Relieved, I nodded. I checked Griff. He seemed completely exhausted. His hand, in mine, was very cold. “We’re safe for now, Griff,” I told him.
He blinked and focused on me. “Rose,” he said, his voice rough.
“He spoke!” I exclaimed.
“So he did,” Timothy said dryly.
“That’s a good sign, don’t you think?”
“Story is weaker here, in the Forest,” Quirk said, then jerked his chin in Griff’s direction. “And look at him now.”
I did. Griff took a breath, about to speak again, then went even paler. His eyes clenched shut, and he gritted his teeth, as if he was in pain.
Story wanted him silent, I guessed. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “You don’t have to talk.” I looked down at Quirk. “He needs to rest.”
“All four of us need to rest,” he said grimly. “But can you smell that?”
As he spoke, the wind shifted a bit, and I caught a whiff of smoke. “Yes,” I replied. “What is it?”
“The Forest won’t give them a path, so Story’s servants are hacking and burning to come after us,” Quirk said. “We’d better get deeper into the Forest before we can rest. I know a place where we can camp; we’ll be safe from them there. Do you know it, Timothy?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “Come on.”
They led the way, and I followed, not taking my eyes from the yellow bobble on top of Quirk’s hat, pulling Griff along with me.
The Forest seemed to dislike me and Griff. Where the path was smooth for Quirk and Timothy, we kept stumbling over roots that appeared under our feet, and being swatted by branches. I kept my eye on the bobble and trudged on.
A tree with smooth, silver bark appeared in our path. Quirk and Timothy went to the right around it, and without thinking, I led Griff onto what seemed to be a wider path around the other side of it, and two steps later, the path ended and we were facing a tangle of golden leaves and ferns turning brown at their tips. I stopped and shouted for Quirk.
He responded from a surprising distance away. Calling constantly, we fought our way through densely packed trees and sprays of bramble until we managed to find each other again.
“Well, that’s enough of that,” Quirk muttered. Digging in his tunic, he pulled out the thimble and put it onto his finger. “A path, curse it,” he ordered.
Almost grudgingly, the Forest offered us another path.
“Not much farther,” he assured me.
We went on as the evening shadows gathered. There was no more smell of smoke on the air. We’d been traveling since before dawn, and I was tired; Griff’s shoulders were hunched, as if he was carrying a heavy burden, and he walked with his eyes closed.
Finally we reached a cliff. It stood across our path, as high as the treetops, rosy in the last of the afternoon light, and crusted with moss and ferns that grew on little ledges.
“See?” Quirk asked, pointing.
I looked, and saw, high above us, an opening in the cliff—a cave.
“It’s an old Breaker hideout,” Quirk said. “A safe place.”
“How do we get up there?” I asked wearily.
“There’s a trick to it,” Timothy told me. “Watch.”
The cliff had seemed steep and unclimbable, but she was right; there was a path of sorts. She scrambled up it first, bringing the knapsack, and then she came back down and with her on one side and me on the other, we led Griff from one handhold and foothold to the next, up and into the cave’s opening. Quirk followed.
Inside it, we found a ladder, which we climbed down into darkness, standing on what felt like a sandy floor, the last of the afternoon light like a window at the cave’s opening, above us. The air was chill and musty.
Quirk whispered a word, and his thimble glowed. Its light reflected from rough, sand-colored walls. The cave was huge, and along one wall there were boxes and barrels, and there was a fire pit in the middle, already set with wood. Quirk went to it, bent, and a spark fell from his thimble. In a moment, a merry fire was burning. Then he and Timothy went to the boxes at the edge of the cave and started opening them. “There’s a spring back here, too,” she called.
I sighed with relief. “Come on, Griff,” I whispered, and led him closer to the flames. He sat, wrapping his arms around his drawn-up knees, and I sat close beside him, lending him my warmth.
Quirk came from the boxes with another, smaller box. “Physician’s kit,” he said, dropping it on the sand next to me. Then he went back to the supplies, and he and Timothy started setting out blankets and preserved food.
