“So . . . there is nothing you can do to free me?”
Sir Bleyz shook his head. “Nothing I know of! The Countess even once tried to breech the thorns with a siege tower! I can almost make out the shape of it—” He squinted off to her left. “If you were to get free from the castle, my lady, and you did not have an army in place, I think she would try to kill you again!”
She nodded. That sounded true.
“Doesn’t everyone know she killed me?” Perrotte asked. “Wasn’t there some sort of rebellion from the barons?”
She couldn’t read Sir Bleyz’s expression from this distance, but she thought she already knew the answer. Jannet was plenty vicious enough to quash any such rebellion. “She has us in a vise grip, my lady, and we have no proof.”
“Other than the sundering of the castle!”
“I am the only living witness of her oath,” Bleyz called. “And I’ve been in exile for years, lest she has me killed.” He glanced at the rising sun. “My lady, I must fly! It is dangerous if any see me here. I will go to Nauntt and send messages to your barons who remember the Cygne name and would welcome your return. Look for me with the new moon!”
And with that, he spurred his horse and rode away from the castle.
“Wait!” she called, but it was to no avail. What good would it do to send messages to her loyal barons if she were trapped in the castle forever?
22
Hammer
SAND WOKE TO THE SCENT OF PORRIDGE.
He opened his eyes to find Perrotte sitting cross-legged on her bed, eating. She held out a bowl for him.
“Wha—at?” he asked inarticulately, accepting the porridge against his better judgment.
“We have a lot of mending to do today,” Perrotte said.
“We do?”
She nodded and handed him a scrap of parchment. “I’ve been observing the thorns, and I think on days that you mend more, the thorns shrink.”
He stared at the notations. “You’ve only got two notations here.”
“I know. That’s why you need to mend a lot today. And maybe none the following day, and I’ll measure the thorns both days, and then! We may have a pretty good idea. But we need to test it.”
He stared at her, trying to think through the theory. Could that be it? Could that really be it? Not fire, not cutting, not figuring out how to go under or how to go over—but mending might defeat the thorns?
“And then we need to take measurements,” she said. “Because if we can’t dwindle the thorns away before winter, we need to figure out how to deal with our food supply. But if we can get free by winter, we’ll worry about food a lot less.”
He felt left behind. “You think that mending the broken things makes the thorns shrink?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Do you know what testing means?”
He rolled his eyes right back. “Yes. I test metal all the time, to see if it’s pure, to see if it’s—”
“Well, then! Stop acting like I’ve just suggested you figure out how to train bumblebees to fly you over the thorn hedge, and let’s get to work!”
FIRST, THOUGH, THEY TOOK Merlin to hunt. Merlin collected enough larks that Sand could finally have lark stew; then the falcon was allowed to eat the sparrows she’d worked so hard for.
On the way back to the kitchen with their string of larks, Perrotte stopped and stared at the ground.
“Green. More green! Look!” She pointed at the earth.
He bent beside her to see a row of tiny, two-leaved green plants poking up through the earth. “Peas! That’s where I planted peas!”
“You planted peas!” She clapped her hands. “I hate peas!”
Between the lark stew and the anticipation of the garden, things were looking up in the kitchen—until they discovered mold on some of the cheeses. And a funny rust on some of the dried apples. And then blight got into Perrotte’s tisane herbs.
The worst discoveries were some rotting turnips, however; not because either of them mourned a lost turnip, but because, in the back of Sand’s mind, turnips were their starvation rations, the option that stood between them and death. And also the rot smelled terrible.
“But how?” Perrotte asked. “I thought nothing rotted here!”
“Nothing lived and nothing died; but then you woke up. And the garden woke up.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That makes no sense. Everything was dead before. It wasn’t all just sleeping.”
“Well, neither were you. You didn’t just wake up. . . .” He took a deep breath. “You lived.”
“So?”
“So . . . I guess death comes with life.”
She shook her head, but what could either one of them say? Before she woke, the turnips had lasted for twenty-five years. After she woke, they rotted in open air—though the ones still buried in the root cellar remained solid and dull and turnipy. For now.
Sand didn’t know where the independently beating heart in the chapel fit into all of this living and dying, though. He tried not to think on it too often.
ONCE PERROTTE WAS FULLY recovered from her battle with the thorns, and all Sand’s thorns had likewise been removed, they began to work in earnest on mending. If mending truly made the thorns shrink, they’d have to fix every single thing in the castle. A daunting thought.
They began their tests of the theory in the smithy, where Sand had the most skill. Together, they set up another forge, another anvil, and made certain Perrotte had her own piles of tools and equipment.
“It will go faster if you can pump the bellows for me when I ask, and on some larger pieces, I may need you to wield the sledgehammer.”
“Sledgehammer?” Perrotte asked, alarmed. “Aren’t those terribly heavy?”
“Eight pounds or so. The artistry in blacksmithing is knowing where to hit, more than your strength of arm. So the way that works is, the master smith, or in my case, the smith with more experience, hits the piece with a lighter hammer, and then you, as the smith with less experience, try to hit the same spot with the sledge. That’s all you have to do, just follow my lead.”
