Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)(72)

“What do you want for such a gift?” Poe said.

“Nothing now,” I said. “I will claim my payment at a later date.”

Poe’s wife regarded me uneasily, no doubt fearing that I would come knocking at their door again with burdensome demands, but Poe murmured something to her, and she seemed to relax.

“I told her that you are my fjolskylda,” he said. “She understands this. She too had fjolskylda in another village, before she came here, and they always made fair exchanges with her and her kin. You will be fair too.”

He said all this without any particular warmth, merely as if he were stating something self-evident. I felt tears spring to my eyes nevertheless. I’ve made bargains with the Folk before, and I can’t say why his words affected me so, but they did.

“I will depart these shores before the winter is out,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be best for you to find a—fjolskylda among the Ljoslanders?”

“It doesn’t matter where you are,” he said simply.

I closed my fist around the bearskin, and then I let the brownie woman take it away. It melted into the forest as easily as a living bear.

“How was the king imprisoned in the tree?” I said.

Poe went still. “It was a long time ago,” he said in a hushed voice, “I was only an icicle on a bough[*] then.”

“Ah,” I said, disappointed. “So you don’t remember.”

“Oh yes, I remember—why wouldn’t I? And even if I didn’t, it’s not as if the forest keeps quiet about it, nor the snows. They were quite upset when His Majesty was locked away—of course, snow has a terrible memory, and forgot almost everything by the following year apart from the fact that it was angry, and so it covered everything in a nasty sleet instead of proper flakes. Everything was all turned to mud and grey sludge; it was horrid.”

Poe talked quite a lot more to me now than he had when we first met, and as informative as I found his ramblings typically, right now I didn’t have time. There would be no way to convince the king I was still enchanted if I tarried too long.

“How was it done?” I pressed. “Some complicated enchantment, I suppose.” Because of course, I needed to know how to trap him again if he proved entirely mad and wicked, not merely mad and wicked by the standards of the Folk.

“Not really,” Poe said thoughtfully. “The first queen gave him a cloak woven from all the seasons, and then when he fell asleep in it one night by the Lake of Dancing Stars, as he often did, she snipped out the winter and stitched the whole thing back together. Then she wrapped him up tight in the cloak and fastened all the buttons. That trapped him, you see—well, no one could escape a year without winter, not even the king. She planted the king’s feet in the woods and turned the silk and wool and gold thread she’d used to weave the cloak into bark and leaf. Since then the tree has grown very tall, and he is still inside it, trapped forevermore.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. “Is that all.”



* * *



—

My hand was throbbing ferociously by the time I reached the tree, every step sending a jolt of fire up my arm. My bandage was bloody, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, other than keep my hand stuffed into my glove and pray that the king didn’t notice.

I stood before the tree, which rustled and hummed musically to itself. I wasn’t enchanted anymore, but that didn’t much matter, for the tree was positively brimming with enchantment—I had noted that before, with Wendell. I think the king was asleep—probably he’d been asleep the whole time, but I’ve no doubt he was still aware of me, in his dreaming.

I shivered with excitement and terror. I kept my hand firmly wrapped around my coin, but I allowed a little of the enchantment to seep into my mind—merely by relaxing my focus, which wasn’t easy, as I was accustomed to fending off faerie enchantments, not inviting them in. Yet it was necessary, for I hadn’t the slightest idea how I was supposed to get the king out. The enchanted ring hadn’t cared whether or not I brought the axe, so there must be some other way.

The magic murmured at me to move my legs. I did so. It had me stride about the grove, making a pile of snow and then shaping it with my hands. I went down to the stream, broke the ice, then found a curl of bark and filled it with water. This I poured over the snowman—yes, the king had me building a snowman, which perhaps I will laugh over later, but was quite disturbing in the moment, twisting carefree childhood memories up with some huge and terrifying magic—and watched as it froze into silvery ribbons like the indication of hair.

I stood gazing at the ugly snowman I had made, feeling rather foolish and wondering if the king in the tree really meant to step inside the snowman and use it as a vessel. Wendell had said that the king’s body had decayed, so he needed to use something, but I couldn’t really imagine this. Of course, the king was still trapped, so what body he wished to step inside was something of a moot point.

I began to wonder if this was all a mistake. Perhaps the king had only meant to enchant Wendell, but since I’d turned up instead, he’d decided he might as well have some fun with me. Dragging a mortal out of bed to build snowmen in the middle of the night seemed like poor sport to me, but I supposed that being trapped in a tree for centuries didn’t afford much opportunity for entertainment. As I was thinking all this, though, a raven fluttered out of the trees and perched on the snowman’s shoulder.