A Truce of Thorns

The crown's road ran out at a single black stone, and past it the Thornmarch began — a wood no king of Auzulas had ever felled, where the snow lay blue in the last of the light and nothing moved that Mara could put a name to. The escort halted at the marker and would go no farther. By the terms of the old peace, a truce-warrant crossed into the Hollow Court alone, on foot, and did not look back.

Mara stood at the stone and felt the cold climb up through her boots. Three nights, the chancellor had said. Three nights as the fae court's guest and its hostage both, until the renewal was sworn and the marches stood another seven years clear of war. Three nights, if nothing went wrong. She was no soldier. She was chosen, the chancellor had told her without quite saying it, because she could be spared.

The wind off the wood lifted her auburn hair and let it fall. Somewhere past the first trees a bell rang once — low, and very far in — and did not ring again. There were two ways to walk into a fae court, the old books said: as what you were, or as little as could be helped.

Mara drew her hood close and let the token stay hidden against her skin. Whatever the fae court wished to learn of her, it could learn slowly, and earn it. She crossed the boundary stone with her left hand loose at her side and her eyes moving, marking the dark between the trees the way she would mark a strange room.

The trees gave way without warning to a clearing, and the clearing was a court. Pale stone rose out of the snow in arches grown through with black thorn, lit from within by a light that had no fire in it. A gate stood open at the foot of it — had perhaps always been open — and in the gateway a figure was waiting, tall and still, watching Mara come the whole long way across the white ground, as though she were late for something no one had told her of.

"Warrant of the crown," the figure said. The voice was soft and carried anyway, across all that snow, with no effort at all. "We had begun to wonder whether Auzulas would send anyone living." The gateway's cold light caught Mara's green eyes and held them. "Come in, then. The Hollow Court has been waiting three days for someone to be afraid of."