The Castle Behind Thorns (10 page)

19

Library

S
AND WOKE TO A GUSTY RAIN; THE BREEZE THAT SANG
in through the cracked window panes smelled of the ocean. Before he opened his eyes, he could hear gulls calling to each other as they rode the winds, and he thought he should climb a tower and look for the birds. But then he remembered Perrotte.

He opened his eyes. She still slumbered on the mattress that cornered with his.

Sand rose and carried the bowl of thorns cautiously down to the smithy. He made the hottest fire he could, pumping the bellows until charcoal burned yellow-white with welding heat, then dumped the thorns into the dazzling center of the fire. The thorns crackled and popped, and Sand swore that inside his neck, the thorns still lodged there wriggled in sympathy.

He brought food and water up to Perrotte and woke her. Her eyes were glassy with fever.

“Drink, Perr,” Sand said when she wrinkled her nose at the plain water. It was high-born snobbery that made her look down at the cool, pure well water. “It's not iced and flavored with parsley seed, but it will do you good.”

She drank.

He removed more thorns, and she looked a bit better after that. He still wasn't sure he'd gotten them all.

“I need you to get well so you can remove
my
thorns,” he said, touching the hot lumps on his neck.

She blanched. “Oh. I didn't realize . . .” She lifted her hands in the air and studied them.

“When they tremble a bit less,” he said. “I got the ones from my knuckles, and mostly these don't pain me.” This was not entirely a lie; knowing that they could be removed, and that he would feel better afterward, made them easier to bear. Much like the difference between the first time he'd been stung by a bee, and the second.

He gathered the array of dishes that had collected by Perrotte's bed to take down to the kitchen. To his shock, Perrotte pushed back her covers and stood.

“What are you doing?”

“I can't stay here. I'm . . . I've had enough of bed. I'm going to the library. I want to find my missing books.”

Sand wasn't sure what books she meant, but then he remembered the ruin of parchment that swamped the room. “The library is in bad shape.”

“Of course the library is in bad shape. I don't imagine that the forces of destruction that took apart this castle spared the library.”

Sand watched her movements, glad for this sign of recovery but not trusting it. She walked creakily, and sported two bright red spots high on her cheekbones.

Nonetheless, he followed her from the room, and almost ran into her when she stopped in the library doorway.

“It's worse than I imagined,” Perrotte said.

Sand nodded. What else was there to say?

Perrotte hovered, almost stepping into the room several times, but always stepping back. Sand understood the problem—she didn't want to crush anything underfoot.

He leaned into the room and scooped up a handful of pages. “Why don't we start out here?” he asked, gesturing at the library's anteroom, whose purpose he couldn't quite discern. It held lots of broken tables and chairs, the requisite shredded tapestries, but not much else that was useful. “I wish I'd at least fixed a table in here,” he muttered, hunkering down to spread the pages out, then answered himself with, “If only wishing made it so, Sand.”

“Do I need to even be here for this conversation?” Perrotte asked.

He looked up, startled. It was not that he had forgotten Perrotte was there. It was more that he'd forgotten that he didn't have to answer himself when he talked.

Certain that a blush now stained his cheeks, he simply turned back to the pages. “What books are you looking for?” he asked.

“My personal collection. My books on natural philosophy, mainly. Books on mathematics too.”

“No histories?”

Perrotte shook her head. “Works of the heathen philosophers, I might be interested in. But the books I owned were Ptolemy's
Almagest
 . . .” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Pliny's
Natural History
. Macrobius. Calcidus. Martianus Capella's
Marriage of Philology and Mercury.
”

Sand shook his head. Not only would he not know what those looked like when he came across them, he'd never heard of any of the authors she'd just listed, except Pliny. Just more proof that he was utterly unprepared to go to the university, in spite of his work with the village priest. Why did his father think he could go?

“And a book called
Astronomicon
. Press printed. My last birthday gift from my father.”

“What about a history of dragons?” Sand finally found a title page. “By Mathilde von Erlenbach.”

“Hardly meaningful, when there are no dragons left in Europe.”

Sand nodded. They had been driven away some centuries before. He wished he could have seen one, at least once, like this German woman had.

Pages stacked up. Perrotte bossily rearranged their piles. Everything written in Latin went on one side of the room. Greek received a small home near the empty fireplace. Vernacular texts were placed in another area, subdivided into languages and dialects. Each language section got split into scribed or press-printed areas. The final subdivision was the category of “interesting to Perrotte” or “not interesting to Perrotte.”

“‘Fixed stars,' ‘luminaries,' ‘spheres'!” Perrotte read from one page. “This could be from one of my books! Or, at least, I found some Ptolemy!”

