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  Thorned: Book 3

  Liam Reese

  Contents

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  Prologue

  1. Divide and Conquer

  2. Interview with a Noble

  3. Tasked

  4. Complications of the Regency

  5. Peaceful Negotiations

  6. On the Road Again

  7. The Change

  8. The Faction

  9. Once More Into The Woods

  10. The New Year

  End of Book 3 – Please Read This

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  Prologue

  It was a simple, uncomplicated life.

  He woke with the dawn light, to the sounds of incautious birds, and arose from his boughery bed to stretch, yawn, and apprise the coming day. The days were much the same, and there was not usually much to appraise. There would be food left over from the night before, sometimes, or he could go out and hunt. Hunting required traveling; he couldn’t bring himself to hunt on his own grounds, and so he would walk as far away as he could manage in the daytime to snare birds and rabbits and squirrels; then take them home again, wiping dampness from his eyes. There was no one to tell him that hunting was perfectly normal and necessary; there was no one to tell him that weeping was not.

  There was no one to tell him anything, much.

  So, he listened to the birds, and the squirrels chittering in the trees. He listened to the howling of the wolves, often less distant than he wanted, and the yipping of the wood foxes. He thought, sometimes, that he heard the cry of banshees and haints, and there was no one to tell him that it was only his imagination. He didn’t know what an imagination was. He only knew what he could see, and what he couldn’t.

  Sometimes a woman came to bring him food. He knew, on some level, that she pertained to him, that she was probably his mother, and he thought he remembered her bringing him here, to the woods. But he couldn’t be sure whether this was a true memory or a false one — he didn’t know about imagination, but he did know about his mind lying to him on occasion — and so he put it up on the dusty shelf that he had set up in his brains for things that did not matter to him anymore.

  His mind could have been lying to him about that, too, but he wasn’t sure.

  He was getting bigger — not older, he didn’t think, just bigger — and he was growing away from the few memories he had of when he was a small child. The memories centered around a hut, outside of which there were people. He didn’t know why the people were there, and he never saw their faces, but he knew that’s where they were. Coldly, outside of himself, he knew that once he had lived in a perfectly serviceable village, with a mother and a father, and a dog; but he knew that that was a false existence. That was how other people lived, not how he lived. He was wise enough to know that he was not meant for a life like that.

  He was not meant for a life like others, because he was different.

  He didn’t know if others could see it — there were no others to test out. He knew the woman who brought him food was afraid of him, and the longer the time between her visits, the more afraid she grew. He knew that fear was a thing that fed on absence, on the buildings of the brains — and so he knew a little about what imagination was, after all, without knowing what it was called. He knew that people were afraid of him, and he dreaded that the animals might someday be afraid too.

  And so he traveled, to hunt, and wept over the things he did, and did his best to be kind.

  His difference was not just in his being so fearsome, but in what he could do. What he could do and chose not to. He had a gift — he was cursed — he had a power and a golden touch. He could change things.

  He knew that this was what made him so fearsome, what had driven him away from the life of a normal boy, and so he did not do it.

  One day was the last time that his mother came to bring him food. He didn’t know it was the last time, of course; you never know that things are the last, because they just are; it is only later, looking back, that you realize. But after the last, there is always a first, and so the day after he watched the woman turn silently away from him and hurry back through the woods, it was the first day that he lived in a world with no human attachments, no one to belong to even tangentially; it was the day that he was, at last, truly alone.

  It was also his thirteenth birthday, but he had no way of knowing that.

  When he realized at last, sometime later, that he had not seen her in a very long time, he sat awake at night and wondered why. Perhaps she had finally grown too frightened of him to come anymore, he thought. Perhaps someone had told her not to.

  Perhaps he should find out.

  That, at last, was what sparked the occasion of his first visit to the village of his birth. After so long in the woods.

  The months drifted on, and the years followed silently afterward like penitents behind the priest, hands folded, and heads bowed. He ran through the woods. He hunted in far fields. He was determined, stubbornly, not to lose his voice, but he spoke to himself in the darkness, as if ashamed, afraid of frightening the animals that he lived with; but still he spoke, and he was determined not to give it up. The earth shrank away as though he flew through the air; he was growing tall. Lean living shaped him into an awkward and ungainly bundle of limbs and sinews as he approached manhood. With the lack of human companionship, he found comfort in the trees, always there, always at his side and at his back — he became content, almost wildly so, and he put the idea of his long-ago village away, although it was perfectly serviceable; his hut in the middle of the woods was his home, and he felt that he had known no other.

  It was a simple, uncomplicated life.

  Until he heard the voice.

