Somehow, I found my voice. “Fair folk cannot lie,” I reminded the king, torn between my fear and a sudden curious pity for him. “The well is gone.”
His eyes narrowed. More dust crumbled from the webwork of wrinkles surrounding them, revealing patches of papery flesh. He looked down at me. The heat simmered. Every bit of skin touching my dress itched foully, and phantom grasshoppers buzzed as pressure mounted in my skull. That was all I was to him, regardless of what I had done: an insect crawling at the foot of his throne. He meant to kill me with the sheer force of his attention. And he would have, if Rook’s ensorcellment hadn’t stopped him.
The moment he realized I was immune to his magic and why, alarm and uncertainty sparked deep in his clouded eyes. “Her will remains her own.”
Rook showed his teeth in a smile that wasn’t a smile, looking so utterly mad I forgot to breathe. “Yes. Now come down and fight me, if you can.”
An indrawn breath. Then the throne room erupted.
Screaming ravens rushed inward from every direction, clotting the air so thickly they smothered the hall in midnight darkness. Their flight was a deafening thunder, drowning out the Alder King’s roar of protest, swallowing whole the fair folk’s surprised cries. A stinging assault battered my face. I coughed on feather fragments swirling about like chaff, only the warmth of Rook’s arm reassuring me he was still there. Between the beating wings I caught piecemeal glimpses of the chaos around me. A woman on one of the balconies clawed at her head as a raven thrashed, caught in her elaborate hat. Another tumbled off, pecked at by dozens at once. Fair folk flooded the stairs, attempting to escape the onslaught to no avail, fights breaking out between them as they trod on one another’s shoes and gowns. A fair-haired girl—Lark?—grinned while she kicked a man in the shin, and then turned toward me, seeking approval.
Fairy blood flowed. The fragrance of summer phlox overwhelmed me with its sickly sweetness, and I struggled to keep my balance as the world spun in a feathered maelstrom.
A towering shape reared from the darkness. Its antlers cut a swath through the ravens, scattering broken bodies to the floor. Rook spun to protect me from the thane’s hooves. At the same moment, a pair of cold hands seized my arms and yanked me away from him, pulling me flush against the nearest tree.
“Stop thrashing about,” Lark said into my ear. “Some of us are here to help you.”
I grabbed Lark’s wrist hard. “Rook doesn’t have a sword!”
“A sword?” She grinned. “Why would he need one?”
As it turned out, he didn’t. Rook ducked and whirled beneath the thane like a dancer, plunging his left hand upward into its chest. It froze and trembled all over. Autumn ivy burst from first its nose, then its mouth, and then its eyes, and rapidly spread over its body until it resembled a giant topiary. He wrenched his hand free, already crushing the ancient brown skull in his hand as he tossed it away. With a swirl of his coat, he neatly sidestepped the cascade of bark tumbling down. He gave Lark and me an assessing look. The ravens now surged around the three of us in a circle, an opaque black wall studded with glinting eyes, as though we stood at the center of a storm. Rook had his back turned when a second thane crashed through.
I cried out to him, but he’d already sensed it. In one smooth motion he dropped to his knees and slammed his palm to the ground, meeting the whirlwind of feathers already rising to engulf him. The thane’s antlers whistled through empty air, missing the large, purple-eyed raven soaring away. Rook vanished into the cyclone, one bird indistinguishable among many. Then he burst free near the ceiling, angling down, crooked legs extended, arrowing toward the thane like a falcon descending upon prey. Once more he disappeared. I strained for any sign of where he might have gone this time, and didn’t have to wait long. The thane listed first one way and then the other, its stumbling hooves crushing the rotten fragments of its companion, and then fell with an earth-shaking crash, disintegrating in a cascade of vegetation that tumbled far across the floor.
Rook strode free of the remains in human form, dusting off his sleeves.
“Did he really cut his finger off?” Lark’s voice held a note of grisly delight. “He did, didn’t he! I haven’t heard of anyone doing that before. It’s permanent, you see—his glamour won’t hide it—and the power won’t last long.”
I swallowed. “Is he . . . can he fight the Alder King?”
A horn blast shook the ground and vibrated up through my shoes. Time stopped. Or at least that was how it appeared at first, but then Rook stepped back, and I slowly raised one of my tingling hands just to make sure I could. The ravens encircling us hung suspended in midair, frozen midflight, unblinking. Not a feather stirred. The horn sounded again. And the ravens fractured like brittle glass and sheeted down, an obsidian cataract crashing at our feet.
The Alder King stood at the top of his platform. The vines had slithered off him; they were still crawling away across the back of the throne. He took one step down. A second. Each impact knocked dust from his body, and as he descended he shed the weight of centuries, as though a mantle of years slipped from his shoulders. An emerald robe revealed itself by inches, trimmed with dark, antique gold. His thick gray-shot beard was braided in places like an ancient warrior-king’s, fastened by golden clasps, and a signet ring glittered on his finger. Heavy brows concealed his eyes, revealing only the stern nose and merciless slash of a mouth I recalled from the engraving in the summerlands. Where was the flaw in his glamour? He had none.
All around us the other fair folk ceased fighting in midmotion, assuming the various strange attitudes of actors in a pantomime. I was dimly surprised by how many appeared to have been fighting not only the ravens, but also one another. Whether some were on our side, or whether the violence over trodden-on shoes had merely proven infectious, I could not guess. They crouched frozen, their claws at one another’s throats as the flowering vines and moss created by their own spilled blood grew over them.
Rook did not move. His back was straight and his face unreadable. My heart in my throat, I chanced a look at Lark, not liking the way the world blurred out of focus when I turned—this was not the time to start swooning like a storybook maiden. She stood frozen as well, staring at the Alder King with wide, glassy eyes as though hypnotized.
The king took another step down, looming in the corner of my vision, and that was when I figured it out. His size. His size was his flaw. He towered above the other fair folk, inhuman in his dimensions, a head taller than even Rook.