The Castle Behind Thorns

by Merrie Haskell

  Sand scooped up a handful of snow and packed it into a ball. His fingers numbed quickly, but he held onto the ball for a long moment, wondering to what purpose he could put it. If he had a pressing need for ice in midsummer, he could take a bunch of these snowballs to the dungeons and store them layered with cloth or sawdust. But to what purpose? What did he need ice in midsummer for? And he would have to store many snowballs to keep them from being lost to melt too quickly. It was cool in the dungeons but not cold.

  “Still, something to remember for next winter,” Sand said. His own voice startled him—not so much that he was talking to himself, for he did that several times a day just so he wouldn’t be so lonely.

  What startled him was the fact that he was thinking he might be here through next winter. And that next winter, he might want to think about preparing for the following summer.

  It made a dull ache in his belly, to think like that.

  So he didn’t think like that. He stopped thinking about time and people and loneliness. He might have to plan for years, for winters and summers to come, and he had to plan on relying on himself—but he didn’t have to think about it.

  Sand’s work continued. He mended tools in the smithy. He made nails. He mended some of the furniture in the great hall, haphazardly and with more nails than a good carpenter would use.

  Slowly, he learned how wood and fabric fit together. They had their own rules, less complicated than the rules governing metal, but important rules just the same. He mended privy seats and doors, cushions and pillows. Life became more comfortable as he worked his way through the castle, focusing on the rooms he used the most.

  In the evenings, he told Merlin the falcon all about his day’s works, and felt the better for having something with ears to talk to, even if he couldn’t see the ears beneath feathers, even if the ears didn’t hear him.

  His scrap piles grew, and he felt that the number of things left unrepaired seemed much larger than the number of things he managed to repair, and yet rooms began to fill back up with mended things. Anything that couldn’t be fixed could help fix something else.

  Piece by piece, room by room, Sand slowly cleaned and repaired, sorted and mended the castle.

  In the castle’s chapel, he restored the crucifix and resewed the altar cloth. He levered the two halves of the altar back into place.

  He saved the most uncomfortable task in the chapel for last, which was attending to the relics. The chapel was the home to the partial remains of two saints: Sainte Trifine, a mother and princess who had died and been brought back to life, and Saint Melor of the bronze foot and silver hand.

  The relics had not made it through the sundering intact. Spilling out of a silver, oval reliquary were the old, wizened lumps of Sainte Trifine’s heart, split into two; and mixed with the shards of a larger golden reliquary lay the broken head of Saint Melor.

  Sand could do nothing, really, that didn’t feel horribly sacrilegious, but leaving these things broken seemed worse than sacrilege. So he poured a few hot drops of beeswax between the bits of Sainte Trifine’s heart and, steeling himself, pushed the halves together with his fingertips. Then, with a small hammer, he beat back into shape the silver reliquary that housed her heart.

  For Saint Melor, he did not think candle wax would be the proper medium for putting the skull to rights, so he simply repaired the reliquary and set the pieces of the skull back inside.

  He wiped his fingers with his shirt hem for a good ten minutes after, and he never did quite get rid of the waxy feeling of Sainte Trifine’s heart that day.

  His stomach grumbled, and he turned back toward the kitchen. He’d mended the door at last, and when he opened it, a flurry of feathers flew at his head.

  Sand yelled in surprise, and ducked. A line of fire sprang into being across his face. The noise of wings passed into the courtyard, and he turned, tracking a frantic little falcon as it circled the courtyard twice, then flew up, up, up, straight into the sun.

  6

  Water

  SAND STILL COULDN’T ENTIRELY BELIEVE THAT Merlin the falcon had come to life and flown away, but there were two indisputable facts that proved it: No longer did a stuffed falcon sit on the mantel, and a thin scrape from the escaping bird’s claw now lined his cheek.

