The Castle Behind Thorns

by Merrie Haskell

  He wandered away, looking aimlessly into other areas just to see what he could find among the rubbish. The kennels were as empty of dogs as the stables were empty of horses—the animals had gotten out. Likewise, the only bird he found in the mews was a tiny stuffed falcon—a once-loved hunting bird that someone had decided to preserve?

  The brownish-gray falcon had gotten odd treatment during the sundering. One of his legs was broken, and he rested on his face as a result, but all in all, the stuffed bird was almost undamaged. Sand scooped up the bird and fiddled with the falcon’s leg for a bit. He splinted the leg with a stick of kindling and a bit of twine, and it worked—the falcon could stand upright again.

  “Nice to see a friendly face around here,” Sand told the falcon, stroking the dark stripe on its cheek. “Now all you need is a name. Of course, I’m not entirely sure what sort of falcon you are. You might not even be a falcon at all. Are you a hawk? You’re no eagle or owl. What else can hunting birds be?”

  He tucked the bird into the crook of his arm, and took it on the rest of his exploration of the outer courtyard, too glad for the company of the bird to consider how strange this action was. The bird didn’t talk back, but it had a face to talk to. “I hope you’re a merlin falcon,” Sand said. “I think I’ll call you Merlin, even if you aren’t one. It makes me feel more hopeful.” Like he had a powerful wizard on his side, even if the wizard was trapped in a stuffed falcon body, just as Sand was trapped in a broken castle.

  HUNGER BECAME SAND’S NEXT concern. He stood Merlin on a slumped kitchen table while he looked for something to eat.

  He found some surprisingly well-preserved olives beneath two halves of an amphora, which had held in some of the moisture of the oils within the olives. Sand’s discovery became a salty and unexpectedly tasty lunch.

  But that was just one meal, and Sand was resolved never to come as close to disaster again as he had with his thirst. He had to figure out his food now, before he ate everything easily scavenged and had nothing left to eat.

  He looked around the kitchen, deeply discomfited by everything about him lying broken, shattered, and disarrayed. Was there anything here he could make whole? Was there anything he could repair easily?

  The spits were all broken, but not all in the same way. With little difficulty, Sand put together a whole spit out of just the unbroken parts. He did this quickly—it was, after all, just some metal pieces that rested on other metal pieces—and when he put the reconstructed spit in place at one of the hearths, he felt a bubble of satisfaction in his chest, kind of like a big cabbage burp.

  “Merlin, we should definitely roast something for dinner,” he said.

  The question was . . . what? The kitchen and pantry held enough food to feed hundreds for weeks, but though nothing was rotted or spoiled, the food remained scattered, split, dried, browned, shriveled, and stale. The challenge was making it edible.

  He set to work. Bit by bit, Sand brought order to the kitchen. The big kitchen worktables were all broken—of course—but a smashed bench was just about the right length to prop up one of the tables. The table surface wasn’t perfectly level—a dried pea would certainly roll off—but it would suffice as a place to work.

  He found half a bucket here and three-quarters of a bowl there—anything that would actually hold material—and placed them on the table, and then began sorting foodstuffs into these jumbled containers. Onion chunks. Cracked cheese wheels. Dried peas mixed with gravel. Lentils mixed with ashes. Almonds mixed with grit. Bread crumbles. Apple bits, fig bits, and pear bits. Withered and halved lampreys, eels, salmon, pike, and trout.

  And turnips—endless ruptured turnips. Had the kitchen just received the turnip delivery for the whole year when the castle was sundered? It was the only explanation he could think of to account for the excessive numbers of turnips in the kitchen’s root cellar, buried in layers of sawdust. Someday he might have eaten everything else in the castle, but there would still be turnips left.

  Sand soaked half a haunch of venison in water until it plumped, then roasted it between two half-onions. “That’ll be quite nice,” he told Merlin.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Sand felt comfortable with his food supplies. The larders and pantries were refilling with his salvaged foods. He had eaten well every day, meals meant for a king, or at least a count. The night before, he’d roasted half a rehydrated peacock, and eaten broken pigs made of marzipan and sugar.

