Court of Winter
The Silent Arrow, the Onyx Court, the Court of Sorrow
Sorrow
Sorrow is a cage. It keeps a person from moving. It roots them in place, cold and unyielding. But people also willingly lock themselves within it. They embrace the bars’ strength, for they’re just as strong as the love for what was lost. They close the door to keep other people out, as if they were sharks. The Winter Court knows that sorrow can be crippling, but also inspiring. You just have to be certain you’re the one holding the keys.
It’s easy for a changeling to be drawn to sorrow. All you had to do was love enough. The Lost return home to find lovers in a false person’s arms, parents dead and gone, children grown and unhappy. The life’s work you built may be shuttered and lightless. The art you created may be destroyed or stolen. The Winter Court doesn’t offer the same strength as Summer and Autumn, or the same abandon and hope as Spring, but it has never lacked for numbers. Those who join the Silent Arrow don’t want to forget.
Sorrow’s strength is twofold. Turn it against your enemies, and you strike at their will to fight. Turn it inward, against yourself, and you can see through false hopes and useless temptations. The Silent Arrow keeps loss, regret, guilt, and despair in their quiver. They’re dangerous things to handle, but they have to be. So many of the Gentry aren’t prepared for the pain that comes with losing something you truly loved — because so many of the Gentry weren’t capable of truly loving in the first place.
Winter has always been the season of sorrow. Light is in shorter supply, and darkness comes early. The modern understanding of seasonal affective disorder offers a more scientific illustration of a relationship with Winter that some people have always endured. The longer the night, the easier it is to mourn.
Harvesting sorrow requires discretion, much like any other Winter Court affair. It wouldn’t do to be seen with a smile of indulgence at a funeral, or when families are picking through the tornadostrewn flinders of their houses. Guilt and regret are nourishing vintages, and churches and prisons tempting sources. The more ruthless courtiers are experts at finding and reopening a mortal’s old wounds, then feeding as they offer a sympathetic ear.
Depression
It takes immense fortitude to push forward under the weight of a heavy sorrow. The Winter Court has always been at greater risk for depression, both in the sense of major depressive disorder and in the more vernacular meaning. In the former case, it’s not because something in Winter’s Bargain may inflict clinical depression — it’s because changelings who suffer from major depressive disorder most often find their way to the Onyx Court. The Winter Court doesn’t offer a false cure for depression, but everyone there understands. And fortune willing, a changeling might be able to turn their affliction into surprising strength.
The specter of depression has developed an interesting counterpart to the Winter Court’s focus on remaining hidden. Pragmatism encourages the Silent Arrow to be ready to cut ties and run at any time. But pragmatism also encourages them to develop safe avenues to the things they enjoy and the people they love, as a means of staving off the sorrow that surrounds them. It’s a cruel contradiction: isolation helps keep a secret, but isolation can eat at your soul. Onyx Courtiers have to be clever to balance these two needs, but of course, the court teaching is that they have to be clever simply to survive.
The great danger of depression is inaction. If you’re always on the defensive, you can’t make any sort of progress. Conscientious Courtiers of Sorrow watch their fellows for the warning signs of a shutdown and try to be ready to help. Less empathetic courtiers don’t bother, figuring it’s every Lost for themselves. The dangers aren’t lost on changelings of other courts. Some can be loath to trust the Winter Court — when the Others come a-riding, what happens if the Onyx Courtiers crawl into their hiding places and refuse to stand with their brethren?
The Turning of the Seasons
High Winter: A freehold with an Onyx monarch is like a forest in winter — the trees seem still and quiet, but the roots are still quietly at work beneath the frozen ground. The freehold withdraws, declares no new grand offensives, and settles in for a time. And all the while, the Court of Sorrow spreads throughout the area, blending in neatly and using the lull to best advantage. They collate rumors, upgrade security systems, and check to see if each freehold member kept their bug-out bag up to date. Succeeding the throne after an Autumn reign has its advantages and disadvantages: The Autumn Court usually tidies up after themselves, but their tactic of fear can sometimes leave the local Hedge denizens inconveniently jittery and the Gentry on the alert.
A Winter king or queen usually seems very conservative next to their fellows. They make few open decrees, instead dispatching courtiers on secret and often deniable quests. When they require the neutralization of a threat, they commission an assassination rather than a war party. Winter has a particular tolerance for fetches, if tolerance is the right word: Very few fetches die during a Winter reign, to avoid stirring up trouble with the mortal world.
If war comes to the freehold, a Winter monarch may take to the field — leading from a fortified rear or dressed like a simple soldier — or he may direct the strategy from afar. But optimally, there will be no war while Winter reigns. If their information networks, wards of misdirection, camouflage, and discreet assassinations have all been reasonably successful, the enemy will be too disoriented and scattered to challenge the freehold.
