“How very mortal you are,” he said disdainfully, and seized the hare from my hand.
“Oh, and take the insides out first, please,” I added, undeterred.
He halted just as he was about to disappear, shoulders stiff. “Will that be all?”
A devilish part of me wondered how far I could push him. If I pretended it was necessary for my Craft, could I command him to stand on his head or turn in a circle three times while he prepared the hare? Only my empty stomach’s increasingly urgent demands prevented me from having some fun at his expense. “For now,” I replied.
Less than twenty minutes later we sat in front of a badly smoking fire, which had seemed hopeless until Rook tired of watching me rub two twigs together and set the kindling ablaze with a flick of his long fingers. He cast impatient glances at the sun while I turned a haunch (at least I think that’s what it was—fair folk weren’t scrupulous butchers, as it turned out) over the flames. Grease dripped from the meat, hissing when it struck the smoldering wood. My mouth watered, and I tried not to dwell on the likelihood that under better circumstances, I would find the odor rank rather than appetizing. I’d never known rabbit to smell quite like this. But as long as I kept charring it by accident, at least it probably wouldn’t make me sick.
Waiting for me to finish, Rook gave his seventh dramatic sigh. I’d started counting.
“You give it a try, if you’re so bored,” I said, handing over the skewer. He took it between his thumb and forefinger. After examining the meat, turning it to and fro, he flippantly lowered it toward the fire.
Instantly, a change came over him. At first I thought he had spied something awful in the forest behind me, and I jerked around with my skin crawling. There was nothing there. Yet he still wore the same expression: his eyes wide and stricken, his features utterly still, as if he’d just received news of someone’s death, or was dying himself. It was terrible in a way I cannot describe. I’ve painted a thousand faces and never seen such a look.
What was happening? I scrabbled for an answer until I realized—Craft. We could transmute substances as easily as we breathed, but for fair folk, such creation did not exist. It was so contrary to their nature it had the power to destroy them. Astonishingly, even something as simple as roasting a hare over an open flame seemed to count as Craft according to whatever force governed his kind.
No more than a second or two had elapsed before Rook’s glamour began flaking away like old paint, revealing his true form, but not the way I remembered it. His skin was desiccated and gray, his eyes fading to lifelessness. It was as though I watched lights go out within him one by one, dimming with every heartbeat.
And I knew that if I did nothing, in another moment he’d be gone.
I would be free. I could escape—or at least try. But I thought of the forest cathedral, the scarlet leaves sifting down in silence. The look on his face when he’d transformed into a raven in my parlor. The smell of change on the wild wind, and the way he had let me turn his head, his eyes on mine full of sorrow. All those wonders crumbling to dust, without a trace of them left in the world.
So I lunged across the fire and tore the stick from his hands.
Seven
HE CRIED out when the stick left his grasp, a sharp, haunting sound of anguish—pain, but also loss. Color flooded back into him, his glamour following behind, though he still slumped to the side and had to catch himself with a hand against the ground before he fell.
“Isobel,” he croaked uncertainly, looking up at me.
My voice came from far away, swept downstream by the blood rushing in my ears. “It was Craft. Cooking. When I offered it to you, I didn’t know. I had no idea.”
His attention fell to the stick I held, a piece of wood with a lump of rabbit flesh smoldering on the end. I shared his disbelief. Almost impossible, that something so ordinary could harm him.
“We should—we should go.” He was so out of sorts he nearly sounded human. He staggered to his feet and turned first one way and then another, unable to get his bearings. “We haven’t covered nearly enough . . . have you eaten? Are you still hungry?”
“I can eat as we walk,” I said quietly, stunned to see him reduced to this. From Emma’s instruction, I recognized the symptoms of shock.
“You aren’t going to die?” he asked.
I shook my head. Toying with him didn’t seem nearly as amusing now.
“Good.” His hand went to his sword, perhaps seeking out its reassuring solidity. He next patted his pockets with a disquieted air until he found the raven pin on his breast and squeezed it. “In that case—”
He cut himself off and whipped around, every muscle in his body tensed. At first I thought he’d gone mad. Then I heard it too: a high, unearthly sound in the distance. Howling.
“I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Wild Hunt caught up with us,” I said reasonably, suddenly feeling strongly that someone ought to behave in a reasonable and reassuring way, even if that person, unfortunately, had to be me. “It sounds like we have a good head start, at least.”
“No, it was not only a matter of time. We are deep in my domain, my realm. Hemlock should not have been able to track us this far so easily.”
“Perhaps the difference is that I’m with you now. As you might have noticed, I do have a bit of a, um. Smell.”
He barely spared me a glance, passing up the ripe opportunity to criticize my mortality. The longer he remained rattled, the more apprehensive I became. He didn’t see the Wild Hunt as a serious threat. So was it just his recent near-death experience making him act like this, or something more—something I didn’t know about?
Coming back to himself, he released his raven pin as though it had scalded him. “We need to be out of the autumnlands before dusk.” And with that, he fixed on a direction and set off.
I snatched up as much of the cooked meat as I could carry, sloshing after him through the ankle-deep leaves. “Wait, out of the autumnlands? What do you mean? I thought we were traveling to the autumn court.”
“We are. Just not the same way we were before.”
“May I ask where we’re going, then?”
“To the place where Hemlock’s power wanes, farthest from the winter court. It will be harder, perhaps impossible for her to track us in the summerlands.”
The landscape changed gradually. The sun sank behind the hills, casting long, straight shadows behind the trees and saturating everything in russet light. Thicker-trunked oaks, elms, and alders crowded out the slender birches and ashes. A melancholy air hung over this part of the forest: the leaves were brown or a dull rust red, and fungus mottled the roots and marched up the trunks, yellow and fleshy in character. Out of curiosity I placed my hand on the bark next to one of these mushroom colonies, only for the bark to peel away in my hand. The exposed wood beneath was pale and spongy, and wood lice scampered away into its crevices.
I dropped the bark, which burst rotten on the ground, and hurried to catch up with Rook several paces ahead.
“We should be reaching the summerlands soon, shouldn’t we?” I asked, just for conversation’s sake. The quiet here bore down like a physical weight. I couldn’t help but feel as though something might be listening, an impression that intensified the longer we remained silent.
“We are in the summerlands. We have been for some time.”
“But the trees—”
“Are not of autumn,” Rook replied. “No, these trees are dying.” Tension narrowed his eyes and set his jaw. “I have heard . . . whispers, that in some places, the summerlands have gone—amiss. I’ve never had occasion to see the blight with my own eyes. I confess it’s worse than I expected.”
“Surely the forest can be healed. I watched you raise an entire glade with a few drops of your blood.”
“Here, only one person holds such power.” His gaze flicked to me, the warning in their amethyst depths clear as a length of exposed steel. “And he uses his lifeblood as he sees fit.”
The trees grew larger and farther apart. The knotted roots bulging across our path reminded me of diseased veins. Immense stones thrust up from the ground at intervals, standing higher than I was tall, draped in thick mantles of moss and bloodred ivy. The late sunlight produced one last burst of gold that sparkled through the failing leaves, and in this light I saw a face staring out at me from the next stone we passed.