“Don’t look.” The words grated painfully beside me, such a wretched sound that at first I didn’t recognize Rook as the speaker. I surfaced as though dragged up from drowning, and groped blindly in the direction of his voice until he took my hand. I lowered my gaze from the terrible, infinite sky. But I could not obey him. I could not look away from what I saw next.
A road stretched before us and behind us. The fair folk cavorted along it in a line, pale forms flickering like sepulchral flames, a procession of ghosts. The forest rose on either side of the path, but it wasn’t the same forest that existed in the world we had been in before. The trees were as big around as houses. Roots rose from the ground at such a height I wouldn’t have been able to climb them if I’d tried. The fair folks’ white luminosity cast flitting shadows across the bark.
While I stumbled forward, years raced around me. Mushrooms erupted from the soil, withered, and tumbled over. More grew in their place. Leaves swarmed onto the branches and fell, new buds already twitching and swelling in their place. Moss raced across the ground like sea-foam, surging and retracting in different shades of green. A fawn picked its way shyly from the undergrowth, only to undergo a strange spasm and then fall dead to the ground, a stag with a gray-furred muzzle and full set of antlers. By the time I passed it, its skeleton was half sunk into the ground, absorbed by layers of decaying leaves that rippled as they consumed it, like devouring maggots.
How many years had passed already? Twenty? Thirty? Fear overtook me. I rounded upon my hand in Rook’s, expecting to find my skin wrinkled and spotted with age. But it was the same. Wasn’t it? The light was so odd—I couldn’t trust anything I saw . . .
“Think of it,” Rook forced out, “as an illusion. When we leave the path, only seconds will have passed. You will not be changed. Not in any physical way.”
His hand shone with eerie light. I almost thought I saw the outline of my own showing through it, and the ring seemed to cast a shadow through his finger. I dragged my gaze upward—
“No,” he rasped.
—to his face. His countenance was ghastly, contorted with agony. Translucent shadows ringed his eyes and darkened his sunken cheeks. It wasn’t until I realized that I could faintly make out his sharp teeth through his closed mouth that it occurred to me the light came from within, burning from his very bones. He barely resembled himself. He looked like a revenant that had just crawled from the soil, clinging to life only through desperate hunger.
“Is my ring killing you?” I asked.
Ever so slightly, he shook his head. Even that small motion cost him. Not dying, perhaps, but in unspeakable pain. “I would not have you see me this way.”
“I’m still not afraid of you,” I whispered, and finally closed my eyes.
“What a peculiar mortal you’ve found.” Hemlock’s voice buffeted me as an icy, howling wind. “A pity. I do like them better when they’re frightened. They’re so pink, and so small. It suits them better.”
I couldn’t say how long the journey lasted. Even without my vision, I got a sense of what was happening around me. Branches creaked and rustled as though the trees were alive. Roots squirmed through the soil beneath my feet. The mushrooms, ferns, moss, and buds flourished and died with a damp squishing sound, like someone stirring a bowl of congealed pudding. The cruel laughter of a fair one occasionally rose above the cacophony, but as time drew on the forest grew louder and louder until I feared my eardrums would burst. I became aware of stranger noises then: a low, shuddering groan emanating from deep within the earth itself. A crystalline ringing I knew must be the stars.
I almost lost sense of who I was—I became a blind animal stumbling along senselessly, cowed by the ageless, implacable enormity of the universe pressing down on me.
Until suddenly, it all stopped.
Only Hemlock’s hands beneath my armpits kept me upright. My eyelids fluttered, golden light flickering through my lashes. A dull roar buffeted me. It was the sound of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of voices speaking at once, but compared to the symphony of time passing it was quiet and faraway, muffled by wads of cotton. I couldn’t bring myself to care about whatever was happening. The earth spun quickly enough that by the stars’ reckoning, I was already dead. It didn’t matter if I survived today, or tomorrow, or the next month. My life was more trivial than that of a single leaf in a forest. A golden afternoon, I remembered, and smiled, with no thought to how I must appear.
My head lolled. Through a crack in my eyelids, I registered that we stood on a platform raised a story or so above the ground. Knotted roots coiled around my feet, blackened by an ancient fire or lightning strike and glistening with beads of hardened sap. The roots descended, forming an uneven spiral stair, to a shining, crowded hall that awaited us below, suffused in what appeared to be bright evening sunlight, but couldn’t possibly be that, since it was night. Rook had said seconds, and I believed him. A struggling thought came to me: the light was reflected by mirrors. Great mirrors stood behind the balconies crowded with fair folk, which surrounded us in tiers like a huge theater, or a courthouse . . . no, not mirrors—sheets of water cascading down, perfectly smooth, reflecting the room into gilded, gleaming infinity.
I tried to focus on the stooped figure beside me. He was saying something, but I couldn’t comprehend its meaning. Clinging to the memory of us so long ago, I pushed a scattering of words past my lips. “That’s why you . . . inadvisable.”
“Yes. You remember! Come back, Isobel. Come back to me.”
“Oh, Rook, just leave her alone. It doesn’t matter if she’s gone mad or not—and if she has, she’s better off staying that way. I’m the one who has to hold on to her, after all.”
“Isobel,” he said again, and pressed his lips to mine.
It was a rushed kiss, his chapped mouth bumping hard and chaste against my own, but it felt like inhaling a breath of fresh air after hours of suffocating underground. I blinked rapidly, the blur around me shifting into focus. Nausea burned a trail up my throat, and every sparkling jewel and pillar and fairy light threw off a dizzying halo, but I remembered I had things to live for after all. If I was going to die, I would do so remembering how much I cared about Rook, and Emma, and March and May, whose fleeting lives mattered terribly, the truths of the fairy paths be damned.
All the fair folk in the audience hall gaped at us. Most clung to the rails, craning their heads as though they’d been watching a familiar play only for an actor to burst in unscripted from the rear doors. Having witnessed Foxglove’s disgust at his earlier display, and having served as an intimate witness to the depths of Rook’s shame, I knew that kissing me in front of the entire summer court was one of the most courageous things he’d ever done.
“I find it awfully trying, you know, that you never take my good advice,” said Hemlock somewhere above and behind me. I wasn’t listening. I was gazing at Rook as he gazed back, bent double by the fair folk restraining him. I almost laughed when it occurred to me that we were at the same level, and I was nearly standing up straight.
He was panting with his teeth bared, and his breath stirred the loose locks of hair hanging in front of his face. “I made you a promise the last time we were in the summerlands. I still mean to see it through.”
“Are you saying that you have a plan?” I inquired, not feeling very well at all, which explained why I found this rather funny also. “And if so, is it arrogant, ill advised, and likely to result in both our deaths anyway?”
“Yes,” he replied, and gave me a quick half-smile in between catching his breath. “I’m afraid there isn’t time just now for you to come up with a better one. Otherwise, I would wait.”
“Go on, then. I know how much you love showing off.”
His expression sobered. “Impossibly, it seems I love you quite a bit more,” he said. He hesitated, gathering his strength. Then he made a sudden, sharp jerking motion, and his glamour came flooding back. Before I understood what he had done he’d thrown off his detainers, drawn himself up to his full height, and shouted in a voice that echoed across every corner of the hall, “I challenge the Alder King! I challenge him for sovereignty over the four courts!”