The Hollow Nine
Ros
The stones were taller in the dark.
I had measured them once, in daylight, when I was nineteen and furious and determined to prove there was nothing on Carn Hollow but granite and lichen. Nine stones in a ring thirty-one metres across. The tallest two point four metres, the shortest barely past my hip. Xanthoria parietina crusting the south faces in orange coins, Lecanora grey on the north, a tuft of sea campion wedged in the crack of the fifth stone like somebody had tucked a flower behind its ear. I had written it all down in a field notebook and gone home and told my grandmother’s empty chair that there was nothing up there. Nothing at all.
At ten minutes to midnight on the twenty-eighth of October, with the wind coming off the Atlantic hard enough to make my eyes stream, the Hollow Nine were something else.
They were listening.
I stood outside the ring with my torch pointed at the turf and my grandmother’s notebook buttoned inside my coat, and I tried very hard to be the woman who had written that field report. Twenty-eight years old. A doctorate in plant pathology. A job at Trevennick Gardens that involved microscopes and grant applications and precisely zero folklore. I believed in peer review and soil pH and the fact that my brother was dying in a hospital bed in Truro because his body had simply decided, at thirty-one, to stop.
My phone buzzed against my hip. I didn’t look. I knew what it would say. Mum had texted at nine: He asked for you. And then at ten: They’ve moved him to the side room. Everyone knew what the side room meant. It meant the doctors had stopped saying words like treatment and started saying words like comfortable.
Kit had pulled three people out of the sea at Porthenna in the last two years. Kit built boats with his hands and sang badly in the pub and called me Rozzy when he wanted to annoy me, which was always. In June he had gone walking on the moor on Midsummer Eve and come home pale and shivering, and since then he had been fading like a photograph left in a window. Bloods failing. Organs slowing. A haematologist with kind eyes had told me it was like someone turning down a dial, very gently, and nobody could find the hand on it.
I could find the hand on it. That was the trouble. I had stopped being able to not find it.
I unbuttoned my coat and took out the notebook.
It was a cheap thing, oilcloth cover gone soft as skin, and it had belonged to Morwen Ashgrove, my grandmother, who had walked out of her cottage one October when I was twelve and come back a year later with frost in her hair and nothing in her eyes. She had died that spring. In between she had sat by the window and filled this book with drawings of plants that did not exist, and taped into the back cover, under a square of yellowed film, was a single petal.
It had been white for forty years. Not the cream of a pressed rose or the brown of everything else in her herbarium. Silver-white, and faintly, impossibly cool to the touch, and when I’d put it under a microscope at work, alone at two in the morning, the cell walls had not been the cell walls of any plant on this earth.
Beneath it, in her slanting hand: Morrowbloom. Grows only under the Hill. It gives a morrow to the dying.
And beneath that, a list I had read so many times in the last week I could have recited it in my sleep, if I’d been sleeping.
Walk the ring against the sun, three times.
At the ninth stone, bleed and say you’ve come asking.
Never give your whole name.
Never eat what they offer.
Never say thank you.
If you must deal, deal with the thorn-crowned one. He was kind.
He was kind. I had stared at those three words for hours. My grandmother had not been kind about anything after she came back. She had flinched from church bells and wept at birdsong and screamed once, horribly, when a neighbour’s child gave her a bunch of hawthorn. But she had written he was kind, and underlined it twice.
“Right,” I told the stones. My voice came out thin and English and ridiculous. “Right. Fine.”
I stepped into the ring and began to walk.
Against the sun meant anticlockwise, widdershins, my grandmother’s word. The turf was wet and tussocky and my boots slid. The first circuit, I felt a fool. I counted stones the way I’d count quadrats on a survey, one through nine, my torch swinging. The second circuit, the wind dropped. Not eased. Dropped, all at once, as if a door had closed behind me, and in the sudden silence I could hear my own pulse and the creak of my coat and, very faintly, something like a bell rung underwater.
The third circuit, the stones were warm.
I touched the fourth as I passed and snatched my hand back. It was warm like an animal is warm. Like a flank. The lichen under my fingers had gone soft as fur.
Keep walking, Ros.
At the ninth stone I stopped. My hands were shaking so badly that I nearly dropped the lancet I’d brought from the diabetic kit in Kit’s bathroom cabinet. I pricked my thumb. A bead of blood welled up, black in the torchlight, and I pressed it to the granite.
“I’ve come asking,” I said.
The stone drank it.
I felt it go. A tiny tug, as if something had taken my thumb in its mouth, and then the torch died in my hand, and the stars went out, and every hair on my body stood up at once.
When the light came back, it was not torchlight.
The ring was still a ring. But the stones were trees now, nine black hawthorns grown from the places the granite had stood, their branches knotted together overhead into a crown so dense the sky came through only in pieces. And the sky was wrong. The stars were too many and too close, and they were the wrong colours, rose and green and the bruised violet of sloes, and they did not twinkle. They watched.
The air smelled of crushed leaves and cold iron and something sweet underneath, like honey left too long in the comb.
And there was a man leaning against the ninth tree.
I knew he had not been there a moment ago. I knew it the way you know a step is missing in the dark. One heartbeat, there was bark. The next, there was him, one shoulder against the trunk, arms folded, watching me with the mild interest of someone who has found a beetle on his sleeve.
