by Anna Sheehan
For Jennifer, my perfect, beautiful, wonderful sister who has never burnt any of my books
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Also By Anna Sheehan
Copyright
Chapter 1
* * *
Once Upon A Time is how they begin the story. Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess, cursed by a wicked faerie, to prick her finger on a spindle and die on her sixteenth birthday. Another faerie softened the curse and the princess and her entire court fell instead into a hundred-year slumber, while vicious, man-eating thorns grew up around the palace. After a hundred years, a handsome prince made his way through the briars, and kissed the princess awake. They married, had two beautiful daughters, and lived happily ever after.
Everyone forgets about the wicked faerie, whose curse was spoiled, and whose name was disgraced. But I couldn’t. I was reminded of it daily.
‘Faerie! Demon!’ Someone shouted that day’s reminder at my kit sister. ‘Nameless! Oh, gods, protect your children! Get her!’
I looked up. I was too far away to be of much help immediately. My sister and I hadn’t exactly been together. It was sheer folly to be seen beside each other in a public place, but we weren’t very far from each other, either. We would work together to get food to eat. The kit had a gift of illusion, so it was easy for her to conjure up a bird or a dog that would distract stall owners so that I could steal a loaf of bread or a withering winter apple. Unfortunately, the kit’s magic doesn’t work very well when she’s scared, and the moment someone recognized her as what she was, she panicked. Her only choice then was to run, and of course I had to stay with her.
It was usually the kit who gave us away. As a man I could wear a hood, and so blended more easily into human society. The kit was still a child, and female at that, so she couldn’t conceal herself as deeply as I could, hoods being distractingly unfashionable for girls. She was also so stunning her features were too recognizable. Faeries don’t look like ordinary humans. We’re usually considered unnaturally beautiful, just a little too graceful. Our limbs are longer, our heads are proportionately small, our eyes proportionately large. We’re naturally taller. And of course we have pointed ears. Some faeries have wings, which makes them even more obviously inhuman. But there was one literally glaring difference between my family and ordinary faeries.
Most faeries glow with magic. It’s a slight glow, one that makes them look as if they’re perpetually standing in the sunshine, even in darkness. My mother, my kit sister and myself were constantly in shadow, even on the brightest day of summer. If we can hide that we’re faeries at all, we can blend in with human society, if we’re careful. If we stay indoors or stick to shadows no one really notices that we aren’t glowing. Unless someone notices that we’re faeries, in which case, we end up running for our lives from angry mobs.
A whole pack of human boys was after the kit this time, all between the ages of sixteen to twenty, each of them eager to prove himself to his mates. I bolted through them. At first they thought I was one of their own, and they let me through. But then I caught up to the kit and helped her turn the corner, and one of them shouted, ‘It’s another one! Get him!’
The kit was too terrified to do any magic, and my best spells took more time to spin than I had. We ran down the frozen market streets while the boys shouted behind us, ‘Thief! Nameless! Demon! Get them!’
A horse shrieked as a cart piled high with hay pulled into the cobblestone street before us. The kit shrieked back, launching herself up over the back of the cart and over the driver, who fell from his perch like a sack of potatoes. I wasn’t so lucky. The cart came up too quickly, and I skidded on ice. A collision seemed inevitable, and I distinctly heard one of the boys behind me shouting, ‘We’ve got him now!’
He didn’t know much about faeries. The cart had fairly high wheels. I bent backward under it as I skidded, nearly touching the back of my knees with the top of my head. But as I came out from under the cart my loose shirt caught on the splintered wood and pulled up over my head. I heard a clatter, and my heart stopped beating. No! I let myself fall onto my back, and the air was forced from my lungs. I looked up, and saw two things at once.
