Ash & Bramble Page 9

  To his surprise, he hears a huff of a laugh. “No, that it’s not,” the Huntsman says. “Not to worry, lad. It won’t be long now.”

  “It’ll be longer than you think,” Shoe whispers, not sure if the Huntsman hears him. His shuffle is a walk, now, and he has to think about every step. Pick up his extremely well-shod foot. Drag it forward, set it down again. Lean forward—but not too far. He’s hunched over like an old man. Pretty soon he’ll be crawling.

  But Pin is right. He is stubborn; he’ll crawl if he has to.

  After a long time, it comes to that. He stumbles again, and falls, and this time he can’t make his legs work. Try as he might, they won’t let him stand. Crawling, he goes on. The pine needles are prickly against the palm of his hand and the fist that is clutching Pin’s thimble. There is just darkness, the ache in his muscles, the dragging weights of sleep and hunger, and the pull from the thimble. If he can keep going until morning, he promises himself, something will happen.

  “Had enough yet?” the Huntsman asks, just a deep voice in the darkness.

  No. He can’t muster up enough strength to say the word out loud.

  He crawls on through the night. Until he finds himself with his face pressed against the rough bark of a pine tree and can’t figure out what he’s supposed to be doing.

  One of the trackers whines, a pitiful sound.

  “Shhh,” the Huntsman tells it. “We’re almost done.” His voice is closer; he’s not on the horse anymore, but has been walking patiently alongside Shoe, waiting for him to stop.

  No. Not stopping. Slowly, his arms and legs dragging, Shoe shifts away from the tree. As he crawls past it, his shoulder bumps the trunk and he goes down, face-first in the pine needles.

  This time, he can’t get up. The candle flame flickers out; he’s used up. A heavy weight of despair presses down on him. The Huntsman will take him to the Godmother now, and he, and probably Pin, too, will be turned into lessons for the rest of the slaves at the fortress. See? the Jacks and the Seamstresses and the new Shoemaker will be told, as the guards point to his body and Pin’s hanging from thorns on the wall. This is what happens to those who try to escape. It’ll hurt a lot, Shoe thinks fuzzily, but then it’ll be over.

  As if he’s a long way from his body, he feels, distantly, the Huntsman’s big hands on his shoulders, turning him onto his still-healing back, and even the pain of that isn’t enough to return him to himself. From far away he hears the whining of the trackers and the Huntsman’s deep voice calming them. Then sleep comes like a black bag over his head, and he’s out.

  SHOE WAKES UP in the morning wrapped in a blanket with his own backpack for a pillow. He’s curled on his side next to a crackling fire. The air smells of pine smoke and browning sausages. An early dawn light filters through the tree branches.

  He’s still got the thimble clenched in his fist.

  As he lifts his arm to look at it, his whole body is seized with a muscle cramp; he grits his teeth until it passes.

  “Awake, are you?” asks a deep voice.

  The Huntsman. The weight of despair crashes back into Shoe. Suffering, death, the whole lot of it. That’s what today has in store for him. Slowly, so as not to trigger the cramps again, he opens his hand to examine the thimble. It gleams silver against his dirty palm. At its base are etched brambles—thorny vines like the ones that covered the wall around the Godmother’s fortress. Amid the brambles, though, are dainty roses. Pin’s thimble. It reminds him of her—prickly, with occasional glimpses of sweetness. In his mind he can see her face so clearly, her dark hair tangled, her gray eyes weary, but still sharp. When he’d first seen her, he’d thought she wasn’t pretty—and no, she’s not. Pretty is too small and light a word for what she is. Missing her is an ache in his chest. He turns the thimble, letting the light burnish its dimpled surface, then puts it into his coat pocket. His eyes drop closed. He’s been captured, just as she has. The one consolation is that it means he’ll see her again before they die.

  “Sausages?” the Huntsman asks.

  He cracks his eyes open again.

  “Expect you need a bit of help there,” the Huntsman says from the other side of the fire. He gets up from the log he’s been sitting on and comes around the fire. He’s a big man, and he looms; Shoe tries to scramble away, and his muscles cramp again.

  “Now then, now then,” the Huntsman says in a soothing voice, and with strange gentleness helps Shoe sit up, leaning him against a tree, then tucking the blanket around his shoulders. He turns to the fire, and turns back with a steaming mug of something that smells like coffee. “Start with this,” he says, helping Shoe close his hand around the tin cup.

