The Castle Behind Thorns (5 page)

“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “But I think I know my own father. And—” Angry words in defense of blacksmithing leaped so quickly to his tongue that they choked themselves off.

“No,
you
don't understand—he wasn't really strong enough to be a smith. Not that you look strong enough, either.” She eyed his arms critically. Sand felt heat rise in his cheeks.

“I'm strong enough,” he said. “And Grandpère always says blacksmithing takes strength of eyes and mind more than strength of arm. I'm plenty strong enough in arm.
You
are strong enough.”

She looked dubious. “Still,” she said. “It is hard to see Gilles as a blacksmith, let alone an old man with a boy my own age.”

“Then maybe what you lack to be a smith is not strength of arm but strength of vision,” Sand snapped.

“I have terrific vision!” she announced. “I can see eight stars among the Pleaides.”

Whatever
that
meant.

“Not vision of the eyes. Vision like imagination,” he said. “You—” He stopped himself from saying something mean.

Fortunately for both of them, Perrotte changed the subject. Patting her hair, she asked, almost off-handedly, “So, the Countess. She knows I'm alive?”

Sand straightened his sleeves. “That would be impossible,” he said. “No one knows you're alive. At the moment, no one knows
I
am alive. We're trapped in this castle. There's an impenetrable wall of thorns surrounding this place.”

If he had expected her to have a horrified reaction to this news, he was sorely disappointed. She just made a sideways grimace with half her mouth, and said, “Impenetrable? I doubt that very much, Alexandre.”

“Call me Sand,” he said, as was his habit when addressed by his full name. He almost swallowed his tongue in an effort not to stick it out at her.

“And
you
must remember to address me as ‘my lady.'”

He just bared his teeth in response, a fake smile. He would not stick his tongue out at her. But no way in Heaven was he doing
anything
she told him.

9

Hook

E
VEN THOUGH
S
AND WAS SURE THAT
P
ERROTTE WAS
his age, he found himself trailing after her like she was one of his littlest sisters and he'd been set to child-minding duty. Certainly she was taller than a toddler, though no less obstinate, and honestly, she walked about as well. She had not regained her full strength, and she stumbled at times, weaving back and forth as she made her way through the castle.

He refused to offer her his arm at first. She would not take his advice to stay in bed, to trust him that nothing she would see today could not be seen tomorrow—just unpeopled rooms full of dryness, stillness, and broken things. But she trudged on, stubbornly clinging to walls to rebalance herself on the way, peering into rooms as if hoping each time to see someone, something. . . .

Finally, he couldn't stand the situation anymore, and offered her his arm for support—but she refused him. She just marched on, all the way from inner courtyard to middle to outer, down to the castle's gates.

At the end of the passageway to the outermost gate, Perrotte flung open the night portal and stared silently at the wall of thorns. When she reached for them, Sand swatted her hand away. “Don't touch!”

Exactly
like minding a toddler.

She jerked her hand back and glared at him. “You. Do not. Touch me.”

“It's just—” He pulled up his sleeve and showed her the purple-red scar on his arm. It was hard to make out in the dim light of the tunnel, but the scar appeared puffier than usual. It also itched horribly just then. He scratched it. “One of the thorns got me, and I almost died from it.” He didn't know how to explain any better.

Perrotte looked dubious, but kept her hands folded as she bent forward to examine the thorns. One branch of the brake lifted slightly—it could have been the wind, but it could just as easily have been some malevolence—and snagged at her head, catching her small cloth cap and a few trailing tendrils of her hair.

“Ow!” Perrotte said, and lifted her hand to her head to disentangle herself.

“No, stop!” Sand shouted, reaching for her hand. He hesitated a bare fraction of a second, torn between helping her and obeying her order not to be touched. She heard him, though; her hand froze just in time, hovering over the thorns twining in her hair.

She dropped her hand and stepped back—but the thorns hung on. Perrotte untied the strings of the cap under her chin, took another step, and then with a vicious jerk, pulled her head away. She grunted. The thorns retained Perrotte's cap and several dozen of Perrotte's golden-brown strands, but she was free.