She nodded, looking a bit unsure of herself, but didn’t refuse or hesitate. “Very well. Anything else I should do, oh, master smith?” She gave him a funny little bow, tipping an imaginary hat to him.
He hadn’t thought he’d sounded too imperious during his explanation, but he responded in kind to her gesture, saying loftily, “I’ll let you know.”
They worked steadily for hours. Sand taught Perrotte just a few of the endless secrets of smithing, enough that she could mend things with very little intervention from him. She had been reluctant at first, saying, “I think I should just help you; the magic of the mending lies in you, not me.” But he told her that she would be a better help to him if she understood smithing well, and had a few projects under her belt.
While they worked, they discussed all the other things that needed mending in the castle, and pondered which things would defy mending altogether.
“Will those unmendable things count against us, with the hedge?” Perrotte fretted.
“I know as much about curses and magic as you do,” Sand replied. “Probably less. You tell me—does magic care about the spirit of one’s intentions or does it care about results? Is magic practical, and knows that not everything here can be fixed, or does magic expect perfection?”
“I don’t know,” Perrotte said crankily. “I guess we’ll have to try a few things and find out.”
“It took me five broken buckets to remake two. The wood that couldn’t be made back into buckets was too shattered, and the metal that bound the staves together joined my scrap piles. It all went to mend other things, or to keep us warm, and so forth. I have to think that counts, even though there are three fewer buckets in the castle.”
“I don’t know,” Perrotte repeated. She was mending spoons and other unbladed kitchen utensils, as they did not require the difficult art of tempering.
“For mending windows and th
e like, we don’t have a glass furnace,” Sand said. “Does the magic care that we don’t have a glass furnace, or is the magic going to quibble with us about the windows?” He was making nails, because nails went fast and they would need many of them when they moved on to mending doors and furniture. “Though. Maybe we could—”
Perrotte shouted wordlessly, and jumped back from her anvil.
Sand looked up to see the face of her hammer, which had fragmented into three wedge-shaped pieces, fall completely away.
“What just happened?” she asked, staring at the hammer like it had turned to a viper and then back into a hammer.
“Your hammer wore out. The facing came off. Perfectly, I might add—those three pieces mean that it was good hammer, properly tempered.”
“A good hammer? But it broke!”
“Yes, it did.”
“How?” The word was anguished. “We’re menders! We are mending! How can this break?”
Sand tried to sound comforting. “Some things just wear out, Perr.”
She looked far more upset than a broken hammer would warrant, but Sand thought he understood. They spent so much time dealing with broken things or trying to fix them that it was a grave insult for one of their tools to betray them. A tool he had already mended once, in fact.
Would he be as upset if it had happened to him instead? Perhaps.
“I’ll fix it,” Sand said. “What’s more, I’ll teach you how to fix it.”
“But that involves tempering—you don’t want to teach me tempering; you said it was too hard.”
“It’s hard, but I never said it was too hard. You’re smart, and we’ll get more done if you understand tempering. I was just being lazy, taking the easy way, in not teaching you.”
Sand put aside his nail rod, and began his lesson on the art of drawing a temper. As he explained how to test the steel, she interrupted: “I know, I know, testing! I teased you about testing, and now I regret it. But why can’t it be easier, to be a blacksmith?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “not all iron and steel is the same in quality. We observe it, we assess it . . . So we can make the right tool with it, not something that will snap or bend when it is used. In the end, we have to make do with what we’ve got, but at least we know what we have before we start work. That’s why we test.”
Perrotte’s impatience had faded during his explanation. “It’s a good way to live one’s life,” she said seriously. “To observe, to test, to assess, before trying to bend something.”
Sand considered that, then nodded. “Sure. Though there’s another thing people say about life, that they learned from blacksmiths.”
“What’s that?”
“‘Strike while the iron is hot.’”
Perrotte frowned. “I’ve heard that before, and I always thought it meant to jump on an opportunity. That’s how people mean it, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” Sand said. “But if you control the fire, you control when the iron is hot. And also, you can reheat iron. I always thought it meant that there was no point in trying to bend cold metal—so, don’t try to make situations into what they aren’t.”
“Sand . . .” Perrotte was stoking the fire in her forge, arranging the charcoal to her liking.
He waited, but she said nothing more. “What is it, Perrotte?”
“Are you really going to go to the university, like your father wants?”
“I promised I would. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I never wanted to go to court. I wanted to study astronomy and the natural sciences. I, for one, dreamed of going to a university to study. My old tutor made it sound like the most wonderful thing. Of course—” She jammed her poker deep in the fire and rooted around the coals. “Of course, women aren’t admitted to universities. The best we can do is to go live near one, and hire tutors to come to us.”
“It’s unfair: You want to go to a university but cannot, and I do not want to go and must.”
“I should cut my hair and pretend to be you,” Perrotte said, then laughed.
“Well,” Sand said, “that wouldn’t really solve my problem. My father would know I wasn’t at the university when I showed up in the smithy every morning.”
“You could apprentice with someone else.”
