“An astrolabe is flatter than this,” she said. “You’re planning to put this all together, so all the metal circles link up to look sort of like a sphere, and it sort of spins, right? That means it’s an armilla—an armillary sphere.”
“No, it’s an astrolabe. Like you had, once, until—” He bit down on the words, and reached inside his tunic to pull out a folded sheet of parchment. He handed it to her. It was a diagram of an armilla for certain, but it was labeled “spherical astrolabe.” Perrotte could see where Sand’s confusion came from.
“Oh, I see,” Perrotte said. She had possessed a flat astrolabe, not an armilla—but her stomach stirred with excitement. What did it matter, the name Sand called it? She’d always wanted an armilla. “Yes, I guess that’s a different term for it. Sand! Can you really make this?”
He nodded. “The details might take some time to get right, but I can get the basics together pretty quickly, I think.”
“And . . .” She hesitated, not wanting to sound greedy.
“It’s for you,” he said.
She thought her face might fall off from grinning so broadly. If they hadn’t been surrounded by hot metal and fire, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have tackled him with a hug. She settled for laughing with joy and clapping her hands.
Sand was frowning. “It’s not an astrolabe then, like the one you had?”
“It’s better,” Perrotte assured him.
They spent the day working on the armilla—which Perrotte decided to always refer to as her spherical astrolabe, as a sort of thank-you for Sand’s astonishing gift. It was a tool much harder to come by than her old astrolabe; her father had never agreed to let her have one.
“Astrolabe means ‘star-taker,’” Perrotte told Sand.
“Mm-hm,” Sand said placidly, neither excited to know it nor uncomfortable to learn this. He was in his element, peaceful and productive, making something new with skills he understood. She might have been jealous if she hadn’t been so excited.
“And I know the perfect motto to put on the side,” she announced.
“Oh?”
“‘Mens videt astra.’ ‘The soul sees the stars.’”
“I like it,” Sand said. “That is so much more your motto than either the phoenix or the swan mottoes.”
Perrotte laughed at the truth of this, and spent the next hour babbling happily about astronomy. Sand just nodded and kept working, occasionally directing her to help with this bit or that of the forging.
They ate and hunted Merlin and went back to work, ate again, then went to sleep. The heaviness in Perrotte’s chest was gone because they were still friends. But the pain in her throat returned, because though they were friends, she still could not bring herself to tell him her last secrets.
PERROTTE WOKE AFTER A few short hours of sleep. She slept longer each night, she realized, and she had some hope that, by the time she was twenty or so, she might sleep through the night and only experience the regular sort of insomnia that she’d had before she died.
She went to the treasury by lantern light and gathered money for the Swiss pikemen, then took it up to the guard tower. She parceled the coins into several twists of cloth that she could throw easily, then waited for Sir Bleyz.
She and Sand would have to pause in their armilla—no, their spherical astrolabe—project and get back to the mending. They needed to bring down the thorns and get free of this place. She couldn’t let Bleyz go off and fight her battle for her. She needed to be there, to assert her place as Countess, to bring Jannet to justice, and perhaps above all, to prove that she was not dead.
She signaled with her lantern. Sir Bleyz came. They spoke briefly, and she threw him the money. He departed. She was watching his torch retreat into the dark fields below, when a footstep scraped behind her.
She whirled, aiming the lantern’s light at the noise.
Sand’s voice was ragged. “War, Perrotte?”
“War,” Perrotte answered fiercely. “I told you I would beat plowshares into swords.”
“That was to cut your way out of the hedge!”
“I believe I said that I would then run my enemies through,” she said, and she stepped around him, intending to go downstairs. She was never going to let herself be trapped in a tower again.
He stood aside and let her pass but followed her. “War, Perrotte! People will die. People with families, people with—”
She whirled on him, her lantern unsteady between them. “People who can’t pay their taxes? People who can’t afford the Countess’s mills or her ovens or her winepresses?”
