Thorns (11 page)

“Jullia,” Ann said, giving me a quick glance that was clearly an order to compose myself. I swallowed hard and did my best to comply as we stepped forward, our feet crunching against the sludgy snow that lined the edges of the alley. Since when had Ann become the strong one?

Jullia searched our faces for any signs of condemnation, and when she found none, her shoulders relaxed. A tired smile hovered at the edges of her mouth but never quite landed. “It’s good to see a familiar face,” she said with a note of exhaustion in her tone.

We murmured answers to her questions, and I tried to act as though I hadn’t noticed we were standing in an alley whispering.

“How’s your father?” Ann asked.

Jullia’s face crumpled. “He is still a prisoner.” She pointed at the end of the alley. “We’re staying with the Tanners temporarily. Ma goes to see the Elders every day, hoping to find some way to have him released.”

Tannin racks filled the small courtyard behind her. A bubbling pot sat over a fire in the middle of the yard, steam spilling from the top. The liquid inside churned thick and dark as blood. The air smelled like charcoal and wet wool. A plume of smoke smudged the sky above our heads and blocked the sun.

“Dye?” I murmured aloud, surprised. With Edmond Dyer in prison, was his family still expected to keep the trade?

“We still have to make our quota if we want supplies,” Jullia explained, noticing my look. “Even without Father here to help, the numbers haven’t changed...” Her voice wobbled, and she looked away. When she turned her face back, her eyes were red but her face was composed. “It’s hard,” she finished.

My fingers knotted into fists. More injustice, this time from the Elders. They could hardly blame the Farthers for such tyranny. What was happening to our village? Had everyone gone mad?

Ann bit her lip as she took in the sight of the makeshift dye supplies and Jullia’s exhausted expression. “Is Everiss here now?”

Jullia shook her head, and the curls that framed her cheeks shivered at the movement. “She’s been sneaking away whenever she thinks I won’t notice. I wonder if she’s trying to see Father. None of us have been able to speak with him.”

“No matter,” Ann said carefully, although I didn’t miss her surprise at the news that Everiss was missing. “I’ll speak to her later.”

I looked at the piles of yarn waiting to be dipped in color. Did Jullia have to do all this herself? “Can we help you?” I burst out.

The courtyard filled with silence. My own words to Adam echoed in my head.
You don’t help other families with their quota. It just isn’t done
.

“I have a few minutes,” I said quickly. “I don’t...I mean, I am no Dyer, of course, but...”

Jullia’s eyes looked suspiciously wet, but she blinked a few times and managed to produce another weak smile. This time it lingered a few seconds. “Oh. Yes. Thank you.”

Ann breathed in deeply. Her expression was briefly a startled one, as if I’d suggested we strip naked and paint ourselves blue, but then she nodded, too. “Of course. We have a few minutes to spare.”

We worked quickly and clumsily under Jullia’s direction, dipping the yarn into the steaming liquid using special forks. The yarn seeped up the color and turned a deep shade of red. Jullia hung the freshly dipped pieces against the side of the house, and the dye dripped into the snow below. In my head, I saw a flash of blood against the snow. I blinked the memory away.

By the time we’d finished, the sun had climbed high in the sky. The day was slipping away.

“I think we should be going,” I said. “Ivy and Jonn might worry.”

Jullia grabbed my hand with her purple-stained ones. She fumbled for words. “Thank you,” she said finally, and her face crumpled as if she wished she could say more, but didn’t know how to do it.

Ann hugged her, and we turned to go.

A sigh squeezed between my lips as we reached the road and I stretched. My shoulders ached and my back throbbed after an hour of dying. What must Jullia and Everiss feel like, doing this day after day? For the first time in my life, I was thankful to be a Weaver.

Neither of us commented on the fact that we’d helped Jullia. But I felt a little lighter. We’d helped her, even if it was against tradition. Maybe Adam was right.

“Oh, Lia,” Ann said as we turned the corner. “They are living in squalor, fulfilling their quota in a dirty alley. There were
rats
.”

“They have a lot more to worry about besides rats,” I said, glancing down the street in search of Farther soldiers. Didn’t she understand? They were completely and utterly vulnerable. They were being forced to fulfill their quota without the adequate resources or means to do so.

