The Castle Behind Thorns

by Merrie Haskell

  Torn bedsheets made good bandages, and there were plenty of linens to choose from. But bandages didn’t make Sand’s wrist feel any better, and they didn’t lower the thorns. How was he going to get out of the castle?

  He steeled himself and opened the night portal again. Immediately, the thorns reached yearningly through the grating of the portcullis. Sand yelped and closed the portal. He backed away, heart racing.

  He could try cutting them, but he imagined the thorns grasping his knife or shears and pulling him in—or just stretching to reach past the length of his blade and sinking more sharp ends into his tender flesh.

  Fire?

  Torn bedsheets also made a good torch, when coupled with scrap wood. He had no pitch or resin for long burning, but he needed only to set the thorns alight. Quite possibly, the thorns would even flee from his fire in the same manner they moved toward him.

  He found another broken fire striker, and tinder that couldn’t really be broken, only scattered. He managed a spark, and he managed to catch it, and shortly, Sand had a proper torch. But when he opened the portal and thrust his torch into the heart of the bramble and leaped backward, the brambles pulled together swiftly and smothered the flame.

  Sand slammed the portal shut and left the tunnel.

  The Count and Countess could not have planted this bramble. That story was wrong—had to be wrong.

  Of course, the story also said that the castle had been evacuated and abandoned because of an earthquake. But he was here, where clearly some magical force had done this work, sundering apples and iron kettles as well as buildings.

  Stories didn’t know everything.

  Maybe he could find a way over the thorns. Cautiously, he climbed the keep’s tallest tower all the way to the top, where he found a cozy room with windows in every direction, and an odd ceiling speckled with numerous hinges and latches. Unlike the rest of the castle, though, nothing was broken within this room—because it contained nothing.

  He leaned out one of the broken windows to look at the thorn brake. The hedge was easily three times as thick as the outer wall of the castle itself. The only place in the castle high enough to see over the hedge was the keep, which was far from the castle walls.

  There was no getting over the thorns. It was as impossible as going through.

  Sand was trapped here, in this broken castle, surrounded by a deadly briar.

  The sun’s rays were growing long and red. Below, the courtyards had fallen into shadow. Sand’s stomach growled in anger over its neglect.

  He went to the kitchen and sorted through the debris to find enough withered apples to make a pathetic meal. Then, wrist throbbing from the thorn wound, Sand looked about for a place to sleep.

  His first, daft impulse was to crawl back into the fireplace. Grandpère always said it was human nature to want to return the way you came, but that was dangerous sometimes—at its most extreme, that’s how people got trapped in burning buildings, unable to think to try a new way out; at its silliest, that’s how people got stuck doing stupid things like sleeping in a fireplace two nights in a row.

  So, instead of crawling back into the cold, dirty fireplace, Sand swept aside the ashes and gathered together all the bits of broken wood lying nearby—except for the pieces of the phoenix and swan crest, which he propped against the chimney stones in some semblance of restored order.

  Sand made another fire. He built it up, warming his hands for a bit, then mended three or four of the broken wax candles that were lying about. Mending candles was dead easy, since all it took was remelting the broken ends together. Though he supposed he didn’t even need to mend them, as a candle stump burns just as well as a whole candle. But Sand wanted to mend the candles. He wanted something in the Sundered Castle to be right again, whole again.

  He slept there, the first night, by his fire, under the eyes of the phoenix and the swan. He shivered a little, but it was with the oncoming fever of his thorn wound, not because he was cold.

  THE NEXT MORNING, SAND’S wrist had swollen around the once loose-fitting bandage, the skin purplish where it wasn’t red. His mouth tasted foul, and he was thirsty.

  In all of his poking about the day previous, he had not seen one single whole bucket, pot, kettle, cup, or bowl. He looked again, though, just to be sure. He had already guessed that a bottle of wine or a jug of ale left intact was out of the question, but that did not stop his hopeful investigation.