The first was the kit. She had vaulted from the hay wain and set off down washer’s alley, where half a dozen laundresses plied their trade. The shouts of ‘Nameless’ and ‘Demon’ had preceded us, as had the curses of the fallen driver. I watched as one of the washer women, her face like a gargoyle and arms like iron tree trunks, lifted up her washtub to throw the ten gallons of water and lye onto my kit sister. The second was my wooden drop spindle, fallen from my shirt onto the icy cobblestones, with the last of my wool still clinging to it.
My choice was terrible, and I hesitated a second too long in making it. Before I could sit up to protect my sister or fetch my spindle, a two pronged pitchfork pinned my hood to the cobblestones. ‘Got you!’ the owner of the pitchfork gloated. It was the fallen driver, dirty snow and ice ground into his hood from his fall. My mind refused to work fast enough, and in the corner of my eye I saw the kit plastered against the wall of the alleyway, the steaming wash water impacting her with the force of a body blow.
The rest of the mob would be on me any moment. My magic was stronger than the kit’s, but took more time to implement. I’d lost my spindle. It all seemed finished for me, but I was lucky. The kit saved me.
It was her best spell, the first spell she’d ever learned to cast. The kit yelped and suddenly half the street was engulfed in blue and white foxfire. People screamed. Horses whinnied. Shouts of ‘Fire!’ echoed over the houses. My captor hesitated then dropped to his knees, trying to shield his face.
Yes! I twisted the pitchfork away and threw it as far as I could into the blinding fire. Pausing to snatch up my spindle, I ran to catch my sister and pull her away from the coming mob, which would soon realize the foxfire held no heat.
‘You all right?’ I asked as I pulled her along behind me.
‘My eyes hurt,’ the kit said.
‘If you were human, you’d be blinded for life,’ I pointed out. ‘Come on, we have to hide.’
She blinked at me, and despite the dire circumstances, she giggled.
‘What?’
‘You’ll have a hard time. You’re glowing.’
I looked down at myself. The kit’s foxfire surrounded my hands, and my clothes bled white tongues of flame. It tended to stick to magic, and I was always doing magic. I shook the flames off so that I wouldn’t be a glowing beacon to anyone persuing us. ‘This way,’ I said, and I ducked away from the marketplace.
The marketplace sprawled just outside the main gates of the palace, with a wide margin separating the town from the hedge of thorns that protected the royal house. To the west were the residences of the more affluent townsfolk, who looked upon the somewhat tamed hedges as an advantage, particularly in the summer when the roses bloomed. To the east were the slums, which had been forced in that direction by the more aggressive thorns. I pulled the kit towards the deserted eastern wall of the palace. There was quite a gap between the houses and the thorns here, and the people tended to look on the hedge as nothing more than
a hazard. ‘This way.’
The kit baulked as I tried to lead her towards the eastern wall of thorns. ‘That way?’
I glared at her. ‘You have a better idea?’
The shouts of the mob behind us grew louder. The kit’s fire would be dying now, leaving, unfortunately, no damage. If I had my way, every last one of the bloodthirsty blackguards would be burned to a cinder, but that wasn’t the kit’s magic. The kit swallowed. ‘No?’ Her fear made it come out as a question.
I pulled her towards the palace and the hedge of briar roses. ‘I’m sorry,’ the kit said as she followed me. ‘I’m so sorry. The breeze came up, and my scarf blew, and …’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault you were recognized.’
The poor kit was beyond beautiful, and that was most of her problem. I was the plain one in the family, and thanked the stars for my features. I took after our da, a fox faerie my mother had taken up with against, apparently, the advice of general faerie society. Before we’d lost our Light, my ma’s family had been considered rather high rank amidst the faerie clans of the area. Fox faeries were more earthy, more mischievous, more bestial, and usually dismissed by the greater clans. Most of them were loners who made no claim to the great clans of most of faerie society. My mother was the worst off in our family, as she was still tall and noble and beautiful, and moreover, bore wings she could not hide. The kit and I took after earthy Da, and were, fortunately, wingless. I hid my more overt features beneath a hood, summer and winter. It was aggravating that my sister couldn’t wear such a thing without drawing too much attention.
