What had he wanted? Abruptly, everything fell into place.
Before I’d made my first bargain with him all those years ago, perhaps even before I’d been born, he’d already begun scheming. Placing my home under a powerful enchantment to gain my trust and ensure that no harm came to me before he set his plan into motion. Arranging Rook’s portrait. Bringing us to the Green Well. Planting the iron dagger, which was never meant for Rook after all, but for the Alder King all along. And worse—knowing exactly what to say that would make him my bitter enemy, and set me crashing through the woods, away from my predestined path toward the impossible course of destroying the Alder King. Astonishment and fury washed over me in equal measure. My voice hardened, choked with emotion. “I don’t appreciate being used as a pawn in your game, sir.”
He looked at me a long moment in silence. “Ah, but you were not a pawn. All along, you have been the queen.”
I took a breath. His inflection was laden with some hidden meaning I didn’t have the patience to decipher. “And you are treacherous, and I’ll never forget the pain we endured by your design, no matter what came of it in the end.”
“Spoken, if I may say so, like a true monarch.” He smiled again. But a shadow passed over his countenance, and this time, his eyes didn’t crinkle. His portrait room sprang to my mind unbidden. All those patient centuries of collecting portraits—not out of desire for them, but because he was waiting for me, for my Craft, a spider at the center of a vast web he’d spun for hundreds of years in solitude.
“I do believe that is for the best,” he went on, watching me intently. “Trusting one of my kind is quite enough foolishness for a lifetime. Mortals are always better off not forgetting what we are, and that we only ever serve ourselves.”
“Gadfly,” Rook said, in a tone that suggested the spring prince was overstaying his welcome.
“Just one last thing, if I may.” Gadfly brushed some invisible dust off his sleeve and raised his eyebrows at Rook. “You are aware, I trust, that you are not yet named king? That there is a certain something you must—”
“Yes, I know!” Rook interrupted crossly.
I shot him a curious glance and discovered that he was nervously avoiding my eyes. He looked relieved when tentative footsteps crunched within the house, liberating him of the burden of explaining this “certain something” to me, and for the moment I was happy to forget all about it.
“Emma!” I called. “We’re safe! We’re in the . . . parlor.”
“I can see that,” Emma said calmly, picking her way into the room with the twins clutching both her hands. “There are holes in the walls. March, whatever you just picked up, don’t eat it.”
“Too late,” said May.
Emma shook her head. She scanned the parlor, and then the yard, and saw Gadfly, whereupon her eyes narrowed appraisingly. “Now who’s going to clean up this mess?”
“Oh, dear,” said Gadfly. “I’m afraid I must be off.”
Epilogue
I WRAPPED the bandage neatly around Rook’s injured hand, pleased to see that this time, he didn’t hide a wince. Two weeks later, his finger was nearly healed. We sat at my kitchen table beneath the wavering amethyst glow of his fairy light, still shining brightly after the two dozen enchantments he’d dispensed that day as payment to the workmen rebuilding our parlor. It didn’t escape me that he had not yet mentioned returning to the forest, or said anything about taking up the role of king, so the moment he started fidgeting restlessly in his seat, I had a reasonable idea of what he was working up to.
“Once,” he said, “I mentioned to you how succession works among my kind. How one prince is replaced by another. Or at least, how it used to work—the law can be different now.”
“Yes, and it’s awful,” I said with feeling. “Killing one another like . . . oh.”
Rook hadn’t been prepared for me to start figuring it out myself. He paled and continued quickly, “So, technically, as you are the one who defeated the Alder King, you’re now—well—the queen of the fairy courts. And I . . .”
I took pity on him. He was turning rather green. “Rook, I would be delighted to marry you and make you king. But first, I have one demand. It is of the utmost importance.”
I couldn’t tell whether he looked more relieved, or more frightened. “What is it, my dear?”
“I’d like another declaration, please.”
“Isobel.” He swept down to his knees and kissed my hand, gazing up at me in devotion. “I love you more than the stars in the sky. I love you more than Lark loves dresses.”
I startled myself with my own yelping laugh.
“I love you more than Gadfly loves looking at himself in a mirror,” he went on.
“Surely not that!”
Our laughter carried across the darkened yard, past the chicken house full of sleeping hens, the red-leafed oak, and the autumn wheat whispering in the field, half cropped for harvest. The wild wind swept our voices all the way to the forest, where crickets sang a new song to the crescent moon. Somewhere, fair folk were having a feast. Others swirled in the midst of a ball. Others still traced the edges of a piece of bark, gazing at their portraits in quiet contemplation. A thin mortal woman packed her books, assisted by a girl with sharp teeth and a well-dressed man with silver-blond hair. Yet no matter what they were doing, everyone in the forest waited with an indrawn breath, waiting for the taste of autumn, the smell of change, the first news of a king and queen unlike any the world had known before.
And we wouldn’t live happily ever after, because I don’t believe in such nonsense, but we both had a long, bold adventure ahead of us, and a great deal to look forward to at last.