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  ““You are very, very lucky,” said Braeve, “that I do, in fact, like you.” She leaned forward, practically nose to nose with him. “I choose your vengeance that you are not taking. I choose your anger, that sits just at the bottom of your throat and taints every swallow of food. I’ll take every murderous thought you’ve ever had against the people of this village and make them mine. And in the end, what’s left over will be left up to chance.” She stretched out her arms, shaking them and humming to herself.

  Thorn’s breath stopped completely.

  “What?” he said hoarsely. “No.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  She turned away from him and looked out at the village. “Why?” she said. “Because it is fun. And because I like you. And because you have always been told that you were a curse, and now it is true.” She stretched again, lifting her arms to the skies. “And besides, it isn’t as though you’re doing anything constructive with it. Carrying it around inside of you, letting it burn holes in your guts. Wouldn’t you rather give it to me?”

  “No!” he cried. “I wouldn’t.”

  “That’s just too bad,” said Braeve, and she smiled at him, and then she wasn’t there — no, she was there, but she was there, too — she was everywhere, here and there in the village, and sometimes she was clearly herself, she was Braeve, but sometimes she was Thorn, too, and sometimes she had a knife, and sometimes she had a stone, and sometimes she bore a torch, swinging wildly, throwing her head back and laughing and singing. “My gift!” she sang. “My gift to you!”

  Over the sound of her, there was the sound of cries, growing louder — and some of them stopping, suddenly, ending in a fearsome silence.

  Thorn covered his ears, squeezed shut his eyes, but nothing could drown out the sound and the silence, which was worse by far, and so he opened himself again, and looked around, half dazed, and when he spied her dancing down the street just past him, he began to run.

  He ran the way he had not run for a very long time; the way that he ran when he was running away from something, as though he were being chased. He ran down the street, and he launched himself at her, taking her by surprise, wrapping his arms around her and tackling her down and rolling on the hard-packed dirt of the street, and with breath only coming in fits and starts, he managed, “Stop.”

  She was in his arms, and rather than fight him off, she wrapped her arms about him in return.

  “Stop what?” she said innocently.

  He could hear the silent sound of her destruction ringing in his ears, the ghosts of the cries of mothers and children and grandparents, the end of all things for the village of his start.

  “It isn’t as though I’ve killed anyone,” she said, gently. “After all, it’s your anger I’ve been using. And what harm could such a weak thing like that do?”

  He unwrapped his arms from her and stood up. Around him, the village stood, a little the worse for wear, but mostly unharmed. A few of the villagers came out of their houses, pieces of smashed crockery and cookware in their hands; a dog was limping; someone’s roof was mildly on fire. Small things. Thorn took in the first deep breath in what felt like years.

  “I thought —”

  “You thought what, that I would kill everyone in the village to get vengeance for how they treated you when you were young?” She scoffed at him. “Thorn. You’re not that important. Don’t let the queen’s notice swell your head.”

  “An illusion. It was all an illusion.”

  “Mmm, most of it,” she agreed, clapping him on the shoulder. “I really did set that roof on fire, though.”

  He turned back towards the sheep farmer’s shed, wheezing with relief, anxious to see Elseth again, to know what she needed and to give it to her if he could. And there was Berren, and he looked as though he were sleeping in the dirt, but for the side of his head that was all bloody.

  “Oh,” Braeve said, and made a tsk noise. “Oops. Missed one.”

  But he didn’t move. Thorn got down on his knees beside him, and put a hand on his shoulder, and still he did not move.

  “Oh, maybe I didn’t miss him after all,” said Braeve. She chewed on her thumbnail. “Shall we call that a casualty of war?”

  “Is he — is he dead?”

  “Maybe not,” she said, looking down at him. “Maybe he only looks like he’s dead. You know all about that, don’t you, Thorn? Things looking like other things.”

  “Did you do this? Why did you do this?” Thorn stared up at her, utterly baffled. “You liked him. You said so.”

  “Ah, well,” said Braeve, “I said I liked you, too, and look how that turned out.” She bent and scooped Berren up; he remained limp and lifeless in her grasp, and she put him over her shoulder without any apparent effort. “Nothing’s over till it’s over, you know. You. Your Elseth. This beard here. Even the queen, her royal highness, wherever she may be and whatever she may be doing.” She blew a kiss into the air. “And Lev — ah, Lev. I want to hear the end of the story sometime, Thorn.”

  Still baffled, he nodded numbly. “I — I’ll tell you.”

  Braeve laughed.

  “How can you tell me?” she said. “The end of the story hasn’t happened yet.”

  She disappeared, then, drifting into nothingness, accompanied by a vast wind from nowhere, and the returning sounds of the animals in the forest.

  In the wind of her passing, a letter fluttered to land at his feet; he bent down to pick it up and held it in one unfeeling hand. It looked as though it had been caught in a rainstorm, and the majority of it was illegible, but he could just make out the first bit and the last.

  Thorn —

  Please, please come home to me.

