Rose & Thorn Read online

  As Griff joined his cohort, nodding to the others, Quirk handed him a weighted practice sword. “Ready?” he asked.

  Griff nodded as the other cohorts fell into straight lines. A bored-sounding commander called out the moves, and the Watchers responded, like clockwork. They drilled for an hour. Griff was used to it, but the lack of sleep and his meager dinner the night before left him feeling light-headed, his arms heavy, his footwork slow. Next they ran laps around the edge of the training yard, still carrying their weighted practice weapons.

  “Come on, junior,” jeered one of his cohort, a rangy older man named Stet, who had never approved of Griff’s early admittance to the Watchers.

  Griff had worked very hard to qualify. He knew that he’d been admitted for what he could do, not because of who his father was, but he’d never convince the rest of the Watchers that being the Lord Protector’s son did not give him an unfair advantage. With an effort, he picked up his pace.

  After they’d run for twenty minutes, they had another forty minutes of sparring. As usual, Griff was paired with Quirk, who, despite his small size, was one of the best fighters of all the Watchers.

  By the end of their session the sun was well up, but the yard was still deep in shadow behind the high walls that surrounded the citadel. After putting away his training blade, Griff leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. With the exercise, the cut over his ribs had opened again; he felt blood seeping into the bandages. The doctor would scold him if he returned to the infirmary to have them replaced.

  “Breakfast?” Quirk asked, stumping up to him.

  Opening his eyes, Griff straightened. “Definitely.”

  They headed across the courtyard toward the barracks, and the dining hall.

  “D’you ever think,” Quirk began, “about strict rationality and austerity, whether it really is the best defense against the rise of Story?”

  Griff looked quickly around them to see if anyone had overheard Quirk’s words. The other Watchers in their shift had already gone in; they were alone. He glanced down at his colleague. “It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?”

  “I suppose it has,” Quirk said musingly. “I just find myself wondering, now and then, what’s so bad about stories. They’re just stories, after all.”

  That kind of thinking was dangerous. “Stories that are told give power to our enemy.” Griff lowered his voice. “All stories serve Story.”

  “So we’re told,” Quirk said. “We Watchers enforce a rule of strictness, rationality, and silence, all to keep Story from gaining power. But what if we haven’t got it right? What if the stories we tell, our own stories, have a different kind of power?”

  Griff stopped and stared down at Quirk. “But we don’t tell stories. Ever.”

  “Right. I know.” He put his hands on his hips and gazed up at Griff. “You’ve been raised more strictly than anyone in the City. You wouldn’t even begin to know how to tell a story, would you?”

  Wordless, Griff shook his head.

  “There’s the irony,” Quirk went on. “You’re perfectly trained as a fighter, and so am I. But what if we’re fighting Story with the wrong weapons?”

  Griff found his voice. “Quirk, be careful,” he whispered urgently.

  “Ah well,” Quirk said with a shake of his head. “Just thinking aloud, junior. Don’t worry about it.” He went on ahead.

  Griff stared after him. Quirk’s words were alarmingly close to treason. Of course he was going to worry about it.

  As he caught up to Quirk at the dining hall door, a citadel servant intercepted them. “Message for you from the Lord Protector,” he said to Griff. “You’re to report to his office.”

  “Doesn’t he have time for breakfast first?” Quirk protested.

  “Immediately,” said the servant.

  Griff knew better than to argue. With a nod to Quirk, he headed for the citadel, then up the stairs and down the hall to the Lord Protector’s office. No Watchers stood outside the door, for once. After knocking, he entered.

  As usual, the Lord Protector was behind his desk, neatly dressed despite the early hour. He’d probably been at work since before dawn. Near the empty fireplace stood a soberly dressed older woman, with a younger woman flanked by Luth and Taira. The woman’s hands were chained behind her back, and a cloth gag was bound across her mouth that prevented her from speaking. As Griff came into the room, the Lord Protector got to his feet. “Ah,” he said. “Finally.”

  There was no point in protesting that he’d come as soon as he’d received his father’s message.

  The soberly dressed woman studied Griff. “This is him? He will lift the curse from my daughter?”