  He thought at first it was the woman, his mother, having returned unexpectedly. But it was not, and he knew it almost immediately after his first thought of the possibility. The voice was sweet and lovely, and he’d never heard anything like it. It was low, quiet; not strong, but it carried. It curled around the rippled edges of rough-barked trees, flowing toward him as though it was sent like a dove. It came to his ears as clear as though the speaker were right at his side, speaking quietly to him, for his hearing only.

  He stopped and listened.

  “I have heard that there are ghosts and monsters in these woods, you know.”

  He had heard the same thing himself; it was on the tip of his tongue to say so. But as he turned, he saw that of course there was no one there. Her voice was quiet, and still a way off. If he wanted to find the speaker, he would have to move.

  He moved.

  The voice carried on in a low monologue as he traveled towards her, feet quick in the loam and fallen leaves. There was something else there, too — he could hear the footsteps now, and the quick breathing. A large fox, watching the speaker with speculative eyes; she must be quite small and undefended if the fox was thinking of attacking. Thorn brushed past it, frightening it off with his approach, and looked eagerly to catch a glimpse of who, exactly, was speaking in the silent woods.

  “I wonder how far it is to the edge of the woods from here?”

  It was a girl. He knew about girls; rather, he knew that they existed. Rather, he had some vague memory of their existence, from what he thought of as his own previous life. She carried a basket, and she wore a cloak that looked as though it had been nut-dyed,
the way his mother had dyed cloth, a yellowish-brown that blended in with the woods around her. She was quite thin, and looked frail, though her voice was strong.

  It had been so long since he had seen another human that his breath caught in his throat and he saw spots in his vision. His heart thumped away like an escaping bird, and he thought of running away, fleeing back into the woods — but she continued to walk, and continued to speak, and he couldn’t bring himself to take the first steps in the opposite direction.

  “I have to say, I am not really enjoying this walk,” she said, amusingly, in a tone of voice that suggested she wanted to confide in someone but only the trees were available.

  Perhaps I should walk with her, he thought, wildly, though that was of course the last thing he should do. It would be ridiculous to put himself in such a situation. Suppose he startled her, and she shrieked. He didn’t think he could stand it if she shrieked at the sight of him. But he couldn’t very well just leave her here and go on with his business as though nothing had happened. Could he? He hadn’t the faintest idea of what to do.

  He had no idea what to do.

  “Perhaps Mother wasn’t entirely wrong. Perhaps I should have someone with me to go

  to the market, instead of going on my own. But I’d hate to be untrue to Father’s faith in me, misplaced as it might be in actual fact. I’d like to show that I’m healthier than they think I am, and more capable too. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see how far I get, won’t I?”

  Market! He had vague memories of a market. He had been, once or twice, he thought; at least, he thought he remembered it. People selling things. People rushing around and pushing and looking down at him with faint frowns, as though they knew he was wrong but weren’t quite sure why.

  Someone like this girl should never be asked to go somewhere like that alone.

  “Well,” he asked himself, conversationally but quiet, “what exactly are you going to do about it?”

  The girl stepped around a tree trunk, and he stepped forward at the same moment, striving for poise, lifting his chin, squaring his shoulders. If only his heart would calm down!

  She did not shriek. She did not even back away or drop her basket and run. She didn’t do much of anything, really; she went very still, and looked at him very closely.

  He said, “Do you always speak to yourself when you’re alone?”

  An issue of importance; after all, he did. He didn’t see anything wrong with it, and it was heartwarming to think that it was the sort of thing that normal people did; normal people who didn’t live in the woods.

  But she didn’t answer one way or the other, only looked at him with those eyes that pierced straight through, like a thorn in the paw of a wolf.

  He didn’t remember much after that. She spoke to him, she listened to him — that was all that mattered. And her eyes never left him; watchful, wary, but curious, too, curious and intrigued. Fascinated, almost. And when he walked beside her, she did not flinch away from him. When he took her elbow as she stumbled — he didn’t even think about it, which was unusual enough, he thought he could probably count on the fingers of both hands the times that he had touched another human — she allowed him to and leaned on him a little as she straightened herself out.

  Just as though they were normal.

  It thrilled him, and it frightened him more than a little.

  She walked away from him eventually, that first day — not until after he had stolen a few loaves from her basket, of course — and he followed her through the woods. Just to keep an eye on her. Just to keep her safe. Foxes and wolves and catamounts in the woods. You never knew what would happen.

  He crept back to his hut as the evening started to fall and drew his blanket around him as he tucked himself up in the corner. His little fire died down as he watched it, mesmerized by the embers, seeing nothing else but the intensity of her eyes.

  He wondered, daringly, if he could find her, if he went to the village where he had been born. Or — so much the better — if she would ever come back on her own.