“Wonderful!” Sand said, though he couldn't understand this level of excitement over books. Certainly, organizing the library was a fine preoccupation for a rainy day—though the smithy had a roof on it, last he checked. He didn't
have
to be here. But here is where Perrotte wanted to be, and he couldn't quite imagine letting her out of his presence for more than a trip to the privy closet.

That was when he remembered the bargain he had offered the saints. If he ever did get out of this castle, he had promised to go to university. He may as well accept it and prepare himself. He had a lot to learn about scholarship and natural philosophy.

Though . . . for the first time, Sand could imagine something he could bear to study at university.
Medicine
. He'd hated removing Perrotte's thorns, but he could see the value in caring for people, far more than he could see the value in studying theology or law.

Medicine wasn't blacksmithing. But it wasn't becoming a priest, either.

Silence came from the other side of the room for a while. When Sand finally looked up from his work, he saw that Perrotte was seated cross-legged on the floor, chewing on the end of her thumbnail while she read over something. Her eyes scanned the page—and her lips didn't even move.

“What did you find there?” he asked.

“
The Life of Sainte Trifine
. Well, part of it.”

“Sainte Trifine? Like the relic in the chapel?” Whose heart he'd mended with beeswax? “Is it . . . interesting?”

“Yes. Listen to this. After Trifine was strangled and beheaded by her husband, ‘her body was brought to her father's palace. Her father went to Gildas . . .'” Perrotte looked up. “Gildas was the monk who persuaded her to marry her husband.”

“But Gildas also resurrected her.” That was really the only part of the story that Sand knew.

“Yes!” Perrotte said, scanning the rest of the page and flipping it over. “Very well, you know the . . . that part. Do you also know the bit where Gildas went to her murderous husband's castle and prayed over a handful of sand—then threw it against the castle walls? The castle collapsed and was swallowed by the earth.”

Sand imagined a spinning vortex of earth opening up like a great mouth and sucking down the whole of a castle. He knew only one castle, this castle, and the picture in his mind was disturbing. Sand shuddered. “No. I've never heard that before.”

Perrotte's eyes glittered over the edge of the page. “Doesn't it sound—just a little bit—like the sundering of
this
castle?”

“A bit,” Sand said, turning away to pick up more debris from the library floor.

“There's more,” Perrote said. “Trifine is my mother's family saint. The Cygne saint.”

He stared down at the topmost of the pages he'd scooped up. It was scribe-written, some sort of treatise on healing. He thought Agnote might like to read it. He missed her so much—the whole family—even his father. His lost home was like a dark hole, an endless well inside him; all his interior organs kept falling toward that center nothingness.

“Sand, are you listening?”

“The Cygne saint,” he repeated.
Cygne
meant swan. “Is that why there are swans all over the castle?”

“Yes. The Boisblancs were in dire straits, financially; they pleaded for the Cygnes' fortune. My mother was the last child of that line, so it was agreed that she and her fortune would come to my father when he married her, if he adopted the swan into his crest and took their motto as his own.” Perrotte gave a slightly cruel smile. “The swans everywhere drove my father's wife mad.”

“What's the Cygne motto?”

“‘Fidelity, Sacrifice, Love.' It's boring.”

“You think that's boring?”

Perrotte wrinkled her forehead. “I think it is . . . the opposite of interesting.”

“Well, what motto did ‘Fidelity, Sacrifice, Love' replace?”

“‘
Ex favilla resurgo.'
‘From the embers, I rise again.' Phoenixes rise from embers, of course.”

Sand frowned. “I thought phoenixes rose from their own ashes.”

Perrotte rolled her eyes. “Embers, ashes . . . What's your family motto?”

He raised his eyebrows. “We're blacksmiths, Perrotte. We don't have a motto. Unless it's, ‘Please kindly pay us on time, for services rendered.'”

Perrotte's cheeks flushed. “Sorry. I . . . I guess I forgot.”

They spent quiet time sorting pages, while the rain tapped the distant roof and ran off the ends of broken gutters. Sand despaired, realizing how few books he'd actually known existed, let alone read—while on the other side of the room, Perrotte made small, pleased noises in the back of her throat whenever she found something she recognized.

Sand felt they'd made only small inroads into the library by the time Perrotte called for a break, yawning and clutching the small of her back. But she said she was pleased with their progress.

“I don't think we're that far from assembling at least a few whole books,” she said.

Sand looked at the anteroom lined with neat piles of parchment and vellum, then back in at the library's giant pile of chaos. He could step inside the library now without treading on pages, that much was true. It still didn't seem like much.

