We do not honor the ghūls who haunt the Maghreb with titles such as king or queen - but then, the Narvonnians once worshiped the monster, and burned sacrifices to them in cages of wicker.


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    <li style="font-weight: 400">The Commentaries of Aram ibn Bashear</li>


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    4th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297


    Claire had seen Acrasia several times, and the experience always left her mind in dark places. The larger part of that was the memory of the night Percy died. However pleasant the faerie might make herself appear, Claire knew that she was only a single incomprehensible decision away from violence - like a wild animal. The smaller portion was that Claire had to admit that Acrasia was inhumanly beautiful. Trist had loved her once, even if she’d been lying to him, and there was always a sliver of worry that wormed its way into Claire’s chest. How could any man who had loved someone so gorgeous ever be satisfied with a normal woman?


    Beira made Acrasia look like a young girl playing with her mother’s jewelry and makeup.


    The Faerie Queen’s eyes were the blue of a cloudless winter sky, her hair the shining of dawn sunlight on iced over tree branches. Her skin was white as new snow, before man or beast tracked their way across it. She cast light down from her throne so brightly that Claire had to squint her eyes: Beira was nearly blinding.


    Claire made her curtsy. “Thank you for your hospitality, your majesty,” she greeted the faerie. “I am Clarisant du Camaret-à-Arden, and these are my companions. Dame Etoile,” she indicated her armored guardian with one hand, and the broad-shouldered woman nodded in greeting. “John Granger, our Master of Arms. Henry, a hunter and man at arms in my husband’s service. Yaél du Havre de Paix, squire to my husband.”


    “Why do you come before my throne, Lady Clarisant?” Beira asked. “I have watched you since you called my name. The decorations in my garden should have been adequate warning to turn you back, I would have thought, but you have continued on. I presume there is some reason you judge important enough to give your life for.”


    “We mean no offense to you, and no intrusion on your territory,” Claire answered. “We come as friends, to speak of things which threaten us all. I saw the daemon frozen in your garden, as you call it. That makes at least nine daemons that have been loosed into the world over the past few months, your majesty. The very sun has been blotted from the sky by the Great Cataclysm itself. In Narvonne, our king and our Exarchs are fighting as we speak, but they need help.”


    Beira shrugged. “It would be an understatement to say that I have no affection for Sammā?ēl,” she said. Bore, in the meanwhile, had advanced up the long aisle and taken a place standing to one side of the queen’s throne. “I would have preferred your human Exarchs removed his presence from our world centuries ago, to be quite honest. And yet, in this one particular instance, his actions do not displease me. The entire world is winter,” she pointed out, with a smile.


    “Not true winter,” Claire attempted. “True winter has snow so bright under the sun you can hardly look at it. And if this darkness lasts much longer, thousands of people will starve.”


    “It is too late to stop that,” Biera said. “Weeks of darkness have killed almost all the fruits and grains you mortals rely on. The animals will begin dying next, the ones that eat the grass and the leaves. But none of it really matters. My people will persist.”


    “Cern said you could help us,” Yaél broke in. “Like he and Auberon did at Falais.”


    The faerie queen’s head moved like an owl, turning rapidly and further than any human woman’s neck could have moved. “How do you come to know those names, human child?”


    “I met them,” Yaél said, and Claire knew she needed to find a way to stop the girl from talking. “Auberon gave me his ring for the chapel where he grew the tree-throne, and I got to eat from his Graal too, once. And he healed Trist! Do you know Acrasia, too?”


    “My husband,” Claire broke in, “is Exarch to the Lady Acrasia, who is sister to Cern the Hunter. Trist Tithes to Acrasia and to Auberon.”


    “Auberon has taken a second Exarch?” Beira turned back to Claire. “How interesting. Your husband, you say?” The queen of winter leaned forward on her throne. “I am intrigued. What would you have of me, mortal woman? Perhaps we can bargain.”


    “My king wished to purchase food from the prince of Raetia,” Claire began. “But when we arrived, Prince Conrad locked us up. We can’t even get to see him - he only ever sent his advisor, a man named Minister Fabian.”


    Bore and Beira exchanged glances. “That creature’s name is not Fabian,” the faerie with the long beard told them.


    “Creature? He isn’t human, then?” Claire asked.


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    “Stop giving them things for free,” Beira chastised her attendant. “What do you offer me, Clarisant du Camaret-à-Arden? A first-born child is traditional, and I see you carry one. I might also be persuaded to accept the squire. If Auberon has a fondness for the girl, she might make a good bargaining chip.”


    Before Yaél could open her mouth, Claire firmly said, “Neither of those is someone I am willing to part with.”


    “Offer me something else, then,” Beira said. “Love, to warm my heart. I can feel it here among you. Yours, for your husband, perhaps? Or these two who make eyes at each other when no one is looking. I would accept that.”


    Claire very deliberately did not look at either Etoile, or Henry. “Not love,” she said. “What about a Tithe?”


    “Continue,” Beira said, making a turning motion with the first two fingers of her right hand.


    “You need Tithed souls, do you not?” Claire said, her thoughts scrambling. “And you accept oaths.”


    “Both of these things are true,” Beira said, with the smile of a cat stalking a mouse.


