Chapter One: Lot Forty-One

The Courts of the South have a saying, and it is older than the crown: A fairy will forgive you for being poor, for being ugly, and even for being right. She will never forgive you for being human.

The fairies did not think of this as cruelty. They thought of it as arithmetic. A fairy was made of moonlight and old magic, with wings like stained glass and a lifespan measured in centuries. A human was made of mud and was gone within eighty winters. One does not hate a candle for burning down, but one does not ask it to dinner, either.

So the humans were sold, as everything beautiful and cheap is sold, in the Gilded Market of Vael Aurin, on the first night of every month, under lanterns that gave off no heat.

It was into this market, onto a cold stone platform, that Isolde Marchetti woke up.

Her first thought was that she had a terrible headache.

Her second was that she was lying on something that was definitely not her bed, and that whatever it was, it smelled of wet rock and old lamp oil.

Her third, much slower, was that the last thing she remembered was a truck.

She had been crossing Halvorsen Street at 7:40 in the evening, carrying a bag of takeout and thinking about a spreadsheet. Specifically, she was thinking about cell G14, which had been returning a #REF! error since Tuesday and which she was going to fix first thing tomorrow, and then there had been headlights, a horn, and a very large noise.

Tomorrow, she thought stupidly. I was going to fix it tomorrow.

She opened her eyes.

Above her there was no ceiling. There was a vast dark sky with no moon in it, and strung across the sky, instead of stars, were hundreds of small floating lanterns, each one glowing a cold pearl-white. Below the lanterns was a crowd. Below the crowd was a stage, and she was on the stage, and so were about thirty other people, all kneeling in two long rows with their hands bound in front of them.

Isolde sat up very slowly. Something heavy and cold shifted against her throat.

She touched it. It was a metal band, thin as a bracelet and fitted close to her skin, with a tiny rune cut into the front that glowed a faint, sickly silver.

Okay, she thought. Okay, okay, okay. This is a dream. I'm in the hospital and they gave me something good.

"Don't," whispered a voice beside her. "Don't stare at them. And don't ever speak unless they speak to you first."

Isolde turned her head. The woman kneeling next to her was in her fifties, maybe, with grey in her hair and a face that had stopped being surprised by things a long time ago. She wore a rough brown shift and the same silver collar. She was not looking at Isolde. She was looking straight ahead, perfectly still, like someone who had learned that stillness was a form of armor.

"Where," Isolde breathed, "am I?"

"Vael Aurin. The Market." The woman's mouth barely moved. "You've been out since they pulled you off the cart. We thought you were dead. I'd have preferred it for you, to be honest."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Quiet. They're starting."

The auctioneer was a fairy.

Isolde had no other word for him. He stood at the front of the stage in a coat the color of dawn, with a thin silver cane and two shimmering wings folded neatly behind his shoulders, and the thing she noticed first was that he was beautiful. He was almost unfairly beautiful, in the way a knife can be beautiful, and he looked at the line of kneeling humans the way a man looks at a rack of coats.

"Honored guests of the Court," he said, in a voice like warm honey over broken glass. "Welcome, and thank you for gracing our humble market. Tonight we offer fine hands, strong backs, and not a single complaint. Let us begin."

And then the numbers started.

It was a horrible thing to watch, and the worst part was how orderly it was. A man was pulled up from the front of the line. The auctioneer named his trade (farrier, thirty winters, sound teeth), the lanterns brightened over him, and fairy nobles in silks and feathered cloaks lifted slim fingers from the crowd. The bids rang out in quiet, bored voices. Four silver. Six. Seven. The man was sold, collared, and led away, and the next one stepped up, and then the next.

Isolde watched a mother and her teenage son go to two different buyers. Neither of the fairies seemed to notice that the two humans had turned to look at each other.

Her stomach turned over. She wanted to scream. She wanted to stand up, and she could feel her whole body winding up to do it.

"Don't," the woman beside her breathed, as if she'd heard the thought. "They'll silence you. Not kindly."

Isolde stayed where she was. Her hands were shaking.

And then, because she was who she was, a different part of her brain started to work.

It was the part that had spent four years in logistics, optimizing last-mile delivery for a company that shipped mattresses. It was calm, cold, and mildly offended by inefficiency, and it began, entirely on its own, to make observations.

There are two guards at the left stairs and two at the right. Four in total, all fairies, all carrying ceremonial rapiers and none of them watching the stage. They're watching the crowd. They're guarding the money.

The collars are the only restraint. No chains on the feet, no locks on the doors. That means the collars do something. That means the collars are the entire security system.

The auctioneer is sorting by price tier. Skilled labor first, then strong labor, then "domestic," and then...