“I suppose.”

“Why so glum, Sand?”

He looked around at the piles of pages. “I don't . . . who can learn all of this? How can I possibly go to the university when I never knew a tenth of this existed?”

Perrotte stood beside him, hands on her hips, and surveyed the piles with him. “Sand, do you have a memory storehouse?”

He gave her a sideways look.

“Sorry. Look. My tutor, Efflam, taught me how to build a memory storehouse. In your mind, you imagine a room with all the things you need to remember in order there. As you walk through the room in your mind, you see things that remind you of what you're trying to remember. Say you needed to remember the names of the stars of the Pleiades.”

“Of course. I'm always trying to remember those,” Sand said, trying not to sound
too
sarcastic.

Perrotte just rolled her eyes at him. “Well, every Breton knows the names of the Seven Founder Saints of Bertaèyn—so you might imagine a room with the founders' statues, and at the foot of each statue, you would imagine carved one of the stars' names. Maybe under the statue of Saint Maloù, you have carved the name of the star Merope. It helps that Maloù and Merope start with
M
. Like that. It doesn't matter—no one else can really tell you how to build your storehouse. It's
your
mind. Anyway, that's a good way to remember things that you have a hard time with. Not that you need bother—clearly you are a blacksmith and a mender born.”

He nodded slowly, staggered by this whole notion: Storehouses in your mind? He was thinking through all that, when he realized Perrotte had gone silent and was just staring at him.

“What?” He rubbed self-consciously at his nose.

“In the chapel, the saint—” she said, and stopped.

“In the chapel, the saint
what
?”

“I know you don't like talking about the mending magic,” Perrotte said in a rush. “And maybe it's not magic at all, because maybe it's a miracle, like a saint would perform.”

It came to him, then. The memory of the relic he'd mended: Sainte Trifine's heart. He'd stuck it together with beeswax, then repaired her reliquary. Fear prickled at his chest.

“What about the saint in the chapel, Perrotte?”

“The relic of Sainte Trifine—her heart. It's alive and beating.”

20

Falcon

S
AND LURCHED TO HIS FEET AND MADE FOR THE
door. He strode through the falling rain with grim purpose.

The chapel sounded deathly silent after the weather outside, and his boot steps echoed loudly against the stone vaults overhead. It wasn't a very big chapel and in just a few moments, he was crossing himself and opening the reliquary.

He stared in horror at the heart moving inside the box. He dropped to his knees before the altar.

Perrotte's footsteps sounded behind him. He waited. Her hand touched his shoulder.

He was quiet, thinking before he spoke. He didn't want to speak of this, actually, but he knew he must.

“Magic should have some purpose to it,” he said. “There's no purpose in what has happened to this heart.”

“I think mending is your magic's purpose, Sand.” She stood beside him, staring down at the relic.

“So, I'm some sort of witch? Who made a heart beat inside a silver box?”

“You really think you're a witch, and not someone blessed by a saint?”

“Blessed?” His voice cracked on the word and he stood up.

She shrugged. “It doesn't really matter to me.”

He drew back. “I'm sorry,” he said stiffly. “I thought you would care.”

“Oh, Sand, that's not what I meant! I do care. I just . . . I don't think your mending magic is evil, if that's what you're worried about, but I meant that it doesn't
matter
. You are good. You do good things. My guess is . . . I mean . . .” She frowned, and stared at her hands for a moment, before saying, “Well, you know, strange things happen to saints before they're made saints.”

A laugh escaped him in one big bark. “I'm hardly pious enough for sainthood.”

She shrugged, smiling a little. “Stranger things have happened.”

“I don't like that notion. I aim to be a smith. And have a family someday.”

Now it was Perrotte's turn to laugh. “I said ‘saint,' not ‘monk.' And I thought you were going to Paris to university, to please your father? Don't most men who go to university end up priests?”

“Some do. And I'm going. But I'm going to study medicine, not theology.” He felt muted and flat: he'd figured out how to make the best of that bad situation, but learning to heal people still wasn't blacksmithing.

“
If
we get free of here,” Perrotte pointed out. “So far, the thorns are winning.”

Sand went to the chapel door to stare out at the rain. From the ground level of the inner courtyard he couldn't see the thorns. “I prayed at Saint Melor's shrine the night before I woke here.”

“Saint Melor, patron of my father's family, and Sainte Trifine, patron of my mother's family,” Perrotte said. “Maybe you should mend Melor's skull and see if it has answers for you.”

Sand glared at her—then over her head, caught sight of the colored glass windows depicting Saint Melor's life. The glass was cracked, and some of it was missing—but most of the story was there.