They were being broken. Punished.

Sharpness and shadow filled the village now, almost as much as the Frost outside. At least in the Frost, we had the snow blossoms to ward the Watchers off. Here, there was nothing to keep the Farthers at bay if they wanted to kill one of us, and the monsters in uniform roamed day and night.

Ann bit her lip. I looked at the sky—it was time for me to be heading back—and then at her face. “I’ve got to go.”

She nodded.

I hovered there a moment, both reluctant and eager to leave. Worry tugged at my heart with invisible threads as I studied my friend’s pale face. I didn’t miss the way her eyes swept the street, or the way her fingers trembled.

What was she not telling me?

“Be safe,” she said, her teeth bone-white against her lips as she tried to smile and failed. We touched hands, and I stepped away from her and down the street for the gate. When I looked over my shoulder, she had already vanished.

With unease gnawing at my gut, I turned my face toward home.

WHEN LATE AFTERNOON came, I saddled the horses, running my fingers over their shaggy coats to check for burrs before settling the blankets over their backs and then the saddles. When I retrieved the bridles, a shadow moved against the light of the window, and Adam was taking one of the bridles from my hand as I sucked in a startled breath. “You frightened me!”

“Sorry,” he murmured, not looking remotely sorry. He took the bridle and slipped to the side of one of the horses, the taller one with a star on her forehead. He slid the bit into the horse’s mouth, crooning softly to the animal as she tossed her head. He glanced at me. “What do you call this one?”

“Doesn’t have a name.” I approached the second horse, a gelding with four white socks.

Adam shot me a baffled look. “No name?”

“What point is there in naming them? They aren’t pets.”

“Do you always have such a dire view of things?”

“It’s not dire,” I protested. “It’s sensible. When you name things, you start worrying about if the Watchers will get them, and if they’ll be warm enough, and if they’ll be taken away from you. You start to care.”

He shook his head and reached up to rub the mare between her eyes affectionately. I remembered he was good with horses. “Star, then,” he said, murmuring more words to the mare. She flicked one of her ears in his direction and nickered softly.

I scowled at him in mock annoyance. “You can’t just name my horse.”

“I thought they didn’t belong to you. I thought you just boarded them here in exchange for extra supplies.”

I couldn’t argue with that kind of logic, unfortunately. I crossed my arms and did some more fake scowling.

Adam pointed at the gelding. “That one is Officer Raine.”

A sly smile crossed my lips. “Well, just the back half of him.”

Adam threw his head back and laughed in startled appreciation.

Still smiling, I led the gelding out into the snow. Adam followed with the mare, and we mounted them just outside the paddock behind the barn. We were hidden from the house, a fact that made me glad.

My smile faded as I faced the dark shadows of the forest. The wind caught my hair and ruffled my cloak, and a chill swept over my skin. Even in the light of day, the woods radiated danger.

I looked at Adam and found him watching me.

“Are you ready to go back?”

My heart stuttered in my chest. “Back?”

Instead of replying, he kicked his horse into a gallop and rode straight into the forest. I had no choice but to follow as he crossed the perimeter of the trees and plunged into the Frost.

The sunlight always looked different in the woods, all diluted and glowing, almost as if we were underwater. It was strange to forge ahead without a path to mark the way. The trees were just slashes of black and brown against the white drifts of snow, with the occasional flash of red berries or the shock of blue where a snow blossom bush bloomed, and the prickly scent of pine mingled with the smell of damp bark and melting snow.

The horses snorted, the sound punctuating the eerie silence along with the stamp of their hooves in the snow. Still, a hush enveloped us, discouraging words. I exhaled softly, unable to shake the feeling that we were being watched. I turned in the saddle, scanning the trees for movement.

But the dark hollows were still, silent.

The horses moved swiftly, leaping over fallen trees and galloping up embankments. When we reached a hill, Adam drew the mare back to a walk and let my gelding catch up.

“Do you remember when we met in these woods several months ago?” he asked as he scanned the trees.