  The cup is hot under Shoe’s fingers. For a moment, all he can do is sit and hold it; then he manages to lift the cup to his mouth and take a sip. The coffee burns a warm and bitter path to his stomach, which responds by demanding something to eat.

  Shoe eyes the Huntsman warily. He has an enormous, drooping mustache, brown skin, and a shiny, bald head. He is busy at the fire; he skewers a fat sausage with a fork and holds it out to Shoe. “Careful, there. It’s hot.”

  For a moment Shoe hesitates; then, slowly, he reaches out and takes it. He doesn’t remember having sausage before, so it’s the best one he’s ever eaten, and he savors every scrap of it, trying to ignore the two drooling trackers that are keenly watching him eat it. The Huntsman’s big brown horse is tethered to a low branch, he notices, and there’s an open saddlebag on the ground near the fire, and another bedroll.

  “I’m your prisoner, aren’t I?” Shoe asks through a bite of sausage.

  “So it would seem,” the Huntsman answers.

  Finishing the sausage, Shoe wipes a bit of grease from his chin with the corner of the blanket. “Why didn’t you stop me walking last night?” he asks, and takes a sip of coffee.

  “Well now, that’s the strange thing, isn’t it?” the Huntsman says. He is busy dabbing a thick, greenish salve on the trackers’ backs where they’ve been whipped. “You’re leading us straight as arrow-shot to where we’re supposed to be going.”

  The words are like a blow. All that struggle to get away, and he was going toward his own suffering and death? “Oh, that’s definitely irony,” he mutters, his voice shaking. “Trying to escape the fortress by running directly toward the fortress.”

  “The Godmother’s fortress, you mean?” the Huntsman asks, setting aside his pot of salve. At Shoe’s nod, he goes on. “No, you’re not going there. You’re heading for the city, and that’s where I’m ordered to bring you.”

  Shoe stares. “The city?” he repeats, as if saying the word again will make his brain understand it.

  “Aye.” The Huntsman sets a large tin bowl filled with porridge on the ground. “The Godmother’s city.” The two trackers, both moving stiffly, come to the bowl and, dipping their heads, begin to lap up the porridge. “She’s got plans for you there, most likely.”

  “I expect she does,” Shoe says morosely.

  The Huntsman fries two more sausages and adds them to the trackers’ bowl; they look up, their dog faces grinning, and then plunge their muzzles back into their breakfast. “They’d wag if they could,” the Huntsman says with a sad sigh. “But she didn’t give ’em tails.”

  Feeling better now that he’s got breakfast and coffee in him, Shoe studies the thimble again. He’s seen it do magic, when Pin lit the fire in the cave, and when she made the smoke arise from the cobblestones outside the Godmother’s fortress. He frowns. It’s Pin’s thimble. “It’s leading me to Pin,” he whispers, feeling stupid for not realizing it before.

  If the thimble is leading him to Pin, the same place the Huntsman’s been ordered to take him, then the Godmother must have plans for both of them in this city, whatever it is.

  Shoe realizes that his hands are shaking. He clenches his fist around the thimble.

  The Huntsman is sitting on his log, drinking coffee from a tin cup. “Afraid, are you?”

  Of
course he’s afraid, but he’s not going to admit it to his captor. Shoe shrugs. He doesn’t want to think about what’s going to happen to him. His story is going to be very short, and it will have an ugly ending.

  “Hmm.” The Huntsman maneuvers the cup under his drooping mustache and takes a sip of coffee. “What if you could do something else. Like, say, join up with other people who’ve escaped?”

  Shoe looks up. “You know people like that?”

  “I may,” the Huntsman answers. “They might be hiding away in a place where the Godmother can’t find them. You interested?”

  Before he can stop himself, Shoe nods.

  “I can take you to them,” the Huntsman offers. “We’ve got a place in the forest.”

  Shoe’s noticed how the Huntsman has switched from the vague maybe I might know some people to the more certain we’ve got a place.

  He frowns. The Huntsman is the Godmother’s man, isn’t he? His offer of escape is much more likely to be a trap. But . . . he seems kind. Gentle, even. And he’d put the salve on the trackers’ backs, where they’d been whipped.

