A Treason of Thorns Read online

  With a weighty thud, I let my pike fall onto the kitchen table, and Mira turns. Horror writes itself across her face.

  “Violet Sterling, you’re a sight, and today of all days I wanted you home early.”

  Leaning against the table that holds my rather splendid fish, I hunch my shoulders, as if doing so can protect me from what’s surely coming. If Wyn were here, he’d appear and just stand at my side, a silent ally in all things. And if we were home, the House would already have a carpet of reassuring flowers around my feet.

  Will I never feel whole without them?

  “Why? What’s happened?” I finally summon the courage to ask.

  Jed ducks into the cottage, and the whole space feels suddenly smaller. “Mira had a visitor come looking for you today. A messenger from the king.”

  All the air goes out of me. I drop onto my chair, ignoring the fish now lying forgotten on the table.

  “His Majesty’s back from Belgium and stopping at the Knight’s Arms in Thiswick tonight,” Mira says. “Apparently he’d be much obliged if his only goddaughter would pay him a visit tomorrow at noon, before he journeys on. The messenger said—he said there’s news from Burleigh House.”

  “News.” My voice breaks on the word. There’s been no news from Burleigh House for seven years. And every sun that sets without it is a relief to me, because it means that across the country, my father and Burleigh and Wyn have survived another day of House arrest.

  Jed steps up behind me and puts his enormous hands on my shoulders. “He didn’t give any particulars, but I don’t think we have to tell you what to expect.”

  I choke back questions I know Jed and Mira have no answers to, and mechanically lay the table for supper. But when we’ve eaten and the dishes have been cleared, I duck out of the cottage the instant Mira’s back is turned. Jed watches, saying nothing as I shove our dory into the water and scramble aboard. I ship the oars and haul back on them and the boat reluctantly begins to move.

  “Violet!” Mira calls through the open cottage doorway. “Just where do you think you’re going so close to nightfall?”

  “Away!” I answer back, sculling for all I’m worth. The dory pulls steadily forward, building momentum until I’m skimming across the water, dragging the welter of my emotions behind me like a length of tangled net. Movement is the best thing for me, I know—to still the aching of my heart, the clenching of my stomach, the furious grinding of my teeth. I scull until my arms and back ache—till sweat drips between my shoulders again and the last of the day’s sun adds freckles to my freckles.

  And when I’ve rowed for so long that each oar seems weighted with lead, I drop anchor in the middle of a tidal floodplain. Water stretches ahead of me to the very edge of the eastern sky, which has gone dark. I turn away from it, and from the vast, uneasy North Sea, looking westward instead, toward the setting sun. Beyond that blaze of splendor lies my past. Beyond it lies my future. Beyond it lies my House.

  Blood and mortar, I miss it with everything in me. Every bone and every breath. I thought the end of Papa’s House arrest might taint things between Burleigh and me, but even knowing what’s surely happened—that my father must be dead, finally killed by the House itself—all I feel when I think of Burleigh is an agonizing desire to be with it.

  So I know in the morning I’ll visit His Majesty. I’ll sit in front of him while he feigns pity and tells me Papa’s protracted death sentence has ended, and a new Caretaker must assume his place. I’ll do what must be done, choking down my hatred and fear of the king, all for the sake of Burleigh House. Because in the wake of Papa’s arrest, Burleigh will need a gentle hand.

  It is a wicked punishment, House arrest, designed to torment both a Caretaker and the Great House they tend. If found guilty of treason, a Caretaker is stripped of the key that allows him to channel his House’s magic safely, and restricted to the grounds. The House is bound to let no one in or out until its powerless Caretaker lies dead.

  But a Great House cannot keep the countryside healthy for long without a key-holding Caretaker to direct its power. Sooner or later, a good House must put itself and the land first, no matter how badly it hurts to do so.

  There have been five House arrests over the years, before my father’s. Two Caretakers killed themselves before their Houses had to. Three were killed by their Houses, though outside the confines of an arrest, the binding the Great Houses have been placed under expressly forbids them to take a life.