The image of him standing with his back to me, a cloaked figure amid all the white, was forever branded in my mind. One of the horses had run away—Star, in fact—and Gabe a¬¬nd I had followed her deep into the forest. We’d come upon Adam suddenly, and I had kissed Gabe to distract Adam from seeing his face and realizing he was not a villager. And it had worked. Adam hadn’t realized who Gabe was. And then he’d given me a hint that led later to my discovery of the secret room filled with Thorns documents beneath the barn floor.

“I remember,” I said quietly.

“I was looking for the gate. Since your parents’ deaths I’d been searching the Frost for it. They had all the maps, all the knowledge. I was not privy to that information when they were alive.”

“But you knew about the secret room beneath our barn. Why didn’t you look there for the maps?”

He met my gaze. “I
did
look. They weren’t complete. Don’t you remember?”

“True,” I said, surprised he’d stolen into our barn at some indeterminate point in the past without our knowing. But then I remembered the ease with which he’d slipped into the barn this afternoon, the way he moved through the Frost at night, almost as if by magic. “So you didn’t find anything. You didn’t know where it was.”

“Half of the two maps needed to chart the way had been stolen. Your father often carried the second map with him. He was charting as he explored. We knew so little about the ancient ruins, and he was the expert. He must have dropped it in the Frost the day he died. At first I wasn’t sure if you had found it, or someone else, and for a time I didn’t dare approach you for fear of betraying myself as a Thorns operative to anyone who might be watching.”

Thinking about my father’s death made my throat squeeze and my eyes burn, but I hungered for these details, too. I took a deep breath and let it out. “Cole was watching, remember? He found the map and gave it to the Mayor, and I saw it when I went to confess about Gabe. I remembered it later when we found the maps, and I made a copy with Ann’s help the same day I confronted you about working for the Thorns.”

“Yes,” Adam said. “You astonished me with your resourcefulness. I’d hoped I could start you on the path to uncovering your heritage with us, but I never dreamed you’d accomplish so much on your own.”

His unexpected praise startled me. I bit my lip and stared at the mane of the horse instead of looking at him. Adam wasn’t free with his compliments. It meant a lot, coming from him.

“Thank you.”

“He was wrong about your parents,” Adam said after another moment of silence.

I glanced up and found him gazing at me intently. His face was unreadable, his eyes clear and hard as flint. “He?”

“Cole,” he said. “That night at the gate. He called them soft-hearted civilians. But they were a key part of the Thorns here. Their contributions were greater than most people realized.”

The lump in my throat squeezed tighter. “Thank you,” I whispered again. Their deaths had not been in vain, not if they’d done so much good.

“They were important players in the organization,” he continued. “They gave their lives, and it wasn’t for nothing. They saved the lives of hundreds with their efforts, perhaps more.”

“Did many go through the gate?” I asked.

He mulled over his words, as if trying to choose the best way to put it. “Many did not make it this far. But some, yes.”

Branches scraped at our faces and cloaks as we progressed farther into the Frost. Adam must have memorized the way, for he guided his horse with confidence around piles of rock and beneath sagging trees.

“How much longer?” I asked. I shot a wary glance at the late-afternoon sun.

“We’re close,” he said, pointing to the ground in front of us.

I caught my breath.

Watcher tracks—giant ones—marred the snow. The horses shied away, and I struggled to hold the gelding in place.

“They keep close to the gate,” Adam said. “It’s just up that hill.”

My heart began to pound. But when we crested the top of the hill, I forgot my terror, because the scene before me took my breath away.

The trees fell away, and a swath of ice-crusted lake swept along the hill to our left. The mountains rose up in the distance, their peaks stabbing the storm clouds that hugged the horizon. Before us, the smooth curve of an icy beach glittered in the sunlight alongside the black waters of a lake. Everything was placid, peaceful…almost as if everything were sleeping.

“Is this…?” I looked around. Where were the ruined buildings? Where was the entrance? It seemed familiar, but only as if from a dream I’d had years and years ago and almost forgotten except for a faint, lingering impression.

Adam tipped his head. A grin teased across his lips. “You don’t see it?”

“I…” I spurred my horse forward and rode toward the lake, craning my neck. I saw nothing but frozen ground and ice-covered rocks. I looked over my shoulder at Adam, who hadn’t moved. Slowly, I turned the gelding around and galloped back to his side. “All right,” I said. “You’ve had your fun. Where is it?”