The Thornbound Vow: Bonds And Barbs

lay thicker on the archive steps than snow on the fen road in late January. Maren brushed her sleeve across the carved lintel and watched a pale curl of grime drift toward the flagstones, catching the thin morning light that slanted through a cracked clerestory window. Somewhere behind her, a cart rattled over cobbles in the lower town, and a rooster crowed once, twice, then fell silent as though the weight of the old palace had swallowed the sound.

She had not been certain the door would open. The royal archive had been sealed since the king's illness, and the keeper, an ancient man named Torval who smelled of ink and pipeweed, had taken his resignation to the steward's office three winters past. Maren had tried the handle anyway, and the oak had swung inward with the slow, reluctant groan of something that had not been asked to move in a long time.

Inside, the air was cool and tasted faintly of chalk. Rows of shelving stretched away from her in long corridors, each one stacked high with bound ledgers, rolled maps, and portfolios tied with ribbon gone brown at the edges. The floor was pale stone, worn smooth at its center by generations of feet, and her boots left no mark upon it. Her own village cottage had a hearth that smoked and a roof that leaked and a floor of packed earth. This place had been built to outlast the people who came to it.

She had come prepared. Two nights before, she had sat at her own table with a stub of candle and copied out every name she could trace on her mother's side of the family, working backward through parish registers and the brittle pages of a prayer book that had belonged to her grandmother. Elspeth Calloway. Elspeth Calloway, born in the year of the slow spring, married, or so the record said, into the service of the Thorn Court. Married to no one, the next page had added in a different hand, the ink a shade darker, as though the writer had wanted to be sure the correction was understood.

Caelum had not spoken of Elspeth. He had spoken of his great-uncle once, only once, in the long hours before dawn on the second night of their binding, when the candles had guttered and the rain had run in thin rivers down the cottage glass. He had said the name and then he had stopped, and Maren had not pressed him, because she had learned already that the places where Caelum went quiet were the places where the thorns grew deepest.

She moved between the shelves now, trailing her fingers along the spines of the bound volumes. Most were court records, inventories, tallies of grain and tallow and the slow attrition of royal household accounts. She passed them by. What she wanted was older. What she wanted was in the room at the far end, where the ceiling dropped and the dust was undisturbed except by whatever small, careful creatures had made their homes in the corners.

The door to that room was not locked. It opened onto a space no larger than her kitchen at home, with a single reading desk and three stools, and a window so high and narrow that the light it admitted fell in a pale, narrow band across the floor like a strip of unbleached linen. Someone had set a candle on the desk and left it there, half burned down to a puddle of wax. Maren did not light it. She had brought her own.

She set her satchel on the desk and drew out the lists she had copied, smoothing them flat with the heel of her hand. Then she began to work.

The first hour was a quiet kind of labor. She found the indexes of the older court records, bound in calfskin that cracked when she opened it, and traced her way backward through the reign of the previous king, and the one before that, and the one before that. Names surfaced and sank. She made note of a Calloway who had served as a forest warden under a queen whose portrait she had seen once in the chapter house at Brenford, a thin-faced woman with a long jaw and eyes that had been painted to look patient. She made note of another Calloway, a woman this time, who had been listed as a healer to the household and who had died in the year of the great fever. Elspeth was not among them.

She was about to close the index and try another shelf when she noticed that the calfskin cover of the volume in her hands was softer than the others, worn at the corners in a way that suggested it had been taken down and put back many times. She turned it over. On the back, in a hand she did not recognize, someone had written a single word in faded brown ink: Thorn.

Her breath caught. She opened it again, more carefully this time, and found that the pages inside were not court records at all. They were letters.

There were dozens of them, folded into the binding in small, tight packets, each one dated in the same careful hand. The earliest bore a date that made Maren's stomach fold in on itself: forty-three years before the binding of Caelum and Maren, the same year the Thorn Court had been declared extinct by the Council of Barons. The latest was dated three years after that.

She unfolded the first letter and read.

It was addressed to no one. Or rather, it was addressed in such a way that the name at the top had been crossed out, a single firm stroke of the pen, and beside it the writer had written the word Beloved in a hand that shook only slightly. Maren read on.

The writer spoke of a man she had met in the gardens of the old palace, in the long gallery where the roses grew against the south wall. She described him with a specificity that made Maren's cheeks warm, the way he held his cup with both hands, the way he laughed with his head tipped back, the way he listened as though whatever she was about to say was the most important thing he would hear that day. She wrote that she had known within a fortnight that she would either marry him or die of the wanting, and that she had not been certain, even then, which was the more likely.

