Princess of Thorns (2 page)

I don’t dream for a moment that she has cursed me as surely as she’s blessed me.

I am only a child, too innocent to realize that there is no salvation without sacrifice, no light without darkness, no triumph that doesn’t carry the seeds of its own destruction bouncing in its pocket.

Ten Years Later 

The immortals are wrong; the golden god the humans say comes to fetch their spirits at the end is real—far younger than they’ve imagined, and neither wrinkled nor bearded, nor possessing a third eye in the center of his forehead—but real all the same.

Real, and
divinely
beautiful.

Sleep drags at me, but I struggle to keep my eyes open, not wanting to miss a moment of my death.

I wonder how the god will summon my soul from my body, and if it will hurt the way it does when ogres steal a soul. I wonder if he will take my spirit to the Land Beyond, curse me to the Pit, or force me to live out another mortal existence, this time as a vulture, or a Carn fish, or a maggot, or something equally miserable in order to pay for the mess I’ve made of my human life.

“A fifty-fifty chance and I get the wrong one.” The god laughs bitterly as he runs a hand through his shaggy hair. “Should have flaming known.”

I try to ask what he means, but all I manage is a moan.

“Waking up, then, are you?” He glances down at me where I lie, wrists chained to a metal ring the Boughtswords drove deep into the ground. “How you feeling, little man?”

His voice is deep and softened by an accent I know I should be able to place, but I can’t remember the language of round vowels and soft
R
s. I can’t even remember the names of the four kingdoms. There is no room in my thoughts for anything but the god’s terrible beauty—his golden hair falling in waves to his shoulders, his bee-stung lips, his eyes as bright and blue as the sea stone I stole from Janin’s treasure box.

He is … magnificent.

The god snaps his fingers between my eyes, but I’m too numb to flinch. “Can you understand me?”

I reach up, patting his cheek before running a buzzing finger over his impossibly perfect mouth, surprised to find his lips as solid as the chains knocking against my arm, real and warm and a tiny bit chapped, which for some reason makes me giggle.

“Sleep-drunk bastard,” he mumbles, knocking my hand away. His expression is kind enough, but I see the disappointment in his eyes.

But then, he is a god, and must see straight through me to the secrets of my black heart. He must know that I have lied, thieved, and betrayed my only friends, and all of it for nothing. I am dying, and soon Jor will join me in death and the Ronces line will reach its tragic end.

“Forgive me,” I say, but the words come out tangled. My tongue is thick, my mouth dry, and my head full of smoke and shadow.

The leader of the Boughtswords set four braziers of Vale Flowers burning in my tent, determined to keep me too sleep-sick to damage any more of his men before the caravan reaches the slave market. Instead, I will soon be dead. I try to take satisfaction in the fact that he will lose the small fortune even a scrawny, Fey-trained warrior would have fetched at market, but I’m too muddled to focus on any one thought for long.

Even Golden God, the great and beautiful, with his lips like a love poem, has begun to lose my interest to the dragon-shaped shadows flickering on the roof of the tent until he takes hold of my shoulders and gives a shake.

“Focus, boy.” He pinches my ears before tapping my forehead with his thick finger. “If I free you, can you stand? It’ll be easier to get you outside on your own feet.”

Outside?
Outside the tent? Outside my body? Outside …

My eyes begin to burn from being held open too long. I try to blink, but my lids slide shut and stay that way, no matter how I fight to open them. My lashes are made of stone, my lids weigh more than the leather armor lying heavy on my bound chest.

The armor is stolen, too. I snatched it from Thyne’s cot the morning I left, though I knew he would give it to me if I asked. Thyne would lie down and let me use him as a carpet if I told him to, though, of course, I never would. What’s the point in walking on a broken man?

What’s the point in walking on an
unbroken
man?

The thought confounds me, making my head ache even more than it did before. What
is
the point in walking on an unbroken man? Is the question nonsense, or a riddle I must answer in order to gain passage out of this limbo world inhabited by gods and monsters and the ghosts of all the people I’ve failed in my seventeen years of life?

Failed, when I was so certain … so determined …

I’m dimly aware of the god patting my cheeks, but it’s too late for him to draw me out. I am sinking into myself, back into the mists of my mind.

I run down a red mud road, past Janin, my fairy mother, who cradles Thyne in her arms, mourning the son who might as well be dead after what I did to him. I run past my mother, covered in the wasted blood she used to bless me. I run until I reach the outskirts of Mercar, and then on through the abandoned city, down roads where ancient buildings have begun to crumble beneath a bruise-black sky.

I throw myself through the castle gates into the royal garden, where the sacred Hawthorn tree’s leaves flame crimson red. I hear my brother scream from somewhere deep within the castle and run even faster. Faster and faster, but I can’t remember the way to the throne room where Ekeeta conducts her rituals. I can’t find Jor, can’t free him, can’t do anything to right my many wrongs.

