The door of the waystation hung from a single rusted hinge, and when Aurelia shoved it inward, the hinge screamed loud enough to send crows wheeling from the broken eaves above. She stood in the gap, one hand on the iron, breath misting in the cold, and listened. Nothing followed. Only the wind, and the wet, gurgling complaint of the marsh beyond the stone.
"Get in," she said, without turning.
Seren slipped past her, low and quick, their cloak drawn tight against the drizzle. In the grey half-light that filtered through gaps in the roof, the waystation looked less like a shelter and more like a jaw. Four walls of fitted black stone, blacker still with damp. A hearth choked with old ash. A broken table. A chair with one leg shorn clean off, lying on its side like a fallen soldier. The smell was of rot and something sweeter beneath, cloying, like lilies left too long in standing water.
Aurelia pulled the door shut. The remaining hinge gave one long, defeated groan, and the wind died to a low moan through the slats.
"Find what wood there is," she said. "I'll see if anything in the back is still whole."
Seren nodded, already moving toward the hearth, and Aurelia pressed on into the dark. Her fingers found the wall, traced along it until she found a doorway without a door, and stepped through into a smaller chamber. A cot, the rope webbing rotted through. A footlocker, its lid warped shut. A shutter, hanging loose, let in a stripe of thin rain that fell across the floor like a blade. She crouched by the locker, hooked her thumbnail under the lid, and pried. The wood gave with a wet crack.
Inside: a tinderbox, half full. A coil of cord. A knife wrapped in oilcloth, the handle smooth with use by hands long dead. She took the tinderbox and the knife, left the cord. Her hands were shaking. She made them stop.
When she came back to the main room, Seren had a small pyramid of broken chair-leg and splinters laid in the hearth. Their eyes lifted to hers, questioning.
"Flint and steel," Aurelia said, and knelt. The tinderbox was older than either of them, the hinge green, the steel pitted, but the flint held a decent edge. She struck. Once. Twice. A spark caught in the dry heart of a splinter, glowed, and then died. She struck again, slower this time, and the spark held. She bent and blew, soft, patient, until a tongue of yellow flame licked up and the splinters began to whisper.
Warmth came grudgingly, and with it the smell of old smoke, acrid and human. Aurelia sat back on her heels and let the heat find her face. The rain had plastered her hair to her neck, and now steam began to rise from her collar in thin pale threads. Behind her, Seren had gone still, listening to something Aurelia could not yet hear.
"What," Aurelia said.
Seren held up a hand. One finger, two. Wait. Their head was cocked, weight balanced on the balls of their feet, the way a cat considers whether to flee or to spring. After a long moment they lowered the hand.
"Nothing," they said. "Or something too far off to matter."
"You're a comfort," Aurelia said, and there was the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth, gone before it could settle. She fed another piece of chair-leg to the fire and watched it catch. The shadows in the room jumped and resettled, and she saw, for the first time in the half-light, what she had not seen before.
A shape in the far corner, between the wall and what remained of a settle. Tall. Standing, where nothing had been standing a moment ago. A figure, or the memory of one, drawn in greys and deeper greys, with a face that was a suggestion of a face, and eyes that were two pits of absolute black.
The fire popped. Neither of them moved.
Then the figure spoke, and the sound was like a wind in a chimney, or a child crying at the bottom of a well.
"You have come to the house of my keeping."
The voice was not one voice. It was many, layered, a chorus of throats speaking the same words a half-breath apart, so that each syllable rang with a faint aftertone of itself. A northern accent, but older, older than the stones, older than the marsh.
Aurelia's hand went to the knife at her belt. Seren had not moved, but their stillness had changed quality, from watchful to coiled.
"Who are you," Aurelia said. Not a question. A demand.
The shape tilted its head, and the gesture was wrong, too far, the chin going past the shoulder.
"I am Moirath," the shape said. "I am the keener of this house. I have wept at the birthing of every Thorn for nine generations, and I will weep at the last." A pause, and in it a sound like a sob, vast and muffled, as if heard through several walls of stone. "You are the last. I have come to bargain."