  He could not think overly much about it. What logic was there to follow? The falcon had been dead—indisputably dead, stuffed and mounted and then broken in the sundering—and now it was alive, the first living thing that Sand had seen inside the castle. It made no sense! Not a single, solitary lick of sense.

  Sand went on about his day of mending and cleaning and straightening, while the scratch on his face went from burning pain to dull stinging and then to vaguely annoying. Spring returned by noon. The snow melted everywhere that the sun reached, and feeble winter hung on only in shadows.

  Sand settled down with pieces of several different buckets and finally considered how to take them apart and mend them into one, good bucket. He was no cooper, but the hard parts of bucket construction, the parts he knew little about—the selection of wood, the cutting and dressing of the staves, and all the words of the trade that he’d heard but didn’t really know, like flagging and jigging—were already done for him. He just had to bring the staves tight together again so that water couldn’t leak out.

  “And what does it matter?” he muttered to the bucket staves laid out before him as he inexpertly tried to fit them. “I’m no worse off than I was before if this doesn’t work.”

  The first few times, it did not work. Buckets were sized by eye, and none of the staves from the candidate broken buckets quite fit together. Sand cautiously shaped a few of the staves with a half-chisel, knowing it wasn’t exactly the right thing to do but not sure how to do what he needed to. The real craft of coopering lay in this part of the process, but the magic of it lay in the next step, when coopers used steam heat and iron truss hoops to shape their barrels and buckets. Since he possessed no real artistry with wood, Sand decided to move on to heat and iron. He understood heat and iron better than he understood anything else.

  One of the buckets still had a proper base hoop intact and in place. Sand added staves from other buckets, and added an upper hoop from yet another bucket, slipping it down over the outside of the staves. He dug out a small pit in the smithy and built a good fire in it, then set half a tilted cauldron of water to boil. He placed the bucket over the cauldron, waiting for the steam to soften the wood. It took a while, but when eventually he started hammering truss hoops, driving them down over the widening staves, it all came together.

  It should not have worked. His joins between staves were terrible; he did not possess the right tools; he did not fully understand the principles of making a watertight bucket; and this sort of work took at least a journeyman’s eye to supervise a raw novice like him. But somehow, once he had hammered the last truss into place, he had made something watertight.

  Or so he assumed. The bucket held his small amount of test water just fine. But when he threw the bucket down the well, attached to his bed-linen rope, the weight of the full bucket was too much, and the linens drew apart. He lost half the rope and the whole bucket down the well.

  He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. A whole day’s work on one bucket, and it was gone down the well! And yet—the bucket had obviously held enough water that it had been too heavy for his makeshift rope.

  He laughed first. It had hardly been a rope at all; just some tied-together sheets, not even braided, let alone twisted and back-twisted as befit proper rope.

  And then he cried, just a little. Agnote would have pointed out his rope problem long before he lost a bucket, and kept him from such a stupid mistake. Grandpère would have suggested taking the time to braid the sheets on the first day, even when he’d been so thirsty—just in case his first linen sheet-ball had likewise been too heavy and snapped his line.

  His father, though—if he had been the one to supervise this whole experiment, he woul
dn’t have warned him about the rope. He would have said, “Do you think there is anything you are forgetting?” and if Sand had said, “No,” he would have just nodded and let Sand proceed, watching from under his heavy brows. He would have let the rope snap, yes; and afterward, he would have shrugged, saying, “And what sort of caution would you have learned if I had stopped you?”

  And then his father would have had Sand make a better rope while he went to look for a hook, and together, they would have tried to fish the bucket out of the well.

  He missed his father then, keenly, so keenly it was like a hundred knives pierced him. In spite of all the arguments, in spite of his father’s ridiculous ambitions for Sand that made no sense . . . he wished he could be home.

  Sand crossed himself and prayed to Saint Eloi and his name saint and to the Seven Founder Saints of Bertaèyn: “If the Lord grants me the gift of leaving this place, if I ever rejoin my family, I will not gainsay Papa again. I’ll go to university, as he wants. I will obey him in all things.”

