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“Wendell!” I shouted, but he seemed not to hear me. Eventually, Lord Taran, who had been distracted by another wraith, simply kicked the thoroughly dead guard out of Wendell’s reach.

The earth shuddered.

I had been in the process of picking myself up, because it was abundantly clear that, as poor Lord Wherry had noted, there was no need for Deilah or me to be there, getting in the way, but the tremor threw me to my knees. A new spectre had risen from the mist, towering over the others. It was a drayfox—which, I have since learned, can grow as large as cottages in their old age. The mist swirled about it and through it, only half obscuring the scabs poking through its spectral fur. It was then that my mind cleared.

The scabs were like those on the tree fauns’ horns.

My thoughts took off at a gallop. I remembered what Callum had said about Queen Arna—that she had taken the poison within herself and somehow infected the realm with it, as a mortal might pass on a cold. It was a mad idea, of course, and yet simultaneously—as is often the case in Faerie—there was a sort of logic to it. Monarchs of Faerie do not merely inhabit their realms; they are thought to be intricately entwined.[*] It was both a threat to Wendell’s rule and the perfect revenge against him. He who had evaded the same poison was now forced to watch it consume his realm.

The theories kept churning. The poison that had sickened this grove had come from the tree fauns. Had the common fae possessed by it also been possessed by the fauns’ malice?

Wendell crouched at the edge of the darkness, leaning on one hand; the other he pressed against his side, blood dripping through his fingers. When he looked up, I saw that he was lost. His expression was devoid of anything other than the all-consuming fury I had witnessed only a handful of times, and had rather hoped I would not see again.

“Brother, do not touch it,” Deilah cried through her tears. She ran towards him, and I seized her arm and dragged her down the hill, or tried to—she fought me, her elbow connecting with my stomach, and the breath left me in a wheeze.

Wendell, still possessed by his mindless fury, marched into the swirling mist as if we had not just watched it possess everything that it touched. Horrified, I screamed at him to turn back, which produced absolutely no effect. But the mist did not rise to cover him as it had Lord Wherry; it shrank back. It closed behind him, but not in the places where his blood fell upon the earth. There the grasses and underbrush of the forest grew lush and green, shaking off the curse.

This I noted.

The curse did not seem to appreciate Wendell’s determination. Dozens of wraiths rose out of the darkness—it sickened me, the sight of so many small Folk destroyed by this dark magic, even as I quaked in terror of them.

Lord Taran had no such conflicted feelings, and even seemed to be enjoying himself. His sword flashed as he hewed and stabbed, often moving so fast that he was little more than a dark wind to my eyes. I clutched Deilah to me—to comfort the child, who was still crying, though I suspect it was as much to comfort myself.

Wendell, meanwhile, had neither slowed nor slackened his pace, no matter how many monsters the mist threw at him. Two of the guardians swooped in to help him—not Razkarden; no doubt he was too wise—and he killed them without pause, or any sign of recognition.

When he reached the spectral drayfox, which had only grown in size, he drew back his sword and hurled it in a glittering arc. It plunged into the spectre’s eye, and a gust of wind enveloped the grove, the ground trembling beneath our feet. The spectre sagged backwards, and then it collapsed.

Wendell had caught his sword, or summoned it somehow, and was now hacking at the mist itself, there being no more wraiths to challenge him. Eventually, Lord Taran, stepping gingerly through the mist, which was beginning to dissolve, met Wendell’s sword with his own, disarming him with a series of impossible strikes. At that, the fury seemed to leave Wendell like an exhaled breath, and he gave Lord Taran a puzzled look, as if there had been nothing at all strange about his murderous rampage, nor any reason for him to stop.

The disintegrating mist expanded towards Deilah and me, and the girl tore herself out of my grasp and ran pell-mell into the forest, shrieking. Wendell swore and took off after her, vanishing into one tree and then stepping out of another, where he caught his sister and hauled her back towards our mounts. She seemed torn between beating her fists against his chest and sobbing into his neck, which slowed their progress somewhat. The grove was brightening, and I coughed on the smoke clogging the air. One of the guards came hurrying towards Lord Taran, soot smeared across her cheek.

“We’ve surrounded the grove with pyres, my lord,” she said. “These trees will soon be up in flames.”

Lord Taran sheathed his sword and came towards me, which sent me scuttling backwards on my hands in instinctive terror before I forced myself to stop. He helped me to my feet, catching me with unexpected gentleness as my legs wobbled. And then I was dragged away.

Skip Notes

* Wentworth Morrison’s Folk-Lore of Scotland, Volume III: Thrones of Faerie (1852) remains the definitive resource on this topic, but Farris Rose’s exhaustive investigation of Cornish faerie stories (in particular his Atlas of Tales, 1900) provides additional insight. Cornwall holds the record for the sheer number of interactions between mortals and monarchs of Faerie (Rose’s “Comparative Analysis of the Faerie Markets of Bodmin Moor,” published in Dryadological Fieldnotes in 1902, offers several intriguing theories as to why this might be so). In many of the tales recorded by Morrison and Rose, a faerie monarch’s power is also their Achilles’ heel: while they control the landscape and weather, they can be defeated by being trapped and removed from their homes, as a flower dies when uprooted from its soil.

9th January

It has been too long since I’ve written. Several times after our journey to the yew grove I have picked up my journal, readied my pen, and then simply stared at the blank page—a symptom of a condition with which I have intimate familiarity by now: namely, stupefaction brought on by some manner of faerie misadventure. In addition, I had only a page or two left in my old journal, hardly enough space to recount anything in detail.

Eventually, I visited the bookbinders, still hard at work filling the shelves in my journal room, and selected this ridiculous paper confection. It has pages enough, but also an enchanted lock—which I do not bother with—and intricate silver engravings of overlapping circles of fern fronds, which I am beginning to recognize as a common artistic motif in Where the Trees Have Eyes. The top of every page is illustrated with a little landscape sketch, a gentle brook or a moorland vista, and if one stares at these long enough, they become a tiny window to the place where the artist must have stood. It is all completely frivolous and unnecessary.

But. I am writing again.

I reached Dublin’s Trinity College three days ago via a carriage from Corbann to the train station one village over, then two additional trains. Since then I have been ensconced in their Natural Sciences Library—in which is housed their considerable collection of dryadological journals and folklore—from dawn to dusk. I would sleep here if the librarians would allow it, but while most of them have received me with kindness and welcome, the head librarian is a tyrannical sort, and seems already to disapprove of me and my many requests, even seeing fit to lecture me for leaving the special collections room in disarray, so I doubt such a request would be well received. One would think books existed simply to be looked at and occasionally dusted, the way that man carries on. And if the filing system differs from Cambridge’s, is it my fault if this occasionally leads me to misplace things?

I have been dreadfully scattered of late. I sat down to provide an account of my doings since the grove, and here I am, griping about librarians.

Wendell has written me three letters already, despite the short period of my absence. I had the below waiting for me when I arrived at my rented lodgings.

To: Dr. Emily Wilde

11 Scholars’ Square, Trinity College

Dublin