Thorn

by Anna Burke

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About Bywater

  For Tiffany

  May you always be a thorn in my side

  She smelled it, sharp and bitter on the wind.

  The pack smelled it, too.

  Blood, and another smell— a smell she had not scented in years, not this far north. She padded through the woods; the pack ranged behind and ahead and to either side, white shapes against the blue-white drifts.

  Tracks.

  Fresh.

  Leather, horse, lynx, wolf, elk, bear, sweat, blood, piss, ale, wool, metal, grain, smoke.

  She raised her head, nostrils flared, turning from side to side for any sounds beyond the creaking pines.

  There.

  Downwind, but it didn’t matter. Not for this game. A faint jingle. A creak that was not bark on bark. A cough that did not belong to cat or elk.

  The old hate quickened.

  The pack tightened around her.

  Red tongues lolled.

  Breath steamed.

  Winter bared her teeth.

  Chapter One

  They say the Huntress rides out when the sun is at its farthest and Winter has her jaws buried deep in the heart of the warm, green world. In the mountain valleys, they swear you can hear her hounds on the knife’s edge of the wind, howling down the peaks in a spray of teeth. The Huntress rides behind them mounted on a great white bear with a horn of silver and bone at her lips and a spear cut from the living heart of a mountain pine at her side. No beast can stand before her charge, and every northern child knows that the Huntress stalks the snows, looking for the lost, the unwary, and the bold alike.

  So they say, and so the story wanders farther and farther from the truth as the seasons turn, save for the one place time doesn’t touch and cold preserves.

  Her keep lies atop the tallest mountain, where the snow never melts and spring cannot bear to shine its yellow light, and the only thing that blooms on those chill stones is the white of the winter rose. They say the veins of that flower run red with heart’s blood, and that to pluck but a single blossom from that mountaintop is to bring the wrath of Winter herself down on you.

  I would know, for I have felt the prick of those thorns.

  • • •

  My father came down from the mountain three days after my seventeenth birthday. I remember the smell of snow, and the dark needles of the pines lying stark and cool against the blinding white of the drifts.

  His horse was more ice than hair when it stumbled into the clearing where our cottage stood, steam freezing in clouds around its muzzle and icicles clinking as it walked. Frost rimed my father’s beard, and behind him on a vast sledge were stacked the frozen pelts of wolves and elk and mountain lions, a lord’s ransom in winter fur.

  He rode in alone, and my sisters ran out to catch him as he slid from the horse while I stayed in the doorway, knuckles white against the red of my skirt as the weak sun made its way down over the rooftops and I counted the shadows of the hunters who had not returned.

  I should have run to him. I should have rested my warm hands on his frozen face, but I had felt misfortune’s shadow fall over me too many times before. I knew, even as the wealth of the forest promised new beginnings and an end to old debts, that Winter was upon us.

  • • •

  “Rowan, the door.”

  I put down my spindle with a groan, gathering the gray wool into my basket and tucking it back underneath my chair. My younger sister rolled her eyes.

  “You could pretend to be sick again,” Aspen suggested.

  “That excuse is wearing as thin as my boots. Besides. Then they’ll be saying I’m weak as well as odd.”

  Aspen faked a delicate cough and rolled her eyes at Juniper, our youngest sister. “Well, you’ve hardly gone out of your way to change their minds about the odd part,” she said.

  I swallowed the bitterness and pushed down the memory of home— our real home in the city, not this thatch and timber prison surrounded by sentinel pines and hardwoods— and forced a smile.

  “You could at least pretend to like him, then,” Aspen said, her tone softening. “It’s not as awful as all that.”

  I lowered my eyes, hating myself for the rush of shame that flushed my face. Aspen was right, of course. At least we had this place, an oversight, a scrap of land so far removed from civilization that my father’s creditors had not even bothered to assess its value. At least I had the luxury of a house to hate.

  “Pretend to like Avery?” This time the smile felt more real.

  “He just hates that you can read and he can’t. Which, by the way, you might try not reminding him.”

  “If he never opened his mouth that would be so much easier,” I said, my hands checking my hair despite myself. It was no use. It fell heavily around my shoulders, thicker and coarser than Aspen’s, and as unruly as a mountain goat’s.

  Aspen, with her red lips and dark hair, was by far the beauty of the family, and the knowledge was not lost on her. Even Juniper, though she had yet to master the simultaneous use of all of her limbs— a condition that made itself apparent in symptomatic shards of shattered pottery— shared Aspen’s heart-shaped face and gentle curves. Where my father’s coastal blood had tempered my mother’s wilder features in my sisters, I alone looked like I belonged here in the tiny village of Three Elms.

  The irony cut deep.

  “You could try doing something besides talking.”

  Her words doused any good mood I had managed to salvage. “Keep an eye out for father while I’m gone,” I said, feeling her smirk follow me out of the room.

