Until suddenly, it all stopped.
Only Hemlock’s hands beneath my armpits kept me upright. My eyelids fluttered, golden light flickering through my lashes. A dull roar buffeted me. It was the sound of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of voices speaking at once, but compared to the symphony of time passing it was quiet and faraway, muffled by wads of cotton. I couldn’t bring myself to care about whatever was happening. The earth spun quickly enough that by the stars’ reckoning, I was already dead. It didn’t matter if I survived today, or tomorrow, or the next month. My life was more trivial than that of a single leaf in a forest. A golden afternoon, I remembered, and smiled, with no thought to how I must appear.
My head lolled. Through a crack in my eyelids, I registered that we stood on a platform raised a story or so above the ground. Knotted roots coiled around my feet, blackened by an ancient fire or lightning strike and glistening with beads of hardened sap. The roots descended, forming an uneven spiral stair, to a shining, crowded hall that awaited us below, suffused in what appeared to be bright evening sunlight, but couldn’t possibly be that, since it was night. Rook had said seconds, and I believed him. A struggling thought came to me: the light was reflected by mirrors. Great mirrors stood behind the balconies crowded with fair folk, which surrounded us in tiers like a huge theater, or a courthouse . . . no, not mirrors—sheets of water cascading down, perfectly smooth, reflecting the room into gilded, gleaming infinity.
I tried to focus on the stooped figure beside me. He was saying something, but I couldn’t comprehend its meaning. Clinging to the memory of us so long ago, I pushed a scattering of words past my lips. “That’s why you . . . inadvisable.”
“Yes. You remember! Come back, Isobel. Come back to me.”
“Oh, Rook, just leave her alone. It doesn’t matter if she’s gone mad or not—and if she has, she’s better off staying that way. I’m the one who has to hold on to her, after all.”
“Isobel,” he said again, and pressed his lips to mine.
It was a rushed kiss, his chapped mouth bumping hard and chaste against my own, but it felt like inhaling a breath of fresh air after hours of suffocating underground. I blinked rapidly, the blur around me shifting into focus. Nausea burned a trail up my throat, and every sparkling jewel and pillar and fairy light threw off a dizzying halo, but I remembered I had things to live for after all. If I was going to die, I would do so remembering how much I cared about Rook, and Emma, and March and May, whose fleeting lives mattered terribly, the truths of the fairy paths be damned.
All the fair folk in the audience hall gaped at us. Most clung to the rails, craning their heads as though they’d been watching a familiar play only for an actor to burst in unscripted from the rear doors. Having witnessed Foxglove’s disgust at his earlier display, and having served as an intimate witness to the depths of Rook’s shame, I knew that kissing me in front of the entire summer court was one of the most courageous things he’d ever done.
“I find it awfully trying, you know, that you never take my good advice,” said Hemlock somewhere above and behind me. I wasn’t listening. I was gazing at Rook as he gazed back, bent double by the fair folk restraining him. I almost laughed when it occurred to me that we were at the same level, and I was nearly standing up straight.
He was panting with his teeth bared, and his breath stirred the loose locks of hair hanging in front of his face. “I made you a promise the last time we were in the summerlands. I still mean to see it through.”
“Are you saying that you have a plan?” I inquired, not feeling very well at all, which explained why I found this rather funny also. “And if so, is it arrogant, ill advised, and likely to result in both our deaths anyway?”
“Yes,” he replied, and gave me a quick half-smile in between catching his breath. “I’m afraid there isn’t time just now for you to come up with a better one. Otherwise, I would wait.”
“Go on, then. I know how much you love showing off.”
His expression sobered. “Impossibly, it seems I love you quite a bit more,” he said. He hesitated, gathering his strength. Then he made a sudden, sharp jerking motion, and his glamour came flooding back. Before I understood what he had done he’d thrown off his detainers, drawn himself up to his full height, and shouted in a voice that echoed across every corner of the hall, “I challenge the Alder King! I challenge him for sovereignty over the four courts!”
His severed finger, still wearing my ring, lay curled among the riven oak’s roots.
Twenty
THE FAIR FOLK surrounding us stepped back. My knees buckled, but Rook caught me by the elbow before I fell and threaded his arm through mine. I wondered why no one was attempting to stop him, until I saw his face. I hadn’t seen him like this since the night he confronted me about his portrait. He blazed, fiercely incandescent, somehow less human than ever even with his glamour returned, projecting that if anyone came near us, he would strike them down on the spot. One advantage of their horrible fairy customs, I supposed: strength was everything, and with the iron gone Rook was the most powerful fair one in sight. More than that—he didn’t have anything to lose. Even Hemlock looked wary.
“Your hand,” I said.
“It will bleed quite a lot, I imagine,” he replied in a satisfied tone. “Can you walk? I need you close.”
Right, the plan. The plan in which Rook tore off his own finger and, apparently, challenged the Alder King to a duel to the death. What could possibly go wrong?
I squeezed my eyes shut, searching inside myself, evaluating my reserves. “I think so. Not for long.”
“Then let us go.”
Together we descended, my dress leaving a trail of petals on the uneven steps. When we reached the bottom, I looked back once. The riven oak from which we had emerged grew suspended on a balcony, its dark roots entangled around the platform and its branches halfway grown into the wall. I saw no door, no archway, no other entry anywhere. The Alder King’s seat of power could only be reached through the fairy paths.