A Treason of Thorns

by Laura Weymouth

  I can almost imagine away the past seven years. Can almost picture a better life. Mama is still with us. Wyn is down by the stream, and presently Mira will call us in for breakfast. Papa is Caretaker—

  But no. Even if Papa was still Caretaker, Burleigh would still be slowly dying, sickening a little more every day thanks to the binding placed upon it.

  I open my eyes, and when I do, Wyn is standing not ten yards away from me on the forest path. I squint, to make sure he’s real and solid, not a memory of the House’s, but there’s no watery cast of light playing over him, just sun through the leaves.

  Wyn seems well. Better than he has in days, now that I think about it. The hollows are gone from beneath his eyes, and his untidy hair curls damp around his collar, as if he’s just washed in the stream.

  All the worry on his account that I forced endlessly down for seven years, and that I could not really feel last night for fear of falling apart, hits me like a storm surge. My hands shake, and I feel as if I’m going to be sick. Suddenly I can’t bear to look at him. I turn on my heel and rush blindly through the woods, though I can hear him following after me.

  ‘Violet!’ Wyn calls. ‘Vi, stop a moment!’

  But I don’t, not till I’ve got out of the cover of the woods and stand in the middle of the wildflower meadow. The blossoms have taken on strange, twisted shapes, and as I clench my fists together and try to catch my breath, a hedge of brambles rises up around me, waist-high and bristling with thorns.

  Wyn stops short. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he says, his voice low and strained. ‘I wouldn’t have left if I could have helped it.’

  I shake my head, desperate not to feel the things I’m feeling, or to remember what it was like being left behind by Mama and then made a homeless orphan by Papa. But to my heart, it doesn’t matter why Wyn left. All that matters is that he went. That without warning I found him gone. Yet I know my heart to be relentless and unfair, so with a supreme effort, I force down every scrap of loneliness and hurt.

  ‘No,’ I tell Wyn. ‘It’s all right. I shouldn’t expect what you can’t give; you made it clear from the beginning that you’re not planning to stay for long. I’m being foolish. Don’t mind me.’

  Wyn takes a step forward, heedless of the brambles. They retreat a little, making way for him. ‘Violet. Say what you mean, for once. Tell me the truth. You’re upset with me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No. Yes. You left. I am so tired of people leaving me, Wyn. So tired. My mother, my father, you—’

  ‘I came back,’ he offers, though there’s no defensiveness in his voice.

  ‘It’s not just this time, though,’ I say. ‘Why wouldn’t you go with me? When Papa was put under arrest, why did you stay? I needed you, Wyn. Mama always put herself first and Papa had Burleigh to think of. You were the only person I felt safe with, and you turned your back on me to stay here of all places, and I can’t understand why.’

  ‘Blood and mortar,’ Wyn mutters under his breath as he runs a hand across his face. ‘Violet. Can I show you something?’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ I answer flatly, because now I’ve said my piece, all I feel is sad and empty.

  The brambles pull back and wither away as I step forward.

  ‘It’s this way,’ Wyn says, and leads me back into the woods. I hesitate at the edge of the forest. Part of me wants to stay out in the sunlight, in sight of Burleigh House, which has never let me down. But Wyn stops and waits for me, and at last I follow.

  We go just about as far as you can get in the little forest while still remaining on Burleigh’s grounds. And in a back corner, in a thicket near the furthest edge of Burleigh’s land, we come upon something I’ve never seen before.

  There’s a small shepherd’s hut in among the trees, built of odd, mismatched boards and roofed with a thin layer of thatch. It has no windows, and only one door.

  ‘What is this?’ I ask Wyn. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘I made it,’ he says, stuffing his hands into his pockets. ‘The year after the arrest began. You can go in – I think then you’ll see why.’

  I open the door and stop on the threshold. ‘Will you come with me?’

  Wyn joins me at once. It’s reassuring, having him at my back, and I step into the close, dim interior. At first the only light is whatever filters through the chinks in the walls and the bare patches on the roof. But then Wyn strikes a sulphur match and lights a lamp, and it’s like we’re alone together in a small golden bubble, when everywhere else on the grounds it’s impossible to escape the pervasive presence of Burleigh House.

