Thorns of the Eternal: Thorns Beneath The Snow

Frost rimed the broken shingles of the cottage roof, and somewhere beyond the wall a crow called twice into the grey. Elara Venn woke to the smell of pine smoke and willowbark tea, the latter steeped too long again, bitter enough to pucker the tongue. She lay still for a moment, listening. The floorboards beneath her shifted with the weight of a body that had not moved in days. Then she rose, wrapped her shawl tight against the predawn chill, and crossed the small room to where he slept.

Caelum Ashworth lay on her mother's narrow cot, his wounded side bound in clean linen that she had changed twice in the night. The stitches held. The flesh around them had lost the angry red of infection, fading to a mottled purple that would, in time, become a scar he would carry for the rest of his life. His breathing came slow and even. She touched his forehead with the back of her hand. Cool. Good.

She left him to wake on his own.

The kettle sang over the fire. She poured the dark brew into a clay cup and carried it to the window, watching the eastern sky brighten by slow degrees. The Thornwood lay south of the cottage, a dark smudge against the paling horizon. Its edge crept nearer each year, swallowing pasture, swallowing road. She had walked its margins for three seasons now, charting the retreat of safe ground with ink and vellum, and still the border surprised her. Trees that had stood a hundred yards from her doorstep in autumn now brushed the fence posts, their roots curling beneath the stones like black fingers searching for purchase.

She drank. The tea scalded her throat and she welcomed it, the small pain anchoring her to the morning.

A creak from the cot. She turned and saw his eyes open, watching her from the shadows of the narrow room.

"You should be sleeping," she said.

"Have slept enough." His voice came out rough, scraped raw by fever and silence. "How long?"

"Three days. The wound is clean."

He sat up slowly, one hand pressed to his bandaged side, and swung his legs over the edge of the cot. The floorboards groaned under his bare feet. He was taller than she remembered from the night she had found him bleeding on the road, or perhaps the cottage simply made him seem so. His hair, dark and unwashed, hung past his jaw. He pushed it back from his face and looked at her with the guarded steadiness of a man measuring how much of himself he could afford to reveal.

"I can walk," he said.

"You can barely sit."

"Close enough."

She did not argue further. Arguing with Caelum Ashworth, she had learned in three short days of tending him, was an exercise in patience she did not always possess. He moved stiffly to the door, unlatched it, and stepped out into the grey morning. She followed with a second cup of tea she pressed into his hand without a word.

The sky had turned the color of old pewter. Mist lay in the hollows between the cottage and the treeline, curling around the roots of the birches that marked the last stretch of open ground. Beyond them, the Thornwood rose. She had seen the forest from a distance many times, had sketched its shape into a dozen maps, but standing here, with the wind off the hills bringing the scent of wet bark and something older, something faintly sweet and faintly spoiled, she felt the size of it settle against her chest like a held breath.

Caelum stood at the edge of the open ground, the tea untouched in his hand, his gaze fixed on the trees. He did not move. The mist moved around his boots, and still he did not move.

"You should not stand so close," she said. "The border shifts. A path you walked yesterday may be forest today."

He did not answer. His jaw tightened, and she saw his throat work as though he meant to speak and thought better of it. He lifted the cup to his mouth at last, drank, and lowered it again without looking at her.

"You are going to walk in," she said. It was not a question.

"There is something in there."

"There are many somethings. Birds. Boar. Thorns that grow through boot leather if you stand still too long."

He turned his head then, and she saw the look in his eyes. She had seen that look before, in the faces of men who had lost things they could not name. It was the look of a man who had heard a voice calling from a place no one else could hear.

"I have walked many woods," he said. "None of them called."

"Woods do not call."

"This one does."

She wanted to laugh, or to scold him for the poetry of it, but the look on his face stopped her. He was not being romantic. He was being precise. She had spent enough years listening to her father's men give reports of strange lights and stranger sounds along the border to know the tone of a man who believed what he said.

"How long have you heard it?" she asked.

"Since I woke." He looked back at the trees. "It is louder here."