“God's guts,” she swore, rubbing her scalp.

Sand's arm itched furiously. “That was a close thing,” he said. “I almost died of blood poisoning when just one thorn got me.” He rubbed his old wound, surprised by his casual tone.

At the word “poisoning,” Perrotte shuddered, staring at the little scrap of silk that had been her cap. Slowly, it was pulled from view by the shifting brambles of the thorn hedge.

Sand scraped at his arm with his fingernails and regarded her curiously. Perrotte slammed shut the portal, spun on her heel, and left the tunnel. In the outer courtyard, she stopped, staring up at the thorns towering over the castle walls. Her eyes seemed unfocused.

“Perrotte?” he asked. “What's wrong?”

“A memory of a memory,” she said absently. Her eyes cleared, and she fixed her keen hazel gaze on him. “Well. Here we are, then, trapped in Castle Boisblanc, where everything is broken.”

“I've mended a few things,” Sand said.

“Surely,” she said, almost arrogant.

“Some of which are at the bottom of the well,” he said, remembering the bucket he'd lost just before she'd appeared. He didn't want the bucket to become waterlogged, and he certainly wasn't going to wander around child-minding Perrotte all day. He wasn't quite sure how to take his leave of her, so he sketched what he thought might be a courtly bow, and hurried off toward the smithy, muttering, “Excuse me, then,” under his breath. And notably, not referring to her as his lady.

“Where are you—” she called after him, but he didn't stop.

He wasn't angry, he told himself. What did her ingratitude and high-handed manner matter? He had things to do. He had a castle to repair.

He was sorting through his pile of scrap metal, looking for something that wanted to be a hook, when she caught up with him. He ignored her, and chose a likely-looking bar of steel, jagged on one end from the sundering. He no longer remembered what the steel had been, or where he had found it before bringing it to his scrap pile, or even if he
had
found it. It might have been in the smithy's scrap pile from the beginning. Iron was too easy to reuse and too hard to wrest from the earth to ever throw any of it away.

“What are you—?” she began, but he cut her off by noisily shoveling charcoal into the forge.

“I'm doing what I do,” he said roughly. “I'm mending.” He arranged his tinder and kindling, struck a spark, and pumped the bellows, enjoying the way the flames grew into a blaze and roared.

“Mending?”

He didn't say anything. He piled charcoal around the kindling and pumped the bellows furiously. Smoke died away as the kindling was consumed and the charcoal took light; he spread the lit coals wider, and piled more charcoal on top.

He regretted that building a fire was a relatively slow process—he'd like to be at the stage of hammering things before she asked any more questions.

But a good fire couldn't be rushed, even with a bellows. Fortunately, Perrotte said nothing further. He didn't look at her, hoping she would leave if he ignored her. But when he glanced away from the fire, she was still standing there, watching him work.

Once the fire was burning well, Sand thrust the steel bar into the heart of the white-burning coals, and pumped the bellows again. When he pulled the bar out with his tongs, the end glowed a lovely light orange. He set to work with his hammer, shaping the end with a few well-placed strokes, smoothing out the jaggedness to something a little more pointed and purposeful. But not too sharp. It wasn't meant to be a fish hook.

He put the metal back into the heat, this time pushing it farther so as to heat the center of the bar, and pumped the bellows. He glanced at Perrotte. Still, she said nothing—just stood there, with her arms crossed, watching him, as silent and as still as the stone for which she was named.

He began to feel a little bit guilty for his ire, for ignoring her. She had just risen from death, or something like it. She was more than twenty-five years removed from everything and everyone she had known. So what if she was a little prickly? Wouldn't he be a little prickly in her place?

And he couldn't ignore the truth of their situation. She was the first person he'd spoken with or touched in so many days they might have been weeks, and she might be the only person he spoke with or touched for the rest of his life.

Her mere existence changed his world.

