Heart of Thorns

by Bree Barton

  The truth coiling through Mia for days finally settled in the pit of her stomach. She knew the answer before she even asked the question, but only now did it materialize in clear strokes, like ink drying on a page.

  She took a breath. “Did my mother have magic?”

  “Oh, darling. Your mother had mountains of magic. In our sisterhood, she was a powerful Dujia, a gifted Dujia.” Lauriel touched her cheek. “As are you.”

  Chapter 35

  Murderous Angels

  MIA SAT AT A small wood table with Lauriel, Quin, and the twins, devouring a savory breakfast. She ached for the journal—she wanted to wrap her arms around it, squeeze out every last drop of truth her mother had concealed for so many years. She understood nothing: about her mother, about magic, about the world.

  But the kitchen was warm. Days of fear and exhaustion melted from her pores. In spite of everything, she could feel her heart opening like a flower to the sun. If she closed her eyes, gave herself over to the clank of forks and aromas of fire-cooked food, she could pretend she was at home, sitting around their kitchen table, her father stealing kisses from her mother while the bread dough rose. The one benefit of her raging headache was that it obliterated all possibility of scientific conjecture. She was forced to live in her body, to let the morning wash over her, a medley of simple pleasures, not least among them: eating real food again.

  “How’s the minha zopa?” Lauriel asked.

  Mia nudged her bowl forward, and Lauriel smiled and spooned out another generous helping. “A Fojuen classic. Pork chouriço, grilled onions, roasted tomatoes, and straw-fried potatoes seasoned with garlic and wine.”

  Lauriel had prepared them a magnificent feast: in addition to the minha zopa, there was crusty bread hot from the oven, pats of yellow butter and zanaba jam, soft crumbling cheeses, fresh-grilled cod with green chilies and tiger milk, sautéed mustard greens, peppery chicken baked in hot ash, and a sweet liquid made from roasted corn. Lauriel proudly named the dishes as she set them on the table, hot steam snaking up from each plate.

  Mia’s taste buds were in ecstasy. A rawboned hunger poured through her, and with every bite she took, she felt her body replenish. Her mother had tried many times to cook her favorite Fojuen recipes for their family, but she could never get them quite right. It was next to impossible to find the right ingredients and spices in Glas Ddir, she said, after King Ronan closed the borders.

  Now, sitting in Lauriel’s cozy kitchen, Mia knew she was eating authentic Fojuen cuisine for the first time. The tangs and flavors flooded her mouth. She thought of all the mornings she had spent with the du Zols, comfortably ensconced in their sunny kitchen in Ilwysion, her mother looking as happy as she ever had.

  “There’s more of everything, darling,” Lauriel said, tapping a scooped spoon against a giant saucepan. Above the stove, long ropes of garlic swung from the wood beams, next to iron and copper pots forged by Lauriel’s own hand. Beneath them a row of orange baked-earth pots sprouted robust plants and herbs. There were no walls in the kitchen; it opened onto the rest of the modest cottage. Through the back door, Mia spotted plump red tomatoes growing on a vine.

  “Do you like the fish, Your Grace?” Sach’a stared hopefully at the prince. “I helped make it.”

  Mia waited for Quin to express his usual food euphoria, but he’d been quiet and withdrawn ever since arriving at the cottage.

  “He loves it,” she answered for him. “Quin adores fish.”

  “Good,” Lauriel said. “We haul a fresh catch from the lake every morning.”

  Junay rolled her eyes. “If I have to eat one more fish, I will bury its carcass in a part of this house none of you will ever find.”

  Junay, the other twin, had retained every bit of fire Mia remembered from three years ago. Sach’a was charming and poised, with a carefully controlled maturity; Junay was volatile and righteous. The girls shared their father’s dark umber complexion—Dom favored their mother, with his warm ochre skin—but that was where the resemblance stopped. Even the twins’ hair was a testament to their warring personalities: thick, spirited corkscrews bounced off Junay’s shoulders, while her sister sat primly in her wicker chair, smoothing sweet almond oil into her scalp.

  “If you buried a fish in your own house,” Sach’a said calmly, “then you would have to smell it, too.”