  My heart aches for Burleigh, required to do what is neither in its nature or its bond. But it breaks at the thought of Wyn. Seven years after the arrest began and I still don’t understand why my father was allowed to inflict a portion of his punishment on a child and keep Wyn trapped within the manor walls. I’ve never been able to think of it without resentment gnawing at my insides. Everything else I can fathom—Papa risking arrest and a charge of treason in his attempt to steal Burleigh’s deed from the king and free our House. Indeed, all across England, there are people who support the unbinding cause in spite of its risks.

  Of course I sympathize with that. Of course I want Burleigh out from under the king’s thumb. The royal family has maintained control of the Great Houses since William the Deedwinner first bound them. Caretakers may manage the Houses’ magic, but it’s the deedwinner they must obey. I suppose it wore on Papa, watching the king make decisions for Burleigh that were not in its best interests.

  Yet the price Papa paid for his attempt and subsequent failure—the choice he made to sacrifice not just his own freedom, but Wyn’s—has never sat well with me. And I don’t know why it had to be that way.

  A good Caretaker puts her House first, I remind myself, to calm the anger that still rises in me when I think of Wyn. Before her family. Before her friends. Surely, that must have been what Papa was doing, whether I understand his actions or not.

  The light on the horizon burns down to crimson embers. Swallows skim across the water, and far above them, bats flit here and there. Around me, the air cools and sweat dries on my skin as the sky darkens. I shiver, a salt girl alone on a salt marsh.

  When the stars wake in the sky, winking to life one by one, I count them. It’s an old trick Wyn and I learned together, long ago, when we’d sit out on the roof of the House. We were both of us children plagued by worries, and on the nights they kept us from sleeping, we’d count stars together until the fears faded. It used to work. It used to keep my fear at bay.

  Now, though, I always lose count before the tide of my worry turns, and this night is no different from any other since my father and my friend were sealed away within Burleigh’s walls. When I’ve lost myself among the stars, I turn inward, the way I learned to do after both heart and home were taken from me. In the labyrinth of my own mind, I count fears instead of stars.

  I am afraid of memory, and the visions it brings of my father’s careworn face—his stern eyes, his harried smile. Did he do right? Will I be a worthy successor to him? Will I someday meet the same fate?

  I’m afraid of never seeing home or Wyn again, of living my life in limbo here on the fens, and never wishing for better. Of never feeling whole.

  I’m afraid of losing Jed and Mira as I’ve lost everything else. I’m afraid of hunger, which stalks us each winter as the saltfish barrels run low. I’m afraid of the sea, that gives life and then buffets the coast with storms.

  Each fear surfaces and as they rise, I take them one by one, box them up and put them away on a dusty shelf in the back of my soul. I don’t know what else to do with these thoughts that threaten to choke me, so I keep them locked inside, like last winter’s moldering apples or a dragon’s tarnished hoard.

  The last fear I tuck away is this: I’m afraid of the king, desperately afraid. But for me, the good of Burleigh House will always come before that fear. It must.

  “I want to go home,” I whisper to myself and the night sky and the stars.

  Home. The word tastes like honey and ashes, like hope and regret, and
this I know: I would face the devil himself for a chance at getting back to the House I grew up in, and at finding out what fate has befallen the one friend I had as a child. The king is only a little worse than the devil, after all, and I would beg or bargain, whichever he prefers, to get back to where I belong. To be what I was born to become—the Caretaker of my beloved House.

  The tide has turned, running out to sea. It pulls at my boat, tugging me eastward and away from home. For the first time in years I ship oars and truly set myself against it.

  As I scull toward the west, I hum an old, old song.

  Blood for a beginning

  Mortar for an end

  Speak out your binding

  Be you foe or friend

  Fifth House holds quicksilver

  The Sixth ruins all

  But for blood in its mortar

  But for breath in its walls

  2

  HIS MAJESTY IS A LATE RISER, AND I AM NOT. IN FACT, I’ve already been up for several hours by sunrise, on the water with a dark lamp and my fishing spear, and even delivered a catch in Thiswick. I learned long ago that there’s nothing like activity to keep sorrow at bay.

