Thornglass

Bram Ashcroft has caught a falling pane with his bare arm and laid frost wards that have outlasted eleven river winters. Nothing has tested him like nine weeks under the Keepers eye.

Thirty-nine, six foot three and built from twenty years of hauling crated glass up lock towers, the human glazier from Dunmere answered a letter that was either very rude or very honest: an elven Keeper needed a man who does not fail. Her great iron-and-glass conservatory hangs high in the boughs of Caer Ilvanor, the hail has shattered its dome, and if the ward is not whole by the night of the bloom, her black moonroses may never open again.

Lady Saelith Arendhel has kept the Thornglass for sixty years. She is exacting, unsmiling, impossible to impress, and every evening she stands at the foot of his ladder in the wet green heat while he works shirtless sixty feet above her. Tonight she has traded her gardening smock for off-the-shoulder emerald silk, sent everyone else down the long stair, and pricked her thumb on a thorn.

By old custom she owes the man who finished her glass a boon. Anything in her gift.

He means to ask for something small. She has spent nine weeks deciding that small will not do, and the Keeper of the Thornglass has a great many rules about how things are done properly. Before the roses close at dawn, she intends to teach him every one of them, and he may find a few of his own worth teaching her.