Thorn Read online

  “I am so very, very sorry.” Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “Father,” I said, earning shocked looks from my sisters for my tone. “What happened? Where are the Locklands?”

  “Rowan.” Aspen shook her head at me. “He is ill. He needs rest, not questions.”

  “Please, Rowan,” said Juniper, her lower lip quivering.

  I looked into their faces. Neither of them had stopped to consider what would happen to us if Avery’s father and brother were dead. The reasons for our flight from the city were well known, and in the mountains, where superstition held sway over logic and curses exacted justice, I did not want to think about what our neighbors would decide to do with us between now and the spring thaw, should they conclude we had brought our bad luck with us.

  “She is right to ask,” my father said to them, sitting up with painful slowness and placing a wind-roughened hand on his injured leg. “I should have stayed in the mountains.” He hushed my sisters’ protests. “I must speak to Avery.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, thinking of the beasts outside the door. “Aspen’s right. You need rest.” I paused, no longer sure if I wanted answers. “Are they . . .?”

  “Dead,” he said. In the silence that followed his words, he murmured something else.

  “What did he say?” I asked my sisters.

  “‘Mercy,’” said Aspen, turning to me in confusion. “He said ‘mercy.’”

  “Mercy brought you home,” I told him.

  He made a strangled sound, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was laughter. Then his eyes focused, and he saw the sword leaning against the hearthstone.

  It had been a terrible thing to see my father cry, and more terrible still to see him afraid, but nothing was as terrible as the sight of despair breaking him, aging him, crippling him before my eyes.

  Outside, the wind picked up. My sisters huddled closer together, and all four of us stared at the door. My gaze faltered on the rose. The entire table had frosted over in a sheet of ice, and the rose looked fuller, more alive than any cut flower had a right to be.

  “Where did you get that rose?” I asked.

  My father didn’t answer. The howling started again, closer this time than ever before, and something large and primal roared outside the door.

  The beast did not use its claws this time. Instead, I heard the distinctive crunch of booted human feet landing on the doorstep, and the unmistakable sound of a human fist knocking, once, twice, three times on the wooden door.

  “Get behind me,” my father said, straightening his now hunched back and brandishing the sword before him.

  The stranger knocked again. Once, twice, thrice.

  “Who is it?” Aspen asked in a shaky whisper.

  I felt ice stir in my veins.

  I remembered the prick of thorns in my palm.

  I watched as the door burst open, shattered by a great white paw as the head and shoulders of an ice bear burst through the doorway, bellowed once, then retreated.

  I heard the slow step of feet picking their way through shattered timbers, and a brutal gust of wind whipped snow into the room in frenzied flurries.

  “Stay back,” my father shouted, and I loved him for his bravery even as I knew that there was nothing he could do to protect us against what was coming.

  A tall figure emerged through the snow, dressed in a long, white fur cloak with a hood that shadowed its face. My hand tingled, the way fingers and toes do when they have been exposed to cold for far too long.

  The figure raised gloved hands and lowered its hood.

  My father trembled. Aspen screamed. Juniper staggered and clutched at my sleeve to keep from falling.

  I stared.

  I had been wrong to think that the colors of winter were merely silver and white, I found myself thinking. There was the black of wet tree bark; the bruised blue of shadowed drift; the deep, undimmed green of the pines; and the harsh shock of red blood across snow.

  The woman standing in our kitchen was all of these and more.

  Red lips curled in a mocking smile. Dark green eyes challenged my father from a face pale with the first flush of a winter sunset, framed with hair the brown of the last of autumn’s leaves beneath the snow, the darkness limning distant trees, and the blue-black fall of a winter night.

  “Where is it,” the woman said. It was not a question. She examined each of us in turn, and when her eyes fell on me at last, a thrill went through me.

  “Where is what?” I asked, my words little more than a whisper.

  “My rose.”

  I pointed.

