Cold Iron

The rot took my father's hands first, and a smith without his hands is already half a ghost.

I found him at dawn slumped against the cold forge, his fingers gone grey to the second knuckle, the skin there hard and dull as slag. It had crossed the river in the night the way it crossed everything now, silent, patient, leaving black veins in the wheat and a sweet sick smell over Coldwick that no rain could wash out. My little sister Pearl stood in the doorway with her fists pressed to her mouth, eight years old and already learning the face people make when they are deciding not to cry in front of someone smaller than themselves. I had taught her that face without meaning to. I had been making it my whole life.

Everyone in Coldwick knew where the rot came from. You only had to stand at the edge of the eastern fields at dusk and look at the treeline, where the world stopped being ours and started being theirs, and feel the cold come off it like breath off a winter river. The Thornwild. The fae lands. For a hundred years the cold iron in our walls and our window-latches and the nails of our boots had kept them on their side of the border, and us on ours, and that had been the whole of the arrangement: they did not cross, and we did not ask why the forest never greened.

Now something in the forest was dying, and it was taking us with it.

I did not tell Pearl where I was going. I told her to keep the fire fed and her father warm, and I took the one thing in our house worth carrying into the land of the fae. Not a blade, though I thought about it. A horseshoe nail. Plain cold iron, forged by my own father's hand, still black from the quench. I closed my fist around it until the cold of it bit my palm, and I walked east into the trees, and the iron went with me like a held breath.

The Thornwild did not want me. The cold deepened with every step until it was a hand on the back of my neck, and the trees leaned wrong, and the light went the colour of old silver and stopped behaving like light at all. I walked half a day or half a year, I could not have told you which, and then the forest simply ended and I was standing in a hall that had no walls, only pillars of living thorn and a ceiling of black branches and frost, and at the far end of it, on a chair of woven iron-grey wood, sat the most beautiful thing I had ever been afraid of.

He was tall and too still, pale as the inside of a shell, his hair the white of frost on glass and his eyes the pale exhausted silver of a sky that has not seen the sun in a long time. A crown of black thorns sat low on his brow as though it had grown there. He did not rise. The cold in the hall came off him the way the cold off the treeline came off the whole forest, and I understood, standing there with a horseshoe nail sweating in my fist, that I had walked all the way to the source of it.

"A mortal," he said, and his voice was quiet and unhurried, the voice of someone who had stopped expecting to be surprised by anything centuries ago. "You came through the border carrying iron. Either you are very brave or you have nothing left to lose."

"My town is dying," I said. My voice did not shake, which surprised both of us. "The rot comes from here. From you. I want it stopped."

Something moved behind his eyes, the faintest flicker, the way light moves on the bottom of a deep well. "You want." He said it as though the word were a foreign coin he was turning over. "And what does a smith's daughter from the cold side of the river think she has to bargain with?"

I do not entirely know what made me do it. Perhaps only that I was tired of standing still while everything I loved went grey. I crossed the hall, close enough to see that he was not breathing, and I opened my hand and I pressed the cold iron nail flat against the back of his pale, perfect wrist.

He made a sound I would think about for the rest of my life. Not pain, exactly. A sharp indrawn breath, the breath of a man broken out of a long sleep by a bucket of cold water, and where the iron touched him the skin went red and real and human, and his silver eyes flew wide and fixed on my face as though I had reached into his chest and closed my hand around something he had forgotten he owned. For one held heartbeat neither of us moved. I had meant it as a threat. It had landed as something else entirely, and we both knew it.

"Three hundred years," he said softly, and there was wonder in it, and something darker underneath, "since anything could touch me at all."

He named his price before I could pull away. One year. One year bound to his hall, my hands sworn to his forge, and the rot would be held back from Coldwick the whole length of it; his word, and the fae cannot break a word once given. A year of my life for all the years of everyone I loved. It was no choice at all, which is the only kind of choice the powerful ever offer you.

I said yes. A thread of frost-silver light rose from the floor and wound itself three times around my wrist and sank into the skin like a brand made of cold, and somewhere far behind me I felt the border close like a door, and the Thorn Lord of the Hollowthorn looked at the mark he had set on me and did not look at all like a man who had won.