Thorns (2 page)

I felt his gaze on my back the whole way to the door. I dragged on my cloak, wrenched the door open, and stamped back out into the yard.

I let the wind sting my eyes until they streamed water.

~

Ivy was up when I returned to the house. She sat by the hearth, her brown hair pulled back in a braid with damp tendrils sticking to her neck and her mouth pressed in a thin line of frustration as she worked.

She’d grown taller over the last few months, and thinner. Her wrists looked like sticks and her shoulders were lumpy, like sharp roots were sprouting from her skin. It was just bone, though. We were all made of bone these days.

“Good morning,” I said, wondering what had caused the scowl on her face.

“I’m up,” she said. “You don’t have to make nasty comments.”

“It wasn’t a nasty comment,” Jonn said, bumping her foot with his good leg.

Ivy frowned. She’d become more surly lately, which could have been due to growing taller while eating less.

I checked the stew over the fire. It would cook all day and be ready to eat for supper. In the meantime, we could have potatoes for breakfast. I put them at the edge of the coals to bake.

After a few moments of work, my sister growled in frustration. “This stupid yarn,” she said, tossing it down. “I’m so
sick
of it.”

“Are you sick of eating, too? Because that’s what we have to give up if we can’t make quota,” I snapped.

Tears prickled her eyes. “You’re so mean. Why can’t you be like Ma?”

The words hurt like slaps. “I’m sorry I haven’t been more cheerful while I’m trying to keep you alive,” I said finally.

Her eyes glimmered with unshed tears. She crossed her arms. I wondered for the thousandth time what was wrong with her these days.

“While we weave, I’ll tell you riddles,” Jonn said. “All right?”

She rubbed her arm across her eyes and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She didn’t look at me. “All right.”

I stalked to the kitchen and braced myself against the stove. I bit my lip to keep from saying the words that filled my mouth.

I wanted to slap her. Fulfilling quota wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t something we did because we wanted to, or because we enjoyed it. This was do or die. If we didn’t deliver our required amount of yarn to the village each week, we didn’t receive our food supplies—supplies that were already being rationed because of the Farther occupation. If we didn’t make quota, we wouldn’t be fed.

My sister was almost fourteen years old—almost a grown woman in our world. She knew this. She had to know it. We had no other choice.

“I’m going into the village,” I announced, and headed for the door.

THE FROST WAS cold. Ice wrapped the tree branches in soft silver, and a mist of shadow and snow enveloped the woods like a veil. The path was long and twisting, and I ran.

My cloak streamed behind me, a ribbon of blue in a world of white. All around me, the snow fell in slow spirals like fairy dust. It might be beautiful in some other place. Here it was ominous, because here we had no fairy tale endings...only horror stories.

Blue blossoms lined the path, the flowers that kept the monsters in the forest at bay. But as I headed for the village, Watchers weren’t the first thing on my mind.

There were other things to be worried about in the Frost now.

Farthers.

My stomach twisted at the thought, and I slowed. I didn’t want to go into the village, but I had no choice. That rabbit wouldn’t feed us for two more days. We needed more food.

Silence blanketed the trees and clung to the snow the closer I got to the village. Not even bluewings stirred in the branches above my head. I knew what had the creatures so disturbed. Our home had been invaded. The balance, precarious as it had been, was completely upset. Two months ago, Gabe had stumbled through the Frost and into my life. But now he was gone.

I had stayed.

And so had the Farther soldiers who’d come looking for him.

My boots crunched in the snow as I stepped over a fallen limb and ducked under a low-hanging bough. The path curved around a cluster of trees, their branches reaching for me like skeletal hands. As I rounded the curve, I stopped.

Soldiers stood in the path, rifles slung across their arms. Their heads turned in unison as they caught sight of me, and I forced myself to keep walking. My hands were suddenly clammy with sweat despite the frigid wind, and my skin prickled.

Here the path became enclosed on all sides by a cage-like tunnel made of thick metal slats interwoven with wire. The Farther soldiers guarded the entrance, armed with guns. They were here to make sure no Watchers slipped down the path to the village, they said. They were here for our safety, they said.

