The Hall of Thorns

They gave me a room with no door I could lock and a window that looked out on a garden where nothing had bloomed in a century, and a pale girl with a deer's wary eyes brought me a gown the colour of frost and would not speak to me.

There were rules. The Thorn Lord told me himself, that first night, walking me through halls that breathed cold, his hands clasped behind his back so they would come nowhere near mine. Do not eat the food of the court, or I would forget the taste of mortal bread and never be able to leave. Do not dance, if the court danced, for it would not stop when I wished to. And above all, never, to anyone, in jest or in terror, speak my true name aloud, because in the Thornwild a name freely given was a leash freely handed over, and there were those here who collected them.

"And you?" I asked. "Do you have my name?"

"I have your word and your year," he said. "I do not take what is not offered. It is the one virtue I have left, and I keep it because it is rare here, not because I am good." He said it flatly, a fact about the weather. I was learning that he never lied. None of them could. It made the things he did not say very loud.

His name, the court's name for him, was Caelan. He had ruled the Hollowthorn for three hundred years and he ruled it the way you'd carry a cracked bowl full of water across a long room, every movement careful, every word measured, nothing spilled. I had expected cruelty. What I found was worse, in its way: a tiredness so deep it had worn a groove in him, the tiredness of a man who had spent centuries spending things, coin and seasons and people, to keep one dying thing alive a little longer.

The dying thing had a name too. At the black heart of the court grew the Hollowthorn itself, a tree taller than any cathedral, its bark the grey of beaten iron, and it was the root the whole court was tied to, the tether that held the fae to the living world. It was rotting from the inside. I had felt the rot in my father's hands; here was its other end, and it was vast, and it was old, and it was losing.

I was not the only one who watched Caelan carry his cracked bowl. On the second day I met the Dowager. Lady Sorrel had ruled the court before him and had never entirely stopped; she was small and silver and lovely and she smiled at me the way a frost smiles at a late flower. She circled me once, slow, and breathed in as though she could smell the iron in my blood.

"So this is the smith," she said. "How thin she is. How quickly we will have to begin." And to Caelan, sweet as rot: "You waste the daylight you do not have, nephew. The tree will not wait on your tenderness."

"She has only just come," he said.

"They always have only just come," said Lady Sorrel, and smiled, and left, and the word always sat in the cold air long after she was gone, and I did not understand it yet, and I should have.

What I did understand was the forge. They had built me one in the lowest hall, fae-silver and cold-iron tools laid out for hands that could not bear to hold them, and Caelan brought me down to it that evening and showed me the work. The cure for the tree, if there was one, had to be forged: a thing of cold iron and fae-silver fused together, two substances that hated each other the way fire hates water, bound into one by a smith's hands and a smith's will. No fae could make it; the iron would kill them to touch it. Only a mortal born to the anvil could.

"My father is a better smith than I will ever be," I said, turning a fae-silver ingot in the firelight, watching it drink the flame and give nothing back.

"Your father could not hold cold iron and fae-silver in the same fist and live," Caelan said. "You can. It is rarer than you know. It is why the bargain found you and not him."

I should have heard the weight in live. I was too busy watching his face in the forge-light, the way the warmth of the fire made him look almost mortal, almost reachable, the way three hundred years fell off him when he forgot to hold them. He caught me looking. For once he did not look away.

"You are not afraid of me," he said, as though it were a riddle he could not solve.

"I'm too tired to be afraid of anything," I said. "I've been holding my whole house up since I was twelve. You're just one more cold thing I have to keep alive." It came out harder than I meant. He laughed, a short startled sound that I do not think he had made in a long time, and the sound of it did something dangerous to me, low in the chest, that I told myself was only the heat of the forge.

That night the deer-eyed girl finally spoke to me. Only four words, whispered, before she fled. "Ask him," she said, "how many smiths."