  In here, though, my sense of Burleigh’s consciousness is dampened. I let out a small, audible sigh of relief as the House’s pain and exhaustion fade from the edges of my mind. They don’t vanish entirely, but quiet to a bare whisper.

  ‘It’s because nothing in here is part of Burleigh,’ Wyn explains, without me having to say what I’ve felt. ‘I found the boards in the old barn, and all the nails and the thatch – they’d been brought in from the village and were just sitting there, gathering dust. So I built this myself. The House had no part of it. When the arrest started, Burleigh was always . . . looking at me. You know the way it is, when all of its attention is focused on you, and it’s hard to keep upright? It’d be like that for days at a time, and I got so tired of it I could hardly see straight. I just wanted somewhere of my own, somewhere to hide. And this is it.’

  I settle down, sitting cross-legged on the rough planks of the floor. Wyn sits too, facing me, and sets the lamp down between us.

  ‘It helps when I’ve done House magic, to come out here,’ he says, an apology written across his face. ‘If I’ve done a lot of it, I can’t think of anything else. I didn’t mean to let you down, Vi. Are you still angry?’

  ‘Have I ever been able to stay angry with you?’

  Wyn smiles, and it’s a half-broken, wistful thing. ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘Can I look?’ I ask, gesturing to the confined space around us.

  Wyn shrugs. ‘All right. There’s not much to see.’

  He’s not being entirely truthful, though. I take the lamp and hold it up, and find charcoal drawings on every wall. They’re of an achingly familiar landscape – wide, flat expanses of water and grass, with seabirds skimming the air overhead. I can almost hear the sea. Almost taste the salt. Almost smell the brine.

  ‘It’s the fens,’ I say, turning back to Wyn. ‘You drew the fens. How did you know that’s where we went?’

  ‘Jed told me, just before you left.’ He gets to his feet, ducking a little to avoid hitting his head on an arrangement of carved wooden birds suspended from the ceiling. I look at them, squinting a little in the low light, and I know every one of them. There’s a teal, a marsh harrier, a common crane, a grey shrike with a tiny hooked beak. They’re fen birds.

  ‘I found some books in Burleigh’s library, and read about where you’d gone,’ Wyn says.

  Suddenly hot tears burn at my eyes and my throat aches. Even while I was away, Wyn and I were still together in a sense. Sometimes, I feel as tied to him as I do to Burleigh House. And the panic I felt before dissipates, because he hasn’t left, he’s still here.

  He’s still here.

  ‘Wyn?’ I say. He looks down at me, a question in his eyes. ‘Please don’t do House magic any more. It’s not safe, and I hate watching what it does to you.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know I shouldn’t. And I know I promised you that I’d stop. But if I’d let all that mortar out into the countryside . . .’

  We both fall silent. Burleigh is failing, and someone must stand in the breach until I manage to find the deed.

  If I manage to find the deed.

  I turn my attention back to Wyn’s drawings on the walls. There’s one of gulls flying over the shore that catches my eye. When I step closer to it, I notice odd marks on the waves and the gulls’ wings. Not marks, handwriting done in ink, on the opposite side of the paper.

  ‘Do y
ou mind?’ I ask, gesturing to the picture.

  ‘Look all you want,’ Wyn says.

  Removing the pins that hold the page to the wall, I flip it over. There’s verse scrawled across it in an unfamiliar hand. The back of my neck prickles as I read.

  First, speak a binding

  Second, wield a knife

  Third, give your spirit

  Fourth, give your life

  Fifth, take in power

  Sixth, take it all

  Till your blood runs with mortar

  Till your breath fills the walls

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ I ask Wyn, holding out the page.

  For a long moment, he’s absolutely silent, staring down at the paper. ‘No,’ he says, and I know he’s lying from the way he won’t meet my eyes. He’s never been able to bluff.

  ‘What is it?’ I press.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know. Just some old nonsense, on a scrap of paper I found years ago. Put it back.’

