Not immediately, but soon enough, Merlin swooped down from the rafters and landed on Perrotte’s skirt-covered arm.
“Well done, Merlin,” she said in a low and even voice. “You don’t have any jesses, do you?” She glanced at Sand. “Thin leather ankle straps for falcons,” she explained.
Sand shrugged. “He wasn’t wearing any when I found him.”
She pursed her lips. “She, really. A male falcon would be much smaller.”
“Oh,” he said, entirely unsure what response was required for that.
“Let’s go,” Perrotte said. “I might need your arm at some point. I’m still sometimes unsteady.”
He hurried after her. She descended to the middle courtyard, which had a ring of guard towers along the outer wall. The falcon blinked, but showed no signs that he—she—wanted to fly off. Perrotte headed for a nearby guard tower, and slowly climbed the narrow stone steps to the top.
“Can we, maybe, tie a message around Merlin’s leg and see if anyone contacts us from the outside world?” Sand asked Perrotte’s ascending back.
“She’s not a pigeon,” Perrotte said sharply over her shoulder.
He wasn’t sure if Perrotte meant that messages were beneath Merlin’s dignity, or if it was just not possible.
“It’s against her nature,” Perrotte explained more gently when they reached the top. “She’ll hunt for us, but she’s going to come back to us, if the bond is strong enough. She’s not going to fly off to—I don’t even know where you think she might go—and wait and carry a message back. Or however pigeons do it.”
He just nodded, looking down at the thorns from the tower. They didn’t loom over the castle walls quite the way they used to. In fact—the thorns used to stand a man’s height above the walls, and this tower would not then have been able to look down on the thorns at all. He was sure they were much lower now. Weren’t they?
Beside him, Perrotte thrust her arm upward. Disturbed by the motion of her arm, the falcon took flight, winging up and away.
“Oh,” Sand said, a small disappointed sound. Merlin was gone. He was going to miss the bird. He—no, she—wasn’t friendly or cuddly or much of anything other than a distant, lurking watcher, but still, she was something else alive in the castle.
He stood beside Perrotte and watched the falcon fly out over the asparagus fields beyond the castle. The muddy fields were greening, like everything else in the world that he and Perrotte were no longer part of. Even the thorns had leafed out and now displayed five-petaled, pinkish-white flowers.
The thorns. They really had been much higher than the castle walls. Hadn’t they? He ran through his memories of his time in the castle. He couldn’t really remember, but on his first day in the castle, yes, the thorns had been a man’s height above the walls. Afterward, they hadn’t loomed quite so high, but he’d attributed that to the fact that everything had been new and strange on the first day, and he’d since grown accustomed to the thorns looming.
But at some point, they’d become less looming, and at some point after that, less looming still. Which brought him to this day, and the fact that they were lower. They really were. Only a few feet above the castle walls, really.
“The hedge—” he began excitedly, but Perrotte was watching Merlin fly off into the deepening hyacinth-colored dusk.
“I don’t think it’s a concern for Merlin.”
“No—the hedge is lower.”
Now she looked at him. “Lower than what?”
“Lower than it was.” He told her how the thorns had looked on his first day. “How high did they look when you first—woke?”
“Somewhat over my head, were I standing on the walls. I guess.”
He nodded. “And now?”
She stared down at the hedge. “Well, the thorns are lower. You don’t think it’s because I cut any of them at the night portal, do you?”
He frowned. “Seems unlikely. You cut hardly any. That’s the other side of the castle, anyway.” He had returned to lower the portcullis and burn back the thorns creeping under the night portal. The thorns seemed willing to be stopped at the gate, but they were no less thriving outside.
She shrugged, and scratched her neck where a thorn branch had lashed her. She palpated her skin gently. “I think there’s a thorn in there,” she said.
“Will you be able to find it again tonight?”
“Probably.”
He nodded. “We’ll get it.” That’s how the final thorns would be ousted: one by one as she discovered them under her skin, or if either of them noticed any mark of blood poisoning. “I’ll need you to work on mine as well.” He pointed at the lumps on his neck. “Are you ready to go back down?”
“Back down?” she asked.
He glanced at the wall of the inner courtyard, where smoke from the dinner fire wafted. “I know turnip stew is not your favorite—”
“Merlin isn’t done,” she said.
Sand frowned. Perrotte raised her arm. A distant dark spot, low over the ground, raced toward them, growing larger. And then Merlin was there, dropping a lark onto the stones between them, and landing on Perrotte’s outstretched arm.
“Did you know she’d come back?” Sand asked.
“No, of course not—but I saw her strike, and saw her turn toward us. Bring that lark with us. It’s her supper.”
Sand stared with longing at the lark. It would have gone so well in the stew. Or in a pie, if he could figure out a way to make a crust.
“Don’t worry,” Perrotte said, almost laughing. “Once she’s fed, I’ll teach you to hunt her from up here—and then you can have as many larks as you like.”
He laughed uncomfortably, wondering how much his hunger had shown on his face. He hadn’t tasted fresh food of any sort in weeks. But of course, Merlin had the right of first refusal. He picked up the lark by its feet and led the way down the tower stairs.
