Page 80 of A Treason of Thorns

I’m not sure the House will listen, not after our strange and unsettling confrontation in the graveyard and its silence this afternoon. Burleigh isn’t a certainty to me any longer, when once it was my bedrock. But the memory flickers and dies, and a wave of lilies of the valley ripple toward me. Their sweet fragrance fills the hallway and I sigh. Part of me wants to cling to the inevitability of who I used to be, to go into Papa’s room, to run my hands along the scars that mar my House, and whisper to Burleigh thateverything will be alright, I’m here, I was born to be a Caretaker, you come before anything else.

Instead, I walk over to Wyn, lilies parting before my feet. I settle down on the bolster and rest my head on his lap, and he puts his book aside.

“Can I stay with you?” I ask, keeping my voice quiet in the emptiness of the hall. “Please, Wyn?”

“Always,” Wyn answers simply. I lie quite still for a while, staring at the debris-strewn floor, the cracked walls dripping mortar, the place near the main stair where the attic has caved in and a great beam rests slantwise, half of it propped up at ceiling height, its splintered end fallen into the corridor. So much has changed these last few months—once it was Wyn who’d take refuge in my room, feeling lost and ill at ease between the walls of Burleigh House. Now here I am, coming to him because he’s the only thing in this place that grounds me. Only with him do I find a momentary sense of belonging, of surety, of home.

Wyn’s hands move through my unbound hair. I shiver, though not with cold, and shut my eyes. Slowly, his undemanding touch and all the tension of the past summer overcome me. I’m half asleep when he speaks in a low voice, and at first I’m not sure if it’s my own exhaustion that’s muddled his words.

“Fowles in the frith,” Wyn recites. My heart jumps at the strangeness of his words, but slows again as I realize it’s Wyn’s own voice speaking, not Burleigh’s harsh and gravelly tones. “The fisshes in the flood, and I mon waxe wood—much sorwe I walke with for beste of boon and blood.”

“What’s that?” I mumble.

“Middle English verse,” Wyn says. “It’s what I’m reading. I read a great deal of it during the House arrest. And Burleighthinks in Middle English sometimes.”

“What does it mean?”

“The birds are in the wood,” he answers slowly, “the fish are in the flood, and I must go mad—much sorrow I walk with, for the best of bone and blood.”

“I don’t know if I like it. It’s sad.”

“I know. But it’s the one thing Burleigh and I agree on, most of the time.”

“Say it again?”

He does, but before he’s finished, I’m asleep.

The light is still thin and grey when I wake. I keep absolutely still, fixing this moment in my memory. Burleigh beneath me, anxious and brooding but quiet for now. Wyn beside me, so close I can feel the slow rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.

Then I get silently to my feet and take Wyn’s book from where it lies on the floor beside him. It strikes me that in better times, he and Alfred might have become good friends. But these are the times we have, so I take the stub of pencil he’s been using as a bookmark and scribble a note on the title page.

Wyn—

I’ve gone to get the heartstone, because I don’t want a fuss, and I don’t want to say any goodbyes. I know you’ll understand that. Could you get everyone off the grounds and out of the way first thing?

I’ll see you soon.

Violet

Leaving the book open to the note, I slip out the door. In my own room, I pull on my fen clothes and braid my hair and go down the main stairs of Burleigh House one last time, moving hesitantly among the brambles that slither up the staircase.

On the threshold of the front door, I pause.

“Will you wake everyone, once I’ve gone?” I ask. The House sends a soft-leaved vine climbing up the doorpost to twine around my finger and I sigh. Oh, Burleigh. Are we friends or enemies now? Why must you make it so hard for me to tell?

Outside, the snow is melting, leaving puddles and piles of slush everywhere. The air’s mild and soft, like a day in spring, but there’s an electric edge to it, a tension, as if a storm’s brewing. I pull on a pair of gum boots before leaving the House, but mud spatters the hem of my wrinkled skirt, so that by the time I reach the Shilling I look like quite a vagabond. Fitting, I suppose, that I should look as downcast and desperate as I feel.

The Shilling’s nearly abandoned at this hour but Frey’s cousin Ella, who manages things from late at night till midmorning, is behind the counter, a cheerful yellow scarf wrapped around her tightly coiled black hair. I give her a halfhearted wave.

“Is Frey up?”

“Does sheeversleep? She’s in the private dining room, balancing the books. Just ignore the placard, you can go right in.”

“Thank you, El.”

A little sign dangles from the dining room door, DO NOT DISTURB printed on it in decided capital letters. But I let myself in anyhow and Frey grumbles without looking my way.

“Can’t you read? No one’s allowed in here.” Frey’s got ledgersand small blank books and order slips and handwritten notes spread across the table, a fierce scowl on her face as she sorts out the business end of running the Red Shilling.