When I crashed through the doors of the tavern, I found nearly half the village gathered there, with Aud fielding questions in Ljoslander. None of them had any interest in foreign bystanders in a moment of crisis, and my arrival was largely ignored. Cursing my lack of fluency, I managed to find Finn in the crowd, and he pulled me aside to translate the situation.
It was Lilja. But of course it was Lilja, the village beauty who could fell trees and cleave firewood as easily as draw breath. They said she had been travelling back to Hrafnsvik with her beloved, a milliner’s daughter named Margret who lived in the town of Selabær. They had been taken together, the horse they rode wandering back to its yard before dawn, saddle empty and askew. The other horses had been sent into a frothing panic when it had been stabled among them, a telltale sign of a brush with the tall ones. A search party was being organized, grimly. Lilja’s mother, Johanna, who had lost her husband to drowning only a year previous, was being looked after by Thora and her helpers, being near insensible with grief.
Finn then asked me, quietly, if there was anything I could do, given my vast knowledge of the Folk. Unfortunately, Aud chose that moment to conclude her address and join us by the fire, and with the two of them gazing at me with a desperate shadow of hope, I could only promise to think about it.
As I left, Aud entreated me to confer with Bambleby. I could tell from the look she gave me that she was not foolish enough to hope for disinterested aid from one of the Folk, but was willing to offer in exchange whatever was within her power. The loss of two youths, both barely turned twenty, weighed that heavily upon the village.
Indeed, when I returned to the cottage, I found Bambleby dressed and breakfasted (victuals having been delivered by one of Krystjan’s farmhands) but far from raring to join the search. I recounted what I had learned at the tavern, and he listened politely (a result, I suspect, of my earlier mood rather than some newfound benevolence on his part).
“Aud is willing to pay for your assistance,” I said bluntly.
“Oh?” He looked amused. “Am I to take this as an offer of monetary value, or will she deliver to my door a sheep born of a cow whose wool turns to silver in the moonlight, or some such thing?”
“I think she will give you whatever you want, if it is hers to offer and will not endanger herself or others.” I spoke in the careful style in which I am given to negotiate with the Folk, which he seemed to recognize with a kind of weary amusement. He gave a dismissive lift of his eyebrows and turned his gaze back to the fire.
I abandoned caution and spoke to him in my usual manner. “Wendell, be more forthcoming, please. Are you barred somehow from interfering in the sport of your kind?”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “And they are not my kind, Em, particularly; all these silly categorizations devised by mortal minds are about as useful as names given to the wind. If you want the truth, I don’t know if it’s in my power to rescue our young lovers, and I have no desire to risk my neck trying. Why do you wish to risk yours? You don’t care about these people.” Surprise dawned in his face. “Or do you? You feel something for Mord and Aslaug, I think. Can it be my cold-blooded friend has come to value the society of these people?”
I opened my mouth to give him the retort he expected, to say that I was motivated by scholarship, pure and simple, that the opportunity to investigate this bizarre ritual was of a magnitude greater than any I had been presented with before, in terms of the ramifications for our understanding of the Folk. It was entirely true, but for some reason, it made me feel unaccountably lonesome.
I looked out over the yard. I could see the axe where Lilja had left it, impaled in the stump—she had taken to coming by nearly every day to restock our supplies. It was such a bleak sight that I quickly looked away.
Yes, I felt something—I am no monster. But would I go after them for their sakes alone, if there were no scientific discoveries to be had?
No. No, I wouldn’t.
My life has been one long succession of moments in which I have chosen rationality over empathy, to shut away my feelings and strike off on some intellectual quest, and I have never regretted these choices, but rarely have they stared me in the face as bluntly as they did then.
“Why don’t we just pretend?” he said, sparing me from articulating any of this.
I blinked at him. He went on, “We would not have to go anywhere. Let us take a sled a little distance into this godforsaken wilderness, camp out for a night or two, and return with tales of fantastical revelry. Together we could invent a convincing narrative, I’ve no doubt. The villagers will not sorrow much over our failure—surely they’ve already guessed that their daughters are lost. We will accept their gratitude for trying, and then we shall go to ICODEF and be showered with praise for being the first scholars to empirically document an encounter with the courtly fae of Ljosland. I shall get my funding. You will make a name for yourself—your cherished tenure will follow soon thereafter. Do you know who was recently appointed to the hiring committee?” He folded his hands and smiled at me.
I held his gaze. I will not lie and say I was not tempted by his suggestion. It would be an easy scheme to carry out, an exceptionally easy one to get away with. I was too practical not to talk through my concerns before ruling the idea out. “You have already earned a reputation for falsifying research,” I said. “Would such dramatic claims not fall under suspicion?”
“Ah, that’s where you come in, my dear Em. Your reputation is spotless. No one would believe you would participate in a ruse of this magnitude. Of any magnitude. You will launder my reputation most efficiently.”
I believed him. But it did not take me more than a moment to make my decision. Perhaps I did not care—could not care—as much as I should for the fate of two youths. But I was also not someone who would put glory before discovery, empty praise before enlightenment. This was about the encyclopaedia, but it was also about something greater than that—the thing that drove me to create the encyclopaedia in the first place.
“We don’t know for certain that Lilja and Margret are lost,” I said.
He gave a groan and pressed his hands to his face. I waited.
“If you wish it,” he said from between his fingers, “I will help you.”
I examined him carefully, for I am used to dealing in faerie bargains, and could recognize one in his voice. Yet it was a faerie bargain with only one side, a singular thing indeed. I could not comprehend his motivations.
“I wish it,” I said. “Shall I say it three times?”
“I suppose you might as well, you infernal creature.”
I did.
“Wonderful,” he replied sourly. “Well, don’t expect me to help with the packing. I am doing this against my own better judgment. And if the provisions prove inadequate, I am turning the whole mad expedition around.”
Skip Notes
* Of course, I refer here to de Grey’s disappearance whilst investigating the sinister goat-footed mountain faeries of Austria in 1861, and Eichorn’s subsequent vanishing act a year later during one of his many rescue attempts. (Eichorn was convinced de Grey was abducted into Faerie, discounting the commonly accepted narrative of her having taken a fall during a nasty storm.) Decades later, villagers throughout the Berchtesgaden Alps claim to hear Eichorn’s voice calling “Dani! Dani!” during winter tempests, though whether this amounts to evidence that one or both remain trapped in some liminal alpine realm is the subject of much conjecture. See When Folklorists Become Folklore: Ethnographic Accounts of the Eichorn/de Grey Saga by Ernst Graf.
