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  Thorned: Book 2

  Liam Reese

  Contents

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  1. Water In The Blood

  2. A New Assignment

  3. Revenge From A Fox

  4. The Valley of Rogues

  5. Parting of the Ways

  6. The Badlands

  7. Hometowns

  8. The Alchemists

  9. Memories In The Desert

  10. The Path to Rebellion

  11. Go Oft Awry

  12. His Majesty Will See You Now

  End of Book 2 – Please Read This

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  1

  Water In The Blood

  There came the morning, while on the journey, when they could not wake Karyl from his sleep.

  “Is he still breathing?”

  Irae stood up and eyed Thorn, her brow sternly furrowed.

  “If he wasn’t breathing,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t be trying to wake him.”

  Thorn shrugged helplessly, hands spread wide. “It seemed like a logical question,” he said, reasonably enough, in his opinion. “At least, to me it did.”

  “Keep your thoughts to yourself, next time,” said Irae shortly, but her anger wasn’t truly directed at him. She was worried, and when Irae got worried, she got angry. When she got sad, she got angry, too. The same thing tended to occur when she was frustrated, irritated, tired, and hungry. Thorn thought this was probably a side effect of having been raised a princess and given everything you ever wanted as soon as you wanted it. Then suddenly there was no one at your beck and call anymore, no one to hand you what you asked for. He supposed he should be grateful for small mercies, that her anger did have breaks in it and that he could wait through it for the lulls.

  The big lump that was Karyl appeared to be sleeping, nothing else more sinister than that. He lay on his side, his hands tucked up under his chin. There was dirt on his cheek, but that was probably from lying on the ground. None of them were too clean, anyway. He had gone to sleep in a position that saved his left side, Thorn noticed. The bandages were also becoming increasingly grimy as they covered the arrow wound he’d received on a misadventure in the recent past.

  Thorn didn’t like thinking of that night. It wasn’t just Karyl, of course; it was also Lully, the young, innocent-looking kitchen maid who had had her arm broken because they’d been led into a fight almost none of them were prepared for. Karyl was a big man, thickset and rough, and he had taken his wound with scarcely a grunt. The sound of Lully’s keening and whimpers, on the other hand, would linger in Thorn’s mind and nightmares for years to come. He was sure of it.

  Irae pressed a hand to the dressings that protected Karyl’s injured side. In response, the former guard shifted and groaned slightly in his sleep. He sounded like a very old dog, Thorn thought, who was feeling the pain of an imminent end without knowing what it meant. His breathing, too, was shallower than it should have been; shallower than Thorn would have liked.

  “It’s badly infected,” said Irae tightly.

  Her face was pale. She was naturally a little wan, her skin quite sallow even after all the living out of doors over the last month or so. Her dirty blonde hair gave her no color to draw from.

  “I thought he was able to clean it out,” said Thorn. “It’s been five days.”

  “I know. I thought so too. He said that he had taken care of the problem.”

  “It looks more like he took care of it by ignoring it,” objected Thorn.

  “I wish I had known,” said Irae. She rubbed the back of her wrist across her forehead, wiping away sweat and trying to avoid dirtying her face with her fingers, which had picked up some of the grime from Karyl’s bandages. Her efforts were in vain, as her wrist was just as dirty as any other part of her. She left a swath of dirt just above her eyebrows. “I’ll try to clean it myself, but I don’t know that I’ll be able to do much.” She pressed a hand to the former guard’s forehead. Irae wasn’t an overly small woman, but her hand looked quite tiny against Karyl’s broad face. “It may already have gone too far.”

  “Too far?” said Ruben from behind her. He crouched over her shoulder to look at Karyl, his long pointy face looking quite worried. His own thatch of straw-colored hair had been dampened by rain and mud over the last few days, and he was looking a bit worse for wear. As were all of them, Thorn reminded himself; it was only that Ruben looked like a scarecrow at the best of times, so now that the best of times were well gone, he had come off a little worse than the rest of them. Arguably. Ruben would almost certainly argue it, for one. “What do you mean, too far?”

  Irae did not even have it in herself to grace this with an answer, as upset as she was, and left it to Thorn to draw the bard a little ways away from the rest of the group huddled around the prone Karyl.

  “Listen,” he said, brow furrowed in consternation, “do you think the three of us could get Karyl onto his horse?”

  “The three of us?”

  “Jelen, you, and me.”

  “You would ask the queen to do something like that?”

  Thorn rolled his eyes. Jelen — Irae, that was, he still couldn’t seem to stop himself from calling her by the name she had given him — wasn’t really the queen — officially, she had never been crowned — and she hadn’t yet regained her throne. He didn’t feel much closer to helping her get back her crown than he had at the beginning of this woebegone adventure, and he was already heartily sick of the whole royalty aspect.