The man was not named. But he was of the Thorn Court. Maren knew it from the small details the writer let fall: the silver pin at his throat, the way he spoke of the old oaks as though they were cousins, the half-finished sentence he would begin and then abandon, as though the end of it were a door he had decided not to open.

She turned the page. The next letter was dated six weeks later, and the warmth of the first had curdled at its edges. The writer had learned something. She did not say what. She wrote only that she had been a fool, and that the fool in her had hoped, and that hope was a kind of curse of its own. She wrote that she would do what must be done, and that she prayed to whatever saint was still listening that he would forgive her in the end, though she did not deserve it and knew it.

The third letter was dated a month after that. It was short. It said: It is done. He is alive. I have made sure of that much. Whatever comes of this, know that I chose you over the vow, and I would choose you again, and again, and again, even knowing what it would cost.

There was no fourth letter. There were, however, other documents tucked into the same packet. A copy of a royal writ, dated the same week as the third letter, granting certain lands and privileges to a Calloway of the outer marches in recognition of services rendered to the Crown in a time of war. A second document, in a different hand, recording the testimony of a woman of the Thorn Court, given under oath before a magistrate of a rival kingdom, in which she named the man she had loved and the place where he could be found.

Maren read it twice. She read it a third time, slower, her mouth dry.

The woman who had written the letters had loved Caelum's great-uncle. The woman who had given testimony before the magistrate of the rival kingdom was named Elspeth Calloway. The testimony had named the man and the place. The writ that followed had granted lands to her family in reward.

She had betrayed him to save him, or so she had told herself. She had betrayed him and he had survived it, and she had kept the letters, and she had hidden them here, in a volume marked with the word Thorn on its back, in a room no one had visited in decades.

Maren sat back on the stool. The candle on the desk had burned down to a small, steady flame. The light through the high window had shifted while she read, and the pale band on the floor had crept toward the far wall. Somewhere in the palace, a door closed with a sound like a book being shut.

She thought of Caelum's silence when she had asked about his great-uncle. She thought of the way he had stopped, the way his mouth had closed around whatever he had been about to say, the way his eyes had gone to the window as though he could see through the glass to something she could not.

She thought of the vow that bound them both, the oath she had sworn without understanding, and of Elspeth, who had sworn her own oath to a man she loved and had broken it to keep him alive, and of the price that must have been paid afterward, in the long years between the granting of those lands and the extinction of the Thorn Court.

The candle guttered once and steadied. Maren reached for the letters and began to fold them back into their packet, slowly, with the care of someone handling something that might yet cut her.

The garden breathed. Maren felt the word as fact, not figure: the roses at the perimeter rose and fell with a slow rhythm no human lung could match, exhaling sweetness into air that tasted of wet stone and old grief. Moonlight lay on the paths like spilled milk, and the shadows between the hedgerows shifted when she did, or seemed to.

She had not meant to come here. She had meant to return to her room in the west tower, to set the letters on the desk, to pour water into a basin and wash her hands and pretend the ink had not sunk into the skin of her fingers. But her feet had carried her down the gallery stairs, through the silent courtyard, and out into the formal garden beyond, where the queen's ancestors kept their sculpted yews and their patient counsel. She had come because she knew where he was. She had known since the first night in the palace, when one of the kitchen boys had whispered that there was a man in the old hedge, a man grown into the roses the way a saint is grown into a painted frame, and that if you pressed your ear to the thorns you could hear him breathing.

She had not pressed her ear. She had brought a lamp instead.

Now she stood at the edge of the bower. The lamp was set on the stone lip of a dry fountain, and its small flame pulled at the dark without warming it. She looked at him, and the looking took something from her chest she had been counting on.

He lay within the hedge as though the hedge had grown around him in his sleep, the way ivy grows over a forgotten gate. Thorns traced the line of his jaw. Thorns crossed his folded hands. His eyes were closed, and his lashes, dark and longer than any man's should be, lay on his cheeks like the shadows of leaves. His breath came slow, and the roses bent toward him, and the thorns moved with his breath, opening a fraction when he inhaled, closing when he exhaled.

Maren set her jaw. She had not come all this way to stand at the edge and tremble.

"Caelum," she said.

No answer. The moon shifted behind a slow cloud, and the light on his face changed, and she thought for one wild moment that he had smiled.

"Caelum. I have read the letters."

