Bramble

You remember pieces.

Light, first: cold silver light pouring out of a man's raised hand like water out of a broken jar. Then thorns, black and enormous, erupting from the ground under the wyvern and wrapping its wings. The wyvern shrieking. Falling. A shoulder under your ribs, someone carrying you, saying something sharp in a language that sounds like breaking ice.

Then nothing.

You wake to firelight and the smell of pine resin.

You're on your back on a bed of furs inside a hollow under the roots of an enormous tree. The roots arch overhead like the ribs of a ship. A small fire burns in a ring of stones, the smoke curling up through a gap in the earth. Your shoulder is packed with something cool and green and bound with strips of blue silk that was, very recently, somebody's shirt.

The somebody is sitting across the fire with his back against a root, in his coat and nothing under it, peeling an apple with a small silver knife.

"Good," Prince Rhien Sablethorn says. "You're not dead. I'd have been annoyed."

You go for your belt. Your dagger is there, in its sheath. So is your sword, propped against the roots by your hand where you could reach it. He's left you armed.

"Your shoulder will hurt for a week," he goes on, like a physician. "Wyvern teeth are filthy, but birch sap is cleaner than anything your surgeons own. The moss is for the fever. Don't scratch it. Apple?"

He tosses a slice across the fire. You catch it with your good hand before you've decided to.

"The wyvern," you say. Your voice comes out like gravel.

"Dead. In the briars. It took me an embarrassingly long time." He cuts another slice and eats it himself. "Wyverns don't come through the Thornwall. They don't hunt at dusk, and they don't hunt in the birch woods, because the birches sing and it hurts their ears. So that one was either very confused or very well paid."

You don't know what that means either. Your head is full of fog. You look at your wrist because it's burning.

There's a mark on the inside of your left wrist, where the skin is thin. It looks like a thorn drawn in dark ink, curved and sharp, the length of your thumb. It's warm. When you touch it, it pulses, once, like a second heartbeat.

"What is this?"

"Hm." He glances at it and away. "We'll get there."

"What did you do to me?"

"Pulled you out of a wyvern." He points the little knife at you, not threateningly, more like a teacher with chalk. "You're a knight of the Ward. The cloak clasp. The way you hold your sword hand, like it's always about to be needed. Thornbridge?"

You say nothing.

"Thornbridge," he decides. "They teach that silence there too. Very stern." His eyes, in the firelight, are the violet of the last minute before night. He looks at you the way you'd look at a puzzle you already know the answer to and like anyway. "And your name is?"

You could lie. You're human. You can.

"Ethan," you say, and you have no idea why.

Something moves in his face again, the same thing you saw at the moon-pool. Then it's gone under a grin. "Sir Ethan. Well. Welcome to the Gloaming. I'm told you've heard of me."

"Everyone's heard of you."

"Mostly lies. Which is funny, given." He finishes the apple and throws the core into the fire, where it hisses. "Sleep. You'll heal faster. I'll sit up a while."

"Why?"

"Because something might come, and you're in no state to stab it."

"No," you say. "Why did you save me?"

He considers that for so long you think he won't answer. The fire pops. Outside, the birches chime.

"Because you were being eaten," he says at last, "and I didn't want you to be."

It's a true answer. It's also not an answer at all. You're starting to understand how fae talk.

You try to sit up. Your shoulder goes white and you fall back, and your eyes sting, and you hear yourself say, without thinking, the way you were raised to say it to every healer and cook and stablehand who ever did you a kindness, "Thank y..."

His hand is over your mouth before you finish.

He moved across the fire faster than you saw. He's kneeling over you, palm warm against your lips, close enough that you can see the faint silver at the edges of his irises and smell resin and snow on his skin. His face, this close, is almost hard to look at.

"Don't," he says quietly. All the teasing has gone out of his voice. "Never say that to one of us. Not to me, not to anyone in the Gloaming. Thanks admits a debt, and debts here are real things. They have weight. People have been ruined by a polite word." He takes his hand away, slowly. "If you must, say you're glad of it."

You stare up at him. Your mouth tingles where his palm was.

"I'm glad of it," you say.

"Good." He sits back on his heels. The grin comes back, but softer. "Manners. I like that in an assassin."

Your stomach drops through the earth.

"Sleep," he says again, and goes back to his side of the fire as if he hasn't said anything at all.

You don't sleep.

You lie with your eyes half-closed and listen. You listen to the fire burn down. You listen to the birches. You listen to his breathing across the hollow, which is slow, and then slower, and then even.

He knows what you are. Of course he knows. And he left you your sword.

Either he's a fool, or he thinks he can't be hurt, or this is a game you don't understand. It doesn't matter. The king's voice is still in your ear: one knife, in the right hand. Nineteen days. Eighteen now. If the prince doesn't reach Briarmoot, there's no war. That's what you were told. That's what you swore to do in a cold chapel under a shield you've looked at your whole life.

You ease up onto your good elbow.

He's asleep sitting up, his head tipped back against the root, his throat bare above the open coat. The circlet has slipped. In sleep he looks younger, and less like a painting, and more like a man who is very tired.

You draw the dagger. It doesn't make a sound.

You get to your knees. Then one foot. The fire's down to coals, red light on his face. Three steps. You've done harder things. You've never done this, but you've done harder things.

You're close enough to hear his heartbeat, or think you can. You lift the blade.

Your hand won't move.

It isn't fear. You know what fear feels like in your arm. This is like reaching for something on the far side of glass. The muscle is there. The will is there. The blade simply will not go down.

The thorn on your wrist flares hot as a brand.

And the dagger changes in your fist. You feel it before you see it: the steel softening, twisting, splitting along its length into green wood and leaves and long curved thorns, until you're holding a bramble cane that has never been a weapon in its life. A small white flower opens at the tip.

Rhien opens his eyes.

He looks at the bramble, and at you, and he doesn't move at all. He doesn't look afraid. He looks, for one second, almost sad.

"Ah," he says. "Did no one explain debts to you?"