The Castle Behind Thorns (6 page)

11

Stars

S
AND'S BREATHING EVENED OUT ALMOST IMMEDIATELY
, though his fingers twitched and squeezed Perrotte's in his sleep. Eventually, Perrotte pulled her hand from his, and lay with one palm under her cheek.

She had been so tired before. She had slept only briefly before going to fetch Sand from her old room. Now she was wide awake.

Perrotte had never been a good sleeper, and maybe that was why she lived again. Death was the ultimate night, and she couldn't keep her eyes closed even through that.

Bad sleep was why she had come to be an observer of stars. Before her father remarried, there had been no questioning of her late nights and lazy mornings, or the reason that she needed doors in a tower ceiling and a servant to come prop them open for her, or star charts, or an astrolabe, or a tutor in the natural sciences.

But then her father never recovered from a wound that baffled physicians. The Count felt he needed a son, so he married Jannet, the pious younger daughter of a family from Lower Bertaèyn, who spent more time praying than doing most anything else.

For a while after her father remarried, Perrotte's life had remained much as it had been. But slowly over the months, Perrotte realized that secret ice lurked in her new stepmother's otherwise pleasant manner—narrow ice, tiny ice, that seeped slowly into every crack and crevice between people and widened them.

The plan for sending Perrotte away to some convent had been sprung without warning; suddenly, her tutor, dear old Efflam, was being sent into retirement, while her father's new wife paced around, ordering servants this way and that to prepare Perrotte for a journey. “You need proper religious instruction before you move out into the world of temptations and trials,” Jannet had said. “You need time for spiritual contemplation before you go to the Duchess's court.”

There had been no time to appeal to her father; the Count had gone to dance attendance on the King in Paris, and wouldn't be back for a month. Perrotte had played chess with Efflam for years; she knew when checkmate was inevitable. All she could do now was guard the supply lines of her retreat, as it were; she had to make sure her special possessions came with her: her books, her maps, and her astronomic instruments. She had packed everything from her tower room, and her chests were prepared when Jannet came in for inspection.

“Sir Bleyz is ready for you, Perrotte. Now, what's all this nonsense?” Jannet asked.

“My things,” Perrotte said.

Jannet threw open one chest, then another, glancing with unconcealed disdain for what she found inside. “Unpack them,” she ordered Perrotte's maid, Loyse.

Perrotte stepped forward. “No. They are coming with me.”

And just like that, Jannet had yanked the first thing out of the closest chest: Perrotte's prized astrolabe, swaddled in silk. Jannet held it against her breast, above her swelling belly.

“I'll be taking this until you learn how to honor your new mother properly. Raoul! Yannig! Come in here. Take these chests away to my rooms. Perrotte will be traveling only with this.” Jannet had nudged a single clothes chest with her foot.

The servants had all obeyed Jannet. How could they not have? She was their Countess; Perrotte would be the heir only until Jannet produced a son, which she might do in the next few months.

Years later, in a room not far from the site of her dispossession, Perrotte pushed the memory away and sat up, groping for her candle. Sand's breathing didn't shift. She went to the hearth and crouched to light the taper from the embers.

Shielding her eyes from the light, she left the room. She wanted to see the stars.

She wondered if her old astrolabe and any of her other possessions were still in the castle. She was afraid to find them, though; they must be broken like everything else.

Perrotte reached the castle's courtyard, and stumbled out into the mud, bare feet squelching coldly. She looked up, finding “the shining Bears at the height of the sky,” as one long-dead Latin philosopher put it, the stars that never rose and never set. The constellation of the larger bear, or as everyone who was
not
a dead Latin philosopher called it, the Plough, contained seven stars, by most counts. But Perrotte always looked for, and always found, the two-part star in the Plough's handle, a double star that most people never noticed: a star and her sister.

She thought of her own sister then, who had been newborn when Perrotte returned from the convent. She felt warmth toward this unknown sister, and guilt. Perrotte had seen Rivanon exactly once, and what she felt now made no
sense
to her, and not because Perrotte lacked imagination, but because it did not seem that anything that could have grown inside of Jannet could cause such feeling in Perrotte's heart. She was a rotten older sibling, a poor protector. Perrotte had been trapped, first by death, now by thorns, and she had left Rivanon alone to be raised by Jannet.

