The Castle Behind Thorns

by Merrie Haskell

  Anna stayed down on the carpet beside Perrotte. Perrotte, trying to catch her breath from the fright and the pain, as well as the horror of being scolded, stared at Anna. Anna stared back, her eyes lit with strange delight. She grinned. Anna’s having fun! Perrotte realized with a start. And she thinks I’m having fun too!

  There had been no other moment like that. And Perrotte did not think that climbing out windows, being scratched by branches, or getting in trouble was fun, so when it came down to it, she and Anna didn’t have much to build a friendship on, did they?

  And yet, in all the ways that the nobly born counted friendships, Perrotte and the future Duchess were considered close friends. Their families relied on each other, and they themselves did not detest each other. Who knew how they might have come to regard their friendship if Perrotte had ever arrived at court?

  Perrotte considered how different her friendship with Sand was in comparison. Certainly, their time spent trapped together, working for a common goal, made their bond more intense. She found herself thinking often of Trifine’s resurrection by Saint Gildas. Gildas had not only avenged her murder but he’d brought her back to life. She wondered how Saint Gildas and Sainte Trifine felt about each other. That had to be an intense bond, too.

  But beyond all of that, Perrotte genuinely liked Sand.

  So it made her sick to think about not telling him the truth about Sir Bleyz. But every time she convinced herself to reveal the truth to him, something stopped her. Something that knew that Sand would not approve of how she planned to depose Jannet.

  THEIR DAYS OF BEING sharp-set continued. The ancient food spoiled and spoiled, and the garden grew and grew. They swooped down on any new food like Merlin on a ring pigeon. They ate spring onions, borage, garlic scapes, rampion, and parsley, and more asparagus, dandelions and leaf lettuce. Mints sprouted, so they drank tisanes and chewed mint leaves.

  Trees and plants bloomed, and bees flew over the castle wall to drink the nectar, but didn’t stay. Sand was wistful, wishing aloud that the bees would set up a hive within the castle wall, so they could collect the honey.

  Daily, Perrotte measured the thorns. “We have to work faster, or we’ll starve,” she said. “We’re peckish now, but it’s spring. Even if we have a bountiful summer and a good harvest, we won’t have enough to save for winter, and no means to preserve it anyway. We’ve no swine, cattle, or fowl. We can’t make sausages. We can’t collect eggs. We’ve no spices or salt to preserve anything. No vinegar to pickle anything.”

  “We can dry apples and pears and cherries,” Sand said.

  She shook her head. “That won’t be enough, not nearly enough.” She eyed the unripened fruit on the hedge. “Dare we eat the raspberries when they ripen?”

  “Are you suggesting we eat cursed fruit? Vicious fruit? Attacking fruit?”

  “The harvest would be a problem,” she agreed. “We have to get out of here.”

  “We’re mending as fast as we can,” Sand said.

  “And it’s working,” Perrotte said. They had exposed nearly a foot of the outer walls. “I just don’t know about the timing.” She stopped herself from saying, Perhaps Sir Bleyz can send us food, catapult it over the wall.

  Sir Bleyz. His plan to foment a rebellion on her behalf confused her. They hadn’t known each other that well before she died. He’d been newly a knight, and new also in her father’s service. He had conducted her to the convent, and they’d barely spoken.

  But when he came to bring her home from the convent the day before Christmas, she had found herself babbling aimlessly to him. Her relentless chatter was probably from relief over leaving the convent. First, she talked freely about her father’s letter to her, with the plan he had outlined that she would become a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess. Sir Bleyz, a very chivalrous young knight with a magnificent shock of black hair, let her talk as much as she liked.

  Her chatter flowed so easily, though, that she found herself making up stories about her life for him. Lying, in fact. She told him how the nuns had been loath to see her go, and had wept when she took leave of them. “I went to each one, and gave them all a token of my favor—a handkerchief, a scarf, a nice ribbon—of course they cannot wear anything fancy with their habits, for they are nuns, but it is nice, when you have nothing lovely, to look upon something pretty.”