She looked down the line. The people at the far end were the oldest, the youngest, the sickest, and the ones who looked frightened enough that they might be trouble.

Then the bulk lots. The leftovers. The ones nobody wants individually.

She looked at her own hands. They were soft, with a faint ink stain on the right index finger that she'd had since Tuesday.

Oh no, thought Isolde. I'm going to be in the bulk lot. I have no trade. I have a degree in supply-chain management and I am going to be sold as filler.

It took another hour to reach her.

By then the crowd had thinned, and the lanterns had dimmed to a tired glow. The auctioneer's voice had gone flat. The fairy nobles who remained were the ones with nothing better to do, and they leaned together in small glittering knots, speaking in low, bored voices about hunting parties and someone's disastrous betrothal.

"Lot forty-one," called the auctioneer. "A domestic. Female, twenty to thirty winters. Hands unmarked, teeth sound, no known trade." He paused, as if he hated to say the next thing. "Origin unknown. Found unconscious on the Veil Road. She may be a runaway, so a discount is, of course, applied."

A murmur went through the remaining crowd. Not interest, exactly. More like the polite disgust of people watching a stain spread across a tablecloth.

Isolde stood up. She did it because the guard at the end of the line was gesturing at her and she had no better plan. Her legs were stiff and her heart was going like a hammer, and the collar felt as if it were getting tighter.

A fairy woman stepped forward from the crowd.

She was tall and impossibly slender, in a gown of layered silver that seemed to ripple as though it were underwater, and her wings were the pale violet of dusk. She had the kind of face that had never in its life been told no. She stopped in front of Isolde and looked her up and down with open, unhurried contempt.

"Is this what passes for stock these days?" she said, to no one in particular. "She looks half-starved. And that hair."

"It's a runaway discount, Lady Vesperine," said the auctioneer apologetically.

"I can see that." The lady reached out with two gloved fingers and lifted Isolde's chin, turning her face from side to side the way one might inspect a melon. Isolde's jaw clenched. It took all of her will not to bite the glove.

"Fine," said Lady Vesperine, bored already. "Let me test the binding. I don't buy defective merchandise."

She pressed one fingertip against the silver collar and murmured a word in a language that sounded like frost cracking.

The rune on the collar flared white.

Then, very softly, it went dark.

Not the flicker of a faulty spell. It went out the way a candle goes out when someone pinches the wick, a small clean absence. The cold weight at Isolde's throat did not change, but she felt something shift behind her breastbone, something warm and strange that had not been there a second ago, like a hand opening inside her chest.

Lady Vesperine frowned. She said the word again.

Nothing.

Isolde's mind did a thing she would never be able to explain afterward. It went completely, perfectly quiet. And in that silence, one thought came to her with total clarity.

Don't react.

She kept her face blank. She let her shoulders sag slightly, and she dropped her eyes the way the woman beside her had. She made herself small, dull, and unremarkable, because every instinct she had was screaming that the worst thing in the world right now would be for these people to find out.

"Hm," said Lady Vesperine, after a long moment. She withdrew her hand and wiped her glove on her sleeve. "Cheap work. The runes on these things are always badly cut." She turned away. "I wouldn't take her as a gift."

The auctioneer, who had not noticed anything at all, sighed with relief. "Then we'll add her to the final lot. Thank you, my lady."

The collar's dead, Isolde thought, with a strange and distant calm. It doesn't work on me. And no one knows.

She stood very still. Her heart was hammering so hard she thought it must be audible.

The final lot was twelve people, and Isolde was number nine.

It was the dregs, as she'd predicted: three elderly men, a woman with a limp, a boy of nineteen with a bad cough, the woman who'd knelt beside her (her name was Hester, it turned out), and a handful of others who had been judged, one by one, to be not worth a bid. They stood in a huddled row at the edge of the stage while the last few fairy nobles drifted off to their carriages.

"Twelve in a bundle," said the auctioneer, wearily. "Domestics, general labor. Anyone? Two silver for the lot?"

No one answered. A moth bumped against one of the dimming lanterns.

"One silver, then. One copper. Come, honored guests, it's practically charity..."

"I'll take them."

The voice came from the back of the crowd, and it was deep, low and gravelly, and it did not sound like any of the other voices in the Market. It sounded like a stone being dragged across another stone.

The remaining fairies went quiet. Then, slowly, they turned.

A man walked out of the shadows.

He was enormous. Isolde was sure he must be seven feet tall, built like a wall with a cloak thrown over it. His hair was a dark iron-grey and braided back from a weathered face with a scar through one eyebrow, and he wore a heavy coat of black wolf fur that smelled, even from the stage, of snow and woodsmoke. His eyes were amber and flat and utterly unimpressed.