He was tall. Taller than Kit, who had to duck through the door at the Ship. He wore black in a way that made the word seem inadequate, a coat that fell to his knees and drank the strange starlight rather than reflecting it, and his hair was black too, long enough to tie back, with two streaks of silver-white at the temples as if frost had touched him there and stayed. On his head, resting low on his brow like an afterthought, was a circlet of blackthorn. Real blackthorn, the spines long as my little finger, a few of them tipped with tiny white flowers that should not have been blooming in October.
The thorn-crowned one.
His face was the kind of beautiful that makes you want to step back. All bones and shadow, a mouth too sure of itself. And his eyes, when the light caught them, were the green of deep water under ice, pale at the centre and darkening to something nearly black at the rim.
“You’re bleeding on my threshold,” he said.
His voice was low and unhurried and had the faint rasp of a man who did not often bother to use it. It went straight down my spine and settled somewhere it had no business settling.
I put my thumb in my mouth. It was the most undignified thing I could possibly have done, and I did it anyway, because my body had apparently stopped consulting me.
He watched me do it. Something moved behind those eyes.
“I’ve come asking,” I said around my thumb, and then took it out, because I refused to bargain with a fairy prince with my thumb in my mouth like a toddler. “For a morrowbloom.”
“Have you.” He didn’t move from the tree. “Do you know what you’ve done, little thief?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“You came through a locked door without an invitation, into a house that isn’t yours, to take something that doesn’t belong to you.” He tilted his head. “In your world, what do you call that?”
“Shopping,” I said. “I’m not a thief. I’m a buyer.”
That surprised him. I saw it, a tiny check, like a cat hearing its own name. Then the corner of his mouth lifted, very slightly, and that was worse. That was so much worse.
“Then you’ve come to the wrong market,” he said. “Nothing here is for sale, mortal. It’s only ever for trade. And everything costs more than you think.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I’ve read the notes,” I said, and held up the notebook as if it were a passport.
His eyes went to it. Went still on it. For a moment the mild amusement fell off his face entirely, and what was underneath was older and much less mild, and I took an involuntary step backward into the ring.
“Where did you get that?”
“It was my grandmother’s.”
“Your grandmother.” He said it slowly, tasting it. “And what was your grandmother’s name?”
“Morwen,” I said, before I could think, and then, because the night had made me stupid, “I’m her granddaughter. I’m Rosalind—”
He moved.
I didn’t see him cross the space between us. One moment he was against the tree and the next he was in front of me, close enough that I could smell him, frost and woodsmoke and that low dark sweetness, and his finger was laid across my lips. Not pressing. Barely touching. His skin was cool as a stone in a stream.
“Don’t,” he said quietly.
I stopped breathing.
“Whatever you were about to say next,” he murmured, “give me less of it.”
His finger stayed against my mouth for one more second. I could feel the shape of it, the ridge of a knuckle, the faint roughness of a callus I would not have expected on a prince. Then he lifted it away and stepped back, and the night rushed in to fill the space where he’d been.
“Names have weight here,” he said. “Your whole name is a rope. Don’t hand it to anyone who might want to tie you up with it.”
“Including you?”
“Especially me.”
My heart was going like a trapped bird. I made myself breathe. “Ros,” I said. “You can have Ros.”
“Ros.” He said it like he was holding it up to the light. “Thank you for that.”
“You can say thank you, but I can’t?”
“I can say a great many things you can’t.” His mouth curved. “I’m Thane.”
“Is that your name?”
“It’s what I answer to.” He looked me over, slowly, from my muddy boots to my wind-wrecked hair. I felt every inch of it, like a hand. “Your grandmother walked out of this ring thirty-odd of your years ago, half alive, and she was the last of your blood to come here on purpose. And now you. With her book in your hand and her eyes in your face. Why?”
“My brother’s dying.”
The words came out flat. I had said them so often in the last month that they’d worn smooth.
“Mortals die,” Thane said. “It’s rather the point of you.”
I hated him then. Cleanly, completely, with a relief that was almost joy. It was so much easier than whatever my body had been doing a moment before.
“He’s thirty-one,” I said. “He’s never hurt anyone. He went walking on the moor on Midsummer Eve and he came home sick, and he’s been dying ever since, slowly, and nobody can tell me why. And I think you know why. I think your kind know exactly why, because I watched my grandmother come back from you with her mind scooped out like a boiled egg, and I have hated every one of you since I was twelve years old.”
The silence afterwards rang.
Thane looked at me. Something moved in his face that I couldn’t read, there and gone, a fish turning under dark water.
“Good,” he said at last.
“Good?“
“Hate is honest. It’ll keep you from being stupid.” He glanced past me, over my shoulder, into the trees beyond the hawthorn crown. “Which is fortunate, because you’re about to have to be very clever, very quickly. Listen.”
I listened.
At first there was nothing. Then, far off and coming closer, I heard it: a sound like hounds, but not. Too many voices, too high and too sweet, rising and falling in a chorus that wasn’t barking and wasn’t song. Under it, the drum of hooves. And under that, something that made the hair on my arms rise all over again. Laughter. Bright, delighted, inhuman laughter.
“What is that?”
“The Queen’s hounds,” Thane said. “They heard the door open. A mortal who comes through the Hollow Nine without invitation belongs to the Queen of the Unseelie. That’s the oldest law there is. They’ll be here before you’ve finished being frightened.”
My mouth had gone dry. “Then I’ll go back.”
“You can’t. The door you came through only opens one way at a time, and it’s facing the wrong way now.” He said it without cruelty. Almost gently. “Your blood bought you in. It doesn’t buy you out.”
