Page 74

Again, she made no response, only watched me inscrutably. I found this unnerving—apparently, no amount of soot or stink will make me easy in the old queen’s company—but affected indifference. I helped her undress and step into the spring. I did the same, scrubbing myself quickly to end the awkwardness of the experience, then dried myself with one of the blankets. I’d brought one clean dress with me; the tent contained no spare clothes, but after fishing about for a while, I unearthed a stylish bathrobe of black silk and dense flannel that I supposed Arna could wear.

The old queen, meanwhile, after scrubbing herself from head to foot with some of the abrasive sand at the bottom of the spring, sat there, motionless and sweating, for a full ten minutes.

“Erm,” I said at last. “We must carry on. My friends are waiting for me. They will be worried terribly.”

“I thought I would never be warm again,” Arna murmured, and I realized she was weeping. She did not wail or blubber, merely let the tears flow down her cheeks. After a moment, she buried her face in her hands.

Now, I have never been skilled at responding appropriately to tears, and in this context I was completely at sea. Fortunately, the old queen collected herself and clambered out of the water. I helped her into the robe, and she murmured her thanks.

“Why did my son send you, instead of coming himself?” she asked. “Was it a test?”

This took me only a second or two to parse. “Ah,” I said. “You think he has demanded that I prove my worthiness to him as a wife by rescuing you from the Veil. That would indeed be a familiar tale. But, in fact, he had no knowledge of my plan.”

I explained the situation to her—my fear that Wendell’s story would follow the second Macan’s if he murdered her. I’m afraid I couldn’t help making the whole thing sound scholarly, referencing other tales and papers I’d read, as if I were defending myself against a skeptical peer reviewer; such is my impulse when I am nervous. I could not tell if she understood me or not. Ridiculously, her primary reaction was to look hurt by the news that Wendell had not forgiven her. “He wished to leave me in that place?”

I considered and discarded several blunt responses to this. Instead I replied simply, “He believes you will never stop seeking revenge.”

The former queen shook her head slightly. “I am done with vengeance,” she said. “I am done with thrones. I am reborn.”

I absorbed this dubiously. I had hoped she would be grateful to me—Folk rescued by mortals usually are, in the stories—but I’d expected to have to bargain with her to secure an end to her hostility. I said, “Let us go home.”

She acquiesced without argument, and I took out the key again. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to proceed from there. It was easy enough to arrive at Poe’s tree from somewhere else in the winterlands, but how did I tell the key I wished to return to that scrap of winter in County Leane? When I walked round the side of the tree, I found myself back in the foreboding quiet of the Hidden king’s grove, gazing at the smoking remnants of our fire and the indent in the snow where the tent had lain.

When I returned to Poe’s tree, I knocked upon the bole. I thought I saw a curtain twitch—sometimes I can see the windows in Poe’s tree, and sometimes I cannot. Then, abruptly, Poe was standing before us, bowing repeatedly in Arna’s direction and babbling apologies.

“You wish for me to show you the way?” he said in a squeak, without any prompting from myself. “Yes, yes—Mother and I shall miss you! But with royalty, naturally—important business cannot wait—a great many demands upon you—”

And he went charging around the side of the tree. Arna, Shadow, and I had to run after him, and between one step and the next, we were returned to the lonely Irish peak with the village of Corbann visible in the far distance.

—

We made it off the mountain before darkness fell, but only barely. Arna moved slowly, and frequently required me to assist her over obstacles and down steep sections of trail. It was not a bad thing, though, for I was still very worried about Shadow, who seemed so weary as to be almost in a daze: he would fall back on his haunches abruptly, panting and staring at nothing, before seeming to start back to himself and hobbling after me.

I had hoped that Arna would maintain a dignified silence, but there luck was not on my side. Much to my chagrin, after seeking a few more details about how precisely I had managed to follow her into the Veil—including my history with the Hidden king, about whom she seemed remarkably incurious—I found my relationship with Wendell interrogated.

Every particular was sought. The old queen wished to know where we had met; the development of our friendship and whether we had truly begun as academic rivals or if there had not been some feeling there from the start; whether he had met my family and friends and the nature of their opinions of him; how Wendell had proposed. She seemed scandalized that we had been married with so little ceremony, and I was forced to remind her that this had been necessitated by the direness of the circumstances, namely her having poisoned the kingdom and made designs on Wendell’s life. This landed with very little impact.

“Still, he must be planning a grand celebration,” she said. “When my late husband and I wed, the revelry lasted so many nights one forgot when it had begun.”

“I am not much for revelry,” I said irritably. We were descending a tricky slope, and I would have preferred to focus on my feet rather than on conversation, particularly this one. I could not help adding, “I wonder at your sudden interest in your son’s happiness, Your Highness.”

I thought she would not reply at first. Then: “He is a different person than I thought he was.”

This confirmed something I had noted and wondered about: the former queen’s manner of speaking of her stepson had fundamentally altered. I knew from Wendell that his stepmother had been dismissive towards him in his youth, sometimes ignoring him entirely, other times doting upon him in a condescending manner more suited to a pet. It was as if, in foiling her plot and dooming her to torment and death, his character had acquired a new dimension, one that she might respect. If this might not seem an obvious foundation upon which to build some semblance of maternal affection, I can only note that maternal affection is often a complicated subject in faerie stories.

When it grew too dark to continue, we made camp within a little circle of standing stones. I was not worried about bogles now, for they would know Arna, just as Poe had.

“I meant what I said,” she told me as we hunched close to the warmth of the fire, each wrapped in a blanket. “I have no interest in the throne now. I wonder at my obsession with it before—what need has one for power, nor for anything besides the wind, so clear and sweet-smelling, and the green earth beneath one’s feet?”

She stopped and gazed at the sweep of the land. I noticed that she had missed a spot of ash below her right ear, and that her palms had blisters and scabs she was scratching absently at. “I will take up a small cottage, I think, and live alone, offering this wisdom to any Folk who visit me.”

I mulled this over. Naturally I suspected her vow might originate in practical considerations, not sincerity of feeling—she knew as well as I that the game was up. She had no hideout remaining where she could lurk and scheme, and no allies left in a realm she had tried to ruin, among Folk her magic had poisoned. More materially, she had no control over the Veil; Wendell could return her to it if she so much as spoke the word vengeance. But I decided that it mattered little whether her reformation was genuine; a self-serving motive would work for us just as well, Wendell and me, and I was not above flattering her for it, in the hopes that she would eventually come to believe in her nobility, and grow more zealous in its affectation.

“I have never heard of a monarch abdicating the throne of their own free will,” I lied.[*] “The Folk cling to power and rarely have the strength of character to put the needs of their servants before their own.”

She eyed me, and I reminded myself that she was half human, and thus not so easy to deceive as other Folk. “Or the sense of self-preservation,” I added.

She smiled at that. “Do you not recall our conversation the day we met?” she said. “I am not Folk, and neither am I mortal. I am only myself.”