Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries recap

Emily Wilde, a Cambridge dryadologist compiling the first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faeries, spends the winter of 1909 in Hrafnsvik, a remote village in the northern country of Ljosland, to document the one class of Folk her book still lacks. Brilliant at research and hopeless at people, she alienates most of the village within a week, is rescued from her own impracticality by the villagers' patience, and cultivates a small local faerie named Poe as a source. Her Cambridge rival Wendell Bambleby arrives uninvited and charms everyone effortlessly, confirming Emily's long-held suspicion that he is not human but an exiled faerie king. Investigating Hrafnsvik's losses to the courtly Folk, Emily goes further into their territory than any scholar has, and uses her knowledge of how faerie stories work to recover the villagers who had been taken and end the threat the village has lived under for generations. Her encyclopaedia is completed, the village adopts her, and Bambleby, no longer hiding what he is, asks her to marry him. She gives no answer, and they return to Cambridge with his exile unresolved.

Emily Wilde, a Cambridge dryadologist, arrives in October 1909 at Hrafnsvik, a small village on the northern island country of Ljosland, with her dog Shadow and a plan to spend the winter documenting the local Folk for the encyclopaedia of faeries she has spent years assembling. Ljosland's courtly faeries are found nowhere else and the entry on them is the last gap in her book. The practical side of the expedition goes wrong immediately: the cottage arranged for her is cold and half-provisioned, she cannot manage the stove or the firewood, and her host, a farmer named Krystjan Egilson, plainly regards her as an imposition. Her manner offends much of the village within days. Aud, who effectively speaks for Hrafnsvik, takes over the management of the relationship, and Emily begins collecting the villagers' accounts of the Folk and of the strict local rules for living alongside them.

Emily's fieldwork settles into a routine of interviews in the village, expeditions into the surrounding country, and close observation of the small common faeries near her cottage, including one she names Poe, whom she cultivates with offerings until he becomes a genuine source. She learns how much Hrafnsvik has lost to the Folk over the years and how seriously its precautions are taken by people who do not regard them as folklore. Then Wendell Bambleby, her Cambridge colleague and academic rival, arrives uninvited, comfortable, elegantly dressed and instantly popular with everyone Emily has been struggling to get on with. Her private suspicion about him, that he is not a human scholar at all but one of the Folk living in exile, hardens as she watches him in a place where the Folk are close at hand.

Working with and around Bambleby, Emily gets closer to Ljosland's courtly Folk than any scholar before her and closer than the village considers remotely wise. She establishes that Hrafnsvik's losses are not old history: people have been taken within living memory, and at least one who came back did not come back as themselves. Emily approaches this as a scholar. The traditional tales are data, and the rules inside them describe how the Folk can be bound, bargained with and outmanoeuvred, so she begins using what she knows on the village's behalf rather than only recording it. Her running observations of Bambleby accumulate at the same time, and in a country where the Folk are close at hand he grows steadily less careful about what he lets her see.

Emily's involvement with the courtly Folk becomes direct and dangerous. She crosses into their territory, where the ordinary rules of distance and time do not hold, in order to recover what has been taken from Hrafnsvik, and finds the king who rules Ljosland's Folk at the centre of the village's long misfortune. Her one advantage is that she knows the shape of the stories these beings live inside better than they expect a mortal to, and she plays it deliberately. Bambleby, meanwhile, stops troubling to hide from Emily what she had already concluded he was. He is one of the Folk himself, an exiled faerie king; his exile was not chosen, his stepmother holds his kingdom, and she has no intention of letting him survive to take it back.

Emily brings the confrontation with Ljosland's Folk to a conclusion, recovering the villagers who had been taken and ending the danger that had shaped Hrafnsvik for generations. The village that began by resenting her ends by counting her as one of its own, and her encyclopaedia, the work of years, is finally complete. Bambleby, no longer pretending to be anything other than what he is, asks Emily to marry him. She neither accepts nor refuses and the proposal is left open. They return to Cambridge with his situation entirely unresolved: he is still exiled, still cut off from his own realm, and still within reach of the people his stepmother sends after him, and finding a way back into his kingdom is the problem the next book takes up.

Emily brings her involvement with the courtly Folk of Ljosland to a conclusion, recovering what had been taken from Hrafnsvik and ending the danger that had shaped the village's life for generations. Her method throughout is scholarly rather than heroic: she knows the shape of the stories these beings live inside better than they expect a mortal to, and she uses the rules within them. The village that began by resenting her ends by treating her as one of its own, and her encyclopaedia, the work of years, is finished. Wendell Bambleby stops pretending to be a human academic: he is an exiled faerie king, driven out of his own realm by his stepmother, who holds it and has no intention of letting him live to reclaim it. He asks Emily to marry him. She neither accepts nor refuses, and the proposal is left standing. They return to Cambridge together with nothing about his position resolved. He is still exiled, still unable to reach his own realm, and still within reach of the people his stepmother sends, and Emily now has a personal stake in a problem she previously regarded as a fascinating case study. That exile, and the question of whether a door back into his kingdom can be found at all, is what the next book takes up.