Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)(66)
Her hands tightened on her son’s small back. She murmured to him, and he ran between the trees without a backwards glance. A whisper of music filtered through the grove, and I fell into a momentary daze. The faerie woman faced Wendell with cold fury in her eyes, and then—I cannot describe what happened next, other than to say that it was like being struck by something, a wave perhaps. Though not physically—I know, I am making little sense. Already disoriented by the music, I staggered about in a trance of some sort, and came back to myself in Wendell’s arms—he had caught me before I could fall, and held me upright.
The faerie woman, meanwhile, had collapsed gracefully to her knees. She placed both hands in the snow and pressed her whole face into it. “Forgive me, your highness,” she murmured.
“No, no, no,” Wendell said. “None of that. I’m not anybody’s highness anymore.”
She gazed at him with confusion in her eyes, which slowly cleared. “You are only a child.”
“Good grief!” he said. “I will have you all know that, by the measure of the mortal world, I am quite advanced in years.”
She glanced at me for the first time, her nose wrinkling. Then, to my horror, she said, “And who is this, a pet of yours?”
Wendell gave a nervous laugh. “I would not recommend pursuing that line of inquiry.”
“Well, what do you want?” she said, shifting in the uncanny way of the Folk from humility to rudeness in the space of a breath. “Are you here on business of theirs?”
“I don’t know who you mean, but regardless, the answer is no. This business with your son is part and parcel of my plan to return to my kingdom, from which I have been banished.”
“A quest?” she said, remarkably unconfused by the illogic of his statement.
“Of a sort.” He cast me a brief glower. “A rather winding, meandering one, but one cannot always be fortunate in these cases.”
“Who has cursed your trees?” I cut in. It was not what I wanted to ask first, but many of the Folk value indirectness. I was pleased by the coolness in my voice, for I was still wobbly from whatever enchantment the faerie had blasted us with, and also my pride was smarting from the pet nonsense.
“It’s not only the trees,” she said, after eyeing me curiously for a moment. “We are all of us cursed. Root and branch, flake and frost, young and old. All allies of the old king share in his downfall and his misery.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Would that I had been trapped in a tree, like my lord. It is a kinder fate than watching your children wither like ice in the summer sea.”
“Then that is why you sent him away,” I murmured. My mind flicked through the stories one after another, trying to fit it all into a pattern I recognized. “Then Ari—your son—he is the old king’s child?”
Wendell, who had been only half listening, stamping his feet and blowing warmth into his hands, stared at me open-mouthed. The woman gave a short laugh.
“Your mortal lover has a mind like crystals,” she said. “Sharp and cold. I would like her for my own.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” was all he said in reply to this statement, which was appalling on a great many levels.
“Truly,” the woman pressed. “Would you trade her? Your power is of the summerlands, but I will gift you with the hand of winter.”
“Thank you,” Wendell said; he seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter. “But I am satisfied with my hands as they are. And unless you have a key to my forest kingdom across the sea, I will not be trading my mortal lover today.”
I was going to kill him.
“Em,” he said, “perhaps you could explain this all to me, as you seem to have instantly grasped the situation with your crystalline mind.”
“It’s not difficult to grasp,” I said in as icy a voice as I had in me. “She is loyal to the king in the tree. The Folk who overthrew him have cursed her and her home, and so she sent her child away to keep him safe. But she has told us that she has more than one child, and thus it would follow that she would wish to preserve the most valuable of her brood—and why else would he be of greater value than the others? Perhaps he is also in greater danger too—the changeling bond would keep him safe.”
The woman nodded. “He is a bastard. Still, the queen has slain many of her husband’s bastards in order to safeguard her claim to the throne.”
I frowned. “Then the present monarch is—or was—married to the king in the tree?”
“She was his first wife. He put her aside and married someone else. She sought revenge, and got it, for much of the nobility preferred her to both the second queen and the king. She locked him away forever and had his bride slain.”
My head spun, sorting through all this, though I was used to hearing tales of the complicated tangle of murder and intrigue of faerie courts.
Wendell did not appear particularly interested in this information. He had turned up the collar of his cloak and was back to blowing into his hands. “Well, we will take back the mortal child now, if you would be so kind. I am afraid my blood is too thin for lengthy convocations in this weather.”
The faerie woman, with characteristic changeability that I suspected I would never grow used to, now seemed to view the unwanted return of her son after a years-long absence as something akin to a minor inconvenience. Her initial fury forgotten, she shrugged and turned towards the grove.