An Enchantment of Ravens(68)

I expected her to kill me there on the spot. I wasn’t prepared for her to seize my dislocated arm and wrench it back into its socket with a brutal twist. I was so taken by surprise I didn’t even cry out. The pain in my shoulder faded to a dull throb.

“There you are. I simply cannot stand the sound of humans whimpering. Come along, everyone! Stop moaning. Get up.”

At Hemlock’s call, the trees surrounding the clearing thrashed, snapped, and rustled. A thane stepped forth, bowing its head to free its antlers from the branches. Its glamour streamed from it in ragged pennants. One moment it was a handsome stag of majestic proportions; another it was a monstrous forest growth skittering with insects, its eyes dark knotholes weeping rivulets of decay. When it turned and looked at me I felt something else, ancient and implacable, gazing through it.

“This mortal has just earned us an audience with the Alder King,” Hemlock finished. And she whirled me around before I’d processed the words, marching me back the way we had come. The fair folk picked up and followed us, clutching their disheveled clothes, gazing around wide-eyed. They left Aster behind as though they’d forgotten she even existed.

At first I had not a clue where Hemlock meant to take us, until I spied the riven stone in the distance. Rook lurched upright nearby. He’d thrown off two of his detainers and made it halfway to us by the time they managed to get him down again. One received an elbow to the chest for his trouble. Rook thrashed beneath them, spitting out dirt. “Do not take us this way,” he said to Hemlock. “You know mortals aren’t meant to walk the fairy paths.”

She aimed a dangerous smile down at him. “Do you propose we keep the king waiting?”

“The Huntsman always strove for a clean kill. A fair death.”

The smile froze in place. “She used to,” she replied, so low I barely heard it. Then without another word she dragged me forward. The others heaved Rook, resisting, to his feet.

“Isobel,” he panted.

I couldn’t turn far enough in Hemlock’s grasp to look at him. “What’s going to happen?”

“I cannot say. Some mortals fall ill, and others go mad. Do not dwell on the things you see. Keep your eyes closed if you can.”

Most of the other fair folk reached the riven stone before we did. They slipped into the space between the cracked boulder and simply didn’t emerge on the other side. I strained for any hint of what was about to befall me, but saw nothing other than a perfectly ordinary stone.

“Do be dears and watch him closely,” Hemlock said to Rook’s detainers over her shoulder. “He is still a prince, with a prince’s power, and I shall be quite cross if he attempts something on the way. Put this on him.” She tossed a crumpled-up handkerchief to Swallowtail, who cried out and almost dropped it.

“This is iron!” And indeed, gleaming coldly within Gadfly’s monogrammed linen was my own ring.

“Oh, cease your whining. You needn’t touch it yourself. Just slip it on, quickly now.”

“But—”

Hemlock’s smile widened. Swallowtail hurriedly seized Rook’s sword hand and crammed the ring onto his little finger, the only one it would fit. Rook braced himself, his chin raised defiantly. At first he didn’t react. He stood glaring at Hemlock, proud despite having his arms twisted behind his back and his glamour melting away, hollowing the planes of his face, making a wild, feral tangle of his hair. I had grown used to his false appearance again, and felt a visceral shock at the sight. Just as I began to hope that he could somehow bear the iron’s touch, a muscle moved in his cheek. He wavered on his feet, listing forward drunkenly. A moan tore from his throat, a deep, raw, almost animal sound.

I couldn’t bear seeing him in such agony. I jerked toward him, but Hemlock used my own momentum to swing me around and shove me bodily through the riven stone.

I did not have time to close my eyes.

The first thing I saw, staring upward, was stars. There were too many of them. Pinwheels of light, burning cold and vast, spiraled in a black void without end. The longer I stared, the more I felt I’d never truly been aware of the night sky before, nor had I possessed an accurate understanding of my own insignificance in the face of its enormity. The void between the stars wasn’t empty as it first appeared, but rather filled with more and more stars, and each gap in those had more and more, too, and then—

“Don’t look.” The words grated painfully beside me, such a wretched sound that at first I didn’t recognize Rook as the speaker. I surfaced as though dragged up from drowning, and groped blindly in the direction of his voice until he took my hand. I lowered my gaze from the terrible, infinite sky. But I could not obey him. I could not look away from what I saw next.

A road stretched before us and behind us. The fair folk cavorted along it in a line, pale forms flickering like sepulchral flames, a procession of ghosts. The forest rose on either side of the path, but it wasn’t the same forest that existed in the world we had been in before. The trees were as big around as houses. Roots rose from the ground at such a height I wouldn’t have been able to climb them if I’d tried. The fair folks’ white luminosity cast flitting shadows across the bark.

While I stumbled forward, years raced around me. Mushrooms erupted from the soil, withered, and tumbled over. More grew in their place. Leaves swarmed onto the branches and fell, new buds already twitching and swelling in their place. Moss raced across the ground like sea-foam, surging and retracting in different shades of green. A fawn picked its way shyly from the undergrowth, only to undergo a strange spasm and then fall dead to the ground, a stag with a gray-furred muzzle and full set of antlers. By the time I passed it, its skeleton was half sunk into the ground, absorbed by layers of decaying leaves that rippled as they consumed it, like devouring maggots.