"Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries"

[fiefoe]

It wasn't a very promising start -- do we really need another bluestocking heroine? But once Bambleby came on the scene, the chemistry between the two leads worked so nicely that I had nary a quibble. Of course Heather Fawcett knows her fairy lore.

• I was among the first to sight the snowbound mountains rising out of the sea, the little red-roofed village of Hrafnsvik huddled below them like Red Riding Hood as the wolf loomed behind her.
• It was such stark country—every detail, from the jumble of brightly painted cottages to the vivid greenery of the coast to the glaciers lurking on the peaks, was so sharp and solitary, like embroidered threads
• but those few stared at me as only rural villagers at the edge of the known world can stare at a stranger.
• The truth is that, for the Folk, stories are everything. Stories are part of them and their world in a fundamental way that mortals have difficulty grasping; a story may be a singular event from the past, but—crucially—it is also a pattern that shapes their behaviour and predicts future events. The Folk have no system of laws, and while I am not saying stories are as law to them, they are the closest thing their world has to some form of order.
• “We get mail deliveries every week.” From the way he said it, he saw this as a source of local pride,
• he kindly demonstrated a particular method of stacking the wood and raking the coals within the fireplace that would ensure a long, continuous release of heat as well as easier re-ignition come morning. I thanked him with perhaps an overabundance of enthusiasm
• tossed the letter back in. It did not catch. The fire coughed smoke, as if the letter were an unpleasant obstacle lodged in its throat.
• If he is Folk, he likely lives among us in exile, a not uncommon fate to befall the aristocracy of the Irish fae—their kind rarely goes without a murderous uncle or power-mad regent for long.
• Sheep eyed me with their characteristic look of incurious anxiety.
• She was a woman of advanced years—so advanced, in fact, that I felt momentarily as if I had never truly known old age.
• two sharp black stones for eyes tucked beneath a ravenskin that it seemed to wear as a sort of cloak, but the skin had been poorly cleaned and the eyes were absent It had all the substance of cobwebs and was both there and not there; viewed from certain angles, it was merely the shadow of a stone, and from others, a live raven.
• I still feel as if I am thinly layered in salt from the voyage north, like a bookshelf that has been left undusted.
• Ah! Away with you, woollen rat!” This last was directed at the sheep,
• The problem with Bambleby, I’ve always found, is that he manages to inspire a strong inclination towards dislike without the satisfaction of empirical evidence to buttress the sentiment.
• It is the way in which his emotions seem to slide through him like water, one giving way to another as abruptly as waves on the shore. This changeability would seem disconcerting or false on a human face, but it is just the way the Folk are made.
• “Ah,” Bambleby said, “the woodshed,” in precisely the same tone I had used upon my arrival. And thus we commenced our partnership.
• “I don’t recall any formal agreement. I recall a great deal of scowling and a few attempts at impugning my character, but that could characterize many of our conversations.”
• I intend to return to as many as possible to attempt to observe the common fae in their native environment. It’s unlikely we shall have a chance to do the same for the courtly fae, given their skill at evading human detection; thus we shall have to base our analysis of their ways and habits on ethnographic interviews with the villagers.
• We had plenty of prayers and sorries when Ari was stolen away, and we’ve had plenty since. Can you help us?”
  “That’s—” I stopped. But something about him made me unafraid to be honest. “That’s not why I’m here. I’ve come to catalogue your Folk for the purpose of science.”
• Though they looked nothing alike, there was a kinship that I could not put my finger on, which was perhaps more absence than feature, a lack of something coarse and mundane that characterizes all mortals.
• I said, adjusting the sleeves of my coat. I had turned it inside out before entering the house, enabling me to see through any illusion the faerie chose to show me.
• The screams that followed were worse than those before, like winter given voice. The faerie seemed to dissolve, becoming a creature of shadow and frost, with eyes that shone like the blue heart of a flame. It is thought that all courtly fae are like this underneath; their humanlike forms are only a guise they assume.
• The Folk are bound by many ancient laws, some of which give mortals a great deal of power over their well-being. Mortal gifts strengthen faeries, be they food or jewels, but clothes have a particular power, in that they help the Folk bind themselves to the mortal world
• the stars a thick glittering above me like a spill of treasure.
