I watched Adrik through the window as he approached, his cloak billowing around his tall, well-built frame like dark smoke. He might have looked as imposing and haunting as the faerie warriors I’d watched from my tavern room—passing through Kresting on snarling bears and vicious wolves—had it not been for his good-humored smile and the moss-green gaze alight with mischief. I had to make his visit count. I had to be sharp and awake, andpleasant. To find a secret, a desire. A vileness. To secure the bargain.
Adrik snapped a finger as he passed the peach tree. A fruit dropped readily into his waiting palm.
“Hello,” he trilled as he stepped inside, sinking sharp teeth into the peach. He groaned quite obscenely. The faeries, unlike most humans, had few reservations when it came to exhibiting their pleasures. He held the peach out to me with an embellished bow. “Would you like a bite?” I sealed my lips tightly. He laughed, as if he enjoyed my agitation. “No? Perhapsthis—” he conjured a platter of candies from thin air, “—will please you more.”
The air hummed with power. In the swamp, I’d often vomited from the stench of faerie magic—a thick, rotten thing that slithered like a slug over my tongue. Here, Adrik’s power spilled sweetly through the chamber.
“You must be a great admirer of Bearded Ivar,” he said, glancing with amusement at the book I’d tossed to the foot of the bed.
“I certainly used to be. After spending the night with him, I’m rather disenchanted.” I was shocked to learn that I possessed a sliver of humor after all.
“Now that I know your type,” said Adrik with a quiet laugh, “let me pick out some books for you.”
I drank the tea he’d conjured while he busied himself with the shelves. It was a light and floral brew with a hint of heat. Adrik said over his shoulder, “A green tea with peach blossoms, ginger and honey. It’s my favorite.”
I decided, as I tried the sweets, that I had no love for candied oranges—they tasted like the sickly-sweet potion Lorell made me drink—and that wildberries dipped in chocolate were the best thing I’d ever eaten.
Adrik tapped a book gently on its spine. It floated from its place on the shelf and came to rest on the nightstand, followed by another. I snatched the third from the air, intrigued byits familiar leather binding. It was the same tattered book of folktales my mother had often read to me.
“I thought they were all burned.”
A man had come to us three winters after my mother’s death, dressed in strange white robes, and he’d pried the book from my hands, even as I pleaded with him. That night, the fires down in the village had burned so brightly, I’d smelled the sickly smoke through our sealed windows.
Adrik smiled softly at the book. “You will find that this town has a penchant for sheltering the rare and the precious.”
I stifled a shudder. The faeries suffered a ruthless obsession with collecting strange and powerful things. No wonder Adrik felt fondly for a town that attracted them.
“Do many who live in Wildemire still revere the spirits?”
I tried to sound nonchalant, but in truth, I burned to know the answer. I burned to know if there existed a place that might have seen wisdom in my mother’s madness. A place where the old folktales, haunting my memories like restless ghosts, still lived.
“There are few who do not. The spirits go wherever they are welcomed and honored. We’d be fools to slight them. To risk losing their protection.”
“The rest of the world would claim you are fools to believe in them.”
If Adrik thought ill of me for voicing such doubts, he did not reveal it. His smile remained mild as he said, “And what wouldyouclaim, Evana?”
I hesitated, convinced for a moment that he’d lured me into a trap, forcing me to unmask my madness just to scorn me as the villagers had. “I am not inclined to pass judgement on matters that exceed my understanding.”
“Then you are wiser than most.”
“Or more cowardly.”
He gave me a curious look, head slightly tilted. “It depends on what you make of your ignorance. A coward finds comfort in it and preserves it by shielding their eyes and ears. A wise person might find in ignorance an incentive to learn something new.”
“And what do you call a person who is afraid to find a lie hiding in every so-called truth?”
“A rightful skeptic, perhaps.” His smile had sharpened. He nodded to the book I still cradled as tightly as I had on the night of the burning. “I know better than to convince a skeptic, but I will say this: You will find more truth in these lost folktales than in the words preached by villagemen.”
I said, with a meaningful glance at the small town beyond the window, and with no small measure of amusement, “Are you not a villageman, too?”
He laughed quietly. “I suppose. Would you be more inclined to believe me if I were a lord or a prince?”
The sound I made was too sharp to be a laugh. “Less.”
“Wise,” he said with a wink.
To save firewood—the piles were, according to Adrik, shrinking rapidly—he carried me to the parlor. I endured this quietly and with a shameful flush. He settled me into a fireside armchair, amid haphazardly placed stacks of books.
