Thorn

by Anna Burke

  The woman helped me down off the bear. My legs collapsed as they hit the ground, weak and useless. Snow spilled into my collar, chill against my breast, and I gazed up at the bear looming like a mountain above me.

  “You must be hungry,” she said.

  It took me several long moments to determine whether she was talking to me or the bear. My eyes traveled reluctantly away from the shaggy flanks to her face. No flicker of expression betrayed the emotions behind her mask of ice. Green eyes. Dark hair. Red lips. Her features burned like cold iron, and I flinched away from them.

  How could I be hungry? How could I think of food when my legs were numb with cold and I was as far away from home as it was possible to be?

  My stomach grumbled.

  The snow bit deeper into my knees.

  The stranger extended a gloved hand and I took it, wobbling as my legs remembered their duty.

  She led me through a darkened stable that smelled of wolf, bear, and wild things my nose could not identify, a heady, animal musk that sent my muscles into new spasms of terror. Heavy stone arches and broad timbers delineated the stalls, and the wood bore the dark stains of centuries. A few long hairs clung to the roughened doors, the only evidence that horses had once dwelt there. At the end of the stable stood another stone archway, large enough to accommodate a rider on horseback. The door swung open on greased hinges at her touch.

  Three of the wolves accompanied us; the rest remained in the stable, where I heard the distinctive sounds of carnivores ripping into flesh. I was glad of the darkness. I did not want to know what her creatures fed on. The woman lit a torch from a sconce and went on. The sound of the striking flint echoed, emphasizing the cavernous feel of the place, and shadows danced on the walls, throwing the rangy silhouettes of the wolves into sharp relief.

  The hallway beyond the stable opened into a great hall, empty now, with sagging tables shoved against the far wall and the dais cleared of all furniture entirely. Tapestries moldered, flickering in the torchlight. The remaining rags depicted hunting scenes: muscular horses charging bristling boars, slashed through here and there by disturbingly large claw marks. I stayed close to the woman, even as a small voice warned me that her humanity was a trap. If this castle was the lair of a beast, there was only one candidate for its queen. Her dark hair shifted in the light, more like shadow than anything cast by the torch.

  The deserted hall led eventually to a low flight of stairs, bringing with it warmer air as the steps curved around a pillar that looked as if it had been hewn from the mountain itself. The wolves jostled against me, their fur brushing my cold fingers, their paws silent on the stone, and then we were in the kitchen. Here, herbs hung in fragrant bunches from the rafters, and a long, low fireplace radiated warmth from its banked coals. A heavy iron kettle hung over it and the rich smell of meat stew overwhelmed me.

  “Sit,” she said, pointing to a worn but clean table. Its surface was an unbroken slab of wood, milled from a tree that must have towered over its neighbors in height and girth. She tossed her bearskin cloak over the far end of the table and stooped to stoke the flames while the wolves settled down around the hearth, panting past gleaming teeth and hot red tongues. One turned and licked at its hind leg. Pink blood stained the white fur. She scolded it in a soft voice, and the leather of her jerkin gleamed in the rising flames. I watched the light shift over it, making shapes and faces that I half recognized. I jumped when she straightened, the trance broken.

  She placed a bowl of stew on the table, full of venison, potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions and greens, and seasoned with fresh herbs. The rising steam wreathed my face and thawed my lips and nose. My stomach grumbled again.

  You may as well eat, said a timid voice in the back of my mind. Reason, it seemed, had decided to reappear, this time on the side of my traitorous stomach. I picked up the wooden spoon and took a bite. I had not had anything to eat since I left my father’s house, and my insides roared to life at the taste of food.

  Warmth followed the meal. It crawled back into my limbs on silent paws, leaving faint impressions on my skin.

  So did her gaze.

  She watched me eat, her green eyes glowing like the wolves’, until I wiped my chin with my sleeve self-consciously and tucked my knees up to my chest. She ate her own stew more slowly, giving me time to observe her, although I did not dare look at her face. Gold threads shot through the thick, black wool of her sleeves and the heavy northern collar laced around her throat. I followed the leather thong up her throat, but that was too close to her face for comfort. I resumed my contemplation of her sleeves.

