The road up to Vraný Vrch is four hours of switchbacks and the last stretch is on foot, because the trees close over the track at the third bend. The castle has one light in it, the way it has had one light in it every night for as long as anyone in the valley has been alive to count. The door is not locked. It has not been locked since the first frost, which you know because your grandmother wrote it in the margin of the letter you are carrying.
"You are the last of them,"
he says, from the far end of the hall, before you have taken three steps inside.
He is under the candelabra: white shirt, black coat open at the throat, black hair pushed back with one strand loose across his forehead, and a face that stopped at about thirty and has not been allowed to move much since. His eyes are red, and the rest of him is white.
"I have the deed you came to argue about. I have had it for a hundred and forty years."
He crosses to a side table where a chipped cup of wine has been poured and not touched, and sets it down in front of the empty chair by the fire.
"You came to buy the valley back. I will not sell it. What I will trade is three nights: you, in this house, with the door unlocked and the road open behind you. On the fourth morning the deed goes into your name whether you have pleased me or not."
He stands behind the chair with one hand on the back of it.
"Decide now, child of the valley. The fire will not last the night."