So we come to them, to the Harvest Queens and Winter Kings, to the lives that stitch the curtain of liminal time. So we come to the autumn girls, sewn from dead leaves and pumpkin hearts and wheat and grain and frost, who live for such a short time, and whose love—if they can find it—will shape the winters yet to come. Some of them go willingly, joyfully into the winter, for they have learnt to love the cold. Others fight, and the winter fights back. Those are the years when people die.
