This is the first lesson:

The only mortal thing that kills a faerie

is an iron blade and an ash hilt.

Winter came early to South-of-the-Wall; that was one of the punishments the faeries had written into the curse when they’d first bestowed it upon mortaldom at the end of the Long War, all those ages ago. It came on quick and it was white and hard and cruel, and there was no escaping it. This Eire knew - had known since she’d been but a child of five summers old, when they’d all been made to leave the big house by the sea in the wake of Mother’s death. There was no questioning the coming of it - only how many you’d find curled up on the black new earth once the snow finally began to melt.

Eire and her family counted four: her father, who hardly remembered his own name now, and her two sisters, Aislin and Niamh. Last year between the three of them they’d managed each not to become one of the snow-sleepers, and only then thanks to the family Harrowe and their kindness. Then the snows had taken Hart Harrowe, and now they were alone.

This winter would be the hardest of all. Eire knew this, too, and tried not to think of it, but she’d drawn her last arrow, and there was a hollowness in her belly that reminded her with every step of the empty table that awaited the rest.

She was up high, tucked away in the boughs of a birch as white as the sky itself, where she thought - hoped - nothing below could see her. The branches here were as slender as fingers, but she was sure and light-footed. Ten years’ hunting around the Avon had made these woods as familiar as her own sisters’ faces (Aislin’s, sweet and round, apple-lovely; Niamh’s, sharp and proud, crow-bright. She shook her head. The cold was getting to her, filling her head with warm, wicked dreams, and here, now, those led to death).

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There was her mark - a doe, young and fallow, bright-eyed in spite of the cold. Her ribs hardly showed through her thick winter coat. The last of the winter herd.

She was browsing through the snow with her nose; looking in vain, Eire thought, for shoots buried underneath. She knew there were none left. All the other animals had already fled from Avon and, before that, stripped it of each last leaf and twig and scrap of bark there was to eat. This doe would be dead soon. It was her or Eire, anyway.

She willed her fluttering heart to still. With her right hand, she lifted the arrow - ash, iron-tipped, goose-fletched - and nocked it against the sinew string. Her fingers trembled. Silence, she told them. Be steady.

The doe raised her head and looked - right at Eire, she thought for a breathless instant - but, no, her gaze was wide and glazed; she wasn’t looking, Eire realized, but listening. Her black-tipped ear flicked nervously. Eire had the tip of the arrow aimed at one big black eye. The shot was clean, she knew. She had to take it.

And yet -

There was no sound, not to Eire, but the doe twitched and then was moving, and the shot was gone. And then a moment later the wolf crashed into the clearing in a storm of snow and teeth.

He was massive. The doe stood no chance. She was fast - Eire knew her fear, knew the kind of haste it gave her, had run like that before - but the wolf was faster, and as the doe twisted to leap away he was upon her, utterly silent, his head as big along as a grown man’s arm, his eyes as wide and yellow as the hidden sun. There was a burst of blood. The doe screamed, loud and short, and then she fell limp, vised in his impossibly huge jaws. He gave her a savage shake and from her shredded throat came a sigh. Her last breath.

Eire’s heart stopped dead as the wolf turned to look up at her.

Since she’d been very small, when Mother was fighting out her last days, she’d been taught this: There is no running from a faerie that wants you, as surely as there’s no hiding from their winters. And a faerie that sees you will always want to take you.

And this Eire knew as a hunter: No mortal wolf was ever that big - that dark - that quiet.

The bow was in her hands; the string drew back; she didn’t think for an instant. It was too late. The wolf dropped the dead doe, rose up to meet her, and on his vast haunches he had even Eire on her perch high in the birch tree within his grasp.

But her shot was sure and true.