The Ledger of Stolen Years

The job came on cream paper that should have smelled of nothing and instead smelled of cut grass and frost, and Cora knew before she opened it that it was not the kind of work she usually did.

She was a forensic accountant, the sort hired when a number somewhere has quietly stopped telling the truth and someone needs it made to confess. She was good at it. She had a flat in the city, a cat she pretended not to love, and a temperament built for the long patient unknotting of other people's lies. She did not believe in much. So when the letter offered triple her rate to audit "a discrepancy in the accounts of the Court of the Long Year," and gave an address that was a stile at the edge of a wood that, on every map she owned, did not contain a wood, she went — partly for the money, partly because the number in her head had already started itching the way it did when something didn't reconcile.

The wood was real when she reached it. The stile was real. And the man waiting on the other side was the most beautiful and most wrong thing she had ever seen — tall, courteous, his shadow falling the wrong way from the afternoon sun, his smile holding a few too many teeth arranged a little too evenly.

"The Reeve of Hours," he introduced himself, and bowed exactly low enough to be insulting if she had known the rules. "You audit debts. We have a debt that will not balance, and our ownclerks are forbidden from reading it. We require a human eye. Mortals, you see, are the only ones who can look directly at a stolen year and see whose it was."

He led her down through the wood into a hall that was also a hillside, lit by a light that came from no lamp, where the Court of the Long Year kept its accounts. And the accounts were not money. Cora understood that within the first hour, and it changed her down to the floor of herself.

The fae did not trade in gold. They traded in time — hours coaxed from the dying, afternoons lifted from the distracted, whole seasons bargained away by the desperate. Their great ledger, a thing of vellum that breathed faintly under her hands, recorded every year ever taken from a mortal and folded into the long, ageless life of the court. Sevenths of childhoods. The last good summer of an old man. A bride's wedding day, bartered for a husband's life and spent here as a single golden hour in some courtier's endless feast.

It was monstrous, and it was meticulous, and against every instinct Cora found her professional soul leaning toward it — because it was, at bottom, only bookkeeping, and bookkeeping she could do.

"This column," she said, hours in, tapping a place where the breathing vellum had gone cold under her fingers. "It doesn't foot. Years going in with no name attached. Someone's been stripping the source identity off the deposits." She looked up at the Reeve, who was watching her with an attention that had sharpened into something hungry. "That's not a clerical error. Someone's hiding whose years these are. Why hire me to find it, if you already know you've got a thief inside?"

The Reeve's too-even smile did not move.

"Because," he said softly, "we do not know who the years belong to. That is the discrepancy. And