Thornbound

by Stephanie Burgis

  “We each have our own particular strengths. And”—I slid a rueful glance at my sister-in-law, who gave me an equally rueful smile from her position at Lady Cosgrave’s side—“I’ve been reliably informed that no one can succeed every time on their own. Together, we may yet work wonders.”

  Now that I was finally leading the way to Wrexham, every factor but efficiency had dropped away. It was a drumbeat throbbing through my skin, the compulsion to reach him before anything worse could happen.

  “Just tell me,” I told Luton as I led our group into the cool darkness, “exactly what you saw today.”

  I knew from Lady Cosgrave that the fey was female. I knew from my dreams that she hated my family.

  What a gift it must have seemed to her, for a Harwood’s husband to walk into her woods just when Honoria’s bargain had unleashed her full malice.

  “As I tried to tell you earlier,” he said wearily, “I was up late working on my lesson plans when I saw your husband walk into the woods. I thought perhaps no one had mentioned the danger to him—or he’d forgotten it—so when he still hadn’t come out an hour later, I thought I’d better take a look.”

  “Despite the danger?” Amy asked.

  “And without mentioning it to anyone else first?” Jonathan added.

  Luton snorted. “I hardly feared any fey for my own sake. I can protect myself perfectly well!”

  Miss Stewart let out a dreamy sigh behind me, while our other students rustled with interest and the shell-lined drive crunched beneath our feet.

  Shielded by the growing darkness, I rolled my eyes and stepped off the drive onto the cool grass. “Regardless,” I said.

  The woods bulked thickly ahead of our lantern-cast light, deep and shadowy and secret. Somewhere inside it, that fey and her thorns were lurking, waiting for me in the dark.

  She had to know I’d be coming for him. Harwoods never, ever abandoned their family. That was the unyielding truth that had kept us strong for centuries. It had built this estate and my family’s political and magical legacies, too.

  If she was laying a trap for me now, I would step into it with my eyes wide open. Miss Birch had remained behind to protect Thornfell; it would be waiting, strong and safe, for my students to return to even if I fell in the woods tonight.

  “There’s not much more to say.” Luton shrugged. “She’s a typical fey. No interest in any intellectual debates or logic. Wouldn’t let him go or even engage in a simple magical duel to sort it out like gentlemen.”

  He’d suggested a magical duel to a fey? As my eyebrows rose, I reluctantly accepted the unpalatable truth: I would never be able to sack Gregory Luton, after all. No one who had risked his life so recklessly to save my husband could ever be allowed to lose his safe haven at my school.

  It was an utterly disheartening realization, but I swallowed it down as I raised my lantern before me and ducked my head below the first overhanging branches to step inside the deeper darkness of the bluebell woods...and into fey territory.

  A cool breeze rustled through the leaves above me, carrying a faint, eerie echo of distant horns. The sound shivered across my skin, sending goosebumps prickling across my body.

  Whenever the bluebells opened, the veil between worlds in these woods became thinner than the finest gauze, allowing the fey to move seamlessly between them. Who knew where those horns were truly sounding? Or what wild hunt might be taking place in these very woods tonight?

  No human could ever be safe in these woods tonight. But no one turned back. We all clumped together to form a tightly huddled mass, and I turned to Mr. Luton.

  “We’ll follow your directions through the woods to find her.”

  “Miss Harwood?” Miss Hammersley’s voice shivered behind me. “I don’t think we’ll need to.”

  She held up her lantern, followed by all of the others...and their gathered glow revealed a long, thick green vine, studded with glistening thorns, lying curled and waiting on the grass before us, twitching with impatience like a serpent preparing to strike.

  I sucked in a breath. Before I could speak, it unspooled its curves, rapidly shook itself out, and then turned and flowed sinuously away into the woods...just slowly enough for us to follow.

  “So.” My voice shook, but I took a purposeful step forward. “I believe we have our directions.”

