Wind swept across the field, bending the wheat in shimmering waves. As it spread outward, the colors changed. The leaves on the trees turned golden and scarlet and fiery orange. Soon the transformation set the whole forest ablaze. Stretching far into the distance, the only green that remained belonged to the grass verges bordering the fields and a handful of lone, tall pines poking through the canopy. I laughed out loud imagining how confounded the people of Whimsy must be—Mrs. Firth scrambling out of her shop, appalled; Phineas considering the painting hung beside the door. A single red leaf drifted down from the kitchen oak.
“It’s so quiet,” I marveled. The breeze ruffled my dress, its sweet, longed-for coolness raising gooseflesh on my arms. Birds sang sweetly in the trees. From the edges of the forest, crickets chirped a liquid melody. But the grasshoppers had all gone silent.
A lone figure distinguished itself from the wreckage in the yard, fastidiously picking through the thorns strewn across the ground. His blond hair shone silvery in the sun, and he had changed his clothes since I had seen him last—he wore an eggshell-blue waistcoat and an immaculate, freshly tied cravat.
My gut clenched. Buried somewhere in my parlor, I still had an iron dagger.
Gadfly called out to us in a mild, pleasant voice. “And so the rule of summer is ended, and autumn has come to Whimsy. I do regret that spring is so far away, but that’s simply how the world works, and I trust that one day the seasons will turn again. Good afternoon, Rook. Isobel.” He halted several yards away and bowed.
Frowning, Rook returned the courtesy. I was bound by no such obligation, and glared.
“What a happy welcome,” Gadfly said. “I merely wanted to congratulate you both on a job well done.” His gaze shifted to me alone, and he smiled, a warm, courteous smile that wrinkled his eyes while revealing nothing. “You made all the right choices. How splendid. How singular. The moment you slew the Alder King, you destroyed every mandate he has ever made. You and Rook are free to live as you please, unburdened by the Good Law. The fairy courts will never be the same.”
Somehow I found my voice. “But you—you wanted . . .”
What had he wanted? Abruptly, everything fell into place.
Before I’d made my first bargain with him all those years ago, perhaps even before I’d been born, he’d already begun scheming. Placing my home under a powerful enchantment to gain my trust and ensure that no harm came to me before he set his plan into motion. Arranging Rook’s portrait. Bringing us to the Green Well. Planting the iron dagger, which was never meant for Rook after all, but for the Alder King all along. And worse—knowing exactly what to say that would make him my bitter enemy, and set me crashing through the woods, away from my predestined path toward the impossible course of destroying the Alder King. Astonishment and fury washed over me in equal measure. My voice hardened, choked with emotion. “I don’t appreciate being used as a pawn in your game, sir.”
He looked at me a long moment in silence. “Ah, but you were not a pawn. All along, you have been the queen.”
I took a breath. His inflection was laden with some hidden meaning I didn’t have the patience to decipher. “And you are treacherous, and I’ll never forget the pain we endured by your design, no matter what came of it in the end.”
“Spoken, if I may say so, like a true monarch.” He smiled again. But a shadow passed over his countenance, and this time, his eyes didn’t crinkle. His portrait room sprang to my mind unbidden. All those patient centuries of collecting portraits—not out of desire for them, but because he was waiting for me, for my Craft, a spider at the center of a vast web he’d spun for hundreds of years in solitude.
“I do believe that is for the best,” he went on, watching me intently. “Trusting one of my kind is quite enough foolishness for a lifetime. Mortals are always better off not forgetting what we are, and that we only ever serve ourselves.”
“Gadfly,” Rook said, in a tone that suggested the spring prince was overstaying his welcome.
“Just one last thing, if I may.” Gadfly brushed some invisible dust off his sleeve and raised his eyebrows at Rook. “You are aware, I trust, that you are not yet named king? That there is a certain something you must—”
“Yes, I know!” Rook interrupted crossly.
I shot him a curious glance and discovered that he was nervously avoiding my eyes. He looked relieved when tentative footsteps crunched within the house, liberating him of the burden of explaining this “certain something” to me, and for the moment I was happy to forget all about it.
“Emma!” I called. “We’re safe! We’re in the . . . parlor.”
“I can see that,” Emma said calmly, picking her way into the room with the twins clutching both her hands. “There are holes in the walls. March, whatever you just picked up, don’t eat it.”
“Too late,” said May.
Emma shook her head. She scanned the parlor, and then the yard, and saw Gadfly, whereupon her eyes narrowed appraisingly. “Now who’s going to clean up this mess?”
“Oh, dear,” said Gadfly. “I’m afraid I must be off.”
Epilogue
I WRAPPED the bandage neatly around Rook’s injured hand, pleased to see that this time, he didn’t hide a wince. Two weeks later, his finger was nearly healed. We sat at my kitchen table beneath the wavering amethyst glow of his fairy light, still shining brightly after the two dozen enchantments he’d dispensed that day as payment to the workmen rebuilding our parlor. It didn’t escape me that he had not yet mentioned returning to the forest, or said anything about taking up the role of king, so the moment he started fidgeting restlessly in his seat, I had a reasonable idea of what he was working up to.
“Once,” he said, “I mentioned to you how succession works among my kind. How one prince is replaced by another. Or at least, how it used to work—the law can be different now.”
“Yes, and it’s awful,” I said with feeling. “Killing one another like . . . oh.”
Rook hadn’t been prepared for me to start figuring it out myself. He paled and continued quickly, “So, technically, as you are the one who defeated the Alder King, you’re now—well—the queen of the fairy courts. And I . . .”
I took pity on him. He was turning rather green. “Rook, I would be delighted to marry you and make you king. But first, I have one demand. It is of the utmost importance.”
I couldn’t tell whether he looked more relieved, or more frightened. “What is it, my dear?”
“I’d like another declaration, please.”
“Isobel.” He swept down to his knees and kissed my hand, gazing up at me in devotion. “I love you more than the stars in the sky. I love you more than Lark loves dresses.”
I startled myself with my own yelping laugh.
“I love you more than Gadfly loves looking at himself in a mirror,” he went on.