“Then what—”
“There is one other law,” he said. “Almost as old. A trespasser who is named a guest by a lord of the court is under that lord’s protection. Guest-right. No one may lay a hand on her. Not the hounds, not the court. Not even the Queen.”
The voices were closer. I could hear individual ones now, rising out of the chorus, calling something that was almost words.
“And you’re a lord of the court.”
“I’m a prince of it.” He said it without pride, the way you’d say you were tall. “So here is my offer, Ros who won’t give me the rest of her name. I have a morrowbloom. I will give it to you. In exchange, you’ll spend seven nights at my court as my guest. Each night, you’ll grant me one truth or one touch. Your choice, which.”
I stared at him. “One truth or one touch.”
“Your choice,” he repeated. “Every night. Not mine.”
“And if I don’t want to choose either?”
“Then on any night you can say enough, and I’ll walk you back to this ring myself, and you’ll go home whole. Unharmed, unbound, unowed. I’ll swear it.”
“With the flower?”
He was quiet a moment. “If you leave early,” he said, “you leave with what you came with.”
So. Not a trap, exactly. A bargain with a door in it. I turned it over the way I’d turn a specimen, looking for the rot.
“My brother doesn’t have seven nights.”
“Time doesn’t run here the way it runs above. Seven nights under the Hill will cost you one night in your world.”
“Say it exactly,” I said.
The corner of his mouth moved again. “Exactly?”
“I’m a botanist,” I said. “I spend my life being exact about names. You can’t lie. I know that much. But you can say true things that aren’t the thing I need. So say it exactly. I go home to Cornwall, in my own time, before sunrise on the twenty-ninth of October as mortals count it, and not a hundred years later with everyone I love in the churchyard.”
He looked at me for a long moment. The hound-voices rose behind me, so close now that I could hear the snap of branches, the ring of something metal.
“You’ll be home in Cornwall,” Thane said, “in your own time, before sunrise on the twenty-ninth of October as mortals count it. No one you love will have died while you were gone. I swear it on the thorn I wear.”
Something in the air tightened when he said it. I felt it in my teeth.
“And you won’t—” I swallowed. “Do whatever it is your kind do. To make people want things. I want whatever I choose to be mine.”
“Glamour.” The word came out of him cold. “No. I won’t. Not tonight. Not on any night.” His eyes held mine, pale-green and steady. “If you ever want me, Ros, it’ll be because you do. I’ve no interest in anything else.”
If you ever want me. As if it were a question of when.
The first hound broke through the trees.
I didn’t see it properly. I saw a shape like smoke poured into the outline of a dog, white as bone, with eyes like coals blown on. It stopped dead at the edge of the hawthorn ring, and it smiled at me, and its mouth was full of something that was not teeth.
“Your choice,” Thane said softly. “Quickly, now.”
I thought of Kit in the side room. Kit’s hands on a plane, curling wood off a hull in long pale ribbons. Kit dragging a stranger out of the surf by her collar and then sitting on the slipway afterwards, shaking, saying, I didn’t think, Rozzy, I just went.
“Yes,” I said. “I accept. Seven nights.”
Thane held out his hand.
I took it. His palm was cool and dry and much larger than mine, and the moment our skin met, something went through me like the shock off an electric fence, down my arm and into my chest and lower, so much lower, and I heard myself make a small, appalled sound.
“I name her my guest,” Thane said, not loudly, but the words carried, rolled out across the trees like a struck bell. “Under my roof and my thorn, for seven nights. Let anyone who touches her answer to me.”
The white hound flattened its ears. Behind it, others had arrived, a pale mass of them seething at the treeline, and behind them I could see riders now, tall shapes on tall horses, faces too beautiful and too pale. One of them laughed, a high sweet peal, and called something across the ring in a language that sounded like frost cracking.
Thane answered in the same language. Whatever he said, the laughter stopped.
Then he turned to the ninth hawthorn, and I saw that there was a gap in its roots now, a dark arch just tall enough to walk through, and stairs going down into the earth. Warm gold light breathed up from below. So did music.
“Step through with me, Ros,” Thane said. His fingers tightened around mine. “And whatever you hear behind you, don’t let go of my hand until I tell you.”
I stepped through.
Behind us, something with far too many voices began, very softly, to laugh.
Guest-Right
Thane
She held my hand the whole way down, and she held it like a woman holding a knife by the blade.
Three hundred and nine steps from the hawthorn door to the floor of the Hill. I had walked them more times than there are stars over Carn Hollow, and I had never once counted them until that night, because that night every step was a step she took beside me, trembling and furious and refusing to let me see either. Her fingers were cold. Her palm was damp. Her pulse knocked against my wrist like someone at a door.
Behind us the hounds sang her name. Not her true one. They didn’t have it, thank every dark thing. But they had the smell of her blood, and they sang that, sweet and greedy, all the way down, until the stair turned and the music of the court rose up to drown them.
“Don’t look at them,” I said, when we reached the bottom.
Of course she looked.
The great hall of the Unseelie is a cave the size of a cathedral, and its ceiling is the root-mass of the Hill itself, black roots thick as ship-timbers knotted overhead and hung with lanterns of glowworm and foxfire. The floor is frost-polished stone. The air smells of night-blooming jasmine and cold earth and old wine. And it is full, always, of my people. Tall and terrible and lovely, dressed in moth-silk and beetle-shell and spider-lace, laughing at jokes that are older than her language.
And among them, carrying trays, pouring wine, kneeling to fasten shoes, were the mortals.
