“King,” said the queen, “of the Oak.”
The taste of victory turned to ash on his tongue. His head shot up before he could even think of restraint. Shock parted his lips. Betrayal burned in his eyes.
The queen gazed down with an expression no less serene for the death sentence she had handed down on his head.
Behind her, just over her left shoulder, the Holly King’s mouth twitched in something almost like a smile.
Shrike wasted a half-second staring at his predestined opponent, then snapped his eyes back to the queen. Still, she appeared unmoved.
“Arise,” she repeated. “My Oak King.”
Shrike staggered upright. All grace had flown from his limbs along with the queen’s favour. His mind reeled. He’d won her tournament. Buckets of blood had spilled beneath his blade and flowed over his hands to prove his strength and fealty. He couldn’t think what he’d done to displease her.
Perhaps, he thought as she smiled her inscrutable smile and cast a considering look over him from the crown of his head to the heels of his boots, he’d pleased her all too well.
The spectators surged forth with a joyous roar. The true feasting began, with servants carrying forth a half-dozen more wine-spewing boars from the bower into the crowd, and the throng tangling all limbs in a frenzied dance to celebrate the harvest.
Shrike withdrew from the queen’s presence with a bow and slipped away in the ensuing chaos. A well-placed knee here and a sharp elbow there carved his path from the centre of the festival to the encroaching forest at its edge.
The illumination of the rising bonfires behind him didn’t reach far into the trees, with their ancient trunks so broad and the undergrowth so thick between them. Shrike drew his sword and hacked his way deeper into the darkness. The dense greenery swallowed the noise of the revels, with only the rustling of new growth creeping up behind him as he went. It didn’t grieve him to leave the celebration behind. He had no time to lick his wounds, much less join the throng.
He had a silver wheel to splinter.
Some minutes or hours after he began striking his own path through the woods, he reached a thicket ringed with pale mushrooms. He wiped his sword clean on the hem of his tunic, then sheathed it before collapsing at the base of an immense oak. Its roots grew as thick around as his own waist and formed a rudimentary throne. Fitting, he thought, as the queen had titled him after the same.
Yet he couldn’t allow himself to wallow in bitterness. Nor could he yield to the siren song of sleep, with the sting of the cut on his cheek and the deep ache of the bruises beneath his armour. Instead, he plucked a silver strand from amidst his black locks, some thirteen inches long, and selected an acorn from the hundreds scattered across the ground. He tied the hair around the stem of the acorn’s cap. Holding his left hand out before him, he dangled the acorn over it, a mere quarter-inch above his palm. He waited until it stopped swaying, stopped spinning, and then waited another moment for absolute stillness.
“I seek that which will allow me to prevail over the Holly King,” Shrike intoned. “His current incarnation and in all his future forms. Where shall I find my quarry?”
The makeshift pendulum shivered on its thread, then began to swing, a hair’s breadth at first, then further and further, rippling outward until its path traced a particular line etched in Shrike’s palm.
Shrike frowned down at it. He clenched his hand into a fist, shook out the pendulum, and tried again.
It traced the same line with renewed vigour.
Shrike broke off the thread and popped the acorn into his mouth. It tasted almost as bitter as the queen’s favour. Chewing it burst open the half-healed wounds in his cheek and lip. As the acorn crunched between his molars, he considered the directions it had given. He would not find his answer in the Court of the Silver Wheel, nor in any of the fae courts.
His quest, it seemed, must take him into the mortal realm.
~
Staple Inn
London, England
23 September, 1844
Fog swirled outside the thick glass panes latticed with leading. Its hue and viscosity looked almost identical to the grey sludge of milk and tea sitting in the chipped cup and mis-matched saucer beside Wren Lofthouse’s inkwell. Every so often the dark speck of a sparrow would dart through the fog, coming perilously near to the window before veering off again. The dark specks of ink-spatter in Wren’s tea never veered off.
Wren gazed down at these specks, and, unable to summon any feeling stronger than resignation, quaffed the whole remained in two gulps, ink and all, before returning to his ledger. On a day like any other spent clerking in Staple Inn, Wren might as well drink ink. It would make no difference. Indeed, it hardly seemed to alter the tea’s flavour one jot. Which, Wren supposed, he could only blame on himself. After all, it’d been he who had brewed it in the copper kettle over the smouldering coals in the hearth.
Another sparrow swooped past the window. Wren glanced up at it, suppressed a jealous twinge, then looked across the law office to the desk opposite where sat the sole other occupant; Mr Ephraim Grigsby, Esquire. Mr Grigsby, a bachelor of some sixty years, had an unfortunate resemblance to an egg balanced on stilts. Still, he bore it up better than Wren bore any of his own burdens. Indeed, he seemed to thrive on the monotony of receiving rents, drawing up and executing wills, and rearranging columns of figures from one ledger to another. His weathered face remained in the same placid attitude as one might see on a gentleman fishing away the afternoon.
Wren, a bachelor of a mere thirty years, felt nothing like the same serenity with his situation and had resolved to take his razor to his throat if he ever drew near it. For the present moment, however, he dipped his pen nib into his inkwell with a sigh.
The muffled silence of the office shattered as the bell rang in the hall.
As if compelled by clockwork mechanism, Wren set aside his pen and rose from his desk to weave his way between bookshelves, cabinets, and stacks of ledgers towards the door at the opposing end of the chamber.
