Rose & Thorn

by Sarah Prineas

  “It will be,” I promised, and took up my narrative again. “One dark and stormy night, Shoe was working on a fine pair of boots, when there was a knock on the cottage door.”

  “Shoe?” Griff put in. “The shoemaker’s name was Shoe?”

  I hadn’t really thought about that before. “I wonder if he had another name when he lived out in the world,” I mused. “He must have. Maybe he was Shoe because he was in hiding. That would make sense. At any rate, he’s Shoe in this story. He opened the door, and in stepped the Penwitch, all wild and wet from the rain, carrying a bundle wrapped up in a blanket.”

  Griff was listening, his chin resting on his folded arms. I could see his gray eyes shining in the light of the lantern, as if he was seeing the things I was telling him about. That was one of the magical things about stories—if they were well told they could transport the listener to another time, another place.

  “The Penwitch handed the bundle to Shoe,” I went on. “He pulled back a fold of the blanket and saw that it was a baby. She is under a curse, the Penwitch said to Shoe. Guard her well. And then she used her magic to set a boundary around the valley so that Shoe and the baby would be safe. When Shoe started looking after the baby, he found that she had a mark on her arm. A perfect rose, just starting to bloom. And so he named the baby Rose.”

  “The Lord Protector said your mark was excised,” Griff said abruptly.

  “Don’t interrupt,” I scolded. Then I paused. “He had me taken to the cells below the citadel,” I told him, “and a man there burned it off.”

  “Oh.” Griff rubbed his eyes, as if tired.

  “He’s a horrible person, the Lord Protector,” I said.

  Griff shook his head. “He’s just doing what he has to do to protect the City.”

  I shrugged. Griff was a Watcher, after all, and, as Quirk had said, he’d been trained to serve the Lord Protector. “Now, where did I leave off?”

  “The baby named Rose,” he answered.

  “Yes, that’s right. Thank you. Shoe, who was very kind, took care of the baby, and raised her to be a good girl, and told her stories every night, and taught her to tell stories herself. The kind of stories that make you feel warm on a cold winter night, or make you laugh when you need a bit of cheering up, or make you sad when you feel like having a good cry. Stories that seem like they’re about something simple, like goats and wolves taking shelter in a barn during a blizzard, but turn out to be about something completely different, stories that make you understand more clearly who you are, and what the world is like.”

  He was staring at me, a frown line creasing his brow.

  “That’s what stories do,” I explained. “That’s what Shoe taught me.”

  He shook his head slowly, denying it. “All stories serve Story.”

  I studied his bleak face. “What a strange life you must lead,” I said musingly. “So rational and cold. You have no stories at all about the things that have happened to you. I wonder how you even know yourself.”

  “I know myself,” he said.

  “What are you, then?” I challenged.

  His gaze met mine, intense. “A weapon.”

  I shivered. Yes. He was. I tried to defuse the tension that had arisen between us. “If you are a weapon, then listening to me must take the edge off you.”

  He frowned.

  “Because I am a rather fine storyteller,” I said lightly, “and the story of me and Shoe is a good one.”

  “All stories serve Story,” he repeated.

  I released a frustrated breath. “Well, I’m not going to argue with you about it.” Teasing him again, I said, “Should I stop now? Or do you want to find out what happens next?”

  “I do want to know,” he said soberly. “But that is Story at work. That is part of its power. Once it starts, it is very difficult to stop it.”

  Hmm. What he said made an odd sort of sense. But I’d just come to the most important part of my own story. The sad part. I couldn’t stop now. “And then,” I went on, “the boundary around our valley was broken. That meant the Penwitch had died, and so Shoe’s heart broke, because he had loved the Penwitch so completely, and then he died, too.” I blinked away sudden tears. “Rose had always wanted to go out into the world, to live her own story, but losing Shoe . . .” I took a shaky breath. “It was awful.” Under its bandage, my burned rose ached, and my tears overflowed.