The mist shifted. A branch cracked somewhere deep in the Thornwood, the sound rolling out across the open ground like a stone dropped into still water. A crow rose from the nearer birches, its wings beating the grey air, and was gone. Elara's hand found the iron knife at her belt without her telling it to.

The morning brightened. The first true light came slanting over the hills, catching the frost on the grass and turning it briefly to silver. In that light, the Thornwood looked almost beautiful, its canopy a dark green mass against the pale sky, its nearer trunks straight as cathedral pillars. It was the beauty of a thing that had waited a long time and had all the patience in the world to wait longer.

"I will come with you," she said.

Caelum shook his head. "You have maps to draw."

"The border can wait a day."

"It has not waited this long to wait another."

She stepped up beside him, close enough that her shoulder nearly brushed his arm. He smelled of willowbark and old sweat and something beneath both that she could not name, something that reminded her of the cedar boxes her mother had kept in the cold cellar, wood that had never known light.

"Three days ago I found you on the road with a sword wound through your side and your boots full of blood," she said. "You were too weak to crawl. I carried you here. You will not walk into that forest alone."

He looked down at her. He was taller by a full head, and she had to tip her chin to meet his eyes. For a moment neither of them spoke. The mist thinned between them and the trees, and in the thinning she saw a shape move among the trunks, low and quick, there and gone.

"There," she said quietly.

"I saw it."

"It was not a boar."

"No."

He finished the tea in two swallows and handed the empty cup back to her. His hand was steady. She set the cup on the fencepost and drew the knife from her belt.

"Stay behind me," he said.

"You are the one with the hole in his side."

"Stay behind me anyway."

She did not argue. There would be time for arguing later, if later came. They walked together across the open ground, the frost crunching under their boots, and the Thornwood rose up to meet them.

The mist closed around them like a door.

Within twenty paces the open ground was gone. The Thornwood did not so much begin as arrive, the trees thickening from scattered sentinels into a wall of black bark and twisted limbs, and the air changed. It tasted of iron and wet stone. Elara felt the cold move through her coat and settle against her ribs.

Caelum walked ahead of her, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. He did not draw it. Something in the way he moved told her the blade was less a weapon than a habit, a thing he carried the way other men carried prayers.

"You said you mapped the borders," he said, without looking back. His voice came out flatter in the silence, the words stripped of their warmth. "What have you found?"

"Paths that close. Streams that vanish. Stones that were on one side of a clearing and are now on the other." She stepped over a root that curved up from the ground like the spine of some buried animal. "The Thornwood is not a place. It is a living thing, and it is moving."

"Moving where?"

"Everywhere. Into the farmland, into the villages that border it. Three farms gone in the last winter. Not burned. Not flooded. The land simply folded inward, and the forest swallowed what had been there."

He said nothing. The trees grew closer, their branches interlocking overhead until the sky was only a memory of grey. The light that filtered through was the color of old pewter, and it made the world look as though it had been left too long in a locked room.

"You told me you were looking for someone," Elara said. "A sister."

Caelum's stride did not change. She watched his back, the way his shoulders held, the careful arrangement of his coat across the wound she had stitched three days before.

"Lira," he said. "Her name is Lira."

"How long has she been lost?"

"Since autumn."

"What took her?"

He did not answer. They walked in silence past a tree whose bark was split open in a long vertical wound, the wood inside dark and glistening as though the tree had been flayed. The smell that came from it was sweet and rotten, the smell of fermentation, of fruit left too long in a cellar.

"You do not have to tell me," Elara said.

"I know."

He stopped. Ahead of them the path split around a stone so old it had lost its shape, a lump of granite that might once have been a standing stone or a boundary marker or nothing at all. Caelum put his hand against it and stood for a moment, his palm flat to the rough surface, and she saw his eyes close.

"My family held land east of the Vale," he said, and his voice was different now, lower, more careful, as though he were speaking in a room where someone slept. "Ashworth lands. My father was lord of the outer marches, a courtesy title, since the real power sat in the capital. We were not wealthy. We were not important. But we were old, and my father believed old counted for something."