  The feeling of the knives didn’t go away entirely—in that moment, he missed his grandfather and Agnote. He missed his little sisters, too; they were such pains at times, but right now, all he could think about was the way they blinked at him with their large blue eyes, so adoring and fond, as if he could do anything.

  He pushed the feelings away. He didn’t really have time to mope, did he? He’d better go about fishing that bucket out of the well.

  Unfortunately, there were no hooks to be had—but the castle housed plenty of metal, and a half-functioning smithy, so he would make his own hook. After he reworked his bedsheets. Having no rope jack or a ropewalk to twist linen into rope, he decided that a double-thick braid was the wisest course. He settled in, thinking that he would work on the rope until sunset.

  But Sand finished no rope that day. That day, everything changed.

  7

  Stone

  A CRACK IN THE CEILING DIVIDED THE CRYPT IN half, Perrotte noticed. The crack crossed above her, in line with her waist, and her creeping fingertips discovered that the line crossed beneath her as well—a hairline in the stone under her, though much wider above. Light came from the crack in the ceiling, she decided, the dimmest, faintest of lights through the slenderest of cracks, but it kept her from total blindness here in the dark.

  She imagined climbing out of her niche and walking upward into the light. She would come to the surface, and oh, how surprised people would be! She imagined her father’s and her nurse’s happiness at seeing her alive again, and imagined her father’s wife’s shock and perhaps dismay.

  Slowly, Perrotte pulled herself to sitting. Even slower, she put a hesitant foot to the floor. She half stood, a false start, and sat back down. She waited, then tried again. This time she stayed on her feet, and started forward in the dim dark, hands outstretched for balance and to ensure she did not run into something in the shadows. Odd piles of rubble lay about, piles she did not remember.

  She reached the stairs out of the crypt and ascended them, stumbling slightly over broken stones. In the chapel, sunlight poured through the colored glass windows depicting the strange life of Saint Melor and his metal foot and hand. She noted without understanding that the glass was cracked.

  She wandered out to the courtyard, squinting into the brightness of the sun. She tried to make sense of what had once been her home and was now a shattered ruin. Confusion gave way to bewilderment, which in turn gave way to astonishment. This was Boisblanc, the castle where she’d been born, lived, and grown. Now it was an empty shell, broken in half. The keep was cracked, the earth itself was cracked, and nothing was as she’d left it.

  The memory of comforting darkness was fading. She could barely recall those early moments of wakefulness in the stone niche in the crypt. Those memories slipped behind a door in her mind. All that she felt now was thirst. She stumbled to her knees, forced herself up, and went on. Warm blood—living blood—ran from a scrape on one knee, but she tried not to mind. She needed something to drink. She could not think past that need anymore. Wine—in the cellars—cider—in great barrels—ale—

  Her feet carried her toward the pantries, and she found nothing there to drink, either. Water. Water. Water. She struggled to keep on, staggering out of the kitchen and into the bright sun again, heading down the stairs toward the well.

  Water. She might have said it; she might not have. The word was like a call within her. With the well in sight, she fell to the mud.

  8

  Porridge

  A GIRL, DRESSED IN SAFFRON VELVET AND RUSSET silk, with frizzled golden-brown hair flowing from under a small cap, staggered toward Sand across the courtyard. Her hazel eyes were glassy, and her mouth was open.

  “Water,” she croaked, and fell.

  Sand had never moved so fast, but still he didn’t manage to catch her before she reached the ground. She thumped sideways into the mud, and Sand felt a twinge of guilt that he hadn’t somehow been faster.

  A person. A girl.

  The girl from the crypt—yes? She wore the same—

  The dead girl from the crypt.

  Almost, he did not touch her. Almost, he was too afraid of her sunken eyes and hollow cheeks and the fact that she had been dead when last he saw her. But he forced himself to touch her. He turned her over. Her breath was labored, her eyes closed.

  She had spoken before she fell—one word. “Water.”

