The Thorn and the Icicle: The Warding on The Door

The brass bell above the door of the Wrenmoor Inn gave a single, thin note when Eleanor pushed through into the lamplit warmth. She had not meant to come here. The ribbon shop stood empty an hour ago, its bolt of holly-green silk untouched on the counter, and her feet had carried her down the cobbled lane as if they had a quarrel with her will.

Margot Henley stood at the bar, one gloved hand resting on the polished oak, the other turning a small glass of sloe gin between her fingers. She wore a dark blue coat buttoned tight at the throat and her dark hair was pinned back severely. When she turned at the sound of the bell, her mouth curved into a smile that never quite reached her eyes.

"Eleanor." She said the name as if tasting it. "I thought you kept country hours. Up with the larks, home with the candles."

"I came for the post." Eleanor gestured vaguely toward the desk near the hearth. "And perhaps a glass of something to cut the chill."

"What a fortunate coincidence. I was just leaving." Margot set her glass down. The sloe gin caught the firelight and glowed like diluted blood. "Walk with me. The lane is lonely at this hour, and a woman should not go unaccompanied."

Eleanor hesitated. She had not asked for company. The ribbon shop still waited, its green silk cooling in the afternoon air, and she had a collar to finish before the festival. But something in the angle of Margot's chin, in the practiced patience of her smile, made refusal feel ruder than silence.

They stepped out together. The lane stretched ahead of them, hemmed by low stone walls and the bare skeletons of hawthorn. A fine, persistent frost had settled on every surface, turning the village into something drawn in silver ink. Their breath came out in pale plumes.

"You have been working hard." Margot's tone was sympathetic, almost girlish. "The festival preparations. Such a burden for one so young. Your mother would be proud, I think. In her own way."

Eleanor kept her eyes on the path. "My mother has been gone a long time, Miss Henley. Her opinion is no longer a concern of mine."

"Of course, of course. Forgive me." A pause, deliberate. "I only mention it because I have been reading the parish records. Fascinating documents. Your mother was quite the authority on the old customs, was she not? The binding of the fields. The lighting of the Yule log. All that forgotten mummery."

Eleanor's step slowed. The ribbon shop seemed very far away now. The cobbles rang cold under her boots.

"The village has its traditions," she said carefully. "I do as I am asked. No more."

"And yet." Margot glanced at her sidelong. "You wear a curious ornament about your throat. A locket, is it not? Old silver, if I am not mistaken. Quite distinctive."

Eleanor's hand rose, involuntary, to the chain at her collar. The locket lay warm against her breastbone, hidden by the high buttoned front of her dress.

"It was my mother's," she said. "I do not see that it concerns anyone."

"My dear girl, everything concerns anyone who wishes to see Wrenmoor flourish." Margot's voice dropped into something almost tender. "That locket has a history. A specific and somewhat troubling history. I wonder if you know what it is you carry."

The lane narrowed where the old stone wall curved toward the churchyard. A crow lifted from a yew tree, complaining at their approach. Eleanor stopped walking. The frost glittered on the graves beyond the low iron gate.

"Speak plainly, Miss Henley. I have ribbon to finish before dark."

Margot turned to face her. The practiced charm had drained from her features, leaving something sharper behind. She folded her hands at her waist, a schoolteacher preparing a lesson.

"Very well. That locket belonged to the Winter Queen." The name fell between them like a dropped knife. "The spirit who held this village in her keeping for centuries. She was bound at the founding of the parish. A covenant between the old powers and the first settlers. The locket was her token, her seal. The village kept it safe in the church vault, generation after generation, as a pledge."

Eleanor's chest had gone tight. She could feel the locket pulsing against her skin, a faint warmth like a held breath.

"My mother kept it," she said. "How my mother came to keep it is not your concern."

"Everything concerning that object is my concern." Margot's voice did not rise, but it hardened. "The binding is fragile. Has been for years. And when a mortal wears the token of a bound spirit, the spirit knows. The spirit attends. The spirit draws close."

Eleanor said nothing. A cart passed on the lane beyond the wall, its wheels grinding the frozen ruts.

"You have drawn attention to yourself, Eleanor. To your house. To your work." Margot took a step closer. The frost on her boots cracked softly. "I have seen the way the stranger looks at you. The Irishman with his books and his questions. He follows the old paths. He knows what that locket signifies. And there are others. Older things. Things that remember the covenant."

"You are frightening me on purpose."

"I am warning you as a friend." The smile returned, colder than before. "Take the locket off. Bury it. Return it to the church. Do whatever you must, but do not wear it through the festival. The solstice draws near. The veils thin. And if you go walking through Wrenmoor marked as her creature, you will find the welcome of the village colder than the weather."

Eleanor drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders. The locket lay quiet now, its warmth banked, as if it had heard its name spoken and chosen to listen.