Elara did not move. She stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her breath coming in small white clouds and she listened.

"There were four of us children. Two brothers older than me, both dead before the curse. Lira was the youngest. She had her mother's mind and my father's stubbornness and none of the sense either of them pretended to have. She was sixteen when she wandered into the Thornwood."

"Why?"

"Because she thought she could cure what ailed our lands." He opened his eyes. "There was a sickness in the sheep, in the wheat, in the water. Our healers had no name for it. Lira decided the sickness came from the forest. She had read some old book, some scholar's theory about the boundary between the wild and the tamed. She thought if she could find the source she could end it."

"Did she?"

He laughed, but the sound had no warmth in it. "She found something."

They started walking again, slower now, the path narrower. The mist moved among the trees like something with weight. Elara could feel the forest pressing in, the trees leaning toward them as though listening.

"What did she find?"

"I do not know." He said it simply, the way a man says the weather. "She went in on the first frost of autumn. By the second frost she had not returned. By the third, my father sent men in after her. Six men. None came back."

"And you?"

"I was in the capital. I received word and I came, and by the time I arrived my father was dead of the shame of it, and my brothers were arguing about the estate, and the Thornwood had grown a mile closer to our holdings." He touched the wound at his side without seeming to realize he was doing it. "I have been walking these woods for two months. I have found nothing. I have heard her name in places where no one should know it. I have seen things move in the fog that I cannot bring myself to describe."

"What things?"

"The shape you saw on the road. Smaller than that."

He fell quiet. They came to a place where the path widened into a clearing, and in the center of the clearing stood a tree unlike the others. It was silver-white, its bark smooth as a woman's arm, its branches heavy with blossoms that should not have been blooming in the cold. The blossoms were the color of old paper, and they filled the air with a sweetness so heavy it made Elara's eyes water.

"I have been in this clearing before," Caelum said slowly. "Three times. Each time it changes."

"How?"

"The first time, there was a child sitting beneath it. A girl of about ten, with her hair in two braids. She was singing. When I stepped toward her she stopped, and she looked at me, and her eyes were wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"They were not eyes. They were openings, like the mouths of caves, and through them I could see something moving in a darkness I did not want to understand."

Elara looked at the tree. The blossoms did not move. The air around them was utterly still.

"The second time," Caelum said, "there was a woman. Middle-aged, dressed in the clothes of a healer. She asked me my name, and when I told her, she said it back to me, but in a voice that was not hers. It was Lira's voice. It was my mother's voice. It was my own voice, speaking from somewhere inside her mouth."

He was not looking at the tree. He was looking at his hands.

"What did you do?"

"I ran. I am not proud of it, but I am alive because of it."

"And the third time?"

"There was no one. There was only the tree, and beneath it, on the ground, a single feather. White. Larger than any bird I have ever seen. I took it. I still have it."

He reached into his coat and drew out a small cloth, which he unfolded. Inside lay a feather the length of his forearm, white as milk, with a faint iridescence that shifted when the light touched it.

Elara stepped closer. The feather seemed to pull the light into itself, the way deep water pulls the eye downward.

"It is not from a bird," she said.

"No."

"What is it from?"

"I do not know."

She reached toward the feather, and he did not stop her. Her fingers brushed the barbs, and the touch was warm, warmer than it should have been, warmer than anything had a right to be in this cold and this mist. She felt the warmth move up her hand and into her wrist, and she pulled her hand back.

"What is your sister's name?" she asked, though she already knew.

"Lira." He looked at her then, and for the first time she saw something in his face that was not the careful mask of a man holding himself together. It was fear, and beneath the fear, grief so old it had become a kind of weather. "Lira Ashworth. She is all I have left of what we were."

"You did not tell me everything."

"No."

"What is the curse?"

He folded the feather back into its cloth and tucked it into his coat. The motion was slow, deliberate, the motion of a man putting away a thing he could not bear to look at.

"You should go back," he said.

"I told you I am coming with you."

"You do not know what you are coming with me into."