  He had water. He ran to the kitchen and filled his copper cup. Hand over the cup to catch sloshes, he ran back. He knelt beside her in the mud and dribbled water in her mouth, hoping it would revive her; her eyes fluttered, but did not open. She swallowed the water, though, swallowed all of it, and immediately her sunken skin plumped and brighter colors came to her cheeks and lips.

  He dripped more water into her mouth, until she would swallow no more; then, unwilling to leave her in the mud of the courtyard, he hoisted her awkwardly onto his shoulders. She was taller than Sand but lighter than he expected, as light as one of his sisters.

  He carried her to his bed in the Count’s room, tucking her into his comfortable nest. He built up a fire to take the chill from the air, then hurried down to the kitchen to make her some food. He did not want to leave her alone too long, in case she woke.

  He put a good porridge on to cook in a copper pot. He combined oats with dried bits of plum, pear, apple, raisins, and some carefully picked-over crystals of honey. He heated water for washing, then carried porridge and water up to the Count’s room. He drew up a stool next to the bed. Dampening a scrap of fine toweling, he washed the girl’s hands and face.

  This woke her. She stared up at him with frightened yet imperious eyes.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I am Alexandre, son of Gilles Smith,” he answered, withdrawing his hands and folding the bit of toweling he’d used to clean her.

  She frowned, sitting up. He pushed back the stool a little, giving her space, while she cast her gaze around the chamber. Nothing broken remained in the room; only items that had been mended had been brought back in.

  “Where is my father?”

  “Pardon me, but who is your father?”

  “The Count of Boisblanc, of course.” She sat up slowly. “You are here in Boisblanc, and you do not know this, Alexandre, son of Gilles Smith?”

  Sand blinked. “Call me Sand,” he said, but his mind was ticking over and over. The ruler of Boisblanc was a countess in her own right, but since her husband was a prince of France, most everyone referred to them as the Prince and Princess, not the Count and Countess. The woman everyone still called the Countess was the dowager, the mother of the Princess.

  As for the Princess’s father, Count Derien of Boisblanc had died before Sand was born. This girl looked Sand’s own age, about twelve or thirteen. She might be the daughter of the Prince, he supposed, but she could not be the daughter of the deceased count. . . .

  Well. Except for the fact that until very recently, this gir
l had been dead. And who knew for how long? Maybe her father was a Count of Boisblanc from a hundred or more years ago.

  “Um,” Sand said, and stood.

  “Um,” she mimicked, swinging her legs out of the bed, but not yet standing.

  “You . . . you were dead, last I saw you,” he said.

  “. . . my lady,” she said.

  He frowned.

  “Address me as ‘my lady,’” she said.

  He swallowed. She was awfully prickly. But he nodded, trying to maintain an amiable face as he said, “You were dead last I saw you, my lady.”

  A number of expressions chased across her face in quick succession, and he felt like he only recognized any of them long after they had been replaced. Fury, sadness, grief, despair—he knew those, but there were a dozen others.

  “I was,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I was dead, and I thought I remembered it—but it’s only a memory of a memory anymore.”

  “How long ago?” Sand asked, but he knew it was a stupid question. “Um, who was the king when you—?”

  “The King?” Her lip curled the way only a Breton’s lip could when the King of France was mentioned. “Charles. Laughably called ‘the Affable’ by his sycophants.”

  The flesh above Sand’s eyes prickled. “King Charles the Affable died some twenty years ago. Or so. He hit his head on a doorway and died.”

  Again, expressions fled across her face so quickly that none ever landed. Humor, perhaps, for the way in which Charles died, and some sort of triumph, but also grief again. Always grief.

  “Twenty years?” she whispered. “I’ve been dead for twenty years?”

  Sand was a truth-minded person. “More. It’s been more than twenty-five years since the castle was sundered.” Then he regretted what he’d said, so he added a late “My lady” to make her feel better.

  “What of my duchess?”