  “Thank you,” Junay snapped. “I’m so glad I have a sister who knows everything.” She turned her attention to Mia. “How come you didn’t know your mother was a Dujia?”

  “Duj!” Lauriel scolded. “Junay!”

  “What, Mamãe? I want to know.” She turned back to Mia, undeterred. “Weren’t there signs? Things that didn’t add up? Surely you wondered.”

  Mia was taken aback. “She never talked about her past, I guess. I knew she had secrets, but I never thought . . .” She trailed off, feeling like a failure of a daughter to miss such an obvious part of her mother’s life. Not to mention a bad scientist: she had ignored every clue.

  “I . . . I knew she’d studied medicine in Fojo Karação. That she traveled to the river towns in Ilwysion and Killian Village to help people who were sick or dying.”

  Junay groaned. “She didn’t come here to study medicine! She came to study magic. Did you never wonder why so many of those sick people recovered?”

  Mia opened her mouth but no words came out. Her mother had healed people with magic. Of course she had. A twelve-year-old knew more than she did.

  “Junay.” Lauriel placed a firm hand on the table. “You are being relentless. Mia has just arrived after a long journey. Can you leave her in peace?”

  “Fine.” She folded her arms, then unfolded them. “You really didn’t know? That just seems hard to believe.”

  “My father led the Circle of the Hunt! How could my mother have had magic? The Gwyrach were demons. They were ruthless and inhuman.”

  She saw Lauriel glance at both her daughters.

  “I’m sorry,” Mia said quickly. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  Lauriel waved a hand. “I imagine you’ve had many surprises on your journey, and not all of them pleasant.”

  “Including when Nanu grabbed her in the merqad and called her a veraktu,” Sach’a said. They all turned to look at the old woman, who was now knitting passively, no threat to anyone. She wheezed.

  Lauriel turned to Junay. “It was your day to watch her, Jun.”

  “I watched her yesterday!”

  “And I watched her the five days before that,” Sach’a said quietly. “Did you give her her medicine?”

  “She didn’t need it,” Junay fumed. “She’s fine.”

  “Her medicine is for when she gets confused?” Mia asked.

  Lauriel shook her head. She stood and began plucking leaves from the herb pots. “Our bodies and minds fail us as we age, even Dujia. Especially Dujia. It’s as if our magic erodes our shells more quickly.” She stuffed the leaves into a speckled stone mortar and ground them with a pestle. “Nanu’s mind disturbs her, but her lungs give her trouble, too. They are not what they once were. Sometimes the air becomes trapped and she has trouble breathing.”

  Lauriel sprinkled the herb powder into a dented copper cup and poured in a stream of steaming purple liquid. When Nanu wheezed again, she fitted the cup into her wrinkled brown hands.

  “Drink, Mamãe. This will smooth your breath.”

  As the old woman sipped at the broth, Mia said, “Why can’t you use magic to heal her lungs?”

  Lauriel smiled. “It’s not as if we lay our hands on someone and heal all their ailments forever. We heal them in small ways every day. But magic is reactive, not preventative. By the time we are forced to use magic to intervene, it is often too late.” She patted her mother’s knee. “So we take what precautions we can. And when it becomes necessary to use our magic, we do so.”

  “I used head magic on Nanu today,” Sach’a said proudly, “after she called Mia a veraktu.”

  “What is a veraktu?” Mia aske
d.

  “It’s nothing,” Junay sniffed. “Just a Dujia who’s in denial. A Dujia who’s ashamed of being Dujia because she’s been fed lies her whole life and sucked them down like jelly.” She smiled brightly. “Can I do something with your hair?”

  Helpless against the girl’s mood swings, Mia nodded. Junay clapped her hands and bounded off to the loft upstairs.

  “Forgive her,” Lauriel said. “She hasn’t bloomed yet. Her sister has, and . . . well. As you might imagine, this house is something of a war zone. To have one Dujia daughter and her unbloomed twin is a nightmare no parent should have to endure.”

  Mia had so many questions. What did it mean to “bloom”? Was that when the dormant magic in a Gwyrach’s body manifested? And where was Domeniq? She tried to imagine masculine, strapping Dom in a village overflowing with demon women. The thought amused her. She supposed he’d had good training for it, growing up in a house with three women.