"Then tell me."

He looked at her for a long moment. The mist moved between them, and in the mist she saw shapes again, low and quick, circling the edge of the clearing. He saw them too. His face changed. The softness went out of it, and what remained was the sellsword, the man who had walked into this forest for two months and come out alive when others had not.

"We do not have time," he said.

"Make time."

"There are things in this forest that wear the faces of the dead. They have worn my sister's face. They have worn my mother's. They will wear yours if they think it will slow me down." He stepped toward her, and she had to tip her chin to meet his eyes, the way she had on the road. "I am not trying to frighten you. I am trying to keep you alive."

"You are trying to keep yourself from remembering why you are here."

He went still. The words had landed somewhere. She saw it in the way his breath stopped, in the way his hands closed at his sides.

"I am not your enemy," she said. "I am not a thing that wears a face. I am the woman who stitched your side and fed you broth and sat with you through the nights when you spoke her name in your sleep."

He did not speak.

"If you want me to go, I will go. But I will not go because you tell me to. I will go because you ask me, the way a man asks, not the way a master commands."

The shapes in the mist drew closer. She heard something that might have been breathing, or might have been the sound of the forest itself, the slow exhalation of a place that had been holding its breath for a thousand years.

Caelum looked at the tree. The blossoms had begun to fall. They drifted across the clearing like paper, like the pages of some book being turned by an unseen hand, and where they touched the ground they lay still, and where they touched the stone they turned black.

"Ask me," he said.

"Ask you what?"

"What you wanted to ask. About the curse."

She looked at him. He was standing very straight, his shoulders squared, his hand on his sword, his face as still as the face of a man who has decided to step off a cliff.

"How did it start?" she said.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the softness was gone, and what remained was something she could not read, something that lived behind the educated voice and the careful manners and the hand that did not tremble even when the rest of him did.

"I cannot tell you that," he said. "Not here. Not in this place. If I tell you here, the forest will hear, and the forest has been listening for a very long time."

He drew his sword.

The steel came out of the scabbard with a sound like a drawn breath, and the sound seemed to wake something in the clearing. The shapes in the fog stopped moving. The blossoms on the ground began to tremble. The silver tree leaned, just slightly, toward the two figures who stood beneath it.

"We move," Caelum said. "Now. Whatever happens, do not look back."

The Thornwood swallowed them whole.

They ran. That was all there was to do, all there was time for, and the forest closed behind them like a mouth. The path they had followed into the clearing existed no longer. Where there had been open ground there was now undergrowth, brambles, low-hung boughs that caught at Elara's hair and the hem of her coat. Caelum went first, his sword in one hand and the lantern in the other, and the light from the lantern fought a war with the dark and was losing.

"Do not look back," he said again, between breaths.

She did not look back. She did not need to. She could hear what was behind them: a sound like wind through dry leaves, except the leaves were not dry, except the wind was not wind, except the sound was getting closer.

"Here," Caelum said. "Through here."

He shouldered through a stand of blackthorn that tore at his coat and left thin lines of blood on his hands. Elara followed, raising her arms to shield her face, and the thorns caught her anyway, raked her cheek, snagged her sleeve. She did not stop. The sound behind them did not stop either. It came closer, and closer, and then, just as Elara thought it would touch her, the ground fell away.

They slid.

The slope was steep and the ground was loose, scree and dead needles and the remnants of ancient bark, and they went down on their backs and on their sides and once, briefly, entirely in the air. The lantern flew from Caelum's hand. It struck a stone and the glass did not break, but the flame went out, and the dark rushed in to fill the space where the light had been.

They came to rest at the bottom of the slope in a tumble of limbs and breath, and Elara lay still for a moment, staring up at nothing, feeling the cold seep through her coat. Something was trickling down her face. She touched it. Her fingers came away dark, and she could not tell if the dark was blood or the dust of the Thornwood.

"Caelum," she said.

A sound to her left. A cough. Then, "Here."

She heard him move. She heard him swear, softly, in a language she did not recognize, and then the scratch of a lucifer and the smell of sulfur and the lantern bloomed back to life.

