Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2)

by Heather Fawcett

“You look as if you’ve come from a wrestling match with one of your books. May I ask who won?”

“Where would I be without you, Em?” he said. “Probably still flailing about in Germany, looking for your door,” I said. “Meanwhile, I would be sleeping more soundly without a marriage proposal from a faerie king dangling over my head.”

marriage has always struck me as a pointless business, at best a distraction from my work and at worst a very large distraction from my work coupled with a lifetime of tedious social obligations.

“Lost is a kingdom with many paths, but they all end at the same place.

I considered this dubiously. Not only because every time I learn something new about Wendell’s cat, it makes me less inclined to make her acquaintance, but because, in my experience, cats in general exist in a state of perpetual resentment and dissatisfaction.

‘You are too shy, little one,’ she always said. ‘You must try your best to make friends, for those who are small cannot easily stand alone.’ ”

“I’m sorry,” I said, self-conscious now. “Perhaps I shouldn’t talk.” “Whyever not?” He drew back, examining me with a perplexed smile. “I like the way you talk. And everything else about you, in fact. Is that not clear by now?”

“Other women snore, or talk in their sleep. I don’t recall ever being woken by the sound of vigorous pencil scratching.” “You could always ask one of those other women to marry you,” I said. “Though it may not be easy to find one who is quite so tolerant of faerie assassins and strange quests as I am.”

“You are so frightened of the Folk, of new methods of scholarship, of anything that interrupts your safe, comfortable routine at Cambridge, that you have rendered yourself irrelevant.”

in order to be surprised, I could not have known already that you are capable of anything.

“Never be afraid to tell me.”

“I will be with you,” I said quietly. “I’m not going anywhere.”