  Maybe the Huntsman is a rebel, and he’s offering a way out. In Shoe’s fist, the silver thimble warms. He can feel it pulling him toward Pin. Toward his own death. The thought of that makes him tremble down to his bones.

  This fear isn’t doing him any good. In the fortress he was afraid all the time, especially after the post. He’d kept his head down and worked hard, and he hadn’t done anything to change the horror of it all until Pin had come and led him out.

  He can’t be afraid anymore. He takes a deep breath to steady himself, to face what he’s got to do. Stiffly he sheds the blanket and, leaning against the tree, levers himself to his feet. “No,” he tells the Huntsman. “I need to go on.”

  The Huntsman shakes his head. “She’ll kill you.”

  “Pin is there,” Shoe says stubbornly. “The girl who was captured by the Godmother. I can’t get out unless she does, too.”

  “Your Pen—” the Huntsman starts.

  “Pin,” Shoe corrects.

  “Right-o.” The Huntsman nods. “This girl of yours. Pin. It’s clear enough that she’s been chosen for a special fate.” He gives a grim shake of his head.

  “It’s bad, this special fate?” Shoe asks.

  “The worst,” the Huntsman says.

  “Then we’ll have to hurry.” Shoe grips the thimble, feeling its pull. “Do you think we can get there today?”

  “Maybe, if the forest wills it.” With a huff, the Huntsman gets to his feet. “Well, come on, Jip, Jes,” he says to the two trackers. “Our desperate criminal here is bent on meeting his doom before dinnertime.”

  While the Huntsman packs up his bags and saddles his horse, Shoe shoulders the knapsack and sets off. He can only hobble through the trees at first, with his muscles so stiff and sore, so it isn’t long before the Huntsman catches him.

  “Off to find your Pen,” he comments, after riding in silence for a while.

  “Pin,” Shoe corrects again. “Yes. I, um . . .” It feels strange to be saying it out loud. “I think I might love her.”

  “Ah.” After a silence full of cogitation, the Huntsman adds, “You’re not a Prince in Disguise, are you?”

  “Nothing like that,” Shoe says.

  “Didn’t think so.” He gives Shoe a pitying look. “Here, I’ll carry this for you.” He reaches down from the saddle and takes the pack from Shoe’s shoulder. “Listen, lad, you don’t want to go to the city. Come with me. The forest will protect us.”

  “I can’t,” Shoe says, and, free of the weight of the pack, shifts from a walk to a slow shuffle.

  The Huntsman nods sadly. “All right, then. I see how it is. I’ll get you secretly into the city. The wheels’ll be turning, though, so you won’t have much time to find your girl.”

  Pin, Shoe thinks as he trudges along, knows who she is. Somewhere inside her head, she’s got her self—her own self—hidden away, a girl who sweeps her skirts aside when she sits, a girl with a proud tilt to her chin, a girl who laughs at irony even when she’s dirty and bloodstained and exhausted after running through the forest for a day and a night. Shoe hasn’t any idea who he is, except that he’s a shoemaker, not a secret prince. He could be somebody’s son, or brother, though he doesn’t know about lover, because if that were the case he’s sure he would’ve been better at kissing Pin.

  He’d give anything, he thinks, to be able to kiss her again.

  CHAPTER

  9

  I SEARCH THE ENTIRE HOUSE FOR MY THIMBLE. I START IN the library, where I spent all night in the cinders—thinking maybe it fell out of my pocket while I was sleeping—but the hearth is cleanly swept. Then the blue breakfast room, drawing rooms, dining rooms, a vast ballroom, all of it only half familiar, as if I’ve been told about this huge mansion of a house but never actually walked the hallways or peered into any of the rooms. It’s a strange, disconnected feeling—that itch, again, that tells me I’m supposed to be somewhere else.

  Having explored the entire upper house, I head down a set of narrow stairs to the servants’ areas—the kitchens and wine cellars and storage rooms—where the servants exchange sidelong glances as I ask the maid Anna if she found my thimble. She says no, and I go back upstairs. The music room was empty when I searched before, but as I step softly past the door, I hear a faint note played on a piano. A moment later, the note is echoed by a voice. Catching a tune, the voice soars into a ripple of notes, a quick breath, and then a leaping, joyful song full of trills and high notes.