They were in a hollow. The walls of the hollow rose around them on three sides, steep and high, and the fourth side opened onto what looked like a frozen stream bed, white stones and dark water and the glitter of ice. Above them, far above, the canopy had closed so thickly that no sky was visible at all, only the black interlace of branches and the slow drift of snow that had begun to fall.

"The snow," Elara said.

Caelum looked up. His face was pale, the scratches on his hands standing out like ink lines on parchment, but his voice, when he spoke, was steady.

"Yes," he said. "The snow."

It came down steadily, without wind, without sound, as if the forest had decided to bury them where they lay. Within the hour the hollow would be full. Within the night they would be entombed.

"There," Caelum said. He pointed with his sword to a dark shape at the base of the far wall, half hidden by a fall of dead vines. "Do you see it?"

She saw it. A cave, or the mouth of a cave, wide enough for two, low enough that they would have to crouch to enter.

They crossed the stream bed. The stones were slick with ice and the dark water numbed her boots, and twice she slipped and would have fallen if Caelum had not put out a hand to steady her. He did not speak. His face was the face of a man who had stopped being surprised by anything the Thornwood could do.

The cave was deeper than it looked. They went in single file, Caelum first, the lantern held high, and the walls narrowed around them until Elara could touch both sides at once if she stretched out her arms. The stone was cold and damp and there was a smell she could not place, a mineral smell, like iron, like old blood.

The passage opened. They stepped out into a chamber.

It was small, perhaps ten feet across, and the ceiling was low enough that Caelum had to duck his head. But it was dry. The floor was sandy. The walls were smooth, as if water had once flowed through here and then been diverted, and at the back of the chamber, where the stone curved up to meet the ceiling, there was a narrow chimney that went up and up into darkness, and through it, faintly, the sound of the wind.

Caelum set the lantern down. The light steadied. The chamber was, for the moment, a small island of warmth in a sea of white.

"We wait," he said. "Until it stops."

"If it stops."

"It will stop. Eventually." He looked at her, and she saw, in the lantern light, that he was trying to smile, and that the smile cost him something. "Three days, perhaps. A week. The Thornwood's tantrums are usually brief."

She sat down. Her legs were trembling. The cut on her cheek was bleeding freely now, and she put her hand to it and felt the blood well up warm between her fingers.

"Let me see," Caelum said.

He crossed the chamber and crouched beside her, and he took her hand gently and moved it away from the wound, and she hissed at the cold of his fingers against her skin. He produced a square of cloth from somewhere inside his coat, clean, folded small, and he pressed it to her cheek.

"Hold this," he said. "Firmly."

She held it. He sat back on his heels and looked at her, and the lantern light made shadows of the hollows under his eyes.

"You are cold," he said.

"I am always cold."

"No. Not like this. You are frightened."

She did not deny it. She could not have denied it. The cold that was in her was deeper than the snow, deeper than the hollow, and it had nothing to do with the temperature of the air.

"Tell me," he said. "About the cartography. About the borders. Tell me something that is not this place."

She did not know why she told him. Perhaps because the chamber was small and the snow was falling and there was nothing else to do. Perhaps because he had asked, and the asking was gentle, and she had been so long without anyone asking her anything.

She told him about the maps. About the way the Thornwood's edges moved, the way the borders would shift overnight so that a path that had been safe on Monday would be swallowed by Tuesday. She told him about the brass instruments, the theodolite, the measuring chains, the long days of walking with her sketchbook and her pencils. She told him about the notations, the careful symbols she had invented for the things the Thornwood did that no previous cartographer had thought to record.

Caelum listened. He did not interrupt. He sat with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out before him and he listened, and as she talked she saw, slowly, some of the tension go out of his shoulders. He asked questions, occasional ones, careful ones, and she answered them, and the answering felt like a door opening somewhere inside her that she had not known was closed.

"You are good at it," he said, after a while.

"I am stubborn at it."

"That too. The Thornwood needs stubborn people. It does not give up its secrets to the impatient."

