Thorns of Decision (Dusk Gate Chronicles)

by Breeana Puttroff

  When her mom finally looked at her, tears in the corners of her eyes, the roughest edges of Quinn’s anger smoothed a little.

  “When I got back to Bristlecone, I went straight to Nathaniel’s house. At the time, I had no idea how much Nathaniel had or hadn’t told you. I didn’t know, Quinn. When I realized where you must have been last weekend, all I could think was that he had gone behind my back and told you, when he’d promised. He’d promised me, he’d promised his own brother, and then he had my own child lying to me? Leaving me and running off to a completely different world where who knows what could happen?”

  Quinn swallowed hard. In all the time since Nathaniel had told her about her father, she’d never seen that side of it. It made sense, really, because ...

  “How could I have even imagined that you’d found the gate on your own? That possibility never even crossed my mind. And then, last night, when Nathaniel told me what had really happened, about how confused and upset you were and then I thought about how I’d behaved toward you this week...”

  Tears began to flow down Quinn’s own cheeks. Without even paying attention to what she was doing, she pulled William’s handkerchief out of her pocket. As she brought the cloth to her face, she caught sight of his initials, embroidered in silver thread on the corner, and a second wave of emotion overtook her, mixing hot anger with the sadness.

  “How dare you keep it from me in the first place, mom? There should have never been a possibility that I was ‘sneaking off’ with Nathaniel. I should have had a relationship with him this whole time. I should have known about the gate. I should have known my family.”

  She dabbed furiously at her tears with the handkerchief while Megan stared at the floor.

  It might have only been minutes, but it felt like an eternity before her mother’s gaze met hers again.

  “Even if I could have told you, Quinn, I had no idea how. It’s not a good answer, I know, but I don’t have a good answer. It’s not something there are lessons for, you know, telling your child that she has a secret family who lives in a hidden world and she’s not allowed to know anything about them until she’s eighteen?”

  “That’s the part I don’t get, Mom. Why keep it from me until I’m eighteen? What is going to change so magically when I have a birthday that I’ll suddenly be old enough to know my family?”

  “I don’t know! Do you think that this is how I wanted things to be? I was only a couple of years older than you are now when I met your father. Imagine, just for a moment what it was like to meet and fall in love with this absolutely wonderful, loving man who was everything I ever wanted, perfect in every way, except he had this little secret.”

  Her mom stopped, looking down at her hands and taking a deep breath before she continued. “And I dealt with that, Quinn. After he finally convinced me that it was actually true, I even tried to accept it. I didn’t understand it, but it was who he was, and I loved him.”

  More tears ran down Quinn’s cheeks now, but she was too wrapped up in what her mother was saying to stop them. They dripped into her lap, making dark circles on the legs of her jeans.

  “And then you came, and things became even more complicated. It was the only time he ever took me to his world, you know. He was always so adamant that it wasn’t safe for us to go there, but your having a “proper” Naming Ceremony was important enough for him to risk it.”

  “What was so dangerous about it?” Quinn demanded. “I’ve been there four times now. I’m safe.”

  “I don’t know. There were so many things he never told me about. He always just said that it was his own issue, and that he would take care of it, he would take care of everything. The only thing I had to do was help him guard the secret from you while you were a child. And then he died, and he left me here, alone, with you and this huge secret, and I wasn’t prepared for that. All I could do was keep my promise, keep you safe.”

  “But I’m telling you, I’ve been there. I’ve spent a lot of time there. I’m not in any danger.”

  “I asked Nathaniel about that last night. He said you’ve been safe, because the secret has been kept. Nobody knows who you really are.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? How would I be in more danger just from people finding out I’m Nathaniel’s niece – Samuel’s daughter?”

  Megan took another deep breath, and then reached over to something that was laying on an end table beside her chair. As she pulled it onto her lap, Quinn could see that it was a large envelope, made from the thick cloth-like paper that was manufactured in Eirentheos. “I went to the bank this morning, and took this out of the safety deposit box.”

  Quinn frowned as her mother handed her the envelope. “What is it?” It felt heavy, weighted down in a bottom corner by something that made a muffled jingling sound with each small movement.

  Megan didn’t answer, just pulled a tissue out of the box on the same table and dabbed her eyes with it as she watched.

  She felt a strange sense of foreboding as she reached into the envelope. The first thing she pulled out was a large piece of paper. Covered with words written in elegant calligraphy, her first impression was that it was some sort of certificate. There was an entire paragraph at the top written in a language she didn’t understand. She frowned at her mom.

  “It’s some sort of equivalent to a birth certificate in Samuel’s world. You received it at your Naming Ceremony.”

  Sure enough, in large letters in the middle of the paper, she saw her name, or at least her first name. “Quinn Katriel Rose?” she asked.

  “Samuel changed his last name to Barten when he came to live here. It was a secret even to people in this world that Nathaniel was his brother. That’s why on your original birth certificate here, when you were born, he made Rose your middle name. The Barten was changed to Robbins, of course, when Jeff adopted you. But in his world, you were given that name at your ceremony.”