Sand crossed his arms. “They’ll pay with their lives—people armed with pitchforks and poorly forged swords!”
“Yes!” Perrotte said. “That is the price of rebellion! People risk their lives. And when the thorns come down, I’m going to go out and risk the same. If I lose the war, do you think I’ll live even a day past laying down arms?”
He was deadly quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t matter. The hedge isn’t coming down,” he said with eerie calm. “I’ll not mend another thing in this castle. No one dies. Nobody’s brother or father or son falls in this war, and you don’t get executed, either, Perrotte. We will just stay here. Live here. Forever.”
“So we die here together of starvation or old age? No, thank you! I’ll keep mending things. You’ve taught me enough. I may not have the magic, but I can mend it all!”
“You’ll never get the chance,” he said, snatching the lantern from her hands and dashing it to the stones.
27
Army
IT COULD NOT COME TO WAR.
It could not come to Perrotte’s second death, either.
The thorns must never come down.
He strode to the smithy and grabbed the sledgehammer. He knocked aside the bricks of his forge with a few heavy swings. Embers tumbled out onto the loose sand floor and burned ineffectively alone. Bricks crumbled and fell.
All he could think about was Perrotte’s head on a chopping block, and his grandfather’s smithy, empty of the son lost to war. Sand turned and swung a weighty blow at the smithy door.
Perrotte was shouting: “Stop, Sand, stop!”
He turned to her, panting. “You started it! You can stop it. Will you stop it?”
“Yes! Yes! Don’t do this, Sand. Don’t undo all our mending!”
“Isn’t war just as bad as this? Worse?” He gestured at a broken anvil in the corner, lying on its side. “Just as destructive, but to more than just things.”
She was standing between him and the astrolabe, he noticed. He wondered if that was the real reason she wanted him to stop. But since it was breaking his heart to destroy the smithy, he lowered the sledge.
“You’ll stop this knight from raising an army?” he demanded. “You won’t go out there as soon as the hedge is down and get yourself killed?”
“Yes, Sand,” Perrotte said. She wasn’t crying, though her voice broke. He admired her strength of will.
He dropped the big hammer to the floor and stared at her. He hoped—how he hoped—
A distant boom interrupted his thought. Perrotte’s head whipped around.
“Is that—” Sand began.
“Cannon fire?”
He had no idea.
They ran out the door, racing to the nearest guard tower.
Beyond the thorns, beyond the asparagus fields, stood a small army.
Sand squinted. He could make out a line of cannons aimed at the castle. Above them hung a puff of smoke, not yet dispersed in the still air of morning.
“Phoenixes!” Perrotte snarled. “Everywhere phoenixes, not a swan in sight.”
Sand frowned, looking at the phoenix-spangled banners of the Boisblancs in the distance. He was so used to seeing all the phoenixes around the castle entwined with silver swans, that it only then occurred to him that the swans were unusual in some way. He’d never seen the swans before he’d awakened in the castle. The Countess must have removed the Cygne swa
ns from everything in the countship over the last twenty-five years.
“What are they doing?” Sand asked, bewildered. He craned his neck this way and that, trying to figure out where the cannonball had hit.
In the distance, he sighted another puff of smoke. An instant later the boom arrived, a cannonball fast on its heels.
The cannonball flew into the hedge, and the thorns absorbed the projectile almost silently.
Sand would have laughed with relief if he hadn’t seen another smoke puff in the distance.
This time, the cannonball struck the wall in the thin bare space where the thorns had receded. The wall crumbled, and the thorns moved yearningly toward the broken spot.
“If they destroy the castle walls with the cannons, will the thorns just come and . . . kill us?” Perrotte asked. “Is that her plan?”
Sand shuddered. “That’s diabolical.”
“Well, what else can she do? She can’t cut her way through the thorns and take back the castle. The standard tactics for breaking a siege are useless to her. Starving us out won’t work—we can’t surrender, anyway, because of the thorns. She can’t wait for our guards to grow careless—we haven’t any. She can’t bribe any doorkeepers—we haven’t those, either. Destroying the walls is her only way of destroying us.”
