Thorn crouched on the cellar floor, not wanting to sit in the damp, counting the minutes until she could climb out. She made a small light to keep her company, mentally practicing the wardbreaking techniques, rewarding herself by revisiting the prince’s memory of a ride through the woods for each repetition. When an hour plus a little extra—just in case—had elapsed, Thorn climbed up the steps, easing open the door into the kitchen. The cottage was quiet. Thorn was alone and free to attempt her escape.
Just in case Jada came back for something she’d forgotten, Thorn resolved to wait for dusk. She completed her chores for the day. She milked Nessie and bedded the goat down in the little shed for the night. She put the chickens in their coop, too. Neither Thorn nor the dangers of the world could penetrate the wards, but animals could. The foxes and forest cats would love a goat or chicken dinner, given the opportunity. Once they lost a hen, one of Thorn’s favorites, an excellent hen, iridescent black with face tufts that she’d named Esmerelda and who’d wormed her way through the rose hedge and escaped. Apparently the wards kept only Thorn safe. She missed Esmerelda still.
At last, the light turned from golden to violet, signaling the end of the gloaming and the arrival of twilight. Thorn strolled slowly, sedately toward the garden gate, as if someone or something might notice if she made any sudden moves. Although she’d looked out that small portal in the fence many times, she saw it as if anew. The white picket fence extended in an arc, making a trellis for the roses. Their black-emerald canes wove a dense barrier in and around the fence, the leaves bristling with tiny blades, the thorns long and curved, the buds and blossoms heavy, glowing with buttery light in the purpling shadows, as if they’d soaked up the sunset colors, radiating back the warmpink-tinged golds, their thick, sweet scent heavy in the still summer twilight.
The gate filled the opening, though not completely, closing off the only briar-free aperture. The silvery lines of the runes shimmered along the wooden slats of the fence and through the roses themselves, sending out their unfriendly prickles for her to go away. Resisting the discomfort, Thorn made herself trace their precise, perfect lines with a questioning fingertip, careful of the thorns.
Jada’s magic, as familiar as Thorn’s own, infused the runes, but—as Thorn had wondered about—they’d been drawn and established by someone else. Her psychometry confirmed it, giving her an image of a tall, brown-skinned, and dark-haired man. He’d done the work with avid ambition and a fierce desire to protect—and as long ago as Thorn had been alive.
A thousand questions flooded her mind, but she set those aside to focus on this task: to see if she could thin the wards enough to open the gate.
She didn’t need to retrieve the book to do this. Thorn had developed her memory to perfectly reproduce the instructions from the text. She did get out the journal she’d put in her pocket. Precise documentation of all magical experimentation was good practice. So, Thorn had gotten her pink leather-bound journal off the shelf. Embossed with gold roses, the plush blank book had been a gift from years ago. Thorn had found it so pretty, the perfection of its creamy parchment pages too pristine to spoil. She’d never been able to bring herself to mar them with writing.
Now it would hold notes that would lead her to a new life, one where she could go to the city herself and purchase all the blank journals that caught her eye. She’d found a kind of company in writing down her thoughts and expressing her feelings.
Carefully noting the date and time, Thorn labeled the entry as attempt number one. She also recorded which technique she intended to employ. If the first didn’t work, she’d move to thesecond, and so on. She refused to allow any potential failures to dissuade her.
She unraveled the ward with meticulous patience, loosening it just enough to ease open the gate a narrow width that allowed her to gaze out into the darkening forest. The woods marched dense with the columns of trees. Birds sang their evening song in the canopy. And a path led away from the gate, weaving through the trees to a distant road. A road that led to the greater world. Waiting for her.
Allowing herself to feel the triumph of the moment, to savor the sweet taste of incipient freedom, she finally relaxed. She had succeeded.
Jada need never know. It would be her little secret. And in the morning, she would—
“Thorn,” Jada said, appearing suddenly on the path before her as if from nowhere, a wealth of rage layered into that single, quiet utterance of her name, invisibly potent wings unfurling in a promise of punishment that set her heart frantically pounding.
Jada’s voice rose to a scream like a fox in the dark night. “What have you done?”
2
Now that Rose had officially entered her twenties and her final year at the Hendricks Academy for Sorcerous Pursuits, she looked forward to finally beginning her glorious career as a preeminent sorceress of dream magic. She’d lived at school since her parents sent her away at the tender age of six and she wouldn’t miss it at all.
Despite her mother’s predictions that Rose would find friends, or at least peers, at the Hendricks Academy, she lived an isolated life. She was a quiet island with no visitors, within sight of a land teeming with people. Her teachers adored her. Her classmates did not.
