At that, my old habit, carefully honed, reasserted itself, and I gripped the coin in my pocket. The strange desire that had filled me receded, and I knew that, of course, if I went back, the white tree would seize me, and Wendell would have to come to my aid.

I withdrew my hand from my pocket. But I saw no evidence of the chill that had gripped me when my fingers brushed the leaf. Only—my third finger trembled. I put the hand away again before Bambleby noticed.

“What does the king want with you?” I said, not needing an answer but merely voicing my thoughts as they thumbed through the well-worn stories. “Of course—to possess you. He has no substance left that is not tree.”

“No doubt.” He was shivering so with the cold that I was a little sorry for him. “I felt him reaching for me the moment I stood above his roots. He is very ancient. His people locked him up in that tree because—well, I don’t know. He believes it horribly unjust, naturally. He has been sitting in there fantasizing about revenge and murder and all the rest of it for centuries.”

I wondered that he could be so dismissive, when he was exiled royalty himself, but his lack of sympathy seemed quite genuine.

“Fascinating.” I watched the roots writhe, already piecing together the entry in my encyclopaedia. Note to self: I must needs enquire after this manner of faerie gaoling; is it a feature in other tales of the Hidden Ones? “No doubt the Folk of Ljosland stay far away from him.”

Bambleby was gazing at the tree with an unreadable look. “He is very powerful. He would let me use that power, after whatever bloody rampage he has been plotting.”

“You are not thinking of going back?” I said, terror gripping me. “You are bewitched.” Oh, God—how would I stop him if he was?

“No,” he said, and it seemed to answer more than my question. He turned away, a strange sort of melancholy in his eyes. “No. Let’s go home.”

—

Bambleby was nearly silent on the long, tedious journey back, which was most unlike him. I wondered if he was self-conscious after revealing himself to me, but of course that wasn’t it. I don’t think Bambleby would be self-conscious if he were stripped naked and paraded through the streets of London.

As soon as we got through the door of the cottage, he collapsed into one of the armchairs, nearly insensible. I got his boots off him and discovered that his feet were so white as to be shading into blue. His face, too, was white, and he could not move his fingers. His eyes were very dark, barely any green in them at all now—an interesting phenomenon that I had a mind to examine further, but I managed to quell the scholarly impulse. Only when I had built the fire to roaring and helped him into three blankets did he become himself again, and begin moaning about tea and dinner and chocolate. I would not have obliged his veiled demands, only I was genuinely worried about him, and so I put together an adequate dinner for both of us from the leftover stew Aud had donated in the morning and Poe’s latest confection. I even, against my better judgment, gave him the last of the sheep cheese that I had been saving for my own supper—I’ve grown rather fond of it.

“Your blood is too thin,” I said—gloatingly, I’m afraid, for it is not every day that one proves oneself stronger than a faerie prince. “I suppose the Irish Folk are only adapted to dreary rainstorms and the occasional frost. And more rainstorms, of course. Do they have other weather in Ireland?”

He glowered at me from behind his mug—I had made him the chocolate after all. “We cannot all be made of stone and pencil shavings,” he replied.

After supper, he fell asleep in the chair, and I helped him to his bed. To my great amusement, one of his conquests showed up shortly thereafter, apparently for a prearranged rendez-vous, a pretty, dark-haired thing, yet another of Thora’s granddaughters. I was sorely tempted to show her the state of her paramour after a hike of only a few hours, and not a particularly difficult one, for Ljoslanders appear to prize hardiness above all things, amusing myself imagining the dent it would put in Bambleby’s appeal.

Skip Notes

* There are, in fact, several stories from France and the British Isles which describe this sort of enchantment. In two of the Irish tales, which may have the same root story, a mortal maiden figures out that her suitor is an exile of the courtly fae after he inadvertently touches her crucifix and burns himself (the Folk in Irish stories are often burning themselves on crucifixes, for some reason). She announces it aloud, which breaks the enchantment and allows him henceforth to reveal his faerie nature to whomever he chooses.

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16th November

I expected Wendell to sleep late today, and he did not surprise me; by the time he stirred himself I had already breakfasted and returned from my visit with Poe, whose tree home required shovelling again. It snowed again in the night, a true snow this time. I myself had awoken to the sound of a very strange knock at the door, heavy and rhythmic, and I had a moment of terror, my mind going to tales of ancient winter kings come to demand unfavourable bargains, only to discover that it was Finn, kindly shovelling our steps. The snow was waist-deep in places, with drifts rolling higher like waves, deep enough to drown in and painfully bright beneath the cloudless sky.

After breakfast, Aud arrived on snowshoes with a lump of beeswax and a basket of candles. From the latter rose a powerful smell, a mixture of lemons and rot.

“For the windows,” she said. “Light them each night. It will keep the tall ones from your door.”

“I see,” I said, and proceeded to extract from her the recipe for our paper. The candles were made from fish oil, lemon juice, fermented seaweed, rose petals harvested on the full moon, and the crushed bones of ravens (quantities to be provided in the appendix). It sounded rather fanciful to me—there are human workings, metal for instance, that the Folk near universally disdain, but they rarely take the form of poetic recipes (not that this has prevented many charlatans from making a tidy profit from same). But Aud assured me that the tall ones’ music would not pass into the cottage with the candles burning.

I showed the candles to Wendell, when he finally bestirred himself, and he turned his nose up at them. “Snake oil,” he said.

I nodded, relieved that he agreed with my assumption. The smell of them unlit made my stomach turn over; the fumes they would release whilst burning didn’t bear imagining.

He suggested that I set the candles in the window nevertheless, to keep us in Aud’s good graces. The beeswax, though, struck me as a handy precaution, given the auditory nature of the Hidden Ones’ enchantment.

“Will you come with me to interview Auður’s family?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I will offer myself up to Aud today, I think.”

I looked at him askance. Aud was organizing a snow-plowing, a scene in which I could not visualize Bambleby.

He frowned at me over his breakfast. “What? How hard can it be?”

I didn’t bother to reply that I doubted it would be very hard, but still more than his soft hands would care for. Indeed, when I next saw him, he was standing in a small knot with Krystjan, Aud, and several other village dignitaries, drinking mulled wine and having a natter while they kept an eye on Finn and the other youth engaged in the grunt work of clearing the road and landings.