by Anna Sheehan
‘Aye.’
My ma looked very sad, and a little afraid. ‘You should eat that,’ she said. ‘You’ll be needing it.’
I frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. I glanced around. ‘Where’s the kit?’
‘She’s gone to town to check up on your princess,’ she said. ‘You’ll be going off again in a bit.’
‘Don’t presume to foresee me,’ I snapped. ‘I’m never going to see that bigoted clod again, and even that will be too soon.’
‘You’ll go,’ my ma said. ‘And you’ll die,’ she added in a voice bleak as the winter. ‘Either you’ll die, or she will.’ She stared straight at me. ‘I told you you were being reckless.’
There was nothing to say to that. I picked up the cake, which was made with fruit and nuts and held some wholesome weight beneath the sweetness. After a few bites I looked over at her. She looked immensely sad. ‘Did it never occur to you,’ I asked, ‘to go and see Faerie Caital after … what happened?’
My ma looked up at me. ‘Don’t listen to what she says. She’s mad. She’s always been mad.’
‘She says it might have been possible, once, to find a name for us.’
‘There was never any hope of that,’ my ma said. ‘She never knew us. I saw her barely twice in my lifetime.’ She closed her eyes. ‘She couldn’t possibly. That much I could see.’
I shook my head. ‘Since when have you been so willing to foresee anything?’
‘I never stopped seeing,’ my ma said. ‘I only stopped saying.’
I finished the nut cake in silence as the sun sank quietly in the sky. I heard the kit returning before I saw her. When I saw her I lurched to my feet, preparing to do battle. Her face was twisted in pain and rage, and she held a crumpled piece of paper clenched in one fist. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
The kit launched herself at me. ‘You’ve killed her!’ she shouted. ‘You evil, nameless demon brother, you’ve killed her!’
I caught the kit by the arms and held her away from me. Dark tears were streaming down her face, steaming slightly in the cold air. She was the one who looked demonic, the fires of hell smoking down her cheeks. ‘Who have I killed?’
‘Willow! Princess Willow!’ She wiped her face with the royal blue scarf the princess had given her, her faerie tears bleaching spots of it a yellowish white. ‘They’ve condemned her to death for spinning the thorns to gold and putting the royal family to sleep, and it’s all your fault!’
‘Condemned her to death?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about? She’s getting married this morning.’ The thought caused a stab of rage through me, towards her and towards Hiedelen’s entire country.
‘No, she’s not,’ the kit explained, pushing the crumpled broadsheet under my nose. ‘Narvi’s fallen asleep, Willow’s been accused of treason, and now they’re going to kill her unless she can spin the thorns, and I know she can’t do it, because you must have done it, and now she’s going to die because of you!’ The kit hit me on my wounded shoulder and I grunted with the pain.
‘Stop it!’ I said. I grabbed her around the neck and held her under my uninjured arm, bent double so she couldn’t hit me again. She flailed, but I knew how to hold someone who was trying to hurt me. As she struggled, I glanced over the broadsheet that the kit had brought. Damn. The kit was right. Somehow last night, between my power and the inherent magic of my aunt’s old spinning wheel, the deadly thorns had chosen to spin themselves into gold – it was probably that flash of annoyance I’d gotten when Will had reminded me of Lynelle that did it. Gold and death and Lynelle always tangled together in my mind anyway. It wasn’t just a little trouble the princess was in, either. It really was a sentence of death, and it really was my fault. ‘If I promise to go and help her, will you stop hitting my wounded arm?’
The kit ceased her struggles and nodded beneath my grip. I let her go and she tilted her head, stretching her neck. She sniffed and wiped her face again, further bleach-staining the scarf. ‘You’re really going to help her?’ she whispered.
I stared at her. ‘You care so much,’ I said. ‘Don’t you find it exhausting?’
She shrugged with a little smile on her face. I thought of Will lying against me last night, warm and welcoming. I thought of her stiff and cold, her head severed by an executioner, or bled by my mad aunt’s eccentric thorns. I couldn’t let it happen. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So help me, I’m really going to rescue the wretched princess.’