Perrotte turned to see where Sand was staring. “Saint Melor's father was Saint Meliau.”

“Was everyone in Bertaèyn a saint, back in the day?”

“Everyone who didn't murder anyone, maybe,” Perrotte said. “Saint Melor was only seven years old when his uncle, Riwal, murdered Meliau for his kingdom. Riwal wanted to kill his nephew as well, so the inheritance would be undisputed. The law in those times was that the heir had to be able to hold a sword and ride a horse. Some bishops persuaded Riwal to just maim Melor, to cut off his hand and his foot so he could neither hold a sword nor ride.”

The first colored glass depicted Melor receiving a new foot from a bronzesmith and a new hand from a silversmith; the second showed him going about his studies at a monastery with his metal hand and foot. The legend said that the appendages moved at his command and grew with his body.

Sand said, “I'm pretty sure you can ride a horse without a foot. And Melor could have learned to fight left-handed.”

“Riwal didn't think of that,” Perrotte said.

“I don't know why they didn't get a blacksmith for the job, either,” Sand said. “I think steel would have made a better hand than silver. Same for the bronze foot.”

The next glass showed Riwal ordering Melor's guardian to kill the boy and bring Riwal his head.

Well, there was no replacing
that
with silver or bronze, Sand thought. Or even steel.

The final glass showed the guardian's journey with Melor's head.

“That's the selfsame head on the glass that's in this chapel?” Sand asked, though he knew the answer.

“Yes. Melor spoke to his guardian through it. He asked to be buried near a spring that he called into being, and there they built a shrine—”

“The shrine I prayed at not to go to university,” Sand said.

“I guess your prayer was answered,” Perrotte said.

Sand strongly considered throwing something at her—but there was nothing to hand that wasn't sacred.

“You should get some rest,” he said roughly, and stalked off to the smithy. He hoped Perrotte would go back to bed. He needed some time to himself.

In the smithy, he built up a fire and started mending. He worked on anything that came to hand, piece after piece, thrusting finished items into the ashes to cool while his mind churned his thoughts to butter.

If they ever actually broke free of the thorns, he would have to go to university, which was bad enough—but he wasn't entirely sure that Perrotte wouldn't end up accused of witchcraft. He wasn't sure
he
wouldn't be accused of witchcraft. Or heresy. Everyone knew Jehanne d'Arc was a well-regarded martyr
now
, but she'd claimed to hear God's voice and they'd burned her at the stake. Neither he nor Perrotte heard any voices, but they surely had done things that would make people nervous. Things that made
him
nervous. And neither he nor Perrotte had any political patrons to save them. In fact, just like Jehanne d'Arc, Perrotte had political enemies.

Added to this was the constant worry that if they did not break free, they would someday run out of food. And more immediately, what about Merlin? The falcon was just sitting in the kitchen, watching them from the rafters. The bird needed to eat, but showed no sign of departing the kitchen on his own.

Of course, Perrotte hardly ate anything—hardly slept, either. Was that what happened after . . . the sort of awakening she had experienced?

Sand also worried about the thorns in his neck. It worried him that they were there, biding their time, though he didn't feel them terribly often. As if they heard his thoughts, a dozen light licks of pain shot out from the thorns.

He hung over his anvil, panting, until the pain passed. His resolve strengthened. He needed to remove the thorns; he needed to finish removing Perrotte's thorns too. But later. First, he needed some time with his hammer and anvil.

Recovered, Sand worked steadily, mending hinges and bolts and door latches, andirons and fireplace pokers and hearth tongs, toasting forks and spatulas and stirring spoons. His piles of broken iron shrank, and that made him feel good.

Daylight was fading by the time he reached the end of the pile at his feet. His last act was the mending of a chisel—a complicated task, one that required hardening and tempering. Fortunately, he could skip a few steps: The metal's quality was assured—this chisel had been a chisel once already—and since he'd found it in the carpenter's shop, he even already knew at what point he should perform the final quench, which was when the chisel's filed surface turned the color of rain-dampened straw. A wood chisel must be quenched at a different color than a metal chisel.

But in the end, he'd left it too late in the day. He could no longer clearly see the colors in the steel by the time he reached the last step in mending the chisel. Disgusted with himself, he tossed the chisel down with his tongs, and left the smithy to dusk. Night was a good time to see the gradations between the glowing colors, but the tempering colors were subtle, possessed no glow, and required proper daylight to distinguish.

Sand's stomach grumbled, and his feet carried him to the kitchen. It was not that he'd forgotten to eat; it was more that he'd refused to break his concentration from things that made sense. Constant work was the only remedy for forgetting what had happened in the chapel.

