The Terms

"How do you know my name?"

"Go home," he says again, as if the first time was a draft.

The light from the open tree paints one side of his face green. Up close he's worse. Better. Both. There are faint gold points at the tips of his ears, and you can't stop looking at them, because they're real, because this is real.

"Where is my sister?"

He doesn't answer. He just watches you, still as the hawthorn.

"Peony Ferncastle," you say. "Twenty-five. Brown curls. Sings when she's nervous. She came here. She came here a lot." Your voice cracks and you hate it. "Is she alive?"

"Yes."

The word goes through you like warm water. You have to put a hand on the hawthorn to stay standing.

"Is she hurt?"

"No."

"Is she under that hill?"

A pause. "Yes."

"Then give her back."

"No."

"Why not?"

He tilts his head, and the thorns of his crown catch the moonlight. "You'll find, Ava Ferncastle, that I answer what I choose to answer. And that everything I say is true. My kind can't lie. Ask the wrong question and you'll get the truth anyway, and you won't like it."

"Then here's the right one. What do you want for her?"

"Nothing you should give."

"Let me decide what I should give."

Something moves in his face, there and gone. "I've refused better offers than yours tonight," he says. "Go home. Keep your coffee warm. Forget this clearing."

"I'm not leaving without her."

"Then you'll stand here until the moon sets, and the door will close, and you'll be cold." He turns back toward the seam of light.

You look past him, through the open tree. You see a slope of black thorns going down and down, gray and dead under a dim green sky, like a forest after a fire that never stopped burning.

"What's that?"

He stops. "The Briarwaste."

"Is it between here and her?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll walk through it." You step toward the door. Your heart is slamming. "You won't bargain, fine. I'll find her myself."

He moves faster than anything should. One moment he's in the doorway; the next he's between you and it, close enough that you can smell him, green and cold, like snow on cut stems. He doesn't touch you. You notice that. He puts himself in your way without laying a finger on you.

"You would die in there," he says quietly. "Not quickly."

"Then bargain with me."

He looks at you for a long time. You hold his stare. You've stared down a board of directors over a stand of diseased oaks; you can stare down a fairy.

"Your sister," he says at last, "told me you'd do this."

"Then she knows me."

He closes his eyes. When he opens them, something has settled.

"Then write," says the king.

You use the back of Peony's notebook and both your pens. You sit on a root at the edge of the ring with your headlamp on and write it the way you'd write a grant proposal, which is to say like your life depends on every comma.

He waits. He stands in the moonlight with his hands clasped behind him, and he doesn't hurry you, and he doesn't look over your shoulder.

You know the stories. Peony read them to you every Halloween, out loud, doing voices. Never eat their food. Never give your name. Never thank them. Never agree to anything vague, because they'll twist it until it strangles you.

So you don't write anything vague.

When you're done, you read it out loud.

"One. I, Ava Ferncastle, will be the bride of the King under the Hill for a year and a day from tonight. Bride in title and name only. This marriage asks nothing of my body."

His eyes flick to you, then away.

"Two. You won't touch me unless I ask."

"Agreed," he says.

"I'm not done. Three. Every full moon, a door opens from wherever I am under your hill to my home in Portland. Moonrise to moonrise. I can go through, and I can come back. Four. Nothing I eat or drink under the hill binds me to anything, and a day under the hill is a day in my world. Five. I can end this bargain on any full moon, and no penalty falls on me or on my sister. Six. At the end of the year and a day, you release my sister Peony Ferncastle to me, and you open the door home for both of us." You look up. "That's it."

He holds out his hand. You hesitate, then give him the notebook, careful that your fingers don't brush his.

He reads it the way you read a soil report: slowly, twice. His thumb rests on the second clause.

"No touch you don't ask for," he says. "You understand I can't lie about whether I'll keep that."

"Then tell me you'll keep it."

His eyes come up, green as new leaves and twice as dangerous. "I'll keep it."

"And the fifth one. I can walk away."

"On any full moon. Yes." He reads it again. "You've closed every door I'd have used, if I were the kind of king your sister's books warned you about."

"Are you?"

"I've been told so." He says it without a shred of humor, and you can't tell whether that's a confession or a joke. "I'd like to add a clause."

Your stomach drops. Here it comes. "What clause?"

"Seven." He takes your pen. His handwriting is black and beautiful and old-fashioned. He reads as he writes. "The bride will tell the king if she is ever afraid of him."

You stare at him. "That's it?"

"That's it."

"Why?"

"Because I'd want to know." He offers back the pen. "Do you accept my clause?"

You read it three times for a trap. There isn't one. "Yes."

"Then sign."

You sign. Your name sits on the page, ordinary, blue ballpoint.

Beneath it, in black, he writes his own. Odran Yew. It looks like a name that has been carved into things.

He presses his thumb against one of the long thorns on his crown until it bleeds. His blood is not red. It's green, thin and bright like sap from a cut stem, and it smells like spring. He draws his thumb beneath your name, and the green line sinks into the paper.

The page moves.

The ink of your contract lifts off the paper and twists into a thin green vine. It slides across your knuckles, warm and harmless, and wraps once around the fourth finger of your left hand. Tiny thorns rise along it, not cutting, just there. Then a bud forms on it, no bigger than a grain of rice, and opens into a perfect white hawthorn flower.

It doesn't hurt. It's the strangest thing you have ever felt, and it doesn't hurt at all.

The ground under the ring sighs.

The mushrooms brighten. The whole circle tilts, gently, like the deck of a boat, and the soil inside it opens downward into steps of living root lit with green.

"It's done," says Odran Yew, King of the Thorn Court, holding out his hand to you and then, remembering, lowering it again. "You're my wife."