His lashes lifted. The eyes beneath were not the warm brown she remembered from the road, from the rain, from the third night when he had finally stopped being polite. They were the color of bracken in winter, and they fixed on her with a recognition that was also a warning, and the warning was not for her, it was for the thing behind her that had followed her down the gallery stairs.

"Don't," he whispered. The word was small and sharp, like a thorn broken off in the flesh. "Don't come closer."

She stopped where she was. The air between them smelled of cut stems and something older, something that made the back of her throat ache the way cold water aches when you drink too fast. "Caelum, I know about Elspeth. I know what she did. I know what the vow cost her."

"Go back." His voice was thin. His lips barely moved. "Go back to the palace. Go back to your room. Do not finish the sentence you are about to finish."

"She was my grandmother's grandmother. She swore the oath and then she broke it to save your great-uncle, and they gave her the lands at Briarhollow for it, and the house, and the name, and the long quiet fall into nothing. The writ I read tonight was written in her own hand. She wrote it herself, and she signed it, and she did not weep when she signed it, and that is the part I cannot put down."

"You do not know what you are saying."

"I am saying that I understand the oath."

His hand moved. It was a small motion, hardly more than a twitch, but the thorns around his wrist tightened as he did it, and she heard the sound his skin made against the wood, a sound like a page being torn very slowly.

"I am saying," Maren went on, and her voice was not steady now, it had the breathlessness she could not govern when she was afraid, "that if the oath has two flavors, the one I swore and the one Elspeth swore, and if the one I swore is the one your family paid for in blood, then I am not going to let you pay for it again. I am not going to let you lie here and bleed into the roses for the rest of your life because some queen in a far room decided the debt was not yet cleared."

"Maren." Her name in his mouth was a thing with edges. "If you finish that sentence I will have to choose. Do you understand? I will have to choose, and the choosing will not be what you want."

"Then don't choose. Let me choose."

His eyes closed. She saw the thorns press into the soft place beneath his chin. She saw his throat work as he swallowed. She saw the hand that had moved now turn, palm upward, on the bed of broken stems where it rested, and the fingers open, as if they were reaching for something they had been told not to reach for.

She took a step. Then another. The thorns at the edge of the bower bent toward her, curious, and she felt them brush her skirt, light as the legs of a spider, and she did not stop.

She knelt beside him. She did not touch his hand. She put her own hand on the ground beside his, close enough that the warmth of his skin reached her across the gap, and close enough that if he moved his fingers another inch they would meet.

"You once told me," she said, and her voice was very quiet, "that the vow was a chain and not a rope, and that a chain holds both ends. You told me that on the third night, when we camped in the rain and you would not let me sleep because you said I should know what I had agreed to."

"I remember."

"You said that when the chain is pulled, both ends move."

"Yes."

"Then I am moving my end."

His fingers closed on hers. The thorns at his wrist tightened with a sound like a knuckle cracking, and a thin line of red appeared on his skin where the wood had bitten in. He did not flinch. He held on.

"Maren," he said, and now his voice was not thin, it was the voice he had used in the rain when he had told her about the court, about the name, about the heirloom he carried in his pocket that he had never shown her, the voice that meant he had stopped performing. "If you stay, the queen will know. She has waited for the chain to be pulled. She has waited since before you were born. If you stay, she will use what you have read tonight as the lever, and she will make me choose between you and the name, and I will choose you, and the name will end in me, and the oath will be paid in a way no one in that palace will forgive."

"Then let her use me."

"I cannot."

"You can. You are doing it now."

His thumb moved across her knuckle. The motion was small and it was the most human thing she had felt from him in days. She felt the callus on his palm, the ridge of a scar she had never traced, the faint tremor that ran through his fingers and into hers.

"You are not listening," he said, and his mouth twisted. "You never listen. You are the most stubborn woman I have ever met, and I have met queens."

"And you are the most infuriating man, and I have known three."

That pulled something from him. It might have been a laugh. It might have been the beginning of a sob. The sound was not finished before the thorns around his arm moved, fast, a single contraction, and his hand was pulled back into the dark of the hedge, and the place where his fingers had been was only stems and a smear of red on a leaf.

Maren stayed where she was. Her hand was still open, palm upward, on the ground. The warmth where he had been faded by degrees, and the air filled it again, and the air was cold.

She heard him breathing. She heard the roses. She heard, very faintly, the sound of a window being raised in the palace above, and the papery cough of someone who had been listening for longer than she had been kneeling.

She did not move. She sat in the moonlight with her hand open and the red on the leaves drying to brown, and she watched the place where he had been, and she waited for the hedge to give him back to her, or to take the rest.