With the kit’s white hair and her white skin and a pair of huge amber eyes which glinted with mischief, she was far too noticeable. She tried to hide her ears beneath her hair, and in winter she could don a scarf, but she was so stunning, and so out of proportion for a seemingly eleven-year-old child she had a much more difficult time than I did. And she was so white that her shadow was obvious.
We were shadowed because we were disgraced. There’s a name for us. The only name left to us. We were of the Nameless.
Humans don’t fully understand what a terrible thing it is for a faerie to be without a name. To a human being, a name usually means only what someone is called. It is a label, an appellation. As one would title a book or a play, to change the title is not to change the play itself.
But to one of my kind, a name is self. To change or remove our name is to burn the parchment the play was written on. The play no longer exists. Oh, the players may remember the parts. They may act out a scene or two. Members of the audience who saw it may remember the play in passing. But the play itself is lost.
I wasn’t born lost. My mother remembers when I had a name. She doesn’t remember my name, of course, or her own. I was an infant when we lost ourselves. My kit sister had a name, when she was born. If I tried very hard I could almost remember noticing it, the blood connection she had with her brother granting me that taste of her instant of self. It lasted about a second before the curse took effect, and her baby glow was cast into shadow. Now she was just another fox kit fae, like me. Nameless. Stationless. Considered a criminal, almost a demon. Laws forbade harbouring us, dealing with us, feeding us. We were lower than vermin. We were considered plague carriers, fit only to be exterminated. Hence the angry mob. Hence why we were risking our lives sneaking into the thorn hedge surrounding the palace at Lyndaron.
The leafless briar roses shivered as we stepped into their winter shadow. They pulled aside as if to welcome us. I knew better than that. I pulled out my spindle. ‘No, don’t!’ the kit cried, looking behind us.
‘You want to die?’ I asked.
The kit frowned. Using the spindle was illegal, but we were already being hunted for our lives. She gestured that I should go ahead.
This wasn’t the first time I’d spun my way around the palace thorns. They were a useful place to hide, if you had no other options. No one would possibly follow you in there, not the most bloodthirsty murderer. To enter the briar patch was death.
I pulled a few fibres from the wool in my pouch and fed them onto the thread I already had on my spindle. I closed my eyes for a moment to find the feel of the thread, and then spun the spindle, letting it swing like a pendulum beneath me. The wool became thread, and I poured my magic in with it, forcing my will upon the thorns. They began to twist and sway, spinning quietly aside. I nudged the kit forward with my foot and followed in after her. Once inside, the magic followed me, closing us into a tiny bubble of clear space into which the thorns could not follow. When we were deep enough inside the hedge I grabbed the spindle and the thread, holding the spell taut around us.
Within a few more minutes several of the mob appeared beside the hedge. They’d brought dogs. I heard one of them yelp as he got too near the hedge. ‘Hey, Ralph, get back from there!’
I wanted to scoff. The damned dog had a name. The kit and I were below even that.
It wasn’t through any fault of ours. The Nameless are made Nameless through a consensus of the faerie clans, usually because of some heinous act. Ordinarily, the Name is stripped only of the malefactor, but in this case the malefactor was the head mistress of our clan. The only way to make her of the Nameless was to strip her of her clan name as well as her own. Which meant the entire clan suffered, including my cousins, my mother and myself.
My mother’s aunt was to blame. As for what she did, the stories were garbled. It was clear she cast some kind of curse on Princess Amaranth, but precisely what it was and what her motives had been had been lost. I was too young to follow the faerie gossip before we were made Nameless, and my ma wouldn’t discuss it, but from what I had been told as a child, she had tried to kill Princess Amaranth, and had cursed the royal palace with the thorn hedge. The very thorn hedge the kit and I were hiding in, as the mob bayed for our blood.