  Yours,

  Jelen

  10

  The New Year

  Balfour seemed larger and busier than ever, after spending the last two weeks outside of it in the countryside. There were too many people, it was true— but none of them were Braeve, and none of them were his own villagers, and for all of these facts, Thorn was extremely grateful.

  He walked his horse through the streets, plodding and slow, resisting the urge to glance behind him to see if there was any companion at his side. He knew there was none.

  He was so preoccupied with trying to think of how to explain everything to Irae — explain? How could he explain when he still wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened? Other than that, he turned to someone for help who had already proven to be untrustworthy and dangerous, which was not a good explanation at all — that he scarcely noticed that he was being observed and followed until a hand reached up and took hold of the bridle of his horse.

  He looked down into a face that was vaguely familiar, but which took him a moment or two to realize was that of Rickerd, lately of Raff’s band of rogues. He squinted up at him and Thorn squinted back down at him, baffled as to why he was here.

  He had just started to ask when the young man’s face lit up with a triumphant glow, and the tentative hand on the horse’s bridle turned into a strong grip on Thorn himself.

  “It is you!” he said. “I thought so!”

  “What?” said Thorn. “Why?”

  But now other hands were pulling Thorn down from his perch on his horse, eager hands, hands belonging to bodies dressed in the green and gold uniforms of the castle guard. An older man with impressive mutton chop whiskers stepped up to stand just behind Rickerd, directing a stern glare at Thorn.

  “Are you certain, young lad?”

  “Quite,” said Rickerd, and now Thorn saw, coming into view, the figure of Batrek Felcin, brow like a thundercloud, fists clenched at his sides.

  “You should execute him on the spot,” breathed the noble furiously.

  “Now, now, we can’t very well do that,” said the guard with the mutton chop whiskers. He appeared to be in charge, directing two of the other guards to take Thorn by the elbows and march him along between them. “That may have been the sort
of thing that would happen under King Lev and his favorite executioner, but that certainly isn’t how things are run now. Besides, this young man is a personal friend of the December Queen.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” spat Batrek Felcin. “That’s rather the problem, isn’t it?”

  Thorn was being marched away a little more quickly than he would have liked. He could hear them clearly behind him, but not see them any longer. He twisted his head to the side to try and look at them over his shoulder.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Why am I being arrested? I haven’t done anything!”

  Lately, whispered the voice in his head, apparently compelled into honesty. The admission, thankfully, didn’t make it all the way out of his mouth.

  “Thorn of the Pluron Woods,” said the chief of the guards, “you are arrested and charged with suspicion of implication in the disappearance and perhaps the murder of both Lisca Felcin and Lev, the erstwhile December King of Ainsea.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll have his head!” called Batrek Felcin after him.

  “Only if the law demands it,” said the chief of the guards, and in order to not seem partial to the prisoner, he turned a fierce glare on Thorn. “Which it very well might.”

  All in all, it was the most confusing arrest Thorn had ever undergone, and that was saying something In short order he found that he had been conducted to the castle, through the main gates, around the side to the gate leading to the cells, and installed in one of them on his own, and in the time that it took he was no clearer on what was going on than before. No one seemed all that inclined to set him straight on things; apart from the initial accusation, he heard nothing of what had been charged against him. Left to his own devices in the cell, he sank down on the little wooden cot and put his head in his hands.

  “Why does this sort of thing always happen to me?” he said, miserably, and the little voice in his head pointed out that this was, at least, a variation on the sort of thing that always happened to him, and that he should be grateful that he was not trapped in monotony.

  Thorn was truly starting to dislike the little voice in his head.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there all by himself — there seemed to be no other prisoners waiting in the other cells, which he supposed could make him feel good about how special he was if that was the sort of outlook he was likely to have — but the light from the small window set high up in the wall had faded and turned a dusty rose gray by the time he heard the jingling of keys and the stamping of feet. Someone was at last coming his way. At the very least, he hoped for a meal, but found to his surprise — and, also, to his delight — that it was a bit more than that.

  The December Queen of Ainsea, Regess of Balfour, was rustling toward him in a stately satin dress, getting her hem all dirty on the dank cobbled floor. She was also holding a tray with a plate of food on it, and a flagon which he dearly hoped had fresh, cold water in it.

  She slid the tray into him, carefully, through the unlatched grate that was there for the purpose, then stepped aside and reached her arms through. Thorn hesitated only a second before stepping up to her and reaching through in his turn. The embrace was short, hampered by the bars between them, but he could feel the warmth from her soaking into his cold bones, better than any fireside, and when finally, he released her — he had to let go first — and stepped back, he saw that she was smiling as though she couldn’t help herself.

  Which was what it felt like he was doing, too.

  The flagon turned out to hold ale, but the food was hot. He ate while she spoke.

  “I don’t have a great deal of time,” she said. “I want to get all of this over with, and it’s getting dark out.”

  “Let’s just do it tomorrow,” he said. “Whatever it is. Can we do it tomorrow? I’m exhausted.”

  “No, no,” she said, waving a hand at him. “We need to get it settled today. It’s been too long. Thorn, I don’t think you understand.”

  He snorted. “Well, you’re not wrong.”

