Princess of Thorns

by Stacey Jay

  I’m glad. I don’t want to look at her a second longer. I hate her so much I can taste it, like cork-fouled wine filling my mouth, destroying my ability to recognize any flavor but its bitterness. I stomp around the bed, tearing off my gown as I go, not caring if Nippa sees me naked. She’s already bathed me. It’s not as if we can be on more intimate terms.

  “Is it not more extraordinary for one so lost to be found than it is for one who never strayed in the first place?” Nippa asks, plucking my gown from the floor and folding it as I pull on the boy’s pants—which fit as perfectly as I suspected they would—and reach for the black shirt.

  “Yes,” I say in a falsely pleasant voice, working my buttons with trembling hands. “She should be given a medal for finally realizing it’s wrong to go about killing people as if they are grouse.”

  Nippa frowns. “I know your heart is kinder than that. Even half of your mother in you is enough to make you three times the person your father ever was.”

  I pause in pulling on my new stockings. “You knew them?”

  “I knew your father when he was a young man, and, after your mother moved to the city, I would attend her when she was ill.” Nippa sets the gown on the bed and begins spreading up the covers. “I came here as a junior nurse when the queen was married to King Radord. She lost so many babes during those years.” Nippa tuts beneath her breath. “Little ones born of a human and ogre union rarely survive, and when they do it is often only for a few days. Ekeeta would hold the babes, rocking them until the light went out of their eyes. It made her … frail, easy prey for Illestros and his allies. Her brother convinced her the only way to end her torment was to allow him to poison King Roland.”

  “He killed my grandfather and my father?” I ask, not wanting to think about Ekeeta rocking her dying babies. She has destroyed too many lives for me to have pity for her suffering. “Is he the one who ordered the executions of Mother and the others loyal to my father, as well?”

  Nippa nods. “And ogres, too.” She opens the armoire across from the bed and pulls out a sliding shelf, revealing a brush and comb set and a bowl full of ribbons.

  “My sister died for refusing to swear allegiance to the new rule,” Nippa continues, handing me the brush and a blue ribbon and watching as I pull my hair into a swift braid. “She made me swear to go along with the takeover and … everything else. She believed one day our queen would see that Illestros had led her astray and need allies. Those who’ve been in hiding are glad that day has finally come.”

  “After ten years.” I shove my feet into the black boots.

  “Better than twenty.” Nippa says, clearly a pragmatist. “Better now than after our world has been plunged into darkness. I believe your mother would have agreed. She wasn’t the sort to hold on to anger.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I mumble as I tie up my laces. If Mother hadn’t held onto her anger at Father, then she wouldn’t have wished for me to possess a heart no man would dare defy and Niklaas and Thyne’s minds would still be their own.

  “I am. She had such a kind soul. She was the only person who could bring out your father’s gentle side. I only ever saw him smile in her presence.”

  “Will you tell me about them? My father, especially?” I ask. “I remember my Mother, but I—”

  I stop, head swiveling as a terrible howl breaks the silence outside. I hurry to the window, with Nippa close behind, coming onto my tiptoes to see down into the garden.

  What I see makes gorge rise in my throat.

  “Goddess,” Nippa murmurs, hand flying to cover her mouth.

  Three floors below, on the east side of the royal garden, ogre soldiers are busy in the animal pens. A company swarms into the neatly ordered holdings, slitting throats and shattering cages, claiming a life with every slash of their blades. A few birds manage to escape their enclosures and take to the air, but dozens of vultures, crows, and other birds I can’t name are not so lucky. Feathers fly and wings go limp as the animals fall and are trodden into the dust by black boots.

  In the dog and wolf pens, teeth flash and claws scratch, but it is steel that sends blood spraying onto the grass, onto the stone walls, onto the uniforms of the ogres who have set about killing the queen’s pets with a single-minded rage.

  What could these animals have possibly done to deserve such a fate?

  It isn’t the animals; it is their mistress this is meant to harm.

  “We have to go. Now.” I grab the sleeve of Nippa’s brown dress and pull her from the window. “Where is my staff?”

