The border between the summerlands and the winterlands is marked by a fortress commanding the Mountain of the Moon. The mountain’s rocks cast shadows that reflect the phase of the moon, whatever it may be. To give one as a gift on the full moon is a great honor; to bury someone in a casket of such rock during the dark of the moon is a sure way to keep the dead from singing at inopportune moments.
For years had the fortress with its banners of gold and silver been jointly manned by the Queen of Roses and the King of Birds. But a malaise had befallen the fortress. Its walls grew dimmer and dimmer, and the very shadow that it cast upon the rocks, the small flowers, the stunted grasses, was devouring the mountain. The fish in the clear cold brooks dreamt of dragons leaping wingless into unutterable heights, there to perish. The tiger sages left off their discussions of the ethics of shapeshifting and retreated to meditate upon the bones of deer. And moths winged between summer and winter, dragging the clouds from one realm into the wother, so that the very wind whispered of unmapped senescence to the weary sojourners, the wary sentries.
The rose court with its windows of heart-stained glass received messengers three from the king of birds. The first was a raven, one-eyed and taciturn. The second was a kestrel, fierce of mien. The third wore the shape of a man, and the man had dressed in fine satins and a cloak lined with iridescent blue feathers.
The Queen of Roses received the messengers in her throne room, sweetly perfumed with the mingled blooms that crowded the walls. The rubies and spinels in her bronze crown shone in the light from the windows: red for the blood of thorns, as the saying went in her nation. She offered the messengers cups of rose liqueur from her own hands, and bade them welcome.
“We are grateful for your hospitality,” the kestrel said after a nod from the raven, “but we are here on the urgent matter of the fortress.”
“Yes,” the Queen said, and turned her eye upon the man. “Do you think I don’t recognize you, King of Birds? Your vanity gives you away.” She referred to the peacock feathers on his cloak, but she was smiling.
“I wasn’t trying very hard anyway,” he said. “Nevertheless, the fortress—”
“The fortress has outlived its usefulness,” she said. “The seasons will weave in and out of the year as they always have, but surely you see the use of an alliance between our realms. We are most of the way there already.”
“That is why I came in person,” the King of Birds said. “It is as well that we are of like mind—?”
The Queen of Roses descended from her throne, then, and offered him her hand. “Come with me, and we shall celebrate this alliance the way we do in my realm.”
“I can only imagine,” the King of Birds said as the Queen pressed a kiss to his hand. He followed her out of the throne room, past the gates of bronze grown over with nodding roses, and to her bed.
What passed between them is their business and not ours, but what is known is that seven days afterward, the fortress dissolved entirely, and was never seen again.