He was about to say something to her, but he didn't know
what
. So he angled his heated metal over the edge of the anvil and started bending it, then set it to heat again. Since he was making a mere hook, and it didn't have to hold up to heavy usage, and also because Sand was in a hurry to retrieve the bucket, he chose not to weld the hook's eye.

He got a little lost in the process of working the hook. He came back to the world during the quench. The bubble and hiss of water meeting hot metal was as satisfying as ever.

He looked over at Perrotte, half-expecting her to have finally left. But she still stood there, watching.

“Sand,” she said, and now her voice was polite, not prickly. “I would like to learn how to do that.”

“Quench something?” he asked, not surprised. Everyone wanted to quench something, at least once.

“No.
That
.” She gestured at the hook. He stared down at where it dangled from his tongs. Surely she didn't mean that she wanted to learn how to make hooks. Hooks were boring. “I want to smith something.” Her voice was smaller and less imperious as she added, “I want to mend something.”

“Oh,” he said, words failing him. He'd never been allowed to call himself even an apprentice blacksmith, but he was well aware of the importance of keeping his grandfather's craft secrets. But Perrotte didn't have to learn anything particularly secret just to mend something.

He remembered then the story of when his father became his grandfather's apprentice. After his father left Castle Boisblanc and shoemaking behind, he had shown up at Grandpère's house. His father had begged to be taken on as Grandpère's apprentice. Grandpère had asked his father the one question, the most important question.

No one needed to ask Sand the question, of course; raised by a smith and with Grandpère's blood in his veins, everyone had known Sand's answer since he was a toddler. And in the end, they hadn't asked him the question because his father had no intention of letting him become a smith. It still rankled him that he'd never been asked. That he never would be asked.

Even so, Sand asked Perrotte the one important question of blacksmithing: “Do you have an imagination?”

10

Bed

P
ERROTTE BLINKED LIKE A SLEEPY CAT.

“Of course I have an imagination,” she said, sounding prickly again.

“Well, great,” Sand said. “I've never heard of a good smith who had no imagination.”

Perrotte glanced around the dim smithy and ran her finger through the fine layer of dust and soot on the nearest hammer. “It would take some imagination to think of this place as beautiful. Is that why smiths don't clean better? They can imagine away the dirt?”

He shook his head. Dust and soot were part of the job. “I meant—can you imagine how things are going to shift in the fire and under the hammer? Can you look at four pieces of broken metal and think of a way to put them together into something useful? Turning swords into plowshares? That sort of thing.”

Perrotte frowned. “I'd like to turn a plowshare into a
sword
,” she said. “I'd cut our way out of those thorns, and then use it to run my enemies through—” She bit off her next words and swallowed them.

Sand stared at her, aghast. She met his eyes, defiant.

“What? You don't like bloodthirstiness?” she asked.

“Pardon? No. I'm horrified that you would dull a sword on that thorn brake. I could make you some pretty good hedge shears.”

He laughed inwardly as the defiance on her face changed to surprise. But he did wonder who her enemies were—and how he would make sure never to give her a sword and then get on her bad side.

 

S
AND FINISHED BRAIDING HIS
rope. It went fast, because when his hands tired, Perrotte took a turn. Then he spent the better part of an hour leaned over the edge of the well, casting his hook into the water again and again, dredging for the bucket. Perrotte leaned over the edge with him, and gave him completely useless advice. Sometimes he caught the bucket and managed to haul it up a couple of feet before it plummeted into the water again.

“Let me have a turn,” Perrotte said, and on her second try, she hooked the handle and triumphantly hauled the brimming bucket upward.

“Beginner's luck,” he muttered, then helped her bring the bucket over the well's lip. That she had completed the rescue in no way diminished his enthusiasm for having a real bucket to haul water in. He grinned, carrying his watertight bucket, full, all the way to the kitchen.

It occurred to him: The bucket was far better at holding water than it had any right to be. He'd had tremendous luck in mending so many things over the last week, working far beyond his skills.

And then there was the matter of the hawk.

And the matter of Perrotte.