As if anyone believed such a lie.

I swallowed to moisten my dry throat. My footsteps rang out too loud in my ears as I reached the entrance to the chute of ribbed metal that snaked through the forest like a skeletal dragon’s trachea. The Cage, we’d started calling it, for that was what entering it made us feel like. Like animals, trapped.

Villagers dotted the path inside the Cage, mostly woodsmen and hunters coming or going from their daylight work in the forest or along the shores of the nearby river or lake of ice. Most kept their faces turned toward the ground and away from the soldiers’ stares. Nobody spoke.

I stepped into the Cage. The metal bars above and around me blocked some of the light, but still let in the searing wind. I tugged my cloak tighter around me at the moment of scrutiny. I hated it. Every second I walked the tunnel of cold steel, I imagined the soldiers raising their weapons and shooting me in the back. What if they’d somehow discovered that I was the one who’d sheltered Gabe? What if they knew that I’d helped him escape? Would they wait for me to show up for Assembly or quota day and then nab me like a rabbit?

I forced myself to take a few deep breaths, to be calm.

Then a figure in a blue cloak caught my eye.

He stood only a few paces away, leaning against the metal supports of the Cage as he adjusted the snow blossom-emblazoned leather strap on his wrist. A young man. He turned his face as I drew close, and I knew him at once.

Adam Brewer.

He was tall and lean, dark-haired, with eyes that pierced like arrows and a mouth that rarely smiled. He always seemed to wear a look of intense concentration, as if he were solving all the Frost’s puzzles behind those dark eyes of his.

My heart thudded. Adam and I shared a deadly secret, one we didn’t dare speak of in public. Adam was a Thorns operative—a member of a secret organization dedicated to the overthrow of the corrupt and cruel Aeralian dictatorship that had killed and imprisoned many. If the Farthers knew who he was, they would shoot him without hesitation. Yet here he stood, fearless, while the Farther soldiers stamped their boots to ward off the cold only a few paces away.

Our gazes met.

A muscle twitched in his jaw, as if he had something he wanted to say but restrained himself. The air between us thickened, and I felt his attention as tangibly as if he’d put his hand on my arm. I itched to acknowledge him, to say his name, to ask if he had news, any news. He was my one link to Gabe, to the Thorns, to my parents’ double life…to everything that had happened.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak to him here or in the village, where people still supposed us to be enemies. And I hadn’t seen him alone in the forest since the night Gabe disappeared through the portal.

I ached with the weight of a million questions. I wanted to ask him about Gabe, about the gate, about my parents. About what he was doing now, about what he planned to do in the future. I’d become someone else, someone adrift in a sea of secrets and conspiracies, and he was an island of answers and knowledge and strength.

But the back of my neck prickled with awareness of the Farthers behind us. My mouth felt locked shut.

Adam’s eyes slid over me as I passed.

My hopes of speaking with him, asking him any questions at all, hardened and shattered as I continued down the path through the Cage. The wind bit at my gloved fingers and tugged the edges of my cloak, and I walked faster, my feet making wet crunching sounds in the snow.

I turned another corner made of ribbed steel, and I stole a glance behind me.

He was gone.

I blinked once and looked ahead. Now I could see the stone roofs of the village peeking above the trees. I was almost to Iceliss. Fresh dread broke over me, and anxiety began to gnaw at my stomach as I reached the village gate.

Metal spikes stabbed the sky where our wooden walls had once stood, and the village entrance had been transformed into a web of steel cages that locked at sundown, keeping dangerous things out…and other dangerous things in. Soldiers patrolled the top of the gate from a walkway that led around the entire perimeter of the village. Their eyes were hidden by the black eyeshades they wore, but I still felt the weight of their gazes on me, and I shuddered at the sight of the guns in their hands.

The shadows cast by the Farther walls slid over my skin as I slipped through the gate. I passed beneath the soldiers, and then I was inside the village.

The stone streets and houses looked different now. Older, sadder. Farther soldiers were everywhere. The snow in the streets was churned into muddy sludge by their boots. The quota yard was full of them lounging, talking, and smoking.

