Chapter One: The Price of Everything
The thing about bargains, Tamsin Hale had always said, was that you only ever got to make one that mattered.
She said it to customers, mostly, in the thin cold light of the Marrowby market, over a trestle table of dried feverfew and bundled comfrey and jars of honey she had sworn on her mother's grave were local. It was the kind of thing a woman said to get an extra penny out of a farmer's wife. Go on, then, take two. You'll only ever make one good bargain in your life, might as well be with me.
She had never once believed it.
She believed it now, at ten minutes to midnight, kneeling on the bare boards of her sister's room with a cracked bowl in her lap and blood on her sleeve.
"Don't," Linnet whispered. "Tam. Don't look like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're counting."
She was counting. She was always counting. It was the way she had been made, or the way the last seven years had made her, which came to the same thing: a ledger running behind her eyes, quiet and merciless, adding things up. Coal, nine pennies a scuttle. Barley, fourteen. The apothecary's fee for the grey-cough tincture, three silver shillings a bottle, and Linnet had needed one a week since the first frost.
She had stopped being able to pay it on the eleventh of October.
It was the twenty-third now.
"I'm not counting," said Tamsin. "I'm thinking."
"You do your thinking with your mouth in a line."
"I do not."
"You do. You look like Mama when the cow got into the garden."
Tamsin laughed. It cracked in the middle. She set the bowl down on the floor, because her hands had started to shake, and she folded them in her lap where Linnet couldn't see.
Her sister lay propped on three pillows under a patchwork quilt that had been made, stitch by stitch, from the good dresses of two dead women. She was seventeen. She had been, until the autumn, the loudest girl in Marrowby: a gap-toothed, freckled, impossible creature who sang in the lane and argued with the vicar and once stole a goose to prove a point. Now she was the colour of tallow. Her hair, which had been red, had gone the dull rust of old iron. Every breath came with a small wet rattle, like a sack of dry peas being shaken in the next room.
The grey cough. It took one in nine of the border children, as far as anyone could tell, and it took them slowly, and nothing in the mortal world could stop it.
"Tell me about the garden," Linnet said.
"It's October. There's no garden."
"Tell me about the one you're going to have."
"It's a long story."
"I've got time," said Linnet, and smiled, and Tamsin felt the smile go through her like a knife through bread.
She told her about the garden.
She had told it a hundred times. It lived in the corner of her mind where other people kept prayers. A walled garden, south-facing, with a pear tree against the brick. Beds of lavender and rue. A little glass house for the tender things, where she could grow what the Marrowby soil refused: the pale blue poppies of the high country, the red-veined sage. A bench. A kettle. A door that locked from the inside.
"And a dog," said Linnet.
"No dog."
"A dog, Tam."
"A dog eats the seedlings."
"A dog," said Linnet firmly, "is the whole point of a garden."
"A dog," Tamsin agreed, and her sister's eyes closed, and the rattle in her chest slowed, and slowed, and steadied.
She sat there for a long time, listening.
It was a tiny house. It had two rooms below and two above, a slate roof that leaked in the north corner, and a chimney that smoked whenever the wind came from the hedge. Beyond the window, the village of Marrowby lay asleep under a clear cold sky, rooftops silver, lanes empty. A fox barked somewhere past the church. And beyond the last field, where the land dipped toward the border, a long dark line cut across the stars, tall as a barn and thick as a wall, black against the night.
The Hedge.
Nobody in Marrowby looked at it directly, and everybody knew where it was at all times, the way you know where the stove is in a dark room.
The apothecary shut his door in her face at nine the next morning.
He did it kindly. That was the worst of it. Mr. Pell was a round, grey, anxious man with spectacles and a kind soft voice, and he came out onto his own step in his shirtsleeves to do it, so she would not have to be shut out by a servant.
"I can't, Tamsin," he said. "I'm sorry. I've told you. I've carried you eleven weeks."
"I've got the herb money Saturday. I'll have it all by Saturday."
"You said that last Saturday."
"I'll sell the comfrey. I'll sell the good honey. I'll..."
"Girl." He took off his spectacles and rubbed his nose. "The tincture's three shillings. You make perhaps four a week. You've a sister who needs a bottle a week, and a roof, and a fire. I can count as well as you." His voice dropped. "I'll tell you something I shouldn't. I've had nine of these in the last year. Nine children with the cough. And the tincture..." He stopped.
"What?"
"It doesn't cure it," said Mr. Pell, very quietly. "It only slows it. Everyone in the village thinks otherwise, and I've never had the heart to correct them. It buys a month. Perhaps two."
The street went on being a street. A cart creaked past. Somewhere a hen complained.
"There's no cure," said Tamsin.
"There's one."
"Where?"
He did not answer. He did not have to. His eyes slid, helplessly, as everyone's eyes did, across the rooftops and the winter-brown fields to the dark line on the horizon.
"No," she said.
"I'm not telling you to."
"You're telling me the Hedge."
"I'm telling you what's said." He had gone grey as his waistcoat. "My grandmother's sister had the cough. She was nineteen. She went through at midnight on a Hallowe'en. And she came back at dawn, singing, and the cough was gone. Forty years ago, that was. She never would tell what she'd paid."
"Paid?"
"They don't give anything away, the Fair Folk." He put his spectacles on with a shaking hand. "Please. Don't ask me again. I can't be the man who told you."
He shut the door.
She stood on the step.
The wind had come up. It smelled of woodsmoke and cold. She stood there with a basket of unsold comfrey on her arm and her mother's shawl pulled round her shoulders and the ledger in her head going very quiet, as if someone had taken the pen out of its hand.
It was an old story. Everyone in the border country knew it.
