A Throne of Woven Midnight

14 min read · Dark fantasy romance · Free, complete, 18+

The war between the Courts of Day and Night had lasted for a thousand years, and Morwenna was tired of winning.

She had done it for twenty-two of them. Crowned at nineteen, she had not lost a battle since, and every victory came home to the Night Court in the same shape: a list. She read the lists herself, in the Unlit Hall, by one candle. Names first. Then villages. Then the miles of the Dusk she had taken, the band of half-light where the two halves of the world overlapped and the sun sat on the rim of the sky for ever, never rising, never gone. It was the only ground her people could grow bread on. She had moved the line a long way into it.

Tonight she was forty-one years old, and she had come to the Twilight Bridge to stop.

The bridge crossed the Seam, the gorge that split the Dusk from north to south, a drop so deep that the river at the bottom was only a sound. Bridge-law was older than the war: no blade drawn on its stones, no blood shed between its towers. It was the one promise both courts had kept for a thousand years, chiefly because nobody had found a way to profit from breaking it.

Behind her, at the Night end, Marshal Galt waited with twelve of the shadow host: tall shapes of dark with starlight caught in them like frost in a hedge. Galt had argued against this parley for a month. He had lost, and he was letting her hear it in his silence.

The new King of Day came alone.

She had expected gold. The Day Court wore its light like armour and its armour like light, and it never went anywhere without a retinue to reflect it. Instead one man walked out of the glare at the far tower in a plain grey riding coat with a black band on the sleeve, and he did not hurry. He was tall and brown-skinned, his dark hair cropped close as a soldier’s. Thirty-six, her reports said. A second son. Crowned at midsummer, three months after his father’s death and two years after his brother’s.

He stopped at the centre stone and did not bow.

“Queen Morwenna.”

“King Aurelian. You came without a guard.”

“I’m on a bridge where you can’t draw a blade.” He looked at her the way a general looks at a map of ground he means to take back: slowly, missing nothing. “I wanted to see your face without a helmet in front of it. You killed my brother at Wendle Ford.”

There it was. She had wondered whether he would wait.

“I did,” she said. “He had burned four villages on my side of the ford that week. I offered him quarter in front of his own banner. He spat on the offer.”

“That sounds like Joscelin.” Nothing moved in his face. “I’m not here to argue about what he deserved. I’m here so that I’ll know you, the next time I see you across a field.”

“You came to a peace talk to memorise me.”

“You came to a peace talk to win it.” He held out his hand for the paper she carried.

She gave him her terms. She had written them herself, in her plainest hand: the line where it stood, every prisoner home before the year turned, and the war ended in the only way she could see it ending, which was with her still ahead.

He read the sheet once, all the way down. Then he folded it in half, and in half again, and dropped it over the parapet into the Seam.

Morwenna watched it fall until the dark took it. Behind her, Galt’s breath went out through his nose.

“The line where it stands,” Aurelian said, “is the line your victories drew. Forty thousand of my people lived in the Dusk before you moved it. They live in tents along the Gilt Road now. Their children have grown up under canvas. I want the old boundary stones back. Wendle, the mill towns, all of it.”

“The Dusk is the only ground my people can grow bread on.”

“I know. I’ve read your grain tallies.” He let that sit. “Mine are worse.”

“Then we have nothing to talk about.”

“We have seven nights. Bridge-law: either crown may ask for seven nights of parley, and the other can’t refuse without breaking the bridge. My council made me swear I’d ask. At the end of seven nights I can tell them I tried.”

She could have refused. It would have cost her nothing but the bridge, and the bridge was the oldest thing either of them owned.

“Seven nights,” she said. “At dusk.”

“It’s always dusk here.”

“Then come when you like. Don’t be late.”

She felt his eyes between her shoulder blades all the way back to the Night end, and did not turn round. Galt fell in at her side.

“He’s buying time, Majesty.”

“Yes,” said Morwenna. “So am I.”

He was never late, and he was never pleasant.

On the second night they argued about the mill towns, and he knew the output of every wheel. On the third they argued about prisoners, and he had a list: names, ages, the regiment each had been taken from. He read it aloud, one name at a time, until she said, “Enough,” and he said, “Is it?” and read three more.

She brought her weaving, because every Night queen did. On the night of her crowning she had sat alone in the Unlit Hall and woven her throne out of midnight, thread drawn down from the sky above the Seam, and every night since she had added one row to it: a strip of black no longer than her finger, woven on a frame no bigger than a book, carried home and stitched into the chair before she slept. The throne held the shadow host. That was why they did not eat or sleep or desert. They obeyed whoever sat in it, and she felt them through the thread the way she felt her own hand in the dark. They had won every war she had sent them to.

