Under the Hill

The stairs go down longer than the hill is tall.

You notice that the way you'd notice a wrong reading on a meter. You count steps, because counting keeps you calm, and at three hundred you stop, because the numbers have started to feel like an insult.

The walls are roots. Not carved, not built. Living roots, thick as your waist, braided together and lit from inside by a soft green glow, like the light through a leaf held up to the sun. The air warms as you go. It smells like rain on hot stone and bruised petals.

Odran walks one step ahead of you, never more. When the stairs narrow, he slows. When they turn, he waits. He doesn't offer his arm. He keeps his hands at his sides like he's carrying something that might spill.

"Your crown," you say, because the silence is getting loud. "Does it hurt?"

"Yes."

"Then why wear it?"

"Because it's mine." He glances back. "You ask a great many questions."

"I'm a scientist."

"I know." He says it like a fact he's filed away somewhere. You file that away too.

The stairs end in a hall that steals the breath out of you.

It is a cathedral grown out of a forest. Hawthorn trunks rise like pillars, their branches knitting overhead into a vaulted ceiling of thorns and white blossom, and among the blossom hang lanterns made of something that isn't fire: pale blue-green lights drifting gently in glass. Foxfire. The floor is moss, deep and springy. Black yew hedges make alcoves along the walls, and in the alcoves are people.

Not people.

They're too tall, or too slender, or too still. Their skin is too perfect, their hair too bright: silver and copper and green-black and white. Their eyes catch the light like animals' eyes do. And every single one of them is beautiful in a way that makes your teeth ache, and every single one of them turns to look at you.

The hall goes quiet.

You lift your chin and keep walking, because the alternative is running, and you're pretty sure running is a bad idea here.

A woman steps out of the crowd and drops to one knee in front of Odran. She's older than the rest, with an iron-gray braid over one shoulder and knuckles laced with old white scars. She wears leather the color of yew bark and a sword like she sleeps with it.

"Majesty." She rises and looks at you. Her eyes are flat brown and missing nothing. "So she came."

"She came," says Odran. "Captain Eithne Rooksby, my steward and the captain of my guard. Eithne, my wife."

The word wife goes through the hall like wind through grass.

"Lady Ava." Eithne gives you a short nod. Not hostile. Not friendly. Assessing. "You'll want food. You'll want sleep. You'll want to see your sister. Two of those you can have tonight."

"Where is she?"

Eithne looks at Odran. Odran looks at you.

"Asleep," he says. "Safe. You'll see her at sunrise."

"Why not now?"

"Because she asked for sunrise." His voice is careful. "It was her one request."

That makes no sense, and you open your mouth to say so, and someone laughs.

It's a beautiful laugh, warm, like a hand on the back of your neck. A man comes toward you through the crowd, and the crowd parts for him almost as fast as it did for the king.

He looks like Odran's brighter reflection. Same height, same carved bones, but where Odran is black and green and winter, this man is honey and gold: dark-honey hair falling in loose waves, gray eyes that crinkle when he smiles, a mouth made for it. He wears deep plum velvet and a ring of black thorns on every finger.

"Brother," he says. "You've married a mortal." He takes your hand before you can stop him and bows over it. His lips don't quite touch your skin. "How sentimental."

You pull your hand back.

Odran hasn't moved. But the temperature in the hall drops, and the foxfire in the nearest lantern shudders.

"Aodhan Sloe," he says. "My half-brother. Lord of Sloe Hall." A pause. "Don't take his hand again unless you want to."

"I don't," you say.

Aodhan laughs again, delighted. "Oh, she's sharp. Good. You'll need that, sister." He leans in, and his voice drops to something private. "Has he told you yet what a bride is for, down here?"

"Aodhan," says Odran.

Just that. Just his name. Aodhan's smile doesn't falter, but he steps back.

The wedding feast is a long table under the blossoms, piled with things you half recognize: pears glazed in something gold, dark bread, cheeses veined with blue flowers, wine that smells like violets.

You don't eat. Every story you know says don't eat.

Odran, seated beside you on a chair of braided thornwood, watches you not eat for a quarter of an hour. Then he leans over, careful to keep his shoulder from brushing yours, and says, quietly, "Clause four."

"What?"

"Nothing I eat or drink under the hill binds me to anything. You wrote it. It's law now. The food can't hold you." His eyes meet yours. "You're hungry, Ava. I can hear it."

You stare at him. "If I eat that pear, I can still leave."

"If you eat that pear, you can still leave."

He can't lie.

You eat the pear. It's the best thing you've ever tasted, and you're so relieved you almost cry, and you don't let him see, and you're fairly sure he sees anyway.

Your chambers are at the end of a long root-walled corridor. Odran stops at the door. It's made of pale hawthorn wood, carved with flowers, and there's a lock on it, a small bronze latch on your side.

"It locks from within," he says. "Only from within. No one under this hill can open it but you. Not even me."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because you wrote that I may not touch you unless you ask." He looks at the latch. "A door is a kind of touch."

You don't know what to say to that.

He reaches into his coat and holds out a sprig of hawthorn, a short green twig with three leaves and a single white flower. When you take it, you're careful, and so is he. Your fingers don't meet.

"If you need me," he says, "speak into it. I'll hear."

"What if I just want to yell at you?"

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The rumor of one. "Then I'll hear that too. Goodnight, Ava." A beat. "Wife."

He goes. You lock the door. You lean against it and slide down until you're sitting on the floor, in a room full of moss and moonlight and a bed made of woven willow, and you pull your phone out of your pocket, because it's habit, because it's the last normal thing you own.

It's dead. Of course it is.

You set the hawthorn sprig on top of it while you take off your boots.

When you look back, the sprig is moving.

It curls. It wraps itself around your phone, slowly, delicately, like a vine finding a trellis. Its three leaves press flat against the black glass. The white flower opens wider.

The screen lights up green.

There's no carrier name, no battery icon, no clock. Just one bright line of text, arriving with a soft sound like a leaf landing on water.

It's from him.