The Castle Behind Thorns

by Merrie Haskell

  Dedication

  for Aunt Carol

  you were there for me

  whether I was kind or prickly

  Contents

  Dedication

  Map

  1 - Ashes

  2 - Wound

  3 - Kitchen

  4 - Dark

  5 - Anvil

  6 - Water

  7 - Stone

  8 - Porridge

  9 - Hook

  10 - Bed

  11 - Stars

  12 - Tower

  13 - Forge

  14 - Heart

  15 - Thorns

  16 - Gloves

  17 - Lancet

  18 - Child

  19 - Library

  20 - Falcon

  21 - Knight

  22 - Hammer

  23 - Ember

  24 - Door

  25 - Coins

  26 - Star-taker

  27 - Army

  28 - Parents

  29 - Head

  30 - Saints

  31 - Siege

  32 - Mending

  33 - Sister

  34 - Negotiation

  35 - Castle

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Merrie Haskell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  1

  Ashes

  SAND WOKE, CURLED IN THE ASHES OF A GREAT FIREPLACE.

  Surprised to find himself waking at all, for he had no memory of falling asleep, Sand scrambled to his feet. Soot billowed from him in a cloud and sneaked up his nose. He sneezed four great sneezes that came back in lonely echoes from the vast room beyond the fireplace.

  Sand had never slept in a fireplace before. He never wanted to again. But he hesitated inside the fireplace, one foot suspended in midair, afraid to leave.

  In the room beyond, everything was broken.

  Every single thing.

  The mantel lay in two disjointed pieces on the cracked hearth. Mixed with the mantel’s splinters lay the shattered crest of a great family, their gilded phoenix and silvered swan once entwined, now separated and dismembered.

  The enormous wooden tables throughout the room sagged and slumped like beasts fallen to the hunt. Every bench around the tables lay sideways and in pieces. Each cup and bowl was shattered or smashed. All the tablecloths and tapestries puddled in scraps on the floor or hung in tatters, and even the wood and kindling for the fireplace had been reduced to slivers.

  Across the red-painted walls adorned with gold phoenixes, long scrapes revealed white plaster. Overhead, a myriad of fissures snaked along the ceiling’s timber beams.

  Sand stepped over the broken mantel and crest, shedding ashes on the phoenix’s and swan’s painted feathers as he went.

  How had he gotten there? How had he gotten here?

  For now he knew where he had awakened.

  He was inside the Sundered Castle.

  Every morning of his life, Sand had stepped out the front door of his house and ignored this broken castle across the valley. Everyone in the village ignored it. It was unreachable. Only the castle’s towers were visible above an enveloping thorny hedge, a raspberry bramble of astonishing proportion that had grown up around the ruin after the abandonment. Of course, no one picked raspberries from the hedge.

  Though he saw the castle every day, Sand rarely thought about the place anymore. But to Sand as a small child, the split towers were exciting, a place for great adventure, with a lost treasure hidden somewhere inside.

  His father had answered all of Sand’s ceaseless, little-boy questions with bored detachment. Why did thorns surround the castle? Well, the Count and Countess had planted the bramble to keep looters out, and also to make sure no one got injured by the unstable towers. Why had the castle broken apart? An earthquake some twenty-five or more years ago had cracked the walls, and everyone had run away. Everyone? Yes, everyone, even Sand’s father, who had been an apprentice shoemaker in the castle when it was sundered.

  The end. Stop asking questions, Sand. No one cares about the castle.

  Eventually, the allure of the castle wore off, and Sand did stop asking questions. And as he grew older, he even mostly forgot about the castle, just like everyone else in the village.

  But now he was inside.

  Sand shook the better part of the ash from his clothes, straightened his tunic, and studied the hall. He didn’t believe he was in danger of imminent death from the roof or walls crashing down, in spite of the cracks in the ceiling. In fact, the long-ago decision to abandon the castle seemed poorly thought out. The towers and walls had remained upright since his father’s boyhood. If they had stood this long, the castle must be safe enough for a little exploration.