  But now, as the meeting time draws closer, I sit cross-legged on the pallet in the loft that serves me for a bed. Dried onions and bunches of rosemary hang only inches above my nose. Outside, the world is awash with pale light and gulls cry mournfully as they wing their way seaward. I look toward the shore, and somewhere inside me, there’s a grief that can’t be borne. I didn’t expect it, and I’m not entirely sure who it’s for—my father or Wyn or my House or myself. I can’t afford to fall apart, though. Not with His Majesty waiting. Not with Burleigh’s fate hanging in the balance. So I shut my eyes and tamp down the sorrow so far that all I can feel is a whisper of it. This, too, is one of my manifold fears—that someday I’ll shut up my heart so securely there’s no unbinding it, and I’ll be left numb till the day I die.

  “Come down for a bite of breakfast,” Mira says from below. “Whatever’s happened, I don’t like to think of you facing it on an empty stomach.”

  I couldn’t eat, though. Not for love or money. Instead, I shuffle on my knees to where a battered chest sits under the round window. A briny breeze dances in and blows cool against the back of my neck as I fumble with the chest’s lock. It sticks a little, stiff with lack of use. When at last the lock gives way, I push the lid up and let out a long sigh.

  We left Burleigh House in a hurry. His Majesty sentenced Papa on the front drive before a traveling court and ordered me out by day’s end. I was only able to snatch a few of my things, which I’ve since kept tucked away, needing no reminders of home when my blood forever calls westward and anxiety churns constantly through my veins.

  This morning seems a time for reminders if ever there was one, though. I push past a one-eyed china doll, a drawing of Wyn’s, and a long-outgrown frock until I find a sprig of dried ivy leaves. I take it out and hold it gingerly, as if it might crumble beneath my touch.

  Mira’s voice drifts up to me. “Violet, I’m begging you, love.”

  “Not hungry,” I call back, looking down at the ivy until my eyes blur and lose focus.

  The smell of damp soil.

  Rain running down my bedroom windows at Burleigh House.

  The weight of a full valise, tugging at one arm.

  Below, the king’s carriage stands on the drive. I press my face to the glass, still only a child, just ten years old, not ready for any of this. It’s past time to leave, and Mira’s already come up to my bedroom to ask if I need help with anything. I sent her away, because I can’t bear for anyone to see how broken I am at the thought of leaving Burleigh, the only constant presence in my life since the day I was born.

  But the House sees, and that hurts me worst of all. I want to be brave for it, to be a good Caretaker, but I can’t stop silent tears from tracking down my face. Wind moans in the chimney, rain sobs against the windows, and white funeral flowers bloom from the cracks in the wall. Hurrying toward the doorway, I stumble over one of my dolls lying abandoned on the bedroom floor. My valise falls and bursts open, scattering hastily packed clothes about the room.

  Always, always, it is one last insignificant thing that finishes me. I crouch in the midst of the mess and sob, shoulders shaking, stomach aching, my heart torn to shreds. The House trembles on its foundations, but there’s nothing it can do.

  And then, though I didn’t hear the door, Wyn is in front of me, picking up the mess I’ve made, pushing pinafores and stockings back into my valise. When everything is packed away once more, he holds the bag out to me. I look up and his face, too, is tearstained and pale.

  “It’s time to go, Violet,” he says.

  “I know,” I tell him. “You’re finally getting your wish. We’re running away.”

  Wyn’s already wretched expression grows a little more miserable. “This isn’t what I wanted. You know that—I’d never want anything that hurts you so.”

  He reaches out and takes my hand, a rare gesture from a boy who seldom bridges the gap between himself and the rest of the world.

  I swallow and look down at our intertwined fingers. “Don’t let go. I can’t do this all by myself.”

  “You can do anything you set your mind on,” Wyn says fiercely. “Anything, Vi, don’t you know that?”

  But all the way down the stairs and out the door onto the drive, the only thing that keeps me from falling apart again is his hand, warm in mine.