On the way across the garden courtyard, something new caught his eye—something in a long-abandoned garden bed.
Something green.
He ran to it.
“Sand!” Perrotte called. “What are you doing?”
“Green,” he said. “Green!” He pointed at the dirt.
She followed more slowly so as not to disturb the falcon on her arm.
“Asparagus spears,” she said reverently.
“Asparagus spears,” he agreed. “I think . . . in about a week . . .”
“We’ll have something fresh to eat.” The longing in her voice matched the longing in his whole body. Something fresh and green. He wanted green even more than he wanted the lark he carried.
“I thought nothing grew here.”
“Well. Nothing did grow.” He glanced at her. “Until now.” It had to do with her; he felt it in his bones. She had come alive, and things started to grow.
That was when he noticed the buds on the broken apple, pear, and cherry trees across the courtyard. He started for them eagerly, waving her to join him.
“We’ll have fruit this autumn!” he said with satisfaction. They wouldn’t have to figure out how to pick raspberries off the deadly thorns, at least.
“This autumn?” The quaver in her voice was unmistakable. He glanced at her face, which sported a range of uncomfortable emotions. “You think we’ll be trapped here that long?”
“I don’t know how long we’ll be trapped here,” he said. “I hope for the best. But I’m also preparing for the worst.”
“But the hedge is shrinking.”
“And we don’t know why.”
Perrotte pointed up at the tallest tower with its sheet hanging out the window. “Someone must see that!”
“I thought someone would see the smoke from my cooking fires, too. But so far, nothing and no one has ever approached the castle.”
“Have people lost all curiosity in just one generation?”
Sand spread his arms out, encompassing the whole castle around them. “Don’t you think that’s part of it? In a castle torn
apart by an unknown force, surrounded by a thorn brake that attacks people? That’s part of the curse, something that keeps people from investigating.”
“When you lived outside, didn’t you ever come and look at the place?”
“Nope.” Sand shook his head. “Not even once. When I was little, if I asked questions about the place, everyone shushed me, or told me not to think about it. So I stopped asking, and I stopped thinking about it. Mostly.”
Perrotte harrumphed. “Still, I would think someone would come look.”
“They might.” Sand sighed. “But they haven’t yet, so I think we should carry on. Make sure we have enough to eat, and warm clothes to wear. And that all the doors and shutters are mended to keep out winter cold.”
She frowned. “We might be here in winter.”
He nodded soberly. “Winter. Or the rest of our lives.”
21
Knight
After the red-mawed woman left her, Perrotte walked away from the birch tree. She moved more easily in the dark-bright world now that she had refused the water of forgetting and been granted the right to stay.
Eventually, she found herself beside a sedge marsh, where the water reflected stars that were not in the sky. She counted blades of grass where they broke the water’s surface, and she counted stars where the water was smooth and grassless. She found it a good task for a time, one that soothed the rages within her; she counted to some very high numbers.
Sometimes, though, her thoughts drifted away from the stars and from the grasses, and she remembered that she had died. “I don’t think this is Heaven,” she would think. “I do not think it is Hell, either. But surely I was not so bad that I am truly in Purgatory. Is this Purgatory?”
And then she would remember the conversation with the woman, remembered saying, “I will not drink. I will not go on,” and being told that it was her right.
And she would remember that her death had come unjustly, and for a time, she would forget to count the stars.
PERROTTE’S EYES FLEW OPEN.
She got up to peer out the window. She had managed perhaps an hour of sleep, but no more than that. She rubbed her fingers over random parts of her skin, but felt no thorns—perhaps the last effort had gotten them all. She didn’t feel feverish or sick anymore.
Restless, she left the bedroom. She wanted her observatory back, but death had taken it from her—death and Jannet. She also wanted her astronomic books back; so far, she’d found no hint of them in the library. There were other works of natural philosophy that she could read and enjoy, but it saddened her that not only had Jannet destroyed her closely read and annotated texts, she had likely also destroyed all Perrotte’s notes on her observations.
She would begin again. She found some blank parchment fragments in the library, suitable for jotting notes while she observed the stars. All the ink had been lost in the sundering—spilled and then dried—but she had discovered most of the supplies for making ink throughout the library: green vitriol and gum couldn’t be destroyed by being halved, and oak galls needed to be crushed to make ink anyway. She even found quills long enough to use as pens.
Perrotte would choose a new observatory in another tower of the keep and take the roof tiles off. She wouldn’t have a fancy hinged and closable roof, but an observatory was an observatory.
And she had something else important to observe, besides the stars: the thorns. She wandered around the castle with a bit of chalk from her purse, climbing guard towers and looking out at the dark mass of thorns, until she found the perfect spot to make her observations. She drew an X on the floor of the tower, so she would be sure to stand in the same place every time. As dawn lightened the sky, she quickly jotted down: “From the fourth window on the east-most tower, the thorns reach halfway up the fifth stone block to the left of the arrow slit on the right guard tower.”
The next night she wrote: “One-third of the way up the fifth block.”