The thorns still surrounded the palace, attacking the unwary. The writhing, twisting briar roses seized innocent victims whenever they could and drained them of their very blood. It was quite a spell. Even twenty years after Queen Amaranth’s resurrection, the thorns still grew over and around the palace. They tried to cut them down, but the only thing that had worked so far was to drive them out with strong ivy, which sapped the ground of the nutrients the thorns needed to survive. Some areas of the thorns, like the western wall, had been tamed by interbreeding them with ordinary roses, but these were expensive, didn’t always take, and needed to be imported from distant countries. The truly deadly thorns were now fewer in number, mostly surrounding the eastern wing of the palace. Unfortunately, the thorns that were left now seemed more aggressive, more hungry for the blood of passersby. Eventually, so the royal family swore, they would have eradicated the thorns for good. I wished the thorns would last forever, and eat the royal family into the bargain.
Unfortunately, they seemed about to eat my sister. ‘Ow!’ she hissed. ‘It has my leg!’
‘Be still!’ I crouched down and twisted my spindle another time. The thorn complained, creaking its hunger, but slowly released its hold on the kit. She heaved a sigh of relief, but only whispered her thanks to me, keeping hidden from the mob and their dogs. Not that they could get at us in here.
Many in Lyndaria don’t know how spindles work, even in the ordinary way. They’ve been banned since before the interregnum. I’ve had to make my own. Even if I was human, if anyone saw what I hid beneath my tunic I’d be arrested. Once they found out that the malefactor was also one of the Nameless, I’d probably be executed. The Nameless are not allowed second chances. My drop spindle looks a bit like a wooden top, with an extremely long handle. When I attach a bit of hand-twisted thread to the lower end, I can start the spindle spinning, and use the weight of the round ‘top’ section to pull the thread from the wool. Which is what I was doing now to still the thorns, pulling from the little bag of wool I always kept on a belt beneath my tunic. I have the Spinner’s Gift. It is usually considered a women’s gift. It isn’t a very common gi
ft in men. I inherited it from my mother, along with my Namelessness.
In Lyndaria, which looks down on magic to begin with, this is a thrice-cursed gift. I am a faerie, I am Nameless, and I am a spinner. If the queen knew of me, I’d be above mass murderers on My Lord Provost’s list of Evildoers To Be Disposed Of. Spinning magic caused the interregnum, and caused beautiful Queen Amaranth to spend a hundred years asleep in her briar-guarded palace.
I sometimes wondered why the thorns were so difficult for me to subdue. If it was indeed my aunt who had summoned them, they should respond to the traces of her blood I carried in my veins, and bend to me like a lover. But they didn’t, and I was forced to maintain a constant spell with my spindle.
‘Let ’em go, Reg!’ shouted one of the mob. ‘They’re long gone or eaten by the hedge. Let’s get out of here. These plants scare me.’
‘Too right,’ another replied. ‘Do you know how many hundreds have died in their clutches?’
‘I heard a story about a pair of lovers,’ began another voice, and as he told his tale they all began to fade away down the paths. A dog barked one more time in our direction, but was quickly called back.
We weren’t out of the woods yet. I still had to bring us back out of the briar patch without getting caught and bled. ‘You go on ahead of me,’ I told the kit. The sweat was beginning to stand on my brow. The thorns were battling me with a hundred years of strength.
‘R-right,’ the kit said, and took a hesitant step away from the palace wall. I kept up a constant spin as I walked behind her out of the hedge. Finally we were far enough away to be safe. I heaved a sigh of relief and let go of my thread.
I had been a bit cocky. With a crack, a branch of thorns lashed for my ankles, trying to drag me back into their clutches. I was out of range, but only by an inch. The kit yelped, and I jumped out of the way. ‘Whoops!’ The kit grabbed me and pulled me away from the hedge. ‘I’m all right!’ I snapped. I was ashamed of myself. I should have kept the spell going until we were well out of range. You’d have thought that a hundred and twenty years of Nameless wandering would have weaned me away from such folly. I pushed the kit away.