Aurelia did not lower her hand from the knife. Her heart was in her throat, but her voice, when it came, came steady, and warmer than the rest of her.
"Bargain for what."
"For the night," said Moirath. The shape drifted forward a half-step, and the air in the room grew cold around it, a circle of chill that pushed back the warmth of the fire. "The marsh has teeth tonight. The hounds are loose, and the thing that wears my brother's face walks abroad. I can keep them from the door. I can sing them to other quarry. I have done this before, for your grandmother, for your mother, for the small one who came before you and did not live to be named."
"You knew my mother," Aurelia said. The words came out before she could think to stop them.
"I keened at her wedding," Moirath said. "I keened at her burying. I sang her hair white before her twentieth year." The black pits of the eyes regarded Aurelia without blinking, without any movement at all. "She had a mouth like yours. A mouth that asks for what it cannot pay for."
Seren stepped forward, placing themselves between Aurelia and the shape. Their hand rested on the short sword at their hip, but they did not draw.
"What is the price," they said. Their voice was low, controlled, the faint fae music of it flattened into something harder, more human.
Moirath did not look at them. Could not look at them, perhaps. The shape's attention was fixed on Aurelia alone, and would not be turned.
"A memory," Moirath said. "One memory, freely given. Not taken. I will not rob a Thorn. I have no power to rob a Thorn. But I may receive what is offered, and the door will hold until dawn, and the hounds will pass us by."
"I don't trade with things I don't understand," Aurelia said.
"Then understand me." Moirath's voice shifted, the chorus falling away until only one voice remained, and that voice was tired, and old, and unbearably sad. "I am bound to this house. I am bound to the blood. I cannot leave this place, and I cannot starve, and I cannot rest. I am a mouth without end, and I must be fed, or the house will fall, and the things I keep from the door will come through it, and they will find you in the dark, and they will not bargain. They will only take."
A log in the fire split with a sound like a gunshot, and sparks bloomed upward and died against the black of the hearthstones. Aurelia did not flinch. Seren did, a little, and covered it by shifting their weight.
"What kind of memory," Aurelia said.
Moirath was silent for a long time. The silence had a texture, like fog, and it pressed against the skin.
"Any kind," the shape said at last. "A morning. A face. A meal. A name. The weight of a child's hand in yours. The sound of a door closing. I do not choose. You choose. You reach into yourself, you take one thing, you lay it in my hands, and it is gone from you, and I am fed, and the house is fed, and we are quit of one another until next you have need of me."
"And if I refuse," Aurelia said.
"Then you go into the marsh," Moirath said, "and the marsh will have you, and I will keene for you in the morning, and the house will have no heir, and the blood will end in a ditch, and the thing that should have been sung will go unsung, and that is a worse thing for the world than it is for you."
Seren's hand had gone white at the knuckles on the sword hilt. "Aurelia," they said quietly, a warning, a question, a plea, all in the one word.
Aurelia held up a hand to silence them, and they fell silent, though their body did not.
She looked at Moirath. She tried to see beyond the grey, beyond the pits where the eyes should be, to whatever it was that stood there, whatever old sorrow had worn itself into the shape of a woman and refused to lie down. She did not see anything. She saw only the grey, and the cold, and the smell of rotting lilies.
"One memory," she said.
"One," Moirath said.
"And you will hold the door."
"Until the sun is up. I swear it by the salt in the ground and the iron in your blood. I swear it by the name I had before the name I have now."
Aurelia drew a breath. The fire burned low, and the shadows crept forward another inch across the floor.
"Done," she said. "Take it. Take a morning. Take a morning when I was seven and my mother braided my hair in the kitchen and there was a blackbird on the sill and it sang, and the bread was warm, and I did not know what any of it meant. Take that. I will not miss it. I have other mornings."
She did not know, until she had said it, which memory she would choose. The words had come from somewhere deeper than thought, and now they hung in the air between them, small and bright and terribly fragile.
Moirath's shape did not move, but something changed in it. A softening. A settling. The black pits of the eyes were no longer pits; they were dark, and deep, and full of something that might have been pity, or might have been gratitude, or might have been the look of a woman who has been given a crust after a long fast.