There were eleven at court that season. Shepherds and walkers and one very unlucky folk musician who had played a reel at the wrong crossroads in 1974. They moved like sleepwalkers. Their eyes were bright and empty, and they smiled, all of them, a soft, adoring, vacant smile, and when a lady of the court snapped her fingers at a young man in a torn anorak he went down on his knees at once and laid his cheek against her slipper and sighed as if it were the sweetest thing he had ever been given.
I felt Ros go rigid beside me.
“That’s glamour,” she said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“Is that what happened to her? My grandmother?”
I could have lied, if I were a thing that could lie. I have sometimes wished it. “No,” I said. “She was never glamoured. She was something worse. She was asked. Every day, for a year.” I felt her look up at me and did not look back. “Keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t eat anything. Don’t speak to anyone unless I tell you to.”
“You don’t get to order me—”
“Tonight I do,” I said. “Tomorrow you can hate me for it at your leisure.”
She shut her mouth so hard I heard her teeth click. And she kept walking.
I had meant to take her straight to my own wing. I should have known better. We were barely across the first quarter of the hall when the music faltered and the crowd drew back like a tide going out, and I felt Her attention land on us the way you feel the sun come out from behind a cloud. Warmth first. Then the burn.
“Thane,” said the Queen of the Unseelie. “My Hound. You’ve brought me a present.”
She sat at the far end of the hall, on a throne grown from a single blackthorn root, in a gown made of the wings of ten thousand moths, grey and brown and soft as ash. Ysolde, who had been queen under the Hill since before the Romans came, whose face was so beautiful that mortals had been known to weep themselves blind looking at it. She smiled at me now. She smiled at Ros. She smiled the way the hounds had smiled.
I bowed. Not low. I never bow low. It is one of the few disobediences left to me.
“I’ve brought myself a guest, Majesty.”
“A guest.” The Queen’s eyes slid over Ros, slow as honey. “How hospitable. And how unlike you.” She leaned forward. The moths rustled. “Is it an Ashgrove? It smells like an Ashgrove.”
Ros’s hand clenched in mine.
“It’s a mortal woman who came asking,” I said evenly, “and I’ve named her under my roof for seven nights, and you heard me do it. Guest-right.”
“I did hear.” The Queen sat back. Something passed behind her face, a calculation, a door opening onto a corridor I knew better than I wished to. “Seven nights. Well. Do enjoy her, Hound.” She smiled again, softer, and that was when I was most afraid. “Remember that everything which grows beneath my Hill is mine in the end.”
The court laughed. They always laugh when she makes a joke. Most of them had no idea it was one.
I bowed again and took my guest away before she could say anything that would get her killed.
My rooms are on the north side of the Hill, as far from the throne as I could dig them. There is a door of black oak with a thorn carved into it, and beyond it a long low chamber with a hearth that burns without smoke, and shelves, and a bed I had not slept in for longer than a week at a time in two hundred years. And beyond that, through an arch of living holly, there is my garden.
I took her there first. I don’t know why. Perhaps because I wanted her to see something under the Hill that wasn’t a horror.
She stopped in the archway so suddenly that I nearly walked into her back.
My garden is lit by the plants themselves. Ghost orchids hang in the dark like pale moths. Moonflowers the size of dinner plates turn their faces up to nothing. There are ferns that uncurl in silver and mosses that glow a faint, sullen blue when you step on them, and in the beds along the walls I have nightshade and henbane and mandrake grown fat and sleek, and a hedge of black roses whose scent will stop a mortal’s heart if she breathes too deeply. Beside the pool there is a bell jar of clear ice, and inside it, on a single slender stem, a flower like a star that has decided to stay.
Ros made a sound I had never heard a mortal make. It wasn’t fear. It was the sound, I realised later, that a scholar makes when she sees the thing she has spent her life imagining.
“Is that—”
“Morrowbloom,” I said. “Yes.”
She took two steps toward it and stopped herself, her hands curled at her sides. I watched her want it. Watched her lean, and catch herself, and lean again. It was an extraordinary thing to see. Her whole body yearning toward a flower.
I wondered, with a jolt that went straight through me, what she’d look like leaning toward me like that.
“It’s real,” she whispered.
“Everything here is real. That’s what makes it dangerous.” I came up beside her. Not close. Close enough. “It’s yours after the seventh night. Not before. I can’t break that without breaking the bargain, and if the bargain breaks, the guest-right breaks with it, and you belong to the Queen again before you can blink.”
“I understand.” She turned, and there was the hate again, bright and steady as a lamp, and I was almost glad to see it. “So. Night one. How does this work?”
“However you like.”
“No. Exactly. When does a night begin and end?”
I felt myself smile and couldn’t stop it. “At the dawn bell. There’s a bell rung in the Hill when the sun rises above. Everything I’m owed tonight, I’m owed before it rings.”
“And a truth is—what? Anything you ask?”
“One question. You answer it honestly, as fully as you’re able. You’ll find you can’t do otherwise. You’ve given your word under the Hill. It holds.”
“And a touch?”
“Is whatever you offer me,” I said. “You name it. Where, and how, and for how long. I take nothing you haven’t named.”
She looked at me for a long moment. She had green eyes, but not my green: hers were the mortal kind, flecked with brown, the colour of a beech wood in May. There was a little scar through her left eyebrow. A loupe hung on a cord around her neck, a small brass hand lens of the kind scholars use for reading the hairs on a leaf, and she held it in her fist as if it were a charm against me.
“Truth,” she said.
Of course.
