A Court of Shift and shadow

I

Katies POV:

The old manor had been abandoned for almost 130 years now. A sad husk of a house was all that was left. At least in my opinion. My father had left this manor to rot, and maybe it was for the better. Spring was in full bloom around me and the old manor. Roses had grown up and over the walls, created a bizarre facade of thorns and red roses.

I had explored the manor many times in the shape of a mouse, or sparrow. Or any other shape that was suitable, as the old house had become quite unstable over time. The grand entrance and staircase had traces of the last time anyone lived there. An old cloak hung by the door, full of holes as insects slowly devoured it into nothing. In the shape of a sparrow I flew to the upper floors. Marks from my fathers claws were spread all over the walls and floors.

I only knew parts of the story, of how a human girl came to live here, fell in love with my father. She broke the curse Amarantha had laid upon the land, and died in the process doing so. Her name lost to memory and time, or had my father refused to tell it to the historians writing the story down? I would never dare to ask him about it.

The following war and the historical moment in which a High Lady was created in the Night Court had forever changed my father. He found and married my mother only 10 years after the war, they had then left this house and built the new one after their wedding. She had died in childbirth, my birth. And the only thing I know about her is that she made him happy. Irma, my mother, had made my father happy, and that was all I needed to know.

The rooms in the old manor were filled with spider webs and dust. Some old furniture stood and slowly weathered away. I ventured to even higher floors and found myself in a room full of paintings. This was my favourite room, paintings of the spring court grounds, roses and my favourite, one of two pigs in masquerade masks. The fae who painted these had humour. Once I had tried to paint myself, but the paints had dried up long ago, and asking my father for new ones felt... Wrong... He probably knew who made these. And that life, the life before the war, he had long ago left it behind.

Slowly I left the manor and flew high over the hills, letting the dust from the manor fall off in the wind. The new manor was not so different from the old one, only the walls guarding the grounds were higher, and less inviting. Spikes decorated the top, and guards walked between them. Magic shields held uninvited visitors at bay, and as I landed and shifted to my fae form the magic let me in. The new manor didn't have roses climbing the walls, nor the lifeless windows of the old. But the white facade almost felt as lifeless, if not for the servants walking around.

"Heir Katie, did you have a good flight?" One of them asked as I walked by.

"Yes Cassandra, what's for dinner tonight? I'm starving!" I said back.

"The hunters haven't come back yet, but we hope for some deer." Casandra smiled. "Some letters have arrived, your father is out with the hunters and have not been able to look at them."

"I will take a look, something else?" Casandra shook her head. "Good, see you later."

Half running, half walking I went into the manor and into my office. Not that I needed one, it was more of a symbolic one. The only work I did was to sit and look busy, often by practising my handwriting or trying to get my father to come to the meetings the other high Lords and Ladys held. The first to perfection, the second... I tried, and that was it.

The letters all had emblems from the other courts, six different letters, six different emblems. And a seventh letter was also there, the emblem was not one of the other courts. Pitch black wax, and the shape in it barely visible if I didn't hold it in the sunlight. One dark mountain and nothing else. It was addressed to the Spring Court, not to my father like the others. Slowly I put down the letters and opened the one from the Autumn Court, the only court My father wanted to communicate with. It was the High Lord Eris himself who had signed the letter.