Thorn

by Anna Burke

  “What do you know of loss?” she asked the witch. “Who were you to judge me?”

  The wind sighed.

  The Huntress closed her hand around the nearest vine, willing the past to stay where she had left it, bleeding out in a bed of green spring moss.

  She had found freedom, here in the snows. It was the kind of freedom that had to be taken, earned each and every day from the cold, but it was enough. It was more than enough. She still had her Hounds, and she still had her forests. Those were the things she could not bear to lose. Even if . . .

  She stopped.

  There was no even.

  There was no if.

  She would not let the witch unmake what had been made. There would be no spring, here. Spring brought only death.

  The Huntress tore the vine from the wall, calling down the snows in a rain of rose petals.

  Chapter Seven

  I watched her ride out into the blizzard from my window. The snow parted once, and I saw dark hair stream out from a white hood, and then nothing.

  Days stretched, and it was dark even in the garden with the wind scrabbling at the glass roof and throwing snow in through the arrow slits of the outer hallways. I found an old fur long enough to fashion into a cloak and ratty enough that the attentions of the pup did little to detract from its appearance. Not that I cared. It was warm.

  The keep fell silent without the Huntress. The pack was gone, and the remaining she-wolf kept to her den in the stables. My pup waxed and waned, bright-eyed and playful some days, listless and lethargic on others. “You cannot die,” I told her, shaking her gently as she turned her muzzle away from the food I’d chewed for her.

  I had said the same thing to my mother.

  “You can die,” I amended, looking the pup straight in her blue eyes. “But I will be very, very disappointed in you if you do.” The pup wiggled in my grip, desperate to lick my face.

  On the fourth day of the Huntress’s absence, my feet took me to the tower, and I paused at the foot of the stairs. No wolf blocked my way. Light and whirling snow spilled in from the arrow slits, leaving drifts on the steps. I tucked the pup under one arm and placed a tentative foot on the first step. When no other creature materialized, I took another, and another, climbing up past empty rooms with doors half open with a purpose that set my teeth on edge.

  There was a room at the top of these stairs. I had seen it, coming in out of the snow that first day. A room at the top of the tower with a single lit candle, in a castle that had stood empty for days before our arrival. No candle burned that long, and candles did not light themselves. I would find answers there.

  I had to.

  I regretted carrying the pup. A few days of food in her belly had put weight on her bones, and my legs burned from the climb. It was no wonder the Huntress moved the way she did. If I climbed this many stairs on a regular basis, I too would lope with the easy grace of a mountain lion.

  I smelled them before I saw them. A pale, half-remembered scent ensconced in ice.

  They spilled through the next arrow slit, tight white buds and full blooms ghosting against the dark stone of the stairwell.

  A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.

  I had kept my distance from the roses at the gates. These, though, would be impossible to avoid if I wanted to continue upward. The fragrance grew stronger as I drew parallel with them, wary of the long, raking thorns.

  They were not like the roses in my mother’s garden. The petals were smaller, denser, wilder than the heavy blooms she grew in the loose, black soil of the coast. The thorns, too, were longer, the sharp curves promising pain to any who dared brush them aside.

  My father had plucked one of these roses.

  I tried to picture it, ignoring the voice that warned against such thoughts. Him, covered in ice and shivering as he trudged alongside the Locklands. The roses, waving in the wind, impossible, beautiful, a gift from a land without mercy.

  A gift for his daughter.

  He had handed me into the heart of winter, leaving me alone to deal with its thorns. Had he known what he was bringing?

  Rage flared, immediate, demanding.

  I would have died. I would have thrown myself into the drifts, or perhaps a chasm, before I brought one of these flowers home to my daughters. I would have plunged the rose into my breast or, better yet, laid it and my life before the Huntress’s feet. I would have died a thousand deaths before I gave such a rose to someone I loved. I sagged against the wall, staring at the briars ahead.

  I had asked for the rose. He would have stumbled past them if I hadn’t, and home to us, and together we would have dealt with Avery. Together we would have survived, as we had before. The roses trembled in the gale outside. I let them catch at my clothes as I passed, because what was one more thorn?

  I mounted the last flight with leaden steps.

  A door waited at the top. The wood was dark with age and bound with iron. I paused before it, catching my breath, and traced the metal with my eyes. It was worked into the shape of a vine, but the work lacked delicacy, as if it had been made by human hands instead of sorcery. Only the lock showed real craftsmanship, and that too was heavy-handed, putting more emphasis on the bolt than the design. I placed my hand upon the metal, my heart sinking.

  It was locked.

  I’d climbed halfway up the mountain for a locked door.

  The pup wiggled, and I set her down, resting my forehead against the door. Whatever was beyond it remained out of my reach.

  Unless . . .

  Sara had taught me a thing or two about locks.

  I slid a pin from my hair, grateful that I’d thought to put it up out of the way today, and slid it into the chamber. The pin grew cold to the touch, then shattered. Frost bloomed across the lock. A shard nicked my neck as I stumbled backward, and I barely caught myself on the uneven stone wall. The pup whimpered, a feeling I echoed wholeheartedly, and I raised a hand to my cheek to feel the place where another piece of shrapnel had grazed my skin.