I gestured her to the bench by the pool. She sat on the very edge of it. I stayed standing. I had been thinking of what to ask her since the moment I’d put my finger to her lips in the ring, and I had a hundred questions, and every one of them was a weapon. Who taught you the words. What do you know of your blood. Did your grandmother ever speak of me. All of them were things I needed. None of them were what I wanted.
“What did you think,” I asked, “the first moment you saw me?”
She stared at me. “That’s your question?”
“That’s my question.”
“You could ask me anything.”
“I did.”
Her mouth opened, and closed, and opened again, and I watched the bargain take hold of her. Watched her try to choose her words and feel the truth come up through them like water through sand. Colour climbed her throat.
“I thought,” she said, through her teeth, “that you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. And I wanted to hit you with my torch.”
The laugh came out of me before I could stop it. It startled us both. I could not remember the last time I had laughed at something that wasn’t cruel.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t you dare thank me.”
“I can. You can’t. I did warn you.” I bowed to her, a little lower than I had to the Queen. “Good night, Ros. That’s one.”
She slept in my bed. I slept in the chair by the hearth, or rather I sat in it, with my boots on and a knife across my knees, and watched the door until the dawn bell rang somewhere deep in the stone.
I am the Queen’s Hound. I have been for longer than I care to number. I know what she does and how she does it. And from the moment the girl in the ring had said Midsummer Eve on the moor, I had known what was wrong with her brother.
Elf-shot. A little arrowhead of black flint, no bigger than a fingernail, fired from the dark into a mortal’s body. It does not kill quickly. It is not meant to. It drains a life like a slow leak in a hull, and it calls, as it does so, to whoever loves that life most. It is a lure. A fishhook baited with a brother.
The Queen had loosed that arrow. I’d have staked my thorn on it. The last Ashgrove woman had walked out of the Hollow Nine with her secrets intact and her mind in tatters, and the Queen had waited thirty years for another to come of age and wander close. Then, on Midsummer Eve, she had found one. Not the woman. The brother. And she had shot him, and waited, and the woman had come.
And I could not say a word of it.
That is what it is, to be the Queen’s Hound. Two centuries ago, in a moment of weakness I have regretted every day since, I took her oath and her geas, and with it a binding on my tongue. Of my counsels and my designs, you shall speak to no one not of my court. I could hunt for her, and I could refuse to hunt, and I could bow less low than I ought, but I could not tell. Every time I’d tried, in two hundred years, the words had turned to thorns in my throat.
So I had done the only thing left to me. I had got to the ring before the hounds did, and I’d offered Ros the one protection the law gave me the power to grant. Guest-right needs a bargain. A bargain needs a price. A price had to be something she could always pay, every night, without harm. Truth or touch. Both entirely hers.
That was the reasoning.
The truth, which no one had asked me for, was simpler and more shameful. I had wanted her the moment she put her bleeding thumb in her mouth and looked at me as if I were something she’d like to set on fire. I’d wanted to know what she’d say. I’d wanted to know what she’d give.
I am a creature of the Unseelie Court. We are not, as a rule, good.
She spent the day, if there are days under the Hill, in my garden.
I had expected her to sulk in the bedchamber. Or to try the doors, or to weep. Instead she came out at what would have been mid-morning above, still in her mud-stained mortal clothes, and walked straight past me to the beds along the north wall and dropped to her knees in front of the mandrake.
She did not touch it. She simply looked, with the brass lens screwed into her eye, her nose about an inch from the leaves, murmuring to herself in Latin. Mandragora officinarum. But the leaf margin is wrong, it shouldn’t be crenate. And these hairs. Then she moved on to the moonflowers, and then the moss, and then, for a long time, the black roses, from a careful distance, holding her breath.
Wren found me watching her from the archway.
Wren is a hob. She has kept my rooms for four hundred years and she has never once pretended to respect me. She is short and brown and wrinkled as a walnut, with moss growing in her grey hair, and she was carrying a bundle of folded silk the colour of sloes.
“You’re staring,” Wren said.
“I’m guarding.”
“From what? The mandrake?” She snorted and shoved the silk into my arms. “For tonight. And the revel. If she’s to walk at your side in front of Her, she can’t do it in trousers with sheep shit on the knees.”
“Revel?”
Wren gave me a look of profound pity. “The Queen’s sent word. Tomorrow night. A revel in honour of your guest.” She said the word the way you’d hold up a dead rat. “Every lord and lady under the Hill. Every eye on the pair of you. And the host and his guest open the dancing, as is custom.”
The silk was cool and heavy in my hands.
“She knows,” I said quietly.
“Everyone knows. She smells like an Ashgrove.” Wren looked past me at Ros, kneeling in the blue moss with her lens in her eye, and her old face softened very slightly. “She smells like the other one. Morwen. You remember.”
“I remember.”
“Then don’t be a fool twice, my prince,” said Wren, and went away.
The second night, Ros chose touch.
I saw her decide it. She sat by the hearth in the sloe-coloured gown Wren had left, and it fit her the way only hob-sewn things fit, close at the ribs and loose at the hips and cut low enough across the collarbones that I had to look at the fire instead for a while. Her hair was down. Her feet were bare. She had clearly spent the last hour working out what was more dangerous, another question or my hands, and had concluded that I could ask her a great many things she did not want to answer.
She was right.
“Touch,” she said. “But I’m naming it.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
“Your hand.” She held up her own, palm out, like a woman taking an oath. “My palm. One finger. Nothing else. Until the bell.”
“That’s hours.”
“Then you’ll get bored,” she said, “and that’ll be nice for both of us.”
