An Enchantment of Ravens Page 2

  He brightened so much I feared all my efforts were in vain. “Does that mean you’re going to recommend me?”

  “Maybe, but not Swallowtail. Don’t trade with him until you’ve learned their habits.” Chewing on the inside of my cheek, I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a man emerging from Firth & Maester’s. Gadfly. Of course that was where he would have gone for his embroidery. Though I must have been nearly invisible standing inside the dark shop across the way, he looked unerringly toward me, beamed, and raised a hand in greeting. Everyone on the street—including the gaggle of young women who’d been waiting for him outside—eagerly craned their necks to find out who was important enough to merit his attention.

  “He will do,” I declared. I placed my coins on the counter and shouldered my satchel, avoiding the new heights of elation dawning on Phineas’s face. “Gadfly is my most esteemed patron, and he enjoys being the first to discover new Craft. Your odds are best with him.”

  I meant that in more ways than one. Phineas would be safest with Gadfly. Had I not dealt with him first at the tender age of twelve, even with Emma’s help, I likely wouldn’t have lived to see my seventeenth birthday. Even then, I still couldn’t shake the feeling I was doing Phineas a double-edged favor, granting him a dearest wish that was bound to either destroy or disappoint him in the end. Guilt chased me toward the door without a word of good-bye. But with my hand on the knob, I froze.

  A painting hung on the wall beside the entry. Faded with age, it depicted a man standing on a knoll surrounded by oddly colored trees. His face was obscured, but he held a sword that glinted brightly even in the gray light. Pale hounds swarmed up the knoll toward him, suspended in midleap. The hair stood up on my arms. I knew this figure. He was a popular subject of paintings done over three hundred years ago, when he stopped visiting Whimsy without explanation. In every remaining work he was always standing in the distance, always battling the Wild Hunt.

  Tomorrow, he’d be sitting in my parlor.

  I shoved the door open, curtsied to Gadfly, and hurried through the throng of curious bystanders with my head down. Exclamations followed in my wake. Someone called my name, perhaps hoping for the same favor as Phineas. Now that Emma had said it, I saw the truth written all over everyone. They were watching, waiting for me to accept an invitation I would rather die than spend half a second considering. I could never explain to any of them that to me, the Green Well’s reward wasn’t heaven. It was hell.

  The sun hung low in the sky as I made my way home. My shoes tapped along the path through a wheat field to the rhythmic buzzing of grasshoppers, and the light’s steep angle intensified the summer heat until the back of my neck grew sticky with sweat, cool every time the breeze blew my hair aside. The town’s crooked, brightly painted rooftops descended out of sight behind me, concealed by rolling hills my narrow path split like the part in a woman’s hair. If I walked quickly, I could make it back in precisely thirty-two minutes.

  It was always summer in Whimsy. Here the seasons didn’t change according to the passage of time as they did in the World Beyond, an idea I could barely fathom. While I walked my walk that never changed, the painting’s oddly colored trees haunted me like a recent dream. Autumn was to all accounts a dreary time, a withering of the world when birds vanished and the leaves discolored and fell from their branches as though dying. Surely what we had was better. Safer. Endlessly blue skies and eternally golden wheat might be boring, but I told myself, not for the first time, that it was foolish to long for anything else. A person could suffer worse things than being bored—and in the World Beyond, they did.

  A whiff of decay jogged me from my frustrated thoughts. This part of the path wove near the forest’s edge, and I cast a wary glance into its shadows. Dense honeysuckles and briars flourished like a barrier beneath the branches. In days long past, during the less friendly time before iron was outlawed, farmers had risked their lives driving iron nails into the outermost trees to ward off fairy wickedness. The sight of the old, bent nails, rusted and twisted almost beyond recognition, always gave me a prickle of unease.