  She did.

  She came back, and she spoke with him and smiled at him, and she gave him a loaf of bread with something she called sultanas in it. He walked alongside her all through the woods, casting sideways glances at her hand where it wrapped around her walking stick — he had a vague suspicion that it meant something was wrong with her, though he couldn’t possibly imagine what. He had never seen someone so alive. He could hear her heart beat loudly, echoing in the cavern of her rib cage, but surely it was only bursting with the joy of who it belonged to.

  He learned her name, that day — Elseth — and as she left, he opened his mouth before he was quite aware that it was happening, and his own spilled out.

  “My name is Thorn,” he blurted, and had to clench his hands to keep from clapping them over his mouth. Too little, too late.

  She smiled at him, though.

  “I’m glad to meet you at last, Thorn,” she said. “My mother always told me that I should never talk to strangers in the woods.”

  “Of course, she has a mother,” he told the woods around him after she was gone, warding off the time when he had re-wrapped himself in the silence of the twilight air. “She has a father too. I knew that. I knew that. Everyone has a mother and a father — even I do. Somewhere.” He couldn’t explain why it bothered him so much. “Mother, father, village,” he said, experimentally. “A place to belong. She doesn’t live in the woods. She speaks softly and carries a big stick. She’s normal without being normal. She’s a weak and weekly sun.”

  Privately — just to himself, without sharing it with the woods at large — he had begun to think that if there were humans like Elseth out there, perhaps being human must not be so bad.

  That night he dreamed that he awoke in a house in the village, and there were flowers growing everywhere, springing up from the dirt, pushing up from the depths of the earth. Flowers and greenery everywhere he looked, but the houses themselves were silent and empty, and though there were roofs and walls and doors, the people that made the village a village were nowhere to be found.

  He awoke with melancholy sitting hunch-backed at the edge of his mat, and went for a run in the woods, barefoot and shirtless and cold, to keep from feeling too sorry for himself.

  Elseth came every week, and though he always hesitated to approach her, she never made him sorry when he did. They spoke of things that were not important, and a few things that were. He told her of his mother, and of how she had apparently disappeared, to all intents and purposes. He told her of what he remembered of his own childhood, which was not much, and of how he had grown in the woods.

  When he spoke to her of things that had gone by, she listened with her brow furrowed, a little crinkle right in between her eyebrows, and her eyes were deep and thoughtful in a way he had never seen. She looked as though his stories changed something in her, laced something up inside that had been loose. Encouraged by her interest, he embellished a little — the time he had found a fox cub turned into saving an entire litter from being eaten by a catamount, the occasion on which he had spied on hunters from the market town turned into being hunted down and narrowly escaping with his life. All of his stories brought the same concern, and he began to crave it. Sometimes, when he spoke, she reached out toward him, carefully, and always stopped just shy of touching his shoulder or his ragged sleeve.

  He thought that if she touched him he might just break into pieces. He thought perhaps she thought that, too.

  She began to need a rest, halfway through the walk, and although he would have happily sat with her forever, she seemed to fear that he would grow bored, and brought a book. The first time, she plopped it on his lap as he sat beside her on the fallen tree stump. He looked down at it askance.

  “What’s this for?”

  “What’s it for? It’s a book. What do you think it’s for?”

  “Hitting people with?” he suggested, because she seemed to think he was funny
sometimes. She gave him a look that suggested she did, indeed, find this slightly amusing, but that she didn’t want to encourage him.

  “It’s for reading, silly. I’ve always read to my father, but no one has ever read to me. So. Read to me.”

  He nudged at it with a knuckle. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Are you afraid of reading out loud?”

  “No,” he said, though on reflection he supposed he probably was. But that wasn’t the problem. “I don’t know how to read. I was never taught.”

  “Ah,” she said, and nodded thoughtfully. “I should have thought about that. I only — we have such a good school teacher in the village, everyone knows how to read at least a little. I know it’s rare, but — I’m sorry, Thorn.” She tapped at the tree trunk between them, as though she wanted to pat his knee reassuringly. “Don’t feel bad. It’s entirely my fault for assuming.”

  He wanted to ask what, exactly, she had assumed — was it just that he could read? Or that he was from her home village? — but he wanted more to ask a favor of her.

  “Teach me, then,” he said.

  She looked quickly at him, and blushed, and then even more quickly away.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly.”

  “You could. I’m sure of it.”

  She looked down at the book, and shook her head, but she was going to give in. He had never been so certain of anything in his life. She had a knowledge and she wanted — he could scarcely wrap his brains around it — she wanted to share it with him. He closed his fingers carefully over this fact, a fisted hand on either side of him. He could feel his heart in his wrists.