"So be it," Moirath said.
The shape raised a hand, or the idea of a hand, and reached toward Aurelia's brow. The fingers were not fingers, and the touch, when it came, was not a touch, but a cool pressure, like the inside of a cellar door against a child's forehead in summer. There was a moment, brief and absolute, in which Aurelia was seven, and the blackbird was singing, and her mother's hands were gentle, and the bread smelled of yeast and woodsmoke, and the world was small and whole and kind.
Then it was gone.
The shape withdrew. The cold in the room receded, drawing back to the corner like a tide, and the fire blazed up bright and steady, as if a door had been opened to a better draft. The smell of rot and lilies thinned, and under it came the clean, sharp smell of rain on stone.
Moirath was smaller now, or further away, or both. The grey had not lifted, but it had thinned, and for a moment Aurelia thought she saw the outline of a woman, very old, very tired, with a mouth that had been a mouth once and would be a mouth again when there was something left to keen for.
"Sleep," Moirath said, and the word was a kindness, or as near to kindness as such a thing could manage. "I will keep the door. Nothing will pass it until the sun is up. Nothing."
Then the shape was gone, or had always been gone, and there was only the corner, and the settle, and the fire.
Aurelia sat down on the floor by the hearth. Her hand was still on the knife. She found that she could not remember, all at once, what her mother's kitchen had looked like. She knew there had been a blackbird. She knew there had been bread. But the shape of the room, the slant of the light, the way her mother's hands had moved in her hair, all of it had slid away from her, like a word on the tip of the tongue that will not come.
She did not weep. She had not wept in a long time. But she sat very still, and the fire warmed her face, and she did not speak for a long while.
Seren, after a moment, sat down beside her, close but not touching, and did not speak either. Outside, the marsh went on with its wet breathing, and somewhere in it, far off, a thing that was not a hound and not a man bayed once at the moonless sky, and then was silent.
The silence between them had the texture of held breath. Aurelia could hear the pop and sigh of the fire, the small guttering of the candle Seren had set on the settle, and beneath it all, a deeper quiet that was not silence at all but the sound of the marsh listening.
She did not know how long she sat there. The warmth of the hearth pressed against her shins, and her fingers had gone white around the hilt of the knife, and somewhere in the slow turning of the room she understood that Moirath had not asked for a memory. She had asked for a memory, and Aurelia had given it, and she could not now recall what it had been.
Only that it had mattered. Only that there had been a voice, and a shape, and a small warm weight in her arms, or against her cheek, or somewhere she could not place.
"Seren," she said, and her own voice sounded to her like a stranger's, thin and scraped. "What did I give her?"
Seren did not answer at once. She was watching the corner where Moirath had been, as if the shape of the banshee might reassemble itself out of the grey. Then she turned, and her face in the firelight was older than it had any right to be.
"I do not know," she said. "I could not hear it. It was yours."
"It was a song," Aurelia said, and the words came out of her before she knew they were there, and they were true, and they were the worst thing she had ever said, because she could feel, in the place where the song had been, a great soft absence like the shape of a tooth pulled from the jaw. "It was my mother's song. The one she used to sing to me when I could not sleep. I cannot, I cannot find the tune of it now. I know there was one. I know she sang it every night when the wolves came down from the ridge. But the notes are gone. It is as if someone has taken a blade to the inside of my head and cut them out."
She was weeping. She did not feel the tears begin, but they were there, hot on her cheeks, and the salt of them ran into the corners of her mouth. She put up her hand, and her fingers came away wet, and she stared at them as if they belonged to someone else.
"I do not know why I weep," she said. "I cannot remember what I have lost. How can I weep for a thing I cannot call to mind?"
Seren moved then, at last, and put her arm around Aurelia's shoulders, and the touch was awkward and warm and entirely human. She did not speak. She only held on, and Aurelia leaned into her, and the fire burned, and outside the marsh breathed its slow wet breath, and somewhere in the dark a creature that was not a hound lifted its voice and was answered by another, and then both were silent.
Aurelia slept.