  Sweeping my gaze across the undergrowth again, I saw nothing amiss. No doubt I was being paranoid about a dead squirrel rotting somewhere nearby. Reluctantly reassured, I checked my satchel for the fourth or fifth time just to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind at the store—an odd habit of mine, as I never made such mistakes. When I looked up, something was wrong. A creature stood on the rise of the next hill, beside the lone oak that marked the halfway point home.

  My first thought was that it was a stag. A tremendously big one, but it was the right shape, more or less: four legs, two antlers. Then it turned to look in my direction, and right away I understood it wasn’t.

  Just like that the wrongness spread. The breeze dropped away, and the air grew still and oppressively hot. The birds stopped singing, the grasshoppers stopped buzzing, and even the wheat drooped in the stagnant air. The stench of decay grew overwhelming. I dropped down to my hands and knees, but it was too late.

  The not-a-stag stood watching me.

  Despite the heat, a fever chill shivered over my skin and crystallized in my stomach. I knew what it was, this not-a-stag. I also knew I was dead. No one could run or hide from a fairy beast. This creature had risen from a barrow mound, a grotesque union of fairy magic and ancient human remains. Some acted as servants and guards to their masters. Others crept from the earth unbidden. One such monster killed my mother and father when I was a little girl, so terribly Emma hadn’t let me see their bodies, and I was going to die the same way. I don’t think my mind could quite process this, because my next thought was that I shouldn’t have wasted money buying pigments; I was never going to use them now.

  The fairy beast lowered its head and bellowed across the field, a deep, rousing, and putrid sound, as though someone had blown into an ancient, once-exquisite hunting horn stuffed full of rotting moss. It swung its heavy body around, antlers first, and sprang down the hill.

  I lunged from my crouch and ran. Not toward the safety of my house half a mile in the distance, but away from it, into the field. If I was going to do anything of value in my last moments alive, I might as well try to lead the thing as far away from my family as I could manage.

  The wheat parted around my hiked-up skirts. Stems crunched beneath my boots, and prickly seed heads scratched welts across my bare arms as they whipped past. My satchel bounced against the backs of my thighs, cumbersome, slowing me down. Grasshoppers shot out of the way as if flicked from the field by an invisible hand. At first I heard nothing but the rasping of my own breath. None of it felt real. I might as well have been running through a field for the fun of it, on a lovely day beneath a flawless blue sky.

  Then a shadow’s coolness touched my sweaty back, and darkness enveloped me. The wheat thrashed like waves in a storm-tossed ocean. A hoof slammed down beside me, burying itself deep in the soil. I threw myself backward, stumbled, and fell, floundering among the shafts. The fairy beast loomed over me.

  A proud stag’s guise rippled over it like the reflection of sun on water. In the dark spaces between the illusion lay a skeletal form of decomposing bark held together by vines that shifted like tendons, a hollowed skull-like face, antlers that were not truly antlers but instead a pair of crooked branches wound tight with thorny briars, each one as long as a man was tall. A sickness lay over it; as it snorted and raised a quivering leg, bark sloughed away and tumbled across the ground. Shiny beetles swarmed out of the pieces, skittering over my stockings as they fled in every direction. I retched at the taste of rot coating the inside of my mouth.

  The fairy beast reared up, blocking out the sun. I thought my last sight on earth was going to be the constellation of maggots weaving in and out of its belly. Therefore I wasn’t certain how to react when the monster simply collapsed in front of me into a soft, tumbling heap of worm-eaten wood. Centipedes longer than my hand spooled out into the grass. Two huge, spotted moths took wing. The gras
shoppers began buzzing again right away as though nothing had happened, but still I lay clammy and trembling on the ground, blood pounding in my ears. With a repulsed cry, I kicked at the pile. Bone fragments scattered along with the bark. The human corpse that gave it life had been destroyed.

  “I’ve been tracking that beast for two days, and I might not have caught up to it if you hadn’t drawn its attention,” said a warm, lively voice. “It’s called a thane, in case you’re interested.”