  Sara had said nothing about how to pick spelled iron.

  I tucked the pup under my arm and fled, whipping past the roses and the library until I was back in the comparative safety of the kitchen where the only things that bloomed were dried herbs.

  “Damn,” I whispered into the crackling hearth fire. Then, when there was no response and the emptiness of the keep sagged around me, I said it louder. “Damn, damn, damn you all.” My scream startled the pup but I did not care. I slammed my hands on the table, the screams building until the words jumbled into one long wordless sound, at once high and low, raw and shrill, shredding my throat and battering against my teeth until the world was subsumed in sound. I slumped against the hard wood, my lips sore and stretched and my throat ragged. I didn’t know what exactly I had expected to find. A person perhaps, another prisoner like me. A hope I hadn’t realized I was holding on to died with my screams. I was alone here. Truly alone.

  I can’t do this, I thought, staring around the deceptively docile kitchen with its pots and herbs and pleasant fires. I would not spend the rest of my life here, chopping vegetables and enduring the mood swings of a woman who could order her beasts to eat me without so much as a moment of warning. Her library was no substitute for companionship. All the books in the world could not replace what I had lost, but I still had one way out.

  I locked the pup in the kitchen and waded through the snow in the courtyard, blinking at the light. The storm had lifted, leaving a sky so brilliant it hurt my eyes. The roses on the gate nodded at me in greeting, dark stems indistinguishable from the black iron. I pushed the gate, fearing that it too would be locked and knowing that if it was, I would throw myself upon the thorns, both iron and wood, and claw my way either through the gate or into the next world.

  It opened.

  No, it did more than that.

  It sighed at my touch, and the leaves rustled, perhaps the leaves on the gate, perhaps leaves somewhere else, both distant and close, leave
s that I wanted to strip from the stem and stomp into the bleeding earth. Past the gate, the snow danced in glittering spirals as it blew across the lake. I closed my eyes against the unbearable brightness and sank into the snow.

  How long would it take, I wondered, for the blood to freeze in my veins? The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. Hours? How long before I slipped into a sleep from which I would never wake? They found men frozen, Avery had told me, with smiles on their faces. I would die here one way or another. Why not now? I nestled deeper into the snow and waited for my mind to come up with an argument against it, but all I heard was the wind, whistling as it blew flakes of snow across the lake.

  I opened my eyes a long while later, animal instinct forcing my lids apart. The bear swayed its massive head from side to side, and from atop its back the Huntress watched me, straight as the spear she carried, her eyes wilder than they had been before she left, and her mouth set in a high, untouchable line below cheeks that could have shattered clouds.

  And her eyes.

  I had thought they were green, but this was a green so dark I felt the ground lurch beneath me, the last green at the heart of winter, a shred of life in a place hostile to all things tender and growing, the green of pine needles in shadow and moss frozen on the banks of mountain streams.

  She slid from the bear’s back. I didn’t stir. The snow was soft, and if I didn’t move, if I didn’t reclaim ownership of the body in the drift, I could watch her a while longer from the frozen center of the world where everything was color and light and only cold demanded feeling.

  “No.” She held out her hand. No emotion crossed her face, but I knew that she knew what I was doing, lying in the drifts, and with that knowledge came everything I had tried to leave behind. The weight of the world pressed me deeper into the snow.

  “Get up.”

  The growl in her voice lit into me like lightning. I grabbed her forearm, clumsy with cold, and stood.

  She turned away to look out over the lake. A new bearskin cloak hung around her shoulders, and the beast’s claws crossed at the breast, the long, black nails nearly the length of my hand. What was left of its head hung at her back, a gore-stained hood with empty eyes still rimmed with red.

  “I want to go home,” I told her, the wind catching at my voice.

  “You have no home,” she said, as calmly as another person might have said, “dinner is ready,” or, “I don’t think it will rain.”

  “I do. I have two sisters, and—”

  “That life is over.”

  I drew breath to argue, but the space between us was gone and the scent of the very-recently-parted-from-its-body bearskin overwhelmed me.

  “Your life is not yours to throw away.”

  “What?” I looked up at her, hating her for the way she looked right through me without seeing me, hating her for her indifference, for her secrets, for the story she would not tell me and the life she had stolen from me without any reason I could see.

  “You belong to Winter now.” She fingered the claws crossed at her breast, and her gloves came away dark with blood.

  “I belong to no one but myself.”

  “Don’t you?” The scorn in her voice filled the space between us. “You are a debt, merchant’s daughter, here to pay for your father’s mistakes. If you throw your life away, I may consider that debt unpaid.”

  “Then kill me yourself and be done with it. Or do you really have no mercy?”

  She laughed. The sound forced me back a step, and I stared at her as she threw back her head, her pale throat gleaming until the mountains rang with her mirth. “Your father asked for mercy, too,” she said when she had finished. “But he was a fool. He did not understand what he asked for.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Death is mercy in the mountains.”

  She was mocking me. I tore my eyes away from her and looked out over the mountains and into the clouds. “Give me mercy then.”

