An Enchantment of Ravens(24)

No more than a second or two had elapsed before Rook’s glamour began flaking away like old paint, revealing his true form, but not the way I remembered it. His skin was desiccated and gray, his eyes fading to lifelessness. It was as though I watched lights go out within him one by one, dimming with every heartbeat.

And I knew that if I did nothing, in another moment he’d be gone.

I would be free. I could escape—or at least try. But I thought of the forest cathedral, the scarlet leaves sifting down in silence. The look on his face when he’d transformed into a raven in my parlor. The smell of change on the wild wind, and the way he had let me turn his head, his eyes on mine full of sorrow. All those wonders crumbling to dust, without a trace of them left in the world.

So I lunged across the fire and tore the stick from his hands.





Seven


HE CRIED out when the stick left his grasp, a sharp, haunting sound of anguish—pain, but also loss. Color flooded back into him, his glamour following behind, though he still slumped to the side and had to catch himself with a hand against the ground before he fell.

“Isobel,” he croaked uncertainly, looking up at me.

My voice came from far away, swept downstream by the blood rushing in my ears. “It was Craft. Cooking. When I offered it to you, I didn’t know. I had no idea.”

His attention fell to the stick I held, a piece of wood with a lump of rabbit flesh smoldering on the end. I shared his disbelief. Almost impossible, that something so ordinary could harm him.

“We should—we should go.” He was so out of sorts he nearly sounded human. He staggered to his feet and turned first one way and then another, unable to get his bearings. “We haven’t covered nearly enough . . . have you eaten? Are you still hungry?”

“I can eat as we walk,” I said quietly, stunned to see him reduced to this. From Emma’s instruction, I recognized the symptoms of shock.

“You aren’t going to die?” he asked.

I shook my head. Toying with him didn’t seem nearly as amusing now.

“Good.” His hand went to his sword, perhaps seeking out its reassuring solidity. He next patted his pockets with a disquieted air until he found the raven pin on his breast and squeezed it. “In that case—”

He cut himself off and whipped around, every muscle in his body tensed. At first I thought he’d gone mad. Then I heard it too: a high, unearthly sound in the distance. Howling.

“I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Wild Hunt caught up with us,” I said reasonably, suddenly feeling strongly that someone ought to behave in a reasonable and reassuring way, even if that person, unfortunately, had to be me. “It sounds like we have a good head start, at least.”

“No, it was not only a matter of time. We are deep in my domain, my realm. Hemlock should not have been able to track us this far so easily.”

“Perhaps the difference is that I’m with you now. As you might have noticed, I do have a bit of a, um. Smell.”

He barely spared me a glance, passing up the ripe opportunity to criticize my mortality. The longer he remained rattled, the more apprehensive I became. He didn’t see the Wild Hunt as a serious threat. So was it just his recent near-death experience making him act like this, or something more—something I didn’t know about?

Coming back to himself, he released his raven pin as though it had scalded him. “We need to be out of the autumnlands before dusk.” And with that, he fixed on a direction and set off.

I snatched up as much of the cooked meat as I could carry, sloshing after him through the ankle-deep leaves. “Wait, out of the autumnlands? What do you mean? I thought we were traveling to the autumn court.”

“We are. Just not the same way we were before.”

“May I ask where we’re going, then?”

“To the place where Hemlock’s power wanes, farthest from the winter court. It will be harder, perhaps impossible for her to track us in the summerlands.”



The landscape changed gradually. The sun sank behind the hills, casting long, straight shadows behind the trees and saturating everything in russet light. Thicker-trunked oaks, elms, and alders crowded out the slender birches and ashes. A melancholy air hung over this part of the forest: the leaves were brown or a dull rust red, and fungus mottled the roots and marched up the trunks, yellow and fleshy in character. Out of curiosity I placed my hand on the bark next to one of these mushroom colonies, only for the bark to peel away in my hand. The exposed wood beneath was pale and spongy, and wood lice scampered away into its crevices.

I dropped the bark, which burst rotten on the ground, and hurried to catch up with Rook several paces ahead.

“We should be reaching the summerlands soon, shouldn’t we?” I asked, just for conversation’s sake. The quiet here bore down like a physical weight. I couldn’t help but feel as though something might be listening, an impression that intensified the longer we remained silent.

“We are in the summerlands. We have been for some time.”

“But the trees—”

“Are not of autumn,” Rook replied. “No, these trees are dying.” Tension narrowed his eyes and set his jaw. “I have heard . . . whispers, that in some places, the summerlands have gone—amiss. I’ve never had occasion to see the blight with my own eyes. I confess it’s worse than I expected.”