  At the question, Griff’s stomach clenched, and he was glad that he hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. It had been months since he’d had to break a curse, and he’d thought—no, he’d hoped—he was finally done with that.

  Despite what Quirk had been saying, it was the strict and austere practice of rationality, the iron rule of the Lord Protector, and careful patrolling by the Watchers that had, after many years, seemed to squelch any attempt by Story to reestablish itself in the City. One way they could tell that it was trying to rise again was when curses began to fall, at random, on ordinary City-folk. If their curses weren’t lifted, the cursed ones would find themselves entangled in one of Story’s plots, at odds with the rational laws that governed the City.

  But Griff himself had a special talent, one that the Lord Protector simultaneously abhorred and found very useful. He was a curse eater. Maybe it was because his father was the most rational person in the City, the one least likely to be cursed, and Griff had inherited that resistance to Story. Or maybe there was some other reason. At any rate, Griff could take on another’s curse and somehow—he wasn’t sure how he did it, exactly—negate it.

  But it was never an easy process.

  “What—” Griff started, then cleared his throat. “What is her curse?”

  “It came on her three days ago,” the mother answered. “She awoke in the morning, and flowers fell from her mouth whenever she spoke.”

  “Flowers?” interrupted the Lord Protector. He seated himself behind his desk again and picked up his pen. “Can you be more specific?”

  “Well, yes,” the woman answered. “She speaks daffodils when she is happy, marigolds when she is angry, and violets when she is sad.” She shifted away from her daughter, as if she might be contaminated just by describing the curse.

  “I see,” the Lord Protector said, and wrote something in the book that, Griff knew, was filled with notes on Story’s devices. Curses were a particular interest of his father’s; it was as if by analyzing every aspect of a curse, he could come to understand Story and how it worked, and thus destroy it forever. The Lord Protector also had notes about objects that were important to Story, things like glass slippers and poisoned apples and magical mirrors. Such items were rarely seen in the City—they were destroyed whenever they appeared. “Go on,” Griff’s father ordered the woman when he’d finished noting her words about her daughter’s curse. “You responded appropriately, I presume?”

  “Of course,” the woman said primly. “But the house became filled with flowers. We had to start giving them away to the neighbors.” She folded her hands before herself and cast her eyes down. “The irrationality of it was starting to be noticed. One of the Watchers who patrols our sector of the City told me to bring her here, and so I did.”

  Griff looked away, and found himself locking gazes with the gagged young woman. She was a few years older than he was, short, ordinary, with brown hair and mud-brown eyes that were shining with unshed tears. She shook her head, and the tears spilled over, rolling down her cheeks, soaking the gag. She gasped, as if she wanted to speak.

  She didn’t want to lose the curse. The cursed ones often didn’t, Griff had found. Their curses made them special, different, beautiful. Magical. Wonderful.

  And wonder had no place in the City. Not anymore.

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sp; At the desk, the Lord Protector looked up. “Get on with it,” he said impatiently.

  Griff knew better than to protest. He nodded.

  “We’ll hold her for you, junior,” Luth said, gripping the young woman’s arms tightly.

  “The gag should come off, too,” Taira said. She ran a fingernail along the girl’s jaw, then jerked the gag away.

  The girl gulped and gazed up at Griff with beseeching eyes. “Please don’t,” she whispered. As she spoke, rich purple violets streaked with gold tumbled from her lips, falling to the floor. Luth and Taira stared; the Lord Protector nodded and made a precise notation in his book. The girl’s cheeks paled. “I—I promise not to speak,” she went on, and the violets’ indigo darkened nearly to black, their pollen dusting her lips. “Please don’t take the curse from me.”

  I’m sorry, Griff wanted to say to her. But he couldn’t. He had to obey his father’s order. As he stepped closer, his feet crushed the violets, and their sweet, green smell filled the room. He raised his hands and rested them on each side of the girl’s head. She tried to pull away, but Luth and Taira wrenched her arms back, holding her steady. “Please, please don’t,” she pleaded as more violets fell.

