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November 9 - November 15, 2024
I am nothing if not persevering.
I suppose most children fall in love with faeries at some point, but my fascination was never about magic or the granting of wishes. The Folk were of another world, with its own rules and customs—and to a child who always felt ill-suited to her own world, the lure was irresistible.
Bambleby murmured assent. I realized that he was smiling at me sleepily. Lizzie would have been beside herself with blushes at that smile, but I was too used to him. I simply gazed levelly back, waiting for him to explain this latest outrageousness. “I missed you, Em,” he said. “It was strange not having you across the hall, scowling at me.” “I wonder at your ability to detect my scowls through the wall. Are your senses heightened in other ways?” I was needling him. I do this sometimes. I believe Bambleby knows my suspicions about him.
He has an irritating way of understanding me, at least in part, which is more than anyone else does—no doubt some faerie gift of his.
As for Bambleby, I had no idea. Perhaps he had drowned in the spring.
I thought quickly, hiding it behind a frown. It had become clear to me, in a way that it never had before, that it would be wise for me to be frightened of Bambleby. And if I could not muster fear—a dubious proposition, to be sure—I should at least attempt wariness, if for no reason other than that he is Folk. My suspicion is suspicion no more, but fact.
That took the wind out of me. Being labelled contrary by Wendell Bambleby would stop any sensible person in her tracks.
“Why are you still bleeding?” I demanded, absurdly offended. He let out a breath of laughter. He was resting his head upon his uninjured arm. “Em. You nearly severed my hand.” I shook him. “Tell me what to do!” “I have no idea.” His voice was faint. “I have never been injured before. I don’t much care for it.”
If you do not admit kindness from others, you cannot be surprised when they fail to offer any.”
I could see him only in parts, through the forest: a smear of gold; a hand on one of the trees; the edge of his black cloak. “Emily,” he said, “come away from there.”
A dreaminess fell over me, and I almost took a step. But then my hand clenched reflexively on the copper coin I carried in my pocket—it’s something I’ve practiced many times whenever a faerie has tried to bewitch me. He had never done that to me before. It was him doing it, not the tree—I could hear it in his voice. I was suddenly filled with a fury of such force my vision swam, and which drove away the last vestiges of his enchantment.
“Yes, you can stop pontificating at me for half a second so that I can concentrate,” he yelled over the lashing roots. “I haven’t done this in a very long time. I don’t even know if I remember how. And if you would please encourage your fanged familiar to stop mauling my cloak!”
What actually happened was both underwhelming and utterly terrifying: he folded himself into the earth and was gone.
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.
There was something darkly amusing about a faerie lord—one of those same creatures who delight in leading hapless mortals astray in dark wildernesses—being unable to find his way home.
“Intellectual curiosity. I am an explorer, Wendell. I might call myself a scientist, but that is the heart of it. I wish to know the unknowable. To see what no mortal has seen, to—how does Lebel put it? To peel back the carpeting of the world and tumble into the stars.”
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.
The third question is always the most important one.
Shadow, loping at my side, left no tracks. He never does.
I tried very hard not to be awed by this flamboyant display of Wendell’s. It was the first time I’d seen him be free with his magic, and it left me feeling unsteady and on edge; I realized that I was used to ignoring that part of him, or at least looking past it.
He stepped out from behind a tree—or perhaps from the tree; I didn’t see. He reached a hand out and snapped the neck of the faerie gripping me, which I had not expected, and I staggered back from both him and the crumpling body. He saw the mark on my neck, and his entire face darkened with something that seemed to go beyond fury and made him look like some feral creature. The faeries scattered like leaves, though they were too intrigued and too stupid to run. “Are you hurt?”
“There you are!” he said, looking up at me in relief when I entered. His voice was ordinary, as if the appalling, violent frenzy of an hour before had been little more than a sneezing fit, something that would have surely terrified me to my bones had I not already been accustomed to his mercurial moods and anticipated it. That is not to say that it wasn’t terrifying at all.
I say half, because I was mostly just watching you, observing the way your mind clicks and whirrs like some fantastical clock. Truly, I have never met anyone with a better understanding of our nature, and that anyone includes the Folk. I suppose that’s partly why— Ah, but you really would kill me if I desecrated your scientific vessel with the end of that sentence.
In fact, I liked it so much that I wound back time and did it again, just to hear the lovely thunk of his head hitting the snow. I had just decided to have a third go at it—for we Folk like things that come in threes, you know—when you roared at me to stop.
I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t dislodge you when you slumped against me in sleep, your head coming to rest on my shoulder. No, silly me; of course you’ll mind, but perhaps I don’t care.
He was a story; he had proven that when he had taken the impossible ice sword and driven back our enemy with the ease of breathing, his blade flashing too quickly for me to follow it. I’d had no idea he was capable of something like that—magic, yes. Displays of physical skill, the sort of skill that requires training and effort? No. Since that night, I feel as if the ground has altered slightly beneath the two of us, as if I cannot see him from precisely the same angle I used to.
“One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”
“Why would I do that? I prefer your company, Em.” He said it as if it were obvious. I snorted again, assuming he was teasing me. “Over the company of a tavern filled with a rapt and grateful audience? I’m sure you do.” “Over anyone else’s company.” Again, he said it with some amusement, as if wondering what I was doing speculating about something so evident. “You are drunk,” I said. “Shall I prove it to you?” “No, you shan’t,” I said, alarmed, but he was already sweeping to the floor, bending his knee and taking my hand between his. “What in God’s name are you doing?” I said between my teeth.
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“I will never again believe you to be incapable of hard work.”
He is more magic than person, that is the truth of it. Is this what happens to all the Folk as they age, their power hollowing them out like the fissures in an ancient glacier?