  Eventually, Sand found himself staring into the castle’s well without a bucket or a rope. He couldn’t see the bottom, of course, but he could smell the mineral tang of the trickling water below. Not that it mattered. No rope, no bucket: no water.

  He climbed slowly to his feet and began searching the castle for anything that could hold water. He had no luck. Every single thing that could haul water from the well, from butter churn to chamber pot, was broken in the exact way that made water-hauling impossible without major repairs.

  With that thought in mind, Sand forced himself to go down to the outer courtyard to the craftsmen’s workshops. Though reluctant to seek the castle’s smithy, fearing what he might find there, he knew if he were ever going to repair anything for real, he would need a working forge and proper equipment.

  Sand pulled aside the remains of the door to the long-abandoned blacksmith’s workshop and stopped, staring in fascination and alarm at the anvils that lay wrenched apart on the loose dirt floor. Sand took a deep breath that shook with more emotions than he could name. The iron kettles and pots that lay broken in the kitchen—Sand could almost, almost, imagine that. He could certainly imagine the forces that overturned and smashed the bricks of a forge, or split apart hammers and tongs and other tools that were now nearly useless. He picked up a split bellows that sagged, half bent over the edge of a fallen forge. Bellows split now and then in a smithy, even without a great magical devastation.

  But an anvil—a hefty, proper anvil, pulled apart into jagged, chunky metal, so that he could see the fibers of the iron inside . . . It was unimaginable. Or it had been unimaginable, before today.

  The workshop had been a large one with numerous forges, as befitted a count’s seat, with space for armorers and swordsmiths to work, as well as areas for the forging of more mundane articles, like spoons and forks. Sand could tell: This smithy had once been magnificent. And now it lay in total ruin.

  Sand backed out of the smithy, dread creeping over his shoulders with chilly claws. There was nothing here to help him.

  Disconsolate, he returned to the middle courtyard. Thirst was on his tongue, in his throat, in his jaws.

  He slid down the well post into a hunch, chin on chest. The early spring air was chilly for resting, but the sun warmed his shoulders as it crossed overhead. He sat for a long time, watching the light and shadows change with the movement of the day. It was strange not to hear birds. There were none in the castle, and none in the thorns. All around him was silence.

  “Nothing lives here and nothing dies here,” he said, speaking just to break the quiet. “Except me.”

  After a time, Sand poked at his wrist. Still swollen. The faintest of red lines had started a march up his arm, the first telltale of blood poisoning.

  He prayed then to Saint Eloi, who watches over blacksmiths: “Please don’t let me die here, alone. I don’t even know why I came to be here—but it can’t have been to let me die, can it?”

  The prayer reminded him of the night before he’d awakened in the fireplace. He had fought with his father, their biggest argument yet. Instead of going to bed when his father ordered him to, he’d taken off for Grandpère’s house, running by frosty moonlight over the well-worn path.

  And then? He had paused at the shrine to Saint Melor, where a small spring pooled and people threw in bronze pins and silver coins with their prayers.

  His memory lingered on that shrine and the way the offerings there had glittered in the water under the full moon. He’d had no pins or coins, but he’d made a handful of nails that
day at the forge. He’d had a nail in his purse; he’d pulled it out and tossed it into the pool, offering it with a prayer to Saint Melor, who had lost a foot and a hand that were replaced with bronze and silver appendages. “Oh, holy Saint, intercede for me. Help my father to understand my heart, help us to repair the love between us. Do not make me to go the university.”

  He didn’t remember anything after that until the ashes in the fireplace.

  He forced himself to his feet and went to the kitchen, half convinced he was hungry, not thirsty, and picked through the debris for bite-sized morsels of shriveled carrots, desiccated pears, even a dusty crust of a pie.

  But eating just made his thirst worse. He had to find a bucket, or something that could act like one. He should look everywhere he had not yet looked. He pushed himself first to the stables, where he found all the saddles slashed; all the reins, girths, and straps cut; and every single piece of straw bent in half. No whole buckets here—just another reminder of the strangeness of the castle’s sundering.