• They love music and hold elaborate balls in the wilderness, particularly upon frozen lakes, and if you hear their song drifting on the icy wind, you must stop your ears or burst into song yourself, or be drowned by it and swept insensible into their realm. For they are also hungry.
• Irish Folk are only adapted to dreary rainstorms and the occasional frost.
• And more rainstorms, of course. Do they have other weather in Ireland?”
• He glowered at me from behind his mug—I had made him the chocolate after all. “We cannot all be made of stone and pencil shavings,” he replied.
• I answered honestly. “Intellectual curiosity. I am an explorer, Wendell. I might call myself a scientist, but that is the heart of it. I wish to know the unknowable. To see what no mortal has seen, to—how does Lebel put it? To peel back the carpeting of the world and tumble into the stars.”
• “If something is impossible, you cannot be terrible at it.” My hand tightened briefly on my pen.
  He smiled again. “You are not so terrible, Em. You merely need friends who are dragons like you.”
• The forest has a different quality now, girded with winter. It no longer dozes among its autumn finery like a king in silken bedclothes, but holds itself in tension, watchful and waiting. In moments like that, I am reminded of Gauthier’s writings on woodlands and the nature of their appeal to the Folk. Specifically, the forest as liminal, a “middle-world” as Gauthier puts it, its roots burrowing deep into the earth as their branches yearn for the sky.
• Yes, I felt something—I am no monster. But would I go after them for their sakes alone, if there were no scientific discoveries to be had?
  No. No, I wouldn’t.
  My life has been one long succession of moments in which I have chosen rationality over empathy, to shut away my feelings and strike off on some intellectual quest, and I have never regretted these choices, but rarely have they stared me in the face as bluntly as they did then.
• Your reputation is spotless. No one would believe you would participate in a ruse of this magnitude. Of any magnitude. You will launder my reputation most efficiently.
• It is an intuition I have come to trust, for if you spend enough time studying the Folk, you become aware of how their behaviour follows the ancient warp and weft of stories, and to feel the way that pattern is unfolding before you. The third question is always the most important one.
• Afterwards, he retreated in a moody huff to the tent to shroud himself in the blankets Aud had provided, where he withdrew needle and thread and proceeded to mend minute tears in his cloak, muttering to himself and generally making a picture that was like some bizarre inversion of one of the hags of Fate, weaving the future into their tapestries.
• He seemed unable to enjoy the stark beauty of it all, the wild terror of the mountains, the towering glaciers, the little ribbons of time that clung to the rock in the form of frozen cataracts. The aurora danced above us both nights, green and blue and white undulating together, a cold ocean up there in the sky,
• Lilja came back to herself first. It was a strange thing to watch; as if she’d stepped back into her own eyes after cowering in some dark corner.
• Even though I was looking directly at him, at times it felt as if I were staring right through to the stars and mountains at his back. I could read only mischief in his gaze, which frightened me more than the malevolence I saw in many of the others,
• I have no doubt, my dear Em, that you will be beside yourself with gratitude when you find that I have filled in the next entry in your journal. When I informed you of my intentions, I believe you glared in your sleep, another superpower of yours
• Then I knocked his head off with one well-aimed stroke, nice and clean and hugely satisfying. In fact, I liked it so much that I wound back time and did it again, just to hear the lovely thunk of his head hitting the snow. I had just decided to have a third go at it—for we Folk like things that come in threes, you know—when you roared at me to stop. I turned, and saw that Lilja was being sick in the snow, which distressed me, as I’ve decided that I quite like her. I’m not sure if it was due to the general mess that accompanies decapitation or the fact that mortals are not used to seeing time moved back and forth like the pages in a book, but I felt sorry anyway.
• one of his own notebooks, leather-bound with pages that crinkled smartly and had lavender crumbled into them (of course). To my astonishment, it contained a draft of the abstract and an outline in his irritating handwriting.