  Considering the way all the girls in the merqad had gaped at the prince, Dom was probably very popular.

  Mia snuck a peek at Quin. He was chasing a piece of cheese around the plate with his fork. He felt her eyes on him, looked up, and tried to force a smile. She knew she should ask Lauriel if the prince was safe. But if the answer was no, did that mean she’d have to leave Refúj? Selfishly, she didn’t want to. Sitting here with Lauriel, learning about magic, she felt closer to her mother than she had in years.

  “Does Dujia mean ‘demon’ in Fojuen?” she asked.

  “Duj, no! A Dujia is a creature of the divine. The Dujia are a sisterhood.”

  “So here in Fojo, Gwyrach are creatures of the divine?”

  “My darling, everywhere we are creatures of the divine. Duj katt,” she swore. “Did your mother teach you nothing?”

  Mia switched into translation mode. “Duj katt means ‘four gods’?”

  Lauriel tipped her head back and let out a full, throaty laugh, her black curls dancing merrily. “Heavens no. Duj means goddess! Not god. Never god. We are Dujia, descendants of the goddesses. In the river kingdom, they call us demons, but here in the fire kingdom, we go by our true name.” Her eyes glittered. “We are angels. A sisterhood of angels descended from the Four Great Goddesses who gave birth to the four lands.”

  “She won’t say four kingdoms,” Sach’a explained, “because she doesn’t believe in kings.”

  “Kings are just men in paper hats.” Lauriel gestured toward the prince. “It just so happens that sometimes the paper is made of gold.”

  “Gold crowns can be perfectly lovely,” Sach’a added, smiling shyly at Quin.

  From upstairs Junay yelled, “Not when they’re worn by the king of Glas Ddir!”

  Quin shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  Seeing him like this, taciturn and reserved, reminded Mia of the prince she’d known in the castle. She felt more at home with the du Zols than she’d felt in ages, but she imagined he felt the opposite. As unhappy as he was in Kaer Killian, he did have power there; in Refúj he was powerless. Was he frightened? She listened for the rhythm of his pulse, but she couldn’t hear it.

  Come to think of it, she couldn’t hear anyone’s pulse. Not even her own.

  The absence of sensation unsettled her. She’d only been aware of her magic for a week, but already it had animated her blood and made it sing. The headaches were atrocious—she could do without those—but she had swiftly acclimated to the symphony of other heartbeats, the sweet harmony or discordant notes. Not hearing them now, engulfed in silence; it was lonely.

  “I can’t feel anything,” she said.

  “Of course you can’t.” Junay bounded back in holding a comb with heavy iron teeth. Mia flinched as Jun reached out her hand—other than her mother and sister, no woman had ever touched her hair without wearing gloves.

  “For someone with curly hair,” Junay said, “you should really take better care of it.” She yanked the comb through her tangles so hard Mia cried out.

  “Duj! Junay!” her mother reprimanded.

  “What? You always told us sometimes beauty hurts.” She inflicted more brutalities on Mia’s scalp. “You can’t feel our pulse because of the uzoolion.”

  She pointed at the doorway, and for the first time Mia noticed the border of blue stones: the same cerulean stone Dom wore around his neck. They continued past the doorframe and onto the floor, where they ringed the entire cottage in an unbroken line. There must have been thousands of stones pressed into the earth.

  “It’s a boundary,” Sach’a explained. “To keep us safe.”

  Mia got up from her chair—to the consternation of Junay—and stooped over the uzoolion. She ran a finger down the line of smooth blue stones and felt nothing. But that was just it. She felt nothing. Every time she’d touched her mother’s ruby wren, it ignited her blood, shook her to life. But when her fingers grazed the uzoolion, it was as if her blood had struck a wall.

  “Uzool means ‘water,’” Mia murmured. She was stitching together a new theory: fojuen catalyzed magic, while uzoolion impeded it.

  “We have a family rule,” Lauriel said. “No magic in the house. That way we can trust our own bodies, our own hearts.”

  “Which means if someone is being obnoxious in this house,” Sach’a said, “it’s because they’re obnoxious.” She looked pointedly at her sister.