A werewolf.

The auctioneer's face went through three expressions in half a second, and settled on a sort of strained politeness. "Steward Brannoch," he said. "Of the, ah, Northern House."

"Aye." The big man didn't look at him. He looked at the line of humans, one by one, in the same way a man inspects a cart of firewood. "The castle needs hands. Twelve of them. We'll pay the bundle price and be gone before moonrise."

"Of course, of course." The auctioneer swallowed. "Two silver for the lot, I believe I said—"

"Aye. Two silver." The steward tossed a small leather pouch onto the stage. It hit the stone with a heavy clink that was a great deal louder than two silver pieces ought to be. "And the extra is for you not asking me what I'm doing with them."

"I would never," said the auctioneer, and scooped up the pouch.

Behind him, a few of the fairy nobles had begun to whisper. Isolde caught the shape of their contempt without needing to hear the words. Wolves. Savages. Buying slaves by the dozen, like feed. There was a flicker of something else in it too, though, something thinner and sharper under the disdain. It sounded a great deal like fear.

Steward Brannoch ignored all of it. He jerked his chin at the line. "Right. Collars stay on. Anyone gives me trouble, you walk the rest of the way. Anyone gets sick, you tell me before it spreads." His amber eyes swept over them. They passed over Isolde as if she were a post. "We leave now. It's a long road and the north does not wait."

The cart was a long flat wagon with high wooden sides, drawn by four enormous grey horses that did not seem to mind the wolf who held their reins. The twelve of them were herded aboard in silence. Isolde ended up at the back, wedged between Hester and a sleeping old man, with a damp blanket thrown over her knees.

For a long time, no one spoke.

The cart rolled out through the gates of Vael Aurin, past the last of the cold pearl lanterns, onto a road that ran away into the dark. The city's glow shrank behind them until it was a small pale smudge on the horizon, and then it was gone.

"You're not from here," said Hester, quietly.

It wasn't a question.

Isolde said nothing for a moment. Then, because there was no one else and because the night was huge and cold and impossibly strange, she said, "No."

"Thought so. You didn't flinch when the lady touched your collar." Hester's eyes slid sideways, sharp and dark in the dimness. "Everyone flinches. Even when it's not going to hurt. You learn to."

Isolde's throat went tight. "I didn't know."

"I know you didn't." Hester was quiet for a moment. "Listen to me, girl. Whatever you are, and wherever you came from, and whatever that was back there, you keep it behind your teeth. Understand? You say nothing, you show nothing, and you stay small. The wolves aren't kind. But they're the only ones in this world who don't take pleasure in it."

"The wolves," Isolde said slowly. "We're going to a wolf castle."

"The Northern Keep. Aye." Hester pulled her thin blanket tighter. "It's cold as a grave, and the king is said to be worse. They say he hasn't spoken to a living soul in a hundred years."

"He sounds friendly."

For the first time all night, the corner of Hester's mouth twitched. "You'll be fine," she said. "Nobody notices a servant."

The cart creaked on. The old man beside Isolde snored. The wolf steward's lantern swung ahead of them on its pole, a single small gold light in an enormous dark.

Isolde pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at her hands again. The ink stain was still there on her finger, faded and small and utterly ordinary. She stared at it for a long time. Somewhere under the quiet shock was a thin, stubborn thread of something that wasn't quite despair.

Cell G14, she thought, absurdly. I was going to fix it tomorrow.

She laughed once, a short breathless sound that turned into something dangerously close to a sob, and then swallowed it, because Hester had said to stay small.

So she stayed small.

She watched the stars come out, hundreds and hundreds of them, strange and bright and arranged in constellations she did not know. She felt the cold seep through the blanket. She felt the dead collar lie against her throat like a piece of jewelry, harmless and empty.

And beneath her breastbone, faint and steady, she felt that warm unfamiliar thing she did not understand, beating in time with her heart.

It had been there since the moment the collar went dark.

It was listening.

Far to the north, in a keep of black stone that had stood for six hundred years above a frozen sea, a man stood alone at a window and watched the snow fall.

He had stood there every night for a very long time.

Behind him, the fire guttered in the grate, and no one came in to tend it, because no one in the castle ever dared. His hands rested on the stone sill. His eyes were silver, ringed in a darker silver, and they were fixed on the southern horizon with a patience that was not patience at all.

He did not know why he was looking tonight.

He only knew that for the first time in five hundred years, something in the dark had moved, very far away, and he felt it in his bones like the first crack in a frozen river.

Kaelan Duskmere, King of the North, stopped breathing.

Then, very slowly, he began to count.