Clutching my cloak around me, I headed for the market. I didn’t like to linger here.

“Lia!”

My best friend, Ann, darted from a shop and slipped her arm into mine. Her bright red cloak made a brave splash against the gray stone of the buildings around her, but her cheeks gleamed pale and dark circles ringed her eyes. In the last two months, she’d gone from rosy to gaunt. Her father, the Mayor, was collaborating secretly with the Farthers. He’d sold his own people out to the enemy, and she bore the horrible knowledge in secret. For all the rest of the village knew, he was as much a victim as the rest of us.

I hugged her tightly. “I didn’t know if I’d see you today.”

Our friendship was like that now, meted out in snatches of conversation and furtive whispers. It wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe anymore.

“I snuck out,” she said, glancing past me at the soldiers in the quota yard. “Father is busy kissing Raine’s boots, as usual.” Her gaze flicked over me, and her eyebrows knitted together as she frowned. “What are you doing here? There isn’t an Assembly I don’t know about, is there?”

“We need cornmeal. Ivy’s going through a growth spurt.” The fact that everyone’s allotted food rations had been decreased wasn’t helping, either, but since Ann’s father had given that order, I didn’t bring it up to her.

Ann squeezed my hands in hers, and her gaze dropped to the ground. She knew. I could see the shame in the way she hunched her shoulders, as if against a chill in the wind.

“Walk with me?” she murmured, flicking another glance at the soldiers.

We crossed through the center of the village, where the shops and houses of stone crowded together as if huddled against the cold. Pale lichen covered the rooftops and walls, and painted snow blossoms adorned every house, carved into the doors and on the posts and thresholds. Horse-drawn carts rattled past over the cobblestoned streets, where the stones were arranged in patterns of blue blossoms surrounded by gray. A faint dusting of dirty snow coated everything.

“Did you hear the latest news?” she hissed, as soon as we were past the soldiers and out of earshot.

Apprehension knotted in my belly. I shook my head mutely.

“Watchers. They prowled the walls last night, testing them.”

My apprehension turned to anger. “It's the Farthers and their guns, their technology,” I said. “They're stirring everything here into a frenzy. The Watchers never came to the walls of the town before they arrived.”

She hesitated. “Perhaps so, but Raine is only using this to further his own cause. He told the Circle of Elders just last night that this only proves his soldiers are necessary—to protect us from the Watchers. He says that with their guns and technology, they can keep us safer than we’ve ever been.”

“And they believed him?” I couldn’t believe it. “The Farthers are creating the problem and then offering themselves as the convenient solution. Surely the Circle sees this?”

Ann shook her head. “I don’t know what they think anymore. The Elders have become more reticent. They’re frightened for their livelihoods, their families. They do and say little at the gatherings besides sitting there like rabbits. My father does most of the talking, or Raine.”

I shook my head in disgust.

She bit her lip and leaned closer. “There's more, although this bit hasn't been announced to the village yet. The Farthers are building a consulate in the center of the village. They’ve already discussed plans with my father, and laborers arrived this morning from across the river. They start work this week.”

“A...a consulate?” My mind spun with confusion. “You mean...?”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I mean they plan to stay.”

The words hit me like a punch in the stomach. For months now, we'd been promised a peaceful resolution to this waking nightmare. The Farthers had entered our land and occupied our village under the claims of searching for a fugitive, but as time passed it became increasingly obvious that they had more on their minds than finding one person. And now they were bringing in laborers?

I grabbed Ann’s wrist. “Tell me exactly what this means.”

“A consulate building can only mean that they’re sending an official representative from Aeralis to govern us. My father will be a puppet ruler, and some Farther diplomat will be calling the shots.”

Official, Aeralis, govern, puppet
… My knees weakened, my hands felt numb. “And what dos the Circle say about
that
?”

“Like I said, the Elders don’t say much these days. I’ve seen them leaving the house late at night, accompanied by soldiers to ‘see them home safe,’ Father says. It’s a show of power. They know they don’t dare speak out. They’ve been silenced.”