‘No!’ my ma called out. ‘Don’t you see? It’s happening.’
‘See what?’ I asked. ‘Truly, my mother, what do you see? What do you see that can be worse than this?’ I gestured to the barren wood and the frozen ground and the tiny, filthy burrow.
‘I see thorns and gold and blood. I hear screaming. I see death.’
‘Whose death?’
‘Just death, like a golden shroud, a white hand that touches where it will, a claw of thorns.’
I lost my temper, something I never had a strong rein on at the best of times. ‘You see nothing!’ I snapped. ‘You thought I would die yesterday, and here I stand before you!’
‘My foresight has never failed me before,’ my ma said. ‘As I would spin the threads I could see the threads of time, follow them to their ends, and if they are not changed they will always go where I see them lead.’
‘You haven’t spun a thread in a generation,’ I snapped. ‘And if you know so much, why have you not prevented it? Why didn’t you warn us when we were about to be ambushed, or when the winter was going to be hard enough that we half starved and our fingers turned numb from the cold? Why did you not see the hell you were bringing us into, even before you’d let the council strip our names from us?’
‘You blame me?’ our ma asked.
‘I blame you for nothing,’ I shouted. ‘But I have no faith in your visions. Why did you not foresee the spell I would cast, foresee this sentence of death on an innocent girl? And while I’m asking, why did you not foresee Lynelle’s fate?’
‘I did,’ my ma said quietly. ‘You would not have believed me then, either.’
I thought of Lynelle, wiry and coarse, but fragile as a climbing vine, pulled up by the roots. And I thought of Will, sturdy as a country heifer, tempered by refinement as pure as gold. I thought of her slaughtered on a butcher’s block like a heifer. ‘I can’t let it happen again,’ I said. ‘You know I can’t.’
‘Yes,’ my ma said. ‘I know.’
The spinning wheel was gone, but the swathe I had cleared through the thorns the previous evening was unguarded. I thought this curious, so I was cautious until I approached the wall and realized the reason. The door through which Will and I had come was so camouflaged that even I couldn’t see it, and I knew it was there. It took more than a quarter of an hour of hunting to realize where the hidden catch was and slide the passage open.
The secret passages of Will’s were difficult to traverse without her help. There were more turns and dead-ends than I had anticipated, leading to convenient spy-holes and secret weapons caches. Finally I found a panel that led to a corridor, and I left the dark, unmarked passageway behind.
The broadsheet had said that Will was being kept in a room full of thorns, and that probably meant the East Wing. I took a deep breath and headed east until I came to a door that had only recently been unlocked. Dust covered the walls of the corridors, and most of the valuable objects and statues had been removed, making the entire place feel abandoned. This must have been what the palace had been like when King Ragi had picked his way through the sleeping people and finally found his princess in the uppermost tower. The corridors were relatively clear, only the occasional shrub sneaking under some of the doors, testifying to rooms that were past occupancy. The few windows were boarded up, and clawlike hands of briars grasped through them.
It also didn’t take much scouting to figure out where Will was being kept, and I found her fairly quickly. The frustrated scream might have had something to do with it.
Th
e door of the room she was in was locked, but I could hear someone cursing when I put my head to the wood. The door was iron-bound oak, and I wasn’t going to be able to break through in a hurry. But a window stood nearby at the corner. I muttered Will’s stilling spell and pried the boards off the cracked glass. I crept into the briars themselves, climbing amongst them like a squirrel. A few twists and I was able to angle towards a window high up in the wall of the room in which Will was being held.
It was not hard to get inside. The briars had broken this window, and no one had bothered boarding it up. I had to move the briars aside, and got a little scratched. I climbed up onto a beam and watched for a moment, mostly trying to figure out how to approach.
It was Will, of course. She was not sitting weeping in the corner like any normal princess would have, faced with execution. No; Will was wrestling with the thorns. She was pulling up canes with her bare hands and cursing them with inventiveness. It was dark, and the torchlight flickered, so I couldn’t understand what she was doing at first. She continued to wrestle with the thorns, and as I watched she became helplessly tangled. She tripped, fell, but got hung up on the sharp canes, and hung suspended a few inches from the ground. She forced her way back to her feet, but was so hopelessly tangled that I couldn’t see how she’d get herself out. She stood in the middle of her thorny prison and yelled at the moon. A fiercer and more mournful bay I’ve never heard from a wolf. I couldn’t bear to watch it any more. I jumped from the beam to the centre of the room.
