A Guest of Thornwood

The Lord of Thornwood was younger than the stories, and tired in a way the stories had never thought to mention. He received her in a long room walled with books that breathed — Wrenna watched the spines rise and fall, slowly, like sleeping animals — and he did not rise when she entered, and he did not smile, and his eyes were the deep brown of a forest floor, which unsettled her, because she had braced for gold. "You hold iron in my house," he said. "That is rude." "Your weir drowned my mother's village. That is worse." The russet woman, by the door, made a small sound that might have been a laugh strangled at birth. The Lord of Thornwood did not look at her. He looked at Wrenna, and at the key, and something moved across his tired face that she could not read and did not trust. "Sit," he said. "If you are going to ruin my evening, you may as well do it from a chair." She sat. The chair was kind to her, the way the path had been kind, adjusting itself by some small fraction to the ache in her back, and she hated it for the kindness, because kindness from the fae was the most expensive thing there was. "The weir," she said. "A hundred years ago the Autumn Court raised a weir on the upper river. For a hundred years it held the water back and your valley below kept the river that was left — gentle, low, fordable. Now the weir has failed, or been opened, and the hundred years of held water is coming down on us all at once. My village has nine days left. Perhaps fewer. I have walked here to ask you to mend what you broke." The Lord of Thornwood was quiet for a long moment. The books breathed on their shelves. "I did not break it," he said at last. "The weir was my mother's work, and my mother is three centuries dead, and the weir has been failing for forty years because no one in this Court remembers how it was made, least of all me. I cannot mend a thing whose making is lost. That is the truth, key-bearer, and you hold iron, so you know it is the truth." She did know. That was the horror of the iron — it cut both ways. He could not lie to her, and so she could not comfort herself that he was lying. "Then your Court will simply watch us drown," she said. "For a failure of memory." "My Court," he said, with a sudden flat bitterness that did not seem aimed at her, "would watch the whole mortal valley drown and call it weather. I am not my Court." He rose then, and crossed to the breathing books, and stood with his back to her, and she understood she was being shown something — a man choosing his words, the way her father had once chosen his before saying a thing that would cost the family. "There is no spell to mend the weir. But there is older magic than spellwork. There is *bargain*. The river is bound to this Court by the weir's making, and a binding can be re-anchored — re-tied to a new keeper, a new will, a living anchor strong enough to hold a hundred years of water in its place by simply, daily, refusing to let go." "And the price of that," Wrenna said slowly, "is the anchor." He turned. For the first time the tiredness in his face cracked, and underneath it she saw something she had not expected and did not want: regret, worn smooth, the regret of a man who had made this offer before and hated making it again. "A year," said the Lord of Thornwood. "The anchor must be mortal, and willing, and must dwell within the Court for a year and a day, holding the river by their living presence as the weir once held it by stone. At the year's end the binding sets, and they may go home, and the valley keeps its gentle river for another hundred years. That is the bargain. It is the only one I have. And before you ask — yes, it must be you. You came holding iron and offering nothing you valued. The magic noticed. It always notices the one who arrives unafraid." Wrenna sat in the kind chair, in the room of breathing books, and thought of her mother on the pallet, and the Halloran children, and a clock she had stopped being able to hear. "A year," she said. "A year of my life, spent here, as your guest." "As my prisoner," he corrected, quietly, "though I will let you call it guest, if it helps. It does not help me." And Wrenna, who had walked into the wood wanting nothing, discovered she had something to give after all, and that the giving of it would be the longest year of her life.