  The sun was near to setting when he stumbled into the rooms that had once been the private retreats of the Count and Countess. In the Count’s sun-washed rooms, all was decorated in phoenixes—or once had been. Goose-down stuffing trailed out of three long slashes in the mattress, as though a giant trident had been swiped down the length of it.

  A great wave of tiredness overcame him. Sand looked in the mattress for signs of rodents or any other small animals that might be enjoying such a cozy home, but of course there were none. He straightened out several widths of shredded linen sheets, overlapping them across the torn mattress to contain the stuffing. He collected strips of blankets and sheets and bed curtains from around the room and made a little nest. He prayed to his name saint to watch him through the night; then, shedding his ash-covered clothes, he crawled into the nest.

  In the rosy rays of the setting sun, the red lines marching to his heart looked even more inflamed. His wrist throbbed. “Well, I guess it will be a race,” he said to the silence. “Am I going to die first of blood poisoning, or of thirst?”

  He shucked his old bandage and took a length of sheet to wrap tightly around his wrist. “Perfect bandage material,” he said, wearily winding and winding and winding. “I must have a hundred yards of bandage here. A thousand.”

  That thought jolted him fully awake.

  Sand crawled from his nest and stumbled into his clothes. He ran from the room, pelting from bedchamber to bedchamber in the darkening castle, gathering torn bedding as he went.

  He carried his pile of cloth down to the well, where he tied a mass of bedsheets together into a rough ball shape, then tore the remaining sheets into long strips, and knotted them together in a long cord. He attached ball to cord, then threw the ball into the well, holding tightly to the end of his makeshift rope.

  The cloth ball didn’t hit the water, but Sand knew he was close. He pulled the ball back up dry, as expected, and ran upstairs to find more sheets.

  He collected another wad of bedding and carried it down to the well, air rasping like a metal file through his dry mouth and throat.

  His fingers fumbled together another length of sheets. He glanced at the cornflower twilight sky, trying to judge the approach of night, and whether or not he should stop to light candles. He forged on though, testing the broken windlass, and found that at least half of it was still rooted firmly in the ground, planted in cement.

  He tied the end of his rope to it, and tossed the cloth ball into the well once more. This time, his effort ended in a splash, albeit a quiet one. He waited a moment, and hauled up the rope.

  It was heavier than he expected, and even his smith’s muscles burned by the time he hauled the ball out. It flopped, sopping, onto the flagstones of the courtyard. Sand eagerly picked up a segment of sheeting and wrung it into his mouth, then another, then another, then dunked his sheet-ball into the well again, so that he could drink until his thirst was quenched.

  Relief spread through his body, like the warm relaxation that overtook him just before sleep.

  Perhaps he should have gone to bed then. But now that his desperation for water was gone, he suddenly, intensely, missed his family.

  Driven by the notion that he might see the sparks from his father’s forge if he just climbed high enough, he lit a mended candle and entered the keep. Blacksmiths did some work best in the darkness, when it was easier to see the gradations of color change in hot metal. That was why his father’s smithy was high on a hill, on the far outskirts of the village—so that his hammering didn’t keep people awake when he worked at night. Sand and his family were used to it.

  Stomach sloshing, Sand dragged himself up the stairs to the odd, empty room in the tallest tower. Outside, the sky was nearly dark, the dimmest of ruddy reds clinging to a cloud bank in the west, the exact color of heated iron just before it became bendable and began to glow.

  He looked out across the village to the dark shape of a small house on a hill. No fire shone through the smithy’s open door. So his father was not working tonight. Because he was worried? Agnote, Sand’s stepmother, certainly would be, would be worried right out of her mind for Sand right now. No matter how his father felt, she would have sent him off to look for Sand, first to Grandpère’s, then probably along the road to Paris.

  But then what? No one had seen Sand. He had disappeared from the world. What did his father think? What was he going to say to Agnote when he returned home without Sand?

