Ash & Bramble Read online

  The Godmother has guards in her fortress. Some of the guards have scaly skin, like the Overseer, and some have pig snouts, and some have naked rat tails that wave behind them as they walk. Still others have the keen noses of dogs and lean bodies made for running. Trackers.

  I stand and jerk my apron around my waist, fumbling with the ties. They will be coming, of that I am certain. So much for my promise to get everyone out of the Godmother’s fortress. I may be going back there myself, sooner than I would like, as a prisoner.

  Shoe comes from the cave with the knapsack slung on his back. He carries himself a bit stiffly, so I know those wounds aren’t fully healed either, but there is no time to argue about who should carry the pack. Without speaking, he hands me a bit of cheese and cracker, and I eat them as we hurry away, deeper into the forest.

  We hike all that day, uphill and down, along a narrow valley cut by a rushing, icy-cold stream, then up another steep hillside that gives us a view, as we top it, of gray, snowcapped mountains in the distance.

  We hear nothing of pursuit. During a brief rest, I try sealing the wound on my wrist with the thimble, but it continues to bleed. We press on, stopping only to fill the water bottle and to eat more gingerbread, which tastes to me now like ashes.

  “Maybe we’ve gotten away,” I say as we pause, panting, at the top of a hill. Ahead of us, a path overshadowed by trees leads toward the distant mountains; behind us, the path has disappeared, swallowed up by the forest. “I think the forest is helping us escape,” I realize.

  Shoe glances back, but he doesn’t say anything.

  As the sun slopes toward setting and Shoe and I are both stumbling with weariness, we hear, in the distance, the baying of hounds.

  We exchange a glance, but we don’t speak. We both know what it is that hunts us, and we know that they are close. He holds out his hand and I take it for a moment, and then we go on as fast as we can manage.

  With the sunset comes the cold. Our clothes are still damp. “My feet are warm, at least,” I tell Shoe, but it doesn’t make him smile.

  No, of course it doesn’t. He’s felt the Godmother’s punishments before. I haven’t, but I know that if she catches us, our punishment for escaping her fortress—her prison—will not be as simple or as easy as death.

  We press on. Night falls, and we feel our way through the trees. First I lead, with Shoe’s hand on my shoulder, and then he leads, guiding me over rocks and stumps. In the middle of the night a full moon rises. A hunter’s moon.

  As we cross a clearing, Shoe stops me and pulls up the sleeve of my dress. The moon stands directly overhead. In its light the bandage looks black with blood. He frowns, then bends down and rips another strip from my apron—which is growing short—and wraps it around my wrist.

  “I think—” I start to say.

  “No, Pin,” he interrupts. He knows what I am going to suggest, that he should go on while I lead the trackers away.

  “Shoe, there’s only one way this can end,” I tell him, and hold up my wrist as a reminder.

  “No,” he says stubbornly, and I know there’s no changing his mind.

  He comes closer, opening his arms, and I step into his embrace. I put my face against his, feeling on my cheek the light stubble along the line of his jaw, leaning into his neck to breath him in. He smells of woodsmoke from our fire, and sweat, and of the caustic soap used to launder our clothes back in the fortress, and over it his own clean smell. This is what I wanted. I wish it could last, and last, until it became our After.

  But there’s going to be no After for us.

  “I’m afraid,” I whisper, hating to admit it.

  “So am I,” he whispers back. “But we’ll face it together.”

  Blinking back sudden tears, I nod. He tightens his arms around me. I feel his strength and determination, and in return I give him my warmth.

  Then, holding hands, we stumble on through the night.

  DAWN STAINS THE sky red. The wound on my wrist drips a steady trickle of blood. The howl of the trackers draws ever nearer.

  My head is spinning; maybe I’ve bled too much, or maybe it’s exhaustion.

  Beside me, Shoe bends over, hands on his knees, catching his breath. His head jerks up as a hunting howl echoes through the pines. “We could find a stream, maybe,” he pants.

  “To throw off the scent. Yes, that might work.” I look wildly around, trying to get my bearings. Black spots waver before my eyes.

  “This way,” Shoe says, and he takes my hand.

