The first thing a fae will ask you is your name.

Do not give it to them;

that is how they work their curses upon you.

Aislin, I should have killed the fae who took me for his bride the first night he had me, when he tricked me into losing you.

I called it trickery, anyway. He told me it was no such thing, for I had come with him willingly, and it was hardly as if he’d told me any untruths. He - being fae - could not lie, after all.

I asked him if he could bleed. He only laughed.

It was no joke, though. I leapt at him with the iron spit aimed at his throat, and only the mass of vines and flowers around me stopped me from pinning him with it; they closed in on my wrists and ankles and brought me, writhing, to the ground. I tore the branches away; they ripped bloody gashes in my skin, but I didn’t stop. He stumbled back, and on his face I saw genuine surprise.

“Come now,” he said, “not even a whole night betrothed to me and you’re already testing me like this? At least tell me your name first.”

I howled - a wordless scream - and swung at him again, but it was no use: the cursed plants had borne me down and away from him. He stood over me, and I expected him to mock me, but no taunt ever came. He was really, truly bewildered by my fury, I realized, which made him the biggest fool I’d ever met.

He crouched. The tines of his antlers clustered with green buds. “All right,” he said, “don’t tell me, then. Suit yourself. But at least answer me this, bride - did you truly think the Covenant would grant you all that freedom when even we fae cannot come into your mortal lands freely?”

I refused to answer that, too. I hated him for having taken me away from Aislin - from my Aislin, the reason I’d sacrificed myself to be his bride in the first place - and I hated myself, too, for having spoken so quickly. I should have stalled him longer. If he was the worst fool I’d yet known, I was twice as much one.

But - for all my helpless fury - I knew that he was right. The Covenant, what I knew of it, was an impossible tangle of laws, fae and mortal both, and I should have known it would rule something awful for things like this, and I should have been more wary. Mother had taught me better than this. Could I ever have been Lady Conamara with such a reckless, thoughtless heart beating in my chest?

I was crying then, which was so shameful that I had sworn I’d never let even Aislin see me do it. Now I was letting this accursed bastard fae see it, and it only grew worse when he reached out awkwardly to brush away my tears. I scrambled back from him and brandished the spit - as if it could really keep him off me. He only frowned.

“Please, bright one,” he said, “I can’t help you if you won’t speak to me.”

I told him to rot in the bowels of the earth.

He shook his head. “I can’t rot,” he said. “That is my nature.”

This, too, he pronounced without a hint of mockery - fool indeed. I turned my face away and didn’t answer, for what kind of answer could I give something so childish?

He said, “Bright one, why do you want to go back? Is this not what you wanted?”

Of course it wasn’t what I wanted! How could he look at me with such genuine hurt? I snarled, “I want my sister, you fucking dog,” and spat. It was unladylike, but he did not deserve a lady.

He fell silent for a long moment, and around me the woody vines drew back and subsided into themselves. We were wholly cocooned in this verdant stillness. All that was before me was him and his antlers and his curtain of dark hair, now shot through with long, deep green weeds and tiny yellow flowers, and - besides that - my own bloodied hands.

“I can’t bring you your sister,” he said finally. “But I can do many other things. I have gifts. Let me show you; let me soothe your wounds.”

I cradled my hands close to myself; the blood from the gashes his briars had torn into me soaked into the front of my dress, staining it red in little spots. “If this is the kind of gift you grant, I don’t want any more of them,” I told him, low and sharp. “Return me, now .”

He looked briefly sorry; then he scowled and lowered his antlered head. “You haven’t even seen my gifts.”

I fisted my hands, blood and all. “I’ve seen plenty enough.”

“I ended the winter for your village,” he said, “and brought your family warmth, as I said I would.”

In my spite, I wanted to believe he was only bluffing, but Mother had taught me too well to forget that a fae cannot lie. But I also knew better than to think not lying is the same as telling the whole truth. “Warmth,” I said, “that’s all well and good, and at what price? I know you’re not given to charity, bastard, so tell me what you did, and then give me back to my sister, damn it.”

He huffed. “There is no price,” he said. “Do you believe me, little one, or must I show you?”

I bristled. What did it matter? It wouldn’t undo how much I despised him, not unless he did what he told me he could not.

“At least let me cheer you a little,” he pleaded. “Isn’t there anything you’d like to have?”

At that, for how genuine and entreating he sounded, something sparked in me. The Conamara in me wanted to turn him away and tell him I wanted nothing from him except for him to suffer, but if he was offering -

I looked askance at him from beneath my lashes. “Every bride has a bride-price,” I said. “Give me yours.”

