What a Bride Is For

You fall asleep with the phone on your chest, the hawthorn still wrapped around it, warm as a hand.

You wake to a knock.

For a second you don't know where you are. Then you see the ceiling, a lattice of living branches with pale light leaking through, and the ring of thorns on your finger with its one white flower, and the whole night comes back at once. The ring. The tree. A king who can't lie, typing to you in full sentences after midnight, like a man writing letters by candlelight.

You glance at the screen. The conversation is still there. You read the last line again and feel your face go warm, and then you put the phone face down, because there's a knock, and because you're a grown woman and not a teenager hiding a crush under her pillow.

"Who is it?"

"Breakfast," says a warm voice, "and family."

Aodhan.

You get up, pull your jacket on over yesterday's clothes, and open the door a few inches. He's leaning against the root-wall with a silver tray balanced on one hand: tea in a glass pot, honeycomb, small brown loaves still steaming. He's in gray this morning, soft and expensive-looking, and the light from the corridor makes his hair look like poured honey.

"Sister," he says. "May I come in?"

"No."

His smile widens. "You learn fast. Then I'll stand here like a footman." He offers the tray through the gap. You take it, because you're hungry and clause four is clause four. "You slept? Good. Brides often don't, their first night. Especially when they don't know what they've married into."

"I know what I've married into. I wrote it."

"Of course you did, Ava." He says it fondly, like you're a child who has drawn a very good horse. "And my brother signed. He's an honest man. He has to be." He tilts his head. "Has he told you about the tree?"

"What tree?"

"Ah." Aodhan sighs. "He hasn't. Well. It isn't my place." He makes a face that says it is entirely his place and he's enjoying himself. "Only, a mortal bride under the hill, in these times. People talk. They wonder what she's for."

"I'm for my sister."

"Are you?" His gray eyes are gentle. "And what's he for, I wonder?"

"That's enough, my lord."

Eithne Rooksby is standing at the turn of the corridor. You didn't hear her arrive. You get the sense nobody ever does.

Aodhan straightens, unbothered. "Captain. I was being neighborly."

"Be neighborly at Sloe Hall." Eithne doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't need to. "The king's wife has a door that locks. Respect it."

Aodhan bows to you, an elegant, ridiculous bow, and strolls away whistling.

Eithne watches him go. Then she looks at you, at the tray, at your sleep-crushed hair.

"Eat," she says. "Then come walk. There's something you should see before sunrise."

"I thought I was seeing my sister at sunrise."

"You are." She doesn't blink. "This first."

Under the hill, sunrise is a slow thing. Eithne explains it as you walk: the light down here comes from the tree, and the tree wakes with the sun above. So for an hour before dawn the corridors go from black to gray-green to gold, and the blossoms overhead open one by one like a crowd waking up.

You follow her through halls of hawthorn and yew, past a hall where water runs down a wall of moss into a silver pool, past a gallery where something with moth wings sweeps the floor and doesn't look up. Courtiers stop talking as you pass. You catch words. Mortal. Bride. Seven years. Will it be enough.

You file them away.

The corridor ends in an arch, and through the arch is the heart of the hill.

It's a cavern so big it has weather. A faint mist drifts across it. The ceiling is lost in a canopy of branches, and all of them, every single branch, grows out of one tree.

The Mother Thorn is the biggest living thing you've ever seen. Its trunk is a hundred feet around, fluted and twisted like the hawthorn at the ring but on a scale that doesn't make sense, and its roots run out across the cavern floor like rivers on a map, disappearing into the walls. You realize the walls you've been walking past all night, the roots and branches of the palace, are this tree. The whole court is this tree.

And it's sick.

You see it the way a doctor sees a cough. You don't even decide to look. Your eyes just go to it.

Half the canopy is wrong. The leaves on the eastern side are curled and brown-black, not dead-brown, burnt-brown, like someone held a torch to them. The shoot tips droop in tight hooks, a shape you'd know anywhere, a shepherd's crook. On the trunk, at the height of a house, the bark has sunk in long purple-black patches, cracked at the edges, weeping a slow amber ooze.

"Fireblight," you say out loud.

Eithne looks at you sharply. "What?"

"It's a bacterial disease. Erwinia amylovora. It hits the rose family, apples, pears, hawthorn. You get cankers like those, the ooze, the scorched look, the shepherd's-crook tips." You're walking toward the tree before you know you're doing it. "But it's spread wrong. It should move from the blossoms down. This is coming up. From the roots." You stop at the nearest root, crouch, and run your fingers over a crack in the bark. It's cold. Fireblight isn't cold. "And the color's off. This is too dark. Almost black."

"It's called the Withering," says a voice behind you. "It began seven years ago."

You look up.

Odran stands in the archway in black, no crown this morning, his hair loose and a little wild like he slept badly or not at all. In the strengthening gold light he's so beautiful it's almost rude. Eithne steps back to give him room, and you see her look at him, quickly, the way you'd look at a friend who's been sick.

"Seven years," you repeat. "And nobody's treated it?"

"Everyone has treated it. Healers, songs, blood, iron, prayers." He comes closer, but stops at the edge of the roots. "No one has ever looked at it the way you're looking at it."

"How am I looking at it?"

He considers. He can't lie, you remember, so he's choosing.

"Like it can be saved, Ava," he says.

You don't know what to do with that, so you look back at the tree. "I'd need samples. Bark, ooze, leaf tissue. A microscope. A lab."

"You have a lab," he says. "Above the hill. Every full moon."

You turn to stare at him. He holds your eyes, steady, unreadable.

"You'd let me take pieces of your sacred tree to Portland."

"It isn't sacred. It's dying." He says it flatly, but something in the line of his jaw goes tight. "Take what you need."

Somewhere above you, a bird starts singing, a high silver song you've never heard. The light in the cavern turns from gold to white. The blossoms on the healthy side of the Mother Thorn open all at once with a sound like a breath let out.

Sunrise.

Eithne touches your elbow, lightly, the first time anyone down here has touched you.

"Come, Ava," she says. "Your sister's in the sunrise garden. She's been waiting for weeks."