  She was at the table in a single stride, plucking the rose out from the ice as easily as if it had been water. Maybe it was water. Maybe the ice was in my eyes, or in my veins, and the rose was just a rose and none of this was happening.

  “A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.” When none of us spoke or asked for clarification, she took a step toward me. “You,” she said, and her voice, at least, was human.

  “No.” The word ripped from my father’s throat with such violence that I thought I might see blood on his lips.

  “These are your daughters?” the woman asked. When my father did not respond, she took a step closer. “When you trespassed on my land, hunting down my kin, I greeted you with more courtesy than you deserved. Put down your sword, old man.”

  The blade fell from my father’s hands, whether of his own free will or by the force of her suggestion.

  “Please, take me instead,” he begged, falling to his knees in supplication.

  “You took a rose from my garden. Now I shall take one from yours.” Her eyes found mine again. “You must be Rowan.”

  Aspen understood the woman’s meaning before I did. She flung herself in front of me, shielding me with her slender frame.

  “Aspen,” I said, ice gripping my stomach.

  “You can’t take her.” Aspen planted her feet firmly on the hard-packed earth.

  “I can, child, and I will.” The bear roared again from beyond the door. “Consider yourselves lucky that I am content with just the one.”

  “Why?” Aspen, who I had always thought a little too conceited for her own good, rose to my defense again, finding words while the rest of us were struck dumb. “Rowan didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You gave her the rose?” the stranger asked my father.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I heard his heart breaking. It echoed sounds I had only ever half imagined, the sharp crack of frozen sap, the groan of the ice floes breaking up in the spring, and the long, slow howl of the lone wolf.

  “Then it is done.”

  My father picked up his discarded sword and charged. She knocked him to the ground with predatory ease, plucking the sword from his limp hands.

  “Come with me,” she said, and her words slid into my bloodstream with the scent of roses.

  “Rowan, no!” Aspen grabbed my arm, and Juniper clung to my other side, sobbing.

  “I spared your father’s life once. I will not spare it a second time,” the woman said. She raised the sword, and I pushed past my sisters to stand before her, placing my hands on the sharp edge of the blade.

  “Please,” I said.

  Green eyes bored into mine. “From you,” she said, lowering the sword, “that word sounds much sweeter.” I shivered at the cold from the open door, my teeth chattering as a strange numbness filled me.

  My father groaned and stirred on the floor. “Rowan,” he whispered as the woman cast one last glance around the room.

  “You wandered too far north, old man,” she said. “Out here Winter still has teeth.” She pulled me behind her, and I stepped out into the storm.

  The blank security of shock abandoned me the minute I left the house. Waiting, its fur lit by the stray light of the moon, was the bear. I had seen a bear, once, from a distance. That bear had been small and black and comfortingly far away. This bear towered head and shoulders over me, its muzzle tipped with black a
nd full of gleaming teeth. It shook its ruff and snorted, a deep, coughing sound that sent me scrabbling backward against the woman. She brushed me aside and laid a hand on the bear’s snout. It snarled once, then settled, turning bright, black eyes on me.

  “Come here.”

  I glanced around the yard, wondering how far I could make it before the bear ran me down. At the edge of the trees, a chorus of howls rose up in warning. The shaking that threatened to loosen my teeth spread to the rest of my body as the scent of the massive predator saturated my senses, and then the woman was in front of me, her eyes as black as the bear’s in the darkness. She lifted me, and I was too shocked to fight her, stunned into the same terror that leaves the rabbit trembling before the fox. She swung me over the bear’s broad back and I lay face down in the musky fur, my heart threatening to burst in my tight chest. Behind me, I felt the woman swing herself up. Her thigh pressed against my cheek.

  I clung to it, because it was human and warm, and I prayed to all the gods I knew that she, at least, would not attempt to eat me.

  “Sit,” she said.

  My panicked mind refused to process her words, and I clung tighter to her leg. Strong hands pried me off, and I stiffened, terror turning me into the wood of my namesake.