  Eager to see what surprises the place might offer, Sand crunched his way across the broken floor tiles to one of the lower doorways. Even if Sand didn’t find any treasure, his father had lived here as a boy, before he’d forsaken shoe leather for the hammer and anvil. Maybe Sand could find some secret answer to his father’s strangeness hidden here among the broken and abandoned things.

  Sand clambered out of the great hall over the broken door and climbed a short flight of stairs into the kitchen. He stopped and stared in dismay. The disarray here was a thousand times worse than that of the hall.

  Here, loaves of bread ripped in half lay strewn across the floor. Sand picked up one of the half-loaves, finding it lightweight and rock hard. It had dried out, but had never become green or fuzzy with mold. He turned it over and over in his hands, wondering: How had a loaf of bread been pulled apart by an earthquake?

  He found other small lumps on the floor among the shattered crockery—lumps that looked like dried apples, more or less, but not the sort of apple that had started out as a slice, more as if . . . as if these apples had been ripped in half, just like the bread.

  Bread, Sand supposed, could be broken if it fell to the floor during an earthquake. Maybe. But apples?

  Sand sniffed an apple chunk. He detected no odor, no faint tang that a dried apple should have. He tossed the apple lump to the floor and brushed grit off his hands. He took a deep breath. The room smelled of nothing but dust.

  The kitchen housed four big hearths with cauldrons, hearth cranes, and spits, and four baking ovens along a wall. Everything except the stones of the ovens and hearths were broken; those were merely cracked.

  Sand couldn’t even imagine the force it would take to rip an iron kettle in half without heating it to glowing hot, yet it had been done, over and over. He shivered.

  The other door out of the kitchen was split down the center, but still standing. Sand pushed aside the unhinged slab of heavy oak and slipped through the narrow exit. He found himself in a little kitchen garden, where smashed cold frames held rattling dry leaves that might once have been cabbage. Sand thought that the cabbage must have reseeded itself year after year within the frames for it not to have rotted away to nothing in over twenty-five years.

  A doorway across this small courtyard led to an herbary. Sand poked his head inside. Drying racks for herbs sat crushed on the floor, and pottery shards lay about as if flung from every direction. Nothing of interest here. Sand backed out of the room and went on.

  The small garden courtyard had exits at each end, both with sagging, metal-bound oak doors. One had stood open and one had been closed when the castle broke apart. Sand chose the open door, passing through a dark, narrow tunnel to find himself at the head of a flight of stairs leading down into another courtyard.

  This courtyard was much darker than the upper ward, due to the towering raspberry bramble that loomed a full man’s hei
ght over the castle walls. Sand gawked at the hedge for a moment. It was one thing to see these thorns from a distance, where they appeared as nothing but vines shrouding the castle. It was another thing to see the hedge from inside, crowding above the walls, blocking light and wind.

  Sand shook himself. Beyond the castle’s well lay a long low block of buildings that must have been lodgings for servants and guests. He ducked inside the first door he could find, just to get out from the cold shadow of the thorns.

  Sand wandered from broken room to broken room. For a quarter of an hour, his lonely investigation was pleasant. Sand had lived too long in a too-small house with two half sisters not to enjoy the quiet and the aloneness for a moment. But underneath this pleasure grew a dim sense of unease.

  Nothing was whole here, nothing at all. Not a spoon, not a toothpick, not a bed, not a door. No room had been exempted from the destructive force that had overtaken the castle.

  The outer walls were largely intact; many of the windows and doors, though cracked, remained in place. The inner parts of the castle had been fairly protected from the elements, though this was not true of every room; in some places, wind and rain had reduced fabrics to thread and dust, had dried out and warped wood, and had washed away paint.