  “Certain stones come with certain potencies,” Lauriel went on. “They can enhance or diminish magic. Some stones can even store it up. Fojuen is born in the vibrant, thrashing heart of a volqano. When Dujia wear the red glass, it amplifies their magic. It makes the heart pump faster and the blood flow quicker. If a Dujia has not yet bloomed, fojuen can usher the magic in more swiftly.”

  So Mia’s theory was correct. Now she understood why, when she pressed the ruby wren to her chest, she’d experienced all manner of side effects, from headaches to heart palpitations to full-on fainting. It was no coincidence she had first enthralled Quin the same night she received her mother’s book—and the fojuen key that went with it. The little ruby wren was powerful.

  “And uzoolion does the opposite,” Mia murmured.

  Lauriel nodded. “Uzoolion weakens a Dujia’s magic. With enough of it”—she gestured to the stones trimming the cottage floor—“you can block magic entirely. If we wear uzoolion, we cannot be controlled by any Dujia who would seek to hurt us. Even a man who wears the stone can sense the presence of magic. A quiet tap, tap, tap.”

  “I’m guessing this is why Dom wears uzoolion around his neck.”

  “We all do.” Lauriel pulled a blue amulet from her blouse. “It keeps us safe.”

  “Lauriel?” Mia’s voice was small. “Why wasn’t my mother wearing uzoolion the day she died?”

  The room went very still. Even Junay was quiet.

  “Darling, I don’t know.” Lauriel’s shoulders sagged. “I’ve asked myself that many times. If Wynna was with someone she trusted . . . someone whose magic brought her pleasure . . . someone she wanted to touch her . . .”

  “Someone she loved,” Mia finished.

  Lauriel wouldn’t meet her eye. Mia thought of all the evenings her mother had spent with Lauriel on the balcony of their cottage, talking, laughing, sipping blackthorn wine, and taking nips of the stronger spirits they smuggled in from Fojo. For the first time, a smoky coil of doubt ringed itself around her thoughts. She knew Wynna and Lauriel were best friends, but what if their relationship was something more?

  “I did love your mother,” Lauriel said, as if she could read Mia’s thoughts. “But only as a friend. I was not the angel Wynna loved.”

  Mia’s heart beat so hard it threatened to crack her sternum. The theory she’d hatched in the Twisted Forest was rekindling. “But you’re saying she did love someone. Someone who had magic.”

  Lauriel stood and wiped her hands on her apron. Her curls were no longer dancing. “I’ve said too much.”

  “Lauriel. Please. I’ve been searching for the Gwyr . . . the Dujia who killed
my mother for the last three years. The journal was spurring me onward, leading me to this place. That can’t be a coincidence. If the woman who killed her is here . . . if she’s in Refúj . . .”

  They stared at each other. Mia didn’t like not being able to sense the people around her; she couldn’t tell if Lauriel was lying. She couldn’t tell what anyone was feeling, not even herself.

  “Duj katt.” Junay pinched the cod by the bony tail, lifted it into the air, and dropped it onto the plate with a slimy slap. “Who needs to hide a dead fish? The secrets in this house already stink.”

  Lauriel shot her a warning look. “Junay.”

  “Mamãe,” she mimicked. “She deserves to know! If you died, wouldn’t I deserve to know who killed you?”

  She turned back to Mia. “I don’t know who did it, but I know who will. Ask Zaga. She knows everything. She probably has a whole roster of murderous angels in her secret cave.” Off Mia’s blank look, she added, “Go find my brother down at the lake. He’d be happy to take you to Zaga.”

  “Why are you doing this, Jun?” Sach’a murmured.

  Junay smiled beatifically at her twin. “Watch out for those obnoxious ones, Sach. We’re even more obnoxious when we tell the truth.”

  Chapter 36

  Meant for You

  THE PATH TO THE lake was a carpet of soft red sand, studded with low, dry brush. Mia felt better once she was beyond the reach of the uzoolion. As the sun sweated in the morning sky, her blood was making music inside her again.

  Lauriel had pleaded with her not to go—“not yet, not until you’re ready”—but the moment Junay had given her a destination, they all knew there would be no debate. Mia had pushed her chair back from the table and left without another word.

  “Mia?” Quin easily caught up to her on his long legs. “Do you really think this is a good choice?”