An Enchantment of Ravens(29)

I shook my head. “That’s cruel.” All of it was. Him to me, and them to him.

“Such is our nature. It may be cruel, but it is also fair.” He looked down.

My vision was fading, but in the hard lines of his profile I saw that he doubted himself. I recognized the rage when he had stolen me away for what it truly was—fear. Fear that his power was slipping. Fear that there was something wrong with him, that he wasn’t worthy of his crown, and that others could see it now too.

Because I had painted it in his eyes, as plain as day.

“I don’t think it’s fair at all,” I said, anger pitching my voice low.

“Only because you are a human, the strangest of all creatures.” He spoke in little more than a whisper. “What if I told you I could send you back to Whimsy? There is power in a fair one’s death, enough to show the way.”

“Don’t toy with me.” Tears started in my eyes.

“I’m not,” he whispered. “I’m not.”

Hoped to undo the second, he had said. Not hope.

I didn’t say a word after that, because I didn’t have any that would make sense to him. All I had were human emotions, no doubt as clamoring and riotous to a fair one as a flock of squabbling parrots, and no way to quiet them down. When I finally did speak, it was only to let him know I could walk no farther. At that point he barely clung to consciousness. He went to free himself, and slid from my shoulder like a sack of grain, his tall form crumpling down.

My heart leapt sideways before I saw that he had caught himself on his hands. With a groan, he turned over and sprawled onto his back. One hand was at his wound again, and I resisted the urge to tell him to stop touching it, as if he were a child.

I realized what he was doing when he pulled the hand away and held it over the ground. He waited, and I felt his regard.

“If I don’t leave you tonight?” I asked.

“The chance will have passed. The Hunt will pick up your scent too quickly.”

I swallowed once, twice. Surely I was mad. I glanced at his bloody hand. “We’re still in the summerlands.”

“I am a prince yet,” he said, and looking at that inhuman, sharp-boned face, lying in repose in a tangled nest of curls, those eyes feverish with resolve, I thought, Yes, you are, aren’t you.

I lifted the folds of my skirt and sat down on a rock.

It was all the answer Rook needed.

He plunged his hand into the soil, long fingers grasping down. This was no offering to the earth, but a command to it, and the forest surged around us. Bramble roots as wide around as kitchen tables heaved up from the ground, bristling with thorns longer and more wicked than any sword. When they reached their full height they branched, heaving higher, knotting together, until they gathered us up in a fortress like something out of an old tale, a place where a cursed princess slept imprisoned. I was gladdened by the sight of those vicious thorns more than I could say, and wondered whether the stories would have gone any differently if the princesses had been the ones telling them.

When the last tendrils snarled into formation beneath the moon, shattering it like a broken mirror, Rook sighed and went still.



Waking up that morning was worlds different than the morning previous. The jagged scraps of sky showing through the brambles were so overcast I couldn’t tell whether it was before dawn or after. Dew had settled on me overnight, leaving my clothes sodden and my skin so clammy my fingers and toes had gone numb. I was immediately conscious of how sore I felt, and how disgusting a state I was in. Of my entire body only my shoulder felt warm, but in a moist, disagreeable way that set my skin crawling. I found it covered in moss where Rook’s blood had soaked through my dress, and hastily peeled the growth off in clumps.

Then I rolled over, and found Rook dead beside me.

He lay sprawled a few feet away in exactly the same position I’d last seen him. His hand was still buried in the dirt, and his face was sepulchral. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to grow any paler overnight, but he seemed to have done so.

I went to him, my damp, grimy skirt flapping against my legs as I moved. I stood over his body and for a moment just looked. I’d gambled everything on his survival—more than was wise, I admitted to myself, as a gray bleakness engulfed me, chased by a weak flutter of hope.

Because I was wrong. He had to be alive. His spilled blood had turned to moss overnight, but his body remained whole. If he were dead, I wouldn’t be looking at him now, not intact, not like this.

I dropped to my knees and splayed my hand across his chest. When I felt it rise and fall shallowly beneath the rags of his coat, I breathed out an uneven laugh, shaken by relief. I reached for the coat’s edge to peel it back from his wound. My sleeve caught on his raven pin, and cold metal sprang against my wrist. I pulled away. I’d tripped a catch. The bird had a hidden compartment inside.

I would be lying if I claimed the secret it revealed surprised me. There were precious few explanations for Rook’s behavior, and this was proof of the most likely one: a curl of blond human hair nested inside the compartment, carefully tied together with blue thread.

I remembered how he’d insisted on removing the pin for his portrait. Even then he had fumbled to protect himself, his reputation, from his damningly mortal grief. He wore it still, though the pin’s tarnish and antique craftsmanship gave it away as two or three hundred years old.