Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)(71)

I did it the way Lilja had taught me—fixing my eyes on the target, letting the weight of the axe do the work. My other fingers I folded against the side of the stump, to keep them out of the way. I was half convinced I would miss and drive the axe into my hand—it was not at all the same as aiming for a crack in a log, no matter what I tried to tell myself—but I heard Lilja’s voice in my head, her offhanded good cheer, as if there was nothing in the world more ordinary than what I was doing, and I didn’t hesitate. My aim was true, and suddenly I was gazing at my finger, and it was not at the end of my hand.

It was the most curious sensation. At first, I was conscious only of the enchantment leaving me—it felt like falling, that dream sensation in which there is no ground to hit, only wakefulness. I awoke, and then immediately after that, the pain rolled over me in a red wave.

I staggered about, fading in and out of consciousness. I threw up at one point, I think. But somehow, when I fully returned to my senses, I found that I had wrenched off my glove and pressed my scarf against the hollow where my third finger had been.

I sobbed there in the snow for a moment or two, from relief as much as from the pain. When I’d got that out of my system, I returned to the cottage and bandaged my hand.

Then I set off again for the white tree.





3rd December (?)


I just read over that again. It sounds irrational, if not insane—but I assure you, my mind was quite clear.

Of course I considered waking Wendell. But that would have given me away—the king in the tree would have known I wasn’t enchanted if I arrived with Wendell in tow. As a general rule, the Folk do not take kindly to mortals who find ways to break their enchantments—they see it as an affront to their craftsmanship—and so to travel there in an unenchanted state would have been a risky prospect indeed.

I suppose most would ask why I wished to go to the king at all. I cannot answer that adequately, other than by posing more questions. If you give an astronomer a telescope through which he can view an undiscovered galaxy, but allow him only a glimpse of a single star, will he be content? By freeing the king in the tree, I would witness not only the ascension of a faerie king, but the ending of a story I have heard told many times, in many ways. Stories, after all, are so fundamental to their world; one cannot hope to understand the Folk without understanding their stories.

As for a secondary motivation, I admit that it pleased me to think that I could release Aud and Thora and all the others from their fear of the tall ones—for if the king had forbade the taking of mortal youths before, and been overthrown for it, I had no doubt he would do so again once he was freed, if only out of spite. The Folk are, by and large, blinded by pride and incapable of learning from their errors, and even if a mode of thought or behaviour lands them in trouble again and again, each time worse than the one before, they will simply carry on as they always did, which perhaps explains a little of the chaos and absurdity that typifies many faerie stories, and indeed their realms.

I did leave Wendell a note, at least, informing him that I had gone to release the king in the tree, that I had broken the enchantment I had fallen under (I provided no details as to how, in case he flew into one of his homicidal rages and began decapitating the sheep or something), but that I was pretending that I hadn’t, and if I was still gone when he awoke, he had better not do anything to give the game away.

First, I went to see Poe. I walked quickly, or as quickly as I could through the knee-deep snow, with a parcel that had recently arrived at the cottage tucked under my arm.

He crept cautiously out of his tree, puzzlement written all over his sharp little face—I had never come to see him at night before. The spring and the grove were a different place now, full of little lights that might have been stars, reflected in the running water or the ice gilding the snow. But I didn’t think so, for as I approached the spring, they winked out and then reappeared much deeper in the woods.

“I’ve come for my third question,” I said.

He nodded, though his eyes kept drifting to the package under my arm. To spare him the suspense, I placed it before him. He puzzled a little over the wrapping paper until I told him that it was meant to be torn open—which he did with one sharp and silent finger. He cried out at the sight of the black bearskin which my brother had finally—grudgingly and with many expressions of dismay at whatever faerie nonsense I had mixed myself up in this time, for it’s not as if he would believe I would want such an adornment for my personal use—sent from one of the furrier’s shops in London.

“This will delight my lady, for it will set off her beauty and dignity to great effect,” Poe said. And then he added, in the typical fashion of the Folk, who dole out information like a miser does his coin excepting the occasions when they provide more enlightenment than one would care for, “Though she prefers the skins of mortals.”

I chose to withhold my thoughts on the latter half of this characterisation. “Your lady?”

He blushed and lowered his eyes. “His Highness blessed me with a marvellous home. I have had Folk banging upon my door night and day, demanding to marry me. I chose the loveliest, of course.”

“Congratulations,” I said, genuinely pleased. “May I meet her?”

There came a whisper of movement at the edge of the spring. Poe’s sweetheart had been there all along, watching me. There was nothing to distinguish her from Poe, though she was perhaps a little taller, and she wore an odd, pale, filmy garment that I did not care to examine closely. She edged around me to Poe’s side, where she ran her fingers over the bearskin. The two held a muttered converse.