Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)(43)

“Only you would say that,” he said. “Don’t worry. I am not as vicious as the rest of them—you may have noticed. I did not see my stepmother’s plot coming. I’m afraid I was not much used to doing things for myself back then, and that included thinking. My stepmother encouraged this—she ensured I was never without a host of servants to see to my every desire, nor without a party at which to amuse myself.” He slouched down in his seat in a long-limbed sprawl, scowling into the fire.

“Tell me about your world,” I said, leaning hungrily forward.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you will only write a paper about it, and I don’t wish to be an entry in the bibliography. Ask me something else.”

I huffed, tapping my pen against the paper. “Very well. If you turn your clothes inside out, do you disappear? I have always wondered.”

The dark mood vanished like smoke, and he gave me a youthful grin. “Shall we try it?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, an unlikely giggle escaping me. I seized his cloak and reversed it, and he pulled it on.

“Oh,” he said, his face blank.

“What is it?” I gripped his arm. “Wendell? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t—I feel most unwell.”

He let me strip the cloak from him, and then he collapsed into the chair. Only after I had made him another mug of chocolate and built the fire up for him again did he start to laugh at me.

“Bastard,” I said, which only made him laugh harder. I stomped off to my room, having had quite enough of him for one night.





17th November


I woke some hours before dawn in the quiet of a winter night, snow pattering against the window. Shadow was curled against my back, his favourite position, nose whistling.

I lit the lantern upon my bedside table (both lantern and table had appeared earlier in the week, despite my objections) and held my hand up to the light.

For a moment, I saw something—a shadow upon my third finger. It was visible only from the corner of my eye, and only then when I let my mind wander and did not think of it. My hand was very cold. I had to hover it above the lantern for some minutes before it warmed.

I curled the hand into a fist and pressed it to my chest as an unpleasant shiver ran through me. I lifted the covers, intending to go to Wendell immediately and admit my foolishness. But no sooner had the thought entered my mind than it drifted away again. Even now as I write these words, I must hold tight to my coin to keep them from slipping from my memory. Each time I open my mouth to tell Wendell, a fog arises in my thoughts, and I know that if he were to ask me whether I have been enchanted, I would lie quite convincingly.

“Shit,” I said.

I took out my coin and pressed it to my hand. I did not know what manner of enchantment the king in the tree had ensnared me with. What was clear was that I was ensnared. Now, there are faerie enchantments that fade with time and distance if they are not renewed. I could only hope it was of this nature.

If I found my feet taking me back to the tree, I would have to cut off my own hand.

Naturally, I spent the rest of the night in a misery of shame and worry, cursing myself. The worst of it was that Bambleby had warned me away from the tree—if I descended into a murderous rage, or turned into a tree myself, he would be very smug about it.

As soon as the winter dawn ghosted over the snowpack, I dressed and hiked up to the spring in my snowshoes, Shadow at my heels. He does not require snowshoes, nor protection from any weather.

The forest has a different quality now, girded with winter. It no longer dozes among its autumn finery like a king in silken bedclothes, but holds itself in tension, watchful and waiting. In moments like that, I am reminded of Gauthier’s writings on woodlands and the nature of their appeal to the Folk. Specifically, the forest as liminal, a “middle-world” as Gauthier puts it, its roots burrowing deep into the earth as their branches yearn for the sky. Her scholarship tends towards the tautological and is not infrequently tedious (qualities she shares with a number of the continental dryadologists) yet there is a sense to her words one only grasps after time spent among the Folk.

I was happy to reach the spring. I’m afraid to say that I have abandoned propriety and taken to bathing in it, a necessity given the awkwardness of heating water in the cottage. After having a scrub, I dried myself quickly with the towel I had brought along and dressed again, balancing myself on one of the heated rocks.

Usually, I waited for Poe to appear before clearing the snow from his tree, as is only polite, but he was unusually tardy. I donned my snowshoes and trudged to his tree, where I stopped. The tree had been scorched. Not from without, but within, as if struck by lightning. Several of the boughs lay broken upon the snow.

I was surprised by the grief that came over me, scattering my thoughts. Yet there was hope. If Poe had run into the woods, he may have become lost. It was a theory supported by anecdotal evidence of the Spanish anjana, a tree-dwelling species of the common fae, who rarely stray beyond the land compassed by their roots, and may never find their way home if need drives them from their territory. And so I plunged into the woods, calling for my small, needle-fingered friend. No easy feat, not knowing Poe’s true name and being unable to use his language, for fear of what else might hear me. But happily, he showed himself within a few moments of hearing my voice, creeping out from under a root.