  “I’m sorry,” Griff said quietly.

  “It’s all right,” I said, sniffling. I was surprised that he offered words of comfort, even though he disapproved of my story. “Telling about it helps. I have so many stories about Shoe; it means I’ll never forget him.” I wiped my face with a corner of my cloak. “Thank you for listening. That helps, too.”

  After a moment, he gave a brief nod in response.

  I went on. “You can probably guess the rest of my story. I had to leave the cottage behind, and went to live in the village for just a few days, but then I had to leave there, too. I meant to go to East Oria but the Forest brought me here, to the City, instead.”

  I sighed, and we sat in silence for a while.

  “The end,” I added. “For now, anyway.”

  Without speaking, Griff got stiffly to his feet and paced away into the room’s shadows. After a moment I heard him moving again—quick footsteps, the sound of his breaths.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, trying to peer into the darkness beyond the lantern light.

  “I missed training today,” he said gruffly. “I need to drill.”

  And, I thought, after hearing my story he needed to remind me, or maybe himself, of what he was—a Watcher. A weapon. Trained to serve the Lord Protector, trained to resist stories in all their forms. But even though he was grim and quiet, and I was, in a way, his prisoner, I was starting to like Griff. He was a good listener, despite himself. And I suspected that he thought in his head a lot more than he let himself say aloud. Huddled in my blankets, I listened to him finish his training until my eyelids started to droop.

  At last he stepped back into the circle of light. He seemed exhausted, his face flushed, his eyes glittering with what looked to me like fever.

  “All right?” I asked sleepily.

  He gave me a brusque nod. Then he lowered his head and stared down at the stone floor. “Rose,” he began.

  It was the first time he’d called me by name. “Yes?” I prompted.

  “I know part of your . . .” He paused. “Part of what happened before Shoe went to live in the cottage.”

  “You do?” I was wide awake again, and sat up straight.

  He nodded, still not looking at me. “The Witch. Pen. She’s been gone from here for a long time, but she was the first Protector of this City.”

  “Protector?” I asked blankly.

  “Like the Lord Protector,” he said. “She and the shoemaker, your Shoe, gave Story its greatest defeat, fifty years ago.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “It’s the truth.” Then he added, his voice wry, “Not a story at all.”

  My mind whirled, trying to make sense of what he’d just told me. “My goodness,” I said faintly.

  “Story is relentless,” Griff went on. “It is always waiting, always ready to find a weakness and rise again. All her life, the Penwitch fought against it, just as the Lord Protector does. When she brought you to Shoe she must have created the boundary around the valley to keep you in. Not to protect you. To protect the world outside. Shoe was guarding you because you’re dangerous.”

  “What? No.” I shook my head. “Shoe loved me. He took care of me.”

  “You are . . . you were marked by Story,” he insisted. “The Forest sent you here because you’re a danger to the world outside. And you’re cursed.” He frowned. “Something about a spindle . . .”

  “I don’t even know what a spindle is,” I interrupted.

  “It’s a device of Story, my father says.”

  “Your father?” I repeated, my
voice shaking.

  “The Lord Protector,” he said.

  Oh, I could see it now. They had the same eyes. Gray, bleak, rational. Terrifying.

  Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself. “But . . . I don’t mean anybody harm.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s what you are.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. Quirk had said I was a catalyst for Story, but I wasn’t sure, exactly, what that meant. “What am I?”

  He studied me carefully, and I knew he wouldn’t flinch away from the beauty anymore. He saw something else, now. “The stories you tell about yourself are false. You don’t know what you really are. The Lord Protector thinks you are a spy. A servant of Story.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  But Shoe . . . he had never told me that he’d loved the Penwitch; he’d never told me his own story. Was this why?

  Was Shoe, for all those years, not my guardian, but my guard?

  CHAPTER

  9

  AS FAR AS GRIFF COULD SEE, HE HAD TWO CHOICES. ONE, ask the Lord Protector to relieve him of this assignment.

