“Is it time to make tea already?” she asked, then gestured at her documentation. “I just finished,” she added, surprised at how easily the lie came to her lips. She hadn’t outright lied to Jada since she was a child, and part of her braced for her mentor to know, as she always did, to scold her, for the punishing wings to batter her.
But Jada did not notice. She simply scooped up the sheaf of documents, perusing the information with tight-lipped satisfaction. “These will fetch a pretty bit of coin. And yes—time for you to bake the scones and get the tea brewing. Make some of those cucumber and goat cheese sandwiches, too, with the crusts removed. I’ll be there in a bit.”
With a relieved sense of having narrowly escaped a stinging punishment, Thorn turned to go—though she couldn’t help glancing back at what seemed to be a glaring hole where the bookhad been. She should have adjusted the spacing. She almost confessed at that moment, the text burning through her skirt.
Jada glanced up from boxing the artifacts with their documentation. “What?” she snapped. “The scones won’t bake themselves and you know I hate it when tea is late.”
Thorn fled for the safety of the kitchen.
Later that night, under the tent of her bedcovers, Thorn made a small light. Minor pyromancy was another of her weak skills, useful primarily for surreptitious reading past her bedtime—and for venturing into the dark, cramped, and decidedly damp root cellar. She pressed the sealing wax holding the jewel to the underside of her bedframe, where she could drape her hand over the side and caress the surface of the jewel, the prince’s sunshine like another light in her dark night.
With one finger near the gem, and lying on her side with her back to the door, just in case Jada came to check on her, as she sometimes did, and ready to snuff the light at the slightest sound, Thorn read the opening chapter of the kiddie primer on runes in disbelief.
She’d been lied to.
It shouldn’t come as such a shock—after all, Thorn had been dancing around the edges of this discovery for quite some time—but she hadn’t expectedthislevel of deception. For all that the primers on rune-scribing had emphasized the critical importance of perfect execution, it turned out that wardmaking could be accomplishedwithoutrunes. In fact, by sheer luck, Thorn had picked up a text whose author disdained runes as a method for warding, entirely because accuracy could be so critical, which made them useless for a sorcerer under duress or distraction.
The author, a sorcerer named Stearanos Stormbreaker, advised employing runes only for permanently installed wards,such as on a castle—or probably like the ones woven into the rose hedge—and only when they could be regularly reinfused with warding magic by their maker. Thorn allowed the book to close, contemplating the implications in wonder. That must be what Jada did when she left: she reinfused the permanent runes with warding magic.
More important: the warding magic worked separately from the runes. Jada had made them sound like one and the same, but clearly they were not. Jada might have even hired some other sorcerer to inscribe the runes on the cottage fence when it was erected, or in the climbing roses themselves, and the sorceress had simply activated and deactivated them as she left and returned.
All of which meant that Thorn could use the techniques this Stearanos indicated he’d describe later in the book to modify the wards to allow herself an opening in them. She didn’t need much, just a small gap for her to slip out, perhaps find a village.
Eagerly, inspired and excited as she hadn’t felt in a long time, Thorn flipped to chapter 20: “Thinning, Fraying, Penetrating, and Shattering: Four Methods for Breaking Wards.” Reading quickly, she committed the instructions to memory. This way, she could return the book before she started making breakfast, before Jada was even awake.
“Remember,” Jada said, checking the bags Thorn had packed for her, “you will stay within the perimeter of the garden during my absence.”
“Yes, Jada,” Thorn replied meekly.
“Don’t ‘yes, Jada’ me, missy. I haven’t forgotten your rebellious questions. I must be able to trust that you’ll stay safe inside the fence.”
“I understand,” she said, instead of “Yes, Jada,” but she musthave sounded wrong, because her guardian focused on her, the sound of suffocating feathers beating in the distance.
“If necessary,” she said softly, “I can make it so you can’t leave even the cottage.”
“But then who would tend the chickens and Nessie?” Thorn pointed out. She didn’t know what Jada meant by this new threat, but she was sure she didn’t want to find out.
“Don’t push me on this,” Jada warned in a quiet voice that was always worse than shouting. “If you give me any reason to believe that this new rebelliousness of yours will lead to the testing of boundaries any more than you’re already doing, I will confine you to this cottage. Or worse,” she added darkly. “Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now, go on down to the root cellar.”
“The root cellar?” Thorn echoed, fear striking her heart to a faster beat, cold sweat immediately trickling down her spine. She hated the cellar with its damp smell and the worms dangling palely out of the dirt walls. Needing the brightness of it, the bravery in him, she put a hand in her apron pocket, lightly touching the prince’s presence in the gem she kept there by day.
“Yes, Thorn. The root cellar. Don’t try my patience. Go.”
She didn’t dare drag her feet, but Thorn couldn’t make herself hurry as Jada followed her through the kitchen. Opening the door, she peered into the unlit pit, chilly even in summer, the wooden steps down more like a ladder than stairs. “For how long?” she asked.
“Longer, if you don’t get down there right now,” Jada answered, the magic wings wrapping around Thorn in silent threat. “Or do you need help?”
While it wasn’t that much of a drop, it still hurt to land on the hard-packed floor, so Thorn quickly climbed down.
“Count an hour,” Jada instructed, “and then you can come up. I’ll know if you cheat. Understand?”
“I understand.” She shivered already.
“Good girl. I’ll see you in a few days.” She shut the door, quenching the summer sunshine from above.
