Thorns (13 page)

He added the document I’d found to his sack, and we returned to the corridor. The door slid shut behind us. “It seals the room in,” Adam explained. “That’s why the books and papers are so well-preserved.”

“How old is this place?” I wondered aloud, trailing my fingers across the smooth wall of stone.

“Hundreds of years, at least. Maybe thousands.” He shouldered the bag and stepped toward the spiraling staircase. “Come on.”

We retraced our steps through the corridors and up flights of steps. I stared at everything, mulling Adam’s claims that my people had descended from the people who’d once built this place.

When we reached the top of the last staircase, I saw the glare of sunlight pouring through the open door ahead. Relief flickered in my chest. The scent of cold, clean air met my nose as the wind fanned our faces, and I inhaled deep lungfuls of it as we stepped out into the sunshine. “That place is a like a tomb.”

“You were very brave,” Adam said.

I looked at him in surprise. The wind caught his hair and blew it into his eyes, hiding them from me. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. The words hung between us, and I felt surprisingly warm.

A few flakes of snow swirled around us, dragging my attention away from Adam’s enigmatic statements of approval. Gray clouds lurked on the horizon, promising a storm.

“It’s beginning to snow.”

“Good. It’ll cover our tracks.”

We mounted the horses and turned them home. As they found their way back through the trees, I tried to sort out everything I’d seen and learned in the depths of the mysterious ruins.

Echlos
.

Beside me, Adam rode without speaking, his hands guiding the mare effortlessly. My gelding picked his way behind the other horse. The snow had begun to fall in earnest, surrounding us in a curtain of white and enveloping the woods in a hush of quiet. I scanned the forest for signs of Watchers out of habit even though it was not yet sunset.

“What are you going to do with the things we found today?” I asked after the silence began to choke me.

At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said quietly, so quietly I almost missed it, “There’s something I must decipher. I’m hoping they will help.”

“Decipher?”

He shook his head, and I saw I’d get no more out of him. I let the subject drop.

Dusk had descended by the time we reached the barn. I dismounted and led the gelding into his stall. Adam unsaddled the mare.

“It’s almost dark,” I said. “It won’t be safe to walk back.” He knew that, of course, but I couldn’t help saying it.

I almost missed the flash of his smile in the near-darkness. “I have my methods. But I’ll need to leave this with you.” He set down the pack filled with papers and books. “I’ll come back for it tomorrow. Is that all right?”

“Of course,” I said, reaching for it. “I’ll add it to the collection of contraband.”

We smiled hesitantly at each other, the terse kind of smile that comes from sharing danger and dread and all the wild elation that comes from escaping it together. And part of me felt a prickle of something else, too, but then Adam was slipping out into the gathering night and I was alone in the warm darkness of the barn with the horses nickering at my shoulder and a sack of ancient Echlos secrets at my feet. I hid the sack in the secret room and returned to the house.

~

The living area was empty when I entered it.

“Ivy? Jonn?”

The fire smoldered on the hearth, and yarn lay on the chairs. The utter stillness was palpable. I looked into my parents’ old room, thinking maybe Jonn was sleeping, but the bed was empty. Upstairs was equally silent.

I returned to the main room and called their names again, and my voice splintered with panic.

Silence.

Dragging in a quick, frightened breath, I ran to the door. Ivy was always running off, but Jonn? Where could he be?

The yard was white, empty. The shadows of the forest were bleeding into the gathering darkness in the air. Flecks of snow swirled in front of my face. The only footprints in the yard were my own, which meant they’d left hours ago or not at all.

I returned to the house. “Jonn? Ivy?”

The barest scraping sound met my straining ears.

The bedroom
.

I ran back to the doorway of my parents’ room and around the bed to the very end of the room, where a wardrobe sheltered a corner from view. I stopped short at what I saw, my mouth falling open.

My brother and sister sat on the ground, surrounded by papers they were scrambling to put into one pile. They froze at my entrance. Ivy’s face scrunched up in horror, and her cheeks flushed a bright red. “We did all the chores,” she said quickly, as if in a last-ditch effort to distract me. “The quota’s finished. Ask Jonn.”

