Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1)(86)
“Do you know them?” the king enquired, politely nodding at the villagers as they bowed and curtsied.
“Yes,” I said, for there was no reason to lie about it. “They are—friends of mine.”
“You honour us, Your Highness,” Aud said, and swept me another note-perfect curtsey. “And we are honoured to be invited here to pay our humble respects to His Majesty and his bride-to-be, as well as to welcome what I hope will be a new era of friendship between mortals and Folk. It has been too long since we have been honoured with an invitation to your realm.”
“I quite agree,” the king said. “And you put it prettily too—I know very well there were no invitations made to mortals during the interregnum—only abductions. Rest assured such occurrences will no longer be tolerated.”
He gave her one of his kind, beautiful smiles, and I could see that Finn and Aslaug were dazzled; Aud smiled back, though I knew her well enough now to detect a certain opacity about it.
“If I might be so bold as to present His Highness with a token of the mortal realm,” Aud said. “It is nothing so fine as the gifts you have so far received.”
“Then I’m sure I shall like it all the more,” he said with such graceful condescension that several ladies in the audience swooned.
Aud held up the bottle she was carrying. “This is our finest honey wine, which has been maturing for nearly a century of our years. I can attest that there is no choicer vintage in the mortal world.”
The king looked positively charmed by such a humble gift. Glasses were brought out by faerie servants, and Aud filled them all, emptying the bottle among the king’s nearest courtiers. They drank politely, and showed no ill effects beyond a few grimaces—and why should they? The wine in the bottle was not poisoned.
Aud moved to offer the king a glass, paused, smiled, and handed it to me first. My hand shook as I gripped the stem, splashing wine on my sleeve. The wrongness of what we were doing overwhelmed me then, leaving me lightheaded. Those other stories flickered through my mind like dark birds.
I had to be resolute. If I did not go through with our plot, I would be trapped forever, slowly losing more and more of myself, while Hrafnsvik and all the other villages watched their animals die and their shovels break against their frozen farmland.
My fingers white against the glass, I took a sip, and as I did so, I brushed my hair back. A habitual gesture, to keep it out of the drink—my hair, of course, is forever flopping all over the place. But I also brushed the veil Wendell had made for me, loosening a single pearl. The pearl landed in the wine with an insubstantial splash, and dissolved.
I should have felt relief. That was it—my part was done. I had only to pass the poisoned wine to my betrothed. To wait for him to sag forward in convulsions, for the queen and her son and whatever other allies they had among the courtiers to spring forward and finish him. Wendell was already moving—he strolled along the edge of the crowd, moving closer to the thrones as if to improve his view. He would grab me as the king died, and we would flee with Aud and the others in the ensuing chaos.
And yet there I sat, still holding the wine.
Finn and Aslaug began to look worried. Aud alone was at ease, a warm smile still hovering on her lips. But it was not her usual smile, I knew, which was cool and brisk; this smile was a performance.
I leaned forward under the pretense of offering Aud a grateful kiss. She mirrored me, calmly pressing her cheek to mine, though I felt her stiffen slightly with disquiet.
“I can’t do it,” I murmured. My thoughts blurred together, and I had to dig my nails into my palms to keep myself from slipping through time again. “It’s not how it’s supposed to end.”
I believe I babbled something else, about stories or patterns or I don’t know what, for my memory is patchy. I know that Aud kissed me, and I felt her lips trembling. I held her eyes with mine, trying to convey to her that I wished her to tell me what to do, to help me. But she only stared back in baffled silence. And why wouldn’t she? She had planned this whole intricate scheme out with Wendell, and now here I was, threatening to bring it crashing down upon us.
Aud quickly mastered herself, hiding her shock under polite surprise. “Her Highness’s praise is far too kind.”
The entire incident—my hesitation; Aud’s embrace—had lasted only seconds. The king was still smiling, perfectly unsuspecting as he murmured to one of his courtiers. He turned to me, holding out his graceful hand—the nails very white and narrower at the tips, as if they would form points if left untrimmed—to accept the wine.
Aud’s gaze bored into me. I could see she hadn’t understood a word I’d said—unsurprising, given my nonsensical prattling. No doubt she thought I’d gone mad. And perhaps I had, shut away so long in that winter world, encased in enchantments like layers of dreams. Yet in that moment I knew—I knew—that if I went through with our plot, it would be to the ruin of us all. I had no evidence to support this, and yet the conviction had its roots in reason, somehow; not in anything specific, but in my accumulated knowledge of the Folk, the resonance of hundreds of stories. This murder was discordant; a snapped string.
I made some motion with the wineglass—I don’t know what it was. Probably I would have dropped the glass, shattering it, or perhaps in my agitation I was motivated enough for drama and would have hurled it away. But at that slight motion, Aud sprang forward, knocking the glass from my hand.