  “This is absurd,” Lady Cosgrave muttered as we all shuffled forward together. Her voice was low, but in the throbbing darkness of the woods, it carried easily to my ears. “Amy, you at least must see sense: there is no purpose in us all sacrificing ourselves together. This is a matter for magicians, not politicians—”

  “And yet you, Honoria, are the one who invited that creature—twice—into Cassandra’s home, creating this danger in the first place.” Amy’s voice was perfectly cool and utterly inflexible, and despite everything, my lips curved with pride as I picked my way forward through the darkness, listening.

  She had taken Lady Cosgrave’s arm as we’d first set out, in what might have seemed a friendly gesture—but when Jonathan had closed in on Lady Cosgrave’s other side, I’d understood that they were working together, as always, to box her in at the center of our group.

  “Perhaps,” Amy continued sweetly now, “if you’d wished to stay safely out of fey affairs, you might have seen sense yourself before choosing to mortally imperil my family and betray all our years of friendship.”

  That winding, teasing tail of the fey’s vine slithered ahead, just within the farthest circle of our lanterns’ light. The scent of wild garlic blossomed and clouded in the air around us, its leaves hidden in the darkness but crushed by our heavy feet. We’d left the smoother, tamer, established path behind. Now, sticks and tree roots crunched with every step as we made our way up an angled slope, between dangling branches that poked and stabbed at my eyes, while curving leaves stroked and clung to my hair.

  Lady Cosgrave sucked in a breath behind me. “I told you why I had to make those decisions! I thought you understood—”

  “Oh, I do,” murmured Amy, “and I could easily forgive you for dropping my acquaintance. But the moment you chose my sister-in-law’s home as the setting for a fey assassination attempt, placing my family in mortal danger—”

  “That was never my intention or—”

  “Shhh!” I hissed, coming to a halt.

  The thorny tail of our guiding vine had just disappeared, whipping with a sudden burst of speed up a tree, through its leaf-heavy branches, and out of sight. I rose to my tiptoes, raising my lantern high and casting its glow as far as it would spread. Our group came to a ragged standstill behind me. We huddled together, darkness pressing in around our lanterns.

  Quick, unsteady breaths sounded behind me, unreasonably loud to my ears. My heartbeat thudded in my throat. Something snuffled low to the ground nearby, grass rustling by my feet. I clenched my fingers tightly around my lantern to keep myself still. As I took a deep, sustaining breath, a tawny owl cried mournfully through the trees like a warning—and behind me, one of my students let out a muffled whimper.

  That did it. Fury subsumed my own fear, and I stepped forward, jerking free of the protection of our group.

  “Well?” I called out to the creature who hid in the darkness, as Amy and Jonathan stepped up behind me. “What are you waiting upon? I’m here, where you wanted me. You needn’t settle for lurking about my dreams anymore.”

  A woman’s low laughter sounded, uncomfortably close but impossible to locate. It had a jagged, broken edge, and it seemed to come from before me and from my left, both at once. “Ah, you truly are a Harwood, aren’t you? I know that imperious tone so well.” Grass rustled suddenly around my feet in a rapid, slithering circle that sent an icy chill rushing through my veins.

  It was the sound of her vines, looping around me like a noose. But she wasn’t drawing that noose closed—at least, not yet. She said, her tone wondering, “You never believe in the truth of your own danger, do you? You Harwoods walk into these woo
ds and into my arms as if nothing could ever harm any of you.”

  At that, I choked on a bitter half-laugh of my own. “You may have invaded my dreams, but you don’t know much about me if you actually believe that.”

  When I’d been younger, her words might well have described me. Last year, though, all of my fiercely maintained certainty in my own abilities had been shattered beyond repair. I’d spent months putting myself back together with the help of the wise, strong people who loved me—but every mistake that I’d made in these past few days had stemmed directly from my own raw pain, and fear of failing so catastrophically once again.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe in my own danger,” I told her steadily. “It simply doesn’t matter as much as what I’m fighting for tonight.” My love. Our home. My school. Our future.

