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The girl, Thorn, lived at the far edge of the world, deep in the forest where the trees towered and grew bigger around than she could reach with both arms. In her simple cottage and garden, she grew up alone and isolated—but she lived a thousand lives through her sorcery.
From an early age, she could lay hands on even a plain and empty brass box, and read the story better than in a book. Every object she touched offered illuminating glimpses of a world, shards of images that, pieced together, created a tapestry so staggeringly large and complex that Thorn could scarcely encompass it with her mind. All she knew was that, beyond the forest, there lived many other people in beautiful, crowded places called castles and citadels and cities. People with families that hugged each other and gave gifts with love. People who gave pledges of eternal affection with jewels that forever remembered those moments of intense emotion.
The world also held evil. She saw those tales, too, spun out in silent imagery, soaked in violent emotions. Jealousy and hate and greed drove people to terrible crimes. She was safe at the cottage, within the thorny boundary of the rose hedge that billowed and bloomed. Summer brought the heavy honey-gold blossoms, filling the air with sweet scent and the buzz of bees, but in all seasons, the black-emerald canes wove an impenetrable barrier, thorns curved like blades, protecting Thorn from the terrors of the world.
For a very long time, Thorn believed this was true. Her guardian, Jada, taught her how to use her magic, to touch the carefully bagged treasures and describe everything she saw and felt fromthem. Despite the moments of love and happiness she experienced, there were also terrible things, so she believed Jada that they were lucky to live where they did, safe and sound for always.
Thorn hated it when Jada would depart for a day or two or three, leaving Thorn safely inside the enchanted rose hedge where she wouldn’t come to harm. She greeted her guardian’s return with frantic tears and pleas to be allowed to go along the next time. But someone had to feed the chickens and milk Nessie the goat and make the cheese and butter from her milk, to keep up with drying herbs and storing root vegetables for winter, to put away fruits into jars of preserves.
Over time, Thorn lost her fear of being alone. She even began to look forward to the peacefulness of it, to the reprieve from worrying that she might make a mistake or reveal some fault requiring punishment and correction. And she looked forward to the stories she’d see in the trophies Jada brought back.
Thorn would sit in the library at the desk she’d used since she was old enough to take lessons and record the provenance of each new treasure. Through her psychometry, she could see anyone who’d touched the object, and feel their emotions of that moment. This was the remanence people left behind, an echo of their presence in the world. The most recent experiences were usually the brightest and most vivid, almost always some busy marketplace with a jumble of avarice and delight on both sides of the transaction as the object changed hands. She could then go back in time from there, tracing each instance someone had touched the object, all the way back to images of its maker, and how that person had felt creating it. Sometimes she could go back even farther, to the mining or harvesting of its component parts.
What made Thorn an especially effective psychometrist was that she could go so far back and see and feel so much.
With her powerful gift for psychometry, Thorn excavated the deepest levels of an object’s history, which meant her provenancerevealed more than anyone else’s. She’d identified several lost artifacts created by celebrated artisans, fetching Jada a pretty pile of coin—very necessary for the two of them living alone, with no support from anyone else.
Left to her own devices, Thorn sometimes fell down the rabbit hole of tracing the remanence of some irrelevant component of an object. It slowed her down, becoming distracted by some sidenote of history, and Jada detested dallying. But Thorn couldn’t help being drawn in by the stories she saw, like those images of an exotic land made entirely of sand where a jewel had been mined or the surprising and horrifying twist when a bit of leather that appeared to be animal turned out to be human. She had to know everything, unable to look away even when the story turned out to be terrible.
Thorn had learned to balance her curiosity with efficiency, quickly establishing the provenance needed for maximum resale value and then indulging herself with tracing the deeper histories. She especially loved when she found romances tied to the objects. It happened most often with jewelry, given as tokens of love or promises of happy ever afters. The vibrancy of those emotions persisted in the gifts, along with images of kisses and embraces. Thorn lingered over the shimmering sensations of intimate affection, especially savoring the pieces that remembered being worn on the skin that lovers kissed and caressed.
Experiencing those secondhand memories of loving and being loved, so unlike her solitary, friendless life, gave her both hope and a sense of despair. A different way of being existed, but she didn’t know how to find it. Eventually, she realized she would never find anything different unless she left the cottage. Only Jada could pass through the brambles surrounding them, so no one ever visited and Thorn could never leave.
For a very long time, Thorn never questioned that essential truth.
Until one day she did.