  I frown at him. ‘I want to keep it. It could be important.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Wyn says.

  But on our way back through the woods, there’s tension between us. It stretches on and on until we leave the forest and I push the sleeves of my rough fen blouse up, because the day is already warm and muggy. As I do, I hear Wyn take in a sharp breath.

  ‘Violet Sterling, what happened to you?’

  I glance at him in confusion. ‘What?’

  In answer, he takes one of my hands and holds it up. It’s the first time he’s touched me when neither of us is working House magic, and even though we’re not entirely getting on, the feeling of Wyn’s skin on mine sends a shock through me.

  But I see at once what he’s bothered about. Dark blue bruises have blossomed around my wrists, angry against the white of my skin.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, trying for lightness and sounding a little forced. ‘Falmouth wasn’t pleased with how things went here. We had a very . . . animated conversation, last night when I was leaving the Red Shilling.’

  I’ve never seen Wyn look so fierce. ‘Is he still there?’

  ‘No, he’s gone to Bath, don’t worry about it,’ I say.

  ‘Are you certain?’ Wyn asks.

  I give him a thin smile. ‘Frey ran him off with a pistol. I don’t expect he’ll be back any time soon.’

  My assurances sound hollow and unconvincing, even to me. I haven’t told Wyn about the deal I struck with the king – that if Burleigh survives the summer but I’m unable to find the deed, Falmouth will take over the House. And I’m certainly not about to bring it up now, when I’ve no idea what I’ll do if things come to that.

  We walk inside, through the ruins of the conservatory, shattered glass crunching like gravel under our feet. I ought to clear this up – being in disrepair is hard on Burleigh. But there are so many things that need doing. The slate tiles on the guest wing roof are so sparse it looks as if my House has contracted some sort of architectural mange. In spite of Wyn’s best efforts, the dining hall is still growing cracks like a tree grows leaves. The ballroom’s still split down the middle in the wake of my unfortunate accident with Burleigh’s House magic. And everywhere, ivy creeps in at the windows and rooflines. The damage weighs on me constantly.

  ‘When do you finish at the Shilling tonight?’ Wyn asks, putting a hand on my elbow to steady me as I nearly trip on an overturned ottoman.

  ‘Usually a bit after two.’

  ‘I’ll be there at two, then, to walk you home.’

  ‘Oh, Wyn,’ I protest. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Falmouth is gone, and I don’t—’

  ‘Let me do this,’ he says. ‘You may not mind now, but you’ll probably want company tonight. Just trust me, won’t you? I know.’

  I relent. ‘All right, have it your way.’

  Wyn holds the conservatory door open and looks back at the shambles behind us as I walk through. ‘Got my work cut out for me today,’ he says. ‘But first let’s find Mira and see if she’ll feed us. I’m starving – haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday morning.’ He grins at me, and for a brief moment seems like an ordinary boy – the sort of person he might have become if he weren’t tied to my family and my House.

  ‘I’m fighting with Mira,’ I say, moping a bit because I like it when Wyn pities me. ‘I expect I’d be fighting with Jed too, if he didn’t leave before dawn and go to bed while I’m still out. They don’t agree with me about Burleigh.’

  ‘Well, I’m not fighting with you,’ Wyn says.

  ‘Really?’ I ask hopefully. Perhaps he’s already forgotten about the strange scrap of verse tucked away in my pocket.

  ‘Really.’ Wyn tries and fails to hide a smile. ‘I don’t ever fight with you. I just have temporary differences of opinion.’

  ‘That’s the same thing,’ I mutter.

  ‘No, it isn’t. If I were fighting with you, I’d be cross. I’m never cross with you.’

  ‘I’m cross with you sometimes,’ I point out. ‘What makes you so much nicer than I am?’

  I slow my pace, and Wyn walks on a few steps.

  ‘I’ve always been nicer than you are,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  When Wyn notices I’m not keeping up, he stops and turns, waiting patiently. I put my head a little to one side and look at him. At first when I came home, seeing Wyn was a bit of a wrench. I kept expecting to see the child I grew up with. But it’s not like that any more. Right now, I don’t want to see anyone else, just him, as he is in this moment.

