The Castle Behind Thorns

by Merrie Haskell

  He forced himself to focus.

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, his first lancet, now cooled, was ready for filing. He flaked off the gray-black fire scale that had collected on the outside of the metal during his working. Beneath, the steel was shiny and silver-colored. He shaped out a proper edge and point of the lancet so that it was suitable for piercing skin, then continued polishing the surface. Fire scale could not hide the glowing colors of iron. But the rainbow of tempering colors could only be seen on clean steel by bright daylight.

  He put the lancet back in the fire for an even heating. It felt maddeningly slow. He could make a dozen nails, maybe two dozen, in the same time it would take him to draw a temper on this lancet.

  He took a deep and steadying breath, calming his agitation. Lancets were thin and heated quickly. This was no time for impatience, or for making more of his problems than what they were. He pulled out the tool and quenched the tip. Then he waited, watching the colors change as the heat slowly crept back into the cooled area. He was waiting for the edge to turn palest straw yellow.

  Tempering always reminded him of oncoming dawn. The shift in the colors of the sky was very similar, and perhaps that made sense. The sun was the sky’s fire, driving color before it like a forge fire drove color through metal. It always seemed to Sand that some great sound like a giant, ringing bell should accompany the sun’s rising, and likewise some smaller bell should toll for the colors that shifted in the steel while drawing a temper.

  He’d tried to explain all this to Gilles once, and his father had told him to keep his eyes on his metal. He’d tried to explain it to Grandpère another time, and Grandpère had nodded thoughtfully, his half-burnt and bushy eyebrows drawing together as he considered Sand’s words.

  “Like watching your grandmère move from angry to humored when I tease her,” Grandpère had answered. “And her laugh is the bell.” Sand knew that to be true as well. He wanted to tell this story to Perrotte, though he might leave the part out about how he found himself watching her face like his grandfather watched his grandmother’s.

  He thought about her face contorted with pain. How could Perrotte bear it? How could she survive this? Sand’s fingers curled overtight around his hammer handle. “If Perrotte dies . . . I’ll mend her again.”

  Finally, the lancet tip turned palest straw yellow. At last. Sand quenched his first lancet in his slake bucket, and began the next one.

  PERROTTE WAS AWAKE WHEN Sand reached her, the second lancet still forge-warm in his hand. Her eyes were wide and luminous with unshed tears.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you, Sand,” she said.

  He felt his mouth fold into a grim line. He didn’t want her apologies. She was brave, stupid brave; that was a fault, perhaps, but not something she chose to be just to hurt him.

  “You didn’t know,” he said, placing the back of his hand on her forehead, trying to feel if she had a fever. She felt cool to him, but he’d just been at the forge, and his heat sense was skewed.

  “But you knew,” she said.

  “I didn’t know.” He went over to the pot he’d put on to boil earlier. Of course the water had boiled out, and now the pot baked drily in the embers. He sighed, filled it back up, then returned to her side.

  “I was afraid, Perrotte. I didn’t know. You and I both saw the thorns move before, but really . . . what if that was the worst they could do, or would do? What if you were right and I was wrong? I hoped you were right. If you had been, we’d be standing outside the castle right now, laughing our heads off with relief, and wondering why I was so stupid as to be trapped in here for weeks just because of one little thorn prick.”

  She smiled at him then, a sad, sideways smile. “You’re the kindest person I know, Sand,” she said.

  “I haven’t been as nice as I could be,” he said.

  “I said kind, not nice,” she said. “Jannet could be perfectly nice, but she was never kind.”

  He was silent for a long moment, thinking about the difference, then forced himself to blink when he realized he was staring at her.

  “Then I’m sorry for you,” he said gently. “My grandparents are far kinder than me. And Agnote—my stepmother is the kindest person I know. I wish you had known more kind people.”

  She didn’t say anything, just closed her eyelids. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes.

  “Perrotte?” he asked, alarmed.