Low Winter: When another court reigns, the Silent Arrow melts into the background as usual. They remain active in the freehold’s affairs, gathering information and running covert errands. They openly volunteer just often enough that the other courts remember that they’re present and contributing. Apart from that, the Onyx Courtiers tend to act only when directly asked. The Winter Court accords more respect to rulers who remember their existence and make use of their talents. They also note that such rulers are more potentially dangerous to them… but that’s part of respect.
Winter Courtiers play support in a freehold. They may have a variety of roles — scouts, doctors, cleaners, communications, researchers, counselors — but they’re all tied into the same information network, and any freeholder with half a brain knows it. They also know a child of Winter will lie to your face, by omission or otherwise, without thinking twice. You can’t trust every word a Winter Courtier tells you, but you can be certain they have the enlightened self-interest that keeps them part of the freehold, and are invested in the good of the freehold as a whole.
In most seasonal freeholds, the Silent Arrow is one of the smaller courts. It’s easy to get the impression that they recruit new courtiers under protest, and would prefer to keep their numbers small and trusted. That’s not, generally, true. The Winter Court demands discretion, but they offer a place to any changeling who feels safest when they’re not attracting attention. They don’t make the same social demands that Spring and Summer do. We’ll keep you safe and informed, so you can be in control again. You just have to be able to keep a secret.
In that vein, the court upholds certain formal laws of secrecy, sometimes called the Icelaw. The Icelaw defines the most important things to protect. For instance, Winter stresses the medieval idea of courtly love, to protect the heart and reputation. Hate, like love, is best kept to yourself until it threatens to consume you, and then it must be acted on with swift discretion. A Winter Courtier must always be ready to evacuate or vanish, should the freehold suddenly fall. And the world is full of other supernatural beings who simply cannot be trusted — avoid them if possible, mislead them as much as you can, and never meet with one alone.
Give and Take
Winter’s Bargain is one of the strangest of them all. While the Onyx Court is in power, the Others and their hounds are compelled to mourn, to truly mourn, their victims. An invader cannot bloody its blade or talons a second time until it has ritually acknowledged the death of its first target. The Bargain makes a Winter battlefield a truly peculiar sight, for most True Fae have no real idea how to mourn and can only approximate some form of guess. A spidery figure crouches over a corpse, spinning and folding a sticky origami insect to lay on its chest. An ice-skinned lady twists the arm of her servant until tears well out of its eyes, and then daubs those tears on the eyelids of the fallen. A six-masked rider arranges its prey’s limbs into a mock-caper, and douses the carcass with blue fire from a Mobius decanter. And that’s when Winter strikes. Against the Gentry, there’s no room to honor these formal mimicries.
Like all other courts, the Court of Sorrow honors and repays its patron with rituals and celebrations. Winter’s practices are not as grandiose, though. Too much pageantry would defeat the purpose of subtlety, but more to the point, a truly riotous winter festival would be insulting. Humans build fires in the dark part of the year to hasten it along and to beckon forth spring. When the Winter Court builds ritual fires, they burn reminders of their old human lives or their secrets. When they hold grand wakes in honor of all the Lost who’ve perished at the hands of the Gentry, they drink little and let the other courts have the lion’s share of the debauchery. The Onyx Court pays their debt in ritualized grief and the recognition of loss. The most famous exception is the Winter Market, a bazaar that takes place the week before the winter solstice. Vendors must gain the court’s permission to set up, and most are Winter Courtiers trading information and “confiscated” goods. But the Winter Market is distinct in that all transactions gain the Silent Arrow’s gift of discretion.
The Winter Formal, another tradition with an innocuous name, is a once-a-year masquerade. The court requires masks to attend, and uses tokens and subtle magic to ensure that the identities of all participants are kept secret. The Winter Formal is an opportunity to socialize without the stress of politics, where everyone keeps secrets together.
Finally, Radio Free Fae is a tradition with no roots in the Bargain. As such, not all Winter Courtiers approve. Radio Free Fae is a bootleg broadcast, its location constantly moving and as secret as the identity of its participants. Its stated purpose is to share information that all Lost should know, even if the Winter Court hasn’t cleared some of that information for release.
Legends
Not everything green and growing is kind. Once, many fair young men and women were captured for the gardens of a Keeper called the Earth Mother. The Earth Mother was beautiful and giving, but she demanded utmost obedience. If someone displeased her in the smallest way, she planted them in her orchards, and they were never seen in fleshly form again. Many tried to flee her. Only one succeeded.