    “An oath then,” she proposed. “That before my death comes, I will Tithe my soul to you.”


    “You are no Exarch, to make a Tithe to me,” Beira mused, “but I can work around such things. One soul, however young and beautiful and filled with delicious love, will not purchase you much, girl. Particularly not when you offer nothing immediately - only the promise of something in the future.”


    “Not one soul alone, then,” Etoile broke in. “I will make the oath as well.”


    “And me!” Yaél shouted, eagerly.


    “I’m going to regret this,” Henry said, with a sigh. “Fine. When I’m old enough I can’t stand the arthritis any more, you can have me.”


    “Four souls is something,” Beira said, as if weighing the offer on a scale only she could see. “I must consider that, despite your best intentions, something could happen to prevent these Tithes from ever reaching me. A sudden death in battle, or when you are delerius from fever.”


    “Then allow me to offer one right now,” John Granger said. “Take me to seal your bargain, faerie queen.”


    “John, no!” Claire said.


    “Done,” Beira said, and the entire structure of ice around them shivered, as if waves could pass through the ice like they did the ocean. The world itself seemed to toll like a bell, and Claire gasped as she felt something wrap around her heart and settle, heavy as a chain. “As none of you are Exarchs - and unlike Auberon, I have no intention of making any - I must give you all a tool with which to Tithe when the time comes. Accept this, John Granger of Camaret-à-Arden.”


    For the first time, the Queen of Winter rose. She walked to the nearest pillar, and reached a single delicate white hand into the ice, from which she drew forth a long shard that seemed to go on and on. Finally, she held a frozen blade, which she carried down to them, descending the steps with her cloak of white furs trailing behind her.


    John Granger knelt, bowed his head, and held his hands up. Beira placed the sword into his waiting palms, and Claire watched his fingers tighten around the hilt. Granger hissed in discomfort.


    “It’s cold,” he said.


    “Only for a moment,” Beira told him.


    John turned to Yaél, first. “Keep your practice up, squire,” he said. “Every morning when you rise. Cut the clock like I taught you, hear me?”


    “Aye sir,” Yaél said, and Claire thought she looked like she was about to cry.


    “You two,” the master of arms said, addressing Henry and Etoile next. “Stop dancing around it, already. Death comes quick, when you don’t expect it. And have a drink with your father for me,” he told the hunter, with a grin.


    “John,” Claire repeated. Her throat was dry, and it felt like she had to choke his name out.


    “You’ve had a hard time of it, m’lady,” Granger said. “I hope I’ve been able to ease your burden, somewhat. If you’re afraid he won’t come back, don’t you worry. Trist is the best student I ever had, and there’s nothing in the world that would stop him finding you again. He’s got a good heart, but he needs someone like you to keep him from doing something dumb. Take care of him, and he’ll take care of you.”


    “I will,” Claire promised.


    “Right then,” John said. “Don’t be sad for me. I’m just off to join my friends. They all went ahead of me years ago anyway.”


    With that, the master of arms turned the sword, as easily as Claire would work a needle, so that he held the hilt out at arm’s length, with the tip against his stomach, just beneath where his ribs met. Then, he drove himself down to the ground, letting the weight of his body impale himself on the sword of ice.


    The tip and a handspan of the blade plugged out his back, cutting through the stolen armor of the Raetian guards as if it were nothing more than linen. Frost crept out from the blade along the steel of the armor, and where blood coated the blade, it steamed.


    John Granger fell over, onto the floor of the Winter Queen’s palace, with his eyes open. He held his head up for a moment to look out the window, at the lights dancing in the sky, and then the tension left his body and his eyes closed.


    Claire screwed her face up, trying not to let tears fall from her eyes, and looked to the faerie queen. “What have we bought?” she demanded. “Will you feed our army?”


    “I am the Queen of Winter, girl,” Beira said, her cold lips curved in a smile. “Do I look like I have fields of wheat and rye to reap for you?”


    “What then?” Claire nearly screamed.


    “You have bought the storm,” the pale faerie intoned, raising her arms. Around her, the palace shattered into a million shards of ice, and they fell to the ground. Claire did scream then, falling to the ground and raising her hands above her head in a vain attempt to save herself.


    Somehow, not a single razor-sharp fragment of ice hit any of them. It was as if there were a circle of calmness around Beira, within which the ice did not dare fall.


    “Lift up the sword,” the faerie monarch intoned, while she herself raised her arms up into the air, fingers outstretched into claws as if she was grasping something and lifting it into the sky. Around them, the shards of ice lifted, flying together. Where they impacted each other, they stuck together, piling on and forming more and more complex shapes.


    Yaél made for John Granger’s body, but Dame Etoile stopped the squire with a hand on her shoulder. Instead, the older woman knelt down, grasped the hilt of the frozen sword with a wince, and drew it forth from their companion’s dead body.


    “Good,” Beira said, grinning. “Good. Use it well, mortal woman.” Around them, the clusters of ice built into recognizable shapes: soldiers, bears and wolves, horses, all shining beneath the dancing lights in the sky. “South!” the faerie queen called out to her minions as they built themselves around her. “To Basilea, where we slay a Leviathan!”