  Griff felt her curse rise under his hands. It retreated, as if trying to evade him, then struck, slamming into him like a wave of darkness. The girl screamed, and ropes of bitter brambles studded with blood-red roses flowed from her mouth, surrounding them, ripping at Griff’s hands. Bracing himself against the pain and the darkness, he held on. The girl screamed again. A last petal fell, and Griff felt the curse fill his own head, a pounding, ripping ache. Letting his hands drop from the girl’s head, he stepped back. Released from the curse, she hung limp between the two Watchers who held her, weeping hoarsely. Against the plain gray of the stone floor, the violets were a vivid splash of color.

  With shaking, bloody hands, Griff unwrapped the roses that had twined around his arms. The thorns were curved, and wickedly sharp. Ignoring her weeping daughter, the older woman stared at him, her mouth hanging open.

  “It is done?” came the Lord Protector’s voice from the direction of his desk.

  Griff didn’t look up. “Yes,” he answered, his own voice ragged. His mouth filled with bitterness, and he swallowed it down. Getting free of the last of the roses, he let them drop to the floor.

  “That will be all, then,” the Lord Protector said, the distaste clear in his voice. “You are dismissed.”

  His head spinning, dark spots gathering in his eyes, Griff headed for the exit. His shoulder hit the doorframe and he staggered, then managed to get out of the room, and walked dizzily along the hallway and down the stairs. The curse pounded in his head. Barracks, he thought vaguely. Breakfast, if it wasn’t too late. That would help. Blinking away the darkness that edged his vision, he took a wavering step.

  A stutter of footsteps approached. “You look like cold porridge, junior,” he heard Quirk say. “What happened?”

  Porridge. Griff swallowed down a sudden surge of nausea. “Had to lift a curse.”

  “Ah.” He felt Quirk’s blunt-fingered hand on his arm. The sharp brambles had pierced the sleeves of his uniform; his skin stung at Quirk’s touch. “Come on,” he said gently.

  Griff let Quirk lead him up the stairs to their cohort’s empty room.

  “Here. Sit,” Quirk said, and pushed Griff down onto his narrow bed.

  “I was thinking about what you said before,” Griff mumbled. “About what we have to do to keep Story from rising again.”

  “Never mind that now,” Quirk said.

  “No,” Griff said, and tried to steady himself. “The curse. The girl and the flowers. That’s the Breakers’ fault. They tell their stories, and the curses—”

  “Ah, Griff, lad,” Quirk interrupted, “your hands are full of thorns. Lie back now; I’ll go for the physician.”

  The physician would be annoyed with him, injured again. No, don’t go, Griff wanted to say. For a wild moment he thought flowers might fall from his mouth if he spoke. With trembling fingers, he checked to be sure they hadn’t, and felt the curse writhing in his head. A tide of blackness washed over him and his hand fell, leaving a smear of blood across his lips.

  CHAPTER

  5

  NOT LONG AGO, WHEN I HAD GONE PAST THE BOUNDARY and climbed the high hill beyond our valley, I’d seen the City, far in the distance. And I had asked Shoe about it.

  “Well, Rosie,” he’d answered. “I haven’t been there for a long time. I expect it’s changed quite a bit since then.” And then he had described what he remembered—a graceful castle built of stone the color of the sunrise, the wide streets of the upper city, the lovely arched stone bridges, the narrower streets and houses of the lower city, and the place where the City’s river flung itself over a cliff to fall in swags of lace to a lake far below.

  I knew I couldn’t stay with Merry. So that’s where I would go.

  “The main road from the village leads to the City, doesn’t it?” I asked Merry.

  She had agreed without hesitation when I’d said that I should leave, and was packing my knapsack with food, enough for a long journey, and matches, and extra socks, and other things that I would need. “The City?” She shook her head. “No. The road leads to East Oria, the royal city, where the old king lives.”

  “Oh.” I examined the shoes that Shoe had made. I could feel his love for me in every careful stitch, but I couldn’t carry all three pairs; there wasn’t enough room in my knapsack. I sighed. Leaving the shoes felt like leaving Shoe himself behind. But I didn’t have much choice; I had to go on. “Well, is there another road, then?”

