The Price of Rain

The river had been eating the village for nine days when Wrenna decided to go to the fae. She told no one. There was no one left worth telling who would not have tried to stop her, and the ones who would have let her go were the ones too weak now to walk her to the wood's edge. Her mother had not risen from the pallet in four days. The Halloran children cried in a register Wrenna had stopped being able to hear, the way you stop hearing a clock. So she went at dawn, when the mist lay on the flood like a second river, and she carried with her the only thing of value the village still owned: her grandmother's iron key, which opened nothing, and which the fae could not touch, and which was therefore the one offering they could not simply take. The Autumn Court kept its border at the old thorn line, a hedge that had grown for three hundred years exactly as tall as a tall man and not one finger taller. Everyone in the valley knew it. Everyone in the valley also knew you did not cross it, the way you knew not to drink from the green pools or answer a voice that called your name twice from the dark. Wrenna's people had survived beside the fae for generations by the simple expedient of wanting nothing from them. But you cannot bargain from a position of wanting nothing. That was the trouble. That was always the trouble. She found the gap in the thorn where the stories said a gap would be, and she stepped through it, and the cold changed. It was not colder. It was *older* cold — the cold of a season that had been autumn for three centuries and had perfected it. The light came down amber through leaves that did not fall. Underfoot the path was paved in acorns, whole and unbroken, and they did not crack beneath her boots, which frightened her more than anything had yet, because it meant the path knew she was there and had decided to be gentle. A figure was waiting where the path bent. Wrenna had expected that. The fae always knew. It was a woman, or wore a woman, tall and russet-haired with eyes the flat gold of a cat's, and she was dressed in the fashion of a hundred years ago, and she was smiling the way the green pools were green. "A daughter of the drowning valley," the fae woman said. "How novel. They usually send a son, and the son usually weeps. Have you come to weep, little key-bearer?" "I have come to bargain." Wrenna's voice did not shake. She had practised it on the walk, the way she had once practised letters, until the shape of it held. "The river is fae-cursed. Everyone knows it. It did not flood for a hundred years and now it floods, and a hundred years ago is when your Court built the weir upstream. I am not a fool, and I am not weeping, and I have come to ask the Autumn Court to lift what the Autumn Court laid down." The smile did not move, but something behind the gold eyes did — a flicker of genuine interest, the first honest thing Wrenna had seen since the thorn. "And what," said the fae woman softly, "will you give for it?" Wrenna held up the iron key. The fae woman flinched from it, a small involuntary recoil, and Wrenna felt the bargain tilt one degree in her favour. "This is iron," Wrenna said, "and you cannot take it, and you cannot lie to the one who holds it. So you will not waste my morning with riddles. Take me to whoever built the weir. I will make my offer to him, and to no one else." For a long moment the wood held its breath. The amber light did not move. The acorns did not crack. Then the fae woman laughed — a real laugh, surprised out of her — and stood aside, and gestured down the path toward a house Wrenna had not seen a moment before, all dark wood and lit windows under the unfalling leaves. "Oh," said the fae woman, delighted, "he is going to *hate* you. Come along, little key-bearer. Come and meet the Lord of Thornwood."