They braced themselves for the next hit, but no further smoke puffs rose up from the line of cannons.
In the distance, a mounted knight rode slowly out, bearing a white flag on the end of his lance.
“They won’t shoot more. They want to parley,” Perrotte said. Then she brightened. “Wait here!”
She ran off, and Sand waited, watching the knight approach. Perrotte returned shortly, clutching a book that had been reordered but not yet mended.
Perrotte hunkered down with the book, flipping over a few pages, scanning them quickly. “Here. ‘A garrison of two hundred men armed with forty-eight hand crossbows, two great crossbows, and about forty thousand arrow and bolts, can hold off an attacking force of several thousand.’ Oh, and . . .” She scanned the next few lines. “We’d need a few trebuchets and cannons, too.”
It had never occurred to Sand to mend any of the defensive weapons of the castle. They were never his priority. And they still weren’t.
“How does that help us?” Sand asked. “We don’t have two hundred soldiers. We have . . . us.”
“You could repair the great crossbows,” she said. “That would be a start. It might be enough to keep them wary of us.”
“Don’t we have the thorns for wariness?”
“Better to have the crossbows and the thorns.”
He nodded. In the distance, he heard unintelligible words. The knight was shouting something. Sand gestured at Perrotte. “Stay down. Don’t let them see you, not just yet.”
“Parley!” Sand could make out the words as the knight drew closer. “I want to talk with whoever is in the castle!”
Sand leaned over the edge of the guard tower’s wall, showing his face. “Well?” he called.
“What is your name?”
“Alexandre, son of Gilles Smith.”
“And what are you doing in that castle?”
Sand glanced back at Perrotte, feeling a funny half-smile creep over his lips. What was the best answer? She gave him an answering smile, and a shrug. Then she motioned: Go on, then.
“I’m mending it,” he called down.
This, of course, was not an expected answer, and the knight was silent. The knight was too far away for Sand to read his face.
“And to whom do I speak?” Sand asked.
“Sir Jos, son of Lord Helori.”
Behind him, Perrotte swore. Sand glanced back. “He was a baby,” Perrotte whispered.
“So you don’t know anything about him.”
Perrotte shrugged. “He had the worst colic!”
“Not helpful!”
Perrotte shrugged again.
Sir Jos called. “How did you get into the castle, Alexandre, son of Gilles Smith?”
Sand shrugged. “A saint kidnapped me from his shrine and put me into a fireplace here. So I guess the answer is, a miracle of Saint Melor. Or so I think. He has not told me.”
“If you are trying to antagonize him, you are doing a good job,” Perrotte whispered.
Sand scuffed his shoe at her. “I’m just telling the truth!”
“You’re very good at telling it in the most maddening way possible.”
“Thank you?” Sand looked back at the knight, who was getting too close to the thorns. “Keep your distance from that hedge, Sir Jos!”
But Sir Jos did not watch his distance, and quick as anything, the thorns reached out and snagged the horse’s forelegs. The horse did not like this, and tried to rear back. The thorns were too strong, of course, and the horse thrashed and screamed. Sir Jos tumbled to the ground. He jumped to his feet and cut the branches, freeing the horse, who bolted for the horizon.
But while Sir Jos had worked to free the horse, he had not protected himself. The thorns reached for him and pulled him into their center.
28
Parents
SAND DOUBTED THAT THE ARMY WAS PLEASED THAT their representative, sent to parley under the white flag of truce, had been eaten by a magic hedge.
The army sent in two more knights to try to reclaim Sir Jos—this time not bothering with a flag, accompanied by a whole cohort of archers to cover them. They promptly lost those two knights as well.
When four new knights came forward, Sand shouted down: “Don’t draw any nearer! You cannot defeat the hedge!”
“We will send a priest next to cast out the demons you have summoned into this hedge, evil sorcerer!” one of the knights called.
