The Ledger

My sister was dying of a thing with no name, and the fae do not give anything away for free, and those two facts are the whole reason I am writing this down. I want it on a page somewhere that I knew what I was doing. People will say afterward — they always say it — that the girl was tricked, the poor mortal girl, lured into the Thornwood not understanding the cost. I understood the cost. I had grown up four miles from the hedge. I had heard every cautionary tale my grandmother owned, and she owned a great many, and she told them well. I knew that a fae bargain is a beautiful knife and that the handle is always the part they hand you. I went in anyway. With my eyes open. For Lira. The hedge that walls the Thornwood Court is not a hedge the way a garden has a hedge. It is forty feet of blackthorn grown so dense the dark inside it has weight, and it does not have a gate so much as it has a place where, if the wood has decided it likes you, the thorns will agree to be a door. I stood in front of it at dusk with my grandmother's third-best shawl around my shoulders and my hands steady, because I had spent the whole walk making my hands be steady, and I said the words you are supposed to say. "I have come to bargain. I have come to bargain. I have come to bargain." Three times. Everything fae is three times. The wood considered me. I felt it consider me — that is the part the tales never quite manage, the way the blackthorn turns its attention on you like a cold animal lifting its head — and then, with a sound like a long slow inhale, the thorns unbraided themselves into an archway, and beyond it there was lamplight, and a path of pale stones, and the smell of a season that does not happen in the mortal world. I went in. The arch closed behind me. I had expected that and it frightened me anyway. The path took me to a house, if you can call it a house — it was more as though several houses had been beautiful at each other for a hundred years and grown together — and at the door of it stood a woman made entirely of courtesy. She was tall and grey-skinned and her smile had been practiced so long it had stopped being a smile and become a tool. "A mortal," she said, "with steady hands. How novel. Most of them shake. You've come to bargain." "I've come to bargain." "Of course you have. Nobody crosses the hedge to admire the gardening." She stepped aside. "Then you'll want the Ledger. Everyone who bargains in the Thornwood is written in the Ledger. It is the law of the House, older than the House. Come." She led me down a corridor where the candles burned with no flame, just light, just the idea of light, and into a room that was nothing but a book. I mean that. The room was built around the book the way a chapel is built around an altar. The Ledger sat open on a stand of black wood, and it was enormous, and its pages were the soft yellow of old teeth, and it was full — column after column, name after name, in a hundred different hands — of everyone who had ever come to the Thornwood wanting something and been charged for it. "You write your name," the courteous woman said, "and what you have come for, and the House will name its price. You may refuse the price. Many do. But once your name is in the Ledger it does not come out, and the House remembers you, and you may not bargain a second time. So." She offered me a pen. It was a thorn, of course it was a thorn, four inches of polished blackthorn with a nib worked into the tip. "Be very sure, mortal, that you want the thing more than you want the rest of your unwritten life." I thought of Lira. I thought of her in our bed at home with the nameless thing eating her quiet from the inside, getting lighter every week, like a page being slowly turned to. I thought: there is no version of my life worth more than her staying in it. I took the thorn. It bit my fingers — it was meant to; the ink, I understood, was going to be me — and I bent over that vast and dreadful book, and I wrote, in my own blood, in my own steady hand: Sefa of Greywell. I have come for my sister's life. The Ledger did something then. The page warmed under my hand like a living thing waking up. And in the lamplight, the courteous woman stopped smiling — actually stopped, the tool laid down — and looked at me with what I would later understand was the first honest expression anyone in the Thornwood ever showed me. "Oh," she said softly. "Oh, you foolish, brave little thing. You've gone and written that where he can read it."