What Davey Came to Sell

Davey's truck is parked behind the Sugarhouse, and Davey is inside the diner, working the grill with his back to the window like it's any other Tuesday.

You still have his spare key. You've had it since he was seventeen and kept locking himself out.

The tin box is on the floor of the passenger side, where you saw it the night he vanished and didn't look. It's an old cookie tin, blue, with a Dutch windmill on the lid and the paint worn off the corners. You know it. It sat on top of Grandma Dorrie's refrigerator your whole childhood, and nobody was allowed to touch it.

You sit in the cab with the door open and pry off the lid.

Inside: a photocopy, folded in quarters. Grandma's handwriting on an index card. And a sheet of lined notepaper torn from a diner order pad, in Davey's messy capitals.

You read the photocopy first. You can't help it. You're an archivist; you'd read a ransom note for its paleography.

It's a page from a diary, the handwriting cramped and slanting, iron-gall ink gone brown. The date at the top says August 14, 1889.

Abner is dying. The doctor says so and the minister says so and the cholera has taken the Orcutt boys and the Crosby baby already. I went to the ring on Quarry Hill tonight because my mother said that is where you go when God is not listening. They came. A woman white as a candle, and another in a crown of oak leaves who only watched. The white one said she would give me Abner's life. She asked a price.

God forgive me. I gave them the first daughter of the fourth generation to bear my name. I thought: four generations. I thought: none of my daughters will be so foolish as to name a child Clemency.

She said it would be collected on the turning of that daughter's twenty-eighth year.

Your hands have started to shake.

Your middle name is Clemency. Grandma Dorrie chose it. Your mother tried to argue, and Grandma said a family needs to keep its names, and your mother gave in, and you've hated it your whole life. Ava Clemency Lathrop, written on every report card, said in full only when you were in trouble.

You count on your fingers, the way the names run in the front of the family Bible. Clemency's children, the first generation after her. Her granddaughter, Grandma Dorrie, born in 1929 and ninety-six when she died. Dorrie's son, your father. You and Davey.

Fourth generation. First daughter.

Your twenty-eighth birthday is a year from yesterday.

The index card is in Grandma's hand, shaky, from near the end. Davey. I named her before I knew. I found the diary in Mama's chest the winter she was born, and I have tried every day for twenty-seven years to undo what I did. I couldn't find the door. Don't tell her. Let her have her life. Love, Gran.

And then Davey's note, the order pad page, written fast and hard enough to tear:

If you find this I'm sorry. I'm going to go settle it so it never touches Ava. Don't come after me. I mean it. D.

You don't remember crossing the parking lot. You remember the kitchen door banging open, and the heat and the hiss of the grill, and Davey turning around with a spatula in his hand and seeing the tin box in yours.

His face does something terrible. It just falls.

"Outside," you say.

He follows you to the dumpsters behind the diner. He's still holding the spatula.

"How long," you say.

"Since April." He stares at the gravel. "She told me the night before she died. She made me swear not to tell you. She said she'd spent her whole life looking for a way out, and she didn't want you to spend yours that way."

"So you decided to walk into a fairy ring?"

"I decided to pay it." His voice cracks. "I found Clemency's diary in Gran's cedar chest. I tore out the last page and took it with me as proof. I went to the ring at dusk on your birthday because that's when the diary said it opened, and I was going to tell them, take me instead. A life for a life. I'm a Lathrop. I'm the fourth generation too."

"You're not a daughter."

"I know that now!" He throws the spatula. It clangs off the dumpster. "I got through the ring and there was this guy, this gorgeous, terrifying guy with a crown, and he just looked at me and said, 'Oh, you stupid, brave thing,' and had me locked in a room with a hob. And then you showed up and made a deal with him."

You both stand there breathing hard.

"I was supposed to fix it," he says, very quietly. "For once. I was supposed to be the one who fixed it."

You grab him. He's a head taller than you and he folds over anyway, the way he did when he was sixteen, and you hold your brother behind the Sugarhouse dumpsters while he shakes.

You walk into the Hall of Leaves that night still wearing your cardigan. You didn't let Bramble dress you. You didn't let her say a word.

Faolan is in the Long Gallery, alone, reading by the window. He looks up and sees your face, and closes the book.

"You found out," he says.

"You knew."

"Yes."

"The whole time. When you bargained with me. When you told me you wanted to meet me." You're shaking again. "You knew Davey walked in on purpose. You knew about Clemency. You knew about the debt."

"I knew some of it the night he came through my ring. I learned the rest from the page he was carrying." He stands. "Ask me what you want to ask me, Ava. I'll answer."

"Why did you take him?"

"Because if I hadn't, the Hollow Court would have." His voice is very level. "Your brother walked through my ring to reach the one who holds your family's debt. Her name is Sabeline. She is queen of the Hollow Court, under the hill, and she doesn't take substitutes. She would have taken him, kept him as long as it amused her, and come for you anyway on your twenty-eighth birthday. So I claimed him first. By right of the ring, he was mine before he could be hers."

"And then you bargained with me."

"And then I bargained with you." He steps closer. "Here is what that bargain is, since you've earned the whole of it. While you're my sworn guest, no other court in the realms may lay a hand on you. Not Sabeline. Not her hounds. Not her envoys. That mark behind your ear isn't a leash. It's a wall."

The room tilts. You put a hand on the back of a chair.

"So the year," you say slowly. "A year of nights. It runs out..."

"On your twenty-eighth birthday." He nods. "I gave you the longest wall I could. A year to find a door."

"Why?" It comes out raw. "Why would you do that for someone you'd never met?"

He's quiet for a long moment. The fire in the Hearth Oak crackles somewhere below.

"That," he says at last, "is a different question. And I'll answer it when it costs me less."

Before you can push, the gallery doors bang open. Gorse, the hob, stomps in so fast his spectacles are crooked, his thornbush beard bristling.

"My lord," he says. "The Hollow Court has sent an envoy. He's at the gate." He looks at you over the spectacles, grim. "He asks for the debtor. By her full name."