  Quietly, I turn the knob and ease the door open. Through the crack in the door I see my stepsister Dulcet, her back to me, standing by the piano singing. Her voice is so rich it fills the entire room like golden sunshine and spills out into the hallway. What would it be like, I wonder, to open my mouth and have such glorious music come out? Somehow I am sure that my own singing voice is more like frogs croaking.

  Dulcet is my stepsister, and we seem to be settled into certain roles—her proudly disdainful, me the cinder-smudged annoying one who is disdained—but what do I really know about her? She, and her sister and my stepmother, too, are like the house—only half familiar to me. It’s as if I know perfectly well what a stepsister is, but I don’t know Dulcet at all.

  The floor under my feet squeaks and the music stops. Dulcet holds herself absolutely still; slowly she turns toward the door. Seeing that it’s me, she lets out the faintest relieved breath, and then she is her usual carefully controlled self.

  “That was beautiful,” I tell her. “I didn’t know you could sing.”

  Dulcet takes a breath. “Oh, that,” she says, with a false-careless wave of her hand. “I hardly call that singing.”

  “It was glorious,” I say. “You should sing so others can hear you.”

  Dulcet’s face turns cold. “In public, you mean?” Her every move elegant, she closes the lid of the piano and crosses the room toward me. “Certainly not. A lady never performs in public. It would not be attractive or at all appropriate. It’s a terrible suggestion.” She brushes past me, takes two steps down the hallway, and then pauses. Without turning to face me she adds, “You don’t need to mention this to my mother, Pen.”

  “I won’t,” I promise, and I mean it. It’s Dulcet’s secret, and now it’s mine, too.

  My thimble search ends in a picture gallery on the third floor of the house, which is a far grander mansion than I realized. The gallery is a long hallway with floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall, windows that look out over a parklike square edged by other grand houses. On the other wall is a row of oil paintings, each one as tall as I am, almost life-size portraits of people who, I guess, are ancestors who once lived in this house. Most of them I don’t recognize, stiffly posed women in old-fashioned dresses, solemn-faced children, bearded patriarchs.

  Then I come to the end of the gallery. One last painting is leaning against the wall, as if placed there as an afterthought. In the picture, a w
oman is standing in the midst of what looks like an untamed forest that is a riot of fir trees and ferns, vines and moss. She looks directly at me. Her dark hair is braided and pinned into a severe style. Her face is not softly pretty, but sharp-featured and lined with care, though I can see a wicked smile lurking at the corner of her mouth. She has blue eyes set under dark brows, and the wildness of the forest is reflected in them, almost hidden, but still there. A coil of brambles and roses twines around her feet and up the sides of the picture, almost like a frame. Her hand rests on the skirt of her simple dress, and on one finger she is wearing a silver thimble.

  The thimble.

  My thimble.

  This must be my mother.

  I step closer to see. The setting sun comes in through the gallery windows, shining over my shoulder and illuminating the thimble, which is painted in exquisite detail. Silver, dimpled, thorny brambles and roses, just as I remember it.

  And I do remember it. I can almost feel the weight of the thimble in my hand, heavier and more solid than it should be, really, as if it carries with it portents and power. Absent, it is more real to me than anything in this house. I could never have lost it. Never.

  I examine the rest of the painting from top to bottom, but I cannot find any more clues. Except that my mother and her wild forest seem strange and out of place here in this grand house.

  From outside, in the city, comes the sound of an enormous clock striking the hour. The muffled booms make the air tremble; dust motes rise up and swirl around, glinting gold in the light.

  Somehow I’m sure that my mother, watching with that knowing smile, could answer all of my questions. “I expect you know where I lost my thimble,” I mutter. She smiles on. “Stop looking at me like that,” I tell her.

  A bustle and thump from the end of the gallery interrupts me. A tall footman dressed in dark-blue livery hurries toward me. “Lady Penelope,” he gasps.

  “Yes?” I say, and raise my eyebrows.

  The footman pauses, looks from me to the painting and back again with his mouth open, then catches his breath. “Lady Penelope,” he repeats. “Your stepmother wants you in the blue drawing room right away. She’s right tetchy, m’lady, that you weren’t in your room when she wanted you.”