I probably seemed to have appeared from out of thin air, and Will gasped. I didn’t ask if I could help, I simply began separating the stilled thorns. ‘Have you grown to love them so much?’ I asked once I’d cleared a slight path.
Will tore her way out of the thorn hedge, ripping gashes in her clothing and her flesh. Bits of broken briars clung to her hair and were embedded in her sleeve, and one was still piercing her neck. I reached forward very gently and pulled the briar from her flesh. She hissed with pain. Analogies failed me. She looked exactly as if she’d been wrestling with thorns half the night. Her clothes were mere threads, more hole than cloth, and the only reason they still afforded modesty was due to the fortunate layers, and a few strategic knots she had tied to keep them together. Her flesh was riddled with lines of red, and blood stained her skin. A scratch arched across her face, and her eyes were haggard.
‘I …’ She blinked at me a few times. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was about to ask you the same question.’ I reached out and pulled a bramble from her hair. She cringed, but did not back away from me.
‘Awaiting execution,’ Will snapped. ‘What does it look like?’
‘They decided to execute you with thorns?’
‘It was Lesli’s idea. If the thorns kill me, I’m not guilty of using the spinning wheel, and I’m therefore innocent of cursing my sister. If I’m able to spin them into submission, I am guilty. It’s a double-edged sword.’
I frowned. The spinning wheel stood in the only clear spot in the room, in a patch of torchlight. ‘So why are you wrestling with the thorns?’
‘Because if I’m guilty, Lesli has promised me the punishment is not death.’ She threw up her scratched hands. ‘Given the choices, I’m choosing life.’
‘You think you’re going to be able to spin the thorns?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I was willing to try.’
A drop of her blood was running down her cheek like a tear. I caught it gently with the back of my finger. ‘At the risk of your life?’
‘They’ll kill me whether I try or no. And I still have the stillness spell.’ With a striking hiss the thorns answered her, as if in defiance. ‘Blast! For I am nature’s strength, her arm and hand/ That binds the fruitful bounty of the land.’ The briars writhed and quivered and then fell again into submission at her spell. She panted. ‘They’re adapting to the spell, though. They stay still for a shorter and shorter amount of time.’
I could see the spell had cost her. She was no faerie, connected to the magic as a fish to water. Her magic drained her of her own life force. Rest and time would replenish it, mortal as she was, but it wasn’t a bottomless well. It wasn’t that the thorns were adapting. She was losing power, weakening herself. What with her exertions last night and the magic she was expending here, she was likely in a terrible state. I looked at the ground with a sigh, horrified by what I was watching. I shook my head and turned back to her. ‘And when it stops working?’
She stared straight at me without pleading or expectation in her eyes. Fear there was in abundance, but it was a defiant fear. ‘I’ll die, won’t I.’ She sat down at the stool by the spinning wheel. ‘They’ll come to check in the morning. If I’m not dead by then, and the briars aren’t spun away, they’ll hang me publicly in the courtyard. If they don’t decide to just tie me up here and leave me to the thorns.’ She looked up at me. ‘Why are you here again?’
I searched for a thousand different lies I could tell her, and finally stumbled on the truth. ‘I heard you were in trouble.’
She kept her face very still as she said, ‘I don’t flatter myself you’ve come to help me.’
I glared. ‘Why would I help the daughter of my enemy?’
She twitched her eyebrow in acknowledgment. ‘Right. Come to gloat?’
I stared at her evenly. ‘I didn’t expect you to think well of me. But am I gloating?’
She smiled with a black humour. ‘Not very efficiently,’ she said. She ran her finger along one of the angry scratches on her wrist. ‘So why are you here?’ Her voice was so quiet I could only hear it because I was a faerie. I was silent for a long time and she stole a glance at me. She looked away when she saw I was still staring at her, but in that one flicker of her eyes I could read the pleading there.
