A sob caught in my throat. Rook climbed back to his feet, his clothes torn and his chest heaving. I never could have imagined him so humiliated.
“Do what you will with me,” he said, “but don’t make her watch. Let her go.”
Gadfly sighed. With a fatherly hand, he brushed twigs and leaves from Rook’s hair. Rook didn’t react. His head was lowered, hiding his face. I ached with the knowledge that if anything like trust existed between fair folk, he had felt it toward Gadfly.
“It takes two to violate this particular tenet of the Good Law, I’m afraid,” Gadfly said.
“She is ensorcelled.”
“Ah, but her will remains her own. It seems you love her so much that you’ve resisted enthralling her.” This time, no one jeered. The whispers sounded unsettled, confused. “And in any case, as both you and I know, the breach of the Good Law occurred beforehand.”
“Do hurry up, Gadfly.” Hemlock’s smile looked pasted on. “I hate to keep the king waiting.”
“Then kill me!” Rook snarled, twisting around to face Gadfly. “We can hardly break the Good Law if one of us is dead. What is a mortal’s life to the Alder King? She will have returned home, married, borne children, perished, and turned to dust before he takes his next breath. She is noth—” He drew up short with a painful gasp, caught in a lie. “She is nothing to him,” he said instead, anguish wracking his words. “Kill me and be done with it!”
“Rook, stop!” I shouted. I might as well have been a bird twittering for all the attention the other fair folk paid me. Only Rook reacted, flinching as though I’d struck him.
“I suppose we could do that.” Gadfly paused. “But it wouldn’t be fun at all, would it? And it isn’t as though we aren’t giving Isobel a choice in the matter.”
Unceremoniously, he released Rook, who had been leaning so heavily against Gadfly’s restraint that he fell, catching himself on his hands and knees. He threw one arm over the edge of the well and pulled himself up to meet my eyes, panting, though I could tell he wanted to look away; it took everything he had to look at me.
“I was not strong enough to protect you,” he said, at a volume pitched to me alone.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right.”
We looked desperately into each other’s eyes. It wasn’t.
“Now, I apologize for spoiling the moment, but Hemlock has a point—we’re dallying. So.” Gadfly pulled his gloves off, one after the other, and slipped them into his pocket. “Isobel, Rook is quite correct about one thing: the two of you only violate the Good Law in the state you’re in presently. That is, both alive, a mortal and a fair one, and in love. Ah,” he said at my expression. “Yes, if either of you could stop loving the other, we would have to release you. Go on, give it a try if you like.”
All these years, how hadn’t I realized what a monster Gadfly was? But god, I had to at least make the attempt. I squeezed my eyes shut so hard lights exploded across the insides of my eyelids. I thought of Rook stealing me away in the dead of night; his arrogance; his tantrums; how foolish I was for loving him. I imagined Emma tucking March and May into bed alone. Yet my traitorous heart wouldn’t surrender. I could no more change my feelings than I could command the sky to rain or demand that the sun rise at the stroke of midnight.
I released the breath trapped in my chest with a sound that was half a gasp, half a scream. Gadfly knew. Damn him, he knew that for me, not being able to rein in my own heart was the greatest torment of all.
“But there’s another way.” His mild voice insinuated itself into the following quiet. “It is not a crime for two fair folk to be in love.” Someone snickered. Love among fair folk—a grand joke indeed. “All you must do is drink of the Green Well, and you will save your own life, and Rook’s. The two of you can be together for eternity.”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. Perhaps you’d let me live, but not Rook, not for long.”
“Oh . . . I’ve had a bit of wine, I’m in a generous mood.” I opened my eyes in time to see Gadfly nudge Rook with his boot. Rook seemed to have given up entirely; his forehead rested on the well’s stone edge. “He will have to have his power stripped from him, of course, remaining a prince is out of the question, but—I would see to it that he lives. No doubt a part of him wouldn’t want to, after that. He has always been proud. But he would do it for you.”
I was trembling so hard my hair shivered around me. “No,” I whispered.
“No? Truly? You value your mortality so highly that you would condemn not only yourself to death, but Rook as well? He has so many thousands of years left to him. And they say my kind is cold.”
My gaze fell on the raven pin, glinting among the bluebells. “I will never become like you,” I said. “Never.”
Gadfly smiled down at me sadly. “What of your family?”
I raised my head, trembling now with rage as well as fear. How dare he.
“Surely,” he went on, “it would be a comfort to your aunt Emma, and your little sisters March and May, if they could see you again. Just imagine how much you could help them as a fair one.”
“Do not speak of my family.”
“Ah, but I must. Are you truly willing to leave them with no final word of resolution, no body for them to bury? Your dear aunt is so alone. Your memory would haunt her forever. She would blame herself for everything that has happened. Believe me—I know.”
“You are deliberately tormenting me. Emma would never . . . she wouldn’t . . .”
She wouldn’t want me to make this choice. I slumped in Foxglove’s grip, gazing again at the cold sparkle of the raven pin on the ground, almost close enough to touch. Gadfly had planned every excruciating moment of this awful charade. He knew I would never drink of the Green Well, no matter what he said to me, and that my torture would be the utmost spectacle. He held my fate suspended like a magician’s caged dove, ready to collapse the bars upon me and crush me at any moment. And yet . . . and yet . . . the choice remained mine, and mine alone. Gadfly might see every path through the forest, every possible split in the trail—but what about the impossible? What if I left the path and charged blindly into the wild wood, to a place where none of his visions had ever led?
I thought I knew why Foxglove had torn the circlet from my braids. I hoped I was right, because I was about to take the biggest gamble of my life, and I wasn’t fond of surprises.
“I will drink,” I whispered. Foxglove’s fingers loosened on my wrists, whether to allow me to move or out of sheer shock, I didn’t care. I dropped to my knees and groped my way over the ground, fumbling clumsily in my pain and desperation, until I’d pushed an elbow over the well’s stone lip, scraping myself on the rough edge. I cried out softly as the touch jostled my dislocated shoulder. Gadfly watched me, utterly still, his eyes narrowed. How far had I already deviated from his path? Agreeing to drink was the last thing I would ever do. And of course, I wasn’t done yet.
I stretched my good hand down into the well, cupping my fingers. The water felt like any other water, but the mere awareness of what it was sent cold shocks racing through me, and my breath shivered in and out as I lifted the shimmering palmful, which reflected the moon in broken fragments. And then, abruptly, I stopped. My arm had simply . . . stuck. My fingers were pressed together tightly, but water still trickled away, the puddle at the center of my hand dwindling.
What if just touching the water was enough to begin a transformation after all?
Rook said my name.
I raised my fearful gaze and found him watching, tensed as if prepared to spring forward. I saw the anguish of his indecision. He did not want me to make this choice, knowing that for me it was worse than death. But he also didn’t want me to die. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t betray me in one way or another. In the same stroke, I understood what had happened to me.
“Release me,” I told him gently. “Trust me.”
Rook bowed his head. The ensorcellment’s paralysis faded. I clenched my teeth and raised the cupped water until my breath sent ripples shuddering across its surface.