It struck her then afresh, like biting down on a tooth she'd forgotten she'd broken: the overwhelming grief and the horrible wonder of having been dead. The feeling of loss and fear were strong, even though her memories of the darkness and the stone beneath the chapel were fading. Each time she remembered, it was as though another layer had been scraped from a parchment, turning inked words and images into so much dust.

Her memories of the time before
that
also grew fainter. Somewhere, somehow, she had eaten something. Someone had spoken to her, in the darkness of death; a soft hand had brushed her forehead; she had felt a mother's love in that moment, when she had been fed something sweet yet tart, fresh yet moldering. Perrotte remembered:
a woman's face—her brown eyes—a red seed—

It had all happened in a place so dark that it was hard to remember anything, a place so deep that it was starless.

Except there were stars.

Her feet itched to climb the tower stairs up to her old observatory room, but her legs wouldn't take her. So she stayed in the courtyard, tilting her head back, back, back, and turned wide eyes to the stars.

She tried to be as still as possible, but her heartbeat rocked her back and forth, back and forth. She swayed on the balls of her feet just a little. At first she fought the rhythm, trying to be stiller than still. But stars were not still; they had their movements just like the rest of the living universe.

So Perrotte let her body rock with the beating of her heart, while her mind whirled with the circling of the stars, until dawn faded them away.

12

Tower

S
AND OPENED HIS EYES
. H
E FACED A DIFFERENT WALL
than usual. He frowned, confused.

Then he remembered Perrotte.

He sat up, twisting to look at the mattress cornered with his. Perrotte wasn't there.

He jumped from bed and went to find her, willing his heart to stop its frantic beating. He hadn't dreamed her. He hadn't imagined her. And she wasn't dead again, just because he'd taken his eyes off her for the night. He
would
find her.

He didn't have to go far; Perrotte was in the kitchen, which was warm with the scent of the fire and cooked venison. Perrotte was crouched over the pot, occasionally stirring the stew. She smiled at him when he came in, and his heart settled.

“Good morning,” she said.

He nodded, not really sure what to say. He wanted to ask why she'd moved his mattress to the Count's room the night before. He wanted to ask her why she'd held his hand. He thought he knew why, that she'd simply been lonely and scared. But he'd thought he understood things about girls before, and been proved wrong nearly every time.

He served them both bowls of stew, giving her the spoon while he ate with his hands. While he was thinking about how to phrase his questions, Perrotte asked, “Are there any herbs?”

“All dried up and withered away, as far as I can tell,” Sand said. “But you are welcome to look.”

“Ah. But at least there are onions and garlic. Though . . .” She picked up an onion piece and knocked it against the table. It rustled more than knocked. “So dry. That's how I felt when I woke: dry.”

When she “woke.” Sand supposed there was some value in talking about it like that, in not saying “dead.” Christ and several of his saints had resurrected people. Sand wondered how
they
had all referred to that process of coming back to life. Maybe it felt like waking.

A cold thought overcame him.
He
had woken, in the fireplace. He had not known how he'd gotten there—could he have been dead first?

But—but no. He would know. Wouldn't he?

Perrotte poked at her stew. “What was your life like, Sand? Before?”

He shrugged, sipping broth from the bowl before scooping up a chunk of turnip with his fingers. “I hoped to apprentice with my father, but I guess that was never going to happen.”

“How do you mean?”

“He wanted me to leave Boisblanc. He didn't intend for me to become a blacksmith. He made me learn to read, and study every day with the village priest. Papa meant for me to go to a university and study there.”

“The village priest? Why not send you to a cathedral school?”

“I don't know. My father never told me. We lived too far from a cathedral school? We had too little money?”

“Cathedral schools are free—but hard to gain entrance to.”

“I don't think my father ever tried to get me into one.”

“And what would he have you study at university?”

“Papa didn't even know that much! I used to ask him the same question. He would say, ‘Study what you like!' And I would tell him that I wanted to stay home and ‘study' blacksmithing, and he would get angry. We fought all the time about it. It didn't matter how ridiculous his dream was, he wanted it. But me, go to Paris? Or even Angers? Show up at the city gates, alone? And find tutors? With what money? With what sponsors? Even if someone took pity on me, they would not be inspired by my intellect. I am terrible at reading Latin.”

