The Lot Falls

I had spent eleven years making sure my name was never written on a piece of paper that mattered, and the Winter Court found me anyway. That is the thing nobody tells you about the lot. You imagine it as a drawing — a bowl, a hundred slips, a child's hand. It is not. The lot is older than paper. On the longest night the frost climbs the inside of one window in the village, and one window only, and it climbs in the shape of a name, and the name it spelled this year, in feathered white across the glass of my own small attic, was *Lark*. My mother saw it before I did. I came up the ladder with the washing and found her standing very still in the cold blue light, looking at the window, and I knew. You always know. The village had been knowing, one household a year, for longer than the village had kept records. "It might melt," my mother said. "If we light the fire. If we breathe on it." It did not melt. We tried. The Winter Court's frost does not answer to a hearth fire; that is rather the entire point of the Winter Court. So at dusk on the solstice I put on the one good dress I owned, and my mother braided my hair with hands that shook and pretended not to, and I walked out to the boundary stone at the edge of the eastern field, where the lot's chosen singer has waited every year since the village was three houses and a well. I want to be clear about something, because the stories always get it wrong. I was not brave. Bravery is for people who have a choice and decline the safe one. I had no choice. What I had instead — and this is different, and better, and the only thing I brought with me into the Winter Court — was *spite*. Because here is what eleven years of keeping my name off paper had taught me. The Court takes singers. It has taken them for centuries. And the singers come back changed, dreamy and frost-touched and never quite warm again, or they come back not at all, and the village calls this a tragedy and a mystery and a sorrow. But I had listened to the ones who came back. I had sat with old Maren, who was taken forty years ago, and I had noticed the thing the village was too sad to notice: Maren was not heartbroken. Maren was *furious*. She had spent forty years being furious, in a low banked quiet way, and when I asked her why, she had looked at me for a long moment and said only, "Because they were not sorry. Not one of them. They take you, child, and they are charmed by you, and they are never once sorry, and that is the cold of that place. Not the snow. The not-being-sorry." I decided, somewhere in that conversation, that if the lot ever found me I would go into the Winter Court and I would make at least one of them sorry. It was not a plan. It was barely a wish. But it was mine, and it was warm, and I held it like a coal all the way to the boundary stone. They came for me at the moment the last light went. I had expected a carriage, or a great white stag, or some terrible beautiful thing. What came was a door. It simply stood in the field where no door had been, dark wood in a frame of frost, slightly ajar, and warm yellow light leaking from the gap, and from beyond it I could hear — faintly, the way you hear a party from the street — music, and laughter, and the particular silvery sound of a great many people being effortlessly delighted by themselves. And in the doorway, holding it open the way a host holds a door, stood a man. He was tall, and dark-haired, which surprised me; I had expected the Winter King to be pale as his court. He was dressed in deep charcoal and silver, and he was not smiling, and his eyes were the grey of the hour before snow, and he looked at me standing there in my one good dress with my mother's shaking braid in my hair, and he said, in a voice with frost somewhere far down underneath it: "You came faster than they usually do. The lot's chosen generally make me wait at the door. They think the waiting is a kind of defiance." "The waiting," I said, "is a kind of hoping. I'm not hoping. I know exactly what you are." Something moved across his face — interest, I thought, the first crack of it. The Winter King was not, it seemed, often spoken to like that on his own doorstep. "And what am I?" "You are a court," I said, "that takes singers and is never sorry. I have come to perform at your midnight ball, Winter King, because the lot gives me no choice in that. But I have not come to be charmed, and I have not come to be kept, and before this solstice is over I am going to do the one thing your court has apparently never managed in all its centuries." I stepped past him, over the threshold, into the warm treacherous gold of the Winter Court, and I did not let him see that my hands were shaking exactly as hard as my mother's. "I am going to make you sorry." The door swung shut behind me on its own. And the Winter King, for the first time in longer than the village had kept records, looked at a mortal girl as though he did not entirely know what was about to happen next. Good, I thought. Neither do I. Let's both find out.