She looked at him. He was watching the lantern flame, and his face in that light was the face of a man she had never met, a man who had been somewhere else, a man who had been young once and had lost the knack of it.

"Your sister," she said. "The one you are searching for."

He did not look at her.

"Yes."

"What was her name?"

A long silence. Outside, the snow fell. Inside, the lantern guttered once and steadied.

"Aelin," he said. "Her name was Aelin."

"Was?"

"Is," he said. "Is. She is."

She waited.

"She was seventeen when I last saw her. She had our mother's mouth, and our father's temper, and she laughed like a person who had never been hurt, which she had not, which was the point, which was the whole of my father's plan." He stopped. He swallowed. "She was going to be married. To a man three times her age, with lands that abutted our own, and she was not asked. I was not asked. Our father arranged it the way he arranges everything, in private, with sealed letters, with the silence of men who do not think women need to know what is being done to them."

Elara said nothing.

"I was twenty. I had just come down from the capital. I had a sword and a commission and a future, and I threw it all away in a single evening because my sister looked at me across the dinner table and I saw, for the first time, that she was afraid." He paused. "I took her out through the garden. I gave her my horse. I gave her what money I had. I told her to ride north, to the coast, to the house of a woman I trusted, and I went back inside and I told my father what I had done."

"What did he do?"

"What fathers do," Caelum said. "He disowned me. He told the magistrate I had stolen from him. He sent men after Aelin, and after me, and I have been running from one or the other of them ever since." He smiled, and the smile was the worst thing she had seen him do. "It has been six years. I have not found her. I do not know if she is alive. I do not know if she is married now to some other old man, or dead in a ditch, or worse, in some place I cannot imagine."

"Caelum," Elara said.

He did not look at her. His eyes were on the lantern flame, and in the flame she saw, briefly, something she had not expected to see in the face of a man she had known for less than a day. She saw grief. Not the sharp grief of a fresh wound, but the dull grief of a man who had been carrying the same stone for six years and had forgotten what it felt like to set it down.

"You have been alone a long time," she said.

He looked at her then.

"So have you," he said.

The words hung between them. The snow fell. The lantern burned.

She did not mean to tell him. She had not meant to tell anyone, ever, because there was no one left to tell, because the woman she would have told had been dead for three years and the house she would have told her in had been sold and the life she would have told her about had ended the night the fever took her grandmother and left Elara standing in the doorway of a room that smelled of candle wax and camphor and the particular silence of a body that had stopped needing to breathe.

"My grandmother," she said. "She raised me. After my mother. After my father. After the wardens fell." She paused. "She taught me to draw maps. She taught me to read the land. She taught me to listen for the things that did not make sound."

He was very still.

"She died," Elara said. "Three winters ago. In the house in Ashenmere. I was with her. I held her hand. I told her I would be all right, and she looked at me as if she knew I was lying, and then she closed her eyes and did not open them again."

She did not cry. She had used up all her crying in that room, in those weeks after, in the long nights when she would wake and reach across the bed for a hand that was no longer there. But something in her chest loosened as she said the words, something that had been tight for three years, and she felt the loosening like the ache of a limb that had been folded too long and was at last being straightened.

"Since then," she said, "I have been alone."

The snow fell. The lantern burned. Caelum did not speak, and the silence he gave her was not empty. It was the silence of a man who understood, because he had been alone too, because he was alone now, because the road he walked was a road with no company on it and had been for six years.

When he spoke, his voice was rough.

"Then we are two fools," he said, "alone in a hole in the ground, in a forest that wants to eat us, in a snowstorm that will not stop."

"Yes," she said.

"And we have three days, at least, to be fools with."

"Yes."

He looked at her across the small space between them. His eyes, in the lantern light, were the color of the sea she had never seen.

"I am glad," he said, "that it is you."

The snow fell. The lantern burned. And in the hollow, in the cave, in the small warm heart of a forest that had tried to swallow them, two people who had been alone for a long time sat with the silence between them, and the silence was, for the first time in either of their memories, not empty at all.