  “The guards took it,” Nippa says, clasping her hands together, terror and misery mixing on her face. “Why are they doing this? What’s happening?”

  I ignore her and turn, scanning the room for anything I might use as a makeshift staff, but there is nothing. I snatch up the paring knife, deciding it will do until I can steal something better.

  “Our plan has been discovered. Take me to my brother,” I say, motioning for her to follow as I dash to the door. “If we hurry we can—”

  My words end in a growl of frustration as ogre soldiers appear in the doorway, swords drawn. I rush at them, knife slashing in swift diagonals, puncturing chain mail and nicking ogre flesh, but it’s only a matter of seconds before I’m disarmed and my arms wrenched behind my back. There are too many of them and I am still weak. Too weak even to resist as they haul me from the room.

  I hear Nippa cry out behind me, but I know a plea for mercy from me will only make things worse for her.

  I am the enemy, and it seems I’ll have my chance to suffer for it, after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  AURORA

  The golden hall leading to the throne room is even more magnificent than I remember. Floor-to-ceiling windows as tall as Gettel’s cottage line the walls, granting an unparalleled view of the city on one side and the castle grounds rolling down to the sea on the other. In sharp contrast to my dreams of a crumbling Mercar, the city is in excellent condition—every whitewashed building standing tall and strong, every shutter straight, every street so clean it’s hard to imagine horses ever travel them.

  There are no horses now. No people, either. It’s as if the citizens have sensed the darkness building inside the castle and have shut themselves up against it, though the evening is warm and the setting sun makes the city glow a glorious pink, like roses dipped in honey.

  It is beautiful, so beautiful it makes me ache all over. The light, the sea, the elegant lines of the castle my ancestors commissioned after the last fairy war—they paint a picture that fills me with such bittersweet longing I’m tempted to close my eyes against it, but I don’t. I focus, sealing this last glimpse of Mercar away in my heart.

  Janin was only a girl when the last fairy war ended, but she remembers the celebration to christen the new castle, the way humans and fairies celebrated with dancing in the streets and midnight swims and feasting that went on and on until people collapsed on the grass to sleep off the effects of too much meat and wine.

  I imagine the streets filled with laughing people. I imagine pleasure ships floating in a peaceful sea, waiting to take the adventurous out for a swim with the giant turtles. I imagine so hard that, for a moment, I swear I hear music—fairy pipes and fiddles calling all to dance—but then we arrive at the throne room and my paper-thin imaginings are burned away by the reality of a bonfire lit before an ogre altar and a scaffold of pale wood against the wall behind.

  Niklaas and Jor stand atop the scaffold, their hands tied and nooses looped around their necks, already trussed and ready to die.

  “No!” I scream, tears springing into my eyes.

  Niklaas calls out my name as I’m dragged across the room, but Jor doesn’t waste his words.

  “Don’t do what they ask, Ror!” he shouts, turning his face as the soldier next to him grabs the back of his neck. “Let me die, it’s all right. I love you, I—” His words end in a pained cry as the soldier forces a rag into his mouth.

/>   My brother is as thin as I’ve ever seen him, with bruises on his face and a filthy, patchy beard that makes Niklaas’s look perfect in comparison, but he isn’t broken. He is as strong and good as ever, and willing to die for what is right.

  But by the stars, how can I let him? How can I watch him hanged? How can I let my brother, my best friend since the day he was born, the boy whose baby tears I wiped away, who has trusted me with his hopes and dreams and fears and whose hand has always fit so perfectly in mine, die, if there is anything I can do to spare him?

  And Niklaas … Niklaas …

  Gods, goddess, any good force that might be listening, give me the strength to do what’s right, to save them if I can and to make their deaths noble if I cannot.

  But how can I? How? I would rather die myself. I would rather suffer torture for a hundred years than see either one of them lost.

  By the time I’m shoved into a chair in front of the flames, separated from the scaffold by the fire, altar, and a number of armed guards, I’m crying so hard I can barely see. The world blurs, turning the priest’s robe to a smudge of white.

