Page 70 of A Treason of Thorns

I cannot and will not lose him again.

“Do you think we’ll ever just be ordinary?” I ask after a long silence passes between us. We sit together, staring sadly at the ruins of the back woods. “Just Violet and Wyn, a girl and a boy, who can sort out who they are, both apart and together?”

“I don’t know, Vi,” Wyn says. He kisses the top of my head and I sigh. “I really don’t know.”

24

I WAKE FROM A SCANT TWO HOURS OF TROUBLED SLEEP,the smell of old leaves and river mud still clinging to my skin, and find myself plunged into memory.

Burleigh’s wintry woods are all around me, and the wicket gate at the edge of the grounds is within arm’s length. But its frame of twining branches does not show views of the countryside beyond, as it did when I was a child. Instead, it’s filled in with honey-colored stone, as if a bit of the House’s wall has come out to the woods to bar anyone from entering and exiting by the back way. As I sit and watch, Wyn appears.

It’s the Wyn I’ve come to know through Burleigh’s eyes, the boy I never knew who spent seven years locked within these grounds. He wears a moth-eaten, cast-off coat of Papa’s, and snowflakes have gathered on his shoulders and in his hair. He walks down the woodland path, hands shoved deep in his pockets, and often glances back worriedly, as if expecting something to stop him.

Wyn draws abreast of me, and his breath smokes on the cold air. He holds out a hand and presses it to the unyielding stone that fills the wicket gate.

“Open,” he says, and his voice cracks on the word. “Open, please. Let me be free of this place.”

There’s a grinding of stone and Wyn’s eyes light. But the bricks split only a little, and he jumps back with a shout as black spiders pour out over his hand.

Wyn brushes frantically at his sleeve and stumbles backward, tripping over a raised tree root and falling to the ground. It’s then that I notice Papa, slinking down the forest path.

He’s unshaven, with a thin, snarled beard, and wearing ragged, filthy clothes. Even from a distance, I can see the grey pallor of his skin and unnatural sunkenness of his eyes, which glitter darkly in the winter light. Mortar weeps from them constantly, so that every minute or two, he’s forced to raise a hand and wipe it from his face.

“It’s no good,” Papa says, his voice dry and hollow. “You can’t get out that way. I’ve tried.”

Wyn scrabbles around to look at my father, and I see naked fear on his face. “George, what are you doing out here?”

Papa crouches in front of Wyn. “The House let me out. Because it doesn’t like what you’re trying to do.”

“Let me go,” Wyn begs again, this time of Papa. “I’ve had enough. Please.”

My father puts his head to one side, considering, and the gesture is strange, for I never saw him do so as a child. “Where will you run, if I set you free? Would you go to her? Would you bring her back, to take your place so that you can walk away unbound?”

“I would never,” Wyn says, and there’s ferocity behind the words. “I’d keep her away from here altogether.”

Papa glances up, at the branches, the sky, the air.

“And Burleigh would have no one,” he says. Then his attentionreturns to Wyn with a fixed intensity that makes me shudder.

“Why the gate?” Papa gestures to the trees, and the open spaces between them, through which hedgerows and sloping hills are just visible. “You’ve lived here for too long, boy. You’re so fixed on the idea of needing a doorway to come and go. If you want your freedom, steal it. Creep out through the trees, like a fox, like a stoat, like a beast of the fields.” The whites of his eyes gleam, and he waves a hand wildly. “What you covet is before you. Reach out and take it.”

Wyn gets to his feet, casting an uncertain glance at the forest’s edge. “But the House—”

“But the House,” Papa mimics. “Do you trust me, or not?”

Looking down, Wyn mumbles something.

“What? Speak up!” my father snaps.

When Wyn looks up, there’s defiance in his eyes. “I said I trust the man you were.”

“Well, there it is, then.” Papa wipes mortar from his face with one sleeve. “You’ll just have to stay here and rot, because you wouldn’t believe what I had to say. The House will likely kill us both, you know, when it can’t take any more. You feel it, don’t you, boy? Its suffering, creeping up from the earth. I know you do—I can see it on your face every morning and every night. Before long, it’s going to snap, and that will be the end of you and me.”

Wyn takes a step toward the wood’s edge, and then another.

“Go on,” Papa jeers. “Show some spine, for once in your life.”

I draw my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them, trying to hold in how badly it hurts, seeing my father so. Hearing him hurt Wyn.