"I will consider what you have said," she said. "Good evening, Miss Henley."

She turned and walked back up the lane toward the inn, her stride measured, her face composed. She did not look back. She did not need to. The scrape of Margot's heel on the cobbles confirmed the other woman had gone the opposite way, toward the churchyard and the lane that led past the schoolhouse to her neat modern cottage.

Eleanor's hands had begun to shake only when she reached the door of the ribbon shop. She stood for a moment in the frost-blue dusk, one palm pressed flat against the cold wood of the jamb. The green silk waited inside, patient as snowfall.

She unbuttoned her collar with fingers that would not be still. The locket came free in her hand, and she looked at it for the first time in many days. The face of it was worked silver, tarnished to a deep grey, and etched with a pattern she had never quite been able to read. A circle of small running figures, hand in hand, their faces blank. At the center, a hollow where some stone had once been set.

She turned it over. On the back, in script so fine it looked like frost on glass, three words. She had read them a hundred times as a girl. She read them again now, in the failing light, and the cold of the street seemed to deepen by several degrees.

Remember the Covenant.

Her mother's locket. Her mother's burden. Her mother's warning, passed down without explanation.

Eleanor closed her hand around the silver. The warmth was gone from it entirely now. It lay against her palm like a small frozen heart.

She stepped inside the ribbon shop and shut the door behind her. The bolt slid home with a sound like a settling stone. She did not light a lamp. She stood in the dimness with the locket pressed to her lips, and the silence of the empty shop settled around her like snow.

The ribbon shop smelled of cedar shavings and old velvet, and of the green dye that had stained Eleanor's fingertips for as long as she could remember. She stood in the dark and listened to the building breathe around her, the timbers ticking as they cooled, the iron bolts contracting in their staples with small, deliberate sounds. Somewhere above her head a mouse ran along a rafter and stopped to consider her, then ran on.

She put the locket back beneath her collar. The chain was cold against the hollow of her throat.

She stayed a long time. When she finally moved it was to go upstairs, where she had a room above the shop, and to wash her face in cold water and braid her hair for sleep. The looking glass over the basin showed her a face she did not quite recognize. The woman in it looked as though she had been walked a long way in bad weather.

She lay down on the narrow bed and did not take off her boots.

The morning came thin and colorless, the frost still on the panes when she rose. She made herself eat bread and drink small beer. She went to the back of the shop and took down the bolt of green silk from its shelf and measured it on the counter with her arms, smoothing it flat, and then she folded it and put it away again. She did not cut it. She was not yet ready to cut it.

She went to find Declan Marlowe.

He was not at the inn. The common room was empty at that hour, the fire laid but not yet lit, the smell of yesterday's ale and last night's tobacco lying on the air like a stain. The girl who swept behind the bar looked up when Eleanor came in and then looked down again, as if she had been told not to encourage conversation.

"He took a room," the girl said, without being asked. "Upstairs. Third on the left."

"He will be sleeping still, likely."

"Then he should not have been out so late." The girl leaned on her broom. "Folk are talking."

"Let them talk." Eleanor set her mouth. "I have a question for him, is all."

The stairs creaked under her feet as she went up. The landing smelled of damp plaster and tallow. She stood outside the third door on the left and listened, and heard nothing, and knocked twice with her knuckle.

Silence. Then a cough.

"Declan. It is Eleanor Ashford. I would have a word with you, if you are able."

A pause. A sound of movement within. The latch lifted, and the door swung inward, and Declan Marlowe stood blinking at her in the grey light from the corridor window. He had slept in his clothes. His hair was pressed flat on one side. He looked, for the first time since she had met him, like a man who had not slept well.

"Forgive me," he said. "I was dreaming."

"I have come too early."

"No." He stepped back from the doorway. "Come in. I am glad to be woken."

The room was small and spare, as he had said. A bed that had been slept in. A table with his satchel upon it, and a stack of papers weighted down with a chunk of hearthstone. A jug of water, untouched. The window looked out onto the lane, and the frost lay on it thick as gauze.

She went in and stood with her back to the window, her hands folded at her waist. He closed the door and leaned against it and looked at her with the patient, wary expression of a man who has been caught out in something he would rather not name.

"You know why I have come," she said.

"I can guess."

"Then guess aloud. I would hear it from you, and not have to piece it together from what people will not say."

He was quiet for a moment. The floorboards creaked beneath his weight as he shifted.

"Margot Henley has called a meeting," he said. "At the schoolhouse. For tomorrow evening. She intends to put it to a vote that the old rites be done away with. The wassailing. The lighting of the bonfires. The leaving of bread and salt on the thresholds at the turn of the year." He paused. "The procession in the woods."

"Yes."

"She has been quiet about it until now. Working through others. But she means to be seen at this meeting, and to be heard. She means to make a thing of it."