  She didn’t know why she lied to Bleyz, but he was new to the Boisblanc household, and she thought maybe he would actually believe that she was both beloved and cherished by the countship and her family, and she was not in fact unwanted and unfavored.

  The stories took on embellishments. She told him next about how, though her father insisted that she go to court and wait on Duchess Anna, it was against her stepmother’s pleading. “Jannet’s heart is breaking over my departure,” she told Bleyz. “She told me once that she would keep me in her purse if I were small enough, so she could just open it up, any time of day or night, and look inside and gaze upon my face.”

  She then proceeded to tell Sir Bleyz all her plans for court—she made up no few stories there, either. “Duchess Anna is so thrilled that I am coming to attend her,” she lied next. “She writes me letters three times a day, in hopes that I will be able to come to her sooner.”

  It wasn’t a total lie that the Duchess looked forward to Perrotte joining her at court; there had been a letter from Anna, written by a scribe, that formally welcomed her to Rennes. The letter mentioned the supposed fun they’d had together when they were small—but did not mention the latter two occasions that they’d met: Anna and her parents had attended the Count and Jannet’s wedding, and Perrotte had gone with the Count and Jannet to Anna’s father’s funeral.

  A sobering memory of truth didn’t stop Perrotte’s story, though. That was how the idea of the scented shoes had begun—she told Bleyz about the new fashion she planned to start at court. Sir Bleyz surely knew about scented gloves, didn’t he? Well, imagine scented shoes!

  Her fantasies all spiraled down to the nothing from which they came once they reached Castle Boisblanc. Her father wasn’t even there; he was attending the Duchess. Jannet didn’t come down to greet her, being newly delivered of a daughter. No one had sent the news of her new sister to Perrotte in the convent, and Sir Bleyz hadn’t seen fit to tell her. She was allowed to peek in at the wet nurse and let the baby clutch her finger briefly, but that was all.

  A sister. Perrotte was still the heir to Boisblanc, then. For now.

  The lack of fanfare at her return was a small relief in a way, though she knew then that Sir Bleyz must immediately understand how much she had lied to him on their journey from the convent.

  He’d probably known from the beginning, if she had to admit the truth to herself.

  Now, twenty-five years later, he wanted to help her.

  The more she thought about his final words as he rode away, the more she felt certain that he planned to use her resurrection to leverage himself back into a position of power. Did it even matter to him that she couldn’t get out of the castle?

  She couldn’t blame him. He’d been exiled because he knew Jannet’s secrets. Life in exile was hard. But even so, Perrotte didn’t want him to use her.

  The new moon was close. She barely slept in her bed at night, even compared to before. Her restlessness worried Sand, she knew.

  Every night, she climbed the guard tower, and found herself ignoring the stars to instead scan the horizon for a light, for a sign that Sir Bleyz was coming. She often dozed up there, needing more sleep than she admitted to herself.

  She dreamed often of her marsh beneath the world, the stars and grasses she counted there.

  The night of the new moon, however, the dreams of her death shifted, and she found herself reliving the day of the red seed.

  A dark-haired woman came to her in the marsh.

  “Perrotte, the time has come for you to move on,” the woman said.

  Perrotte smiled. She’d had this argument before. “I will not drink. I will
not go on.”

  “Are you afraid to forget? I was afraid to forget once,” the woman said. “The thing is, to drink, you are only giving up the strength of the memories, so it is not painful to be gone from the world. The memories remain. And the love remains, stronger than the day it was born.”

  “What love,” Perrotte said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Ah,” the woman said, and clasped her hands in front of her.

  “What happened to the woman without a face?” Perrotte asked.

  “Politics.” The woman sighed. “Now hear me: You may have given up the choice to go forward . . . but you can still go back. And sometimes to go forward, you must go back. Open your mouth, Perrotte.”

  A strange obedience stole over her, and Perrotte opened her mouth. “How odd,” she thought. “I’m dead and I still have a mouth.”

  The woman held up a red seed, which glowed with life in the darkness under the world. She leaned forward, brushing back Perrotte’s hair tenderly, then placed the seed under Perrotte’s tongue.

