The Night Court's Bride

Eight riders come down through the defile in a blizzard, and one of them is carrying the only thing in three kingdoms that might keep her brother breathing. She read about the Sunstone in a crumbling folio wedged between a treatise on frost-blight and a recipe for pickled herring. The illustration showed a shard of amber the size of a child's fist, glowing from within like captured sunlight. The text claimed it could cure any affliction born of imbalance, which means the Curse of Unravelling, which is imbalance made flesh, which means Marek. The blizzard has been blowing for three hours. Lenora presses flat against a granite outcrop with snow crusting the silver in her hair and watches the patrol ride below. Dark cloaks snapping in the wind like raven wings. A leather satchel strapped across the flank of the lead horse. The boy stopped breathing at midnight. She knows because she was counting. She had counted every breath for three days, because counting gave her something to do besides watching the blue-black veins crawl up his throat. She takes the satchel. She is caught with it inside four minutes, which she had accounted for, and she is not killed, which she had not. What follows: an artefact she could not keep, the price of neutral ground, the trail of the snowblood, a cave full of wounded things, the taste of trust, a shadow within, a court of frost, and the price of blood paid by somebody who never agreed to it. Rylan is the one who decides not to hang her, and neither of them can explain that decision to anybody, including each other, for a very long time. *They'll find this road too.* The traitor. The one who sent word. The one who watched them kiss and said nothing. Rylan will hand over the stone, the court and the crown. Whoever in that court decides a dying boy is a negotiating position will find out exactly what a man is capable of when the thing he wants is finally standing in front of him.