Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)(40)

16th November


I expected Wendell to sleep late today, and he did not surprise me; by the time he stirred himself I had already breakfasted and returned from my visit with Poe, whose tree home required shovelling again. It snowed again in the night, a true snow this time. I myself had awoken to the sound of a very strange knock at the door, heavy and rhythmic, and I had a moment of terror, my mind going to tales of ancient winter kings come to demand unfavourable bargains, only to discover that it was Finn, kindly shovelling our steps. The snow was waist-deep in places, with drifts rolling higher like waves, deep enough to drown in and painfully bright beneath the cloudless sky.

After breakfast, Aud arrived on snowshoes with a lump of beeswax and a basket of candles. From the latter rose a powerful smell, a mixture of lemons and rot.

“For the windows,” she said. “Light them each night. It will keep the tall ones from your door.”

“I see,” I said, and proceeded to extract from her the recipe for our paper. The candles were made from fish oil, lemon juice, fermented seaweed, rose petals harvested on the full moon, and the crushed bones of ravens (quantities to be provided in the appendix). It sounded rather fanciful to me—there are human workings, metal for instance, that the Folk near universally disdain, but they rarely take the form of poetic recipes (not that this has prevented many charlatans from making a tidy profit from same). But Aud assured me that the tall ones’ music would not pass into the cottage with the candles burning.

I showed the candles to Wendell, when he finally bestirred himself, and he turned his nose up at them. “Snake oil,” he said.

I nodded, relieved that he agreed with my assumption. The smell of them unlit made my stomach turn over; the fumes they would release whilst burning didn’t bear imagining.

He suggested that I set the candles in the window nevertheless, to keep us in Aud’s good graces. The beeswax, though, struck me as a handy precaution, given the auditory nature of the Hidden Ones’ enchantment.

“Will you come with me to interview Au?ur’s family?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I will offer myself up to Aud today, I think.”

I looked at him askance. Aud was organizing a snow-plowing, a scene in which I could not visualize Bambleby.

He frowned at me over his breakfast. “What? How hard can it be?”

I didn’t bother to reply that I doubted it would be very hard, but still more than his soft hands would care for. Indeed, when I next saw him, he was standing in a small knot with Krystjan, Aud, and several other village dignitaries, drinking mulled wine and having a natter while they kept an eye on Finn and the other youth engaged in the grunt work of clearing the road and landings.

My visit to Au?ur’s family was informative but not particularly helpful. That is, her parents, Ketil and Hild—both hardy and kind-faced in equal measure, with that greyish touch of sadness—answered my every question, but it was a story with only a beginning and an end. When had their daughter been taken by the Hidden Ones? Two days after Christmas, while fetching mushrooms. How long had she been away? For as long as the moon rose above the mountains at night, which is to say, a little over one week. Where had she been recovered? A hunter found her wandering the mountainside, her basket full of a queer sort of mushroom that melted against his palm.

Through it all, the girl sat in her chair by the fire, empty-faced. Her gaze drifted around the room, occasionally settling on me; I could not help shivering during these moments, for it was like looking through the windows of an abandoned house. I asked questions regarding her condition, of course. In addition to being incapable of speech, she is unable to attend to her own well-being. If ordered to stick her hand into the fire, she would do so; in fact, her left palm bears a scar from the time her mother ordered her to fetch a skillet, forgetting it was still hot from the stove. The only thing she does of her own initiative is wander outside during the longest nights, striding across the snowbound fields without even donning her cloak. She is now tied to her bed every night from the first snowfall to the thaw.

Ketil and Hild were even more interested in asking questions than I, though I could give them little comfort. Not only was I unaware of a remedy that might treat their daughter, I knew of no analogues of her affliction.

Beautiful Lilja arrived in the afternoon to chop our wood, which I’m grateful to say has become a regular favour. I watched through the window as Bambleby flirted, fixing her with many long green gazes whilst his golden hair fluttered in the breeze, even asking her to instruct him in the proper technique, which she did, patient despite his utter lack of improvement. Throughout, she remained cheerfully oblivious, alternately hacking away at the wood and responding perfunctorily to his comments while she wiped sweat from her pretty brow. At one point, I laughed so hard that Bambleby turned and scowled at me through the window. I had heard, through Thora, that Lilja was quite happily committed to a girl from a neighbouring village, but I saw no need to disclose this information to Wendell. It was his own fault, anyhow, for assuming that every woman who walked the earth would be enraptured by his charms.

I spent the day with my books and my notes. Bambleby flitted in and out, contributing absolutely nothing to scholarship, though he did shake out the rugs after exclaiming over their begrimed state and hang some useless woollen tapestry he had purchased from Groa. The effect of his simple ministrations upon the place has been almost alarming; it is virtually cosy. I have never lived somewhere warranting such an adjective, and I am not sure how to feel about it. And anyway, what is the point of decorating a place one is only temporarily inhabiting? When I posed the question to Bambleby, he replied with characteristic solipsism that if I had to ask, I would never understand the answer.