  After the third such room, Sand realized the true oddity of the Sundered Castle. There were no signs of life. No leather had fallen to mouse teeth. No rafters were homes to swallows’ nests.

  Everywhere was silent and still. Sand expected a certain amount of peace—the place had been abandoned by humans for decades. But there was nothing here, no noise, no life anywhere. Not a single rat or snake. Not even a gnat. Not even a spider.

  Sand’s desire to wander cooled. He should stop exploring and find the fabled lost treasury.

  Sand returned to the innermost ward of the castle through the small garden courtyard. He tried the closed door on the other side, but it had rusted shut. He strode back through the kitchens and into the great hall. There he found a more amenable door and entered the central courtyard of the castle.

  Over this larger, irregular yard loomed the four-towered keep, the castle’s last bastion against attack. Here, finally, Sand saw the true sundering of the castle: Daylight shone through a giant crack running north-south through the keep’s walls. The crack crossed the courtyard from the keep’s base, splitting the earth with a slender rift in the ground—not wide, but immeasurably deep.

  The rift led straight to the castle’s chapel, which Sand easily identified from the remains of its colored glass windows. The chapel too was divided, in line with the courtyard’s rift.

  Sand stared down into the dark fissure on the ground. It appeared endless. Sand had a feeling that if he looked too deep, he might find the Devil staring back.

  Sand’s scalp prickled, and he backed away. He faced the cleft keep again. Cracked in half though it was, it looked safe . . . enough. And if he left now, if he just ran away from the castle, he would always regret not discovering the treasure inside. What’s more, if he brought some of the treasure out—well, he couldn’t keep it. Not to spend, anyway; no one would believe a village boy could come by gold honestly, and they’d be right. But if he returned what treasure he found to the dowager Countess, he might receive a reward.

  But on the ground floor of the keep, he found no treasury, just a bunch of small rooms with no discernible purpose—rooms filled with tapestries and chairs mostly. Heart thumping nervously with every creak of the stairs, he climbed to the next floor.

  There he found the library, doubtless once the jewel of the countship. All the castle’s broken rooms had been well appointed and impressive once, but the library amazed Sand the most. How many books were represented here, in this sea of jumbled and torn parchment? One book was more than he could imagine owning, despite his father’s aspirations for him. Well—maybe two.

  Sand picked up a few pages from the floor and read them haltingly, for in spite of his father’s efforts and wishes, Sand was in no way a fluent reader of Latin or any vernacular. He let the pages drift back to the floor and moved on. He found rooms where ladies once sewed, rooms where important people once slept, all sorts of rooms, but no treasury.

  He gave up on the keep. He hurried cautiously down the stairs, afraid every second they would crumble beneath his weight, but they held.

  He felt that a treasury, a proper one, should be underground, and perhaps a bit hidden.

  Maybe the treasury door lay somewhere inside the chapel? He crept inside, admiring the way the sun shone through the colored glass windows depicting a saint’s life, and cast patterns in pease-porridge green and marigold yellow on the floor. After a quick genuflection, Sand had to look away from the broken altar and the cracked crucifix. He scuttled past them, feeling guilt for not putting these holy things to rights.

  Beyond the altar, he saw a passage leading down into darkness. He grabbed half a beeswax taper and lit it using the pieces of fire striker he found lying next to the candle fragments. Chunks of flint and steel still made fire, no matter how broken.

  The stair led to the crypt. He forced himself to enter the dark recesses, candle held high, where he found the worst damage yet. The rift in the courtyard penetrated down to the crypt ceiling. A matching fissure snaked across the floor.

  The fissure ran straight through one tomb in particular, which lay now in shattered pieces of undecorated limestone.

  The body that had once dwelled inside the fragmented tomb must have been ejected by the same force that had rent earth and stone throughout the castle. Scraps of a shroud littered the floor. It was strange, like some great outside force had tried to free the body. But to what end? To just let it lie in a heap on a dirt floor?