  We stumble-run down the side of a steep hill, dodging trees, until we reach the bottom of a valley where a stream runs swift and clear. As I plunge into it after Shoe, the cold water sloshes over my perfect boots. We splash upstream, hoping the water will wash away the smell of blood. My wrist throbs with every stumbling step. I hear Shoe’s ragged breaths as he pulls me steadily on.

  As we climb higher, the stream flows faster, tugging at the bottom of my dress. The frigid water has turned the color of milk; my feet are blocks of ice. The stones lose their blankets of moss and grow sharper. The pines on the stream bank thin, and I look up to see, ahead of Shoe, that the stream slices through a narrow ravine bare of trees. We’re leaving the protection of the forest. The stream is leading us higher and higher to a looming mountain, its broad peak capped with snow, its sides gray with ash—an old volcano. We struggle higher, and the ravine turns sharply and doubles back on itself. It feels as if the water is rushing past us and we are climbing in place.

  We come around another bend and I see, just ahead, that the stream leaps toward us over a ledge, a waterfall just taller than I am. Shoe stops, staring at it, his breath coming in desperate gasps. I push blindly past him, stepping knee-deep into an eddy, and scrabble at the rocks. I hear Shoe shout something, but I find a ledge for my feet and start climbing up the waterfall. Icy water sprays over my head.

  Then his hands are on my shoulders, and he jerks me from the stream, dragging me dripping and shivering out of the water until we are standing on ash-covered ground, surrounded by gray rocks, the gray flanks of the mountain looming at our backs.

  I will go up the bank then, I think. We must hurry.

  “Pin,” Shoe says urgently, and I realize that he’s been repeating my name. With his hands he frames my face, and he feels so steady, so true that I close my eyes and lean into him.

  I feel his breath on my cheek. “They’re coming, Pin,” he says into my ear.

  Blinking the black spots from my vision, I look back, but the stream disappears around a bend in the steep ravine. A howl echoes from just around the corner. I grope for the thimble in my pocket, clench it in my fist. It can’t help us now, but it warms my hand.

  And then I am clinging to him, and he to me. “Pin,” he breathes, and our lips meet and linger, and like wildfire through dry grass our kiss sweeps through me until I am nothing but flame, and it is not just a kiss, but a promise.

  I lean into him, and, without him seeing, I slip the thimble into his coat pocket. Another kind of promise.

  A chorus of howls echoes. They will be here in a moment.

  “Listen,” I start.

  “No, I already told you,” Shoe says fiercely. He brushes shaking fingers over my lips, as if to silence me. “I’m staying with you.”

  “You are not.” I grip the front of his coat; blood from my wrist stains the cloth. “Shoe, she will break you.”

  “I don’t care,” Shoe says. His mouth is a straight, uncompromising line.

  Suddenly I feel a flare of fury. I push Shoe, and he stumbles back, slipping on the ash, falling to his knees. “You have a chance to get away, you stubborn idiot!” I shout, and point upstream. “Go, curse you!”

  He glares back at me, scrambles to his feet. “Not without you, Pin.”

  I hold up my hand. The bandage on my wrist is soaked with blood; drops spatter on the ashy ground. “Shoe,” I say. “If you care about me at all, you won’t follow me.” Then I turn my back on him and start
downstream. I don’t look over my shoulder to see if he’s gone. My booted feet are sure on the ashy bank of the stream. I tumble downhill, picking up speed, and I still don’t look back.

  Ahead, the stream bends sharply around a fall of rocks.

  A tracker appears. He is naked, gray-skinned, man-shaped, with lean flanks, running on all fours. His dog-snouted face snuffles along the ash-covered bank of the stream.

  I stumble to a stop.

  Hearing me, the tracker freezes. He sniffs the air. He sees me.

  At the same moment, four more trackers appear from around the bend. With them is the Godmother, mounted sidesaddle on a tall, white horse. At her back are three grizzled Huntsmen dressed in leather, riding sturdy horses. One of the Huntsmen pulls an arrow from a quiver, nocks it, and holds his bow ready. At a curt word from the Godmother, all five trackers hurtle toward me. In a moment I am surrounded. The trackers’ bodies are smudged with ash; their backs are ridged with bleeding whip marks; their tongues loll from their panting mouths. They smell rankly of sweat and of fear.