  “No.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” My voice cracked as I faced her, and more than I hated her, I hated the way my hand reached out, desperate, searching, grasping for something I would never find here in this cold, bright place.

  “Live.” She pulled her hand out of mine. Her mouth twisted again, but this time there was no cruelty in the line of her lips, and my hand ached where it had so briefly held hers.

  “What is there to live for?” I asked her, pointing out at the wasteland around us. She turned to follow the accusation in my fingertips. Her face eased, and the tautness in her shoulders lessened as her eyes took in the distant line of pines and clouds and falls of ice. She didn’t speak, but I saw the answer in the way her lips softened, parting slightly as a breath of snow danced along the lake. A hawk circled, spinning a trail of frost as it dived in and out of the clouds at our feet. I wanted to deny the beauty of her world. I wanted to deny the ache that had spread from my hand to my chest, tightening like a fist the longer I looked at her lips. I wanted to hate her, and I wanted her to look at me the way she looked at her mountains.

  “There’s nothing here worth living for,” I said, summoning up the remnants of the vitriol still churning in my stomach.

  She turned back to me and the tightness returned, sliding over her body like a second skin as the sweep of her cloak stirred the snow. My cheeks flamed in the cold as she walked away.

  “Damn you,” I called after her.

  She looked back over her shoulder, the bear fur framing her cheek, and gave me a smile that froze the air around it.

  “I am already damned.”

  Pain.

  She saw it in his eyes, and she lay her hand against his head, smoothing the fur over his ears. The cuts were deep. She hummed softly under her breath, and with her other hand she held the cloth to his side to staunch the bleeding.

  “I am sorry, my friend.”

  He whined.

  This one was one of Brendan’s grandpups, or great-grandpups. She had lost track, running with the wolves, of who they’d been. It hadn’t seemed important. Each wolf was its own, and they were all her Hounds.

  It mattered now. It always mattered right before she lost one.

  The loss of one you cannot bear to lose.

  “The things we can bear then,” she said to the wolf and to the witch. “The things we can bear are terrible enough.”

  The wolf sighed, pain taking its toll on his body, and she closed her eyes against the grief. Sometimes she wondered if she loved them more, these pale shadows of the human hunters they had been.

  She did not think of the girl.

  She did not think of the despair she’d seen in those dark eyes, the snow so bright around them, and she told herself she did not feel regret like a hammer, striking again and again and again.

  “Would that we all were wolves,” she said to the wolf as pain from her own wounds clouded her vision until she slumped beside him, her hand on his bloodstained chest.

  Chapter Eight

  We had received the news at three o’clock in the afternoon, shortly after the striking of the bell. My father was in his study upstairs, and Aspen and Juniper were picking up the day’s groceries as it was the housekeeper’s day off. With the housekeeper gone, it fell to me to answer the door. I knew as soon as I saw Henrik’s face that something terrible had happened. His white-blond mustache did not conceal the grim set of his lips, and he was out of breath and sweating.

  “Your father,” he said, looking past me. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs,” I answered, but I blocked his way before he could push past. “What is wrong?”

  Henrik gave me a long look, his ice-blue eyes fierce and pitying.

  “Everything.”

  A gust of wind whistled over the battlements, breaking through the shroud of memory. The wind must have sounded like that, I thought, out there on the water, shrieking as it ripped the sails from the masts, then the masts from the ships, and finally tore apart the ships themselves, timber by timber,
leaving only a few broken casks and the half-drowned body of the cook’s boy, the sole survivor of the gale that sank my father’s three best galleons on their voyage home. All three were heavily laden with silks and spices destined for my father’s clients, and it was only ill fortune that had them returning to our city at the same time, wallowing low in the water with their holds full of uninsured goods.

  Damned.

  Damned, indebted, and condemned.

  I had thought the worst had happened before, first when my mother died, and then again when those ships sank, and lastly in an exile that ended at the dirt road wending its way through the foothills, grass growing in the ruts that led to the small cottage at the edge of the village. I had been ready to accept my share of the burden, wed to Avery and shackled to a town I despised while I grew old and my fingers gnarled and knotted, and our children rolled in the dirt with the dogs and I nurtured hate for my husband like an old bitter seed.

  I had thought I knew the shape of loss.

  This, though.

  This was different. This was a rent in the fabric of reason. People simply were not carried off into the night on the backs of bears by women without a shred of human decency.

  “I am damned.”

  If she was damned, what did that make me?

  Cold, whispered the part of myself that paid attention to such things.

  I left the ramparts, where I had come to brood, and headed for the hot spring. If there was any justice in the world I would be able to scrub away my grief in peace.

  I found the cavern dark and empty. Good, I thought, stripping down out of my clothes and ignoring the pup, who scampered off into the shadows. I should have minded the darkness now that the Huntress was back. Anything could be lurking. If I lit the torches, however, I would have to see my reflection on the surface of the steaming pool.

  I slid beneath the water, letting it run through my hair and over my shut eyes and lips. The warmth held me, and its touch was almost human. I ignored the tears that mingled with the water and waved off the pup, who had settled down next to me to gnaw on my ear. She was not so easily deterred. Sighing, I lowered my head until only my lips and nose floated above the water, removing myself from her reach.