"I know what she means to make of it." Eleanor's voice was level. "I want to know what you mean to make of it. And I want to know why you did not tell me this last night."

He looked at her. He did not look away.

"Because I was not sure," he said, "that telling you would not put you in harm's way."

"I am already in harm's way. I was born in it."

He inclined his head. He did not argue the point.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"I will go to the meeting." He folded his arms. "I will speak for what I know to be true. I will say what I have seen in the villages that have kept the old customs, and what has befallen the villages that have not."

"And will they listen to you?"

"Some of them. Not Margot Henley. Not the men she has gathered to her." He was quiet for a moment. "But there are others in the village who are afraid, and who do not yet know what they are afraid of. They may listen to a stranger before they will listen to each other."

"And after the meeting?"

"After the meeting we shall see what has been set in motion." He looked at her steadily. "I will not lie to you, Eleanor. I do not know how this will fall out. I have seen villages divided over less. I have seen friendships ended. I have seen families broken."

"I know." She unfolded her hands and folded them again. "My mother was broken by less."

He did not reply. He waited.

"I did not come to speak of the meeting," she said. "Not yet. I came to ask you a thing that has been on my mind since last night."

"Ask, then."

She hesitated. The words were harder to find than she had thought.

"The locket I wear. You have seen it, I think. Beneath my collar."

"I have seen the chain."

"It was my mother's. She wore it from the time she was a girl until the day she died. She never took it off. She never spoke of what it meant. She only said that it was to be passed on, and that when it was passed on, the one who wore it would know what to do."

She opened the collar of her dress. The locket lay against the hollow of her throat, the silver tarnished to a deep, uneven grey. She drew it out on its chain and held it so that the light from the window caught the etched face.

"A circle of small figures," Declan said softly. "Hand in hand. There is a place at the center where a stone has been set."

"You noticed it last night."

"I notice many things that I do not speak of."

"There were words on the back." She turned the locket over. "Script so fine it looks like frost on glass. Three words. Remember the Covenant."

He was very still.

"Do you know what it means?" she asked.

"I know what a covenant is," he said, carefully. "I know that there have been covenants in this country for longer than there have been churches. I know that some of them were made between folk and powers that are not spoken of in the chapels."

"And some of them were broken."

"Some of them were forgotten." He paused. "Which is, perhaps, the same thing, in the end."

She looked at him. He looked back.

"You are a scholar," she said. "You were sent away from the university for dangerous antiquarian interests. You travel the countryside collecting the customs of villages that are losing them. You came to this village at this time, and you are lodging at an inn whose walls I have just discovered are ringed with iron nails." She stopped. "You know more than you have told me."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he pushed himself off from the door and crossed the small room to the table, and lifted the chunk of hearthstone from the papers, and set it aside. Beneath it lay a single sheet of paper, much folded, the edges worn soft. He did not unfold it. He only laid his hand upon it.

"Sit down," he said. "And I will tell you what I can."

Eleanor sat.

Declan did not sit. He stood with his back to the small window, and the late afternoon light came around his shoulders and made a thin bright edge of him. He spoke for a long time. He spoke of covenants. He spoke of winters that had been older than the names now used for them. He spoke of the belief, once held, that certain hollows and certain stones marked the places where the old powers had set their boundary, and that within those boundaries, so long as the boundary was kept, so long as the rites were done, the winter could be held at its edge and the village kept safe from the worst of it. He spoke of how the church had come, and had called these things pagan, and had raised its own boundary stones, and how for a long time both sets of stones had stood together and no one had minded. He spoke of how the balance had shifted. He spoke of how some covenants, once broken, did not end so much as they curdled, and became a thing of a different kind, and grew hungry for the attention that had been withdrawn from them.

He did not name the being they had spoken of in the lane. He did not need to. She knew the name. It had been in her mother's book, in the margins, in her mother's own careful hand, and she had read it and not known what to make of it, and now she knew.

"Why here?" she asked, when he had finished. "Why this village, this year?"

"Because some covenants have a term," he said. "And when the term is ended, the thing that was bound knows it. And then it begins to test the binding."

"And the wardings in the walls."

"Are how some of the older families have tried to keep the term extended. My family was one of them." He paused. "My grandmother was from this village. She left it. She took the road and she did not come back, and she made me promise that I would, when the time came. That is how I knew where to look. That is how I knew what to look for."

Eleanor sat for a long moment with the locket in her palm. Then she closed her hand around it, gently, and looked up.

"Tonight," she said. "The eve."

He nodded.

"What must be done?"

"What was always done. In the older times. A binding of the term, for another seven winters. An offering of the first and last of the season. A name spoken into the circle. A name answered to."

"And you need me for this."

"I need you because the rite requires someone who is of the village and not of the church, and there is no one else. I need you because the being knows your blood. I need you because you are the only one I have spoken to of it who has not run from me in the lane." He stopped. "And I need you because I think, when you were a girl, your mother would have wanted you to be the one to finish what she could not."