The moon went behind another cloud. The lamp on the fountain lip flickered once. Somewhere a door closed with the sound of a book being shut.

The door that had closed was not a sound she could locate. It came from every direction at once, or from the hedge itself, a soft percussion like a heart finishing a beat. Maren stayed where she was for a long time. Her knees ached against the cold flagstones. The dew had soaked through the wool of her dress at the hem and was climbing, an inch by inch, up the bones of her shins.

She had not been in love with him for very long. She had been angry with him for years, and frightened of him for almost as long, and curious about him since the first afternoon he had come to her door with a sprained wrist and a lie about a cart horse. The love was a new thing, and it had no business arriving now, with the roses listening and the fountain snuffed out, and the shape of him gone from the place where she had last held his hand.

She closed her fingers at last, slowly, and felt the dried flake of his blood crack against her palm like a fallen petal. She put her hand in her pocket. She stood. Her knees made the small wet sound of a mouth opening, and she walked, stiff-legged, toward the hedge.

She did not touch it.

At the place where the smear of red was drying to brown, she stopped and listened. The hedge was breathing its own slow breath. She could not hear his breath beneath it. She said his name once, under her breath, and the word did not come back to her. She said it again, and a blackbird, startled from somewhere in the interior of the thorn, screamed out across the garden and was gone.

Maren turned away. She walked back across the lawn with her hands in her pockets and her head bowed, and she did not look at the palace windows as she passed beneath them. She knew they were there. She knew the papery cough had not moved on. She kept her eyes on the grass and the white line of the path, and she let the dark take her.

The garden door at the western wall was unlocked. She had not expected it to be. It swung inward at her touch, and the hinges gave a thin, metallic sigh, and she stepped through into the lane that ran between the palace kitchens and the brewhouse. The smell hit her at once: yeast, and scorched flour, and the heavy mineral tang of cold stone, and beneath it the sharper note of someone who had been crying recently and had tried to wash the salt off with carbolic soap.

She knew the smell. She had smelled it on herself, often enough, in the back room above her own shop, after the harder days of her own small life.

A child was sitting on an upturned crate in the angle of the wall, hugging a bowl of kitchen scraps to his chest. He was perhaps eleven. He had the pinched, feral look of a boy who had been hungry for longer than he could remember and had made a peace with it that did not include letting anyone see. He looked up at the sound of her footstep, and his face did a thing she had seen on other faces, in other children, the rapid calculation of whether to run or to fight or to make himself small.

He chose none of those. He said, very quickly, "You're the witch from Briarhollow. The one who's meant to be dead."

"I am not dead," Maren said.

"No," he said. "I can see that." He looked her over with the critical air of a boy who had been cheated out of a piece of news. "You don't look like a witch."

"What do I look like?"

"Wet," he said. "And a bit simple, if you don't mind me saying. You shouldn't be walking about the back of the palace at this hour. The Dowager's women have been asking after the kitchen gardens. They've been asking after the herbs. They've been asking after the hedge-witch from Briarhollow and whether her blood is what it ought to be."

Maren sat down on the crate beside him without asking. He shifted to make room, grudgingly, and she felt the warmth of him through the wool of his coat, a small fierce heat, the heat of a body that had learned to burn bright because it could not afford to burn long.

"What is your name," she said.

"Bren."

"Bren who."

"Bren," he said, with a small offended lift of his chin, "who is the only person in this kitchen who knows the difference between a tarragon and a feverfew. I'm the cook's boy. I'm the only cook's boy we have, since the last one ran off to join a troupe of players in the low country and the one before that stole the silver and the one before that died of a surfeit of apricots. They keep dying, the cooks' boys. I intend not to."

He delivered all of this in a single breath, and then coughed, and waited for her to be impressed.

She was.

"The Dowager Queen," she said, when he had settled. "Serephina."

"That's the one." He looked at her with a sidelong, careful look. "She's asked the steward to find out about your mother. She's asked the steward to find out about your grandmother. She's asked the steward to find out about your great-grandmother and whether any of them were ever in service to the old courts, and whether any of them ever swore a thing they ought not to have sworn."

The lane was very quiet. Somewhere inside the kitchen, a clock was ticking with the effort of an old heart.

"Why are you telling me this," Maren said.

Bren looked down at his bowl of scraps. He lifted a piece of bread, considered it, put it back.

"Because the cook told me to," he said. "And because the cook has been good to me. And because the cook was your mother's friend, once, before your mother died. And because if they find out what you are, and they put you in the same hedge they put him in, there will be no one left in the world who knows the difference between a tarragon and a feverfew except a boy who is twelve next Michaelmas and who has not yet been trusted with the big knife."