  Trembling, Quinn set the certificate to the side, wanting to examine it more closely later. She had a suspicion about what was making the jingling sounds at the bottom of the envelope, and she was both anxious and scared to confirm her thoughts. She tilted the envelope up, and two metal objects on chains dropped into her hands.

  Although she’d been almost anticipating the appearance of a pendant, her heart almost stopped at the sight of the objects in her hand.

  They were gift pendants, just as she’d expected. Both circles of the same size, one on a large, slightly tarnished chain, and one on a tiny chain that glimmered in the low light of the lamp. But it wasn’t the fact that they were pendants, nor even that there were two – of course her father’s would have been left for her as well. What made the room start spinning around her was the fact that the pendants were not the familiar silver worn by the royal family of Eirentheos. No. These pendants were gold. Philothean gold.

  * * *

  Holding the two necklaces in her hand, she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She stared at them without really seeing them – nothing except the color was visible at all. In fact, her vision had gone blurry at the edges, and it only got worse when her hands started shaking.

  “Quinn, what’s wrong?” Megan finally asked, enough concern in her voice that somewhere in the back of her mind Quinn wondered how long she’d been sitting there so silently.

  She couldn’t answer, though. She didn’t even remember how to make her mouth work.

  Alarmed now, Megan crossed the small space and sat down next to her on the couch. “What is it, sweetheart?”

  She closed her eyes, trying to unfreeze her thoughts, trying to remember how to breathe, trying to tilt the world back onto its proper axis.

  “Do you ... do you know what these are?” she finally managed to choke out.

  “Samuel said they were some kind of necklace that they give to babies at their Naming Ceremonies in his world.”

  Quinn nodded. “Yes, they are. You don’t know anything else about them?”

  “No. I never thought anythin
g more of them than that. I’d planned to give all of this to you at your eighteenth birthday. Although, yesterday, Nathaniel did say something that made me think there was more to it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that you might be upset when you saw them, and he wrote down his cell phone number for me, so that you could call him whenever you needed to. He said even if he was at work, he would make sure to pick up the phone for you.”

  Quinn took a deep breath, trying to calm the shaking. She still hadn’t even really looked at the pendants, though a heavy feeling was settling in her stomach about what she might see when she did.

  “Do you want to call him?” Megan’s voice was wary.

  She shook her head, still just trying to breathe.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart? What is going on? They’re just necklaces. Doesn’t William have one, too? Doesn’t everyone?”

  She closed her eyes, steadying herself. “Yes, he does –they do.” If they were of royal lineage, they did, anyway.

  “Then what is going on? I thought you already knew all of this – Nathaniel said he told you.”

  “Well, clearly, he didn’t tell me everything.”

  Megan’s eyes widened. “You knew you were related to them already, didn’t you? To the king and queen?”

  “Sort of,” Quinn managed to squeak. Except that wasn’t what the pendants were telling her at all.

  Finally her vision cleared, the shaking subsided enough for her to pull the little discs into the light so she could examine them. She started with her father’s – the one on the larger, well-worn chain.

  At the bottom, underneath a symbol she didn’t recognize – maybe a cross between a star and some kind of flower? – were the tiny, etched letters of her father’s name. Samuel Derek Rose. Hesitantly, not wanting to confirm her thoughts, but already nearly certain of what she would find, she flipped the pendant over.

  It was there. Rather than the blank side that she would see on most pendants from Eir – from her father’s world, from her world – was the circular symbol that represented the kingdom of Philotheum. A symbol that appeared only on pendants belonging to the king’s own children – or those of his firstborn.

  And she knew. Before she could bring herself to actually look at her own pendant, she knew. She’d heard the name, Samuel, only a few short weeks ago. The name, as it always did, had sent a little jolt of familiarity through her. Samuel was a common name; there were two of them at Bristlecone High School. So when she’d heard the name as she hid in Ellen’s basement in Philotheum, she’d written it off as a coincidence.

  Ellen. The second-born child of King Jonathan. Tolliver’s older sister. Samuel’s younger sister. Her aunt.

  The shock was gone by the time she read her name at the bottom of her own pendant. Quinn Katriel Rose, the same as the name on her certificate. The royal crest of Philotheum was on the back, the symbol of the first-born child on the front. She was the daughter of Samuel Rose. Not Samuel Barten, a store manager from Bristlecone, Colorado. No. Samuel Derek Rose, the first-born son of King Jonathan. The rightful heir to the Philothean throne. And he was dead. And she was his firstborn.

  15. Nathaniel Explains

  When she first woke up on Monday morning, Quinn wasn’t sure where she was. She was startled at how unfamiliar her own bed in her own room felt. She was surprised, too, when she looked at the alarm clock beside the bed and saw that it was almost nine. She hadn’t slept that late in a long time, and she couldn’t remember dreaming about anything.

  Aside from the fact that her whole body felt heavy, weighted down, almost as if she were underwater, she was actually almost rested. For just a moment, she couldn’t remember why she was here, or why she felt so strange, and then a glint of sunlight reflected off the golden disks on her nightstand, and everything came slamming back.

