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Many doors to Faerie are surprisingly easy to break. If one is bold and unafraid of the consequences—a foolhardy boldness in many cases—one has only to crush the circle of mushrooms, or cut down the grove of twisted trees, that connects our world to theirs. I did not need to destroy anything, I merely lifted the first of the unnaturally shiny stepping-stones and turned it upside-down. I think this would have been enough, but to be on the safe side, I flipped the other stones too. The bottoms were covered in mud and insects—perfectly mundane. I was satisfied.

I hoisted my bag, and Shadow and I made our way to the cottage door.

6th February

Naturally, I told Lilja and Margret all.

“He will follow you” was Lilja’s first response. “Surely there is more than one door between Faerie and Ireland. He could use another.”

“Of course,” I said. “But he won’t. He will be too afraid of my reaction. More likely he will pester me with letters.” I gave a bark of laughter. “At least there is no post today—it is Sunday, is it not?”

Margret and Lilja exchanged a look. We were sitting in the kitchen this morning as a fire crackled in the next room and a thin, chilly rain tapped against the window. I had arrived at the cottage before they had awakened; it was earlier than it had been in Faerie, near midnight rather than dawn. So, after writing in my journal, I had tried to sleep for another hour or so—tried to. I had mostly just tossed and turned in the narrow bed.

“What?” I said.

Lilja merely shook her head, then rose from the table. She went into the other room and returned with a bundle of letters in her hand.

“We did not open them,” she said. “Though we wished to, as we could not understand why he would think you were here, and we were worried. But we thought they might be under some enchantment.”

I stared at the bundle she pressed into my hand. Wendell’s ridiculously graceful writing stared back at me.

“Of course,” I murmured. “When he died, the enchantment he used to match the flow of time to that of the mortal realm was broken. A fortnight passed here, while he lay dead, so when I left Faerie, I also stepped forward in time. And yet when I did leave, time advanced in Faerie to match the mortal realm—I wonder if he attached the enchantment to me somehow? He must have. Well, hopefully he has repaired things properly, so that I shall not return to find him a century older. Or will I return to find that only ten seconds has passed since he sent his last letter? It could go either way, I suppose; these things are never consistent.”

I felt a pang, that I had been away from him for so long—from his perspective, anyhow. But there was nothing for it. I looked up to find Margret and Lilja staring at me.

“Erm,” Margret said. “I still don’t see— You only just got here. These letters have been arriving for days.”

Lilja put her hand on her wife’s, and Margret trailed off with a sigh. She gave me a rueful look.

“It’s like that apple tree he gave us, isn’t it?” she said. “It flowers and gives fruit all year long, even when the snow is deep enough to touch the boughs. I can appreciate the apples, but only if I don’t think about them too much. If I start, I fear I will never stop thinking, if you know what I mean.”

I put the letters down. I was too unsettled to focus on them now, anyway. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am ruining your holiday with all my melodrama.”

Margret laughed. “You would not be our Emily if you were not trying to solve some faerie mystery. We expected something of this nature.”

“Yes,” Lilja said. “Well, perhaps not quite of this nature. I still don’t understand why Wendell is not dead. It is said in our stories that is one thing their magic cannot overcome.”

“As far as I understand it, he wasn’t truly dead,” I said. “Not by our mortal definition, anyway. The spirits of the Folk do not depart immediately, but linger for a time in some in-between realm. It is only for that reason that the housekeeper was able to recover him.”

Lilja nodded peaceably—I don’t think she found this particularly helpful. “A good subject for one of your papers,” she said.

I gave a soft laugh. “Yes.”

Lilja poured me another cup of tea. “How long will you stay?”

“As long as it takes me to solve this,” I said.

They exchanged another look. “What do you need to solve?” Margret said. “This Queen Arna is dead. I agree with Wendell on that—she deserved no better fate, and perhaps a worse one.”

“No,” I said. “Something is wrong. In every version of ‘King Macan’s Bees,’ the second king is punished for murdering the first. It has become more and more clear to me that Wendell is caught in that same pattern—too many details parallel the Macan story. Our plan to murder the queen was always the wrong one, much as I cannot see what else we could have done. Stories are the architecture of Faerie, more powerful than magic, more powerful than kings.”

“I thought you said there was one with a happy ending,” Lilja said.

I rubbed my eyes. “Yes. There is one version of ‘King Macan’s Bees’ wherein the first king dies and the second king and his mortal wife live happily ever after. But even that—I don’t know. There is something off about it. I wonder if perhaps it was mistranslated.”

Lilja was nodding. “Or someone’s grandfather decided it needed a better ending. That’s what my afi would do. He loved all the old tales of the tall ones, but if it ended in misery and suffering, he would change it. That drove my mother mad—‘disrespectful,’ she called him. Yet we mortals can change those old stories, can’t we?”

I thought of my own grandfather, left to die upon a lonely heath by his faerie love. “Sometimes we can,” I said. “If we are not ensnared ourselves.”