  Jed and Mira are waiting for us. We stand with them and watch as Papa emerges on the front steps of the House, flanked by half a dozen royal guards. Thunder rumbles low on the horizon and the darkened sky weeps endlessly, water pooling in low spots on the lawn and making wide puddles, rain dripping cold down the back of my neck.

  When the guards bring Papa out and he catches sight of us, his jaw clenches and his gaze clouds over.

  “Wyn, Violet,” he says, voice rough from unnumbered sleepless nights. “Come here to me.”

  Wyn and I look at each other, and I see my own fear and despair mirrored in my friend’s eyes. Wordlessly, I tighten my grip on his hand and he does the same. We climb the front steps together as a peal of laughter sounds from the king’s carriage—His Majesty’s waiting to see Papa’s sentence carried out, but even today, he’s brought a trio of courtiers along to make up a foursome for whist. I’d like nothing more than to snatch the cards from his hands and tear them to bits.

  Papa can’t put his arms around me—they’re bound behind his back, but he’s never been much of a one for displays of affection anyway. Nevertheless, I let go of Wyn and cling to my father for a moment, choking back tears.

  “Be brave for the House, Violet,” Papa whispers. I gather my scant courage and pull away, reaching for Wyn again.

  But before he can take my hand, Papa shakes his head. “No. Wyn, come stand at my side.”

  Wyn turns toward him, wide-eyed.

  “Come on now, Wyn,” my father says. “You’ll stay with me, just like we agreed on.”

  “What?” My voice rings loud across the front lawn, even with the rain to deaden it. Papa won’t meet my eyes—he just looks at Wyn, who stares up at him and finally nods, stepping away from me.

  The tears I’ve kept in check burn their way down my face and I feel as if something on the inside has shattered.

  “Papa, don’t take Wyn,” I beg. “You and the House, and him now, too? It’s too much—it’s everything I have. I don’t know how to live without any of you. You’ll make a ghost of me.”

  “Don’t be hysterical, Violet,” Papa says, and there’s steel in his tone. “You’ll upset Burleigh.”

  “That’s because Burleigh loves me,” I stammer. “And I love the House, everyone knows it. So . . . let Wyn go free, and if someone has to stay, keep me instead. I would do it willingly. I don’t care—you know I don’t. Let the king seal us in together. I will stand by your side and be just what you taught me to be—a good Caretaker, w
ho puts her House first. Please, Papa, please.”

  “Jed, take Violet,” my father says. Indomitable as he is, Papa’s voice breaks on my name.

  Jed steps forward and takes me by the hand. “Miss Violet. It’s time to go.”

  Mira appears at my other side and puts an arm around my shoulder, but I cannot tear my gaze away from Wyn, standing by Papa, his shoulders hunched in silent resignation.

  “No. No!” I’m shouting now, and the king and his courtiers peer out of the carriage windows with interest. But I don’t care. Let them watch me make a scene. “It isn’t fair—look at Wyn. He doesn’t want to stay! Let him go, and let me be with Papa and the House.”

  It’s true Wyn’s pale face is pinched and unhappy. He hurries down the steps and throws his arms around me and I hold him tight.

  “Don’t do this,” I say tearfully. “You don’t have to—they can’t make you. We should be together. Wyn, run away with me.”

  “No,” Wyn answers. “I can’t. Not anymore. But promise me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “Once you’re gone, stay away. Don’t come back.”

  I hardly have time to feel another stab of hurt and betrayal, because at his words, the ground bucks and heaves beneath us, jolting us apart. I stumble and nearly fall, and when I’ve righted myself, Wyn is at my father’s side again.

  “You have to go, Violet,” Papa says. “Think of the House.”

  I am. I do. I always think of the House. So I square my shoulders and turn my back on Papa, taking the first steps down the drive and away from everything I’ve ever known.

  “Violet Helena Sterling,” my father calls after me. “I love you.”

  I’ve never heard him say those words before and I can’t answer back, because if I do, they will have to drag me kicking and screaming from the grounds of Burleigh House. I carry on without a word, and when I draw up alongside the king’s carriage, His Majesty looks out.