“That’s it, then,” Aurelian said on the third night, watching the shuttle go through. “The thing my brother died against.”

“It’s a chair.”

“It’s an army that doesn’t eat. Mine eat. They also go home for the harvest and write letters and desert when it rains. I am losing a war of attrition to a piece of furniture.”

“You are losing because your court sends its princes to burn farms.”

She meant it to cut, and she watched it go in. He did not look away. That was the worst of him, she decided later: he never looked away.

“He was the elder,” he said. “I kept the accounts. They give second sons the ledgers so we have something to hold. I can tell you what this war costs, to the copper, per mile. Can you?”

“To the name,” said Morwenna. “Per mile.”

Neither of them spoke for a while after that. The river went on at the bottom of the Seam. She wove a row and he watched her do it, and the quiet was not an armistice, but it was not a battle either.

She had not been argued with properly in twenty years. Her council agreed with her, or sulked. Aurelian did neither. He came at every point she made from underneath, the way water gets into a wall, and when she was right he said so in three words and went straight on to the next thing. She began to look forward to dusk. She disliked that very much.

On the fourth night the wind came up the Seam hard enough to tear the frame off her knee. He caught it before it went over the parapet, and his hand closed over hers on the wood. Where his bare fingers touched the thread, the black took an edge of gold, thin as a hair, and kept it.

Neither of them mentioned it. He let go first. Afterwards she cut that row from the frame and did not stitch it into the throne. She put it in the pocket of her coat, and found that she kept her hand there all the way home.

On the fifth evening Galt came to her before she left the Hall.

“The column’s in the Hask,” he said. “Three thousand men and a baggage train, three nights out from the granaries at Fell. They crossed the pass the night after he dropped your terms in the river.”

“And the host?”

“At the head of the pass since the second night, as you ordered.” Galt had the grace not to sound pleased with her, but only just. “Give the word tonight and none of them walks out.”

She went to the bridge with the word in her mouth.

Aurelian was already at the centre stone, sitting on the parapet. She stopped a yard short of him.

“Your column is in the Hask,” she said. “Three thousand men, three nights from my granaries. My host has been waiting at the head of the pass since the second night. When I walk back across this bridge I can lift my hand, and by morning there will be nothing in the Hask but snow.”

He got down slowly. For once he was the one who had to find his voice.

“You knew.”

“I expected it. I would have done the same.”

“You’ve known for three nights. You sat here and argued about prisoners.”

“So did you.”

“Yes.” He did not make it smaller. “I ordered it the night after we met. I came here to see your face, and then I went home and sent three thousand men to take the bread out of your people’s mouths, because you had put forty thousand of mine under canvas and called it a line. Then I came back and read you names.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to see whether you would lie to me too, and be good at it.” His jaw tightened. “You were. Are you going to lift your hand?”

She thought of the list she would read if she did. Three thousand names, by one candle. She thought of Joscelin at the ford with his banner behind him, spitting. She thought of twenty-two years of being right.

“What do you want for them?” he said, and she almost laughed, because it was the right question, a ruler’s question, and he had asked it without kneeling.

“Call them back tonight. Then bring me something better than the old stones. Your forty thousand go home to the mill towns. My farmers keep the fields they’ve sown. The Dusk belongs to neither crown. No line at all.”

“My lords will call that surrender.”

“So will mine.”

“And my column?”

“I’ll send the host home tonight.”

“Before I’ve signed anything.”

“Yes.”

He looked at her for a long moment, the way he had on the first night, but he was not memorising her now. He was trying to read something written very small.

“Why?”

“Because I have read enough lists.” Her voice did not do what she wanted it to. “And because you would have lifted your hand, King of Day, and I want to see whether you can put it down instead.”

He stepped closer. The wind had dropped. Below them the river kept up its one long word.

“I would like to kiss you,” he said. “You may say no. You’ve said it to everything else.”

“Not to this.”

It was not gentle, at first. It was a week of argument with nowhere left to go, his hand at the back of her neck and hers fisted in the grey coat, and then, when neither of them gave ground, it became something slower that she had no word for. At the centre of the bridge, where the light belonged to nobody, the dusk took a gold edge, like the thread in her pocket.

She stepped back first.

“Call them back,” she said, and walked home to do the same.

The council was waiting in the Unlit Hall: every lord who sat on its benches, the captains of the host, and Galt standing beside the throne with one hand on its arm.

Every midnight of her reign rose behind him, row on row, black and soft and taller than a man, with the stars still caught in the weave where she had drawn them down. She had sat in it to give every order she was proud of, and every one she was not.

“The host is still at the head of the Hask,” Galt said. “It is waiting for the word.”