  “It hurts, Sand,” she said. “And it doesn’t get easier to bear with time. I feel the thorns all over me, and they’re pushing in deeper. They want my heart. . . .”

  “I’m going to start cutting them out,” he said. “As many as you can stand.”

  “All of them.”

  “It’ll hurt, Perr.”

  “It hurts now,” she said, opening her eyes. “Cut them all out. If I faint—then good.”

  He bit his tongue against a sharp answer, trying to keep his face calm and comforting, to look like Agnote would look while working with a patient. She was a midwife, but lots of people in the village came to her for little bits of healing that didn’t require a barber or a physician.

  There had been a time when Sand had believed that Agnote was calm always; during all the arguments with his father, she would get that comforting, listening expression on her face and try to mediate between Sand and Gilles, never once raising her voice.

  But eventually, Sand had figured it out. She was most upset when she appeared most calm. This became clear after she sent home one of her pregnant patients, who was having blood and pains well before her time. Calm Agnote reigned as she gave the woman strict orders to go home, to lie down, and to have her husband wait on her. Calm Agnote gave the woman a packet of herbs and a promise that she’d follow in an hour to check on her. Calm Agnote had watched her patient walk away, then closed the door.

  Calm Agnote had crumpled into true Agnote a moment later, her face a mask of misery. Sand had gone to hug her, then. His little sisters, Avenie and Annick, never wanting to be left out of any hugs ever, crowded in on them, each embracing one of his thighs and one of Agnote’s. Agnote had just hugged him back for a long moment, then slid her arms around his sisters’ shoulders. “Goodness, children . . . Is this a plea for your suppers?”

  Once she’d diverted the little ones away, though, Agnote had gripped his shoulder, and just smiled at him. A sad smile, but a real one, and Sand had appreciated some things about his stepmother that maybe he’d never understood before.

  It was hard to keep a calm like Agnote’s, but he forced himself to do it now. He wasn’t much of a healer, but he was all Perrotte had.

  He pulled a poultice off a line of raised bumps on Perrotte’s ankle. When he glanced at Perrotte’s face, her jaw was clenched. She suffered.

  Sand set his own jaw, and pressed the lancet tip into the heart of the first bump. He dug the thorn out. It was more difficult to remove than his thorn, which his body had been trying to reject. Blood came with this thorn, and no pus. He wiped the blood away with a hot cloth, and moved on to the next thorn, and then the next.

  Sand wondered how Agnote bore the things she had to do as a midwife. He caused Perrotte pain, even as he helped her. She tried to be brave. She did not scream. But she could not hold in all of her gasps and whimpers.

  “Let’s take a break,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “And then we’ll get you up to bed, then try again.” He wasn’t sure, but he felt like he had missed thorns. And possibly they wouldn’t know it, until the thorns worked to poison her.

  It was daunting.

  “A break,” she murmured. “And then I’ll tell you about the heart.” She crossed herself and started to pray, lips moving silently.

  The heart? Was she talking about the thorns wanting her heart again? Sand left her to her prayers.

  Merlin watched from the rafters with bright, intelligent eyes. Sand held the kitchen door open and whistled to the bird.

  “This is your chance. Go get someth
ing to eat,” Sand said.

  The falcon would have none of it.

  “Fine,” Sand muttered, slamming the door shut after him. He returned to the smithy, where he stoked up the forge and mended a handful of items from his pile of broken things, losing himself in the rhythm of striking metal, the rhythm of the bellows, the rhythm of heat-cool-heat-cool. How was it possible that his father did not love this work with all his heart? How was it possible his father didn’t realize how much Sand loved this work? How much it was in his blood and under his skin—

  Under his skin.

  In all the turmoil and worry, he’d forgotten about the thorns that had torn his own skin. He raised a hand to his neck, feeling the lumps swelling there, and groaned.