  And blood and mortar, I’m glad he came back.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Wyn asks with a puzzled frown.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say, catching up with him. ‘Nothing at all.’

  16

  Midway through my shift at the Shilling, Alfred comes downstairs, looking gloomy and at a bit of a loose end without Esperanza. He occupies their usual table, covering every inch of its surface with papers and notebooks, ledgers and ancient-looking texts.

  Alfred only ever takes tea, I know that by now, and the second time I stop at the table to freshen his pot, I sit down opposite him for a moment.

  ‘Have you ever seen this bit of verse before?’ I ask, taking Wyn’s drawing from my pocket and sliding it across the table wrong-side up so Alfred can see the handwriting on the back.

  He squints down at the page through his spectacles and goes suddenly pale. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘I found it at the House,’ I say.

  ‘Forget about it,’ Alfred says, burying his nose in a book once more.

  I reach across the table and pull the book downwards, so he can’t hide behind it. ‘You and Wyn are both being very cagey about this, and it’s really not accomplishing what you intend. It’s my House, Alfred. I have a right to know what this means.’

  He gives me a pained look. ‘Esperanza would kill me if she found out I told you.’

  ‘Then she never has to know,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t like keeping secrets from Espie.’

  Alfred sounds disgruntled, and I give him my firmest look. ‘I don’t like having a House that’s dying.’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Alfred rifles through his assortment of documents and pulls an extremely old book towards us. As he leafs through it, I can see that all the pages are hand-lettered in faded ink, and the binding made of some sort of cured animal skin. Though I can make out most of the spellings, the language is unfamiliar.

  Alfred gestures to a section of text and I shake my head. ‘I can’t read it. What is it?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. It’s an Anglo-Saxon text, from my namesake, Alfred the Great’s, reign. That dates it to nearly two hundred years before the Great Houses were bound. Do you see this?’ He points to a few indented lines. ‘That’s your verse, more or less. More, really; it’s almost identical. It’s a set of instructions that explain how a person can be bound to a Great House. We call it a binding rhyme, those of us who’ve made a study of the Houses.’

  I frown. ‘Why
would anyone need to bind themselves to a Great House, especially if the Houses hadn’t even been bound by William the Deedwinner yet?’

  ‘There are two stories here,’ Alfred says, overcoming the reluctance that’s obviously warring with his chronic desire to discuss obscure points of House history. ‘One’s about a House in the Scottish Highlands – it’s not called a House in the text, though; they call it a witchcroft. According to this book, it was incredibly old, older than anything else in those parts, and began to fail. It needed new land, and a fresh start. So the man who tended it at the time – call him what you like, a priest, a witch, a Caretaker – bound himself to the croft. He gave it his blood and bones and breath and brought it to Yorkshire, where it eventually became Ripley Castle. Fascinating.’

  ‘And the other story?’ I ask.

  ‘Hold up.’ Alfred turns a few pages. ‘All right, here it is. The chronicler talks about a place in Exmoor, near Withypool. He says there was a strange village called Burglǽcan, or “the town that springs up”. And the people who lived there? They were called Stior-lings – from stioran, meaning to guide and direct. Burglǽcan had been around for ages too, but seemed to be all right until a group of Danes came inland and tried to raid the village. The raiders just . . . died, suddenly, without warning or violence, and the chronicler says a grey substance sprang from their ears and their eyes and their noses. After that, Burglǽcan goes into a swift decline, until one of the Stiorlings binds herself to the place and relocates it.’

  ‘To the Blackdown Hills,’ I say.

  ‘That’s right,’ Alfred says. ‘To the Blackdown Hills, where I would assume it became Burleigh House.’

  ‘And we became the Sterlings.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What happened to the woman who moved Burleigh?’ I ask, leaning forward. ‘And to the man who moved the Scottish House?’ Excitement thrums through me. ‘Could I move Burleigh again, to give it a new beginning?’