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“I must speak with you,” I said, stumbling a little over my words—I was inexpressibly weary by that point.

Wendell stopped midsentence, gazing at me with surprise that shifted almost instantly into guilt. He waved the courtiers away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leading me out of the room. “I should have known you would find all that tedious.”

“You need not apologize,” I said, smiling at the earnestness in his expression. A lightness overcame me; I felt as if I would never stop smiling. “I would have preferred not to drag you away from the party. I know you wish to celebrate your stepmother’s defeat, but—”

“What?” Wendell said, staring at me. The butterflies and other crawling things had abandoned his hair, thankfully, though several spiderwebs remained, which made an odd contrast with the silvered roses two of the servants had added to the golden waves. “Do you think that is why I am in such a good mood? Oh, Em.”

“Your brush with death, then,” I said. “I don’t wish to imply that I was little affected by it, that I was confident all along that it was impermanent. I was not. I have never felt—” I was unable to finish the sentence, and I realized abruptly that I was shivering again, despite the warmth of the castle. “But Wendell, there is something not right in all this—”

“My brush with death!” Wendell said, with nothing more than exasperation in his voice, as if he were resurrected at least once a season. “Emily, Emily. Do you not know the main reason I am so happy? We were married not long ago—a mere hour or two, to my recollection. Or did you forget?”

I stared at him for a long moment.

“I’m afraid I did,” I said at last.

He began to laugh. It went on so long that he had to lean against the wall, wiping at his eyes.

“There was rather a lot to distract me!” I said hotly.

He eventually recovered, though his face was still red, and the roses had become tangled in his hair. “Might I suggest a different form of distraction?”

I gave a soft laugh. My thoughts were in disarray. I wanted to argue with him; I wanted to touch him again, to assure myself once more that he was real. I needed to think. But then he smiled at me in such a way that I found myself saying, “I have no objection.”

I allowed him to lead me away from the party and halfway up the stairs before the nagging voice grew too insistent and I pulled him to a stop. He turned to look at me with a question in his eyes.

“You must pull your stepmother out,” I said. “What you did to her—it is all wrong.”

“Wrong?” Wendell looked baffled. “Em, she would have torn the realm to pieces. She nearly killed you on that island!”

“I don’t mean that,” I said. “She deserves the fate you have given her. But the story is wrong.”

The words sounded hollow—I knew they were true, but I did not know why yet, and how could I explain it to him, when I could not explain it to myself? Still, though, he waited patiently for me to finish.

“Don’t you trust me?” I demanded at last, frustrated.

At that, his expression grew solemn. “Naturally I do. If you believe some misfortune will befall me because I was too harsh with my stepmother, then I will expect it. But Em, I cannot—I will not—watch her poison these lands again. Nor will I watch her threaten you, which she has done now on two occasions. I will suffer whatever fate awaits me to avoid putting you in danger again, and when that fate arrives, my only regret will be that I did not savour her defeat longer. I wish I could watch her now, stumbling about in that accursed place.”

His expression was dark, an echo of his former fury, implacable as a storm. I knew, in that moment, that I would never convince him.

—

I rose early in the morning, long before the sunrise. I watched Wendell sleep for a moment—he had burrowed himself into the blankets as usual, so that only half his face was visible. I brushed the hair out of his eyes—I doubted he would awaken anytime soon, given that he had more than made good on his promise to provide me with a distraction. The clothes we had worn were scattered all about the room, and my mouth felt bruised, but pleasantly so.

I kissed his temple, then I rose, bathed quickly in the ever-full and steaming tub, and packed a bag. I put in it my books, my journal, the draft of my manuscript. An ordinary dress, none of the faerie-made gewgaws.

I motioned to Shadow, and he bestirred himself from the rug at the foot of the bed. Orga, who lay in a nest of quilt beside Wendell’s head, gave a low hiss.

“Ungrateful wretch,” I muttered. The cat only glared at me, as at home in her hostility as ever a cat can be. I had thought we were making progress in our relationship, but losing Wendell seemed only to have cemented his place at the centre of her universe, a dynamic that admitted no interlopers. When it was clear to her that I was merely going to leave, not attempt to drag him along on some new misadventure, she put her head back down, dismissing me from her consideration.

I was not so lucky with Razkarden, however. I had not known he was perched just outside the window, which was open a crack, among the boughs of the weeping rowan, but a flicker of movement alerted me. We regarded each other for a long moment, during which I felt transfixed by his ancient, haunted gaze. I swallowed uncomfortably, for surely he read treachery in my stealth and would give me away, waking Wendell. But he did not, only watched me, and after another moment, I resumed packing. He kept as silent as I, rustling not one feather.

I paused to leave Wendell a note. I wrote only that I needed to spend time with my books—alone.

Then I left the castle, and then I left Faerie.

When I stepped into the mist of Corbann, I let out a sigh. Not precisely a sigh of relief, for I was still greatly troubled in my mind, but one of recognition. The Folk were not of this world, they could only impinge upon it. Here, their ways and perils were not so immediate, and more easily muffled behind layers of scholarly theories.