  “You may still save the ones you love, child,” the priest says, his voice so deep it vibrates my bones. “If you do as I bid you.”

  I sniff hard, focusing on the dagger in his hand, following his arm up to his shoulders, and on to his eyes. It is Illestros, Ekeeta’s brother, the priest who terrified me as a child, and the puppeteer behind the ogre queen’s cruel reign.

  His gaze is even more predatory than I remember.

  “What do you want me to do?” I glare at his oiled head, wishing I could strip the skin from his bones, piece by piece.

  “It is not what I want, but what the goddess demands,” he says with a cruel smile.

  I shiver. Illestros is no servant of the goddess. He isn’t even deluded like the fanatics who burn people they suspect of being witches; he is simply evil and greedy and willing to do whatever it takes to convince those who follow him to commit the necessary atrocities. The goddess is nothing more than a tool, an instrument of manipulation he twists in the hearts of his people.

  “Release her.” Illestros nods to the ogres pinning my arms behind me.

  I wrench free, rubbing at my shoulders but making no move to rise from my chair. There are at least a hundred men in the room: five priests, the rest soldiers. I am fairy-blessed, but even on my best day I wouldn’t stand a chance against these odds, and today is far from my best day. Walking to the throne room was enough to have my heart beating faster. I am a shadow of myself, weaker even than the animals slain in the garden.

  You will not need strength, and if you need it, it will be too late. Gettel’s warning echoes in my mind, giving me some small hope that my weakness won’t matter.

  “What must I do to save them?” I ask. “I want them both spared.”

  “That is within my power, so long as you do as you’re told,” Illestros says. “You will await my signal. When I raise my cup above the altar to begin the ritual, you will drive this knife into my sister’s heart.”

  He motions with his free hand, and a moment later, Ekeeta, her arms bound and mouth gagged with a strip of her own torn dress, is shoved onto the stones before me. She kneels as she did in the bedroom, looking up at me with eyes that beg me not to what her brother demands.

  “You want me to kill your sister,” I echo.

  “Yes.” Illestros holds out the dagger. My fingers reach for it, wrapping around the hilt without my conscious permission.

  I imagine it, the way it would feel to drive the dagger into Ekeeta’s heart, to destroy the woman I hate. It should fill me with savage anticipation to have the justice I’ve hungered for finally within my grasp. Only minutes ago, I was aching to destroy her, or at least I thought I was, but now … with the reality of Ekeeta helpless before me …

  I don’t want to kill her. I don’t want to kill anyone. I just want to take my brother and Niklaas and go home.

  “It is the only way to open the gates to paradise,” Illestros continues, “and she’s done her share of killing your kind.” He fists his hand in Ekeeta’s wig and pulls it away, revealing her bare skull and so many soul tattoos I can’t begin to count them.

  My jaw drops. The markings spread across her skin like a rash, old and new crowded together along every inch of her skull until they spill down her neck and crawl beneath the collar of her dress.

  “She has glutted herself in preparation for this day,” Illestros says, “but she was willing to betray the humans’ sacrifice to spare her own life.”

  So that’s the reason for her change of heart. Ekeeta must have known she was destined to die.

  “She deserves death,” Illestros continues. “Yours will be the hand of justice.”

  I shake my head. “No, I … I can’t.”

  “You are gentle, then, like your brother.” Illestros hums beneath his breath. “I understand, but I will tell you, his gentle ways earned him no mercy from my sister. She whipped him. Whipped him and set beetles free to infect his wounds. They have likely laid eggs. When they hatch, the young will burrow from his flesh, causing great pain. Perhaps it’s better for him to die quickly.”

  He turns away, leaving me with the dagger—knowing there is no risk in leaving me armed when I’m surrounded by guards—and circles around the fire, bowing to the other priests before climbing the steps to the scaffold.

  The platform is elevated, allowing everyone in the room a clear view. I realize this method of execution was likely chosen for that exact reason, but then Illestros stops beside my brother and I lose the ability to think of anything but Jor’s life so close to being lost. A single push and he will fall through the hole in the boards and choke to death and there will be nothing left to do but mourn.