It should be me,
I think as I race down one empty hallway after another, alone but for the sound of Jor’s tortured cries. I’m the one Mama blessed.

I should have done more to protect my brother. I should have insisted we put an end to our twice-yearly visits, no matter how careful we were when traveling under the cover of night. The entire point of being raised in separate corners of the world was to prevent both of Norvere’s heirs from being killed or captured at once. I should have insisted we stay apart. I should have listened to the fairy elders and married the king of Endrean and his navy of five hundred ships. I should have heeded Janin when she warned that there is a difference between bravery and pride, but I didn’t, and now my pride will be the ruin of the world.

I finally turn the corner to the throne room, only to find the doors locked against me. I push and shove. I slam my fists into the etched metal where my father’s family seal—thorns lifting a red-sailed galleon from the sea—still marks the door, but all I receive for my efforts are broken bones. Something cracks in my right hand and pain blooms in my fist. I fall to the ground, clutching my arm to my chest as Jor’s screams cut off with a terrible suddenness.

My brother is dead.

I know it the way I know the sun is hot and the seas are blue. Jor is dead. My sweet brother, my best friend, my last living family member and the only person it is safe for me to love, is gone. He will never grow into those extra inches and broad shoulders he sprouted this year. He will never be a man or a beloved or a father. He will never celebrate his fifteenth birthday.

“I’ll kill you!” I scream, ignoring the tears that run down my cheeks. “I’ll cut your heart out!”

“You’ll do no such thing, child.” The queen is suddenly in the hall before me, staring down at me from her great height.

She is sixteen hands if she’s a finger, a long, lean column in her ivory dress with the gold trim. Her face is as taut and firm as it was when I was a child—youthful and pretty in its gaunt way, though I know she is close to two hundred years old—and her bald head is concealed by a mass of golden hair. The wig looks real, but it is not. It is a lie, as everything about the false queen is a lie.

I leap to my feet, determined to kill her with my one good hand, but when I reach for her my arm goes limp, falling to hang useless at my side. I cannot use deadly force except to defend myself. My mother’s fairy gifts do not allow me to be merciless, even to the one being who deserves no mercy.

“Give yourself to me, Aurora,” Ekeeta says. “There is nothing left for you to live for.”

“Stuff yourself,” I growl, wishing I could sink a dagger into her heart.

“It’s a shame.” Ekeeta leans down until her eyes are level with my face. Her thin lips stretch, but she doesn’t show me her sharper-than-human teeth. “One would think your mother would have wished for intelligence for you along with your other gifts. But Rose wasn’t known for her thinking, was she? Poor, pretty …
dead
thing.”

With a howl, I lunge for the ogre queen’s throat, but the moment my clawed fingers touch her flesh she vanishes, leaving nothing but a pile of biting beetles behind.

The beetles tumble over each other as they scuttle along the floor, fleeing the boot I bring down upon them again and again. I stomp them to juice, panting with panic born in my days in the dungeon when I woke with beetles nesting in my hair, crawling along my throat, creeping beneath my skirt to leave bite marks up and down my legs.

The last of the insects disappear beneath the throne room’s door and I collapse against the wall, covering my face with hands, weeping in a way I haven’t in years. I weep for Jor and Thyne and Janin. I weep for the people of Norvere, who will never be free of the tyranny of ogre reign.

I weep for what feels like years and am still crying when I’m plunged into a world of cold, where there is no air to breathe.

My eyes fly open and I suck in a lungful of water as I’m pulled to the surface. I see bleary gray sky and my own boots sticking out the end of a watering trough, and I cough loudly before a rough hand covers my mouth and a voice hisses in my ear—

“Quiet, little man. These ragers are drunk, not dead.”

I shove the hand away and spin to face the voice, sending water sloshing out onto the grass in the process.

Behind me, squatting with his thick arms crossed atop the rough wood of the trough, is the young god, looking far less godlike in the thin morning light. He’s still the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen—which is saying something for a girl raised among fairy boys so lovely they can break a human heart with a glance—but he’s not divine.

A god wouldn’t have a faint bruise staining one cheekbone or the beginnings of a mangy beard with patches where the whiskers have refused to grow. A god wouldn’t have dust on his clothes or smell like a mix of campfire and barley liquor. And a god certainly wouldn’t wear a full-sleeved gray shirt of the style popular only in southern Kanvasola.

Worship of all gods, human and immortal, has been forbidden in Kanvasola for years, ever since the Immortal King Eldorio decided to live forever and ordered his country to worship him instead.

“You speak the language of Norvere?” the boy asks, hesitating only a moment before asking me the same question in Kanvasol.

“Who are you?” I ask in my native tongue. I know a bit of Kanvasol, but not enough to carry on a conversation. “What do you want?” I shiver but make no move to step out of the water. My head is clear and my stomach settled for the first time in days, and the cold is at least partially responsible for banishing the haze of the Vale Flowers.