“Really,” Sand said, looking down at Perrotte. “Could there be a more willful misinterpretation of this situation?”
“To them, it looks like the hedge is protecting us,” Perrotte said. “It might be a reasonable conclusion. As much as I don’t want to give anyone loyal to Jannet any sort of credit for intelligence or . . . anything.”
“What is your name?” a knight called up.
“Alexandre, son of Gilles Smith.” Sand was growing bored of this question, it being the third time he’d answered it that day.
“And what are you doing in that castle?” the knight shouted.
“Mending it,” Sand called. “Still.”
“We demand your immediate surrender of the castle!”
“We cannot leave this castle any more than you all can get in!”
“We? Who else is in there with you? What fell companion aids you in your sorcery?”
Sand could have smacked himself for saying “we.” He decided to ignore the question. “Listen! This castle is a trap! I am not here willingly!”
The knights moved closer to the hedge, but with a great deal more caution than the first three knights. They were able to avoid the thorns when the hedge grasped for them, but the bramble had spooked them. The knights retreated, galloping back to the army.
“What now?” Sand asked.
“I bet Jannet will come out now,” Perrotte said.
But Perrotte was wrong. The day wore away and no one came for several hours—but the next people sent to parley were known to Sand.
“Oh, no,” Sand whispered, his heart pounding in his ears. “They sent my parents.”
Perrotte refused to hang back any longer. She popped up to peer through the crenel, squinting against the full spring sunlight, but staying somewhat out of sight behind a stone merlon. She was silent as Gilles and Agnote walked slowly toward the hedge, alone.
“Father? Agnote? Stay well away from the thorns,” Sand called.
They obeyed, keeping far back. They looked up at Sand, shading their eyes, and Sand’s heart swelled. He had missed them so much.
“You look thin!” Agnote called. “Are you not eating?”
“There’s not much to eat,” he answered.
“How did you get in there, son?” Gil
les asked, far more gently than Sand expected.
“I was at the shrine to Saint Melor, and I left him some nails. I do not remember what happened next, but I woke up here, in the fireplace.”
Gilles ran his hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration that was so familiar to Sand in this strange place that he felt like he was in a dream.
Agnote asked, “Who is that skulking in the shadows next to you?”
Sand didn’t think Perrotte would come out. Neither of them wanted to reveal her presence to the army. He was ready to deflect the question, but she stepped forward into the crenel and stared down at his parents.
“Hello, Gilles Shoemaker,” Perrotte said, not loudly.
For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath. In that instant, Gilles’s face drained of blood. Sand noticed moss growing in the corners of the tower where shadows kept the stone damp and cool. In the distance, a cuckoo sang.
Gilles crossed himself.
“What is it?” Sand heard Agnote ask his father. “What is wrong? Who is that girl?”
“A ghost,” Gilles said, swallowing hard.
“Not a ghost, Papa,” Sand said. “Perrotte has . . . awakened.”
Perrotte poked him hard on the shoulder.
He whispered, “Don’t you think it would be easier to tell the world that you were asleep than it would be to say that you died and were resurrected?”
Perrotte darted back behind the merlon, and yanked him out of sight after her. “Easier for who? Easier for you?”
“Easier for both of us?”
“Pretending that I was just asleep and not dead is not going to be easier for—” She stopped in the middle of that sentence, shaking her head. “Yes, fine. Maybe that will be easier for me, in some ways. Tell that story. It will definitely be easier for him.”
“Why does it need to be easier for my father, of all people?”
“Because . . .” She put her hands to her face, pressing her knuckles into the soft flesh of her cheeks. She dropped her hands and reached for one of his. “Because, Sand, it was your father who made and brought the poisoned slippers that killed me.”
He had imagined, ever since it happened to Perrotte, what it must feel like to be stabbed with a hundred or a thousand of the hedge’s thorns. It felt just like this, in his imagination.
The Castle Behind Thorns Page 16