He furrowed his brows at me, and for a heart-pounding moment I thought maybe he knew more about mortal law than I knew of his and the Covenant’s, and that we were not in the business of bride-prices in the lowly little town of Avon. Or perhaps he’d somehow learned of our father’s exile from the old house by Lord Conamara and that we three girls, having been denounced, were worth nothing, let alone a bride-price.

But he only said, “Haven’t I done enough for you by giving your family spring?”

I shook my head. “It isn’t a proper gift to my family if you’ve done it for the whole village, unless you brought the sun inside our house and ours alone.” I drew myself up as best I could and looked down on him, though he was easily taller than me by a head, to say nothing of the terrible antlers. I said, “We will have a bride-price. A gift for us, and only us.”

He sneered, but then he said, “Fine. What would you have?”

Mother had always said the fae loved their exchanges and contracts and laws. I thanked her and the stars that I’d chanced upon a fae too stupid to know that this law was my own spite and nothing more. I couldn’t let him know how gleeful I was that he’d fallen for it, though; instead, I glared at him as sternly as I could. I said, “I want my father to be given enough gold and silver to furnish him with tenfold…no, twentyfold the price of a good, strong ox - every day, for the rest of his life.”

If that was too much, surely the fae wouldn’t have boasted about all his gifts, not if he truly meant what he’d said about ending winter. Surely making my family rich was nothing next to bringing on a new season - though it wasn’t as if I knew much about fae wiles anyway. And if I was wrong, maybe he’d call my bride-price too precious and at last return me to my family.

The fae tossed his antlered head scornfully, and his tangle of dark hair and bright little flowers tossed with it. “Done."

“It must be simple for him to get hold of,” I said quickly, for what if he’d added some kind of test or curse to it? “And it must be harmless, and good for trading. Don’t start a river of molten gold that he can’t touch or bring to market or keep from burning down his house.”

The fae glared at me. “Of course not. What kind of trickster do you think I am?”

“The worst kind,” I said, “a thief and a deceiver.”

He sighed.

“You are a bitter and ungrateful bride. After all I’ve done for you - ”

“After all you’ve done?” I cried. “After all you’ve done! You took me away from the only thing I’ve ever loved!”

As soon as I said it, I hated myself. I’d meant to play coy a little while longer and see what else I could get him to grant me. Now, though, his face flashed with anger, and I despised him for having the nerve to be angry - only angry, nothing else - at hearing my most terrible secret, which I’d never admitted aloud to anyone before him.

From the living walls of the thicket-cage he’d wrought around us, a bounty of roses bloomed, red and sickly-sweet. “The only thing you love,” he said, and stepped toward me, his eyes suddenly very bright. “Is that so?”

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“What difference does it make to you, demon?” I snarled.

His eyes flashed, but his voice was light. “Oh, nothing to me,” he said, and stepped closer. The tines of his antlers grew sharp; lichens the color of fire and blood snaked down their lengths, and their bases crowded with the damp gray veils of inkcaps. “But to you, little bright one, everything, no?” The roses around us were withering - no, they were becoming, unfurling black and yellow petals from their middles. “If she was the only thing you loved,” he said, “why did you agree to come with me without asking first what would happen to her ? How could you have been so careless?”

I backed away from him, but the thicket of cursed roses had closed all around me and left no way out. He had well and truly imprisoned me with his flowers. My hands met with a soft, terrible carpet of them and found no purchase among their writhing masses. The petals were not petals at all, I saw then. They were moths, big and bright and lovely and terrible, and when they opened their wings I saw they bore the marks of skulls on their heads, bone-white.

He took my chin in his hand and turned it up so I was looking right into his eyes. They were gray and black and green and gold and red and violet - a thousand shifting colors that changed so quickly, the moment I saw one, it faded into the next. “Tell me,” he said, his voice as gentle as I’d ever heard anyone speak, the moths clustering around his face so thick and fast that I could not see anything else (a thousand empty skulls fixing me with two thousand gaping eyes), “do you really think you loved her if you couldn’t even do that for her?”

I said, “ Fuck you. I didn’t know .”

He made a sound deep in his throat, something like a purr - a growl - a sigh, the murmur of ice melting over a lake and the rumbling promise of distant thunder.

“But you knew of the Covenant,” he breathed. “You know what I am. Surely you must have known what it means for mortals who cross over.”

“No,” I whispered, for despite all my rage, it was hard not to be afraid of the blade-sharp claws that traced my soft throat just then. “Never.”

