Page 3 of A Treason of Thorns

Bind it to the land

Blood for an ending

Mortar for a start

Unmake a binding

At your House’s heart

Unleash a House’s power

Let it all run free

Leave naught for the king

Naught for you or me

First House for a prison

Second for ladies’ rest

Third for a palace

Fourth to be blessed

Fifth House holds quicksilver

The Sixth ruins all

But for blood in its mortar

But for breath in its walls

But this time it doesn’t have the usual effect, not even when I fix my mind on the words.

All I see is Mama’s handwriting. All I can think of is the fact that she’s never coming back.

“Once upon a time there was a Great House,” I begin somewhat desperately. I haven’t told Wyn a story in over a year, not since he grew used to life here at Burleigh. But it grounds me, the sound of him settling in to listen, and the feeling of the immense, brooding presence that is my beloved Burleigh turning its attention in my direction. “There were the Sterlings, too, who lived and died for it. Their blood ran with its mortar. Their bones rested in its ground.”

When I turn away from the fireplace, every inch of the bedroomfloor is carpeted with new-sprouted daisies. Slowly, I lock up the sadness of my mother’s leaving deep inside, because I know I would give anything for this place. One day, my blood will run with its mortar. One day, my bones will rest in its ground.

1

Nine Years Later

BENEATH ME, THE FLAT BOTTOM OF MY BOAT THRUMSever so slightly as a fenland pike bumps against it. The long, gleaming creature is focused on its fishy business, and I’ve been motionless for near an hour, letting gentle currents in the marsh water carry me this way and that. I’m all but invisible to the pike, and an invisible fisher is a successful one.

Sun beats down on my bare head, and heats the long rope of my braid. Sweat trickles between my shoulder blades and down my raised arm, which holds a sharp-tipped fishing spear aloft. This is the one thing that affords me relief—this moment where everything comes together and all of me fixes on a single goal. I’m no longer Violet Sterling, dispossessed daughter of a treasonous nobleman, too long separated from her family home. All the aching worry over Papa and Wyn and my House recedes, and I become whole instead of fractured—Vi of the Fens, who never ends the day empty-handed.

In this moment, I distill into my most elemental self. A level head. A keen set of eyes. A pair of hands that move like quicksilver,or summer lightning. The fish turns over on its side, exposing a glistening expanse of scales.

In an explosion of spear and net and brackish water, I haul the pike aboard. It thrashes ferociously and the boat rocks, but a quick blow from the hatchet I keep under my low seat puts an end to that. Shoving my braid back over one shoulder, I finally allow myself to grin, to wipe the sweat from my forehead, and to feel that my nose has burned terribly yet again. It’ll peel and freckle, and Mira will scold, but so be it. We’ll eat for half a week thanks to this fish. And in this moment of clarity I’ve found a way to shed the creeping anxiety that’s plagued me these past years. At least for a little while.

But even as I straighten and stand above my catch, the sense returns—that I am too far from home, but still bound to it by a long, taut stretch of line. It’s not just Burleigh I can’t get past, either.

“What do you think of that, Wyn?” I murmur. I only indulge the habit of speaking to him when I’m alone on the fens, careful to make sure no one hears. God knows who actually talks to Wyn now—who takes his silences and his moods into account, who lets him stay close when the night is too long and too dark, full of noises and shadows that remind him of things he’ll never speak of. I hope it helps, that I send my voice to him when I can.

With the trackless expanse of the East Fen surrounding me, there’s only a miry waste of bogs and silt deposits and tidal estuaries to hear my secret conversations. In places, the land’s been shored up and laid to pasture, so that farmhouses and sheep enclosures stand out incongruously against the marshland. It’s all a jumble and a maze, but I know this place better than any other save one. The currents speak a language I’ve learned, the seabirds call to me, andthe brassy blue sky above is a map waiting to be read. The marshes are honest, if you understand them, and they always play by their own particular set of rules.