The kitchen was cold when he got there. He built up the fire and heated stew. Perrotte showed up a short time later.

“We have to figure out what to do for Merlin,” he said, handing her a bowl. “He's not eaten anything since he returned.”

She handed the bowl back, and at first he thought this was a protest against the turnips. “I can hunt the falcon,” she said, and tore off a strip of her outer skirt to wrap around her arm. She lifted her arm, chirping oddly toward the ceiling.

Not immediately, but soon enough, Merlin swooped down from the rafters and landed on Perrotte's skirt-covered arm.

“Well done, Merlin,” she said in a low and even voice. “You don't have any jesses, do you?” She glanced at Sand. “Thin leather ankle straps for falcons,” she explained.

Sand shrugged. “He wasn't wearing any when I found him.”

She pursed her lips. “
She
, really. A male falcon would be much smaller.”

“Oh,” he said, entirely unsure what response was required for that.

“Let's go,” Perrotte said. “I might need your arm at some point. I'm still sometimes unsteady.”

He hurried after her. She descended to the middle courtyard, which had a ring of guard towers along the outer wall. The falcon blinked, but showed no signs that he—
she
—wanted to fly off. Perrotte headed for a nearby guard tower, and slowly climbed the narrow stone steps to the top.

“Can we, maybe, tie a message around Merlin's leg and see if anyone contacts us from the outside world?” Sand asked Perrotte's ascending back.

“She's not a pigeon,” Perrotte said sharply over her shoulder.

He wasn't sure if Perrotte meant that messages were beneath Merlin's dignity, or if it was just not possible.

“It's against her nature,” Perrotte explained more gently when they reached the top. “She'll hunt for us, but she's going to come back to us, if the bond is strong enough. She's not going to fly off to—I don't even know where you think she might go—and wait and carry a message back. Or however pigeons do it.”

He just nodded, looking down at the thorns from the tower. They didn't loom over the castle walls quite the way they used to. In fact—the thorns used to stand a man's height above the walls, and this tower would not then have been able to look
down
on the thorns at all. He was sure they were much lower now. Weren't they?

Beside him, Perrotte thrust her arm upward. Disturbed by the motion of her arm, the falcon took flight, winging up and away.

“Oh,” Sand said, a small disappointed sound. Merlin was gone. He was going to miss the bird. He—no, she—wasn't friendly or cuddly or much of anything other than a distant, lurking watcher, but still, she was something else alive in the castle.

He stood beside Perrotte and watched the falcon fly out over the asparagus fields beyond the castle. The muddy fields were greening, like everything else in the world that he and Perrotte were no longer part of. Even the thorns had leafed out and now displayed five-petaled, pinkish-white flowers.

The thorns. They really had been much higher than the castle walls. Hadn't they? He ran through his memories of his time in the castle. He couldn't really remember, but on his first day in the castle, yes, the thorns had been a man's height above the walls. Afterward, they hadn't loomed quite so high, but he'd attributed that to the fact that everything had been new and strange on the first day, and he'd since grown accustomed to the thorns looming.

But at some point, they'd become less looming, and at some point after that, less looming still. Which brought him to this day, and the fact that they were lower. They really were. Only a few feet above the castle walls, really.

“The hedge—” he began excitedly, but Perrotte was watching Merlin fly off into the deepening hyacinth-colored dusk.

“I don't think it's a concern for Merlin.”

“No—the hedge is
lower
.”

Now she looked at him. “Lower than what?”

“Lower than it
was
.” He told her how the thorns had looked on his first day. “How high did they look when you first—woke?”

“Somewhat over my head, were I standing on the walls. I guess.”

He nodded. “And now?”

She stared down at the hedge. “Well, the thorns
are
lower. You don't think it's because I cut any of them at the night portal, do you?”

He frowned. “Seems unlikely. You cut hardly any. That's the other side of the castle, anyway.” He had returned to lower the portcullis and burn back the thorns creeping under the night portal. The thorns seemed willing to be stopped at the gate, but they were no less thriving outside.

She shrugged, and scratched her neck where a thorn branch had lashed her. She palpated her skin gently. “I think there's a thorn in there,” she said.

“Will you be able to find it again tonight?”

“Probably.”

He nodded. “We'll get it.” That's how the final thorns would be ousted: one by one as she discovered them under her skin, or if either of them noticed any mark of blood poisoning. “I'll need you to work on mine as well.” He pointed at the lumps on his neck. “Are you ready to go back down?”

“Back down?” she asked.

He glanced at the wall of the inner courtyard, where smoke from the dinner fire wafted. “I know turnip stew is not your favorite—”