He jerked his chin up. “What do you mean no, ” he hissed, “how can’t you know? Your people wrote it into the treaties themselves - that any of you who betrayed them by befriending or loving or marrying one of us could never return. Do you know so little of your own laws?”

I lifted my own chin, too, to match. “My mother’s grandmother’s grandmother was not yet born when they spoke the Covenant into being,” I said, “nor her grandmother, or her grandmother’s grandmother. I don’t know anyone now who knows the full law of it.”

“Lies,” he said instantly, and the moths fluttered quicker on his antlers, frenzied and desperate. “The treaties say you must pass down the law on your side as on ours. It is word-bound. There’s no way out of that.”

I shook my head. “Fine. Say the law has been passed down. What would I know of it? They teach laws to kings and priests and bookkeepers,” and I opened my palms to him, still crusted with blood from my struggle with his thorny binds earlier. “And I am only a girl,” I said. “I am nothing.”

His eyes were still hard, the moths still restless and uncountable, but he said, “You aren’t nothing. You are my bride,” and he let go of me and took a step back, and then another, and turned away.

I said, “What will you do with me?”

He turned back to look at me; his eyes had settled on a cool foggy gray, and his hair hung long and lank over his cheeks and from those terrible antlers. Behind him I saw that the roses had fruited and fallen away, and in their place clustered rosehips, heavy and swollen and purple as bruises. “Nothing,” he said, “at least, not yet. But you’re my bride , not some kind of chattel. Go on - ask me what you want.”

I wanted him to give me back my sister, of course, but I knew better than to try that on him again. “You must be able to show me my home,” I said. “Take me there. Or at least,” and I swept a hand at the thicket of rosehips around us, “let me out of this. ”

He said nothing, only flicked his head, and all at once the whole fruited thicket came alive; it heaved toward me - like a deep breath - and then each branch and stem and trunk sank in on themselves and curled away, coiling and coiling, back and down. Into the gaps between their shrinking skeletal limbs rushed light: gray light, not the gloom of the midwinter night and not the golden light of mornings and noons before winter had come. This was an uncertain foggy dimness that came from nowhere in particular and swirled around me in aimless drifts, and through it loomed the vague phantom shapes of trees - that might have been the birches of my own modest village, but somehow I didn’t think they were.

My antlered suitor swept a deep, mocking bow. “Home,” he said, “as you asked.”

It was another of his fae tricks. It had to be. I took a step away from him into the gray stillness and heard the dampened crackle of leaves beneath my feet. It sounded real enough.

The light had coalesced a little into something more certain, and I could pick out the shapes of what looked like houses. There, between two trees, was that the shrine where Old Mag held her sermons on the Queen of Ravens each week for the village? And there, in the trees, were the ravens and crows she fed, who followed her in flocks. For a moment I imagined they were only shadows that looked like birds to my yearning eye (fae tricks, still), but then one turned and cocked its head and cawed at me, and my heart leapt.

The fog was thick enough that everything else faded into one gray and shifting mass, but I was sure of my step. I counted twenty paces from the shrine - yes, there was the big ash tree that marked the middle of Avon Town, as gray as everything else - and I turned and counted out another fifteen (Father had taught me well my numbers, for a watchmaker must know these things in working with small and precise parts). There - yes - was the low and misshapen fence Rand Harrowe had helped us build around the front of our cottage four summers ago. And there was the door, and upon it our names, Aislin and Niamh and Eire, scrawled with the knife Father had helped us hold after our first winter there.

My heart thundered in my chest. I knew the fae was following me close behind, though I couldn’t hear him; the crows had followed me too and swirled overhead and in front of me, cawing distantly, but they dared not get too close. Perhaps they too were afraid of him. I didn’t care. I stepped over the threshold of the fence and put my hand to the door - rough and a little warm, as ever, and perfectly real - and then, swallowing down my nerves, I pushed.

There was the old fireplace, caked with ash and all the grayer for it; there was the loft where Father often slept, though it was only a mess of shadows in this strange half-light. But I was not looking at that. I was looking at the little table where we ate and the wheel beside it where Aislin spun yarn for us, and there, knelt next to the wheel, was my own dear Aislin, a wealth of gold and silver in her hands (these gleaming sun-bright, in spite of the grayness that overcame everything else), and on her face was bewilderment and grief in equal measures.

I let out a sob and flew toward her.

She was there, my own real dearest Aislin, solid and warm and soft to the touch when I threw my arms around her, though still gray and somehow a little blurred (perhaps because of the tears in my eyes, but even so - ). I might have been shaping her name through my sobs, over and over. I am not sure. The fae was watching, I knew, and still I was shameless.