  “I would ask anyone with two working arms to help,” he said. “She isn’t less capable because she turned out to be royalty, you know. I’d ask Lully, too, if her arm wasn’t in a sling, and Graic if she —” He turned to glance behind him at the elderly woman who never seemed to be on entirely the same plane of reality as the rest of them. “— wasn’t Graic,” he finished. “Anyway. We will have to make do, because it doesn’t look like Karyl is going to be able to help us.”

  “His wound is infected?”

  “The arrow went deep.”

  “Probably the tip wasn’t cleaned before it was shot into him, either,” said the bard helpfully.

  Thorn eyed him for a moment, trying to judge for himself whether this was a poorly-timed joke or not. He was unable to reach a consensus in his own mind, and finally settled for a cautious, “Probably not.”

  “What will we do with him, if we can get him on his horse?”

  “Jelen — the princess is going to have to decide that. I know nothing of these parts, and she seems to be familiar with them. She’s leading this expedition, after all; I’m just here for the end of the plan.”

  “We have a plan, then?” said the bard eagerly.

  Not for the first time, Thorn wondered why, precisely, the bard was still with them. He didn’t need to be, not really — he had been hired for the first part of the adventure, in order to guide them to achieve the Anvil of the Soul. After helping them fight against some angry monks, his purpose had been fulfilled. Of course, he had helped them and seemed rather attached to them all, Lully especially. And now he would want to be paid the rest of his fee for what he had done. So, on the whole, perhaps it was less surprising that he had thought that the hapless bard would be tagging along with them yet. Though, it would be nice if he could keep up a little more.

  But maybe it wasn’t stupidity. The bard knew
stories, after all; he read, he had books in his pack. The man couldn’t be as stupid as he presented himself to be. Could he?

  Thorn decided not to judge hastily. Who was he to say whether someone could be so terminally stupid, or not?

  Perhaps he hadn’t been paying enough attention. Maybe he had been distracted by what he had seen.

  Thorn flinched at the thought, automatically, unable to help himself or catch himself in the act. He closed his eyes for a brief moment, and measured his voice out, note by note.

  “Yes,” he said, “we have a plan. I’m certain that the princess is the best person to lay out the details for you. I play only a small part in the fulfillment of her purpose.”

  “The turning things into other things part,” said the bard.

  Thorn opened his eyes quickly and squinted at him.

  “Yes,” he said, “that part.”

  “I think we can get Karyl on the horse,” said Ruben. “If we coordinate our efforts. If not, perhaps we can rig a sort of sleigh from branches — nothing fancy, just enough to hold him — and tie it to the harness of two of the horses. They can pull him. We will have to walk alongside, of course, but we will get there in the end. Wherever there is. Perhaps I had better find out.”

  “Perhaps you should,” said Thorn. He stood aside to let the bard rejoin the others and took a moment to stare into the surrounding woods. In the bright morning light, the sight he was looking for was out of place enough that he almost missed it the first time around. When he looked again, however, there was no denying it.

  There was a fox watching them, head lowered, alert and wary. The eyes were golden, but there was something strange about them.

  Thorn swallowed hard past something in his throat. It stayed, persistent and painful, a spike of emotion rather than something physical: regret, perhaps. Chagrin.

  Shame.

  He felt the strong urge to cry.

  The palms of his hands itched fiercely, and he rubbed them together. He could feel the roughness beneath them, as though there were hairs growing inside his skin. The ghost of a memory surfaced, of something warm and human turning into something wild and woodland beneath his touch.

  “I told you I was sorry,” he said but not quite loud enough to be heard by the others behind him. The fox gave no indication of having heard, either, not a raise of the head, not a twitch of an ear. Nothing. But in the silence, there was a rebuke.

  Thorn was embarrassed by the anger in his own tone. He wrapped his arms around himself and turned away.

  He made his way the few steps back to the rest of his companions. Graic was now crouched over the prone Karyl, muttering while Lully and the erstwhile queen were having the closest thing to an argument that Thorn had ever seen between the two of them. Goodness knew that Irae would have argued with a rock if she thought it had looked at her funny.

  Usually Thorn found her bull-headedness somewhat endearing, but not this time.

  Neither of them were paying him any mind even though he practically stood between them, and so he said quite loudly, “What seems to be the problem?” Upon the look he received in response from Irae, he amended, “Well, apart from the obvious.”

  “He shouldn’t be moved!” said Lully. “If we try to make him travel over these rough roads, he will die for sure.”

  “He’s stronger than he looks,” countered Irae.

  “Leaving that aside,” said Thorn, “what do you suggest we do instead, Lully?”

  The young woman’s face was red with crying. She clutched at her broken arm with her free one, as though embracing herself for comfort. Karyl’s devotion to the diminutive kitchen maid was second only to his devotion to his queen and her cause; the two presumably had some history, though Thorn knew nothing of it. There had not been much time for casual conversation since they had met on this strange journey.

  “Find a healer,” she said. “Find one and bring them back here. I will stay with him while you and Queen Irae go look.”

