The Bark Remembers

I did not ask him how many smiths. I was a coward about it for three days, because I had begun to want the answer to be none, and wanting things had never once made them true for me.

Instead we worked. Every evening I went down to the forge and Caelan came with me, because the iron that would have killed any other fae to be near drew him like a moth to the one candle that can burn it. He would stand at the edge of the heat and watch my hands, and we would talk, and I learned the shape of him the way you learn a language you were not taught, by listening for what repeated. He repeated duty. He repeated the tree. He never once said the word I.

On the third night the work went wrong. The fae-silver would not take the iron; it spat and recoiled, and I burned the heel of my hand badly enough that I cursed in good mortal gutter-language and dropped the tongs, and Caelan crossed the space between us before he could stop himself.

He caught my wrist to look at the burn. His bare skin against mine.

I felt him flinch with the contact, the iron-trace in my blood lighting him up like a brand, and I tried to pull away to spare him, and he would not let go. He held on. He held on through the hurt of it, his thumb moving once across the burn on my palm, his silver eyes half-closed, his breath gone ragged and astonished, and I understood that for him the pain and the feeling were the same thing and he had been starving for both. Three hundred years of touching nothing. And here was a soot-stained mortal girl whose hands hurt him, and he was holding them as though they were the first warm thing in a long winter.

"You should let go," I whispered. "I'm hurting you."

"I know," he said, and did not let go, and looked at me as though letting go were the only thing in the world he was not strong enough to do. "It is the most I have felt since before you were born."

I do not know which of us moved. His forehead came down against mine, cool against fevered, and we stood like that over the dying forge, not kissing, which was somehow worse, our breath mixing, his hand wrapped around my burning hand and bearing the burn of it on purpose, and I felt the careful bowl he carried tilt, felt the water of him slop dangerously toward the brim, and I thought: I could be the thing he spills for. The thought terrified me more than the whole of the Thornwild had.

He drew back first. He always would. "There is something you should see," he said, low, "before you decide what I am to you," and I thought, foolish, glowing, that he meant to give me something. He led me out of the forge and through the frost garden to the foot of the Hollowthorn, the great iron-grey tree, and he laid his pale hand against its bark.

"It remembers," he said. "Everything the court spends to keep itself alive, it writes here. Every bargain. Every price. So that we cannot pretend we did not pay it." His voice had gone strange. "I wanted you to see it from me, and not from her."

The bark under his hand was not bark. It was a wall of names. They were carved in the old fae hand, fine as frost-fern, layered a hundred deep, and as my eyes learned to read them my stomach went to water, because they were mortal names, smiths' names, and beside each one a single carved word the same in every line. Spent. Spent. Spent. Forty of them. Fifty. A century of smiths brought across the river to forge for a dying tree, and not one of them carved without that word beside it.

"Caelan," I said. My burned hand had gone numb. "What is this."

"It is what the forging costs," he said, and for the first time since I had met him he could not make himself look at me. "The cure cannot be hammered cold. It must be bound with a life. The smith's life. It always has been. Forty of them, and the tree still dies, because we have been paying the wrong price for a hundred years and were too afraid to learn the right one."

The garden tilted. "You knew," I said. "When you set this mark on me. You knew what the year was for."

He did not answer, because he could not lie, and the truth would have ended me where I stood. And then my eyes found the bottom of the wall, the newest place, the fresh-cut wood still pale and weeping sap, and there, carved in a hand finer and crueler than all the rest, already waiting, already counted among the dead, was a name no one in this court should have known.

Mine. My true name. The one I had never spoken aloud since I crossed the border. Carved into the tree beside a single word that had not finished bleeding.