  Sitting there on her bed, she reached over and pulled the framed picture of her father and her toddler self into her lap.

  “What were you thinking, Dad?” she whispered to the smiling image. “How could you keep this huge secret, and then die and leave me to deal with this? I’m only sixteen, and I only just found out about your world. What am I supposed to do now?”

  She stared at the picture for a long time, the questions filling her brain, but no answers in sight. In the end, the only thing she knew was that she was not prepared to deal with being the heir to the Philothean crown. That was absurd.

  After a while, there was a soft knock at her bedroom door. “Are you awake, sweetheart?” Megan asked, poking her head through the door.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you doing okay? You seemed pretty upset last night.” She came all the way into the room now, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “I think so.”

  “You want to get dressed and we could go out for breakfast?”

  An hour later, Quinn and her mother were sitting in one of the familiar upholstered booths in The Egg’s The Thing, a tiny breakfast cafe on Bristlecone’s only main street. Although it was still chilly outside, the Colorado sun was shining brightly, and the little business district was bustling.

  Quinn’s thoughts, which had been so wrapped up in what she’d learned the night before that she’d barely spoken to her mother, were suddenly spun in an entirely different direction when she glanced out the paneled window of the cafe.

  Abigail was out on the sidewalk, holding hands with her boyfriend, Adam, smiling and giggling about something with him, and their two other companions. Right next to Adam was Zander. And on Zander’s other side was Melanie Fisher, a cheerleader whom Quinn barely knew.

  She swallowed hard.

  It wasn’t fair, of course – even a little bit – for her to be upset. She was the one who had broken up with him, who had – as Thomas had said – broken his heart. And she was dating William. It wouldn’t be right to be mad at Zander for moving on. It wasn’t like she wanted him to be miserable. But it still stung to see it, to realize that she actually had really broken up with him, and that it wasn’t going to be something she could just go back and undo.

  She wondered how mad Abigail still was. When she’d found her cell phone in her room last night, there hadn’t been any missed calls or messages at all.

  When she looked back up, she saw that her mother had been looking in the same place she had. Her expression was sad.

  “Zander was really upset when you broke up with him,” Megan said. “He’s having a pretty hard time with it, I think.”

  Quinn wasn’t sure if that was supposed to make her feel better, but she felt worse.

  “We were all pretty shocked, actually, Quinn. He told Maggie that he thinks you broke up with him because William’s your boyfriend now. Is that true?”

  Her hands twisted in the paper napkin under the table, shredding it into tiny pieces, and she blinked a few times, trying to keep her eyes dry. “It wasn’t true when I broke up with him.”

  A deep crease appeared in the middle of Megan’s forehead.

  “I just – I knew I was lying to him, and I knew there were so many things I couldn’t tell him, and that wasn’t fair. There’s been so much going on, Mom. I knew I couldn’t give back to Zander what he was trying to give to me.”

  A few stray tears made their way down her cheeks. She reached up to dab at them with the napkin, but the whole thing fell apart, so she reached into her pocket for William’s handkerchief that she’d made sure to stuff inside while she was getting dressed.

  “And what about with William?” her mom asked. “You’ve just barely met him. Four days after you break up with your first boyfriend and you think you’re ready to be dating him?”

  “It’s been a little longer than that for me, you know.”

  Megan closed her eyes and sighed. “Right. I always forget about that. It’s so weird.”

  “It’s very weird,” Quinn agreed.

  “Still, though, it’s not like you have any less going on with William. How is it that y
ou think you’re ready for a relationship with him when you’re telling Zander something different?”

  She took a deep breath, trying to soothe the irritation from her mother’s words, trying to stay calm and not begin a battle. Starting a new fight with her mom was the last thing she wanted right now.

  She could see in Megan’s expression that she really was confused, and she knew she was sad, too. Zander was her best friend’s son. Megan and Maggie had no doubt been indulging in dreams of a future with Quinn and Zander together. It wasn’t their decision, though.

  “At least I’m not lying to William, mom. It’s not like I could just tell Zander ‘oh by the way, my dad was from a different world and I’ve been visiting there.’ William knows.”

  “Just how are you planning on having a boyfriend who lives most of the time in another world?” Megan asked, nearly whispering in the small restaurant. “From what I understand, he’s not planning on spending a lot of time here once he’s finished with school. You still have another year of high school, and he’ll be gone. What will you do then?”

  She sighed. She could see that her mom had no interest in discussing the biggest, most obvious possibility. Not that Quinn was quite ready to think about that herself, especially with what she had learned last night.

  “I don’t know, Mom. I still have a lot of things I need to think about. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I do know that I really like William, okay? He gets me. Zander is a fantastic guy, and I hope that someday we can be friends again, because he was always such a wonderful friend, and I do care about him. But it’s different with William.”

  The server brought their food then, and she and her mom busied themselves for a few minutes with salt and pepper and trying a few bites. Quinn had ordered a big bowl of cantaloupe, a favorite of hers, and something they didn’t have in Eirentheos.