I glared at him. “You are calling me self-centred? You?”
He shrugged, unruffled by a slight against something he put little stock in, namely, his character. “In any event, these are practical people, and they care more about what you did than the why of it all. You should have seen Thora’s face when I told them you’d been taken. And Lilja and Margret were ready to declare war for you. Not to mention Aud—she loves that boy you rescued like her own child. And as for Ulfar, he swore on his mother’s grave they’d get you back—he only let out about a half dozen words in total before retreating into that gloomy mug of his, but still that is more than I’ve gotten from him in weeks.”
I felt an unexpected tightness behind my eyes, picturing the tableau he painted for me. I had been imagining myself all alone in this ice palace, with only my wits between me and eternal enchantment, while they all sat in the tavern as Ulfar’s stew bubbled in the back and the wind whistled through the crack in the windowsill that Aud never got round to patching, debating how best to rescue me. As when I had sobbed over Wendell’s injury, my reaction alarmed me. I can’t recall the last time I cried before coming to Hrafnsvik—likely I had been a small child. I won’t be maudlin, yet I couldn’t help but feel that something inside me had loosened—something small but troublesome, like a pebble caught in a shoe.
“And—and what did you decide?” I said.
“Aud and the others will pay the king a visit on the morrow, during the gift-giving. Mortals have been invited, so the king will lift the veil on his realm temporarily. They will present him and his bride-to-be with a wedding gift containing a poison that will render him senseless. Things will get rather messy after that, but not to worry—we will use the chaos as cover as we flee.”
I sat heavily on the bed, next to my enchanted servant, who dreamed so soundly that she appeared to be drooling. “And this winter will end. Is it bad out there, in Hrafnsvik?”
“Utterly dreadful.” He rolled the faerie out of the way and sat beside me. “It snows all day and night, which is very tedious. My own clothes no longer suffice, so I’ve had to borrow a sealskin cloak of Ulfar’s. I suppose it’s warm enough, and I’ve tailored it adequately, but I cannot get the smell of fish stew out. And then, of course, there are the boots.”
I have no doubt he would have gone on at length about the degradations of his wardrobe had I not interrupted, “But this poison will not kill the king?”
“Hmm? No.” He gave me a smile ill-suited to a discussion of regicide. “Sneaking poison in amongst the gifts was Aud’s idea. We make quite a good team. I tracked down the old queen, who was hiding out in the mountains with her firstborn son. Her allies at court faked her death.”
“You tracked her down?” I repeated faintly.
“Yes. Well, I’ve been looking ever since the king enchanted you during our delightful expedition to his tree-prison.”
“You knew!” I exclaimed.
“Of course I knew. Give me a little credit. Anyway, I thought that the queen might know how to break her former husband’s hold on you, so I went searching for a door to her court. I found one, a narrow, ancient door high on a forgotten peak, which would not open for me, but coincidentally it was the same door she eventually fled through after you freed the king. I guessed she might make use of it then, and indeed, I found her hiding quite nearby.”
“You might have told me you knew I was enchanted,” I snapped. “You might have said something that very night, in fact, when we returned from the tree. Or at any other time—we only spent every day together.”
“What would have been the point? You would only have denied it—the enchantment would have forced you to. I dropped plenty of hints in that blasted journal of yours.”
I thought back to how the enchantment had thwarted me every time I opened my mouth to reveal it, how often I had forgotten that I was enchanted at all. I had to admit he was probably right—well, no, I didn’t have to admit it.
I tightened my hand into a fist. It was swathed in a white glove, cunningly tailored with elaborate folds and bunches to mask the absence of the third finger. It gave its ghost-ache, which was familiar to me by now.
“And what is to be the queen’s role in this?” I said.
“The king will not be worried about her, given that he thinks she was torn apart by wolves, and so she will sneak into the gift-giving ceremony in disguise. Once he has been distracted by the poison, she will kill him, aided and abetted by her allies among the nobility, of whom there are quite a few, though they’ve been temporarily cowed into subservience to their king.”
My mouth was dry. “How?”
He shrugged. “I’ve left that up to their fertile imaginations.”
I lowered my head onto my hands. My mind had stopped whirling since Wendell’s arrival—I wondered if he was doing something to counteract the king’s enchantments—but I still felt too light, as if I might at any moment fade away. “Well, you will never fool me again.”
“What?”
“I will never again believe you to be incapable of hard work.”
He shuddered. “Being capable is not the same as being inclined, Em.”
“Could you free me without killing him?” I said. “Could you imprison him again?”
“No,” he said, after a puzzled pause.
“You can turn back time,” I said, frustrated.
He shook his head. “Your belief in me is flattering. But at my age, most Folk have only begun to grasp the extent of their powers. This king is older than the mountains. And worse, we are in his realm, not mine. What does it matter? Surely you don’t pity him. He will starve everyone in Hrafnsvik, you know, burying them and their fields beneath yards of snow even at the height of summer, if left to his own devices.”
I shook my head slowly. “The old queen and her court will go back to abducting mortals. Aud and the others will once again hear their music calling to them on a winter’s night.”
“I daresay they’re used to that.”
I quickly abandoned this line of argument—it was silly of me to expect him to care about the wickedness of the Folk when his own people are guilty of worse than the Hidden Ones, if the stories are to be believed. I tugged at a loose strand of hair—the servants had secured it with some contraption of ribbons and pins, but it seemed not even faerie magic could tame it. “Did they really plan this—this rescue?”
He smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t believe it. Just because you have a heart filled with the dust of a thousand library stacks does not mean everybody does. Here.”
He handed me a small book with a leather cover, plain in an expensively crafted sort of way. His journal.
“I don’t bother writing in it often,” he began.
“I could count on one hand how often,” I said. “Were I missing half my fingers.”
He ignored me. “But I made an effort to document things more consistently after you ran off with the king. You are so obsessed with recording everything about our time here; I thought you would appreciate it. I have marked the entries detailing my conversations with the villagers.”
I was tempted to make some remark to answer his library dust comment, but in truth, I was a little humbled by his thoughtfulness.
“Thank you,” I said finally. “I will—I will confine my reading to the indicated entries only.”
He was only partly listening to me, his attention absorbed by the mirror that hung by my bed, in which he was frowning at his reflection and tugging his cloak this way and that.
“I thought you had only a little common fae ancestry,” I said, trying to suppress my amusement—though not very hard, I admit.
He scowled. “It is a little. I have three other grandparents, all highborn, including a king and queen.”
I nodded, pretending to ponder this. Then I said, “There’s a bump in your nose now.”
He glared at me. “There is not.”
“Your mouth is lopsided.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but then he just let out a weary groan. “What is the point? I am hideous. I can’t wait to change myself back again.”
“Don’t. I prefer you like this.”
He looked surprised, then he began to smile. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “You blend into the background. I could almost forget about you entirely. It’s refreshing.”
Naturally, he found a way to twist this into a compliment. “And am I ordinarily a distraction to you, Em?”
He rose to leave, flicking his fingers at the servant, who grumbled and began to stir. “Your attendants will become suspicious if I tarry much longer,” he said. “I will send you a note with your veil to clarify your role in tomorrow’s events. Perhaps it will soothe your conscience to know that it is a small one.”