Two more followed. They swirled around the snowman, pecking and clawing. When they were done, it looked more like a man—a little more. It was still strange, but no longer hideous. Then, to my horror, the birds fell to the ground dead, blood leaking across the snow from wounds I couldn’t see. They stained the snowman’s feet like an offering, which I suppose they were.
The tree murmured, and magic prodded me again. But it did not prod me to move, it prodded my mind. And that was when I realized—the king didn’t know how to free himself. He expected me to come up with a solution.
Well, that set my thoughts whirling. Though in truth, they had already been diving in and out of stories and academic papers, holding them up against what I knew of the Hidden Ones and their disgraced king.
The Word.
The useless, ridiculous, button-gathering Word, which I had long valued as a piece of esoteric trivia, a footnote, perhaps, in a paper I had yet to write. Well, footnotes in dryadology are sometimes like the Folk themselves, leaping out at you from nowhere.
A thrill rushed through me. Looking back, this would have been a very good moment to stop and think through the wisdom of what I was doing, but I was too full of the delight of scholarly discovery (and, I suspect, my own conceit) to stop. I turned to the white tree and spoke the Word.
And what do you know? A button came sailing out from somewhere among the branches. I caught it and examined it against my palm. It was white and desiccated, like old bone, shedding a fine powder against my skin, with an acorn carved into one side. The button began to melt against my palm, and I dropped it into the snow. The tree had given a shudder when the button came free, but now it was still once more.
I spoke the Word again, and out sailed another button. This one had a flower. The next button had a sailboat dreaming among gentle waves.
All told, I spoke the Word nine times, and as the ninth button sailed free, the trunk of the white tree split open like the front of a cloak, the bark billowing—for a moment, it became silk and fine wool churning in the wind that had filled the grove, and then it stilled. The tree gave a sigh and dropped its leaves, buds, and fruits onto the snow with a rustling thud.
I stared into the cavernous hollow that had opened in the tree, my heart going like a rabbit’s, waiting. When I heard a footfall behind me, I screamed.
“There’s no need for that,” a voice said. “I don’t mind, though. It’s been a very long time since anybody was afraid of me.”
The Hidden king was kneeling in the snow, tsking over the dead birds. He seemed at first to resemble the figure of ice and snow I had built with their aid, but with each breath he drew, life came into his body, and he grew more mortal in appearance. It was a little like watching someone rising towards the surface of murky water; one moment his face was little more than indistinct planes of ice, the next he was blinking his pale blue eyes at me and smiling. Of course he was beautiful—is it even necessary to say it? His hair was black with glints of white, his cheekbones sharp above a wide mouth with a natural smile in it. The white in his hair turned out to be small opal beads, and his clothing was a blackened blue with an overlay like ice, beaten thin with a lacy pattern, and he wore a white crown and layers of jeweled necklaces that glittered fetchingly in the dim light. And yet everything he wore was as tasteful as it was beautiful, precisely the amount of adornment one would expect on a king, no more and no less.
“Poor things,” he said. “This world is terribly unkind to beasts, is it not? Here we are.”
He touched them, and the ravens sprang to life—in a manner of speaking. Their movements were jerky, and they were still covered in blood—one had a broken neck, and its head was bent at a disquieting angle. This one landed on the king’s shoulder and pecked his finger when he stroked it, drawing blood. He laughed.
“Hello, my love,” he said, striding over to me. “My darling rescuer, who has given me back my body and my throne, and freed me from my eternal captivity.”
Before I could recover from my amazement, he kissed me. It was like pressing frozen glass to my lips, like breathing in pure winter. I staggered back a step, coughing, and for a long time after I felt as if I had ice in my lungs.
“I,” I began. “I’m not your love. I’m not anyone.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I know who you are. Years ago, when I was a boy, a seer told me I would one day be locked up by my own people, and only a mousy little scholar could get me out again. I would marry the mouse—which forms a very poetic contrast, don’t you think? And together we would rule over my kingdom.” He stretched. “Well! I am glad to be out of there. My first order of business, I think, will be a nice bath and a feast of salted plums with caviar. Do you like salted plums, dearest?”
It wasn’t easy, in that moment, for me to think like a scholar again. To think at all, really. How was it that I suddenly had faerie kings, plural, demanding to marry me? But I forced myself to be rational and to answer in the way I guessed he would like—yes, I loved salted plums, thank you—and to enquire about the seer.
“I don’t know anything more,” the king said. “I never got a good look at her—she was all dressed in rags. She was not from here, but was one of the wandering Folk, who go all over.”
I thought carefully before saying, “It is kind of you to offer to marry me, Your Highness. But I am not your equal, nor even close.”
He gave me an indulgent look, as if I were a child who had correctly counted to ten. “But I must fulfil your every desire, dear one—starting with our marriage. Your modesty does you credit, though—I have a great love for modesty. But what is this?” He touched my wounded hand, swathed in a bandage that was now leaking dark blood upon the snow.
Terror gripped me. There was no way to pretend I was still under his spell now. “I—I wished to release you of my own free will, Your Highness. As a sign of my respect for you.”
He looked puzzled at that, but, fortunately, he seemed to take little interest in prodding my motivations. With a shrug, he unwrapped the bandage—I gave a sharp gasp as the pain rolled up my arm—and then, like a magician pulling flowers from a handkerchief, he revealed my hand, fully healed and spotless. The finger was still missing, and its absence was an ache—but it felt like an old one. I wondered if he, too, had some power to manipulate time.
“I—I desire to remain unmarried,” I stammered. “As I said, Highness, I freed you out of respect, not because I wished for anything in return. I have a betrothed, you see.”
“Oh, well, that’s no concern,” he said, waving one ringed hand. “I’ll see that we adequately replace his dowry. He won’t sorrow, then, for it will free him up to marry someone prettier than you.”
I could see that the idea that I might prefer not to marry him was completely incomprehensible to him. There was some logic in it, I suppose, given what he had been told by the seer; though I know enough of the self-obsession of the Folk to guess that he would have assumed my devotion either way. So I abandoned that approach.
“As you say, I’m not beautiful.” It was a solid objection, for the Folk never marry mortals who aren’t beautiful unless they have been forced into it by trickery (and even then, the mortals are often revealed to be beautiful in the end, having been enchanted to look ugly). He could find nothing appealing in my ordinariness, especially now, with my plain shift stained with blood and sweat and my hair in exceptional disarray, even for me, most of it hanging loose down my back.
“That’s true enough,” he said, looking me up and down with a pained expression. He looked down at himself after, as if he needed to soothe his eyes with his own beauty. “But let’s see what we can do.”