She did not mean to. She had not thought she would, not in this room, not with the door that was not a door and the corner that was not empty. But the warmth of the fire, and the warmth of Seren's shoulder against her cheek, and the long ache of the night behind her, all of it conspired, and her eyes grew heavy, and the room slid away.
She dreamed.
She was walking in a place she had never been. The ground under her boots was hard, and pale, and gave back a sound like struck glass. The air was cold in a way that had no wind in it, and the light was silver, and it came from no source she could see, falling out of a sky that was the color of old milk.
Before her stood a gate. It was very tall, and very narrow, and wrought of a metal that was not iron, for it did not rust, and it did not tarnish, and when she looked at it, her eyes slipped along its surface as if the metal were water. There were no hinges, and no lock, and no bars; only two leaves of pale metal that met in the middle, and on each leaf was graven a single word, in a script she could read without knowing how.
She did not read them. She knew, without looking, what they said. One said Come. One said Stay.
Beyond the gate there was a hall. She could see it, though the gate was shut. The hall was long, and the floor of it was the same pale ground as the path, and the walls rose up into a darkness that was not the darkness of night, but the darkness of a depth she could not fathom. And at the far end of the hall, on a dais of black stone, there was a throne.
It was not a throne such as kings sit in. It was made of antlers. Thousands of them, perhaps, or tens of thousands, all branching and curving and reaching, lashed together with silver wire and with something darker that she did not wish to look at. It rose high above the dais, and its points were sharp, and its shadow fell down the hall like a stain.
A figure sat upon it. She could not see the figure's face. It was a woman, she thought, or had been a woman, and the shape of her was tall and still, and her head was bowed, and her hands lay in her lap, and she was weeping. The tears fell from her unseen face and struck the pale floor, and where they struck, a small white flower opened, and then another, and another, until the floor of the hall was thick with them, and their smell was the smell of rain on stone, and of bread, and of a blackbird in a cage that had been left out in the sun.
Aurelia.
The voice came from everywhere, and from the throne, and from the gate, and from the pale ground under her feet. It was not a voice she had ever heard. It was not a voice at all, perhaps. It was the sound her own name made when it was spoken in a language that had no vowels.
Aurelia. Child of the last blood. Heir of the thorn.
She tried to speak. She tried to say I am not, or I will not, or Who are you, what is this place, let me go. But the words would not come. Her mouth would not open. Her tongue lay in her mouth like a stone.
The figure on the throne lifted her head. The face was Aurelia's own face. Older, and paler, and with eyes that had seen a great many winters, but her own. The mouth of that older Aurelia opened, and the voice that came out was the voice of the dream, and the voice of the gate, and the voice of the pale ground.
Come through, it said. Sit beside me. The waiting is long, and the songs of the living are a poor comfort, and I have wept until the flowers have grown over my feet.
Aurelia's hand rose of its own accord. Her fingers touched the pale metal of the gate. It was warm. It was the warmth of a hand held in the dark. It was the warmth of her mother's hand on her brow when she had been small, and had woken from a nightmare, and had heard, somewhere in the house, the sound of a song she could no longer recall.
Aurelia, the voice said, and it was gentler now, and sadder. Aurelia, my love, my only, my heir. Push the gate. There is no pain in it. There is only the end of the road, and a seat beside me, and a crown of antlers that does not weigh as much as you think.
The dream shifted. The silver light dimmed, and the pale ground under her boots gave a long low groan, and somewhere in the hall behind the gate, one of the white flowers lifted its head and turned toward her, and its face was the face of a hound, and its voice was the voice of the marsh.
She woke.
The fire had burned low. The room was very dark. Seren's arm was still around her shoulders, and Seren was awake, and was looking at the door that was not a door, and her hand was on the hilt of a knife that was not Aurelia's knife, and her face was the face of someone listening to a sound just out of hearing.
"What did you see?" Seren said, and her voice was very low, and very steady, and entirely false in its steadiness.
Aurelia opened her mouth. She meant to say I saw a gate, and a throne, and a woman with my face. She meant to say She called me by my name, and the gate was warm, and I wanted to push it open. She meant to say I think I have been called before, and I think I have answered, and I think the answering is older than I am.