  I wanted to spit out threats every bit as vicious as the dreams that she had sent me. But with Amy and Jonathan standing in silent support at my back, I drew on their combined strength to summon long-ago lessons from my mother, who’d tried so hard to groom me for future political alliances. “My family has lived in harmony with the creatures of these woods for centuries. That long peace doesn’t have to be broken now.”

  “I am not the one who broke that peace,” she snapped, and the vines tugged closer around my feet. “It was betrayed long before today. I’ve only been waiting for the chance to take my payment!”

  Payment? “Did someone agree to a bargain with you, then leave it unfulfilled?” I asked. “One of my ancestors?” Which of them could have ever been so reckless? And how in the world had they survived it?

  If any of them had outwitted a fey and escaped a sealed bargain, it should have been passed down as a powerful family story. Given the bigoted views that had reigned unquestioned in previous centuries, it would have been considered a proud achievement rather than a guilty secret. But when I half-turned my head to catch my historian brother’s gaze, he shook his own head in a quick negative, his brows knotted.

  Amy said, her tone gentle, “As head of the family, I’d like to extend our sincere apologies if any of our members have mistreated you. I’m certain we can come to a new agreement that—”

  “Oh, Mrs. Harwood.” Grass rustled around my feet as that unearthly voice shivered with anticipation. “Did you think I’d brought any of you here to talk?”

  With a sudden lunge, the sharp-thorned noose yanked tightly shut around my ankles. My feet skidded out before me on the grass.

  I flung my arms to my sides in absolute trust as I fell. “Now!” I bellowed.

  Amy and Jonathan seized one arm apiece, holding me back with all of their strength as the vine tried to drag me forward. Sharp thorns pierced through my stockings into my skin, but I wasn’t listening to my own moan of pain. Behind me, four young women had started shouting out a spell any Great Library graduate would recognize, while another five recited the spell we’d written together this afternoon....

  And dazzling light erupted through the nighttime woods a moment later as golden bells pealed deafeningly all around us like the sound of my overflowing pride.

  Crying out in surprise, the woman exposed before us stumbled back half a step into the lush spread of purple bluebells that covered the ground. As she threw her hands to her pointed ears, the noose loosened infinitesimally around my ankles.

  I could never have mistaken her for a human. Her loose brown hair was streaked with green, leaves grew from its tangled strands, and her arms were as long and thin as a sapling’s branches. Her tattered green and gold gown, alone, was surprisingly familiar in style—but only from portraits painted a century ago.

  Still, none of her odd and startling beauty could hold my attention after I caught sight of the tree just behind her, where a thick mass of green covered a long, lanky shape...that was unmistakably human.

  “Wrexham!” I yanked my arm free from Amy’s grip and seized the supper-knife from Luton’s hands. As little as magicians might like to think it, magic wasn’t the only weapon against magic, after all.

  The half-eaten chicken leg from Luton’s dinner sailed away, burying itself under bluebells, as I slashed myself free from the wicked, stabbing noose. I clenched the knife handle in my fist and leaped forward, ignoring the slide of fresh blood down my feet as I aimed for that tree and the long, familiar shape beneath the vines...which wasn’t moving, even now.

  Why wasn’t it moving?

  Closer, closer—

  Long, strong fingers grabbed my arm and thrust me off-balance, jagged fingernails digging into my skin like claws. “You can’t have him!” Orange-flecked green eyes glared at me. “Your family stole my love. Now I have yours, and I’ll kill him in front of you. Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for this revenge?”

  I glared back at her. “My family never harmed or abducted any fey from these woods! We followed the rules and—”

  “You lied,” she spat, pulling me closer. Her breath tasted of moss and blood. “He lied every time he saw me! I should never have let him walk in my woods. He swore that he loved me, but your family wrapped around him like a curse! He spun me dreams of living together in Thornfell in secret, under their noses, and he tricked me into believing him. He swore he would be true forever, but then he left me without a single word! I meant nothing to him. Nothing did, in the end, except your blasted human rules and your Harwood pride. He—”

  “He?” Through the heat of confusion and rage, sudden clarity pierced. I turned in her grip to meet my brother’s shocked gaze as my students gathered around him and the others like an army. “Wait a minute,” I said.