She did not answer at once. She looked at the folded sheet of paper under his hand, and at the locket in her own, and at the iron nails, hidden behind the plaster, ringing the walls of the small room like a binding of their own.

"I will do it," she said, at last. "On one condition."

He lifted his head.

"You will tell me everything. From the beginning. Not the version for the schoolteacher. The real one. The one my mother knew, if you have it. You will not spare me the parts that are ugly, and you will not leave me to find them out by myself, in the dark, on the eve. Swear it."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he lifted his hand from the paper, and set it, palm upward, between them.

"I swear it," he said. "By the term. By the rite. By the name of the one who waits."

She set her hand in his, and they sat with their hands together on the table between the locket and the folded paper, and the late afternoon light moved across the floor and the room grew dim, and neither of them spoke.

That evening, the power flickered.

Eleanor was crossing the upper hallway of her cottage with a candle in her hand, on her way down to the kitchen for a lamp, when the little flame jumped and the shadows lurched and the candle went out, and in the dark she felt a cold breath move past her, not from the stair, not from the door, but from the wall itself, as if some inner lining of the plaster had parted and let the cold through. She stood very still. The dark was absolute. She could hear the faint tick of the clock downstairs, and the wind outside, and a third sound, which was neither of these things, which was more like a soft, sustained exhalation, the kind of sound a person makes when they have been standing in a room for a long time and have not been noticed.

Then the candle caught again, in a draught from somewhere, and the hallway was there, and in it, standing three paces from her, was a woman.

The woman was translucent. Eleanor could see the wall behind her through the shape of her shoulder. She was tall, and thin, and dressed in a way that was not of this year or the year before it. Her hair was pale, and threaded through it were small white crystals that might have been frost or might have been something that only looked like frost. Her face was still. Her eyes were not. Her eyes were very dark, and very aware, and fixed on Eleanor with a recognition that had nothing to do with the hallway or the moment.

Eleanor opened her mouth.

The woman lifted one hand, slowly, and laid a finger to her own lips.

At the same instant, the door at the end of the hallway was thrust open, and Declan came through it, and he crossed the space between them in three long strides, and his arms came around Eleanor from behind and his hand came over her eyes and he pulled her back against his chest and held her, hard, and she felt the thud of his heart against her spine and the heat of his breath on her hair, and the hallway was suddenly only a hallway, and the cold was gone, and the candle burned steady in her hand.

"Don't move," he said, low, against her ear. "Don't look. Not yet."

"What was that," she said, into the dark of his hand.

"Hush."

"I saw her."

"I know you did."

"Declan."

"Hush." His arms tightened, just slightly. "Listen to me. She is bound. She is not free to cross. She was testing the binding, and you saw her, and now she knows that you can see her, and that is a thing we will have to deal with later, and not now. Now you will breathe. You will count to ten. You will set down the candle, and you will take my hand, and we will go downstairs, and we will shut the door, and we will wait until the power comes back on and the room is warm again, and then we will speak of it. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good." He let his hand fall from her eyes, slowly. She blinked at the dark hallway, and at the candle, and at the wall, which was only a wall. "Give me the candle."

She gave it to him. He took it in his left hand, and kept her hand in his right, and they went down the stairs together.

In the kitchen the range was cold. The clock ticked. The wind moved in the chimney. He set the candle on the table, between the locket and the folded paper, and pulled out a chair for her, and she sat, and he sat across from her, and they looked at each other across the small flame.

"She is not the being we spoke of," Eleanor said, at last. "She is something else."

"She is what is left of the one who was here before the new one," he said. "She is the residue of an older binding. She has been in the walls of this village for a long time. She has been quiet for a long time. She is not quiet now."

"Because the term is ending."

"Yes."

"And because I can see her."

"Yes."

Eleanor sat back in the chair. She looked at the ceiling, as if she could see through it to the hallway above.

"I thought I was the only one," she said. "Since I was a girl, I thought I was the only one who saw things that were not there for other people. I thought it meant I was strange. I thought it meant there was something wrong with me. My mother said there was not, but she would not say more."

"There is nothing wrong with you," he said. "There was never anything wrong with you. You see what you see because the rite runs in your blood, and the being knows it, and the residue knows it, and now you know it too."

She looked at him.

"And what must be done about her," Eleanor said, "tonight. As a part of the rite. As a part of what we have agreed."

He was quiet for a moment.

"She must be spoken to," he said. "By name. In the circle. By you."

"And if she will not hear me."

"She will hear you." He paused. "She has been waiting, I think, to be heard."

Eleanor sat for a long time with the candle between her hands. Then she took up the locket from the table and pressed the catch and opened it, and looked at the two faces inside, and closed it again, and held it against her chest.

"Tell me her name," she said.