Princess of Thorns

by Unknown

  Even before we meet the fairies in the shadows of the woods—before Janin, the Fey healer who will become my second mother, places her hand on my chest to take the measure of my new magic—I know that Mama has wished something very different for me than the beauty or grace or lovely singing voice the fairies granted her in her cradle. When I learn I will walk through life with enhanced strength, a brave spirit, a merciful mind, and a heart no man I love will dare defy, I am pleased that Mama wished so well for me, that she gave me such fine tools to help me reclaim our kingdom.

  I don’t dream for a moment that she has cursed me as surely as she’s blessed me.

  I am only a child, too innocent to realize that there is no salvation without sacrifice, no light without darkness, no triumph that doesn’t carry the seeds of its own destruction bouncing in its pocket.

  Chapter Two

  Ten Years Later

  Aurora

  The immortals are wrong; the golden god the humans say comes to fetch their spirits at the end is real—far younger than they’ve imagined, and neither wrinkled nor bearded, nor possessing a third eye in the center of his forehead—but real all the same.

  Real, and divinely beautiful.

  Sleep drags at me, but I struggle to keep my eyes open, not wanting to miss a moment of my death.

  I wonder how the god will summon my soul from my body, and if it will hurt the way it does when ogres steal a soul. I wonder if he will take my spirit to the Land Beyond, curse me to the Pit, or force me to live out another mortal existence, this time as a vulture, or a Carn fish, or a maggot, or something equally miserable in order to pay for the mess I’ve made of my human life.

  “A fifty-fifty chance and I get the wrong one.” The god laughs bitterly as he runs a hand through his shaggy hair. “Should have flaming known.”

  I try to ask what he means, but all I manage is a moan.

  “Waking up, then, are you?” He glances down at me where I lie, wrists chained to a metal ring the Boughtswords drove deep into the ground. “How you feeling, little man?”

  His voice is deep and softened by an accent I know I should be able to place, but I can’t remember the language of round vowels and soft Rs. I can’t even remember the names of the four kingdoms. There is no room in my thoughts for anything but the god’s terrible beauty—his golden hair falling in waves to his shoulders, his bee-stung lips, his eyes as bright and blue as the sea stone I stole from Janin’s treasure box.

  He is … magnificent.

  The god snaps his fingers between my eyes, but I’m too numb to flinch. “Can you understand me?”

  I reach up, patting his cheek before running a buzzing finger over his impossibly perfect mouth, surprised to find his lips as solid as the chains knocking against my arm, real and warm and a tiny bit chapped, which for some reason makes me giggle.

  “Sleep-drunk bastard,” he mumbles, knocking my hand away. His expression is kind enough, but I see the disappointment in his eyes.

  But then, he is a god, and must see straight through me to the secrets of my black heart. He must know that I have lied, thieved, and betrayed my only friends, and all of it for nothing. I am dying, and soon Jor will join me in death and the Ronces line will reach its tragic end.

  “Forgive me,” I say, but the words come out tangled. My tongue is thick, my mouth dry, and my head full of smoke and shadow.

  The leader of the Boughtswords set four braziers of Vale Flowers burning in my tent, determined to keep me too sleep-sick to damage any more of his men before the caravan reaches the slave market. Instead, I will soon be dead. I try to take satisfaction in the fact that he will lose the small fortune even a scrawny, Fey-trained warrior would have fetched at market, but I’m too muddled to focus on any one thought for long.

  Even Golden God, the great and beautiful, with his lips like a love poem, has begun to lose my interest to the dragon-shaped shadows flickering on the roof of the tent until he takes hold of my shoulders and gives a shake.

  “Focus, boy.” He pinches my ears before tapping my forehead with his thick finger. “If I free you, can you stand? It’ll be easier to get you outside on your own feet.”

  Outside? Outside the tent? Outside my body? Outside …

  My eyes begin to burn from being held open too long. I try to blink, but my lids slide shut and stay that way, no matter how I fight to open them. My lashes are made of stone, my lids weigh more than the leather armor lying heavy on my bound chest.