  Two, he could do his duty as a Watcher, and guard Rose, while interacting with her as little as possible.

  So really he had only the one choice, for the Lord Protector would sneer at any show of irrationality or weakness. And then he would hand Rose over to his most favored Watchers, Luth and Taira, who would drag her down to their prison cells below the citadel.

  In the morning, after Quirk had brought a tray with Rose’s breakfast to her room, he sent Griff down to the dining hall for his own breakfast and then to the barracks physician to have the bandages on his cut replaced.

  With her usual brusqueness, the physician looked him over and pronounced him a fast healer. “But you need to eat more,” she said, while taking the bandages off his fingers.

  Everybody in the City needed to eat more. Then he asked the physician for something for Rose and had to wait while she prepared it.

  By the time he dressed again in his uniform and ran back to the cohort’s room for his patrol knife, he almost missed Quirk and Rose as they were hurrying across the citadel courtyard, heading for the gate that led out into the City.

  At the sound of his footsteps on the cobblestones, they turned.

  Griff thought he saw a look of dismay pass between them before Rose glanced away. As before, she was wearing her cloak over a blue dress. Her blond hair, neatly braided and pinned into a crown on her head, gleamed in the morning sun. As if she’d realized that he’d noticed it, she quickly pulled up her hood, hiding her face. Then she tenderly cradled her burned wrist; it was probably intensely painful.

  “Finally, junior,” Quirk criticized, frowning up at him. “I was beginning to think that you’d decided not to do your duty this morning.”

  “But I—” Griff began. He’d been doing as Quirk had ordered. No excuses, he reminded himself. “Sorry,” he finished, and fell into step behind them.

  Rose, it seemed, was curious about the City, and Quirk had agreed to give her a tour. Quirk, Griff assumed, was acting on their orders from the Lord Protector—Rose was being taken out into the City so that she would attract the notice of the Breakers, so that the Watchers could identify them and suppress them before Story used Rose to make its move. And after that, Rose would have served her purpose, and she’d be given over to Luth and Taira. Griff had seen the citadel prison; he knew what the Watchers did to the people who went into those cells. The prisoners came out empty-eyed and broken in spirit and body.

  Meanwhile, Rose seemed to have no sense of her own danger; she talked cheerfully to Quirk as they went through the citadel gate. In response to her questions, Quirk explained about the Forest, how it encircled the City and blocked access to it so that if Story rose to power again it would not escape out into the world.

  “So if you can’t get out,” Rose asked, “and travelers can’t get in, how do you get all the things you need?” She waved a hand. “Food and cloth and firewood and . . . goats and chickens, and things like that?”

  A better question, one she should be thinking about, Griff thought, was why the Forest had let her in.

  “Ah.” Quirk grinned up at her. “I will take you to the waterfall, and you’ll see how it works.”

  Griff trailed silently behind them as they walked down the steep street. The houses they passed in the part of the City nearest the citadel had once been fine mansions, but in the long fight against Story they’d been abandoned, and most stood empty, their windows blank, the decorative stone scrollwork along their roofs and doorways hacked off. Some had been divided into tenement apartments; from those hung lines of gray-looking laundry. The air was crisp and cool, but Griff smelled the ever-present taint of factory soot, too. Not many people were on the street. The population had been going down—every year fewer babies were born in the City, and some workers were killed in accidents in the factories, and while no one actually starved to death, too many died of the diseases that preyed on those who had to depend on poor rations for their food.

  As they walked, Griff felt strangely aware of every move that Rose made. Maybe it was because watching her was his assignment, or because of the terrible things he’d said to her the night before. He could feel her dislike of him in the way she kept her hood up and her face averted, the way she pointedly ignored him. Yet she seemed keenly interested in everything they passed.

  She stopped at a wide, blank square of scraped dirt dotted by piles of rubble. “What is this supposed to be?” she asked.

  “Long ago,” Quirk answered, “it was a park. Grass, bushes, flower beds, a few trees, that sort of thing.”