  Flavor filled Perrotte’s mouth. Tart yet sweet. Moldering yet fresh. Dead yet living.

  The woman leaned close and kissed Perrotte’s cheek. “I have a message for you, Perrotte. Your mother loves you, and your saints love you. And they have asked that you live again.”

  Perrotte had closed her eyes, unable to bear her aching-full heart with open eyes—and then, and then, it was all gone, and she had awakened in the dark, cold stone crypt beneath the chapel.

  Just as she came to life in the dream, she woke.

  “My lady!” Sir Bleyz called, saluting her with a torch. She scrambled to her feet to look down. “I have been hard at work, moving secretly among the barons. I have told our most trusted allies that you live, and this has brought hope again to them!”

  Her mouth was dry. She swallowed. “It has?”

  “The Cygne line is much missed among the people, both low and high.” He paused. “As is the Boisblanc line.”

  “My sister lives, I thought!”

  “But your stepmother rules. And you are the true phoenix—from the ashes, you have risen!”

  “But I—”

  “Your army can be ready with a week’s notice. We can march on the Countess at Góll Castle and depose her!”

  Góll was a hunting lodge turned castle that her father had not liked very well, but it was the second largest and second most defensible of the Boisblanc castles. So that’s where Jannet now lived, and presumably where her father had died.

  Perrotte swallowed against the lump in her throat that this last thought created.

  “The war of this reclamation will be swift—none will oppose you!” Sir Bleyz called.

  War? She would declare war on Jannet?

  Reason and emotion fought within her. The door in her mind, where the secrets of her death lay, popped open. She still would not look inside, but something slipped out in that moment—an ember, a burning brand, something alight. It rose within her, a line of fire from the pit of her belly, passing through her heart until it burst from her mouth in an angry, triumphant cry. “Yes! Yes! Raise my army. I will claim my land!”

  24

  Door

  THE THORNS WERE FADING. SHRINKING. THINNING. Every measurement that Perrotte took confirmed this, and she took many measurements from many angles, climbing this tower and that, using a sighting stick, and recording all her observations.

  By day, she worked side by side with Sand—in the smithy, in the kitchen, in the carpenter’s shop, in the garden. They mended stools with hammers and chisels, wove baskets, stitched leather, sewed bedsheets, stuffed mattresses, rehung doors, repaired latches, coopered barrels . . . Many things neither of them knew anything about, but through careful examination of broken objects and the use of what Sand called “the smith’s imagination,” they often found a way to move forward.

  But the key to their success in repairing things was really Sand’s mending magic. The only problem was, Sand wouldn’t admit that he had that magic. Not aloud. Not to her. But he did admit it, tacitly, by making sure he assisted in everything that she couldn’t do perfectly. Certainly, with all her practice, Perrotte could turn out many basic tools and implements that were whole and functional in the end. They were not beautiful, but she thought she might become quite good at smithing someday.

  But in the crafts that neither of them understood, the difference was clear. Perrotte’s lumpy carvings turned magically smooth and useful if Sand even took a moment to chisel a few gouges near the end of the task. She was the better tailor, from years of practicing embroidery against her will, but when she tried to sew pages together back into a book, she just created an awkward mess until Sand punched a few holes and pushed through a few threads—then, voilà! A perfectly repaired book.

  She might have been jealous, except it was so very clear that it made Sand uncomfortable and perhaps even a little scared.

  And because she felt guilty, she didn’t push him. She knew she should tell Sand about Sir Bleyz. About the army that he rallied on her behalf. But she thought—she was quite certain, in fact—that Sand wouldn’t approve.

  So she only spoke with Bleyz in the night, leaning out from one of the guard towers. She never told him why she only wanted to talk at night, but he preferred it too; no one from the village would see him approach the castle, see her lean out of a tower, and report the whole thing to the Countess. They both knew, though never spoke directly about it, that if the Countess discovered Bleyz’s doings, he would be executed.