I turned to Griff. “If you take your coat off,” I said, “I can bandage up the cuts you got from the thorns.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice rough.
My heart lifted. “You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”
He looked around at the cave. “It’s weaker here.”
“Story, you mean,” I said.
Quirk had brought a kettle and was hanging it on a hook over the fire. He nodded. “This cave has long been a place hidden from Story. We’re safe. For now.”
Griff nodded, and rested his forehead on his knees.
“Eat something,” I told him, “and then you can sleep.”
He lifted his head again. “I won’t sleep.”
“Oh.” I looked at the flames.
Quirk was setting out a frying pan, and mixing up flour and oil. “Did you find the dried berries?” he asked, and in answer, Timothy tossed him a paper package tied with string.
It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was a respite. I dredged up a smile. “This reminds me of our cottage, mine and Shoe’s.” I glanced aside at Griff, who watched me, his face sober. “Every night we ate dinner, and then we read stories to each other, or told them.”
Quirk poured out tea and passed me two cups; I gave one to Griff. He held it in his hands, warming himself. I set my cup in the sand beside me, and leaned on Griff’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you the story about the time the goats got out of their shed and met a wolf.”
Timothy settled on the sand next to Quirk. “Oh, this sounds exciting.”
“There was the occasional wolf in the valley,” Quirk remembered, pouring the batter he’d mixed into a pan and setting it over the fire.
I nodded. “In the winter they’d come down from the heights to hunt. Mostly they left us alone, but this one time . . .” While we drank our tea and ate the pan-cake that Quirk had made, I told the rest of the story. Quirk laughed at the parts that were funny, and Timothy rolled her eyes when I told about the stupid thing I’d done. “And then . . . ,” I said, and paused. Griff was gazing at me, listening. I smiled. “But maybe you don’t want to hear the end of this story.”
“Let me guess,” Timothy said. “The snow kept falling and the wolf ate the goats, and you and Shoe had no milk or cheese for the rest of the winter.”
“No,” I scolded. I turned to Griff. “Do you want to know what happened?”
He frowned, studying my face.
“Not all stories are Story,” I said. “Sometimes it’s just goats and a wolf and a silly girl in a shed on a cold, snowy night.”
“Story will have its ending,” he said in a voice that grated almost like the grinding of gears.
The sound made me shiver. “We can make our own ending,” I told him.
He shook his head. “Rose,” he started, then took a steadying breath. “Your curse.”
I nodded. “We broke it when I kissed you.”
“No.” He rubbed his head, as if it ached. “The spindle curse has been broken. But there are two others. The sleep curse. And one more.”
I felt a twist of terror in my chest. “Two more curses?”
He nodded, then reached over and took my hand; turning it, he pushed up the sleeve of my sweater, exposing my wrist. With a cold finger, he tapped it. “You are still marked by Story.”
My rose had faded slightly, but he was right. It still bloomed on the pale skin of my wrist.<
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“Can you break the other two curses?” Quirk asked sharply from across the fire. Timothy stared at us over the rim of her mug of tea.
“No.” There was a long silence. When Griff spoke again, his voice was brittle. “If I try, Story will use me to burden her with more curses.”
Trembling, I gripped my hands together. “What are the other two curses?”
He studied me. “The sleep curse is one. I don’t know what the third one is. But I can see both of them.” He lifted his hand, and did something strange, tracing a shape around me, but not touching me. “They cover you,” he said grimly. “Like a shroud. I think one might be death.”
I WASN’T FREE, after all. Story was coiled in me, and in Griff, and it was pulling us toward the City. During the night, I lay next to the fire wrapped in a blanket, but I barely slept. Possibilities kept turning over in my mind, but none of the threads of thought that I followed led anywhere. We couldn’t go back; we had to go on.
As the night ended and the cave opening brightened with the morning light, I sat up, so weary, nearly despairing.
Griff was on the other side of the cave, where the sandy floor was smoothest, doing his Watcher’s drills. I watched him, the shift of muscle over bone, the flick of the knife, the block, the turn, the flow into an attack. His face was focused, austere.