I desperately wanted to hate her. ‘I like watching you suffer, remember?’ I said, but the words hurt. I flexed my jaw, remembering where she had hit me. ‘I suppose you think this predicament is my fault.’ I knew it was my fault, but I couldn’t say it.
Will shook her head. ‘I went to you willingly,’ she said. ‘You may have a wicked streak, but I’m a damned fool.’
I looked around at the thorns. ‘Why are you playing this silly game? Why don’t you run?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘I thought about it. I even tried, but …’
‘But?’
‘For one thing, I’m not a faerie. I’m heavy and clumsy and human. I find it a lot harder to climb these thorns than you seem to.’
She was big, tall and square, but she was anything but clumsy. Perhaps she was only comparing herself to her willowy older sister. ‘You could do it,’ I said, though it was a guess. I wasn’t sure whether a human could scale the thorns as I had, stilling spell or no.
‘I probably could get out of this room, yes, and end up impaled on a crossbow bolt.’
I winced as she said it, and rubbed my shoulder.
‘Besides. Where would I go? Leave here, wander the earth, take Ferdinand’s horse and hawk and hound and go off to seek my fortune?’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because everything’s still falling apart here. Hiedelen has everyone marching to his tune, everyone’s falling asleep, and I can’t just let the kingdom go.’
‘Why not?’ I asked again.
She looked at me seriously. ‘You feel you have to look out for your sister, don’t you?’
I didn’t answer.
‘I have an entire kingdom to protect. I can’t run away, I can’t turn my back, and I can’t even let myself die.’
Something about that statement made me feel ill. ‘Is that what you want?’
‘No,’ she said. She swallowed what must have been tears. ‘No, I don’t want to die,’ she whispered.
‘And I don’t want—’ I began, but I didn’t know how to end the statement. I didn’t know what I wanted or didn’t want. ‘What will you give me if I were to help you?’ I said instead.
‘Help me escape?’
‘You just said you didn’t want that. He’s given you an impossible task. Very well, it’s not impossible for me. But what do I get out of helping you?’
She opened her mouth in surprise. ‘Well, anything,’ she said. ‘Gold. Jewels.’ She held up the necklace around her throat. ‘Do you want this?’
I lost my temper. ‘What would I do with that?’ I spat. ‘You know I can’t sell it. None would buy it off me. I certainly can’t wear it. It would be stolen from me in a day. I can’t eat it, it wouldn’t keep me warm. What good would it do me?’ I bore down on her. ‘I am Nameless, do you remember? Hated by all! Hated by you! A nameless, evil demon.’ She winced as I used her words against her. I turned away. ‘I don’t know why I came here. You have nothing for me.’ I started climbing the thorns back to the windowsill.
‘Wait,’ she called after me.
I hesitated, then looked back. She stood, straight and defiant by the spinning wheel. She touched the wheel and stared at me, her winter eyes cold. ‘I’ll give you my library.’
My emotions warred again. I was touched, but I wanted to be cruel. ‘You mean that?’ I asked. ‘Every book?’
‘Every. Single. Book,’ she said.
My eyes narrowed. I didn’t want to believe in her. ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’
‘The books are in a secret chamber behind the closet in my bedroom. I’m sure you can find them. Go and get them after this, if you want.’ She turned from me and touched the wheel again, gently rocking the wheel back and forth with her fingertips. All defiance left her voice then. ‘Take them even if you won’t help me. What good are they to me dead?’ She shook her head. ‘I’d rather they were taken by someone who wouldn’t burn them.’
The despondency in her words angered me. It was so unlike Will. ‘Move!’ I shouted. She started and took a step back. I seized one of the thorn canes she had already broken off and fed it into the wheel. ‘And keep your mouth shut.’
It was more difficult spinning the thorns than it had been the night before. They argued with me, as if they knew what had happened to their brethren outside, and were resisting. After the first spool was wound I was panting. I stood up to fetch more thorn canes only to find that Will had been collecting them as I worked. ‘Does this help?’ she asked.