I pulled my chair across the hearthstones until we sat knee to knee. Not touching. I could feel the heat of her through the silk. She held her hand out between us, steady, chin up, and I looked at her palm in the firelight. It was a working hand. Calluses at the base of the fingers. A healed cut across the heel. A smudge of blue moss still caught in the creases.
I touched one fingertip to the very centre of it.
She flinched. Not away. Just a tremor, all through her, like a struck string.
“Cold,” she muttered.
“It won’t be for long.”
I drew my finger down, very slowly, along the line that runs from the base of the first finger to the wrist. Mortals call it the life line. They’re wrong. It’s the line of what you’ll give up. I told her that. My voice had gone lower than I meant it to.
“Is that true?” she said.
“No. I made it up. But you believed me for a moment, which tells me something.”
“That you’re a bastard.”
“That you want to be told things.” I traced the next line, the crease across the top of her palm. “This one. The heart line, your people say. It runs deep on you. Breaks here.” I touched a place beneath her ring finger. “And starts again. Something you lost, and decided to love anyway.”
“Stop it,” she whispered. She didn’t take her hand away.
I didn’t stop it. I drew circles. Small ones, on the soft pad of flesh at the base of her thumb, so lightly I was barely touching her at all, and I watched what it did to her. Her lips parted. Her breath went short and shallow. The pulse in her throat, which I could see above the sloe-dark silk, began to climb. I followed the length of each finger to its tip and back down into the valley between them, where the skin is thinnest, and when I touched that place she made a sound in the back of her throat, tiny and involuntary, that I felt in my spine.
“You said one finger,” I said. “You didn’t say how slowly.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.” I turned my finger and drew the edge of my nail, barely, down the inside of her wrist, to the very edge of where her palm ended. Not past it. Not one hair past it. “You’re shaking, Ros.”
“It’s cold in here.”
“It’s not.”
She looked at me then. Her eyes had gone dark, the beech-green swallowed nearly to the rim, and her face was flushed, and her mouth was soft and furious, and I understood with absolute clarity that if I leaned forward six inches I could kiss her, and that she’d let me, and that she’d hate us both for it in the morning.
And she hadn’t named it.
So I sat back in my chair. I kept my finger in the centre of her palm, perfectly still, and I let her feel how still it was, and I watched her realise what I wasn’t doing.
“I won’t take anything you haven’t named,” I said quietly. “That was the bargain. That will always be the bargain.”
She swallowed. Her hand trembled under mine.
Somewhere deep in the Hill, the dawn bell began to ring.
She snatched her hand back and cradled it against her chest, as if I’d burned her. Perhaps I had.
“Two,” she said hoarsely.
“Two,” I agreed. I stood, and bowed, and went to my chair by the door, and laid the knife across my knees. “Sleep, Ros. Tomorrow the Queen throws a revel in your honour, and every hungry thing under this Hill is going to watch you dance with me.”
She went very still in the doorway of the bedchamber.
“And the worst of them,” I said to the fire, because it was true and I could not say otherwise, “is going to be me.”
The Watching Revel
Ros
The hob laced me into a dress made of night.
That was the only way to describe it. Wren had brought it over her arm while I was still in the bath, a great hammered copper tub that filled itself with hot water when I stepped in and smelled faintly of meadowsweet, and she had hung it on the bedpost and stood back with her arms folded, daring me to object. It was black. But it was the black of a sky an hour after sunset, with depth in it, and when it moved, threads of silver showed and vanished in the weave like the first stars coming out.
“I can’t wear that.”
“You can’t wear those,” Wren said, pointing at my jeans with deep loathing, “and the sloe silk’s for indoors. This is for Her. You’ll want to look like you belong to somebody, out there. It’s safer.”
“I don’t belong to anybody.”
“Then you’d best look like you do,” said Wren, “until you’re home.”
She laced me up the back with quick hard fingers that smelled of earth. The bodice was close, and cut lower than I would have chosen, and the skirt fell from my hips in a long dark pour that whispered when I walked. When she was done she turned me toward a mirror of black glass, and I didn’t recognise the woman in it. She looked like someone who knew what she was doing.
“Your grandmother wore grey,” Wren said behind me, quietly. “When she went to the revels. She wore grey every night, and she danced with no one, and she never once let Her see her cry.”
I met the hob’s eyes in the glass. They were small and black and very old.
“You knew her.”
“I brought her bread she wouldn’t eat for a year,” said Wren. “Stubborn creature. You’ve her chin.” She tugged a curl loose by my ear and stepped back. “Keep it up. And keep close to him. He’s the only thing out there that won’t bite you.”
“He might.”
The hob gave a short laugh like a stick breaking. “Oh, he’d like to,” she said. “That’s a different thing entirely.”
He was waiting by the hearth.
He’d dressed for it. Black again, but finer, a long coat stiff with embroidery in black thread so that you only saw the pattern when the firelight moved over it, thorns and leaves and something like the curve of a wing. His hair was tied back. The blackthorn circlet sat low on his brow, and the tiny white flowers in it had opened wider, as if they’d been warmed.
He turned when I came in, and he stopped.
He didn’t say anything. That was what undid me. Two nights of him having something clever to say about everything, and now he simply looked at me, from my bare throat to the hem of the night-dark skirt and back up again, slowly, as if he were reading a page he intended to remember. His mouth was not quite closed.
“Well?” I said, because somebody had to.
“I’m trying,” said Thane, “to think of something true to say that won’t get me slapped.”
“Try harder.”