  “To the City?” Merry shook her head. “We’re outside the Forest, and you can’t get through.”

  We were quite obviously not outside the forest; the village was surrounded by trees, just as our valley was. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Not this forest,” Merry explained. “The Forest.” When it was clear that I didn’t understand, she went on. “The Forest changes when you get closer to the City. It keeps people out, like a wall, and keeps those who live in the City in. The Forest is evil. Dangerous.”

  “Magic?” I interrupted.

  Merry gave an irritated shrug. “I don’t know. But I do know that it won’t let you through, and the City is just as bad—a bad place, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed and confused. The City that Shoe had told me about had sounded lovely.

  THE NEXT MORNING, as the sky lightened from gray to pink, I stood on Merry’s doorstep, hefting my knapsack and stamping my feet in my best boots, wearing my blue woolen dress and a long, brown, hooded cloak that Merry had given me. I felt like a hawk, keen-eyed, alert, ready to leap from my perch, stretch my wings, and fly out into the world.

  Merry poked my arm. “Listen, girl,” she said impatiently. “Shoe raised you as an innocent, up there in your valley, but now you’ve seen how some men can react to that.” She pointed at my face. The beauty, she meant.

  “Yes,” I said. With hunger, wanting to possess. “I definitely understand.”

  “So, be careful. Be quick to run and slow to trust. Keep your face hidden when you encounter strangers. Try, if you can, not to speak every stray thought that comes into your head.”

  I felt a flush creeping up my face. I did tend to chatter, but I’d been quieter than usual, missing Shoe as much as I did. “I will,” I said. Merry was not one for tenderness, but I leaned close and embraced her. “Thank you for helping me.”

  “All right then,” Merry said, blinking rapidly and then pushing me away. “Off you go.”

  “Good-bye.” Taking a deep breath, I stepped from the doorway. Without looking back, I went through the gate and out to the road that, in five days of walking, would take me from the village all the way to East Oria.

  I WALKED BRISKLY all that first day. The sun came up behind me and marched across a bright blue sky. To either side of the road, the forest was thick, shadowed
, and crowded with ferns and mossy rocks. Halfway through the morning, the road from the village joined another, wider road, and I encountered a few other people, a man driving a cart loaded with charcoal, two children riding a huge, brown horse, and a man with a staff and a wide-brimmed hat who approached on foot and nodded as he passed me. Heeding Merry’s warning, and wary of those who might think my face gave them an invitation to touch me, I kept the hood of my cloak up. I didn’t talk to any of them, even though I wanted to ask them where they were coming from, and where they were going. As the sun leaned toward the west and the shadows gathered under the trees, I started looking for a place to camp. I hadn’t seen any other travelers for a few hours, so I guessed that I’d be safe enough sleeping near the road.

  At last I found a good place—a perfect place, really—a grassy clearing in a grove of oak trees, with the road on one side and a stream bubbling along on the other. It was odd that there was no fire pit, that no one had camped here before, given how nice a spot it was. Humming, I cleared a place in the grass and built a little fire, using dried moss to get it started, then adding bits of bark and twigs, and a few bigger pieces of wood that I’d found nearby. The sun went all the way down and shadows crept in from the surrounding forest. I wrapped myself in my blanket and ate some of the bread and cheese that Merry had packed for me.

  I felt content in my circle of warmth and light, with the oak trees beyond. “You’d like this,” I said aloud, as if Shoe was still with me, and felt a pang of sadness knowing that he never would be again. I told him about my day, and about what Merry had told me. That I was beautiful. I wasn’t sure, exactly, what that meant. Shoe hadn’t ever mentioned it; I’d always just been his girl, his Rosie. For Merry, the beauty had meant that I couldn’t be trusted. With my fingertips I traced the line of my eyebrow, felt the feather-tickle of my eyelashes; in the firelight I examined the end of my braid, noting that my hair was a mix of gold and whiter blond, with even a bit of red in it. I studied my hands, the long, slender fingers. What was beauty, exactly? A sum of parts? A whole greater than that? Other people valued beauty, or wanted it, but it set me apart, too, made me different. It might not be an entirely good thing.