  “Sit,” she ordered again. Her voice was low and steady, the kind of voice you would use to calm a frantic animal that you were not above beating into submission if all else failed.

  It worked.

  She helped me straddle the beast. I felt the thick muscles of its shoulders bunching beneath me as it adjusted to the new weight and a sound escaped from the back of my throat that might have been a moan of terror, a whimper, or just my last desperate shred of sanity taking flight.

  This was past understanding, past reason, and certainly past the limits of my imagination. My mind, presented with things beyond its ability to comprehend, shut down, leaving me with a pair of eyes and a frozen tongue and nothing even remotely resembling thought.

  The woman wrapped a firm arm around my waist to keep me upright, bringing the heavy pelt of her cloak with her. The weight of it blocked the wind, and behind me her body was warm. I took comfort in that, because there was no other comfort to be had as the bear lumbered out of the yard I had once hated for its strangeness, and now had never loved more.

  The girl slumped against her, and unbidden she remembered the boy.

  A man, he had called himself, striding into her hall with his father’s colors gleaming on his chest, but a boy for all his brave words, and as green as summer. Three times, Locke had pressed his suit, his eyes barely able to meet hers, and three times she had refused him, laughing with her Hounds as he backed out of her presence.

  “I love you,” he told her the last time. “Let me prove it to you.”

  She had turned away, bored by the game, but her Hounds had stopped her.

  “Let him,” Brendan had said, his big hands resting on the long muzzle of his wolfhound. “Let us see what he is made of.”

  “Go,” she’d told Locke, ignoring Brendan. “Go, run home to your lord father and tell him I will have you when this mountain turns to ash and the lakes boil. Or, perhaps, I will have your sister. Is she as pretty as you?”

  Locke had stammered out something incoherent, and Quince moved restlessly, hair like blown leaves shadowing her narrow face. “It is past time we had a decent hunt. I’m bored with winter. Let him hunt with us.”

  She had paused then, surprised by Quince’s words.

  She fell into the memory, the smell of spring as sharp as glass, as warm and clean as the soft smell of the girl’s hair.

  “Please. Let me prove myself worthy,” Locke had said, ever eager.

  “There is nothing to hunt,” she said, turning, once again, to leave the boy behind.

  “There is always bear.” Quince tossed the words, light as air, but brittle. She looked at Quince then, and saw something far more interesting than the lordling’s pleas.

  “Even a lean bear would feed his father’s entourage,” said Brendan, his deep voice rumbling through the hall. “Let him hunt with us and earn his place here, instead of feasting on better hunters’ kills.”

  “Spring bear is dangerous,” she told Locke. “They wake up angry. Miss a throw, and you’re dead.”

  “I would do anything for you.”

  It was his earnestness that repelled her. It was too much, coming from his handsome face— like a picture, or a poem. Still, she could tell something about him had gotten under Quince’s skin. She touched her Hound’s shoulder, and Quince dropped those quick, dark eyes.

  Her blood stirred. There was game to be had, here, somewhere.

  “Then let us ride.”

  She remembered the taste of melting snow. It had dripped from the trees, darkening her horse’s mane and staining her breeches. Melt-water ran in rills and rivulets, stirring the dark, damp scents of soil and new growth.

  Locke rode a blood-red mountain bay. His blue eyes watched her, his full lips determined. Poets sang about such boys, she thought, spurring her mare forward. There were no poets, here.

  The dogs found the bear as the spring sun set the trees alight, gold spinning webs around the red and green buds. On his hind legs, the bear stood taller than two men, and winter had not wasted the muscle on his enormous frame.

  “Call off the dogs,” said Brendan, his voice as close to her now as it had felt far off then.

  Call them off, she willed the past, but the wish did not change history this time, either.

  “No,” she’d said instead, and she remembered the feel of that cold smile. “Locke, I swear upon my life that if you bring me that bear’s heart I will be yours until my dying breath.”