  She found it difficult to plot a rebellion from shouting distance, but they managed it. Bleyz reported in every few nights about which barons he had approached. All agreed to war. All were weary of the hard times since the sundering of the castle. The countship was poor. The Countess’s taxes were as high as she could set them, and stayed that way, year after year. She pushed the corvée to its limit, requiring her vassals and her vassals’ vassals to labor in her fields and on her roads longer than any other lord in Bertaèyn. She forced them to surrender ever-larger portions of their harvests. She overcharged for the use of her mills, her ovens, and her winepresses. And she had closely and freely allied herself with France, not only supporting the King against Breton lords, but marrying her daughter to a prince of France.

  Every instance of mismanagement or injustice that Perrotte heard strengthened the ember in her heart. She wanted revenge. She wanted justice. She wanted Jannet on her knees, pleading for her life.

  Sir Bleyz worried about funding the army, until Perrotte checked the treasury and found it to be as well-stocked as the rumors suggested. The coronet and sword of Boisblanc were gone. Clearly, some money had been taken away. But many money chests remained, reminding Perrotte of broken eggs, with silver deniers spilled like egg whites, and golden francs like yolks. It would have been impossible to gather all the coins together and carry them off during the castle’s abandonment, with invisible beasts attacking the stragglers. The thorns had kept anyone from coming back.

  Broken coins spent as well as whole ones. Perrotte scooped up bag after bag, night after night, and threw them over the hedge for Sir Bleyz. The lost wealth of Boisblanc would buy Boisblanc back. Jannet would be deposed.

  When that thought crossed Perrotte’s mind, she stopped in her night’s coin scooping. An emotion coursed through her, something between sorrow and dread, something that prickled like a hedge full of thorns trying to get out from deep inside her. Perrotte stumbled, then fell, landing hard in the pile of coins around her.

  Against her conscious will, the door in her mind burst open.

  And everything Perrotte had been hiding from herself came out.

  AFTER HER LESS THAN triumphant return from the convent, Perrotte had comforted herself with going down to see the shoemaker’s apprentice, to ask him if he would scent a pair of slippers for her as one might scent a pair of gloves—just as she had explained to Sir Bleyz while weaving her stories for him.

  She had known
Gilles since his apprenticeship at Castle Boisblanc began, a handsome boy who always lurked behind his master. She couldn’t remember when she started being friendly with him, or when friendliness had changed to friendship.

  It was not proper, to be friends with an apprentice shoemaker, but Gilles liked her, or pretended to. All the other boys she’d ever met, peasant or noble, apprentice or page, had been respectful or frightened or fawning or reserved. No one else had ever smiled at her, or asked her questions about her life. Gilles did that, whenever his master wasn’t looking and Loyse wasn’t paying attention.

  So she went to him then, with her plan for success at Anna’s court, and asked him for help, all unknowing of what ill would come of it.

  She had stopped in to check the progress of the work several times. At last, Gilles brought the finished slippers and gloves to the tower room, the night before she was to leave for court.

  She was watching the stars. She had no astrolabe, no books, and no charts, but Raoul had come and opened the hinged roof of her observatory, and it was enough. She hadn’t bothered to write her father about the disappearance of her astrolabe and other things. She hadn’t let him know about the emptiness of her tower room. The few times she had complained about Jannet early on, he’d at first told her not to be inhospitable to her new mother; later, he had told her not to be a brat. So Perrotte had never complained to her father about Jannet again.

  Footsteps sounded on the tower stairs, and Gilles’s face appeared in the opening, lit from his candle. He climbed to her level, smiling uneasily.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m not pleased to be here,” he said baldly, but when she scrunched her nose in confusion, he explained. “I am unfond of heights.” He plopped a bag down between them. “Your gloves and dancing slippers.”

  She clapped her hands and opened the bag. She pulled out the shoes first, kicking off her fur-lined slippers and sliding her toes into the soft leather. They fit perfectly, almost like a second, but tougher, skin. They were not as soft as her squirrel slippers, but they were comfortable in a different way. She wriggled her toes in them, then got to her feet and danced around the room. It wasn’t quite as she imagined, with every footfall releasing an obvious puff of perfume, but they would do.