  It was good wool. Coarse and heavy, but spun with a softer fleece to offer warmth and comfort. Beneath it, I told myself, would be a lighter tunic, also wool, spun from mountain sheep and dyed with walnuts. Hunting clothes: warm, practical, human.

  She stood, affording me a glimpse of her belt. Several pouches, a flask, a long knife and a short knife, and a curved horn with a silver rim hung over her right hip. Hunting accoutrements. Leather breeches over wool leggings to fend off the cold. Scratches in the leather, dark stains around the knees from use. She wiped her knife on her left thigh after sharpening, the way Avery did. I could tell from the sheen the oilstone left on the leather.

  “Here.”

  She walked like a wolf, light on her feet and alert but confident in her supremacy as she seized a flagon from a shelf and poured a stream of dark red wine into two drinking horns. I picked up the closest one and brought it to my lips.

  She did not acknowledge my gasp of surprise, and so I drank deeply, aware that this was the sort of wine my father had reserved for the wealthiest of his clients, back when he still had clients to appease. It was strong, barely watered, and it flushed the cold from underneath my skin. I drank, and as I drank I gathered my courage the way young girls gather fleece from hedgerows and stone walls for their spindles. It felt just as wispy.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She smiled at me. It was a wolf’s smile, full of teeth. “They call me the Huntress.”

  The name stirred a memory of some old folk tale told over a winter’s evening. I must have heard it in the mountains, for it was not a tale I remembered hearing in my coastal town where the winters were mild. I frowned, unable to bring the memory closer.

  You laughed at their superstitions, I thought. Now look at you.

  “Is that your real name?” I asked. The effort of speaking left me winded, and I tried to breathe slowly.

  “It is as real a name as any.”

  She took a drink, sitting on a stool by the fire, her long legs stretched out in front of her while the flames licked life into the dark leather of her boots. She was beautiful in the way that a blizzard is beautiful. It hurt my chest to look at her, and I knew if I gazed for too long frostbite would work its way into my extremities and the air would freeze in my throat.

  “I’m Rowan,” I said. Maybe if I gave her my name, she would not feed me to the wolves.

  “I know.”

  I didn’t have any more questions after that. My bowl of stew was empty, and the table looked as likely a place to lay my head as any. I was dimly aware that she guided me to my feet, leading me up another flight of stairs and into a room with a bed and a fire. I tumbled into the bed and fell asleep before I had finished pulling the furs over me.

  She paced. The motion was as natural to her as breathing, her boots brushing the stone as lightly as the pads of the wolf beside her. Snow spilled out around them, wreathed in freezing fog. Snow, ice, thorn. That was her world. Those were the boundaries. Those were her boundaries.

  She growled, turning on her heel in frustration as she approached the end of the battlement.

  Damn that man. Damn him and his reaching hands and damn her for her pity. She should have killed him. She should have ripped his throat out, as he and his hunters had done to two of her Hounds, painting the snow red and calling down the ravens to pluck out his sad brown eyes.

  The girl
had his eyes.

  A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.

  She turned again, her gloved fingertips brushing the fur of the wolf beside her, and pulled the rose the man had stolen from her breast pocket to stare at the crushed petals.

  White. No hint of red. Her Hounds had found it in time.

  She looked closer.

  Did the palest hint of pink run through its veins?

  She held it up, letting the full light of the moon fall over it.

  No.

  Fog kissed her cheek, curling her hair into ringlets of ice. For a moment, she had doubted. She closed her eyes. Memory pounced from beneath her lids, riding fear to the surface.

  “Rose for a rose, thorn for a thorn,

  That is the price of true love scorned.”

  The witch had spoken with a voice chipped from the flint hills, laden with the promise of summer and heavy with snow.

  “What do you want, old woman?” the Huntress had asked.

