Page 21 of A Treason of Thorns

“I’ll stay—” Papa began, but then all three of us turned to face the sea, as with a strange rushing noise the water pulled away from shore. One moment it was there, and the next gone, receding with unnerving speed.

“Violet.”

I tore my gaze away from the retreating water. Mama had left the carriage and was tugging at my hand. “Come with me. You and I will go somewhere safe. Let your father deal with this. It’s what he does.”

There was bitterness in her last words, and I didn’t like it, not one bit. I stood at her side and watched in an agony as Papa went back down the pier and out onto the empty beach. Damp sand stretched far, far out to sea, pockmarked with shells and the little holes dug by clams. The boats moored to the pier hung from their painters, or snapped them and fell to the mud below.

“Violet Sterling, you will come back to the carriage with me at once.” I could hear from the break in Mama’s voice that she was near hysterical, but Papa seemed so alone, out on the sand with no one to stand beside him. I’ve never been able to forget the look Mama gave me as I slipped my hand from hers and ran down the pier, racing across the sand. As if drawn against her will, Mama followed in my wake.

“Eloise,” Papa said as Mama arrived at his side. Silent tears pooled in her eyes—she’d learned long ago that sobbing had noeffect. “I need your help. I need you to take the key. I can shift more magic without it, and you can channel some as well.”

That startled me. I’d never seen Papa without the Caretaker’s key, which he kept tucked into his fob pocket, secured on the end of a gold watch chain. No one was allowed to touch it—not me, not Mama, not Jed. I knew, with a child’s knowing, that the key kept him safe when he worked with the House. That it let him move Burleigh’s magic, directing the flow of power here and there with his own energy and attention, while ensuring the House did not leak mortar into his living blood, or take more from him than he could give.

Mama’s face went very white. “I won’t, George. I want nothing to do with any of that and you know it. Isn’t it enough that I suffer through living under Burleigh’s roof?”

Papa turned to me and two bright spots appeared on Mama’s cheeks.

“No,” she said, the word all resentment and sharp edges. “If you give the key to our daughter—ourchild—I swear to you, George, I will pack my bags and leave. Does nothing mean more to you than that House?”

“Violet, will you take the key?” Papa asked. I nodded solemnly and held out both hands.

Mama stifled another sob and went back up the beach, tripping and crying all the way. It hurt me to hear her, but the key fit into my hands as if it were made to rest there, warm in my grip, warmer than I’d expected. It sent a little electric thrill from my head to my toes, and I could feel the House’s energy so much more clearly, running through the ground beneath my feet. That energy focusedwith all-consuming intensity on the horizon, and the stormhead, and a strange gleam of light that stretched across the sea. I squinted and the gleam resolved itself into a wall of water, taller than I’d imagined possible, rushing in toward the shore.

Raw fear poured through me. The key blazed hot but I refused to let it go. Papa trusted me to hold it, and whatever came, I meant to keep my word.

“Alright, Burleigh,” Papa said, crouching in a familiar posture and sinking his hands into the damp sand that surrounded us. “Do what must be done. Take whatever you need.”

Something like a blast of wind hit me, but I felt it inside, not outside, and knew it must be House magic surging out to sea to meet that terrifying wave. Papa dug his hands deeper into the sand and I clutched the key desperately, though it burned in my grasp.

The earth beneath me trembled with the House’s effort, as it pushed against the incoming sea, striving to unmake the wall of water racing into shore. Papa trembled, too, without the key to safeguard him. He shook and shook, until I feared the House might tear him limb from limb.

“Stop, stop,” I shouted, clinging to the key, but tremors still racked Papa and that dreadful wave roared closer, already halfway through the bay and taller by far than Burleigh House itself.

With nothing to guide me but the overpowering current of House magic flowing out to sea, I stepped in front of Papa, as if to shield him from the rushing wave. The roar of its coming was so loud it ate up my defiant, wordless scream as I clutched the key and fell to my knees, plunging my own hands into the sand and squeezing my eyes shut.

Noise and fury.

Fear.

The roar of the wave.

The cold touch of mortar and magic rushing through me.

I shook, and the earth shook, and then...

Salt water, welling gently up around my legs.

My eyes flew open. In spite of the House magic I’d worked, the protection of the Caretaker’s key had let it pass through me harmlessly. My hands looked ordinary as ever, with no trace of mortar left behind. Just pale skin and the small pink bracelet around my left wrist—the mark I’d worn since birth.

The wall of water had gone, along with the stormhead and the wind. Small, docile waves lapped their way into shore, gradually moving up the beach to the high-tide mark. They were ankle-deep already when I turned and saw my father, lying crumpled on the sand, his face seamed with veins of stone grey. Stumbling to him, I pressed my warm forehead to his cold one and sobbed.

But a few brave souls were already emerging from the houses along the bay. They ran to us, and helped me pull Papa up past the high-water mark.

“Where’s your mother?” the fisherman who’d warned us of the storm asked gruffly.

It was only then that I looked, and saw she’d been good to her word. The carriage was gone. I had never felt so lost as in that moment, knowing my mother had fled and my father might breathe his last at any time.

They put us up in the public house and I stayed at Papa’s bedside for three nights as he alternately shook with chills and burned withfever. Mortar leaked from his pores, staining the bedsheets and filling the room with an unnatural, stony smell. I clung to Burleigh’s key, never letting it go whether I woke or slept.