  Quince’s horse shifted, and the look that passed between them burned her through the years, wasted, useless, a mockery of feeling.

  Of course he died.

  Of course he charged, his horse’s eyes wild with fear as he raised his spear and sent it toward the beast.

  His aim was true, but his arm too weak, or else the bear too strong. The claws ripped him nearly in half, and it had taken all of them to bring the creature down. Three dogs died, too, and she had pressed her fingers to their quivering flanks, their lives fluttering beneath her fingers. Her favorite licked her hand, then shuddered, and she forgot about Locke until Quince laughed.

  “Look,” Quince had said, and she had.

  The boy lay with his dark hair soaked in blood and his blue eyes wide with shock. His breathing came in fits, and she stood over him, her shadow blocking the sunlight from his eyes.

  He said her name and fumbled in the pocket of his jacket with clumsy fingers.

  “He brought you a rose,” Quince said, still laughing.

  “Perhaps,” she had said, kneeling beside Locke and lifting the flower from his trembling fingers, “he should have brought a second spear instead.”

  Chapter Four

  My family’s screams followed us into the snow. I looked back as best I could as the bear began to move, struggling against the woman’s grip as the slow lumber gathered speed like an avalanche. I saw my father sprawled in a drift, one arm outstretched towards me, my name on his lips as he shouted himself hoarse. He must have tried to run and fallen, his wounded leg giving out beneath him before he could make it to the clearing’s edge. Aspen had Juniper wrapped in her arms, keeping them both upright as they swayed with horror, and Juniper’s sobs echoed in my ears long after the trees obscured my vision and my family faded from sight, lost to me in the gloaming.

  That night stretched into a cold morning. I woke at one point, shivering, to find that I had turned against her, my head lolling on her shoulder. I ached with cold and exhaustion and fear, and a new stiffness. Riding a giant bear was nothing like riding a horse, and I had never ridden a horse through the night. My thighs ached. My rear ached. My heart ached, and I wondered what my sisters and father were doing now, as daylight brought the reality of the night into harsh clarity. I wondered i
f I would ever see any of them again.

  We rode through dark forests full of pine and fir and black outcroppings of rock, slick with ice and shadow. Ahead and behind ranged the wolves. I counted seven in number, though it was hard to tell them apart. The only one I was sure I hadn’t counted twice was as black as the rocks we passed.

  The bear lumbered through the drifts, a tireless pace that jarred me to my frozen core. Elk scattered in the higher clearings, snorting plumes of steam and shaking their great antlers. From a distance, I thought I saw the swift fall of a mountain lion descending on something small and white, although it could have been nothing more than a gust of windblown snow.

  The air grew thinner the higher we climbed, catching in my throat and burning in my lungs. My captor pressed on, keeping a pace that would have killed a man on horseback, or even a man on a dogsled. Nothing natural moved the way her beasts did, and the wind from our passage creaked through the trees.

  We came at last to a vast frozen lake high amid the peaks. The bear paused on the shore, and across the ice rose the highest point in the spine of my world, a peak so tall that the clouds felt miles below us. At the base of that peak, overlooking the lake, was a keep. The wolves yipped, setting out toward it at a steady lope, and the bear coughed deep in its chest. The roots that the rose had put deep in my flesh stirred again.

  Home.

  The lake itself was at least a mile across, maybe more. The wind stirred the snow on its surface, which swirled and danced and fell apart, small whirlwinds obscuring the castle from view. By the time we passed beneath the shadow of that mountain, the sun was setting once again, staining the walls of the keep a deep pink. The castle hugged the mountain, and three towers erupted from behind the battlements. The central tower rose above the others, marching up the side of the mountain like an absurd chimney. At the very top, a candle flickered.

  It was only as we passed through the huge iron gate that I noticed the roses. They grew in abundance along the lakeshore and covered the stones like enchanted ivy. A sob clawed at my chest.