Realm of Fangs

*"You're asking us to send you to die."* The great hall of Skarn smells of tallow smoke and old decisions. Twenty-three faces watch Astrid Bjornsdottir from the firelight, and not one of them believes she will come back. She is asking for coin. For supplies. A horse, if the village can spare one. Her brother Erlend has six months, maybe seven, and the hedge witch in Thornwick could not stop his coughing last winter and cannot stop it now. The hedge witch wants thirty silver. Astrid has seven coppers. Erlend has twelve silver hidden under his mattress, saved since he was twelve for a horse he now knows he will never ride. The elders offer fifteen silver and advice: let him die cleanly, in his own bed, with her beside him. So Astrid takes the horse money out of her brother's mattress, leaves a note under a candle stub, and walks into the Eternal Winter to find the Ice King. The law of the Frost Court is simple. Any mortal who crosses in and sees the palace must swear the Binding Oath, and the Oath takes everything - childhood, a mother's face, the sound of your own name. Sigrid, who drags Astrid into the throne room, votes for execution instead, and wants it public. Torben has held the ice-throne for forty-seven years and does not blink. What stops him is a white streak in a village girl's hair, because his wife Ingrid had the same one, and Ingrid died when the rebellion burned his house with her inside it. What he offers is not mercy. It is a bargain. There is an ivy growing in the heart of the Ivy Court that cures any illness, mortal or immortal. Bring back a cutting, and his own healer rides for Skarn. The Ivy Court is ruled by the Summer Queen, who hates the Frost Court and hates him, and three hundred years of Sundering sit between the two. Astrid agrees, then holds a knife to the King's throat and tells him what will happen if Erlend dies while she is gone. What neither of them plans for is what Ivy magic does inside a body full of frost - or that the rebellion that killed Ingrid never ended, and that the person writing the court's next story is already inside the palace walls, carving symbols into the ice. A closed-door fae romantasy of bargains, court politics and a truce built by two people with nothing left to lose, ending in meltwater and a spring that has not come in three hundred years.