At first, as a child caught up in the chaos of adapting to her changed circumstances and the excitement of her challenging new classes, Rose hadn’t really noticed her friendlessness. Mostly she missed Aster, her first and only friend, the pony growing chubby and lazy in the stables back at Northbrooke Keep. Now she only saw him on brief school holidays. She hadn’t had any friends at Northbrooke, unless you counted her nannies and tutors. Nor did she have any siblings. Not living ones, anyway. Nobody ever spoke of her dead twin. If not for the gravestone markedLILY OF NORTHBROOKE, with her birth and death dates the same as Rose’s own birthday, Rose might have forgotten about her sister altogether.
Sometimes Rose had wondered, though, if Lily had lived, whether she herself would feel more… normal. She never had liked being touched, even by her parents, and even before she’d manifested as an oneiromancer, her dreams had beenoddly vivid. Sometimes she felt more alive in dreams than awake. She certainly felt more comfortable in her skin.
Besides her inherent strangeness, as one of the youngest students at HASP—as it was referred to by the students, and some faculty—Rose had no natural cohort. Children were bound by the blood geas when their magic manifested or when regular testing identified their potential, in cases of weaker, less showy talents. Tales spoke of children as young as toddlers being bound. Supposedly, the infamous sorceress Oneira, greatest oneiromancer of them all, had manifested as powerfully magical so young that she’d been blood-bound and taken into HASP before she was old enough to talk in complete sentences.
Most schools didn’t accept students until around the age of twelve, the median age of manifestation. Also, as a standard business practice, few academies cared to invest in the intensive caregiving required for very young children except in very special cases. It was only with those outliers, like the infamously dangerous Oneira, who reputedly nearly destroyed the ancient castle that had been her family’s home for centuries, that the academies took in those very young and wildly uncontrolled someday sorcerers.
Rose was another of those outliers. While not as young as Oneira had been, Rose possessed nascent potential as a powerful oneiromancer, promising to be wildly talented in that rare and dangerous specialization. As a precocious only child, she was also unusually independent and mature, so HASP had been willing to take her in that early. Besides, her father, Clotaire, was determined that Rose have the best and most training possible. As a sorcerer contracted to the king of a neighboring realm, he possessed enough political influence to make what he wanted happen. A young child living among much older ones, and strange even to herself, Rose focused on schoolwork and making her father proud.
When adolescence hit, and everyone around her seemed toburst with wild socialization, Rose became keenly aware of her loner status. She did not know, however, what to do about it. Having an analytical mind and keen powers of observation, Rose spent some effort trying to determine why she didn’t have friends. Especially why none of the boys liked her. Even though she still didn’t like being touched, she’d gotten more tolerant of it as she grew older, and she thought she might actually enjoy it from one of the boys she had small crushes on. Except, they seemed to ignore her, instead buzzing like bees around certain girls that everyone seemed to have agreed were ideal for no reason she could discern. It defied rational explanation.
Aside from her general oddness, one factor that Rose determined set her apart was that everyone at the academy was aware that her contract had been purchased for an investment so significant that it bordered on breathtaking. Never mind that the vast sum also meant she would have that much more to pay off someday, the coin from her eventual contracts going primarily to debt service. Knowing the steep road she faced, and having a naturally studious nature with a belly full of fiery ambition cultivated by her father, Rose devoted herself to her studies with a focused diligence that inevitably stoked resentment within her classmates. Nothing she could change there.
As a final nail in the coffin that contained her deceased social life, HASP, like most academies, discouraged close friendships among the student population. Their future relationships would be determined by their employers and it wouldn’t do for them to have complicating loyalties outside of the ones required by their eventual contracts. None of them knew who might eventually contract their services. Any number of the many warring kingdoms might elect to employ the most powerful among them to assist in their ongoing conflicts of fear, greed, and desire. As sorcerers blood-bound to their contracts, they’d have no choice in their eventual enemies. Any of them might end up facing a former classmate on the battlefield. So, succumbing to the dubiousallure of friendship was the height of foolishness. Although the ever-shifting tides of romantic alliances seemed unconcerned with those details.
Besides all of that, Rose also lacked opportunity. Singled out for a specialized educational track from the beginning, Rose received individual tutoring almost exclusively. The larger survey courses where she might have had contact with other students covered material she’d already learned via intensive study with her father and the tutors he’d hired for her, so she was exempted early from those classes, all the better to advance in oneiromancy.
On the occasions when students did gather, Rose observed their gregarious interactions with distant fascination and a tinge of envy, especially those who paired off for those semi-illicit romances, giggling and cooing like birds. Some unused muscle in the vicinity of her heart twinged with longing to belong to someone—someone romantically, not her doting father—but she eventually set that emotion aside as not important, and as something Clotaire would be terribly hurt to know.
Rose mentioned the problem to her father only once, when he came on one of his regular visits.
“They fear you, rightly so,” he explained. “Having no intimates isn’t a problem. Quite the reverse, my rose. It’s an indication of your excellence. These pitiful boys recognize their own inadequacy compared to you and can’t handle it. What could they possibly offeryou?”
“I just get lonely sometimes.”