“I could teach you to read better.”

“I don't want to read better! Everything I want to know, a smith can teach me. Without a book.” Sand laughed, and noticed how bitter he sounded. “I love blacksmithing, and my father refused to teach me any more of it. I used to sneak over the fields in the early morning while my father slept and have lessons with my grandpère.”

“Why did your father want you to go away so badly?”

“I've only wondered that my whole life.”

“Your stepmother?” Perrotte guessed. “She didn't want you around?”

“Agnote? No! Agnote loves me. She's tried to make peace between us since I was little. She doesn't understand my father either.”

“Your mother—died in childbirth?”

“That would be easy to understand, wouldn't it? If my father didn't want me around because I killed my mother by being born? But no—poor Maman died when I was a toddler, from a summer fever.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, noting how long it had gotten since he'd awakened in the castle. Only as he lowered his arm did he realize his hands trembled. “My father doesn't even seem to want my little half sisters around. During our last fight, he said not going to university was selfish, because after a few years, I could find educated men to marry my sisters to.” He shook his head.

“Parents never make any sense,” Perrotte said, almost to herself.

Sand wanted to disagree, but the specter of his last fight with his father hung before him, and he had no heart to argue otherwise right then.

Perrotte put aside her mostly full bowl. “Have you tried contacting the outside world?”

“I build a fire every day. If anyone has noticed the smoke, it hasn't led to any sort of rescue or even basic investigation that I have seen.”

Perrotte looked thoughtful. “We could hang a sheet from a tower window,” she said. “In case . . . in case for whatever reason they aren't seeing the smoke, or are just imagining some silly reason for it to exist. A sheet from a tower window would look too strange to ignore or explain away. I think someone would see it and know we wanted rescuing, if we did that.”

Sand shrugged. Hanging a sheet couldn't hurt, although he didn't think it would help. He'd lived in sight of the castle his whole life, and no one ever really looked at it, except maybe small children. In addition to the sundering and the thorns, the determined ignoring of the place by the outside world was like part of the castle's curse. “We have sheets aplenty, and no shortage of tower windows,” he said.

“Good! Let's go.”

“Are you done eating? I'm not done eating.”

“I'm full.”

He was dubious. She'd had barely five bites.

“You could fetch a sheet while I finish,” Sand told her, and she went off.

He grabbed his spoon back. He chewed an astringent chunk of turnip, chasing it quickly with a bite of venison. He did not look forward to a time when turnips might figure more prominently in their diet.

He was licking the last bits of stew from the bowl when Perrotte returned with half a bedsheet. Sand took her to the smithy to scrounge up some nails, then led the way upstairs to the strange little room at the top of the tallest tower.

He went directly to the window overlooking the valley, inhaling the fresh breeze from the fields. But when he turned to ask Perrotte to hold one end of the sheet, she was standing stone-still at the edge of the stairs.

“Perrotte? Are you all well?”

“This room,” she whispered. He drew closer, and saw tears brimming in her eyes. “This was my most favorite room in the whole castle. This room was my observatory.”

“Observatory?”

“I used to study the stars from here. Until
she
took it all away. What did she do with my things?” She made a half-hearted gesture, as though waving at objects that were no longer there.

“She who?”

Perrotte shook her head confusedly. “My father's wife.”

Her stepmother? Sand could not imagine Agnote taking away his favorite things. Not more than temporarily, as a punishment for a true misdeed. It was against her nature.

But the suddenness of Perrotte's stone stillness and her tears made no sense to Sand. “Did you just remember that all your stuff was gone?” he asked. “Had you forgotten about it until we came up here?”

“No.” Perrotte twisted her hands together. “I remembered that. I wanted to see this room again anyway. What I didn't remember . . .” Her breath caught on a deep, shuddering sob.

Sand's heart wrung itself for her. He didn't think he had cried that hard since he was a small child, but he still remembered how it felt.

“What I didn't remember 'til now,” Perrotte said at last, “is that this is the room where I died.”