  18

  Child

  THE LONG, HORRIBLE DAY FINALLY ENDED. A PILE OF thorns lay in a bowl next to Perrotte’s bed where they glistened malevolently in the moonlight that spilled into her father’s bedchamber. Sand had not gotten them all in the first round, nor the second, nor the third, but he had gotten as many as either of them could stand.

  Perrotte rolled onto her stomach, unwilling to look at her enemies in the bowl.

  She had slept longer than she’d ever done since waking in the crypt, but it still wasn’t very long. She must have made it past midnight, though, judging from the moon. Four days past full, it was still quite bright, and drowned out many stars.

  She wondered if she would ever find the bits of her astrolabe around the castle, and if Sand could mend it if she did. It seemed unlikely. She was going to have to guess at how to construct one, and enlist Sand’s help to do so. Blacksmithing appeared easy, on the surface of it—heat metal and bend it!—but it had so many rules and tests, what little she had learned made her think it as exacting a science as astronomy.

  Perrotte told herself the astrolabe didn’t matter. She didn’t want to go back to her observation tower, anyway. The last time she’d been there, the urge to either vomit or tear her hair had overwhelmed her, and she’d almost remembered dying for a moment.

  She didn’t want to return to the tower room. She didn’t want to remember dying.

  She wanted to forget it all forever. Some days, she thought she could.

  But the memory of the tower—not the last time she had been there with Sand, but the time before that, when she’d died—was right there, just a left turn through a doorway in her mind. The door was always trying to jump open on her, and she was always holding it shut. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see what’s behind there.

  Sometimes, when she wasn’t attentive, the door cracked open too long, and she heard a voice from beyond.

  This wasn’t gentle, the voice said.

  If she could figure out how to lock the door forever, though . . . And she thought maybe she could. Perrotte had trained for years in something her tutor called the “method of place.” In her mind, she had laid out an entire village, full of houses and fields, with a castle overlooking from a hill. It resembled the village and castle of Boisblanc. But instead of people living in the houses of the village, in each one she mentally stored the layout of the night skies in different seasons. In the rooms of the castle dwelled declensions of Latin and Greek.

  This room that she’d built in her mind to store away the terrible memory of her death, though—she had built that when she was dead. Perhaps. Or maybe she had constructed it as she’d come back to life? It didn’t really matter when. The door was there and always trying to leap open. It was exhausting, to keep holding the door shut. But in time, she might be able to build a wall across it.

  Perrotte shook herself. She wanted to see the stars. She slid from bed, giving the bowl of thorns a wide berth, and found her way down and out. She climbed a tower, a different tower, not one of the tallest, but one of the guard towers. She leaned out the window to study the stars.

  It wasn’t the same; she couldn’t fold back the roof and observe whatever section of the sky she liked this way. But it was something. The layers of blue-black darkness calmed her. The varieties of stars calmed her too—the way the light of some stars pierced and others glowed more dimly; the way some blazed reddish and others gleamed blue-white. It reminded her of blacksmithing, and the colors of heated metal. She wondered if the colors meant anything.

  The stars began to fade away, the fainter ones first, until only the brightest remained in a sky that knew more shades of blue than any painter could mix. Perrotte had always wanted a dress that made her think of this kind of sky, a dusky, dark blue silk that she could sew over with a net of silver and diamonds. If she wore a dress like that, what could she not say or do? To feel like the queen of a vast field of stars would be to feel greater than the Queen of France.

  The colors of the sky shifted from blue to rose, and in the distance, Perrotte saw something unexpected.

  A child of perhaps eight years drove geese through one of the asparagus fields below.

  Perrotte waved.

  The child waved back.

  Shocked, Perrotte called out, but the sound of her voice must have died long before it reached him.

  The child waved again, then turned and left. She watched him until he was out of sight.

  The sun finally peered over the horizon. In the rosy dawn, the child had seemed a ghost, a flight of imagination. In yellow sunlight, he seemed impossible.

  But the sunlight wouldn’t stay golden for long. Clouds rolled in from the direction of the sea, and Perrotte could make out gray sheets of rain in the distance.