What she said was, "I cannot remember."
And it was true. The dream was sliding away from her even as she reached for it, the way the song had slid away, the way the shape of her mother's kitchen had slid away. She could feel the edges of it under her hands, like the edges of a bank of fog, but when she pressed, it gave, and there was nothing behind it but the dark.
Seren looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and rose, and crossed the room, and stood with her back to the settle and her face to the door.
"Sleep again if you can," she said. "I will watch until the sun is up."
Aurelia did not sleep again. She sat by the dying fire, and she listened to the marsh, and she did not weep, though the absence in her chest was a great cold weight, and the name the dream had spoken was still warm on her tongue, and the warmth of the gate was still in the palm of her hand.
Dawn came thin and grey, a single thread of light drawn across the marsh like a blade across a throat. The mist did not lift. It thinned, but it did not lift, and through it the shapes of the standing stones were just visible, and the black water was just visible, and the reeds were just visible, and beyond them the low hills were a suggestion of grey on grey.
Aurelia woke, or stopped pretending to have slept, and rose from the settle. Her body ached. Her mouth was dry. The absence in her chest was still there, and the warmth in her palm, and the name on her tongue. She did not speak any of it.
Seren was at the window. She had not moved all night. She stood with her shoulders set and her hands at her sides and her face turned toward the light as if she were measuring the distance between herself and the sun, and finding it exactly what she expected. When she heard Aurelia rise, she did not turn. She said, "The reed-cutters are already on the water. I can hear the boats."
Aurelia came to stand beside her. The mist moved between them, slow and deliberate, as if it had somewhere to be. She said, "We should go."
"Not yet."
Aurelia looked at her. In the grey light, Seren's face was very still. There was a shadow in the hollow of her throat, and a shadow in the hollow of her cheek, and a shadow beneath her eyes that had not been there the night before. But the shadows were wrong. They moved when she did not. They pooled and stretched along the line of her jaw, and crept down the collar of her shirt, and gathered in the creases of her sleeves, and they were not following the light.
Aurelia said, "Seren."
Seren turned, then. The shadows did not turn with her. They stayed, and then they did, and then they were where they should have been, and the moment was over.
"There is something I have to tell you," Seren said. "Before the day is older. Before we go back to the road."
The fire was dead in the hearth. The last of the wood was a heel of white ash that crumbled when the air touched it. The room smelled of cold stone and wet reed and the faint, sweet, terrible smell that had been in the air all night, and beneath that, something else, something that smelled like iron and pine smoke and rain on hot stone. The smell of Seren. The smell of somewhere else.
"Tell me, then," Aurelia said.
Seren crossed the room. She did not sit. She stood with her back to the cold hearth and her face to the light, and the shadows gathered at her feet like dogs called to heel, and the air around her went very still, as if the marsh itself were holding its breath.
"I was not sent to protect you," she said. "I was sent to watch you. To see what you would do, when the song came, and the gate, and the name. To see if you would open the door, or close it, or turn away."
Aurelia's hand went to the hilt of the Thorn knife. She did not draw it. She held it, and the leather was warm from her own hand, and the steel beneath it was cold.
"Who sent you," she said, and her voice was very even, and very quiet.
"The Hollow Court."
The name fell into the room like a stone into a well. There was no splash. There was only the long sound of it falling, and then the silence, and then the sound of it hitting the dark.
"The fae," Aurelia said. Not a question.
"The old ones. The ones who remember the Thorns before there were Thorns. The ones who were here when the first of your line set the first stone in the ground, and the last of your line will set the last stone, and the gate will open, and the woman on the other side will rise, and the world will end, or be remade." Seren's voice was low, and even, and did not shake. "I was their ward, Aurelia. I have been their ward since before your mother was born. They took me from the place I was, and they made me what I am, and they sent me to your mother's house when you were six years old, and they told me to watch, and to wait, and to see."
Aurelia's hand tightened on the hilt. "And what did they tell you to do, when you saw."
