The alehouse at the crossroads had one rule, painted over the door in letters older than the kingdom: * debts are paid in kind, never in coin. * Most travelers thought it meant barter. Sera, a hedge-witch with three days of road dust on her boots and exactly four coins to her name, had heard the truer version from her mother: the Waning Moon served as neutral ground for the courts, and its debts were collected by whoever held the ledger at midnight.

She was on her second cup, arguing comfortably with the innkeep about whether comfrey or yarrow belonged in a healing salve, when the door opened without the bell moving. That was the first sign. The second was the temperature, which dropped the way it does when someone steps out of a cold lake into a warm room — in reverse, as though the warmth had been borrowed and would be asked for back.

He was tall in the way that shadows are tall, which is to say it depended on the light. Midnight-blue coat, silver at the cuffs, black hair long enough to tie or not bother. His eyes were the exact color of the hour between dog and wolf. He crossed the room, took the stool beside hers as if it had been reserved, which Sera suspected it had, and set one perfect silver coin on the bar.

"This buys the lady's next cup," he said, "and the argument. I've been listening from the corner for an hour and the innkeep is wrong. It's yarrow."

"It's comfrey," said Sera, "and who in the deep green are you?"

"Corvin." He said it like a name that had cost him something. "Of the Autumn Court. And you're the hedge-witch who broke the drought in Millbrook last summer without asking the sky's permission." He smiled, and the smile had edges. "Half the Court owes you thanks. The other half owes you a conversation."

The next hour went the way hours go when they're carrying more than they show. He argued yarrow. He lost, gracefully, and paid the debt of his wrongness by telling her which of the courtiers had tried to claim her rain as their own doing. He refilled her cup without asking. When his hand brushed hers over the salt dish — deliberately, she was almost sure — the warmth where he'd touched her stayed warm for a full minute after, like sun held in wool.

"You can't stay past midnight," the innkeep said quietly, at half past eleven. "House rule. The kind enforced from outside."

"I know the rule," said Corvin. He turned his black-and-gold eyes on Sera. "I came to collect a debt. The drought you broke in Millbrook was broken with power that belonged, in part, to my court. A favor of scale. Which means, hedge-witch, that I'm owed something from you. And the alehouse is where such things are settled." He paused, and the edges of his smile softened. "Or forgiven, if the debtor prefers. But I've watched you argue for an hour, and you don't strike me as the forgiving kind."

Sera set down her cup. Her heart was doing something complicated, and none of it was fear. "What does the Autumn Court collect as its kind?"

"Whatever the debtor offers," said Corvin, "that they'd rather keep."

The bell over the door had stopped moving. The fire had burned down to its patient red heart. The innkeep, wise to the last drop in his barrels, took his glasses into the cellar and did not come back up.

"Then I offer this," said Sera, standing, close enough now to feel the lake-cold coming off him. "The rest of the night. Freely given. But hear the terms, fae: you spend it getting warm. Whatever it takes. I broke a drought, and I'll break a cold."

Something moved through his face that had nothing of politeness in it. "That," he said, "is a debt I may not survive repaying."

"Survive it," said Sera, "and come back for the rest."

His mouth was cool at the first touch and not at the tenth. He kissed the way he argued — patient, exact, finding the precise place where she stopped thinking in sentences — and when she pulled his coat from his shoulders the cold came off him in waves, and Sera understood, with a witch's certainty, what he'd been starving for. The Court of Autumn ends at the frost, and this close to the frost, he had nothing but what he could borrow. She put her palm flat on his chest, over the slow hidden beat of him, and pushed warmth into it the way she'd pushed rain into Millbrook's cracked clay.

Corvin made a sound like the first wind of winter finding a crack in a door, and then he was everywhere — hands at the small of her back, mouth at her throat, the two temperatures of them meeting somewhere in the middle and burning at the join. He was careful until she told him not to be. He was quiet until she told him not to be. The fire's red heart watched. The frost on the window bloomed into ferns and melted, twice.

The second time, the warmth didn't fade. It stayed in him, banked like coals, and he lay with his head on her stomach on the hearth-rug and looked up at her with those between-dog-and-wolf eyes gone soft as dusk. "The Court will say I let a hedge-witch pay a debt of power with the one currency they can't tax."

"Let them," said Sera, combing his hair back with her fingers, generous in victory. "And when they ask how you got so warm —"

"I'll tell them," said Corvin, "that I won the argument."

He was gone by dawn, of course. But the drought never touched Millbrook again, and every autumn since, the first cold snap of the year arrives in the crossroads village one full week late — always the same week — and the innkeep at the Waning Moon sets two cups on the bar at half past eleven, just in case one of the debters comes back to pay the interest.