As the cave lightened, Quirk sat up from his blankets, his blond hair tousled. Timothy slept on beside the fire, oblivious. Seeing me, he nodded. “Didn’t sleep?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think he did either.” I pointed at Griff.
“No. He wouldn’t.” Getting to his feet, Quirk yawned and stretched. Then he poked Timothy with his toe.
“What?” she mumbled without opening her eyes.
“Time to go,” Quirk said to her.
“I’m still asleep,” she said, and pulled the blanket over her head.
“Not at her best in the morning, apparently,” he said to me. “I’ll have to remember that.” He crouched beside her. “Come on, Timothy. I’ll make tea.”
She peeked out from under the blanket. “Will you put sugar in it?”
“Aren’t you sweet enough already?” he teased.
She mock-glared at him, but she got up.
After we’d eaten, we prepared to leave the cave, to push on toward the City. I saw how Griff gritted his teeth, steeling himself to bear the weight of Story again. By the time we got to the bottom of the cliff, he was pale and silent.
Timothy seemed on edge, and Quirk was quiet, too, deep in thought. He knew that Story was forcing us back to the City; he knew that we’d all be in danger there. How the danger would arise, we didn’t know.
We walked all that day. In the evening, when we stopped, Griff sat down and fell at once into an exhausted sleep. But after a few minutes he jerked awake again, his eyes wide. I knew why. Story was waiting for him in sleep.
The next day we continued. As we set off, Griff pulled away from me when I tried to take his hand. Then he led us onward. Quirk and I exchanged a look—something had changed. But Griff still didn’t speak. When we took a break, he paced, restless, and ignored my attempt to share my food with him. We went on, and as we walked, brown leaves drifted from the trees along the path. Autumn was advancing; soon it would be winter. Evening fell, and we reached the clearing not far from the City where the leader of the Breakers, Precious, had her cabin.
Timothy ran ahead to open the cabin door. After putting her head in, she came back to us, frowning. “Abandoned.” There was no sign of Precious or any of the other Breakers.
Quirk shook his head and led us to the river’s edge. The water flowed past, swift and dark in the fading light.
Too tired to talk, we set up camp. I huddled close to the fire with a blanket wrapped around me. A few paces away, Timothy and Quirk had their heads together, discussing something in low voices. Griff stood with his back to us, looking upstream, toward the City. As night fell, its lights stained the sky. We would be there tomorrow.
I ached with the need to be with Griff, to kiss him one more time. I got to my feet. “Griff?” I asked, taking a step toward him.
His shoulders stiffened. He didn’t turn around.
Sorrow, sharp as thorns, gathered in my chest. “What are we going to do?”
Quirk came to stand beside me. He was turning the thimble in his fingers; I saw it glint in the firelight. “We’ll decide tomorrow.”
“All right,” I said.
But in the morning, they came for us.
CHAPTER
33
THE CLOSER THEY CAME TO THE CITY, THE MORE CLEARLY Griff saw his path before him. Story was rising to power there, and it drew him. It had received a setback at Castle Clair, when the beauty had not fallen to the spindle curse, but it had found a way to turn the situation to its advantage. There was no escaping it. It was too big, too powerful. Even the Forest could not resist it. He was Story’s weapon, and it wanted him at hand.
And so he made himself into a blade. Sharp, cold, emotionless.
He was awake when they came.
The two girls and the Witch were asleep. The sky to the east was gray with dawn, but the shadows of night had not yet lifted.
At the river, he heard the men sent from the City. The splash of paddles in the water, the low growl of an order. The scrape of wooden keels over rock. They were black outlines climbing out of their boats, lurching up the steep riverbank.
He got to his feet. The thimble, a cold, heavy weight, was in his hand; the spindle was in his coat pocket. He had his knife, sheathed at his back, but he knew he wouldn’t need it. The fire was behind him; he knew that he was a looming shadow to them. Four of the servants gathered in the darkness just beyond the circle of light from the campfire.
“Hold there,” Griff said quietly.
“Well, if it isn’t the errant junior,” came an oily voice from the shadows.