  The cold air in the narrow hall of our entryway, so different from the decorated foyer of our town house, served as another unpleasant reminder of how much harsher everything about this place was compared to the coast.

  “Rowan.” Avery Lockland’s broad frame took up the doorway and blocked the dim light of the winter sky. His dark brown hair curled disobediently on his handsome head, and his full lips smiled easily and often.

  Unless, of course, he was looking at me. Then he didn’t smile so much as grimace.

  I could feel Aspen’s eyes sticking to my back like pine sap. Aspen would have smiled up at Avery with all the reserve of a mare in heat. Probably had, but that was not something I cared to think about.

  “Hello, Avery.” His name tasted like ash and brittle bones.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” he said, gesturing at the sleet spitting down from the glowering sky. “Care for a walk?”

  A gust of wind blew the sleet into my face. I braced myself as the ice stung my cheeks, something in my chest aching to fly away over the trees, down the sloping lowlands to the sea, away from the shadow of the mountain and the boy who was to be my husband.

  I thought about slamming the door in his face, and then, unbidden, came the thought of retreating back into the house where my father’s dreams lay sleeping, and spending
another afternoon staring into the fire while my hands performed the menial tasks that now defined my existence.

  “I would love to,” I said, taking vindictive pleasure from the look of surprise on his face. I shrugged into my cloak and took the arm he offered, stepping out into the cold. We ignored each other, walking in silence down the village lane until we came to the edge of the forest. A cardinal swooped over the path, a brilliant flash of red in the gray day.

  It reminded me, with the familiar stab of pain it always brought, of my mother.

  She rarely spoke of her childhood, and she had gone to great lengths to remedy her provincial past. The only signs she ever gave of missing her home were the names she chose for her daughters and the hours she spent in her garden, tending the mountain rose she’d brought with her. Rowan, Aspen, and Juniper, she’d called us. Her little mountain trees, growing in the fertile soil of the lowlands.

  She had named me Rowan seventeen years ago today.

  “When will your father return?” Avery asked me, stooping to scoop up a ball of sleet. He heaved it at a nearby rowan tree, his timing, as always, bitterly ironic.

  “I don’t know.” I turned my face up to the sky, letting the freezing rain slap my cheeks and sting my lips. Better rain against my lips than Avery, I thought, remembering Aspen’s parting words. At least he, too, was miserable. Only the same worry that had spurred me to accept his invitation could have pried him from his family’s hunting lodge, where he could be drinking a frothing horn of ale by the massive hearth with his cronies and, more than likely, accompanied by a few of the less reputable village women. I’d only been inside once, and I had a vivid recollection of the stag’s head mounted above the hearth, its antlers blackened by smoke, staring at me out of empty eyes.

  I did not want to share the deer’s fate, cooped up with the Lockland clan, half-dressed children with the same insolent blue eyes as the man beside me tugging on my skirts and demanding to be put to the breast.

  I met those eyes by accident. There was a defensive, wary look to them that vanished the moment he saw me looking.

  He did not ask to marry you either, a nasty little voice in the back of my mind reminded me. Avery was as bound to his father’s ambition as I was to mine, and now both of them were somewhere in the mountains, hunting for furs to ship overseas, my father’s disgrace not so total that he did not still have a few contacts eager for the exotic pelts of the north, Avery’s father not so immune to the allure of promised wealth that he was willing to put his son’s desires before his own personal gains.

  So here we were, a pact made in flesh and blood, while the foothills of the mountains hugged the village like an anxious mother, unwilling to let her offspring stray too far into the light of progress.

  A sliver of unease wormed its way into my heart.

  Avery knew as well as I did that the hunting trip could take more than a month, but as the days stretched past the provisions the men had packed, he had taken to blaming my father for the delay.

  “When we are married,” he said, hurling another sleet ball into the trees, “I will not keep you waiting.”

  I didn’t know if it was a promise or a threat. Coming from Avery, it could have been either.

  “When we are married,” I said, making a sleet ball of my own to throw into the dark, wet woods, “you will not make promises you cannot keep.”

  Avery laughed. He had a boyish, contagious laugh that somewhat spoiled my desire to hate him. His eyes flicked toward me again, and he hesitated. I had the impression he was weighing whether or not to call a truce.

  “Do you know why my family is called Lockland?” he said.

  I tucked my mittens, which were now damp with sleet, under my arms and shook my head.

  “It’s an old story.”

  I stifled the scoffing sound deep in my throat before he could hear it and turned my attention back to the woods. The mountains were full of old stories, each more laden with superstition than the last, and nothing made these people happier than reciting them as frequently as possible.

  “A long time ago there was a lord named Locke.”

  “Locke, as in Lockland?”

  “Yes,” he said, missing the sarcasm in my voice.