  Her Hounds had quieted, and even the dogs stopped whining. Only the boy’s ragged breathing broke the stillness, and then that, too, was gone.

  The witch watched out of eyes that reflected only sky and smiled, her nut-brown face as seamed as old bark and just as yielding.

  “Do you toss away true love so lightly, Isolde?”

  The Huntress’s hand tightened on the rose. She gasped as the thorns pierced her, in surprise more than pain, and a drop of her blood fell on the boy’s torn chest. The witch smiled.

  “True love? He was a child,” said the Huntress.

  The woman leaned on her stick, still smiling.

  “A child willing to die for you.”

  “That is not love. That is idiocy.”

  “And yet you bleed.” The witch stepped closer, holding out her hand to take the Huntress’s.

  “Roses,” the Huntress spat, tossing the flower aside and shaking off the old woman.

  “You would scorn them, too?”

  There was a storm brewing in the question. She had felt it even then, but had not heeded it.

  “I have no use for roses.”

  “No use for love, and no use for roses. Tell me, Isolde, what do you have a use for?” The witch raised a finger stained with a single drop of blood to her lips as she spoke.

  “This.” The Huntress opened her arms, gesturing to the forest and shoving fear aside. “The hunt. My Hounds. Not roses, not the love of some pup, and certainly not you.”

  “Ah.”

  The hair on the back of her neck prickled, as it did before thunder broke over the mountains. When the witch spoke next, she had heard each word as a crack of lightning.

  “For your pride, you may keep your castle and your forests, but only beasts will roam your halls, and all those you love will turn to tooth and claw and cloven hoof, save you. You shall be just as you are, colder than a winter star and just as lovely, and you shall live among them, a huntress, a queen among the bones, until the day comes when you learn what it is like to love helplessly, hopelessly, and truly. Only then will you be free, but freedom will bring you no joy, because the price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.

  “Until then, I will bind you and yours with ice and thorn, until the years have stripped the memory of warmth from your bones and the only thing that blooms within your kingdom is the winter rose. As long as those roses grow wild, you shall reign over winter and all her beasts, but beware: where the winter rose takes root, it grows, and its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear.”

  The Huntress forced her eyes open, but the witch’s words still echoed off the moon-drenched mountains.

  It did not matter.

  The rose, idly plucked, had not rooted.

  Chapter Five

  I woke in a room with a curving outer wall and a feel of old wealth clinging to the stones. The fire had burned low during the night, and the chill forced me out from under the furs to add some wood from the stack beside the grate. In its smoky light, I saw old tapestries shot through with silver and gold threads, the colors muted with age and the tapestries’ occupants faceless and faded. A heavy curtain hung over the only window. I dragged a few of the larger furs off the bed and wrapped myself in them, pausing to stroke the velvet of the drapes before I exposed a forearm to the cold and unlatched the shutter.

  Snow and mountain after mountain spilled out before me, the entire eastern range marching away into the sunrise like the craggy backs of grazing cattle. Below, the frozen lake shone like a polished mirror in the brightness of the sun, the snow blinding. Clouds floated past the window, or maybe it was freezing fog; this high up it was hard to tell. Somewhere down there lay the valley where my father and sisters and I had lived, and beyond the mountains, out of sight, lay the sea.

  Somewhere, but so far beyond my reach it might as well have been the moon.

  Wind gusted past the window and into the room. It cut through the furs, stripping away the warmth that still clung to my sleep-soft skin. It took several breaths before I realized the rattling sound in my ears was not the shutter, but my teeth.

  All that snow. All that ice. There was no way on this once-green earth that I could find my way home, even if I managed to escape. I shut the window slowly, the dark wood eclipsing the harsh light, and with it, hope.

  Time passed.

  I did not check the progress of the wintry sun, but the wood burned in the grate and I added more, staring at the flames until they flickered, low and blue, and I was forced to move my hand to fetch another log. Rough pine, burning hot, and the occasional hardwood. If I had been raised in the mountains, I would have known their names. If I had been raised in the mountains, I might have stood a chance.