  Sand crept back down the stairs to the comfortable nest he’d made in the Count’s rooms. It took a long time to fall asleep. His thorn-pierced wrist sent wave after wave of pain up his arm, and he kept thinking about his father, his stepmother, his sisters, the forge, his home. Agnote and his little sisters must be crying. But Agnote, even Agnote who had blown breath into him when he arrived blue from his mother, would never, not in a thousand years, think that Sand lay restless and ill inside the Sundered Castle.

  3

  Kitchen

  WHEN SAND WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, THE SUN was far above the thorn brake, and he felt clammy. His head and wrist throbbed. “I’m alive,” he groaned. “But I’m not doing a very good job of it.”

  He looked at the red streaks snaking halfway up his arm. Agnote was a midwife, and she had treated poison in the blood often enough, but with mixed results. What had her treatments looked like? There had been tisanes and tinctures, of course, and poultices with green leaves—wet, stewed-looking leaves, pale green . . . slightly scalloped, with big veins. Cabbage? Not dock or mullein, but cabbage like people ate?

  Only, nothing but thorns grew here. It was early spring; beyond the castle, things were greening nicely, but inside the walls the land was empty of even the tenderest shoots of green anything. Nothing grew in the gardens. Even the fruit trees stood dead and barren, never having regrown even a little from their shattered trunks.

  Sand made his way back to the courtyard where ancient, dry leaves of cabbage still lay under pieces of glass in the smashed-up cold frames. He no longer believed they had reseeded themselves—he believed that they were the same cabbages that had been here the day the castle had been abandoned. How they had managed to survive as long as they had, as well as they had, Sand didn’t know, but if no insects came to eat them, that must have helped. He collected the dry, rustling leaves and carried them into the kitchen, pondering how he might boil water and stew the leaves without the benefit of a pot.

  In the end, he decided to use half a pot, tilted on its side. It would be a very shallow stewing pot.

  It worked well enough; the stewed cabbage leaves, even with as little efficacy as they must have retained after years of sitting around, felt very good on his wrist. Sand’s body felt lighter, like he’d taken off the heavy goatskin coat he wore in winter. He wasn’t going to die of thirst—not soon. And though he might still die of poisoned blood, it would take a while, and the cabbage helped the pain.

  Sand went looking for a surgery. There had to be so
me place for healing in the castle beyond the mess of an herbary—a place where a barber had once practiced dentistry, lanced boils, and cut hair.

  He did find what could have been such a place, eventually, tucked away in a corner of the middle courtyard. He found dried-up old leeches in a broken bucket and a handful of sharp tools split into fragments. He carried a selection of damaged barbering tools back to his kitchen fire and settled down to work on his arm.

  He selected a broken lancet, and wrapped a bit of linen around the severed handle. His breath came in quick gasps. The lancet’s small, two-sided blade made him nervous. He’d never guessed he could be afraid of a bit of iron.

  But he went on with it anyway.

  Sand pressed the blade point into the dark spot at the center of his wound. The pain was agonizing. He bit down hard on his lips, willing himself to break through the swollen skin and release whatever poisons lay beneath.

  But the lancet’s tip slipped a fraction and pressed deep into his wound without splitting the skin. Out squirted a needle of thorn almost half the length of his little finger. It was just there, poking out of his wrist, like a ground squirrel in its burrow, popping up to look for danger. With the thorn came no small measure of blood mixed with pus.

  Sand plucked out the thorn carefully with his fingertips and threw it into the fire.

  He almost thought it might not light. He could imagine the thorn holding itself intact and piercing him again as he swept the ashes out of the fireplace in the future. But he watched, and the thorn burned just fine.

  Immediately, the throbbing in his arm took on a new pace. He hoped it was a healing rhythm.

  SAND, FEELING BETTER, BECAME curious to see the shop where his father had worked as a boy.

  He strolled down to the outermost courtyard and found the shoemaker’s area. The ruin of wooden lasts and torn shoe leather told him nothing. Sand could no more imagine his father in this room when it was whole and orderly than he could imagine his father at age thirteen.