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I felt an unexpected tightness behind my eyes, picturing the tableau he painted for me. I had been imagining myself all alone in this ice palace, with only my wits between me and eternal enchantment, while they all sat in the tavern as Ulfar’s stew bubbled in the back and the wind whistled through the crack in the windowsill that Aud never got round to patching, debating how best to rescue me. As when I had sobbed over Wendell’s injury, my reaction alarmed me. I can’t recall the last time I cried before coming to Hrafnsvik—likely I had been a small child. I won’t be maudlin, yet I couldn’t help but feel that something inside me had loosened—something small but troublesome, like a pebble caught in a shoe.

“And—and what did you decide?” I said.

“Aud and the others will pay the king a visit on the morrow, during the gift-giving. Mortals have been invited, so the king will lift the veil on his realm temporarily. They will present him and his bride-to-be with a wedding gift containing a poison that will render him senseless. Things will get rather messy after that, but not to worry—we will use the chaos as cover as we flee.”

I sat heavily on the bed, next to my enchanted servant, who dreamed so soundly that she appeared to be drooling. “And this winter will end. Is it bad out there, in Hrafnsvik?”

“Utterly dreadful.” He rolled the faerie out of the way and sat beside me. “It snows all day and night, which is very tedious. My own clothes no longer suffice, so I’ve had to borrow a sealskin cloak of Ulfar’s. I suppose it’s warm enough, and I’ve tailored it adequately, but I cannot get the smell of fish stew out. And then, of course, there are the boots.”

I have no doubt he would have gone on at length about the degradations of his wardrobe had I not interrupted, “But this poison will not kill the king?”

“Hmm? No.” He gave me a smile ill-suited to a discussion of regicide. “Sneaking poison in amongst the gifts was Aud’s idea. We make quite a good team. I tracked down the old queen, who was hiding out in the mountains with her firstborn son. Her allies at court faked her death.”

“You tracked her down?” I repeated faintly.

“Yes. Well, I’ve been looking ever since the king enchanted you during our delightful expedition to his tree-prison.”

“You knew!” I exclaimed.

“Of course I knew. Give me a little credit. Anyway, I thought that the queen might know how to break her former husband’s hold on you, so I went searching for a door to her court. I found one, a narrow, ancient door high on a forgotten peak, which would not open for me, but coincidentally it was the same door she eventually fled through after you freed the king. I guessed she might make use of it then, and indeed, I found her hiding quite nearby.”

“You might have told me you knew I was enchanted,” I snapped. “You might have said something that very night, in fact, when we returned from the tree. Or at any other time—we only spent every day together.”

“What would have been the point? You would only have denied it—the enchantment would have forced you to. I dropped plenty of hints in that blasted journal of yours.”

I thought back to how the enchantment had thwarted me every time I opened my mouth to reveal it, how often I had forgotten that I was enchanted at all. I had to admit he was probably right—well, no, I didn’t have to admit it.

I tightened my hand into a fist. It was swathed in a white glove, cunningly tailored with elaborate folds and bunches to mask the absence of the third finger. It gave its ghost-ache, which was familiar to me by now.

“And what is to be the queen’s role in this?” I said.

“The king will not be worried about her, given that he thinks she was torn apart by wolves, and so she will sneak into the gift-giving ceremony in disguise. Once he has been distracted by the poison, she will kill him, aided and abetted by her allies among the nobility, of whom there are quite a few, though they’ve been temporarily cowed into subservience to their king.”

My mouth was dry. “How?”

He shrugged. “I’ve left that up to their fertile imaginations.”

I lowered my head onto my hands. My mind had stopped whirling since Wendell’s arrival—I wondered if he was doing something to counteract the king’s enchantments—but I still felt too light, as if I might at any moment fade away. “Well, you will never fool me again.”

“What?”

“I will never again believe you to be incapable of hard work.”

He shuddered. “Being capable is not the same as being inclined, Em.”

“Could you free me without killing him?” I said. “Could you imprison him again?”

“No,” he said, after a puzzled pause.

“You can turn back time,” I said, frustrated.

He shook his head. “Your belief in me is flattering. But at my age, most Folk have only begun to grasp the extent of their powers. This king is older than the mountains. And worse, we are in his realm, not mine. What does it matter? Surely you don’t pity him. He will starve everyone in Hrafnsvik, you know, burying them and their fields beneath yards of snow even at the height of summer, if left to his own devices.”

I shook my head slowly. “The old queen and her court will go back to abducting mortals. Aud and the others will once again hear their music calling to them on a winter’s night.”

“I daresay they’re used to that.”

I quickly abandoned this line of argument—it was silly of me to expect him to care about the wickedness of the Folk when his own people are guilty of worse than the Hidden Ones, if the stories are to be believed. I tugged at a loose strand of hair—the servants had secured it with some contraption of ribbons and pins, but it seemed not even faerie magic could tame it. “Did they really plan this—this rescue?”