  My gaze snapped up from the fairy beast’s remains. A man stood before me, so eclipsed by the sun I couldn’t make out his features, only that he was tall and slender and in the process of sheathing a sword.

  “Drawn its—” I stopped, baffled and more than a little offended. He spoke as if this were sport, as though my life mattered not at all; which of course told me everything I needed to know. This figure might look like a man, but he wasn’t one.

  “Thank you,” I backtracked, choking down my protests. “You’ve saved my life.”

  “Have I? From the thane? I suppose I have. In that case, you’re most welcome—oh. I don’t know your name.”

  A frisson of unease rattled me like a thunderclap in the dead of night. He didn’t recognize me, which meant he didn’t visit Whimsy often, if at all. Whoever he was, he was bound to be more dangerous than the fair folk I normally dealt with. And like all of his species he couldn’t resist seeking my true name. I paused, evaluating my mind and senses, and came to the relieved conclusion that he hadn’t put me under a malicious charm, one that might make me speak more freely or reveal secrets I ought not. Because no one used their birth name in Whimsy. To do so would be to expose oneself to ensorcellment, by which a fair one could control a mortal in body and soul, forever, without their ever knowing—merely through the power of that single, secret word. It was the most wicked form of fairy magic, and the most feared.

  “Isobel,” I supplied, scrambling to my feet. I dropped him a curtsy.

  If he realized I’d given him my false name, he showed no sign. He stepped right over the pile in one long-legged stride, bowed deeply, and took my hand in his. He raised it, and kissed it. I hid a frown. Supposing he had to touch me, I rather wished he’d helped me up instead.

  “You’re most welcome, Isobel,” he said.

  His lips were cool against my knuckles. With his head ducked before me I only saw his hair, which was unruly—wavy, not quite curly, and dark, with just the slightest red tint in the sun. Its fierce unkemptness reminded me of a hawk’s or raven’s feathers blown the wrong way in a strong wind. And like Gadfly, I could smell him: the spice of crisp dry leaves, of cool nights under a clear moon, a wildness, a longing. My heart hammered from terror of the fairy beast and the equal danger of meeting a fair one alone in a field. Therefore I beg you to excuse my foolishness when I say that suddenly, I wanted that smell more than anything I had ever wanted before. I wanted it with a terrifying thirst. Not him, exactly, but rather whatever great, mysterious change it represented—a promise that somewhere, the world was different.

  Well, that simply wouldn’t do. I hoisted my annoyance back up like a flag on a mast. “I’ve never known a kiss on the hand to last so long, sir.”

  He straightened. “Nothing seems long to a fair one,” he replied with a half-smile.

  By my reckoning he looked a year or two my elder, though of course his real age might have been more than a hundred times that count. He had fine, aristocratic features at odds with his unruly hair, and an expressive mouth I instantly wanted to paint. The shadows at the corners of his lips, the faint crease on one side, where his smile became crooked—

  “I said,” he remarked, “nothing seems long to a fair one.”

  I looked up to find him staring at me in perplexed fascination with the smile still frozen on his face. There was his flaw: the color of his eyes, a peculiar shade of amethyst, striking against his golden-brown complexion, which put me in mind of late-afternoon sunlight dappling fallen leaves. His eyes instantly bothered me for a reason other than their unusual hue, but try as I might I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “Forgive me. I’m a portrait artist, and I have a habit of looking at people and forgetting about everything else while I’m doing it. I did hear what you said. I just don’t have an answer.”

  The fair one’s gaze flicked down to my satchel. When he returned his attention to me his smile had faded. “Of course. I imagine our lives are beyond human comprehension, for the most part.”

  “Do you know why the thane came out of the forest into Whimsy, sir?” I asked, because I got the sense he was waiting for some sort of validation regarding his mysteriousness, and I wanted to keep the conversation both short and practical. Fairy beasts were rarely glimpsed here, and its presence was beyond troubling.

  “This I cannot say. Perhaps the Wild Hunt flushed it out, perhaps it merely felt like wandering. There have been more of them about lately, and they’re causing an awful mess.”