He wouldn’t look at me.

“What is this?” I reached down and grabbed one of the papers before she could snatch it away. My gaze fell over it—my parents’ handwriting. This was one of the documents from the secret room beneath the barn. I looked at my brother, astonishment and anger filling me in equal measures. “What are you doing?”

A muscle in his jaw flexed. He put another paper on the stack they were assembling, presumably so they could stuff it somewhere to hide it from me.

“Reading,” he said. I could tell he was angry because I knew his moods better than anyone, but he was very calm as he finally looked up at me.

Ivy was not so calm, however. “We’re getting involved,” she said, grabbing another paper before I could get to it.

“
Involved
? With the Thorns? Absolutely not—”

“This isn’t Thorns business,” Jonn said.

“Those papers involve the Thorns,” I growled. “Give them back.”

“These are our parents’ papers, and they belong to us,” he said, daring me to disagree. “We’re reading them. I don’t think your Adam knows what’s in these.”

“He isn’t
my
Adam,” I said, and then stopped short as the rest of the words sunk in. “What’s in them?”

“Nice try,” he said, shaking his head. “But no. You have your duties, and I think we’ve found ours.”

“Jonn—”

Ivy tried to yank the paper from my hands, and I lifted it out of her reach. I glared at my brother, who was now pretending to ignore me. He shuffled more papers.

“Where were you all afternoon?” she demanded. She gave up trying to get the paper in my hands and sank back to the floor.

Now it was my turn to flush. I couldn’t tell them about going to Echlos. Adam would be furious. “I was busy,” I hedged.

She sniffed. “You were with Adam. I saw you leaving through the window. That’s when we decided to take another look at all these papers in the secret room. We found them in a box on the shelf.”

“Those papers aren’t supposed to be just sitting around out here. They need to stay hidden in the room beneath the barn. What if someone saw them?”

“Who’s going to see them?” she muttered.

“It’s dangerous!” I looked to my brother for help. He’d be against Ivy doing this, at least.

But this time, he didn’t take my side. “It’s our heritage.”

I sucked in a breath. “The Thorns—”

“Not them,” he interrupted. “I mean, it’s more than that.”

I stopped. Silence filled the room. “What?”

“Look,” Ivy said. She fanned through the stack and pulled out a heavily creased page. “It says right here that Da’s parents knew about the gate before the Thorns people ever came here.”

She shoved it into my empty hand and crossed her arms over her chest. I lowered my gaze to the page. My eyes traced the words, and my heart thudded as I saw she was right. It was my father’s handwriting. I recognized the scrawl. The words were too thick because of the way he had always pressed down hard on the pencil, and letters slanted hard to the right. I looked up at Jonn and found him watching me intently.

“Read it,” he said.

I lowered my gaze back to the page. My mouth turned dry, and my hands clammy.

Da took me into the Frost today. He’s teaching me the route to the gate along with the histories. He says this is our most treasured secret, the inheritance of the Weavers. We weave history along with yarn, he always said, and now I know it to be true. I have been sworn to secrecy. The knowledge will be mine alone to bear when I am grown, until my own children are old enough to learn it
.

I breathed in deeply. My thoughts were spinning, and I struggled to corral them into a semblance of order. I met Jonn’s steady gaze. “They knew about the gate before the Thorns operatives even came here?”

He shoved a hand through his hair, his angry expression slipping into one of perplexed wonder. “If Grandda was showing him these things when he reached adulthood, then it had to be so. The Thorns came into existence because of the Aeralian conflict. They’ve only been around for five or ten years at most. This was written before we were born.”

I struggled to make sense of it all. “So the secret room below the barn wasn’t built as a spy chamber for the Thorns?”

“I don’t think so. But it just so happened to perfectly coincide with the Thorns agenda when they came along,” he said.

I stared at them both. “So what does this all mean? Why did our family know these things?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I plan to find out.”