  The armor is stolen, too. I snatched it from Thyne’s cot the morning I left, though I knew he would give it to me if I asked. Thyne would lie down and let me use him as a carpet if I told him to, though, of course, I never would. What’s the point in walking on a broken man?

  What’s the point in walking on an unbroken man?

  The thought confounds me, making my head ache even more than it did before. What is the point in walking on an unbroken man? Is the question nonsense, or a riddle I must answer in order to gain passage out of this limbo world inhabited by gods and monsters and the ghosts of all the people I’ve failed in my seventeen years of life?

  Failed, when I was so certain … so determined …

  I’m dimly aware of the god patting my cheeks, but it’s too late for him to draw me out. I am sinking into myself, back into the mists of my mind.

  I run down a red mud road, past Janin, my fairy mother, who cradles Thyne in her arms, mourning the son who might as well be dead after what I did to him. I run past my mother, covered in the wasted blood she used to bless me. I run until I reach the outskirts of Mercar, and then on through the abandoned city, down roads where ancient buildings have begun to crumble beneath a bruise-black sky.

  I throw myself through the castle gates into the royal garden, where the sacred Hawthorn tree’s leaves flame crimson red. I hear my brother scream from somewhere deep within the castle and run even faster. Faster and faster, but I can’t remember the way to the throne room where Ekeeta conducts her rituals. I can’t find Jor, can’t free him, can’t do anything to right my many wrongs.

  It should be me, I think as I race down one empty hallway after another, alone but for the sound of Jor’s tortured cries. I’m the one Mama blessed.

  I should have done more to protect my brother. I should have insisted we put an end to our twice-yearly visits, no matter how careful we were when traveling under the cover of night. The entire point of being raised in separate corners of the world was to prevent both of Norvere’s heirs from being killed or captured at once. I should have insisted we stay apart. I should have listened to the fairy elders and married the king of Endrean and his navy of five hundred ships. I should have heeded Janin when she warned that there is a difference between bravery and pride, but I didn’t, and now my pride will be the ruin of the world.

  I finally turn the corner to the throne room, only to find the doors locked against me. I push and shove. I slam my fists into the etched metal where my father’s family seal—thorns lifting a red-sailed galleon from the sea—still marks the door, but all I receive for my efforts are broken bones. Something cracks in my right hand and pain blooms in my fist. I fall to the ground, clutching my arm to my chest as Jor’s screams cut off with a terrible suddenness.

  My brother is dead.

  I know it the way I know the sun is hot and the seas are blue. Jor is dead. My sweet brother, my best friend, my last living family member and the only person it is safe for me to love, is gone. He will never grow into those extra inches and broad shoulders he sprouted this year. He will never be a man or a beloved or a father. He will never celebrate his fifteenth birthday.

  “I’ll kill you!” I scream, ignoring the tears that run down my cheeks. “I’ll cut your heart out!”

  “You’ll do no such thing, child.” The queen is suddenly in the hall before me, staring down at me from her great height.

  She is sixteen han
ds if she’s a finger, a long, lean column in her ivory dress with the gold trim. Her face is as taut and firm as it was when I was a child—youthful and pretty in its gaunt way, though I know she is close to two hundred years old—and her bald head is concealed by a mass of golden hair. The wig looks real, but it is not. It is a lie, as everything about the false queen is a lie.

  I leap to my feet, determined to kill her with my one good hand, but when I reach for her my arm goes limp, falling to hang useless at my side. I cannot use deadly force except to defend myself. My mother’s fairy gifts do not allow me to be merciless, even to the one being who deserves no mercy.

  “Give yourself to me, Aurora,” Ekeeta says. “There is nothing left for you to live for.”

  “Stuff yourself,” I growl, wishing I could sink a dagger into her heart.

  “It’s a shame.” Ekeeta leans down until her eyes are level with my face. Her thin lips stretch, but she doesn’t show me her sharper-than-human teeth. “One would think your mother would have wished for intelligence for you along with your other gifts. But Rose wasn’t known for her thinking, was she? Poor, pretty … dead thing.”