When it came down to it, Sand had to admit that some sort of magic was at work in the castle.

“This is what we have to eat, then,” Perrotte said, interrupting his thoughts. She eyed the kitchen table's collection of broken and dirty foods.

“There's lots of turnips in the root cellar,” Sand said, pouring some of the water from his hard-earned bucket into a copper pot. This was so much easier than wringing water out of bedsheets over several trips!

“You should plant a garden,” Perrotte said.

“Thank you for the suggestion,” he said formally, putting fragments of venison, turnip, and onion into the pot. “I already have. It isn't working out.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, nothing grows here. Nothing lives. Nothing rots, either. Everything just . . . dries out.”

Perrotte shook her head. A yawn overtook her, and she looked taken aback by it. She lifted her hand to her mouth belatedly. “I'm sorry. I'm so tired.”

Sand glanced at the unplumped chunks of turnip, onion, and venison sitting in the cold water. “Food won't be ready for a while yet.”

“I'm more tired than hungry. I can eat in the morning. Good night.”

“But—”

She stopped in the doorway. “But what?”

“I don't know—that is—” Sand had mended only one bed. “You can sleep in my bed,” he blurted.

Perrotte drew herself up taller, an affronted expression on her face. “Your bed?
Your
bed, in
my
father's room?”

“My bed,” Sand said again, feeling his eyebrows knit together. “The one I mended.”

“Why haven't you been sleeping in the servant's quarters?” she asked. “Or above the smithy? That would be the place for you.”

He gaped at her. “This is
my
castle!”

“No, it's not. I'm the heiress of this castle! May I remind you!”

Sand blinked. Very well, technically it wasn't his castle. But she was no more the heir of it than he. “No,” Sand said. “This castle belongs to your sister.”

“She's not my real sister!” Perrotte screamed, face turning bright red, and a vein popping on her throat. Then she clutched her head. “Oh. Ow.”

Sand was frozen. He didn't know how to react to this Perrotte, to screaming Perrotte.

He was reminded again of what it was like taking care of his little sisters. This would be a temper tantrum, then? And he should just ignore it?

“I'm sorry,” Perrotte whispered, shamefaced.

Sand shrugged, which wasn't an acceptance of her apology.

Perrotte took a deep breath. “I'm sorry,” she repeated. “I don't quite have the control on my behavior that I should. And considering I have more than eight-and-thirty years now . . .”

This startled Sand out of his frozen state. “What?”

“Well, if it's been twenty-five years since . . . and I was thirteen at the time . . . So I'm quite, quite old now. I really should know better.”

Sand sighed, and stirred the stew again. He really should know better too. Perrotte had awakened from the dead—today. To find everyone she knew and loved gone, and twenty-five years in the past. More than that. She was probably closer to forty than eight-and-thirty.

Even the people who still lived, like his own father, had changed, perhaps unrecognizably to Perrotte. And she had also discovered that she was trapped in this castle, this broken castle where nothing lived, nothing thrived, with a boy who apparently thought it was his own castle. . . .

“Of course it's your bed for the taking,” he said, feeling weary. He bit his lips, thinking about the smith's quarters. He hadn't even gone to look at them, but she was right, that's where he belonged.

“No. No, no. I'm horrible. Your bed is the one you mended. You shall have it. I'll go sleep in my old bed.”

“It's not mended,” he pointed out.

“How bad can it be?”

“Bad enough. Take the bed. I'll make do in the smith's quarters, as you suggested.”

“No!” She stepped toward him. “I'm sorry, Sand. I don't know what I was thinking. I think . . . I think sometimes, even though I hated everything my father's wife did, and regarded her every word as poison she dripped from her tongue, sometimes I think I'm as heartless as she is. And I don't wish to be. Please, Sand. Forgive me.” She reached for him.

Awkward, uncertain, he gave her his hand. She squeezed his fingers.

“There, then,” she said, and let his fingers go. “
Do
you forgive me?”