  “Locke was a mighty hunter, and he ruled his clan wisely, providing for his people in the summer and fall and in the long, cold months tanning hides so flawless you could see your reflection in the leather.”

  “What did he do in the spring?”

  Avery paused, looking momentarily confused. “Planted crops, I expect, or sharpened his spear. Do you want to hear the story or not?”

  “Of course I do,” I said, forcing a smile onto my face. “I’m sorry.”

  “One day, Locke fell in love.”

  I hid my eye-roll. Handsome hunters were always falling in love in his clan’s stories or, perhaps more to the point, having women fall in love with them.

  “The woman he loved was beautiful, but cruel. She refused him—”

  “Bet he didn’t take that well,” I said under my breath.

  “— and then killed him.”

  I almost tripped in surprise. “Killed him?”

  “I told you she was cruel.”

  “Why would she kill him?”

  “For daring to ask for her hand? For looking at her the wrong way? For breathing? Who knows. She was a queen—”

  “You never said she was a queen.”

  “Gods, woman, are you going to let me finish the story?”

  “That depends. Are you going to tell it properly?”

  Avery fell into a sullen silence, and another cardinal flitted through the woods, searching for berries.

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the second time that day. “What happened next?”

  He looked up at the mountain above us, his thoughts joining mine as we cast them into the woods where our fathers had gone.

  “She was cursed, along with her court and her castle, and Locke’s father claimed what was left of the kingdom and named it after his son. Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, cutting me off before I could protest the story’s abrupt ending. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a small, wooden shape. “Happy birthday.” He handed the carving to me. I stared at the little wolf in my palm, curled up with its tail over its nose, an old folk blessing wishing the bearer an easy winter.

  “Did you make this?” I asked, disbelief coloring my voice.

  “I might have,” he said, shrugging.

  I stroked the smooth wood, confused and at a loss for words.

  I found the weight of it in my pocket oddly comforting on the walk home as the sky lowered and the sleet turned to snow. I clung to the faint, improbable hope that the charm would work, and that the worst of winter’s fury would hold off until my father returned home.

  • • •

  “You could try to be happy,” Aspen said to me when I sat down by the fire later that afternoon. Her face looked slightly apologetic, and I felt the wooden wolf brush against my leg through my skirt.

  “I am,” I said, meaning it for the space it took to say the words. Of the three of us, Aspen had adapted most gracefully to our new life. The close-mindedness and homogeneity of the mountain valley did not seem to get under her skin the way it did mine, and it probably helped that people tended to like her wherever she went. She plopped down on the hearth beside me, her concern hatching into something far more dangerous.

  “You should wear rouge. You look quite pretty, with your cheeks and lips all red.”

  “Thanks, Aspen.” I made a face at Juniper, who giggled.

  “If you just took a little more care with your appearance . . .” she trailed off, evidently dreaming of the boundless opportunities this would afford me. She ran her fingers through my hair, arranging it to fall around my face in an effort to soften the sharp edges.

  “You’ve got looks enough for the both of us,” I said to her, catching her hand with mine and stopping her before she got carried away and
urged me to try on one of her more fashionable dresses. There had been a time when I was jealous of my younger sister. Beauty opened doors and greased wheels, smoothing the road ahead. It also had its price. People didn’t really see Aspen, only her face and her hips. At least when people looked at me there were no illusions.

  “And you’ve got the brains,” Aspen said to me.

  “What does that leave me?” Juniper asked, her young face full of concern.

  Aspen and I exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

  “The brawn,” said Aspen.

  “That’s right. Looks like you’ll have to get used to mucking out the barn and hauling all the water,” I added.

  Juniper, who was growing so quickly she had a hard enough time walking and talking at the same time, glowered at us. “You’re both awful.”

  “Be a dear, Junie, and get us something to drink? It’s Rowan’s birthday, after all.”

  “Do you think father knows he’s missing it?” Juniper peered out the window at the darkening sky as she spoke.

  “Of course he does,” Aspen snapped, irritation lacing her voice. It was not enough to disguise the worry lurking beneath it. The wind caught in the chimney, and the howling sounded disconcertingly like the cry of a wolf.

  • • •

  “Each of you, think of a gift,” my father had said before he left. “When I return, I will make a trip to town to finish closing out the estate, and I would like to bring you home something special.”

  I did not tell him that my home was there, in the town where my mother had lived and died, and not here, in a remote mountain valley without so much as a single library.

  Juniper, whose voice at least never wobbled precariously, asked for a lute. Aspen begged him for a new dress, or at least some cloth to have new ones made here.

  “What, have you already read every book in the world?” Aspen had teased me when I was slow to reply.

  What use were books, I didn’t say aloud, if all they did was show you worlds and lives that could never be yours?

  “Bring me a rose cutting, like the ones mother grew in the garden in town,” I asked instead. “Just a small one. I can plant it by the well in the spring.”