  One of the trackers sniffs past me, as if he’s following another scent—Shoe’s.

  I fling my arms open, and my blood spatters in a wide arc. Then I wipe my wrist down the front of what’s left of my apron, leaving a smear of blood. When I edge sideways, away from the stream, away from Shoe’s trail, all the trackers follow, watching keenly, their noses a-twitch.

  “That’s right, you dogs,” I whisper. “It’s me you want, not Shoe.” Who, at this very moment, had better be hurrying upstream as fast as his feet can take him.

  Darkness edges my vision. I stay on my feet, swaying. The Godmother guides her horse around a rock, then jerks it to a halt. The horse snorts, breathing heavily, and hangs its head.

  The trackers are snuffling at my skirt. One of them nuzzles at my boot. “Stop that, you,” I tell him. The dog-man glances up at me, gives a low whine, then puts his nose to the ground again.

  The Godmother studies me from atop her horse. She is holding the reins in one gloved hand. Her riding dress is made of ice-blue velvet with fur at the collar and cuffs, all of it beautifully stitched, of course, though its hem is mud-stained and ragged. “Where is your friend, the Shoemaker?” she asks. Her voice is rough. The skin of her face is finely wrinkled, and her silver-blue eyes are smudged with the shadows of lost sleep.

  Though I know I look far worse, exhausted and filthy as I am, stained with blood, wearing a tattered, wet dress, I feel a flash of triumph, knowing that her hunt for us has not been easy. “Who?” I ask.

  The Godmother huffs an impatient sigh and climbs stiffly down from her horse. After brushing at a stain on her skirt, she wades through the trackers, kicking at one of them when he snuffles too close to her foot. The dog-man yelps and cringes away.

  She is taller than I am. Graceful and beautiful. Dazzling, like a cruel, cold sun across a field of snow. She looks me up and down, then gives an annoyed sniff. Abruptly she turns away, gesturing to her Huntsmen. They nudge their horses, coming closer. One of them, I notice, has a whip jammed into his belt.

  “You.” She points at one of the others, a burly man with dark brown skin, an enormous mustache, and an ax strapped to his saddle. “Take two of the dogs and go after the boy. Bring him to me alive.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” the Huntsman says, bowing from the back of his horse. “Jip, Jes,” he calls two of the dog-men. “Get on with you.” He kicks his horse and it trots upstream, trailed by two of the weary trackers.

  I follow them with my eyes. I hope Shoe is running. I hope he can stay ahead of them.

  The Godmother starts taking off an ice-blue leather glove, one dainty finger at a time. “He will be caught, you know, and then he’ll have to be punished. I don’t suppose he’ll be of any use to me after that.”

  I am too tired, now, to be frightened of her. “You won’t catch him,” I say.

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “Of course I will, even if the forest interferes.” And she shrugs as if she’s already bored with the conversation. Her eyes narrow, and she studies me. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “Escaping,” I admit. “Finding out where I came from.”

  She looks faintly amused. “Those things are lost to you.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head, refusing to believe her.

  “So certain,” she chides. “I do wonder what prompted you to think that you were anything but a Seamstress.” Behind her, the two Huntsmen watch from horseback. The three remaining trackers have flopped to the ground, where they lie still, panting. “You must have something,” the Godmother says softly, leaning closer. “Some magical thing that helped you escape my fortress. Am I correct?”

  The thimble. I swallow down a gasp. The thimble that is in the pocket of Shoe’s coat. “I have nothing,” I say truthfully.

  “Mm. At any rate, here we are,” the Godmother says. She holds the empty glove in her other palm, and flexes her bare hand.

  No, it’s not bare, I realize. On the tip of her finger she is wearing a silver thimble.

  A thimble.

  She steps closer, and taps the thimble against her front teeth, as if thinking. “Given who you are, I should have known I’d have more difficulty controlling you. I suppose I thought you were too young to resist. I shall simply have to be more careful this time. We’ll start again from Nothing.”

  Nothing. What I fear most. “No,” I say, and my voice shivers, betraying me. I stare up into her silver-blue eyes. “I’ll remember.” I will remember who I am. I will remember Shoe.

  “No, you won’t,” the Godmother says calmly.