“I—” He wanted to shrug, to hold back his forgiveness like a punishment. But this time, he did forgive her. So he nodded. “I do.”

“Come with me, to look at my old room.”

He banked the fire and lowered the stew pot toward the coals, then went with her to the keep.

“Let's just look,” she urged, entering a room he'd taken no particular notice of before.

Sand had never tried to mend any of the things in these chambers. It looked like a whirlwind armed with sledgehammers had taken the room apart, and then picked up some daggers to finish the job. Sand regarded Perrotte's face.

“None of these things are mine,” she said, poking into a broken clothes chest. “Someone else was sleeping here—they must have moved all my things out. How long—how long between when I died and the castle was sundered?”

“I've never been sure about that, myself. More than days, less than years?”

“And they gave my room over to . . . ?” Perrotte looked around, picking up bits of torn fabric and investigating them. “I don't know who. Some cousin, maybe. Some relative of my father's wife. Blech.”

Sand shook his head.

“Well, I won't have this room! It's not mine anymore.”

“Do you want the Countess's room?” Sand suggested, then almost bit his tongue. Of course Perrotte wouldn't want to sleep there.

But she just shook her head.

“Look, you take your father's room,” Sand said. “I really will find somewhere else. Maybe this room. It's quite nice.” The castle's silver swans and golden phoenixes were painted on the walls here too, though most were scratched through.

“Thank you, Sand,” Perrotte said quietly.

 

P
ERROTTE HAD WALKED INTO
her father's room and lain down in Sand's former bed with the weariness of someone who had been awake for days.

Sand left her, returning to her old bedroom and putting it in some sort of order for his night's sleep. He pulled the mattress off the broken bedframe and stuffed the feathers back inside. He sewed the mattress, using a nail from his purse as an awl and strips of old sheets for thread, tying each of his stitches like Agnote would knot a quilt.

He wandered back to the kitchen to check on the stew. The turnips were beginning to mush up, but the venison was still tough and dry. He ate dried apples and crumbles of cheese instead, then raised the stew off the fire so it wouldn't burn in the night.

Back in Perrotte's old room, he bedded down. The lonely ache in his chest—it hurt worse with Perrotte here. While he felt relieved to have company, she was strange to him. He didn't understand her, nor she him, and he missed his family intensely.

He curled on his side, trying to force himself to sleep. He must have dozed—but then he heard a scrape and a shuffle, smelled the scent of burning beeswax, and sat bolt upright.

Perrotte stood in his doorway—the door needed to be repaired along with everything else in the room—holding a candle. “Sand.”

“What?” He clutched at his chest, trying to still his racing heart.

“Will you—will you stand up?”

Confused, he stood.

She walked over and picked up a corner of his mattress with a grunt, then started to drag it awkwardly toward the door.

“What are you doing?”

She didn't say anything, just continued to drag the mattress along. It was a smaller mattress, which was the only reason she could shift it at all, and while his mending job might have been good enough to sleep on, it hadn't been meant to hold together through this treatment. The mattress leaked a trail of feathers behind.

“Perrotte? Just tell me what you're doing and maybe I can help!”

She continued to pull the mattress along, bent nearly in half and breathing heavily. For the sake of not losing
all
the feathers, Sand picked up two of the other corners and lifted, helping her to maneuver through the door. He carried the mattress along behind her, feeling like an attendant carrying the end of a robe in a coronation ceremony.

She led him into the Count's room, then placed the mattress at a right angle to her own—head to head, but perpendicular, so that just a corner of each mattress touched.

Immediately, she crawled under her blankets and snuggled in.

“Get your covers,” she said, yawning. “I'm tired.”

“What are you—”

“Please, Sand.”

He jogged off to the other room, returning with half-blankets piled high in his arms.

“Lie down, Sand.”

Hesitant, he lay on his mattress. Perrotte leaned over, and he thought she was going to blow out the candle. But first she seized his hand and held it tightly.

Then she blew out the candle.

Though it was strange, holding her hand across the corners of their mattresses in the dark, Sand had no trouble falling asleep.