He staggered as though a rug had been pulled out from beneath his boots. Then he shook his head and, to my dismay, gave the Alder King a crooked smile. The smile was too savage to be called charming. “What a fortuitous coincidence,” Rook declared. “I confess neither of us wanted to see your face, either. In light of these circumstances, I think it best we take our leave.” He folded his arm over his chest and bowed. “Good day.”
The Alder King’s compulsory return bow cut off his darkening expression.
“Quickly, to me,” Rook said, turning and holding out his uninjured hand. A wave of leaves crashed against him as Lark lifted me, hoisted me onto a stamping horse’s back, and pulled my arms around his neck. We took off in a bone-jolting lurch. Powerful muscles bunched beneath my cheek. Faces flashed past, gaping in surprise, shrinking away from the stone chips thrown up by his striking hooves. They stung my own legs, icy pinpricks of pressure without pain. I wondered if I bled.
We clattered up the stairs, Rook’s shoulders heaving as he conquered the too-small steps. The mirrorlike curtain of water grew closer and closer, reflecting his charge in rippling silver, and my own too-pale countenance as I clung astride. He was going to jump through it. I braced myself as best I could.
“This was your plan? Oh, Rook,” I mumbled half-conscious into his warm, rough mane. What he was doing was the last thing anyone would expect. “You’re running away.”
Twenty-one
OUR FLIGHT from the summer court passed in a blur. Only the shock of water streaming from my hair and dripping down my back kept me sensible enough to cling to Rook’s mane. My thoughts lapsed in and out of a stupor, my mind struggling to stay afloat.
At some point early on, Hemlock’s cold voice chased us down a dim hollow lined by half-dead pines. I quailed at their leaning shapes, whose stripped lower branches bent inward over the stream bed like they meant to pluck me from Rook’s withers.
“Oh, do come back!” she called. “We could have tried to take him together, you and I. We could still try. He’s after you, you know. Just think what a battle it would be!”
The horn sounded then, hollow and commanding in the night. Hounds bayed in the distance. The sharp spice of pine resin rose from the needles crushed beneath Rook’s hooves, and his unrelenting pace didn’t falter.
“Please!” Hemlock cried. “I failed him. He’s set them on me. Please—please—please—”
Her screams swirled down with me into the dark.
The next time I regained full consciousness it was to Emma standing in the doorway of our house, holding a skillet in a white-knuckled grip, about to swing it at Rook’s head.
“I don’t care who you are or why you’re here!” she shouted. “You put her down right now and leave.”
“Madam, I—”
“Do you want to know how many times I’ve shoved a man’s intestines back into his body? Fair one or not, I’m sure I can manage it the other way around.”
I tried to speak, but my throat was so dry it closed up. All I managed was a sort of gagging sound.
“Isobel!” Rook and Emma both exclaimed at once.
I coughed, saliva flooding my mouth at the surge of nausea that followed. “It’s all right. Don’t hit him. He’s”—another gut-wrenching cough—“he’s helping me.”
Grim and tight-lipped, Emma lowered the skillet. “Bring her inside and put her on the settee. And then explain yourself, please, beginning with why you were just a horse.”
The walls tilted crazily as Rook carried me through the kitchen and the hall to the parlor, the air redolent with linseed oil, the shapes of the props familiar even in the dark. Home. I was home. An ache swelled bigger and bigger in my chest. I hadn’t expected to be here again—I’d thought I’d die without ever coming back. When he laid me down on the settee, the hot tears spilled over. I had a great deal of other, more important things to say, but my miserable relief hijacked my brain, and all that came out was “Emma” in a strangled wail.
She pushed Rook aside, and he had the good sense to retreat to the foot of the settee and hover there like a scolded toddler. Her arm slid between my back and the settee’s cushions, pulling me against her. I clung weakly, sobbing into her shoulder.
“Oh, Bell, where are your clothes? Why are you wearing a dress that’s shedding petals all over the place? Are you hurt anywhere? Did they hurt you?”
“I’m all right,” I bawled against her nightgown, not because it was true, but because I wanted it to be.
Eventually I subsided into wracking gulps and hiccups, and she laid me back down. I was grateful I couldn’t see the enormous wet spot I’d left on her shoulder in the dark. “I’m going to fetch some water and a lantern. You,” she added, pinning Rook with her gaze, “behave yourself.”
“Er, yes, madam,” he said.
The moment Emma left the room he was before me like a shot, gathering my wet fingers into his hands. He hissed in pain and pulled his left hand back, fumbling around for a handkerchief to cover up his slip. I touched his cheek, and he stilled, the gleam of his eyes intent on my face in the shadows. I marveled at how hot his skin felt, which meant I must be very cold indeed.
“Isobel,” he asked, “are you well? Truly?”
I considered the question. Though I lay motionless, every muscle in my body jumped with overexertion. My heartbeat rocked me slightly, the shell of my ear scraping a rhythmic shuff, shuff, shuff against the cushions, as though I had burned up to a husk as light and frail as paper.
“I don’t know. Are you?” I whispered.
He started to nod and stopped, unable to complete the motion. How silly of us to ask that question of each other, knowing neither of us would ever be well again. Yet I had the strangest feeling, wrapped up in this cocoon of darkness and exhaustion, resting on the almost-uncomfortable stiff brocade of my settee, that nothing that had happened to us was real. The autumnlands, the Barrow Lord, the spring court, the Alder King—all of it impossible, vivid as a fever dream, contrary to the solid reality of home.
“You promised to bring me back,” I said.
“If only I had done so sooner. I—”
Still cupping his cheek, I brushed my thumb over his lips, and he fell silent.
“Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “We made that choice together. But we can’t stay. The Alder King is on his way, isn’t he? Emma and the twins are in danger. If anything were to happen to them . . . we must leave as soon as we can.”
“Isobel!” The lantern Emma held at the doorway illuminated her shock, both at my words and at the position in which she found us. “You are not leaving this house again, no matter what. Do you hear me?”
She rounded on Rook. His winded and disheveled appearance in the lantern light gave her pause. She narrowed her eyes. She suspected the same thing I would have until recently, that the only reason a fair one would present himself like this was to deceive us. Certainly, it would never occur to her that he was conserving every scrap of magic he could.
“Explain,” she said, voice hard. “In detail.”
To my surprise he rose, squared his shoulders, and did. He glossed over certain parts, for which I silently thanked him, but left out nothing of importance. My dreamlike trance faded as he went on. With every word, the memories returned with sharp-edged clarity, tearing holes in the insubstantial veil separating me from the night’s horrors. Emma’s face went whiter and whiter, until eventually she sat down with an expression like stone.
Humiliation prickled my skin in waves of hot and cold, warring with a tight knot of defiance in my chest. The thought of seeing judgment—or worse, disappointment—on her face when she next looked at me made me want to curl in on myself and never face the world again. I had no way to prove that the love Rook and I felt for each other was real and that we deserved every desperate, foolhardy inch of it, and I was already tired, so tired, of bearing its weight as a failure. A crime.
The minutes I waited for Emma’s reaction were the longest of my life. She listened without interrupting. When Rook neared the end her gaze drifted down to his left hand, and a line appeared between her eyebrows. She had never seen an injured fair one before. He shifted at her scrutiny, the only sign of nervousness he’d shown since beginning the story. Despite being a prince among fair folk, in that moment he looked awfully young, not so very unlike a human suitor meeting a girl’s family for the first time.