  “We’re days away from anyone or anything,” said Irae, twining her fingers together. “By the time we’ve located and returned with someone who could help, Karyl would be dead.”

  “Simply trying to get him onto a horse might kill him!”

  “Not trying to get him onto a horse would kill him as well!”

  “What is Graic doing?” asked Thorn, who was distracted and fascinated despite himself.

  What Graic was doing was behaving strangely, or, at least, behaving more oddly than she usually behaved, which was bizarre enough. She had found a small twig with a few leaves at the end of it, twisted it from its tree, and was patting Karyl down with it, still muttering to herself. Irae scoffed loudly, went to her, and took the branch.

  “That’s enough of that nonsense,” she said, and flung it into the bushes. Her hands were shaking.

  “What nonsense, exactly? What was she doing?” Thorn looked curiously at Graic, who was shaking her head with brow fiercely furrowed.

  “Death dowsing,” said Irae. “She thinks she can sense when someone is going to die. It’s a lot of foolishness.”

  She turned away from him, but not before he saw that her face was suddenly pale.

  “He is going to die,” said the queen’s former nanny, unperturbed, “whether you think it is nonsense or not, young lady.”

  “He is not going to die! He can’t!”

  “He is if you make him ride a horse and travel,” said Lully.

  “He is not!”

  “Well,” said Thorn, “one of you is right, and one of you is wrong.”

  “Both of them,” said Graic. “It doesn’t matter what they do. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter what I do. Set your feet on the path and walk to the end. He is going to sleep the long sleep, without dreaming or waking, and the only thing that will save him —” She paused, and the rest turned towards her expectantly.

  “What?” said Irae, and it sounded surprisingly like begging. Thorn cast a glance at her and saw that though her eyes were set and hard and determined, her mouth was soft and given to a slight tremble. She was trying so hard to be a queen, and after the difficulties of the journey, it was proving to be harder than expected. His heart gave a twinge of sympathy, and he looked away quickly; sympathy would get him nowhere. What he needed now was to be strong. “What can save him?”

  Graic turned and looked at Thorn.

  It felt like a blow, like a stab. Her gaze went straight through him and probed at his heart; with difficulty, he met her eyes and realized that they were perfectly clear, sane, and rational for the first time in his experience with the apparently ancient woman. There was something familiar, too, something half buried in there. He thought of looking up, in the days before his parents had driven him into the woods — looking up, on the street in the village of his childhood, and seeing these same eyes, old even then, looking down at a strange cursed child, and knowing far too much.

  But she lowered her lids over those strange clear eyes, suddenly, and turned away from him.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing can save him now.”

  Lully made a noise that sounded like more choked tears, and Irae shook her head.

  “Of all the times for your wisdom to fail, granny,” she said. “Never mind. We’ll get him on the horse.”

  “But —” said Thorn.

  Irae fixed him with her firm stare and swallowed hard.

  “We will get him on the horse,” she said.

  It was even harder than Thorn thought to lift and move the unconscious man. Karyl outweighed them all, being a few inches taller than Thorn himself and nearly two feet taller than Irae. There were a great many tense moments as they pushed him upwards. Then once Karyl was slumped forward over his steed’s neck, Thorn had to steady him to keep him from falling off. Breathing hard from the exertion, he shook his head at Irae.

  “This isn’t going to work. We will have to tie him on.”

  “Then do it,” gasped Irae. Her face was ruddy no
w from the hard work of lifting the weight, and likely, Thorn thought, from the worried embarrassment over Karyl’s pained noises as they had moved him. All the blood had drained from the big man’s face, and though still unconscious, he seemed to be speaking to someone that none of them could see. But his words were fuzzy and slurred. Thorn could not understand them. It was evident to all of them, even the bard, who seemed relatively unaware of things in general, that Karyl was desperately ill.

  Thorn bit his tongue and went to find a rope.

  It wasn’t in his pack where it should have been. After a few moments of fruitless searching, practically turning the entire thing upside down, he flung it onto the ground with a quiet, wordless cry, and turned to see Graic holding the missing rope out to him. She had bundled it neatly but loosely, so as he took it from her it snaked through his hands, pooling onto the ground. He caught at it and snatched the end before he lost it entirely and looked at her.

  She snapped her fingers at him and squinted her eyes.

  “You’re something new,” she said.

  “I’m nothing at all,” said Thorn, not sure how to react.

  “You’re exactly what you say you are,” said Graic and snapped her fingers again. “Something new. I remember you.”

  Thorn swallowed, feeling a sharp spike of anger surge through him.

  “I remember you, too,” he said. “You were just like the rest. You knew that my parents drove me out into the forest, and you did nothing.”

  He waited for a precious moment, knowing that Jelen was waiting for him to return, but unable to look away waiting for a reply from Graic.

  After a breath, and another, she veiled her eyes with her dusky lids and lashes, so darkened and deeply lined that her eyes looked like holes under her hairless brows.