"They did not tell me. They do not need to. There is only one thing that can be done, with a Thorn who has heard the song, and remembered the gate, and spoken the name." Seren looked at her, and her face was very pale, and her eyes were very dark, and the shadows at her feet were not still. "You are the last of the line, Aurelia. You are the heir of the curse. And the Court has waited a long time for an heir who could hear the song, and remember the gate, and not go mad with the hearing of it. They sent me to see if you were worthy. To be their queen, or their executioner."
The marsh was silent. The mist moved. The light was thin and grey and did not warm anything it touched. Aurelia's hand was on the knife, and her heart was in her throat, and the name on her tongue was still warm, and the warmth in her palm was still there, and the absence in her chest was a great cold weight, and she understood, at last, why Seren had never touched her. Why she had always stood a little apart. Why her loyalty had the shape of a thing that could be withdrawn at any moment, like a hand from a flame.
"You were going to kill me," Aurelia said.
"I was going to decide whether to kill you." Seren's voice cracked, on the last word. It was the first time Aurelia had heard it crack. "I have stood beside you for eleven years, and I have loved you, and I have watched you, and I have not known, until this night, which one I was going to do. The Court does not tell. The Court only waits. And I have waited, Aurelia. I have waited so long."
Aurelia did not draw the knife. She held it, and she looked at Seren, and the mist moved between them, and the light did not warm anything, and the absence in her chest was a great cold weight, and the warmth in her palm was a great warmth, and the name on her tongue was a great burning.
"You knew," she said. "Last night. When I woke. You knew, then."
"I knew when you spoke the name in your sleep." Seren's voice was very low. "I knew when the air changed, and the mist came, and the song came out of the water. I knew, and I did not kill you, and I do not know why. I only know that I did not."
The shadows at Seren's feet moved. They stretched toward Aurelia, slow, and tentative, and afraid. They stopped a hand's breadth from the toe of her boot, and lay there, and did not advance, and did not retreat.
Aurelia looked at them. She looked at the shadows in the hollow of Seren's throat, and the shadows in the hollow of her cheek, and the shadows beneath her eyes. She looked at the line of Seren's jaw, and the line of her shoulder, and the line of her hand, which was not quite steady at her side. She looked at the woman who had stood beside her for eleven years, and lied to her for eleven years, and loved her for eleven years, and she did not know, yet, which of those was the heaviest thing to carry.
"I dreamed of a gate," Aurelia said, "and a throne, and a woman with my face. She called me by my name. The name my mother gave me, and the name the curse gave me, and the name that is older than both. She said come home. She said the door is open. She said the kingdom is waiting." She paused. "She did not say what she would do with me, when I came."
"Neither did the Court," Seren said. "That is the test. That has always been the test. Whether you would go, and what you would do, when you came. Whether you would be the queen who remakes the world, or the executioner who ends it. And I do not know, Aurelia. I have stood beside you, and I have loved you, and I have not been able to see, even with the shadows of the Hollow Court behind my eyes, which one you are."
The light grew. The mist thinned, but did not lift. The reed-cutters' boats were dark shapes on the dark water, and the sound of the oars was a small, steady sound, and the world was beginning to be the world again, after the long strange night of it.
Aurelia let go of the knife. She did not draw it. She let her hand fall to her side, and she stood in the grey light, and she looked at the woman who had lied to her, and loved her, and not killed her, and she said, "I do not know, either. But I am going to find out."
She crossed the room. She did not touch Seren. She did not step over the shadows at her feet, but through them, and they did not resist her, and they did not recoil. They lay where they lay, and she walked through them, and they closed behind her like water, and she went to the door, and opened it, and the marsh was there, and the mist, and the light.
"Get your cloak," she said, without turning. "We have a long road to walk, and I would rather walk it with you than without you. Whatever you are. Whatever I am."
Behind her, in the grey room, Seren stood very still, and the shadows at her feet were quiet, and the light was thin, and the morning was a long way from being kind. But she moved, at last, to do as she was bid. And the door was open. And the road was waiting. And the gate was waiting, on the other side of the world, with the woman on the throne, and the name on the wind, and the kingdom that was older than the stones.
Aurelia stepped out into the mist, and did not look back, and the marsh received her like a held breath, and the day began.