• Most of our tenured colleagues rarely require much convincing as to the gullibility of the peasantry. You know that, Em—remember the trouble you had giving co-author credit to that Welsh shepherd for your paper on faerie mounds? Your peer reviewers wouldn’t let it go to print.
• I gazed at him a moment longer. His mourning was a tangible thing that hung in the air. I have never loved a place like he has, and felt its absence as I would a friend’s. But for a moment, I wished I had, and felt this as its own loss.
• She was both like and unlike the Folk I had seen at the winter fair. She was tall and lovely and sharp-edged, and the starlight reflected off her strangely as she moved, like a lake with pebbles dropped into it.
• “Well!” Wendell said after we had returned to the cottage. “What a heartwarming scene! I could get a taste for this philanthropy nonsense.”
• “Shall I make an appointment?” he said, then laughed. “Yes, I believe you would like that. Well, name the time when it would be convenient for you to receive a declaration of love.”
• I almost wish I could be romantic and say it was somehow transformative, but in truth, I barely felt it. But then his eyes came open, and he smiled at me with such innocent happiness that my ridiculous heart gave a leap and would have answered him instantly, if it was the organ in charge of my decision-making.
  “Choose whenever you wish,” he said. “No doubt you will first need to draw up a list of pros and cons, or perhaps a series of bar plots. If you like, I will help you organize them into categories.”
• That pinnacle of faerie scholarship, which I had only weeks ago likened to a museum exhibit of the Folk, neatly pinned down and labelled by the foremost expert on the subject—that is, me—brimming with meticulously documented accounts of foolish mortals who bumbled into faerie plots and games. The irony was rather too keen to appreciate.
• I began by imagining wolves. Yes, there were wolves in the forest—how frightening. And here I was, a defenseless woman, wandering into their depths alone and unprotected. Would it not make sense to carry a weapon, as much sense as it made to don my gloves? Yes, of course it would.
  Slowly, dreamily, I lifted the axe. The blade—oh, God. The blade was sharp. This was a good thing, from a practical standpoint, but it was not possible for me to see it as such in that moment.
• I did it the way Lilja had taught me—fixing my eyes on the target, letting the weight of the axe do the work. My other fingers I folded against the side of the stump, to keep them out of the way. I was half convinced I would miss and drive the axe into my hand—it was not at all the same as aiming for a crack in a log, no matter what I tried to tell myself—but I heard Lilja’s voice in my head, her offhanded good cheer, as if there was nothing in the world more ordinary than what I was doing, and I didn’t hesitate. My aim was true, and suddenly I was gazing at my finger, and it was not at the end of my hand.
• Poe went still. “It was a long time ago,” he said in a hushed voice, “I was only an icicle on a bough[*] then.”
• The useless, ridiculous, button-gathering Word, which I had long valued as a piece of esoteric trivia, a footnote, perhaps, in a paper I had yet to write. Well, footnotes in dryadology are sometimes like the Folk themselves, leaping out at you from nowhere.
  A thrill rushed through me. Looking back, this would have been a very good moment to stop and think through the wisdom of what I was doing, but I was too full of the delight of scholarly discovery (and, I suspect, my own conceit) to stop. I turned to the white tree and spoke the Word.
  And what do you know? A button came sailing out from somewhere among the branches. I caught it and examined it against my palm. It was white and desiccated, like old bone, shedding a fine powder against my skin, with an acorn carved into one side. The button began to melt against my palm, and I dropped it into the snow. The tree had given a shudder when the button came free, but now it was still once more... All told, I spoke the Word nine times, and as the ninth button sailed free, the trunk of the white tree split open like the front of a cloak,
• Kindness. Generosity. Forgiveness.” He winced. “I admit, I struggle with these things myself. Even now, I am filled with a desire to visit many vengeances upon the ones who put me in that tree, including my first wife, whose blood I would very much like to feed to my wolves, cup by cup. But—” He gave me a smile that lit up his entire face. “—I will resist.
• I didn’t watch only the castle as it reared up out of nothing—I also watched the king, terrified and fascinated. When he is not speaking or moving, he becomes perfectly still. I mean that—perfectly. I speculate that, in those moments, he returns to what he is, a piece of winter given form. It is the same stillness one finds in a frozen lake or trees weighted by heavy snow.