  Raising her hand, she brushes aside a lock of my hair. Her touch is almost gentle, but I can feel the cold radiating from her marble-white fingers. My heart is pounding so hard it is shaking my body. “Don’t be so afraid.” The Godmother rests her thimble against my forehead. “I am only giving you what every girl wants.” The chill of the thimble’s touch spreads into me. “And then you will cause me no more trouble.”

  Suddenly I know with a horrified certainty that Shoe was right. There are worse things than the post. Worse things than being stabbed to death by thorns. I try to jerk away, but it is too late. Cold radiates from the touch of the Godmother’s thimble. Darkness swirls around me. Shoe, I think, as I fall.

  And then I am Nothing.

  PART

  TWO

  CHAPTER

  7

  I WAKE UP IN THE CINDERS.

  It is the sound of a distant clock that wakes me, striking the hour. Morning.

  I am curled on my side, practically in the hearth itself. One hand, flung out, rests against the cold grate; a bandage enwraps my wrist.

  There is the clank and rattle of a coal scuttle being set down. “Lady Penelope,” a housemaid says, shaking my shoulder.

  I blink. “What?” I croak.

  “Lady Penelope, wake up.” The housemaid, dressed in a dark-blue uniform with a starched white apron over it, crouches on the carpet next to me. She shakes my shoulder again. “The clock has struck the hour. You can’t be here now.”

  Creaking in every joint, I sit up and put my hand to my head, which aches like fury. Blinking, I take in the room. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves; the room is filled with an overstuffed, doily-covered velvet sofa, spindly tables holding vases billowing with dried flowers, and a desk of polished mahogany. A book lies beside me on the hearth. Oh. The library. The memory of it comes back to me. I must have fallen asleep while reading again.

  “It’s just gone eight, my lady, which means breakfast, and if you’re late again your stepmother will be angry,” the maid says. With her hands, she brushes ineffectually at my dress.

  I look down at myself. I’m wearing a black silk dress, black lace at the cuffs and collar, with three petticoats under it and black button-up shoes that pinch my toes. All of it slightly shabby and covered with a thin, gray layer of ash.

  A flurry at the door, and a b
ig woman bustles into the room. My stepmother, I realize after a blank moment. She has a broad, red face made pale with powder, and a wealth of chestnut hair shot with gray, covered by a lace cap. She is the kind of woman people call handsome. She wears a fashionable blue-and-white striped silk morning dress with three flounces at the hem, a narrow waist achievable only through ruthless corseting, and a wide hoop skirt that sways as she sails across the carpet toward me. “Oh, Penelope,” she says, her voice shrill with exasperation. “I might have known you’d be in here.” She makes shooing motions at the maid. “Go on, girl; you heard the clock strike. Go on with your duties.” The maid heaves up the coal scuttle and hurries out. My stepmother stares down at me. “Get up at once,” she orders.

  Picking up the book I used as a pillow, I climb to my feet. I feel strangely weary down to my bones, and ravagingly hungry. Did I remember to eat dinner last night? “Have I been ill?” I ask. I feel as if I’ve been asleep for a long time, like an enchanted princess in a bramble-wrapped tower.

  “No, you have not, you silly girl.” My stepmother huffs out a sigh of vexation. “Oh, for pity’s sake, look at you.”

  Adrift, I stare blankly back at her.

  “Come here,” Stepmama says, and when I move too slowly, she reaches out and grabs my arm and drags me to the desk. After rummaging in a drawer, Stepmama pulls out a hand mirror and holds it up. “Just look at yourself.”

  Squinting, I peer at my reflection in the mirror. A stranger looks back at me. Her face is too thin. Her chin-length dark hair is tangled. Her gray eyes are shadowed. I turn my head, and so does the girl in the mirror. It is me. Maybe I have been ill; I certainly look it.

  “Do you see? Wretched. Smudged with cinders. Up all night reading, I expect.” Stepmama turns toward the door, a ship under full sail coming about. “You are a very foolish girl. So much like your father.”

  I catch my breath as unexpected sorrow sweeps through me, a stabbing realization that I’ve lost something precious and I’ll never find it again. Find him again. It must be . . . is it . . . grief for my father?