Perrotte considered her measurements against other factors in the environment. Did the spring leaves growing on the hedge weigh it down? Possibly, but the hedge had grown its leaves long before anything started growing within the castle. According to Sand, the hedge kept time by the seasons of the outside world, ignoring the magical spring that had just begun within. Perrotte did not think the hedge bowed beneath the weight of its leaves simply because the leaves were not new.
Perrotte wrote down the day’s activities, in case something she or Sand did affected the magic. Or in case some magic of Sand’s affected the hedge. She didn’t really think it had anything to do with her. Sand was the wizard, or possibly the saint, who had the mending magic.
Mending magic. Perrotte considered Sand’s peculiar magic. The castle’s sundering . . . It meant something. It was a curse, enacted by something or someone. It had to be—castles didn’t just spontaneously break apart. Well, certainly, earthquakes occurred, but not in Bertaèyn very often, and Sand was right, no earthquake would do what had been done to the interior of the castle. It was magic, or a curse, or something along the lines of what Saint Gildas had done to the murderers of Sainte Trifine, when he caused their castle to be swallowed up by the earth.
And the bloodthirsty thorns just proved it, didn’t they? Those grew, without question, because of some magic.
So what would make the thorns shrink? What would lessen their power in this broken place?
What was the opposite of breaking?
Mending.
The sun peered over the horizon, breaking her meditation. She took a deep breath, and turned to go, when out of the corner of her eye, beyond the northern guard tower, she saw something.
A man—a knight in armor. On a horse.
She abandoned pen, ink, and parchment and skittered down the stairs. The eastern tower was useless; she needed a guard tower on the north side if she wanted to be seen. She ran across the courtyard as fast as she could go.
A sudden stabbing pain in her thigh announced the presence of a thorn. Or was it just a reminder pain, like Sand occasionally got in his wrist? She clutched her leg but otherwise tried to ignore it.
Up the guard tower stairs.
Out the top.
She leaned over the edge. The man and horse were close. She waved. He waved back. Her heart nearly stopped.
The knight rode closer.
“Don’t get too close!” she called.
He lifted his visor. “I’m aware of the thorns,” he called back, and she froze. The voice. She recognized that voice, though it was deeper and slower than when she had known him before.
“Sir Bleyz?” she called down, tentative.
He reined in his horse. He crossed himself, but remained silent.
“Sir Bleyz—you conducted me to and from the Abbey of Saint Armel many years ago—and you were supposed to guide me to the court of the Duchess, when it was time.”
He crossed himself again. “Are you a ghost?”
“No!” Yes. “No, I was . . . I have awakened, Sir Bleyz.”
“You were dead, my lady! Forgive my saying so.”
“You’ve called me ‘my lady’—then, you recognize me?”
“Lady Perrotte.”
“Yes. And . . . And I was dead, Sir Bleyz. But I am not. Now. Any longer.”
“My lady—” And there were tears in his voice. “Your lord father . . .”
Her heart clenched. “I know, Sir Bleyz. I know he has passed on.”
Sir Bleyz bowed his head a moment.
“How is it you came riding past here?” Perrotte called down. “Have you come to free me?”
“A rumor came to my ears. No one believed it, but I had to know. And now . . .” He crossed himself again. “I did not think a girl truly dwelled within the castle walls, and now that I find that it is you . . .”
He wiped at the corner of his eye. Was he weeping? She frowned. He had conducted her from the abbey, true, but they had never been especially close.
“My lady, it is good to see you. I am a
t your service.”
“Then please, help me think of a way to get out of here!” she called.
He shook his head. “My lady, you are far safer in there. I have no doubt that were you to leave, your life would be in grave danger.”
“From who?”
“You know from who!”
She nodded. She did know. Jannet. “How is the countship? How goes my sister’s rule?”
She could barely hear his scoffing laugh, but his shouted words were plain enough. “The Princess rarely comes to Boisblanc. The dowager Countess is in charge here, and she taxes the folk most severely, still trying to make up for the fortune lost inside there.”
Fortune lost? Perrotte hadn’t even thought of the treasury—had assumed it would be empty. Surely there had been time to empty it during—
“Tell me about the sundering!” she called.
Sir Bleyz’s horse made a nervous motion, and Perrotte realized that the knight was communicating fear or tension to his mount. Was he simply afraid to be seen here by someone who might report to Jannet, or was he afraid of . . . her? A girl who should be dead?
“When your father returned to the castle, he had questions about your death. I guess they were not answered to his satisfaction! Some weeks later, he took the Countess to the chapel and made her swear on the holy relics that she had not killed you. I was there. As soon as she touched the saint’s heart and swore her innocence, the sundering came. The castle shook—we had no time! We all ran away, carrying very little—those who tried to stay and save a few things, they were driven off by invisible beasts that clawed and scratched—”
Perrotte felt sick to her stomach. She couldn’t even imagine the sundering, but she could picture Jannet in the chapel, her hand over Sainte Trifine’s relic. She rubbed her belly, trying to soothe it.
“Once we were gone, the thorns sprang up. Many men have died trying to cross them.”
She was silent for a moment, trying to regain control of her rebelling body. She felt hot and faint, ready to vomit.
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