• The heads do not bleed—I am spared that, at least—but they do melt, which might sound easier to bear the sight of, but should you ever witness a corpse whose nose or eyes have simply melted away, you will know what nonsense that is.
• “Why?” His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You rescued three of their children—and scores more will be spared, no doubt, now that the changeling has been cast out.”
  “I also freed a faerie king who is perfectly content to doom them to eternal winter.”
• I looked down at myself, at my ridiculous dress. “I wanted to understand the story. I suppose I thought about helping Aud and the others, but I won’t lie and say that I didn’t think about science first. They should not be risking their lives to help me.”
  “Emily, Emily,” he said. “I’m positively astonished you decided to help these people, whether they came second, third, or fourteenth in your mind.
• “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.”
• The plan Wendell had devised with the others felt like taking the story I’d fallen into and folding it to suit me, putting ugly creases down the middle. And yet, as much as I was convinced that there was another door out of the tale somewhere, I couldn’t  see it.
• My fingers white against the glass, I took a sip, and as I did so, I brushed my hair back. A habitual gesture, to keep it out of the drink—my hair, of course, is forever flopping all over the place. But I also brushed the veil Wendell had made for me, loosening a single pearl. The pearl landed in the wine with an insubstantial splash, and dissolved.
  I should have felt relief. That was it—my part was done. I had only to pass the poisoned wine to my betrothed.
• Yet in that moment I knew—I knew—that if I went through with our plot, it would be to the ruin of us all. I had no evidence to support this, and yet the conviction had its roots in reason, somehow; not in anything specific, but in my accumulated knowledge of the Folk, the resonance of hundreds of stories. This murder was discordant; a snapped string.
• “Forgive me, Your Highness,” Aud said with her usual cool calm. “But as Her Highness moved the glass into the light, I noticed that the wine had turned an odd colour—I know our vintage well. I believe the glass itself was lined with poison. No doubt a foul plot hatched by allies of the former queen.”
• Aud gave me a brief, sharp look, and I collapsed back into my throne, still staring at her. She hadn’t understood my hesitation—I could see that written plainly on her face. But far from thinking me mad, she had trusted me wholeheartedly, and she had acted, twisting the story into a new shape.
• I recall Wendell swearing in Irish and Faie as he tried to disentangle me; though we’d made it out of the palace, scraps of enchantment still clung to me like the broken filaments of a spiderweb. I don’t remember the others being there at all, and later Aslaug told me that Wendell would appear and disappear, leading them through the mortal realm as he gradually drew me out of the faerie one. I suppose they walked alongside me the whole time, a world away.
• The villagers shuffled back a little. They’d all accepted that this strange, grey faerie was the dashing Wendell Bambleby, but that didn’t make them any less frightened of him, even though the face he wore now was far less intimidating than his old, painfully handsome one.
  As for myself, I barely noticed the difference. I’d never had any use for his beauty, and he was unchanged in every other respect, including his ability to antagonize—he’d tailored all of my dresses whilst I was trapped in Faerie.
• Perhaps it is always restful to be around someone who does not expect anything from you beyond what is in your nature.
• One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.
• I knew you wouldn’t believe it. Just because you have a heart filled with the dust of a thousand library stacks does not mean everybody does.
• I say half, because I was mostly just watching you, observing the way your mind clicks and whirrs like some fantastical clock. Truly, I have never met anyone with a better understanding of our nature, and that anyone includes the Folk. I suppose that's partly why--- Ah, but you really would kill me if I desecrated your scientific vessel with the end of that sentence.
• The next time I took notice of you, you were sobbing all over the snow. Well, I thought, finally she's being sensible. Then I realized that you were sobbing because you'd stabbed yourself in the arm, and not out of concern for my imminent demise. I noticed that your tears were freezing as they hit the icy ground and collecting into the shape of a sword. <> Well, that almost killed me.
• "Do you know that there are men and women who would hand over their firstborns to have their wardrobes tended by a king of Faerie?" he said, calmly snipping a thread. "Back home, every courtier wanted a few moments of my time."