“You look,” he said, “like the reason my people steal yours.”
I felt it in my knees. I lifted my chin, my grandmother’s chin, and held out my hand like a duchess, and he crossed the room and took it, and the jolt went through me again, smaller this time but deeper, like a stone dropped into a well.
“Rules,” he said, low, as we walked. “Eat nothing. Drink nothing. If anyone asks your name, tell them you’re mine and let them make of it what they like. If anyone offers you a gift, refuse it. If the Queen speaks to you, answer her, briefly and exactly.”
“And the dancing?”
His fingers shifted against mine. “The dancing,” he said, “you’ll have to manage with me.”
The revel had already started when we came into the great hall, and it was nothing like the night I’d arrived.
That had been a court at its leisure. This was a court at its pleasure. The root-ceiling was hung with ten thousand lanterns, and the frost-stone floor had been strewn with petals that released a scent when they were crushed, a heavy, heady sweetness that went straight to the back of my skull. Musicians played in a gallery overhead, fiddles and pipes and a harp strung with something that glittered, and the music was wrong in a way I couldn’t name, a reel that kept almost resolving and then sliding sideways, so that your feet wanted to move and your heart wanted to follow and you were never quite sure where either would end up.
And everyone turned to look at us.
I had been looked at before. I had given conference papers to rooms full of men who were waiting for me to get something wrong. This was not that. This was being looked at by a hundred creatures who had never once in their long lives wondered whether they were allowed to want something. Their eyes went over me like hands. I felt it on the back of my neck, on the bare skin above the bodice, on the curve of my hip where the dress clung. One lady with hair like a waterfall of white feathers leaned to whisper to her companion, and he looked at me and licked his lips with a tongue that was faintly, horribly blue.
Thane did not hurry. He walked me through them as if they were furniture.
Up in the musicians’ gallery, a man was playing the fiddle. A mortal man, grey-haired, in a faded denim jacket with a CND badge on the lapel, his eyes bright and empty. He was playing beautifully. He was also playing with fingers that had bled through to the bone, and a lady below him was laughing, and calling up for faster.
Thane glanced up once. He didn’t stop walking. He said something in that frost-cracking language, not loudly, and the music stopped mid-bar.
The lady turned, outraged. Thane looked at her. She sat down.
“The next tune,” he said, in English, to the gallery, “will be a slow one. And then you’ll rest.”
I looked at him sidelong. He was looking straight ahead, his face unreadable, as if nothing had happened at all.
“That was kind,” I said.
“That was a whim.”
“You can’t lie.”
“I’m not,” he said. “My whims are frequently kind. It’s one of the reasons the court finds me so tiresome.”
The Queen opened the revel from her throne. She did not rise. She raised one hand, and the moths of her gown lifted and settled like a sigh, and she said, “Let my Hound dance with his guest,” and every voice in the hall went silent.
Thane led me to the centre of the floor.
The music started again. The slow tune he’d asked for. It was the loveliest thing I’d ever heard, and the saddest, a melody that sounded like the sea coming in over sand at Porthenna on a summer night, and I thought of Kit so suddenly and so sharply that I stumbled.
Thane caught me. One hand at my waist, the other holding mine up between us, and he drew me in, not close, not yet, and began to move.
I don’t dance. I danced badly at my cousin’s wedding and swore never again. But fae dancing isn’t something you do with your feet. It’s something done to you. He moved, and I moved with him, as if there were a thread running from his body to mine and he only had to breathe to draw it tight. We turned, and the lanterns turned with us. He stepped back, and I followed. He stepped close, and my body went to his like iron to a lodestone, and stopped a finger’s width away, and hung there, trembling, as if there were glass between us.
“Breathe,” he murmured.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re holding it every time I come near you.”
“Maybe you smell.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Maybe I do.”
He turned me under his arm, slow, and when I came back round his hand had shifted from my waist to the small of my back, his palm flat and cool through the dress, and I felt every one of his fingers. He wasn’t pressing. He never pressed. He simply let his hand rest there, and the whole of my attention went to it, until I could have drawn a map of where his skin ended and the silk began.
I was aware, in a distant way, of being watched. A hundred pairs of eyes, a hundred appetites. I could feel them lapping at the edges of the dance. And the Queen, on her root throne, her chin on her hand, her beautiful face perfectly still. She looked like a woman watching a pot she expected to boil.
“She’s waiting for something,” I said.
“She’s always waiting for something.”
“What?”
His hand tightened, very slightly, at the small of my back. He opened his mouth. And then he closed it again, and something passed over his face that looked, for one strange moment, like pain.
“Ask me something else,” he said quietly.
The music ended. The court applauded, a soft, rippling, mocking sound, like rain on leaves. Thane stepped back and bowed over my hand. His lips didn’t touch my knuckles. I could feel the cool of his breath on them, and it was worse than a kiss would have been.
“My prince.”
The voice came from just behind me. Low, amused, slippery as oil on water.
The man who’d spoken was nearly as tall as Thane, and dressed in a cloak made entirely of crow feathers, which rustled as he bowed. His hair was the colour of old blood. His face was narrow and lovely and his eyes were yellow as a hawk’s, and he was looking at me the way I’d once seen a heron look at a frog.
“Corvane,” Thane said, without warmth.
“Majesty bids me tell you,” said Corvane, “that the court is delighted with your guest. Utterly delighted. There’s a wager running.” He smiled at me. His teeth were very white and very even. “Half the court says you’ve had her already. The other half says you haven’t so much as kissed her.”