“The word is home.”

“We watched you on the bridge, Majesty.” He did not raise his voice; he did not need to. “The twelve at the Night end answer to the chair, and the chair answers to this council when you are not in it. They saw.”

Nobody on the benches would look at her. One after another, men and women she had raised to those benches studied the floor.

“You’ll let three thousand Day soldiers walk out of the Hask,” Galt said, “because the King of Day kissed you.”

“I’ll let them walk out because I am done.”

“Then you are done. The host obeys the chair, not the woman in it. Sit and give the order, or step aside and I will sit.” He took his hand from the throne and held it out to her, palm up, almost courteous. “No one in this hall will stop me. Ask them.”

She did not need to ask. Not one of them had lifted their eyes.

Morwenna crossed the floor. She did not take Galt’s hand. She went round the back of the throne, to the place behind the left shoulder where she had tied off the first row at nineteen, and found the end of the thread by touch, as she could have found it in her sleep.

“Majesty,” Galt said, too late.

She pulled.

The last row came away like a dropped stitch, and then the row beneath it, and the one beneath that, faster and faster. Twenty-two years ran through her hands in a long black hiss. Stars fell out of the weave and went out on the floor. Galt lunged for the thread and it slid through his fingers like water. Far off, at the head of the Hask, she felt the host come loose: every tall shape letting go of its shape at once, until there was nothing at the top of the pass but shadow lying on snow, the way shadow should.

When it was finished there was no throne. There was a woman in the middle of the Unlit Hall with an armful of black thread, and a council with nothing left to command.

Galt’s face had gone grey. “You have disarmed us.”

“I have ended it.”

“You have ended yourself.” He turned to the benches, and one by one, in order of rank, the lords of the Night Court stood and turned their backs on her. It was the oldest sentence the Hall knew. A hundred years ago it had come with a rope. Now it meant only that the Hall would not see her again.

“Go to your bridge,” Galt said.

She went. She took nothing but the skein, her weaving frame and the strip of gold-edged black in her pocket. Nobody stopped her at the doors.

On the sixth night he did not come at all, and she did not let herself decide what that meant. On the seventh he was late, and she had stopped pretending she was not watching the Day end of the bridge.

She had slept two nights in the old toll room in the centre tower, on a bench under a window that looked both ways. By bridge-law the parley did not end until the seventh dusk, and she had told him not to be late, and she meant to be the one who kept the bargain, even with no crown left at her end of it.

He came across from the Day side with mud to the knee and a paper in his hand, and he looked as if he had not slept since the fifth night.

“I sent riders after the column the night you sent your host home,” he said. “It came out of the Hask this morning. Every man. They told the whole camp what they saw from the floor of the pass: your host along the ridge at the head of it, and then no host. It lay down in the snow.”

“I know. I felt it.”

“Lord Ambry, my chancellor, had the order to march written before the last wagon was clear. No throne, no host, the whole Night open to the sea. He has wanted that since he was a boy.” He held up the paper. “I signed this instead. Your terms. The Dusk to neither crown. Galt sent his name and seal under mine this morning, by a rider. He didn’t argue. He has nothing left to argue with.”

“And Ambry?”

“Walked out of my hall with eleven lords and their levies behind him. My mother says Joscelin would be ashamed of me.” He folded the paper and put it inside his coat. “She may be right. I haven’t forgiven you for him, Morwenna. I don’t know that it’s mine to forgive.”

“I haven’t asked you to.”

“No. You wouldn’t.” He looked at the skein on the bench, the black heap of it. “Galt says you’re no queen of his.”

“Galt is right.”

“Come back with me.”

“As what?” She did not say it unkindly. “Your court would spit at the woman who killed their prince. So would you, some days.”

He did not pretend otherwise. “Some days.”

“I’ll stay here. The bridge belongs to nobody. So do I, now.” She took the gold-edged strip out of her pocket and the small frame from the bench, and set the first thread.

“What are you making?”

“Not a chair.” She did not look up. “Come at dusk.”

“It’s always dusk here.”

“Then come when you like.” She held out the loose end to him. “Hold this.”

He held it. The thread took its edge of gold again where his fingers were, and she wove the first row with the gold on the outside, slowly, because she had all the time there was and nobody waiting for her to win. When the row was done he was still holding the end, and watching her, and not looking away.

“Is this what you want?” he said.

“I have spent my whole reign wanting what I was supposed to.” She put the frame down on the bench. “Shut the door.”

He shut it. The window looked both ways, onto the Day and onto the Night, and for the rest of that long dusk neither of them looked out of it.

In the morning, which on the bridge was only the same light with different birds in it, she began the second row.