But she did not turn and look at me, even with her held close to my chest.

I drew back. My gut grew cold and heavy. I reached out and pressed a hand to her cheek, which I saw now was wet with tears - like my own. I saw then that her skin did not dimple under my fingers; it was as if there was a veil there drawn over the skin, so that I could feel the heat of her, but not truly touch her.

I said, “Aislin, it’s me. It’s your Niamh.”

My sister didn’t turn or blink or look up, though, and I was right beside her. I said again, pleading, “Aislin,” and then, more and more broken, “Aislin. Aislin, please,” and when she still didn’t move I drew in my breath and felt it burn in my lungs like fire, the taste of cloves again in my mouth, hurting, hurting.

The fae stood over me now, at my side. I had not seen him come toward me, nor had I heard it. The iron spit was at his feet. I did not remember bringing it with me, nor dropping it there, and surely he hadn’t brought it here - iron burns fae - yet there it was.

I didn’t think of hurting him with it. I only looked at him and said, no longer stumbling over my words, “What did you do?”

“I did nothing,” said the fae. There again was that strange hollow tone to his words - which I’d have called sadness if I did not know he was an inhuman beast, the kind who couldn’t love, let alone feel sorrow. “This is the way of the Covenant, bright one. We on the other side of the Wall cannot speak to your mortal kind anymore.”

I didn’t understand - this was surely not the other side of the Wall: we knew where the Wall was, mighty and made of stone; it stretched from ground to sky across Albion far to the north, far away from Avon Town - but I was too desperate to ask him about that now. I turned and seized him by the hanging end of his deerskin, which was almost garish against the gray of everything around him. “Whatever you did to appear to her - to us - when you came to take me for your bride,” I demanded, “you can do that again, can’t you? Do it for me now. Or do it for yourself. Tell her I’m here, tell her I’m alright.”

He shook his head. “I only appeared then because your sister’s killing my kin went against the old laws,” he said, “and breaks in the Covenant are also breaks between the worlds, but they come with rules of their own. You cannot just take; there must be an exchange, one that accords with the laws, for the Wall to let you across. I was able to pass only for the sake of offering to you the life-trade in the name of your condemned sister. The path is closed now.”

“So let me break the laws again!” I cried. “Tell me what the laws of the Covenant are and I’ll break them, and let your wretched, cruel magic open up a path and exile me! Surely if I’m so awful - ”

But the fae was looking pityingly at me as if I were a tantruming child.

“I told you,” he said evenly, “the veil does not break for just any crime, in any way, and besides, you don’t know how to work our roads. You’re mortal.”

I picked up the spit again, but it was halfhearted. “If I killed you I’d be breaking the Covenant, wouldn’t I?”

He scoffed. “There is no way to break the Covenant that will let you cross back before you’re killed for it, girl.”

I was driven nearly mad by that.

“Let me go,” I said, low and trembling. “I don’t want to be your bride anymore.”

He shook his head. “You gave me your hand,” he said. “Promises are binding law for us.”

“I am not one of you,” I spat.

“But you are now in our kingdom, where our laws reign,” he shrugged, and smiled. “So,” he said, “I have done as you asked. Here is your home, and here is your sister, alive and well. I have even paid the bride-price.” I looked again at the gold and silver - an impossible wealth of it - that glittered in my sister’s tearstained hands. “Now,” and he gestured toward the door, which was open, “come with me, and let me show you my home.”

I followed his beckoning look: beyond the door lay not the gray, wrong silhouettes of my village, but something else entirely, something impossible: a field of glimmering stars over a windswept moor, all clad in purples and blues; to the east, a fading orange sun, and in the sky - though it could not be - was a trail of ruined stone castles, beautiful and shattered, hanging there like so many moons.

I looked helplessly back at Aislin, my Aislin, and then again to the fae, who held his hand out to me. His face was lovely and ageless and terrible, and his antlers shone with starlight that spilled through the open door.

Low and sweet, he said, “Shall we, my bride?”

Aislin, what choice did I have but to leave you? You couldn’t see me (somehow, my love, thanks to the strange and cruel magic of the fae, or of the old laws, or both: it was the same to me), and he’d have taken me anyway. But as I stepped over the threshold and into the other world with the impossible sky-ruins and the stars and the wrong sun, my jaw set grimly, my eyes still red and raw (even though I had dried my tears and swallowed the rest of them, for I did not want him to see me cry any further), I whispered a promise under my breath, a promise that bound. I promised this: that I would come back for you, or die trying.