He was twelve next Michaelmas. He was trying very hard not to cry about it. He was failing, in the small, dignified way of children who have been failed often enough to learn dignity early.

Maren reached into her pocket and brought out the piece of bread she had saved from her supper. She broke it in two. She gave him the larger half.

He took it. He ate it with the rapidity of a creature who has learned that food does not stay where it is set down. Then he said, with his mouth still full, "I have something for you."

He reached into the bowl of scraps and produced, from beneath a wilted cabbage leaf, a key. It was iron, and old, and heavy for its size. He put it into her hand and closed her fingers over it the way one closes the fingers of a sleeper over a coin, with care, and with a kind of reverence.

"The kitchen garden," he said. "The one behind the brewhouse. The one with the wall too high to climb and the lock the Dowager's women don't have a key to. The cook says you can come and go from it. The cook says the door opens onto the lane that runs down to the river. The cook says if you go down the lane and turn left at the stone with the cross on it, you'll find a boat."

"Tell me about the cook."

"The cook is a woman," Bren said, "and a queen among women, and her name is Una, and she will not thank me for saying so, and I will say it again the moment she enters the room because I am a fool and she is the only mother I have had since the last one. She says you should eat before you go. She says you should take something warm to drink. She says the bread is in the second drawer of the dresser and the broth is in the pot on the hob and if you touch the pot you will burn yourself, which you deserve, and which she will not pity."

Maren held the key in her closed fist. The iron was very cold. It warmed by degrees against her palm.

"Bren."

"Miss."

"The Dowager Queen. Does she know about the cook?"

The boy looked at her with a look that was much older than his face. "The Dowager Queen," he said, "knows everything that happens in her kitchens. She has known for forty years. She does not always choose to act on what she knows. Sometimes she acts on it in a year. Sometimes she acts on it in a generation. She is waiting for something. The cook thinks she is waiting for you."

"For me."

"For the woman who would come for the man in the hedge. For the woman whose blood is what it ought to be. For the oath that was sworn when the Dowager was a girl and the man in the hedge was a baby in arms and the thorns were only a story told to frighten children into good behavior."

The lane had grown colder. The clock inside the kitchen had stopped ticking, and the silence it left was the silence of a held breath.

Maren stood. The key was warm in her fist. She looked down at the boy, and the boy looked up at her, and between them there passed a thing that did not need to be spoken, the small unspoken treaty of two people who had been underestimated and who had decided, on this cold night, to be underestimated together.

"Eat your bread," she said.

"I have," he said, showing her the empty hand. "I've eaten all of mine. I ate yours too, while you weren't looking. You shouldn't be giving your bread away to strange boys in back lanes at midnight, Miss. It's a habit that will get you killed."

"It is a habit that has kept me alive so far."

"That," he said, with the air of a boy who has won an argument he had not realized he was having, "is because you have been lucky, and luck is a thing that runs out, and you should not rely upon it."

He stood, and he dusted the seat of his breeches with both hands, and he looked up at her, and his face, in the thin moonlight, was the face of every child she had ever failed and every child she had ever tried to save and every child who had saved her in return.

"I will be in the kitchen at dawn," he said. "If you are not dead by dawn. If you are not in the hedge. If you are still yourself. I will be in the kitchen, and the cook will have porridge, and the porridge will have honey, and if you come in through the back door I will pretend I have never seen you before, and you will pretend you have never seen me, and we will both be liars together, and it will be the most comfortable lie either of us has told in a long time."

He turned and walked into the kitchen without looking back, and the door closed behind him with the soft sound of a thing that had been practiced.

Maren stood in the lane with the key in her hand and the smell of yeast in her hair and the taste of bread she had not eaten in her mouth. The river was a long way off. The boat was a long way off. The dawn was a long way off, and the man in the hedge was a long way off, and the Dowager Queen was awake in a high room in the palace, listening to the silence the way one listens to a held note on a violin, waiting for it to resolve.

Maren put the key in her pocket, beside the dried flake of his blood. She walked down the lane toward the river. She did not look back at the palace. She did not look back at the hedge. She walked, and the dew soaked her hem, and the night held her, and somewhere above her, in a window she could not see, the Dowager Queen Serephina watched the small dark figure move down the long white road and did not raise her hand to stop her.

Not yet.

The lane bent, and the river came up out of the dark to meet her, and the moon came out from behind the cloud, and the key in her pocket warmed against the blood in her hand, and she walked on.