“I know.” But he couldn’t. That was no way to keep a bargain with God.
“I was going to court to get away from Jannet. She was sending me to court to get me away from her. It served both our purposes.” She looked up from the embers. “I didn’t really realize that until just now. Though . . .” She trailed off, and clamped her mouth shut, a distant look glazing her eyes. Her “memory of a memory” look.
Sand nodded, swallowing against a sudden lump in his throat. He had sometimes wondered if his father’s burning desire to send Sand away was because Gilles didn’t love him. He could understand a stepparent not loving their stepchild, as was clearly the case with Perrotte and Jannet—in spite of Agnote, who he loved and who loved him. He was sad for Perrotte, for not having an Agnote in her life.
“That’s enough wallowing,” Perrotte said, looking up from her fire. He hoped his face didn’t show any of his feelings, so he busied himself with his own forge, as though he’d not been staring at the top of her head the last few moments. “That’s enough wallowing. Come on. Let’s get mending. We have some magic to test.”
PERROTTE MEASURED THE THORNS the next day, and found that they had retreated a goodly amount. The tops of the castle’s tallest outer walls were now exposed by the shrinking thorn break. Sand found this hopeful; Perrotte reserved judgment.
“It has to be the mending,” Sand said. “So we should just start again tomorrow.”
“No,” Perrotte said, drawing out the word and speaking to him like he occasionally spoke to his little sisters. “Look. The thorns are producing tiny baby raspberries that could be weighing the branches down. So, to test it properly, we have to take a day off. If the thorns still shrink, we’ll know it’s not the mending, and then we don’t have to work as hard.”
Sand found that puzzling. Why wouldn’t they keep mending things? If the thorns came down, people would move back into the castle, and they’d probably rather things were mended.
But he agreed to resist mending that day. Instead, they worked in the garden. The odd things that Sand had planted all sprouted. And about a hundred things that Sand had not planted all sprouted as well, or came back to life. Vines that clung to the keep wall for support started to bud—Perrotte assured Sand that these were roses, and they would have rose petals to scent their wash water, and tart rose hips to snack on come autumn—if they were to be there in the autumn. A hazy green mist seemed to arise over the bushes and branches around the courtyard, as more plants unfurled buds or blooms.
“Too silent,” Perrotte said the day they harvested the asparagus spears. They had agreed that they could not wait the full week to eat asparagus, so these spears would be only half the size they should be. But there were already new spears poking from the earth.
“How so?”
“No birds singing. Not a one.”
They eagerly took the asparagus to the kitchen and passed it through a pot of boiling water, then a pot of fresh cold well water. “The quench,” Perrotte said with a laugh, and then they fell to eating the fresh food, their lips smacking greedily. Sand had never loved the slight bitterness of the vegetable, but it was hard not to eat asparagus in a valley known for growing it. He’d often considered asparagus a burden, in fact—but right now, it seemed a gift.
The asparagus was gone before they knew it, and immediately, Sand wanted more.
As fast as the garden now grew, the food in the kitchen spoiled ten times as fast. The cheeses in the pantry seemed to have remembered their true age in one night, and were nothing but a web of fuzzy white threads the next morning.
Sand wondered if they might starve slowly on asparagus and larks and half-rotten turnips. It was never quite enough food for the both of
them, and they went to bed hungry that night.
“We’re sharp-set,” Perrotte told him. “A proper falconer keeps his birds this way, a little bit hungry always, a little bit keen on food, so that the falcons will want to hunt.”
“I would not do well as a falcon,” he told her.
The next day, they discovered the thorns had not shrunk at all during the rest day. This was enough proof for both of them; they agreed to live sharp-set and mend the broken things in the castle as though their lives depended on it.
Which, in fact, they did.
23
Ember
THE FIRST TIME PERROTTE MET ANNA—BEFORE Jannet, before Anna became the Duchess of Bertaèyn—Perrotte had been left in the nursery with Anna and her baby sister while their parents visited. When the nurse was busy with the littler girl in an antechamber, Anna had convinced Perrotte to climb out the bedroom window with her.
“I do it all the time,” Anna said, one leg over the windowsill. She pulled herself outside, and clung to the vines on the castle wall. “Come along!” she ordered Perrotte, peering in the window.
Perrotte did not hesitate, though perhaps she should have. She’d never been a girl who climbed things. She plunked her bottom onto the windowsill, threw her legs over, and scrabbled to find footholds. She thought she had footing, so she knotted her fingers in the vines and lifted her body away from the windowsill, intending to swing around and face the wall.
She had vastly overestimated the security of her purchase, however, and her foot slipped off the vine and down into nothingness. The jagged end of a broken branch, hidden among the vine’s leaves, scraped a line of hot pain down her thigh. Fear washed over her, and she scrambled to find a place for her feet.
“Good heavens!” came the nurse’s voice from the window. A hand shot out and seized Perrotte’s arm. The nurse hauled her inside and tossed her to the carpet. Anna was seized next, and thrown down beside her. The nurse closed the casement, all the while scolding them—did they think they were birds, monkeys, or squirrels?
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