  He decided to make a second pass around the kitchen. He sorted the nonfood items—the many, many nonfood items—he didn’t think he’d ever be able to return to their original purpose, and tossed them into piles according to the material they were made from. Wood, after all, could be burned, whatever shape it was in, and iron was infinitely reshapable.

  Afterward, Sand scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom. He doused the floor with water painstakingly wrung from his well cloths, and swept the accumulated water, dirt, and debris out the door with a broom he’d mended with strips of leather.

  When he finished, he gazed at his clean, drying floor; at the tables filled with food that he was salvaging, sorting, and storing; at the nearly neat stacks of half-bowls and quarter–cooking pots; at the apple fragments he had soaked in water and now roasted on a spit with dustings of nutmeg and cinnamon; at the heaps of splintered firewood stacked in the corner; at the ripped dishcloths neatly folded and arranged on the mantel next to his falcon.

  He, Sand, had done all this. He had saved these things, sorted them, repurposed them, and made them work again.

  With his mended broom held above his head like a sword, he shouted: “I am Sand, lord of this kitchen!”

  Even though when he said it out loud, he could hear how silly it sounded, he knew that was incomplete. There was no one here to challenge his rule, no one here to tell him otherwise.

  “Lord of this kitchen, and lord of this castle!” he yelled. It wasn’t even a bit satisfying; the kitchen had high ceilings to let the heat rise, but the sound didn’t really echo.

  Broom still held aloft, Sand ran into the great hall, and stood before the broken phoenix and swan crest. “I am Alexandre!” he shouted to the rafters. “And I am lord of this castle!”

  His voice rang out and returned. It was incredibly satisfying.

  And no one disagreed.

  Yet.

  4

  Dark

  PERROTTE WOKE IN DARKNESS IN A CRYPT OF STONE, with no memory of ever having died.

  She knew she woke from death, not from sleep. This knowledge dwelled with her, dwelled within her, deep in her bones, and even deeper in her mind.

  She did not move for the longest time. She did not think that she could move. She felt dry, withered even, and she felt that her skin drew moisture from the stones around her.

  She knew it was dark, yet she could see the minutest details of the stone of the niche where she lay. Darkness did not matter. Strange; there had been a point not that long ago, when she was small, when she had been frightened of the dark, when she had been scared to death—

  Well, not to death. She had died of something else entirely. She knew that; she knew fear had not killed her.

  Yes, she had once been afraid of the dark, but now the dark was friendly. She had spent much time in the dark, and it was no enemy. Darkness had simply been a place to rest before returning to the world.

  It was troubling. Why had she not been in Heaven? Had she been such a sinful child after all, that she had been consigned to Purgatory instead?

  Before waking here, now, Perrotte would have been frightened or troubled by this line of thought, but nothing really frightened her anymore.

  Timeless time passed. Her fingertips twitched at her sides, then her wrists moved. Her chest rose and fell. Her lips and throat were so dry. She swallowed convulsively, barely finding the moisture in her mouth to do so. A taste lingered on her tongue, a flavor left behind in a mouth so arid it might as well be a tomb in a desert. What was the flavor? Sweet yet tart. Fresh yet m
oldering. Living yet dead.

  Memories flashed through her mind like summer lightning. They were there, the memories of being dead, waiting to be coaxed down from the clouds.

  And before that? Before being dead, what did she remember of dying?

  Those memories are behind the door.

  She imagined climbing off the stone couch where she rested and staggering to her feet. She didn’t move her legs yet, though. She lay still, breathing, remembering how to breathe, remembering how to live, and trying not to dwell too much on the whys and wherefores.

  She had died, and then she had undied. That was all there was to it.

  5

  Anvil

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, SAND WISHED THERE REALLY was someone else in the castle, someone to challenge his dominion over it. Just a little bit.