  Griff had forgotten that it hadn’t always been this way—dead and empty.

  Rose surveyed it. “There’s not a scrap of green in this whole City, is there? Why is that?”

  Quirk shrugged. “Nothing will grow here.”

  Griff hadn’t thought about that before. For nearly all his life the City had been this way. Seeing it all through Rose’s eyes made him realize just how barren it really was.

  As they went farther into the City, the streets grew narrower, the houses blank-fronted, the alleys between them shadowed and clotted with mud and trash. They rounded a corner, and Griff caught a glimpse of movement; he stopped and looked back, but saw nothing. Then, as they passed an abandoned shop, he saw a cloaked figure duck into a darkened doorway.

  “Quirk,” he said, interrupting something Rose was saying. “We’re being followed. Or watched.” Breakers, no doubt.

  Quirk paused and cast a cursory glance around them. “You’re imagining it, junior.”

  Imagining? He’d been trained all his life not to imagine things. “No, I’m—”

  “Over that bridge,” Quirk said, ignoring him and turning back to Rose, and pointing across the sluggish, muddy river, “is the factory district. But we’re going this way.” He led Rose, with Griff following, into the familiar district where they usually patrolled: the warehouses, and the waterfall.

  The warehouses were huge, windowless buildings with slate roofs. In some of them were stored raw materials, mostly bales of cotton and wool and hemp, and bundles of hides, and stacks of timber that were brought into the City for processing in the factories and workhouses; and in some were finished products: paper, leather, rolls of cloth and thread and immense coils of rope, all ready to be sent down the river and out into the world.

  At last they came to the waterfall. The river narrowed here, squeezed between two steep, rocky banks, and quickened before hurling itself over a high cliff and into the long lake below, which was crowded with boats and barges, some heaped with coal for running the factories. Perched atop the steep cliff face on the near side of the waterfall were a scaffold and crane and a platform, with an immense pulley and cables turned by a turbine in the river. A lift for bringing up supplies from the barges, and for sending finished products down.

  “This is the only way in and out of the City,” Quir
k said, speaking loudly to be heard over the roar of the river and the grinding machinery of the lift.

  “Except for the gate in the wall,” Rose pointed out.

  “Well, yes,” Quirk admitted. “You’re the first to come in that way for a long time. The Forest blocks everything else.” He looked down at the lift, which was cranking up the side of the cliff with a load of coal. “If the Forest decided to block access to the river, I expect we’d all starve.”

  All along the cliff’s edge were iron railings; there were huge piles of crates and bales waiting to be loaded onto the lift; a gang of heavily muscled laborers waited to unload the lift when it arrived, and then load it back up again for a return trip to the lake. A cohort of Watchers in gray were waiting, too. They would inspect everything that went out and in. Still, smuggling happened. Nobody ever got out—the Forest made sure of that—but Griff was sure that people came in—he was almost certain that the young woman he’d chased a few nights ago, the one who’d given him the sword cut, had not been from the City, but from outside. Someone working with the Breakers, brought in by them to spread new stories that, secretly told and retold, would give new power to Story.

  Rose said something to Quirk in a low voice. He nodded, and she edged around a crate and stepped closer to the railing, where she could look out over the lake and beyond, to the Forest. The wind was stronger there, and it pulled the hood from her head. Her beauty, Griff realized, was not just in her face. Her every move was etched with grace. She turned back, and he found himself noticing again the arch of her eyebrows, the sorrow that lingered in her eyes, the sweep of her lashes as she lowered her gaze. The sunlit glory of her hair.

  He was staring again. He ripped his gaze away from her and saw that Quirk was looking up at him, hands on hips, his face uncharacteristically stern. “Do your duty, junior,” he chided.

  Before he could answer—he always did his duty, Quirk knew that—Rose came back to them, raising a hand to brush tendrils of hair away from her face. “Can we go down to the lake? I’d like to see it.”