  “Lately” could mean anything to a fair one, my parents’ deaths included. “Yes, dead humans do tend to be messy.”

  His eyebrows shifted minutely, creating a furrow in the middle, and his gaze sharpened to scrutiny. He knew he’d upset me somehow, but in typical fair folk fashion wasn’t able to divine why. He was no more able to understand the sorrow of a human’s death than a fox might mourn the killing of a mouse.

  One thing I knew for certain: I didn’t want to linger long enough for him to decide that his confusion offended him and the cause of it deserved revenge in the form of a nasty enchantment.

  I ducked my head and curtsied again. “Whimsy’s people are grateful for your protection. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me today. Good day, sir.”

  I waited until he’d bowed again before I turned back toward the path.

  “Wait,” he said.

  I froze.

  Behind me, the sound of wheat shifting. “I said something wrong. I apologize.”

  Slowly I looked over my shoulder to find him watching me, looking oddly uncertain. I had no idea what to make of it. Fair folk were known to extend apologies on occasion—they valued good manners highly—but most of the time they followed a double standard according to which they expected humans to be the polite ones, while doing everything in their power to avoid acknowledging their own misbehavior. I was flabbergasted.

  So I said the only thing that came to mind: “I accept your apology.”

  “Oh, good.” His half-smile reappeared, and in an instant he went from looking uncertain to looking quite pleased with himself. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then, Isobel.”

  I’d already started walking by the time his words sank in and I realized what they meant. I whirled around again, but the fair one, who could be none other than the autumn prince, was gone: wheat swayed around the empty path, and the only sign of life in the entire field was a single raven winging away toward the forest, with a red sheen on its feathers where they caught the fading light.

  Three

  I STILL had no idea when the prince might arrive, and with my aunt in town making a house call, the responsibility of emptying our kitchen of goat children fell to me. Easier said than done.

  “He called our names weird!” May shrieked, while March sobbed silently next to the stove. Never had I loathed the baker’s boy more, though truth be told he was quite nice, and he did have a point.

  I squatted down and took them both by the shoulders. “Well, when Aunt Emma and I named you,” I said reasonably, “you were goats. You were already familiar with March and May by then, and we weren’t certain whether the enchantment would last, so we decided not to make changes.”

  March gave a strangled sob. I needed a different tactic. “Listen, I have an important question. What are your favorite things?”

  “Scaring people,” said May, after a moment of thought.

  March opened her mouth and pointed into it.

  Oh, god. “Those things are weird, aren’t they?”

&n
bsp; May eyed me warily. “Maybe . . .”

  “Yes, they’re definitely weird,” I said in a firm voice. “So weird isn’t really bad, is it? It’s good, like scaring people or eating salamanders. Harold was paying you a compliment.”

  “Hmmm,” May said. She didn’t look convinced. But at least March had stopped crying, so for my sanity’s sake I declared this round a partial victory.

  “Now, come on. The two of you need to play outside until our guest leaves. Remember, don’t go past the edge of the wheat field.” As I pushed them toward the door a slimy coil of unease stirred in my stomach. If another fairy beast emerged from the forest . . .

  Such events were extraordinarily rare, and I couldn’t forget how easily the prince had dispatched the monster yesterday. Surely we were safe with him visiting. But the uneasiness wouldn’t pass, and I added: “If you hear the grasshoppers go quiet, come back to the house right away.”

  May peered up at me with her eyebrows bunched in suspicion. “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “Why can’t we just play in the house?”

  I propelled them down the stoop while our rickety kitchen door banged shut behind us. I noted with relief that it looked perfectly normal outside. The chickens muttered to themselves as they stalked across the yard, the trees rippled in a lively breeze, and shadows raced over the rolling hills. Yet May kept staring at me. I realized my stomach was still clenched tight as a fist and it must show on my face.

  “You already know the reason,” I said briskly, stomping down my guilt.