  He was terribly lonely. Growing up in the little house attached to the smithy across the valley, with his stepmother’s drying herbs hanging from every rafter and a pair of younger half sisters constantly underfoot, he had always longed for just a little quiet and privacy. But now he drowned in quiet and privacy, and found himself talking out loud—to himself, to his falcon, to the objects he repaired, to the rooms he set right.

  Sand stayed as busy as he could, because when he wasn’t busy, he found himself climbing to that empty, highest room of the castle, to look out across the valley of cherry orchards and asparagus fields to his parents’ house. It was too far away to see his father, Agnote, or either of his sisters with any clarity, but he could sometimes make out figures moving around, and the sight comforted him.

  In the other direction, he strained to catch sight of his grandparents’ house but he could only see the chimney and the smoke from Grandmère’s kitchen fire.

  Discontent, he turned back to studying his father’s house, squinting to see more clearly. Would anyone ever look across and see him staring back? Would anyone ever see the smoke from his fires and think: Perhaps that is where Sand has gone?

  He wished that he had not spent the last year arguing with his father.

  For twelve years, he had agreed with his father about his life’s plan. He was not meant to be a blacksmith, no matter how much he wished it so. He worked in the smithy when he could, learning as much as his father would allow; but most days, he was forced to walk down the hill to study as much reading, rhetoric, and philosophy as the village priest would provide—which, thankfully, was not much. His father wanted him to go to university someday, and Sand never disagreed.

  But then Grandmère had sprained her ankle, and Sand had been sent to spend a few weeks helping out his grandparents. Commonly in a smith’s household, all its able-bodied members helped out with the forge from time to time; Grandmère herself and Sand’s own mother had both been accomplished smiths. Likewise, Sand had been pumping the bellows for his father since he could remember, and had first struck hot metal before he could write his own name. So Sand was able to stand in Grandmère’s stead in the smithy, and help Grandpère with his commissions.

  Those weeks at his grandparents’ house, uninterrupted by his father’s constant talk of university, had changed his life. After working with his even-tempered grandfather and learning at his side; after hearing the stories of his mother, who had died of fever when he was young, and his uncle, who had died in the League War; after hearing his grandfather’s profound and resolute sadness that none of his blood would carry on his work, Sand wanted nothing more than to become a blacksmith.

  When he returned home, Sand told his father: He would not go to Paris or Angers. He would not study at a university. He would become his father’s apprentice. And if not his father’s, his grandfather’s.

  They had fought about it that day, and for many days to come. It had been a most unhappy year in the little house across the valley.

  Their last fight had come to pass because his father had turned down a huge commission, claiming he didn’t have the hands for it. His father wouldn’t take an apprentice, nor would he let Sand work on the commission with him. Sand didn’t see the sense in it.

  “You’re too busy with your learning to help me with the job. So don’t think about it,” his father had said.

  “It’s all I think about!” Sand had cried, before he ran from the house. Once out on the grass silvered with winter’s last frost, he felt like he could breathe again. So he kept running, toward his grandparents’ house three miles away, until he stopped at the spring of Saint Melor.

  Agnote must be so worried.

  He prayed to Saint Eloi to send his stepmother a sign. “Let her know I am safe. Let her know I am well. And if you have time, let her know I require rescue! Let her look to the smoke here at the Sundered Castle and worry on it!”

  WITH THE KITCHEN IN hand, Sand wanted to figure out the other necessities of life, like bathing and sleeping and fresh clothes. Everything depended on tools, however. For half of the castle’s mending, Sand needed a working smithy; for a quarter, he needed needles and thread; and for the final quarter, he needed all manner of things he didn’t even know about.

  What Sand knew of needle-making, he could balance on the end of one finger. Fortunately, he found a few needles that were only bent, not snapped, and those he put to good use with the longest segments of thread he could find, sewing up his bedclothes and a few outfits to change into, as his ash-rubbed clothing grew smelly.

