“Yes, we certainly do.” I kept my voice steady with an effort. “May I ask, did you also have the pleasure of visiting the spring court before you drank from the well?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “How splendid that would have been. I only came here afterward, once I’d transformed.”
How many fair folk had Aster met before she made her decision? How much had she understood about the consequences of her choice? I couldn’t continue my line of questioning without risking suspicion. But it seemed to me that she might not have known what was in store for her, not truly, the same as everyone back in Whimsy.
“I see,” I replied. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Aster.”
“I’m so glad we had the chance to talk. I do hope you follow in my footsteps. It would be lovely to have you here in the spring court, just lovely.” Her fingers gripped and loosened. “Perhaps we might speak a second time before you return to Whimsy, so you can remind me of that word again. Oh, it’s amusing how forgetful I am.”
My smile felt carved onto my face as she took her leave. Rook shifted beside me, but I dared not look at him. I was chilled to the marrow of my bones. The wintry calls of the Wild Hunt’s hounds rose again in my ears, and I saw Hemlock’s white, wild-eyed face receding into the darkness. I recalled the hunger tearing forth from behind the polite, cold smile of every fair one I had ever painted. How was it that we had ever come to admire the fair folk—even hope to become them?
“Gadfly,” Rook said cheerfully, “I believe Isobel has had enough for the day. You know how mortals are, hardly able to stand up for an hour or two before they collapse from exhaustion. If we’re to have any hope of seeing her Craft tomorrow, she will require her remaining energy for—well, whatever it is she needs to do this evening.” I heard, rather than saw, his charming half-smile.
“Good gracious. We mustn’t interfere with her Craft!” Gadfly raised his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen of the court, you will simply have to wait. We will convene again at supper.”
Unhappy exclamations engulfed me. Murmured conversation followed. Numbly, I took Rook’s offered arm and allowed him to lead me away from the bottom of the stairs. Lark gamboled after us, waving at her friends, who watched us go with resentful scowls, which to all appearances Lark enjoyed immensely.
“Now we have you all to ourselves,” she said, coming around to take my other arm. Rook grimaced, struggling to contain his frustration. He couldn’t speak freely in Lark’s presence—but her company was a blessing for the same reason. We couldn’t be seen alone together too often without drawing suspicion.
I nodded at him, hoping it would tell him everything he wanted to know. I was all right. I was grateful for his intervention. But it didn’t make him look any happier.
Lark swung our arms back and forth. “You’re awfully quiet, Isobel! You really must be exhausted. What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Being exhausted, of course.”
Even after spending years in their company, fair folk still had the capacity to surprise me. “It makes you want to sit down, I suppose, or go to sleep. Anything that doesn’t require you to move or think.”
“So it’s like having too much wine,” Lark said knowingly.
I raised my eyebrows, thinking that if Gadfly were human, someone would need to have a talk with him. “Yes, but without the good parts. And, um, most of the bad parts, really,” I added, recalling my first, and last, experience with Emma’s holiday brandy.
Lark shrieked straight into my ear. “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” she said once she’d recovered. “What are we going to do now? Please don’t take a nap, it would be ever so dull.”
“No, I’d like to get started gathering materials for pigments. Do you think the two of you could help?” I shot Rook a sideways glance. “Or is that chore beneath a prince?”
Finally, he smiled—a real smile this time, dimple and all. “Ordinarily I’d say so, but I find I can’t pass up the chance to get stains all over Gadfly’s wretched clothes. It may not matter to Lark but it certainly does to him. So tell us what to find, and we are at your service.”
They took me some distance from what I had begun to think of as the spring court’s throne room, to a place that looked more like normal forest, and sat me down on a stump. There I described to them what I needed. Blueberries, blackberries, elderberries, mulberries—any berries they could find. Wild onions and apple bark for yellow; walnut shells for brown. For black, I could use soot.
“But what are the eggs for?” Rook asked indignantly, looming above me at his full height.
“I need something to bind the pigments into paints. Typically one uses linseed or spike lavender oil, but egg yolk is a readier alternative.” Seeing his expression, I added, “Just don’t collect raven eggs, for heaven’s sake. Oh, and get fresh ones—I can’t have chicks popping out of them.”
“I’ll eat those for you,” Lark assured me, the very image of a proper young lady.
“You’d get along with my . . . never mind.” God, how could I sit here enjoying myself while my family waited at home, thinking me dead or worse? Rook glanced at me, but fortunately Lark didn’t notice anything amiss.
“Let’s see who can get them first!” she cried, and vanished. A bush’s leaves trembled nearby as though something had whipped past them at a high speed.
“Isobel,” Rook said softly. “When you spoke to Aster—”
Lark’s voice interrupted from far away. “Hurry up!”
He hesitated, torn. I glanced around to make sure we were alone, then took his hand. Right away he looked down at our intertwined fingers as though they contained the secrets of the universe.
“Go on,” I said. “I’m the one who came up with this plan, remember? Right now I could really use your help.”
Conflict played over his features. But Lark called for him again, and he didn’t linger.
That evening the fair folk gathered to watch the preparations for my Craft. We’d set up in the same clearing so we didn’t have to go back and forth, and it wasn’t long before the court arrived, more ethereal lords and ladies appearing unnervingly from thin air whenever I turned my back. Fascinated, they watched me grind up the berries, shells, and bark on a flat stone, then scrape them into a collection of porcelain bowls and teacups Lark had brought from the labyrinth. I cracked the tiny songbird eggs, strained the whites out with my fingers, and mixed the yolk and pigments using a twig. A campfire’s sticks popped and shifted nearby, producing the charred wood I’d need for soot.
Pigments were expensive. Before gaining the fair folk’s patronage I’d only used charcoal along with whatever colors I could make myself, and as I worked, my childhood experiments came back to me. Blackberries made the deepest, richest red. Elderberries dried with an ocher tint. Mixed with walnut shell, mulberries created a pleasant medium brown with wine-purple undertones. And blueberries often went on pink, only to darken to a deep indigo over the course of a day. Perhaps ironically, green was the most difficult of all colors to achieve from nature—I would need to experiment with the yellows cooked from onion skin and apple bark, and see what they looked like mixed with my blues.
So absorbed was I that for a time I forgot my audience, focusing on the rapture of color alone. The sun slanted lower and lower, casting a golden edge on all my makeshift tools and feathering my hair with light.
Finally I finished crushing the charred wood from the fire. “I think I’m done,” I said, meaning to address Rook and Lark, but found I spoke instead to an entire crowd of fair folk clustered around me.
“Marvelous,” Gadfly declared, as though I were a court alchemist transmuting lead into gold, while I sat looking up at him with egg slime all over my fingers. He offered me a square of peeled birch bark, and I wiped my hands off on the ground before I took it.
“Thank you,” I said. “This looks like it will do nicely. Would it be all right if I requested a favor?”
Gadfly inclined his head. “I did tell you you would want for nothing.”