Luth, the leader of the prison cohort, edged into the light. With him was another Watcher in gray, and four of Story’s blue-coated servants from Castle Clair, two with the long snouts and fangs of dogs, two with furred faces and the hulking shoulders of bears.
As he had expected, the servants had found boats and gone down the river to reach the City before him. Despite his carefully honed rationality—or maybe because of it—the Lord Protector would have been easy prey; without the City’s true Protector to save them, he and his Watchers would have fallen to Story and joined with its servants. All was in readiness.
“Seize them,” Griff ordered, and pointed toward the banked fire where the Witch and the Breaker and the construct were still sleeping. With a howl, the servants leaped to obey. He heard a scream, and a scuffle; there was a brief flash of light and the sound of a blow. He did his best to ignore it.
“Ran away, did you, junior?” Luth taunted, easing closer. “And now you’ve come back.”
Behind him, he heard another shout and the sound of a blade being drawn, and more Watchers and servants emerged from the darkness, ready to seize the two girls and the Witch.
“Some of us are very glad to see you,” Luth said, and stepped forward to grab Griff’s arm.
“No,” Griff said, slipping the thimble onto his finger.
“But—” Luth protested.
The thimble was heavy with power. Griff raised it slightly and fixed Luth with a cold eye.
Luth faltered and fell silent.
Griff turned as the blue-coated servants came to report. Two of them held the beauty by the arms. Her braids had come unpinned and hung loose around her face; her eyes were wide with fright.
“Griff?” Her voice trembled.
He didn’t let himself respond. “Where are the others?” he asked.
“They slipped ’way,” a servant answered, with an uneasy look at Luth. Then he bowed his head deferentially to Griff. “The little one used magic, sir. We c’n go after them.”
“No,” he ordered. “Leave them. I will take the girl to the citadel.”<
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I COULDN’T STOP shaking. Partly from the cold—the air near the river was dank and chilly—but even more because of Griff. As he gave orders about binding my hands, his eyes skimmed over me as if he didn’t see me.
His vision had once been so keen. I wondered what he saw now. The beauty? Story’s construct? The shroud of the curses that lay over me?
The horrible Watcher, Luth, tied my hands in front of me. “Taira and I missed our chance with you before,” he said, jerking the knot tight. I shuddered and tried to pull away, but he took me by the chin and leaned closer as if he was going to force a kiss. “Frightened?” he crooned. “Good. I like that.”
And then Griff was at his shoulder. “She is not for you.”
Scowling, Luth released me, stepping back.
For a moment I was relieved; then I saw the glint of the thimble on Griff’s finger. It meant he was saving me for something else.
“Put her in the boat,” he ordered.
Rough hands seized me and dragged me down the steep riverbank, and thrust me onto a seat with my back to the bow of one of the boats. After a moment Griff climbed in and sat, facing me. Watchers and servants shoved the boats away from the bank, leaped in, and started paddling upstream, toward the City. They hadn’t found Quirk and Timothy; I felt some hope, knowing they’d gotten away.
The dawn had advanced; the sky was white, with an edge of red to the east where the sun was coming up. In the dim light, Griff’s eyes were the gray of old ice and deeply shadowed with weariness. He still had on the bloodstained, tattered black coat; our hard days of travel had pared him down to bone and lean muscle.
I was shivering. My hands were bound, so I couldn’t wrap my arms around myself for warmth.
The Godmother’s thimble, Quirk had told me, was associated with cold, with forcing people away from their true selves, and with forgetting.
“Griff,” I started, then steadied my voice. “I think you must remember me. I’m Rose.”
A flicker of a glance from the ice-gray eyes. But even that was better than Story’s blankness. It gave me the will to keep going.
“I know,” I said, with a rueful shake of my head. “Shoe used to tease me about how chattery I am. Even at a moment like this, when everything is awful and I’m so frightened, and Story wants us to be miserable, and isolated from each other, and obedient to its . . .” I paused and lifted my bound hands. “Its plots and its plans for us.”
Rose & Thorn Page 27