  Getting the smithy back together, however, would take time. Charcoal burned just as well in halves as it did whole, so that was one problem avoided. The magical force that had sundered everything in the castle had occasionally made some very odd choices in its destruction—Sand found a hammer that had been broken only at the wooden handle and not any of the metal parts, and another hammer whose handle was whole while the metal was broken. He spent what seemed like endless hours fitting the right parts together.

  Reconstructing one of the forges wasn’t so hard, either—Sand just had to stack the broken bricks and wet some clay to line the forge. And fixing the bellows presented little difficulty; he’d mended bellows with Grandpère before. As for an anvil, unless he could figure out how to weld one back together or recast a new one, he was going to have to work with what he had. He had seen blacksmiths work off metal-wrapped bricks in a pinch, and half an anvil was better than that.

  Smiths working with very heavy items used small wooden cranes to raise those items into place onto their anvils. Both of the cranes in the smithy were more like firewood, postsundering, but with a little tinkering, some braided linens acting as rope once more, and a great deal of effort, Sand managed to raise one of the anvils into place on the only ash log left mostly whole in the smithy.

  Sand almost danced a little jig as he untied the rope from his new anvil, then stepped back to examine his nearly orderly corner of the smithy.

  “Well, you’re nothing special,” he told the anvil, grinning. “Just a plain, square anvil, and one worse for wear.” He rubbed the corner that had been sheared off in the sundering. “But you have a smooth face, and you’re ready for hot metal and heavy hammers.”

  His grin faded slowly as he realized something.

  “And you’re ready for cold metal and lighter strikes as well,” he said, smacking his forehead. He picked up his hammer. “I—I’m an idiot.”

  He strode away from the forge, stomping into the kitchen with anger that was directed only at himself. He collected a half dozen broken copper things, and whacked them quickly into a shape. Copper required no heat to reshape, just a strong hammer—and he could have had a strong hammer his very first day in the castle, if he’d taken the time to mend one.

  “Idiot,” he said again, sighing, even though he was glad to have a cup to drink from, and a proper cooking pot. Coppersmithing was no less an art than blacksmithing—he just hadn’t thought of it.

  His ill humor faded as he took his first drink from a proper cup. Then he returned to the smithy and fired up the forge. He set to work on repairing a set of tongs, dreading how slowly t
he work would go. He would have to let the metal completely cool every so often—for he had no tongs to save his fingers. But once he was striking orange-yellow iron again, and watching black scale crowd to the surface of the steel and fall away, he felt like himself for the first time since he’d awakened in the ashes of that long-dead fire.

  The hammer blows seemed to match the beating of his heart, or maybe his heart was timing itself to the hammer. It didn’t matter which. He had a smithy, and everything he needed to do some proper mending.

  DAY BY DAY, SAND’S wrist improved, and by the time he had a working forge, all he could see of his wound was a raised, red-purple scar where the thorn had gone in. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would awaken with a start, as a flash of pain shot through his wrist. But for the most part, his scar was quiescent.

  It was time to challenge the thorns again.

  He tried burning them a few more times, but it didn’t matter how big he made the fire, the thorns immediately extinguished it.

  Now that he had a forge and an anvil, though—he could mend a shovel and dig underneath the wall.

  But he did not dig far before he realized that the thorns had roots as deep as the branches were high, and as lively. He backfilled his hole of squirming, reaching roots as fast as he could, and turned the shovel to another purpose.

  Spring warmed the ground, and outside the castle, signs of new, green life dotted the distant trees and fields. Sand harvested seeds from inside dried apples and pears, whole kernels of grain on wheat sheaves, partial onion bulbs and garlic sets, and peas in broken pods, all dried. He planted them carefully in the gardens and watered them, hoping he might someday have fresh food.

  But the next day, it snowed, a return to winter in the midst of early spring.

  The chill in the air wasn’t very intense, in spite of the layer of wet snow. The early spring mud hadn’t hardened at all underneath the layer of white, and Sand left dark footprints everywhere he walked in the wetness.