  “You’re just now coming back to this, but I’ve been living with it since you left — since the coronation, really.” She began to pace, wringing her hands together thoughtfully. “Or — since before? I don’t know. I suppose I’m not as good at paying attention to these things as I should be.”

  “You do tend to get distracted,” he agreed, and she stopped. When he looked up at her, she was smiling an odd smile at him. “What?”

  “I’m only distracted when distracting things are happening,” she said, softly. “Like you, for instance, coming home when I asked you to.”

  He put his fork down.

  “I came back to fight for you,” he said. “Your first letter said you needed me. I don’t know what’s going on —”

  “Oh, nothing too big. Uprisings. Riots. Political factions taking the law into their own hands — that sort of thing.”

  “Well, let me out,” said Thorn, slapping at the bars with the meat of his palm. “Let me out and let me at them. I came as soon as I could, just like I said I would. I’m here to do what I can for you.”

  She watched him for a long moment, eyes full of light and something else, and then looked away, shook her head, and smiled a small smile.

  “You would, too,” she said. “Wouldn’t you, Thorn. You’d follow me out of your own woods, the woods you grew up in, and follow me to fight giants and forest witches and immortal kings. You’d be there through everything, to do what you could.”

  Thorn gripped the iron the bars and pushed his face against them.

  “Yes,” he breathed. “Always.”

  She looked up at him again, then, and she smiled a little more fully this time.

  “Would you do something else for me, then?” she said. “It’s — it’s what you can do. This may be the last thing I ask.”

  Something about the tone of that he did not like, but he was delighted to see her, and he wanted her to keep smiling, and so he nodded.

  “Anything. Anything.”

  “Tell the truth, Thorn,” she asked him, and laughed a little when she saw how his face fell. “I know, it isn’t easy for you. It isn’t easy for me, either, after all of this. But this is how we get out of this. This is how we fix things, for you, for me, for everyone. For Ainsea.”

  He shook his head. “The truth? I don’t know. I’m not good at that, you know.”

  “I know. The truth, Thorn. About how I found you, about my uncle and about Lisca and what you did for me, because I asked you to.”

  The shaking of his head became vehement, now.

  “No, no,” he said, “that wouldn’t be a very good idea, would it? Tell everyone that I’m Forged? Won’t that land both of us in an awful lot of trouble? Me for being cursed. You for lying about what happened to your uncle.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “I am worried about it! You say you’re having a hard-enough time holding on to your throne as it is. If people are rising up against you, what makes you think that the truth is the sort of storm you can weather?”

  She looked at him with bright eyes.

  “I don’t,” she said. “But that’s not what’s important. You’re here because of me, Thorn.”

  “No, no, I’ve worked it all out. I delivered the message to Lisca’s cousin — we need to talk about the rogues, by the way — and about Berren — and about other things — but maybe that can wait. I delivered the message to Rickerd, for him to come home to his family, and that was when things went wrong. He came home, he must have told Felcin that Lisca left with me, and —” He snapped his fingers. “Lies come home to roost, don’t they? Of course, they’re going to accuse me of doing away with her. And of course, if they’re going to make that leap, they’re probably going to make the leap that I had something to do with the disappearance of your uncle, too. Especially with a noble like Felcin behind it all, egging them on. So, you see? It isn’t because of you at all. It’s all my own fault.”


  “All your own fault for following through and delivering a message you said you would?”

  “Yes, exactly,” said Thorn, “which is exactly why I should remember to never, ever do the things I promise to. It only ends up in tears.”

  She shook her head at him and took a key from her pocket. “I’m going to let you out,” she said, “now that I’ve explained it all. Just remember — we will tell the truth, and it will keep us free.”

  “I don’t see how,” he said. “Jelen, how.”

  She was busily unlocking the gate, casting a smile at him every so often. At long last, the door was open, and he was free.’

  “Trust me,” she said.

  “Jelen. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Thorn. I know it. And do you know what reward you will have, for doing what you do not want to?”

  He sighed and closed his eyes.

  “I am your queen, and you are one of my people,” said Irae softly. “As a servant of the people, I offer you everything that I have.”

  He opened his eyes quickly and turned to look at her, but she was already reaching upwards, stretching up onto her toes to brush a kiss on his temple, just underneath his long hair. Thorn went very still, mind as white and blank as a snowfield, but she only smiled at him. And if her smile was a little sadder than he had ever seen before, if she seemed to have lost something vital, he couldn’t be surprised over it.

  “Thank you for coming home to me,” she said, simply. “Let’s go, now. It’ll be dark soon.”

  “It’s dark already,” said Thorn, but he followed her when she led the way.

  There were torches lit in the front of the castle; they were everywhere, dancing in the reflections of puddles and window glass and the eyes of the nobles and commoners that were waiting there, waiting to hear the outcome. The suspect had been arrested; the queen had been notified.

  The truth would be known, or the people would know the reason for it.

  Above them, the ancient stones of Castle Balfour rose, watchful and waiting. More kings and queens had lived and died there than anyone could possibly have a memory of; more calendars had been started, the regents passing away with the times, new houses rising to take their place: the way things had always been.