches grayed and sagged, bark peeling, riddled with beetle holes. The moss underfoot atrophied to an unhealthy yellow-green, and flowers shriveled in the damp heat that rose from the earth, rank with the stench of decomposing vegetation. The summer court’s corruption had reached the springlands—or it had been here all along.
“I am here to enforce the Good Law!” Hemlock cried in a clear voice. What she said next made the trees groan and whisper and all the waiting ravens take flight in a nervous, silent cloud. “By the order of our sovereign, the Alder King.”
Eighteen
HEMLOCK HALTED only a few paces away, her open hands held out to the sides as though to show us she didn’t have a weapon, or as if she were prepared to embrace us. Given the wicked claws on the ends of her long, knotted fingers, I didn’t try to guess which.
Rook eyed her up and down, and in one smooth, contemptuous motion drew his sword. He angled his body in front of me. I seized the chance to bend and work the ring out of my stocking, and slipped it on while he spoke. “How long have you been the Alder King’s servant, Hemlock?” he spat. “I was unaware the winter court had fallen so low. Bending the knee on ceremony is one thing. Carrying out orders on his behalf is quite another.”