  She yawned then, a sudden gape, and she was overcome with swift tiredness. The thorns, still plying her with their subtle poisons, no doubt. She crept back to her father’s bedchamber, and lay down on her bed. Sand didn’t even stir. She put her head down to sleep again. The voice came to her, as she drifted off.

  This wasn’t gentle.

  But Perrotte kept the door closed, and slept, and dreamed.

  A woman came to her where she clutched the birch tree, a woman dressed in black even deeper than the darkness, a woman without a face, with just a red, empty scar where her face should have been. The woman asked her why she would not drink.

  Perrotte said: “I will not drink. I will not go on.”

  The woman said: That is your right, as one whose blood was spilled unjustly.

  Perrotte felt fierce. “Yes. That is my right.”

  When she woke, she was feverish, and she felt she had dreamed the whole of the night.

  19

  Library

  SAND WOKE TO A GUSTY RAIN; THE BREEZE THAT SANG in through the cracked window panes smelled of the ocean. Before he opened his eyes, he could hear gulls calling to each other as they rode the winds, and he thought he should climb a tower and look for the birds. But then he remembered Perrotte.

  He opened his eyes. She still slumbered on the mattress that cornered with his.

  Sand rose and carried the bowl of thorns cautiously down to the smithy. He made the hottest fire he could, pumping the bellows until charcoal burned yellow-white with welding heat, then dumped the thorns into the dazzling center of the fire. The thorns crackled and popped, and Sand swore that inside his neck, the thorns still lodged there wriggled in sympathy.

  He brought food and water up to Perrotte and woke her. Her eyes were glassy with fever.

  “Drink, Perr,” Sand said when she wrinkled her nose at the plain water. It was high-born snobbery that made her look down at the cool, pure well water. “It’s not iced and flavored with parsley seed, but it will do you good.”

  She drank.

  He removed more thorns, and she looked a bit better after that. He still wasn’t sure he’d gotten them all.

  “I need you to get well so you can remove my thorns,” he said, touching the hot lumps on his neck.

  She blanched. “Oh. I didn’t realize . . .” She lifted her hands in the air and studied them.

  “When they tremble a bit less,” he said. “I got the ones from my knuckles, and mostly these don’t pai
n me.” This was not entirely a lie; knowing that they could be removed, and that he would feel better afterward, made them easier to bear. Much like the difference between the first time he’d been stung by a bee, and the second.

  He gathered the array of dishes that had collected by Perrotte’s bed to take down to the kitchen. To his shock, Perrotte pushed back her covers and stood.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t stay here. I’m . . . I’ve had enough of bed. I’m going to the library. I want to find my missing books.”

  Sand wasn’t sure what books she meant, but then he remembered the ruin of parchment that swamped the room. “The library is in bad shape.”

  “Of course the library is in bad shape. I don’t imagine that the forces of destruction that took apart this castle spared the library.”

  Sand watched her movements, glad for this sign of recovery but not trusting it. She walked creakily, and sported two bright red spots high on her cheekbones.

  Nonetheless, he followed her from the room, and almost ran into her when she stopped in the library doorway.

  “It’s worse than I imagined,” Perrotte said.

  Sand nodded. What else was there to say?

  Perrotte hovered, almost stepping into the room several times, but always stepping back. Sand understood the problem—she didn’t want to crush anything underfoot.

  He leaned into the room and scooped up a handful of pages. “Why don’t we start out here?” he asked, gesturing at the library’s anteroom, whose purpose he couldn’t quite discern. It held lots of broken tables and chairs, the requisite shredded tapestries, but not much else that was useful. “I wish I’d at least fixed a table in here,” he muttered, hunkering down to spread the pages out, then answered himself with, “If only wishing made it so, Sand.”

  “Do I need to even be here for this conversation?” Perrotte asked.

  He looked up, startled. It was not that he had forgotten Perrotte was there. It was more that he’d forgotten that he didn’t have to answer himself when he talked.