IT WASN’T ASSEMBLY day or quota day, but I went to the village the next morning anyway. I couldn’t think beyond the things I’d seen at Echlos, the revelations my siblings had discovered in my parents’ things, and my need to see Ann to help me sort through everything I felt. My thoughts were in a snarl, and my emotions churned thick and fast and spurred my footsteps faster and faster as I ran down the path. I was barely paying attention, so when I saw the extra soldiers filling the street and heard the creak of the Farther wagons rumbling past, my mouth went dry.

What was going on?

Fresh wagon tracks gutted the streets and turned the icy dirt to ridged mud. The soldiers yelled guttural orders at men clad in ragged clothing. Their gaunt faces and hollow eyes haunted me. As I slowed to stare, one of the soldiers turned and swept his gaze across the street. I recognized him—the brute from the quota yard who’d harassed Ann and threatened me. Tugging my cloak tighter around my face, I hurried on. I needed to find Ann. Emotional turmoil or not, I needed to know what was happening in the village. I was with the Thorns now. Such information might be critical.

The Mayor’s house sat atop the highest hill in the village, and my lungs were burning by the time I reached it. I halted by the gate, gazing up as the wind fanned my cheeks and played with the edges of my cloak. The white boards of the house gleamed in the pale winter sun, and icicles glittered like fangs along the porch rails. Most of the village was made of old stone mined from the icy earth, but the Mayor’s house was built from hewn boards and painted a glistening white. Delicate porches ringed the stories and extended into the gardens. It was the picture of opulence, indulgence, and exclusion.

A black coach sat in front of the house, the wheels edged in sharp spikes and the horses drawing it clad in gleaming chains.

I swallowed hard, taking note of the spikes, the chains. What was this? Had the Mayor gotten himself another symbol of his ill-purchased power, or did this belong to Officer Raine? It was clearly Aeralian, not Frost-made, and whoever drove it wanted to send the message that he was powerful, dangerous, and not to be messed with.

But I had other concerns besides locating the owner of the carriage. I needed to talk to Ann.

Instead of going to the front door, I slipped through the garden to the back and knocked on the servants’ entrance. A maid poked her head out. She blinked when she saw me, and I rushed to explain. “I need to speak to Ann Mayor. I have some yarn to show her.” It was our signal. We’d arranged it months ago.

She nodded and ducked back around the door while I slipped off the porch and back into the garden. The naked branches of the trees and bushes did little to hide me, so I waited by the corner of the house. Around it, I could see the black coach.

Footsteps thudded just out of sight, and I tensed as I heard the Mayor’s voice rumble in a low mutter from the porch. I pressed myself against the side of the house as figures swept down the steps toward the drive, but I caught a glimpse of them anyway.

The Mayor walked in front, flanked by two soldiers. Another man followed two paces behind. His back was to me, and all I could make out were a pair of gleaming black boots and a long black cloak with a purple stripe across the bottom. Officer Raine? But no, the walk was all wrong, and the man’s hair was black instead of brown. But he walked with the same implicit authority of the Farther officer. My chest squeezed tight with apprehension.

Who was he?

The mystery figure paused before the coach, his hand on the door.

“I trust we will experience no…opposition…to our goals here?” the man in the cloak said, and the tone he used was soft and deliberate, like a caress of a knife blade against the skin.

I could see the Mayor’s face from my vantage point. He nodded, his eyes flicking to the cloaked man and then to the ground. He seemed stooped, almost shrunken, as if he’d crumpled like an old parchment in the presence of this Farther.

“None,” he assured the man.

“Good. I look forward to your cooperation, Mayor.” He pronounced
mayor
with a sneer, as if to accentuate just how much of a joke it was.

The Mayor was silent.

The cloaked man pulled himself into the coach, the door snapped shut behind him, and one of the soldiers leaped into the driver’s seat and snapped the reins. The horses broke into a jog, and the coach pulled away. I still hadn’t seen the man’s face, just his back, but what I’d seen told me everything I needed to know.

The Farthers must have sent their official representative from Aeralis, then—just as Ann had said they would. There would be no pretense any longer now.

We were under the heel of Aeralis’ shiny black boot.