  A knock on the door set my heart to pounding. I stared at the thick, wooden boards. There was no lock from the inside. All she had to do was open it, and she would find me huddled on the rug by the fire, unarmed, my face streaked with ash and tears.

  Silence stretched.

  I heard the soft clatter of wood on stone, and then nothing. She walked so quietly that it was impossible to tell if she had left, or if she stood, as poised as a mountain lion, waiting.

  The fire died again, and my mind slipped away, sliding down the mountains to the hard-packed dirt road that led to the gray gates of the city.

  I had seen the gates only a few times. We had no cause to leave the city, at least not by land. Sometimes my father took us out in a little boat, rowed by the bear of a man he kept with us for such outings. Henrik was his name. He had a long, blond mustache that Aspen liked to tug. We didn’t see that many blond men in the city, but not many people stared at Henrik for long, with his scarred face and his massive fists, imposing in their strength when wrapped around the oars, but gentle enough when he lifted us one by one onto the docks.

  The Ice Bear, my mother had called him.

  My thoughts skidded away, fleeing those crowded wharfs and the bright skirts I’d worn and taking shelter in the stables where my father kept his horses. A big red roan for riding, and a matched team of blacks for the carriage, stabled side by side in the wide, clean barn that smelled of hay and the occasional salt breeze from the ocean. My mother’s horse flickered in and out of memory, golden, with a mane as white as snow.

  No.

  Father had sold that horse when she took sick, to help pay for the doctors and later the magicians and finally the funeral. Sara had held me as they led my mother’s horse away. Sara, whose quick laugh and quicker hands taught me how to mend and clean the black leather harness and braid the black ribbons into the team’s tails. Sara, who had found the brown gelding and the cart for us when no one else had dared touch my father’s ruinous debts.

  “For you,” she’d said to me, pulling me out of sight. “Get the hell out of here, Rowan.”

  And then she’d kissed me, full on the lips, her dark eyes searching mine. Whatever she saw made her grin; a twist of her laughing mouth, the familiar tilt of her head, the sweet smells
of hay and grain and horse clinging to her rough-spun tunic.

  If I could only get a message to her now.

  Sara, I would write, I need another horse, another cart, another traveling cloak to shield my face, only this time it’s not the banks I’m running from, but . . .

  My mind skipped again, and I found myself in the garden of our town house, the walls built with smooth stones and covered in climbing roses. They had reminded my mother of home.

  I stood, the furs falling to the floor and my chest heaving. There were no roses in my mother’s village. None that I had seen, at least.

  The wild hope died at once. If my mother had ever been here, to this strange castle, she would have told us, or at least my father. She would not have left us without some sort of warning, nor would she have doted on those roses. Pinks and reds, never whites, I remembered, now. I never saw a white rose in her garden. Not like the ones that bloomed here.

  The rush of feeling faded, but it had banished the lethargy that had borne me through the morning, and I crossed the floor to the door, listening with my ear pressed hard against the crack. When I was sure that nothing breathed beyond, I opened it. A tray lay just outside. I glanced around, but nothing stirred in the hallway. My stomach grumbled as I took a cursory inventory. Bread, and another bowl of stew with the fat congealing on the surface. A pitcher of water and a small tin cup. Food fit for a prisoner.

  After eating, I tried to drift back into the warm place between despair and nothingness where memory came and went like waves, but the food had roused me. It was good bread, full of the taste of summer. I fingered the crust. Wheat did not grow on this mountain, nor did the Huntress strike me as the sort of woman who would willingly mill her own flour, which could mean only one thing: the bread came from elsewhere, and any contact with the outside world was an opportunity I could snatch if I kept my wits about me.

  I soaked up the cool stew with the heel of the bread and took a closer look at the room. The first thing I noticed was the lack of dust. I had spent the last year shouldering the burden of the departed housekeeper, and I knew what it took to keep a large house clean. A few cobwebs hung in the highest corners, but the drapes on the bed looked clean, if faded, and the floor was smooth and free of debris.