  With a howl, I lunge for the ogre queen’s throat, but the moment my clawed fingers touch her flesh she vanishes, leaving nothing but a pile of biting beetles behind.

  The beetles tumble over each other as they scuttle along the floor, fleeing the boot I bring down upon them again and again. I stomp them to juice, panting with panic born in my days in the dungeon when I woke with beetles nesting in my hair, crawling along my throat, creeping beneath my skirt to leave bite marks up and down my legs.

  The last of the insects disappear beneath the throne room’s door and I collapse against the wall, covering my face with hands, weeping in a way I haven’t in years. I weep for Jor and Thyne and Janin. I weep for the people of Norvere, who will never be free of the tyranny of ogre reign.

  I weep for what feels like years and am still crying when I’m plunged into a world of cold, where there is no air to breathe.

  My eyes fly open and I suck in a lungful of water as I’m pulled to the surface. I see bleary gray sky and my own boots sticking out the end of a watering trough, and I cough loudly before a rough hand covers my mouth and a voice hisses in my ear—

  “Quiet, little man. These ragers are drunk, not dead.”

  I shove the hand away and spin to face the voice, sending water sloshing out onto the grass in the process.

  Behind me, squatting with his thick arms crossed atop the rough wood of the trough, is the young god, looking far less godlike in the thin morning light. He’s still the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen—which is saying something for a girl raised among fairy boys so lovely they can break a human heart with a glance—but he’s not divine.

  A god wouldn’t have a faint bruise staining one cheekbone or the beginnings of a mangy beard with patches where the whiskers have refused to grow. A god wouldn’t have dust on his clothes or smell like a mix of campfire and barley liquor. And a god certainly wouldn’t wear a full-sleeved gray shirt of the style popular only in southern Kanvasola.

  Worship of all gods, human and immortal, has been forbidden in Kanvasola for years, ever since the Immortal King Eldorio decided to live forever and ordered his country to worship him instead.

  “You speak the language of Norvere?” the boy asks, hesitating only a moment before asking me the same question in Kanvasol.

  “Who are you?” I ask in my native tongue. I know a bit of Kanvasol, but not enough to carry on a conversation. “What do you want?” I shiver but make no move to step out of the water. My head is clear and my stomach settled for the first time in days, and the cold is at least partially responsible for banishing the haze of the Vale Flowers.

  “I’m Niklaas of Kanvasola, eleventh son of King Eldorio,” he says with a grin and a slight bow of his head. “And you are Jor, the lost prince of Norvere.”

  I shake my head. “No, I—”

  “I gave a priceless suit of armor and a piece of my soul for a charm to help me find a briar-born child.” He reaches into the front of his shirt and pulls out a pendant shaped like the spokes of a wheel. It is made of flat, unremarkable gray stone, but as soon as it is free of his shirt it rises of its own accord and strains toward me. I’m certain if Niklaas took it off, the charm would glue itself to my face. “Seeing as you and your sister are the only two such creatures left, I know exactly who you are.”

  “What do you want?” I reach up to squeeze the water from my hair, grateful that my warrior’s knot is holding strong atop my head.

  I look boyish enough with my braids down—it takes more than long hair to make me easily recognizable as female, especially when I’m dressed in a Fey warrior’s clothes—but I’m grateful my hair won’t be in the way if I need to fight. I can’t imagine what a Kanvasol prince wants with a briar-born child, but I’m certain he’s up to no good.

  “Relax, boy, I mean you no harm,” Niklaas says, obviously reading the distrust in my expression. “I’m going to help you escape, and in exchange you’re going to help me find what I’m looking for.”

  My first thought is to tell him to take his “help” and shove it so far between his ass cheeks he’ll waddle down the road—I stopped speaking like a princess the day I began training to be a warrior—but I bite my lip. I came to the Boughtsword camp alone, certain the Fey gem in my pocket and the promise of more once Jor was freed would be enough to secure an army.