Beyond the Hedge, said the story, lay the Court of Thorns, which was not a place but a bargain. It had stood there since before the first village was built, a country of perpetual autumn, ruled by a king who never aged, never lied, and never forgave. If you went through at midnight, with a true wish and something to trade, the Court would hear you. It would name a price. And what it gave, it gave exactly: no more and no less.
Mothers told it to children as a warning.
Never answer a stranger who knows your name. Never take a gift you can't repay. Never, never, never cross the Hedge.
Tamsin's own mother had told it, bending over the cradle, in the kitchen of the house where she would die three winters later of nothing worse than a fever and a poor man's doctor. They'll take your name, Tamsy. They'll take your years. They'll take the thing you love most and leave you the shape of it.
She had told it so often that it had become, in Tamsin's head, a sort of song.
And what do they give? she had asked, once, at six.
Whatever you ask for, said her mother. That's the danger of it.
She did not decide.
That was the thing she would tell herself afterward, later, in the court's long amber evenings. She never decided. It was more like a sum that came out. She spent the day doing what the day required: boiled the washing, mended the roof, sold the comfrey for a penny under its worth to a woman who didn't haggle. She bought a loaf. She made a thin soup. She fed Linnet by spoon and listened to the rattle in her chest.
At six, she lit the lamp. At eight, Linnet slept. At nine, the wind dropped, and the whole village fell quiet, and in the silence she could hear the Hedge.
It was not a sound, exactly. It was a pressure, like the held breath of a great animal. It lay at the edge of the senses, as a hum lies at the edge of hearing, and it had been there all her life, and she had never once, until tonight, listened.
At ten, she took down the leather satchel from its nail. She packed it with the things she knew: dried yarrow, willow bark, a twist of salt, a candle stub, a knife. She stopped. She unpacked the knife. She packed it again. A woman who could not carry a knife into the dark was a woman who had not read the old stories closely enough; but a woman who carried one into the Court was, as the stories also said, a fool.
She left it on the table.
At half past ten, she wrote a letter, in her round, square hand, on the back of a seed-merchant's receipt.
Linnet. I've gone to see a man about a cure. Be good. Eat the soup. Do not, on any account, steal the vicar's goose. T.
She read it three times. It was a very poor letter. She folded it small and put it under her sister's pillow, beside a pressed daisy and a button and a drawing of a dog.
She bent and kissed Linnet's forehead. The skin was dry and too warm.
"I'll be back by morning," she whispered.
It was the first lie of the night.
It would not be the last.
The lane was empty.
She walked it in the dark with the satchel on her shoulder and her heart going like a hammer. The frost had come down hard, and every blade of grass stood stiff and silver. She went past the church, past the well, past the last cottage with its shutters closed. A dog in the farmyard lifted its head and whined and put it down again. The sky above her was enormous and perfectly clear, packed from rim to rim with stars, and there was no moon.
At the edge of the last field, she stopped.
The Hedge stood before her.
It was bigger than she had thought. Seen from the village, it had always been a line; seen from here, it was a wall, black and bristling and perhaps forty feet high, stretching away in both directions without end. It was made of thorn. She had never seen thorns like these: long as her hand, curved like talons, polished, faintly glittering in the starlight. Each branch was thick as her thigh. They knotted and twisted into one another so thickly that no light passed between them, and the whole mass seemed, very slightly, to breathe.
There was no gap. There was no gate.
There was only a smell. It rolled out of the dark in a slow warm wave, and it was the smell of October: bruised apples, woodsmoke, leaf mould, rain on stone. It was the smell of the best day of her childhood, the day her father had carried her home from the harvest on his shoulders and the whole sky had been the colour of honey.
She had not thought of it in fifteen years.
Her eyes stung.
That's how it begins, said the part of her that had listened to her mother. It finds the thing you can't bear to lose. And it holds it up in the dark and lets you smell it.
"I know what you are," Tamsin said aloud.
The Hedge did not answer.
"I'm not here for a gift. I'm here for a trade." Her voice was rough and small against the black wall. "My name is Tamsin Hale. I'm twenty-four years old. I've got two good hands, a head for sums, and a talent for growing things where nothing should grow, which I have never once told anyone. I'm poor. I'm tired. I'm not clever, and I'm not brave." She swallowed. "But I will pay whatever you ask, and I'll pay it in full, if you'll save my sister."
Silence.
The wind dropped.
And somewhere very high above her, in the black branches, a single thorn the length of her forearm uncurled, with a sound like a key in a lock.
"Hm," said a small, dry voice, quite close to her ear. "That was better than most."
Tamsin did not scream.
She would have liked to say she was too brave for it. The truth was that her throat had closed. She turned, slowly, toward the voice, and found, sitting on a low branch not two feet from her face, a little, very annoyed creature with a face like a crabapple, a coat made of dried leaves and a pointed brown cap.
It was perhaps a foot high. It had large, wet, black, intelligent eyes and a long thin nose, and it was holding a lantern, an actual tiny lantern, in one twiggy hand. In the other, a ledger.
"Briar," it said, and bowed with a tiny, very sharp, very sarcastic bow. "Steward of the Hedge, Keeper of the Door, Chief Scribe of the Court of Thorns, and, at this unbelievable hour, your guide." It looked her up and down. "You're late."
"I'm... late?"
"We expected you on the eleventh."
The ground tipped.
"You expected me?"
"Oh, yes." Briar licked the tip of a pencil and made a small, brisk mark in the ledger. "Tamsin Hale. Herbalist. Marrowby. Sister afflicted. Eleventh of October, we thought, but you were slow. Mortals always are, about sacrifice." It looked up, and its black eyes glittered with something that might, in anyone else, have been pity. "Don't look so stricken. It's only that the king has been waiting a long time for someone like you."
"Someone like me?"
"Someone who asks to pay," said Briar, "instead of to take."
And behind it, in the black wall of the Hedge, a door began to open.