  This mysterious he had walked in these woods.

  He hadn’t dared introduce her to our family.

  “Can you be talking about Romulus Harwood?” I asked in disbelief.

  My enigmatic ancestor had baffled the world with his insistence on living here and his refusal to marry any of the women his sisters suggested to him. He’d sighed in his journal over his mysterious love—whom he could never reveal to his sisters. Finally, I understood why.

  “Did he boast about it?” Her face twisted with pain. “When he left me forever without a farewell, did he laugh about how he’d managed to break an immortal fey’s heart?”

  “He didn’t laugh.” Jonathan stepped forward, his voice low and his expression awed. “And he didn’t leave. Madam—forgive me, I don’t know your name. He only called you his beloved in his journal. But didn’t you know? He died. He was only eight and thirty, but the influenza took him within days. Physicians were summoned, and magicians, too, but none of the magic in our family could save him.”

  The claw-like nails around my arm dug in with such a spasm of force, I gasped out loud and blood seeped from my skin. “You’re lying to me again!” she snarled. “Humans are always deceitful. You think you can trick me with your words, just as he did—”

  “We have evidence,” I gasped, breathing shallowly through the pain. “We can prove it.”

  Thank goodness my family never discarded old books...and thank Boudicca I’d brought along our family historian after all.

  “Just wait,” I told the woman who could have been family, “and we’ll show you.”

  16

  In the eerie stillness of the splashed-bright night woods, it seemed that Jonathan might never return.

  My students held the blazing light spell steady, working together with linked arms. My gaze darted from one determined young face to another, watching for any signs of tiring. My captor’s clawed grip on my arm tightened with every agonizing minute that passed, until the deep pain numbed into a steady, constant pulse as faraway and insignificant as my own heartbeat.

  Jonathan would be safe on this trip. I told myself that, again and again as we waited. Mr. Luton had gone back to the house with him to serve as a magical guard along the way—and as far as I knew, no other fey in these woods held a special grudge against our family.

  There still hadn’t been a single rustle of movement from the tree
where Wrexham was bound.

  I tried not to look out of the corner of my eye.

  I looked again and again. I couldn’t help myself.

  If he was—

  No. She’d planned to kill him before my eyes, which meant he was still alive now. I was certain of it.

  ...Almost certain.

  “Annabel Renwick,” I said at last, my voice hoarse with pain. “The one you took. Where is she?”

  There was no body to be seen apart from the one tied to the tree—and that was too tall to be anyone but Wrexham, even beneath all those layers of obscuring vines.

  My captor shrugged irritably, her gaze still fixed in the direction that Jonathan had gone. “I did as I was bid, to fulfill my bargain. I sent that one through the bluebells. She won’t find her way back to your world again.”

  Ohhh. I took a deep, steadying breath as those bluebells bobbed in the night air before me, wild and fey and eerily beautiful, much like the woman who held me in her clawed grip.

  Annabel would no longer be the most powerful tormentor in her new home...and when I thought of exactly what she’d threatened for Lady Cosgrave’s own beloved, I couldn’t find any regret for her punishment. But I couldn’t restrain a reluctant shiver of empathy, either.

  I would never willingly walk by bluebells again.

  After an endless amount of time, Amy took a deep breath of her own and shook out her shoulders, turning away from the darkness where her husband had disappeared. “Well, ladies,” she said briskly, “there’s no point wasting this time, is there?”

  My captor let out a low growl. “If you think you can—”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Amy gently, “but I was speaking to my colleagues. The rest of you may manage the magic here, but we”—she looked from one Boudiccate inspector to another—“are here for the more traditional womanly arts of government. I believe this is an excellent moment to resolve them. Honoria?”