It was a day much like all the days before, except that it was an exceptionally lovely summer afternoon. Thorn had fed the chickens, gathered eggs, milked Nessie, cleaned the kitchen following breakfast, started the dough for the day’s baking, and weeded the vegetable bed. Then, with Jada napping and a bit of time to herself, she took a new treasure—a jeweled belt buckle—out to the willow tree by the pond. She’d already catalogued it, meticulously writing out the relevant provenance. But on impulse, instead of putting the buckle back into its velvet bag, she’d slipped it into her pocket. She would put it back before Jada noticed its absence. She only wanted to play with it a bit more, to savor the lovely sense of it. And the prince she’d glimpsed inside.
As a jeweled buckle, it was pretty enough, and gems usually fetched good coin. In this case, though, Jada had been especially excited, suspecting it had belonged to someone of importance. She could improve on the resale value with a bit of royal cachet.
As Thorn received only images and emotions from the remanence lingering in an object, she couldn’t tell who exactly the royal had been. She could, however, describe him and the people around him: the rich clothing, the servants, the older man with a long red beard who touched it right before, who wore a crown—surely a king—and the person before that, a wealthy jeweler excited to see a royal court. The royal must be a young prince. He posed before a gilded mirror wearing the belt buckle, pleased with the flashing gems, the warmth of approval in the gift. He had glossy golden hair that waved to his shoulders, bright green eyes, a lovely smile. Thorn transcribed all the details she could glean about the jeweler, the origin of the gems, keeping to herself the sorry state of the miners in that distant underground tunnel.
Thrilled with the success of her purchase, Jada treated herself to a glass of afternoon wine and lay down for a celebratory nap—giving Thorn a golden opportunity to savor the presence of the prince in the buckle just a bit longer. Because, more thanhis sense of physical appearance, Thorn loved his lighthearted nature, a natural humor and attractive enthusiasm for life.
He seemed to be around her age, unusual for the treasures she examined. Under the willow tree, Thorn revisited that sparkling moment of the gift-giving, some kind of celebration, the king handing the prince the belt buckle, how much joy the gift had brought him. She was sorry the buckle had been later taken from him, stolen by a desperate servant who sold it to Jada in a back alley.
Thorn sorted through and memorized other moments of sheer happiness from times the prince wore the buckle: him taking classes in dancing and sword-fighting, riding horses through forests, a pair of hounds always with him. On the more poignant side, she recognized a loneliness in him that mirrored hers, a deep sadness, a feeling of not fitting in. Exploring those echoes of his heart reassured her of two things: that she wasn’t the only person in all the world to feel that way and that one could be a wealthy royal, surrounded by hordes of people, and still feel as alone as a girl in an isolated cottage. That someone out there had both—her gray loneliness and those moments of joy—rendered her hopeful and longing for more.
That longing folded in with an indefinable restlessness, a kind of hunger that had begun to plague her. Some of it came from the dull ache of her menses, which had started only the year before and continued to arrive with inconvenient regularity. Jada said that meant she was becoming a woman like her, but that made no sense to Thorn. Jada had pale skin, redly chestnut hair, and blue eyes. Thorn already stood taller than Jada, topping the short and slender woman by a handspan. Would Thorn get shorter again, her brown skin and black hair lighten, her dark eyes turn to blue?
When Thorn wondered aloud about such things, Jada laughed and called herstupid girl.
The hunger refused to subside, instead blooming lush as the honey-gold roses and pricking her as sharply as those wickedly curved thorns. The craving forsomethingbecame tangled up in those intimate moments the jewels recalled so vividly, the needing and wanting and loving, which made Thorn want to fall into dreamy fantasies, a reverie of those sensations and emotions. Now she added the prince to those dreams, imagining him coming to rescue her, like in the fairy-tale books. He would love her and kiss her and give her a jeweled ring to prove it, providing her with one of those shimmering moments of joy she so envied him.
Except that he didn’t know she existed. How would she ever find him when she was forever tucked away in the cottage? How would he find her if no one but Jada knew she even existed?
She had to find a way into his world.
“When I’m finished becoming a woman,” Thorn asked very politely, after she’d snuck the belt buckle back into its bag, alongside the provenance she’d penned, “will I be able to go with you then, beyond the fence?”
“No.”
“Then when?” Thorn persisted. “I’d like to see the city someday.” She knew better than to mention her fantasy of meeting the sunny prince.
Jada laughed her most scornful laugh. “The city is not for you, my little country mouse.”
