“Reputation.” Marigold laughed. “Our father used my mother to slake his desire, stole her newborn child, and left her to rot—and she was not the only woman to suffer that fate.” Tears glossed her eyes for a fleeting instant before they turned to flint again. “You used me to get what you wanted. So did Isaac. Yet it is my reputation in peril. Do you truly wonder why I want to stay here?”
George’s pistol pointed at her heart. “George,” Isaac cried. “How dare you threaten her?”
“Don’t be a milksop. I will shoot her if it saves her life,” his friend snapped. “A decent surgeon will take out the bullet. She’ll only have a little scar.”
“Shoot me, then,” Marigold said before Isaac could protest. “Shoot me. Like an honorable man.” She held out her hands. “He’ll kill me either way, Isaac. The Erl-queen knows the future. If you let him take me back, he will strangle me before I turn seventeen. He will tell you that I ran away to find my mother, that I drowned at sea, anything to make you forget. No one will know the truth.”
His heart was breaking. He was a statue struck too hard by a chisel, splintering all over. His eyes grew hot and damp. George claimed he had done it all for her, so she might have a chance of love with a man above her station. Could his dear friend really have been little more than a procurer, a parasite with designs upon the Fairfax fortune? Had George truly believed Isaac would make Marigold his bride, even if it meant lowering his own reputation? It was more than he could bear. And he could not believe it of George, his friend . . .
Wind murmured around them, carrying leaves with it. The light vanished from overhead, turning the mist the stern grey of pewter. Isaac felt a chill on his neck.
A woman had appeared in the center of the glade. Earth cracked from her shoulders as she rose to her full height. Her skin was the darkest bark, her hair was a wreath of ivy, and she wore nothing but a veil of gossamer. Inside her face, just visible through it, were the same black eyes she shared with the prince—for this could be none other than the Erl-queen, the other queen of England, the creature who had stolen all these girls from those who loved them. The creature who had terrorized a country.
“Leave,” she said in a soughing voice.
Isaac unsheathed his sword again. It had been easy to kill the Erl-queen’s son. Now he was not so afraid.
“Not without the girl,” George said. “Release my sister from your bewitchment, or I will shoot you, as I shot your hell-spawned offspring.”
“Victoria made a bargain. A life for a life.” The forest rippled as she approached, half walking and half drifting, like a wraith from a nightmare. “Leave.”
Marigold splashed through the water and ran toward the monster. George grabbed her and pulled her, writhing, against him. He pressed the pistol to his sister’s jaw, and she began to cry out: a hoarse, enraged sound. Her breast heaved as the Erl-queen watched them, her face betraying nothing through the veil.
“Isaac,” Marigold gasped, “Isaac, you must see what he is.”
“Quiet.” George only had eyes for the Erl-queen. “You will stand aside and let us leave.”
“If she leaves,” the Erl-queen whispered, “she dies young.”
Isaac swallowed. “And Princess Alice?”
When the Erl-queen turned to look at him, the forest seemed to move with her. Leaves and petals clung to her veil. The birds warbled a frenzy of song. The wind sighed. He almost lost courage, but he said, “Will the princess also die young?”
“Her wedding will be held in the shadow of death. She will be melancholy all her life and will not outlive her mother. Two of her children will be slain,” the Erl-queen said. “Two more will die before they truly lived. She was happy in the Forest of Erl.”
“She protects us, Isaac,” Marigold said, her voice low and strained. “The Erl-queen protects us from being hurt, being killed. She brings us here to save us from our fates, to give us a happy life. She is kind to us. She saw in the pool that George would—”
“Riddles and blasphemy.” George gripped her arm. “Back to London we go, my dear. Isaac, with me.” His face was almost bloodless. “We must get Marigold away from here. She needs protection from a man, not this monster.”
Isaac hesitated.
He ought to listen to Marigold. He thought he had loved her . . . but he had loved a fa?ade. Whatever might or might not be true of George, he was her blood, and a shrewd man—he knew what was best for her. And to leave her with this hellish thing that had worked such an enchantment on her mind was surely to leave her for dead.
“No, Marigold,” he said thickly. “I want you too much.”
She closed her eyes and turned her face away.
That was when the Erl-queen’s son appeared beside his mother. As Isaac beheld the creature he was certain they had killed, he turned cold to his very soul.
“If we Erl-folk had any weaknesses, we would take care for humans not to know them.” The mouth of thorns smiled at them both. “I did ask you, Isaac Fairfax,” it said, “if you believed everything you heard about me. You believed that girls were easily distracted. You believed I could be slaughtered with metal.”
Steel had never harmed them. It had been a lie, all of it—baseless gossip, London whispers.
They had no weapons. No means by which to guarantee their safe passage. As Isaac realized how grave a mistake they had made, George ran, hauling Marigold with him by the hair. She screamed at him in fury. In his wake, Isaac desperately swung his sword at the Erl-queen’s son, shouting “Get back, villain,” no longer knowing whether he was fighting to reach Marigold or to protect George, or simply to preserve his own life—but when he slashed open that glistening skin, all that came out were sap and flies. Thousands of flies. He screamed as they surrounded him, as they infested him. The last thing he saw were the rose-thorn teeth.
It must have been hours later when he woke. George was nowhere to be seen. Isaac’s sword lay dull and stained among the leaves, too far away to grasp.
The Erl-queen and her son stood over him. Bloodied mouths. Glinting black eyes.
Oh, those teeth, those terrible teeth, red with death.
“Do not weep, Isaac Fairfax,” the Erl-queen said softly. “This story has a happy ending. Marigold is safe at last from the monsters who imprisoned her.”
A whimper was the only sound that passed his lips. He could not move; he could not speak; he could not scream as the forest drank him into its embrace. Somewhere in the dancing shadows, Marigold was singing. And darkness was encroaching on the glade.
REGAN PERUSSE’S VILLAIN CHALLENGE TO SAMANTHA SHANNON:
Erl-Queen Retelling in Nineteenth-Century London
EVIL REVEALED
BY REGAN PERUSSE