The Pale Maiden had listened and learned. She knew that the only creature that the Earth Mother feared was Winter himself. So she ran to the boundaries of the Earth Mother’s gardens, and she called out to Winter to come and take her away. Winter accepted her offer, and kept her hidden away for six months before returning her to the mortal world. There, she taught others how to honor her patron, formalizing the Bargain and forging the Court of Sorrow. But after six months of rule, she vanished again. Some say the Earth Mother found her again, but that’s a fool’s supposition. We know where she must have gone — back into Winter’s domain, to the seat he keeps for her by his throne.
There was a child, unloved by her family, who ran deep into the woods to escape them when they were angry. She curled up in the snow, shivering, waiting to fall asleep forever, but the plumes of her breath drew Winter’s attention. He came and sat beside her, and the chill of his robes drew the warmth from her, and he asked her to tell him her story. But she never complained, she never spoke of her family, and indeed she was too polite to speak of her pain at all. Winter marveled at the fortitude and manners of this small child, and announced that he would adopt her for his own.
Eventually the child came out of the woods. When she emerged, she wore a crown of ice and robes spun from heavy snowdrifts. She taught other children like her all the secrets that she learned from Father Winter, but to this day she has never spoken as much as her old family’s name.
Back when Sam Noblood was hunting Summer and Clay Ariel was negotiating with Autumn, there weren’t many volunteers to chase down Winter. Only one person declared he’d force Winter to strike a bargain like the other three. The court remembers his name as Snowflake John, though it was surely something else. We don’t remember his face, though; he was called Snowflake John because you couldn’t pick him out of a crowd any more than you could pick a snowflake out of a drift.
John laid out his challenge to Winter, and then… he disappeared. Nobody saw him again for two years. When he finally showed up again, he claimed it was done — he’d bested Winter because Winter hadn’t managed to find him for two full turns of the seasons. It was a ridiculous claim. Surely he wasn’t telling us everything. But we had our pact, and an object lesson in why some things deserve to stay secret.
Winter never wanted a Bargain. He put his house under the ice at the roof of the world, in water so cold no mortal could ever swim to his door and live. When Spring, Summer, and Autumn all agreed to aid their tiny supplicants, Winter sat in his house and shook his head. “Not unless they ask me to my face,” he said.
But Winter had a daughter, and he had been cruel to her. When he caught her with a boy, he slashed her with a knife and threw her into the sea. So one day a quiet fisherman went out to the sea, and he tied a pretty necklace to his fishing line, and he lowered it down to her as a gift. When she followed his line up to the surface, he tended her wounds, brushed her hair, and promised he would marry her if that was what she wanted. She carried him swiftly down to her father’s house, and pushed him through the door before he could freeze or drown. Winter was very displeased that he’d been found, and that he would have a new son-in-law — but a promise was a promise. The Bargain was his wedding gift.
The long-fingered hounds ran without baying in all directions. One snuffled at each stoop along the street, reaching up to caress the door only if the lights were out. Another, pale and naked, clambered into a dumpster to prod for warmth. A third rattled up a rusty fire escape, looking into each window. Nothing, nothing, and nothing. No spoor, no footprint, no sign of their quarry. The only thing that was left was a white mask lying in the street, and soon it too melted away.
Mantle Effects: The Winter Mantle is subtler than those of the other courts. At lower levels, the Onyx Courtier might be confused for a courtless; at higher levels, an observer might mistake the courtier for someone much less potent than they are. And why not? If the Silent Arrow’s primary goal is to elude notice, it would make little sense to proclaim one’s power far and wide. The most prominent feature — relatively, of course — is a feeling of starkness. The Winter Mantle creates a sensation of stillness and clarity, of light falling in just that way that reveals the little details in the changeling’s surroundings. At its most powerful, or when the Lost uses magic, Winter becomes a bit more evident. A few snowflakes fall, or a faint wind is cold out of all proportion to its gentle touch. If a full flurry churns around a Winter Courtier, run.
Courtiers: A forensic scientist finds clever ways to destroy evidence or plant false clues to misdirect their hunters. An aged librarian teaches others the secret speech of riddles with no answers. A stone-skinned hitman loads bodies into the trunk of a car that devours them. A pale, eyeless architect builds tunnels and chambers that never appear on any map. A favor broker parlays stolen secrets into influence with the Goblin Market itself. A school custodian passes on news to other Lost about the children they never see. A therapist teaches her brokenhearted clients how to face their innermost secret demons and how to live with grief. A funeral-home director fakes the deaths of certain sensitive clients, for a reasonable fee, of course. A software engineer buries stealth code into apps to hide or reveal certain locations. A gawky wallflower attends all the grand parties with her more glamorous friends, and carefully notes with whom they leave. A conspiracy theorist catalogs evidence about the movements and activities of vampires and werewolves, and prepares elaborate contingencies should they look the freehold’s way.
Cowardice? Just how shortsighted do you think we are? We’re not trying to hide forever from the Others. That’s impossible. We’re finding a safe place to wait. Until.
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