  I look to Jor, but his eyes are closed. He is prepared to die. I should let him. I should honor his wishes, respect his bravery and his willingness to sacrifice himself for our people, but I can’t. I can’t sit by and watch my brother and Niklaas be killed. I am weak and selfish and I don’t want to live to see a world without them.

  “Don’t do this!” I beg. “Please! Kill me instead!”

  “Impossible,” Illestros says, his calm voice carrying clearly across the room. “In order for the prophecy to be fulfilled you must kill the queen. You are the briar-born child with fairy blessings.”

  The prophecy fulfilled. I can’t help him plunge our world into darkness, but I can’t let him destroy my brother, either. I can’t think straight, I don’t know what to do. I need more time, time to think of a way to—

  Illestros lays his hands on Jor’s shoulders and I scream, “Wait! I can’t kill her! I’m blessed with mercy. I can’t kill someone who isn’t fighting back.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?” Illestros shoves Jor, sending him stumbling forward. My brother falls through the hole in the planks with a terrible choking, gasping, suffering sound and I scream as if the rope grips my own throat.

  I surge toward the scaffold but make it only a few steps before I’m captured by guards who grip my arms, ensuring I can do them no damage with the dagger in my hand.

  “Give Ekeeta a knife and I’ll fight her,” I shout as Illestros descends the dais and Jor writhes at the end of the rope and my soul dies a little with every passing second. “I’ll win! I’ll kill her and win, I swear it, but please—”

  “Kill her now and Reende will pull the boy up.” Illestros takes a cup from an awaiting priest and holds it above the altar, meeting my eyes across the flames. “Kill her, child. It isn’t too late.”

  The guards release me and I turn to face Ekeeta, the knife clutched in my sweating hand. I take two frantic steps toward her, the dagger lifted level with my eyes, ready to slaughter her like a pig if that is what it takes to save Jor, but as soon as I tense to drive the blade home, my muscles seize with such force that my spine arches and my breath freezes in my chest.

  I fall to the ground, knees slamming into stone as the knife goes
skittering across the floor. I scramble after it, panting against the pulse of angry magic burning beneath my skin.

  My hand closes around the knife and I spin on hands and knees to see Jor still moving, but just barely. “Please! Pull him up!” I scream. “Give me time!”

  “There is no time.” Illestros lifts his arm and crooks two fingers. On the scaffold, a soldier moves closer to Niklaas.

  “No!” I wail as I crawl back to Ekeeta.

  She has fallen to her side on the stones, knocking the gag from her mouth. She cries out as I flip her onto her back and lift the dagger, but I can’t understand her. I can’t hear anything over the hurricane of terror swirling inside of me, the howling of magic fighting to do as it was bidden, to honor its rules as stubbornly as anything born of the natural world.

  But it is not natural to allow your brother to be murdered. I can’t do it, I won’t! I will kill Ekeeta, even if it kills me.

  And it might. My body feels ravaged by lightning, every inch of my interior scalded and raw and my head on fire, filled with smoke and wailing so loud I don’t realize I am screaming until I thrust the dagger down—shoving it into Ekeeta’s beating heart—and the world goes silent.

  So quiet. Quiet as the center of a storm, as the breath before dying.

  I gasp as I sag to the ground, but it’s as if there is no air left in the room. I roll onto my back, clawed hands clutching at my chest as the lightning storm within me rushes out to sea, streaming from my body, leaving me alone and friendless and empty as a pocket. Emptier. Within only a few moments, there is not even an echo of magic left inside of me, only a weak, whimpering, sweating husk of a girl.

  A girl mortal in every way.

  The magic is gone. I have betrayed the laws of my fairy blessings and now they have abandoned me. I know it as sure as I know I am a murderer and a fool.

  “Jor,” I moan, rolling onto my side, clutching my aching core with both hands. I look up, but I can’t see the scaffold from the floor. I can’t see anything but the fire and the shadows it casts. I don’t know if Jor is alive, I don’t—