“The court should find a better use for its money.”
“Oh, but it matters, my prince. You know it does.” Corvane’s yellow eyes slid down my body and up again. “A guest who’s claimed is a guest who’s yours. A guest who’s untouched is merely a guest. And it’s only two nights to the Hunt.” He leaned toward me, just slightly, and lowered his voice to something conspiratorial. “If you find the Hound’s hospitality cold, little Ashgrove, my own hall is very warm.”
Thane didn’t move. But something in the air around him changed. The lanterns nearest us guttered. Frost bloomed across the floor under his boots, white and fast, a fern-pattern spreading toward Corvane’s feet.
I had about two seconds to make a decision.
I made it.
“Touch,” I said.
Thane turned his head and looked at me. I saw him not understand, for one heartbeat. Then I saw him understand.
“Your mouth,” I said, clear enough to carry. “On mine. Now. Until I stop.”
The hall went utterly silent. Even the moths on the Queen’s gown stopped rustling.
Thane looked at me for a long moment, his eyes very pale. “Is that what you want?”
“I named it,” I said. “Didn’t I?”
He took my face in his hands.
He did it slowly. That was the thing I wasn’t ready for. I had expected something quick and hard, a performance, a stamp on a document. Instead he cradled my jaw in his cool palms as if I were something he’d been handed to carry across a river, and he tipped my face up, and he looked at me, and I felt my anger fall straight out of the bottom of me like water through a sieve.
Then he kissed me.
His mouth was cool for exactly one second. Then it wasn’t. It was warm, and then it was hot, and it moved over mine with a slow, devastating care, as if he were learning me, the shape of my lower lip, the corner of my mouth, the place where my breath caught. I made a sound against him. I didn’t mean to. My hands, which had been fists at my sides, came up of their own accord and found the front of his coat, the cold stiff embroidery, and held on.
He tilted his head, and the kiss deepened, and the whole hall went away.
There was no court. No Queen. No crow-cloaked lord with a heron’s eyes. There was only his mouth, opening mine, the first slow brush of his tongue, and a taste like frost and dark honey and something under it that was simply him. I felt it everywhere. My scalp prickled. Everything beneath the tight black bodice ached. A heat I had absolutely not authorised gathered low in my belly and spread, molten, downward, until I was pressing my thighs together under the night-dark skirt and pulling him closer by his coat and kissing him back as if I were drowning and he were air.
His hand slid from my jaw into my hair. His fingers spread against my scalp. He made a sound, low in his chest, rough and helpless, and I felt it through my whole body.
Until I stop, I had said.
I didn’t stop.
I don’t know how long it went on. Long enough for someone in the crowd to laugh, nervously, and be hushed. Long enough for the musicians in the gallery, unbidden, to begin playing again, very softly. Long enough for me to forget that I hated him, and remember, and forget again.
When at last I pulled back, it was only by an inch, because I couldn’t breathe. His forehead came down to rest against mine. His eyes were closed. His breath was ragged against my lips, and his hand was still in my hair, trembling.
“Ros,” he said. Just that.
I turned my head, very slightly, and looked past his shoulder at Corvane.
Corvane was smiling. But it was a thin smile, and the frost around his feet had climbed to his ankles.
And on her root throne, the Queen of the Unseelie had lifted her chin from her hand. She was watching us with an expression I couldn’t read at all. Not anger. Not delight. Something patient and cold and terribly interested, like a gardener watching a seed break the soil.
“Well,” said the Queen, into the silence. “That answers that.” She waved a hand. “Play, all of you. My Hound has made his point.”
The court exhaled. The music swelled. And Thane took my hand without a word and walked me out of the hall, very fast, through the crowd that parted for us like grass before a scythe.
He didn’t speak until the black oak door closed behind us.
Then he let go of my hand and walked away from me, to the far side of the hearth, and stood with his back to me and his palms flat on the mantel, his head bowed, his shoulders rising and falling.
“That was clever,” he said to the fire. His voice was not steady. “It’ll keep Corvane off you for a night or two. It counts. That’s three.”
I stood by the door with my back against the wood. My mouth felt swollen. My whole body was humming like a struck bell, a long low note that wouldn’t stop.
“No,” I said.
He went still.
“It doesn’t count,” I said. “That was for them. You said a touch was whatever I offered you. I didn’t offer that to you. I offered it to Corvane, and the Queen, and a hundred people licking their lips.” I swallowed. “So it doesn’t count. Tonight’s is still owed.”
Slowly, Thane turned around.
He looked wrecked. That was the only word. His hair had come loose from its tie where I’d pulled at it. His mouth was dark from mine. And his eyes, pale and ice-green in the firelight, were fixed on me with an intensity that made the hum in my body rise to something nearer a roar.
“Then you’ve given me a gift,” he said quietly. “And now I owe you. I hate owing.”
“Good.”
“Ros.” He didn’t move from the hearth. “Be very careful what you name next.”
I pushed off the door.
I walked across the room. My bare feet were silent on the stone. The skirt of the night-dark dress whispered around my ankles. I stopped in front of him, close enough that I had to tip my head back to look at him, close enough to feel the cold coming off him and the heat underneath it, and I lifted my hand, and laid it flat on his chest, over the thorns embroidered in black thread. Under my palm his heart was slamming as hard as mine.
“Touch,” I said. “And this time, I’m naming it for me.”
Behind me, somewhere down the corridor, the last of the revel music ended.
And the black oak door, which I was sure I had left open a crack, swung softly shut on its own.