  The body hunched in a haphazard pile of withered skin. Like one of the apples in the kitchen, Sand thought disjointedly, altogether horrified. His candlelight should have been steady in the still air below the earth, but it trembled with his shaking hand. Even the quivering light showed the details too well.

  The corpse had been a girl. Her clothes were, perhaps, the only thing in the entire castle that were not ripped or torn; they were fine fabrics, deep saffron velvets and russet silks that had not faded with age.

  And the corpse was whole as well, though clearly the body’s bones were broken beneath its powdery, dried-out skin. The neck was tilted at an odd angle, and the arms and legs were bent horribly akimbo.

  Sand’s first impulse was to run back upstairs, out into sunlight and spring air. He should forget all about this crypt and the desiccated body. He should give up entirely on the castle’s lost treasury and just go home. Shielding his candle flame, he sprinted for the stairs.

  But he paused on the first step back up to the chapel.

  He shouldn’t leave her like that. He should put something to rights in this broken place, and she deserved it; she had been a person once.

  Reluctantly, he turned to face the tomb again. He dripped a blob of melted wax on a stone, planted the candle there, and set to work. He cleared away the stone crumbs from the niche where the tomb had once rested on a raised slab. Squeamishly and holding his breath, he lifted the girl’s broken body and laid her in the niche.

  He breathed shallowly through his nose at first, and then normally. The girl had not rotted at all, just as nothing in this castle had rotted since its abandonment. She smelled like . . . nothing, really. Stone, maybe. He carefully straightened the girl’s bent legs and arms. He aligned her head, though it would not stay in the spot he chose for it. He shrugged and left her chin slightly tucked to one side.

  Once she was arranged in proper repose again, he repositioned the other loose and broken sarcophagus lids on their cracked bases. No other bodies had fallen onto the floor, to his relief.

  With his duty done, he fled up the stairs into the sunlight. He was ready to leave. He’d seen enough, maybe too much, and he wanted nothing more from this place. Its treasures could stay hidden. Its secrets could remain undiscovered. He had to get o
ut. This place hadn’t suffered from some earthquake. Something else had happened here. Something that cut leather, ripped apples in half, and tore apart cast iron kettles. Something that broke bread and tossed bodies from tombs.

  He descended to the lower courtyard and found an open gate. An uneasy race through a dark passage ended in yet another courtyard, faced by stables on one side, and the workshops and lodgings of the castle’s craftsmen on the other. He didn’t pause to explore; he just headed directly toward the castle’s gates.

  Sand threw open the man-size night portal to find himself in a dark tunnel pierced by arrow slits and larger openings that he’d heard called “murder holes.” In theory, if an enemy entered the castle, he could be trapped between the inner and outer gates and simply killed by raining death down through these openings. Sand shivered, thinking how glad he was to be alone in the castle—alone, he knew for sure that he couldn’t be trapped in this tunnel.

  He reached the outer gate and opened its night portal—and stopped. The portcullis was down, but he could raise a portcullis. What he could not raise was the nasty snarl of thorns beyond the portcullis grate. The brambles covered the whole of the gate, so dense and thick that he could not see daylight through them.

  And these were no ordinary raspberry brambles, as he’d always been told. The thorns were ten or twelve times as long as a normal thorn. Fascinated, Sand reached for one of the sharp spikes, just to test its sturdiness. He meant, of course, to touch the smooth side of the thorn, not the pointy bit. But one thorn twitched over and jagged into his wrist, piercing the skin deeply.

  “Ouch!” Sand cried, jerking his hand away.

  The thorns reached for him.

  2

  Wound

  SAND JUMPED BACK, SLAMMING THE NIGHT PORTAL shut. He threw the bar down and backed away from the door.

  His wrist pulsed. He wasn’t bleeding—though he sort of wished he were. Bleeding he could understand. Bleeding he could stop. His flesh around the wound puffed up, round and red.

  He swore, and went to find something to bandage his wound.