  Instead, the gem, which in my naïveté I hadn’t realized was far too valuable to be used as a token payment, was stolen and I was taken captive. I wounded a dozen or more men before I was locked away, but still …

  “How did you get the chains off?” I ask, rubbing the chafed skin at my wrists.

  “Picked the locks.” Niklaas pushes to his feet and reaches a hand down to help me from the trough. “It’s a skill best learned early in my family.”

  I ignore Niklaas’s hand and allow my eyes to flick up and down his long body, considering the eleventh son of the immortal king. He’s tall and strong, with thick muscles obvious beneath his gray shirt and dusty brown riding pants. I imagine he could be dangerous-looking if he would smile less, and he can pick locks and sneak unnoticed into Boughtsword camps and no doubt has many other useful, real-world skills.

  I’m a well-trained fighter, strengthened by magic, light on my feet, and nearly fearless, but I’ve been too isolated on my fairy island. I need an ally who knows the ways of the mainland in order to secure an army, and I need to find that ally quickly. I must free my brother before the Hawthorne tree in Mercar Castle’s courtyard turns crimson. If I don’t, Jor will die come the changing of the seasons. Janin saw his death in a vision, and her visions are rarely wrong.

  Rarely, but not never. Mortal interference can change the course of fate.

  Janin foretold that my mother would live a long, happy life once her hundred years of sleep had passed, but my father fought his way through the fairy briars to wake the Sleeping Beauty twenty years early and changed all that. I have to believe I can change Jor’s fate as well. If I move quickly.

  Summer is lingering this year, but the crisp in the air this morning warns it will not last forever.

  “Come on, then,” Niklaas says, frustration creeping into his voice. “The camp will wake soon, and I’d rather you stay alive. At least until we locate your sister.”

  “What do you want with Aurora?” I eye the sword at Niklaas’s waist, gauging my chances of taking it from him. Ekeeta put a bounty on my head as soon as she realized I had escaped her dungeon. If this prince means to find “my sister” and deliver her to the ogre queen, I will be better off finding another ally.

  “I want to court her. What else would a prince want with a princess?” Niklaas asks with a grin I’m certain has convinced more than a few girls to tumble him without the benefit of sacred vows. “But sadly,
my charm was magicked only to take me to the nearest briar-born child and won’t work a second time.”

  “That is sad,” I say in my flattest tone.

  “Could be worse,” he says, still grinning like the rat that gave the cat rabies. “I’m sure your sister will be pleased to learn I saved her baby brother from the slave market.”

  He pats my cheek; I slap his hand away. “Perhaps. If your father weren’t Ekeeta’s only ally.” I glare at him, not bothering to hide my suspicion from my alleged suitor.

  Suitor. Ha! This pretty lion-boy would gag on his own tongue if he knew I am the girl whose hand he hopes to win. A girl who has no trouble passing as a boy, with not a whisper of the beauty her mother was so legendary for.

  “Exactly.” He winks. “Nothing could make my father angrier than his son shaming him before the queen. So I mean to marry your sister, assuming she’ll have me.” He braces his hands on the trough “Now let’s go, little man, before we lose our chance.”

  He’s lying. No one within spitting distance of his right mind would marry the most hunted girl in Mataquin simply to irritate his father. I have no idea what Niklaas’s true motives are, but it doesn’t matter, not so long as I get what I want before he realizes he’s been played for a fool.

  “All right. I’ll take you to Aurora, but first I’ll need your help securing an army.” I stand up, wincing at the sound the water makes as it pours from my clothes.

  I glance around at the camp. The only movement comes from two buzzards circling high in the leaden sky and a wispy ribbon of smoke rising from the remains of last night’s cook fire. The brown tents remain tightly wrapped, and even the animals are still asleep.

  “An army, eh?” Niklaas watches me struggle out of the trough and squeeze the water from my overshorts with an assessing look. “Better be a flaming big one, boy. Even then, you may be able to take the capital, but holding it will be another thing.”