The malaise crept in so slowly, I didn’t notice for some time. How long had it been since I’d seen a forest clearing humming with magic? How long since the drone of fairy nests echoed from a flashing cove? The silver scepter itself lost its glow and its rainbow array of jewels grew dim. No longer could I use it to keep fell creatures at bay. Trolls roamed farther from their dark lairs, mage-crows from their desolate crags.
I set off to survey the trouble, as far as the outlying lands. I was gone for months, documenting my findings. A black island had sprung up in a distant bay and turned the water foul. A terrible stench rose from crevices and caverns, and poisoned streams and wells. Farmers reported sharp black spikes growing up through their fields. A terrified hunter returned from the forest to say that he had seen more spikes jutting up from the soil there. It seemed everyone and every place was affected but none knew the cause. My mind worked endlessly but found no answers.
After almost a year, I journeyed back toward the palace, sick and weary from my wanderings. The land turned bleaker. Even my carriage began to molder, the silk lining turning black and falling away at my touch. I stopped at meeting halls and taverns along the way, eager to learn what had befallen the land in my absence. I heard tales of trees growing brittle and shattering like ice, crops failing and food growing scarce.
When I reached the palace, I saw a face that sent a shock to my spine. A face I had all but forgotten. I searched my mind for who that face might belong to. Could it be . . . ? My head filled with memories that had slipped away long ago. No, not slipped—that I had pushed away. As if I’d shoved them all down into some deep place and now they were crawling out again.
Here at the palace was Hunter.
“Brother!” he cried, and smiled at me. But in his eyes I saw the same bitterness that had driven him to leave the Other Place long ago.
“You’ve forgotten about me,” he said. “I had to find the way here on my own.”
He opened his palm to show me a tiny jewel, gone black with age or ruin. Then he reached for the gold bracelet on my wrist and turned it to expose the empty setting from which the jewel had fallen. “A bread crumb,” he said. “I found the jewel in our own land, and it led me here to you.”
Unease slid into my heart. I learned that Hunter had been here in the Other Place for some months but had done nothing to combat the spreading miasma that covered all. I suppose there was nothing he could do, but it angered me to learn that he feasted while others starved, that he courted the queen’s attention while the stench of death hung in the air. To him the Other Place was a game, a child’s plaything. I don’t think he believed it was all quite real.
I busied myself in my work, testing out theories that had been offered by the sages in the outlying lands. I sent scouts into the crags to see if the mages had somehow returned, sent spies to watch the ice giants on the far side of the mountains. I applied balms to the sick, said spells over foul wells and withered crops. But the land continued to decline.
One day I was visited by a sage I had once sought council from as a boy. He came to the palace and stood in the receiving room with his dark eyes like smoldering coals, his body so frail I feared the pounding echo of the fountains would knock him down. “You have known what the trouble is,” he said to me. “You have known it since you returned from the outlying lands, but you will not face it.”
I assured him that I had no such knowledge. “If you know what plagues us, it is your duty to reveal it.”
“I do not know,” the man said. “I know only that it is something so terrible you will not let yourself discover it.”
I had him escorted away, thinking he had grown too old to know his mind anymore. But what he said haunted me. Whenever I saw my brother’s face, I felt the sage was right, but I couldn’t understand why I should feel that way. I wanted above everything to discover what plagued the Other Place—why should I not let myself discover it?
My brother grew restless in the palace, impatient with the queen’s agitation. I tried to make him understand what danger the realm was in, but he would not listen. I realized he had fallen into a deep disappointment, that he had returned to the Other Place in the hopes of finding ease and happiness, but that those things had eluded him. After the sage’s visit, he became convinced that I could heal the land but would not.
“See how pale he has become?” Hunter told the queen. “How sickly? He grows worse as the realm does. It is some spell he has cast in order to drive me out.”
“I am only weary from searching for answers,” I said.
“There is a look about you of evil magic,” Hunter said, and the queen admitted that it was true.
Her suspicion stung me, but at last I had to admit to myself that the sickness I felt was more than exhaustion. I hardly ate anymore, and a terrible pain throbbed in my arm. Something lay deep within the flesh there, something I had kept secret for a long time.