Page 111

Thorn crept close and saw the sores rubbed raw around the Gulgot’s neck. The shell inside her shivered to see the Gulgot’s wounds. Thorn’s skin bulged around it, reshaping itself.

“See then?” she said. “She deserves to die. She hurt you, and she hurt me.”

The Gulgot’s nod made a whole breeze. “I understand.”

“The queen is only sixteen,” said Thorn’s mother. “She’s a child. Like you, Thorn. Like Brier, like Cub.”

“I don’t care,” Thorn snapped. “Shekilled—”

“She wants help,” rumbled the Gulgot. “She asks for help.”

“Who does?” asked Brier. She had planted herself beside Zaf’s body and was dutifully combing through Zaf’s snarled hair. Thorn decided she had never loved her sister more than she did in that moment.

“Queen,” answered Cub. His voice tripped over the syllables. “Ce-les... tyna. I hear her. She says, ‘Help me.’”

Thorn’s father frowned. “I don’t understand.”

With a frustrated groan, the Gulgot swung his head from side to side. “Your words are fast. They run away from me.”

Thorn watched the Gulgot’s face for a long time. Swallowing hard, she reached for his shaggy cheek.

“The queen wants help.” Thorn saw herself in the Gulgot’s bright black eye. “With what?”

With a low sigh, the Gulgot leaned into Thorn’s palm. His long-lashed eyes drifted shut. Thorn scratched the giant soft underside of his chin.

Then—carefully, her fingers trembling—Thorn placed her hand beside the wet scabbed sores marring the Gulgot’s neck.

Heat bled into Thorn’s fingers. A voice began to speak to her, and she understood it plainly, though it spoke with no words she had ever heard before. Shivering all the way down to her toes, Thorn knew at once that this was the Old Wild.

Her skin prickled, making her shiver. The Old Wild, gone for so long, was speaking toher. It whispered truths to her, just as it had begun to whisper them to Cub. And even though the whisper was faint, even though the Old Wild was still far away, Thorn saw everything it said like a faded storybook unfolding across her eyes.

She saw the queen, wrapped in a blanket with her sister,lying on a blue carpet embroidered with silver-and-lilac feathers.

She saw the queen’s tears, carving shimmering paths down her cheeks.

She heard the queen’s voice, telling a terrible story that no one should ever have to tell.

A curse. A sacrifice. A Fetterwitch. A wounded country, frightened of a monster.

A crying daughter, feeding her parents porridge curdled with poison.

But then, Thorn supposed, they all had their own terrible stories—their own sadnesses, their own sharp hurts, their own awful mistakes. It was just that Thorn had never imagined the queen to be someone who could cry on the floor. She had never imagined that a queen’s heart could be as heavy and tired and frightened as her own.

And she had never imagined that the monster living in the Break could be named Cub, and that he could miss his parents as terribly as Thorn had missed hers.

Thorn dropped her hand and leaned hard against Cub’s leg.

He sniffed her hair. His cold wet snout bumped her head.

Thorn closed her eyes, trying to slow her breathing. Thecurse’s shadows climbed around her, whispering like secrets and wriggling like worms. The pieces of her mind, now touched by the Old Wild, came together slowly. If she understood correctly, it wasn’t the Gulgot that would tear the Vale in two after all.

It was the curse.

Magic crafted by a scared queen and a powerful witch, decades and decades before Thorn was born. Magic made by people who heard an enormous creature trying to climb out of the crack in their ruined land and named it “monster.”

This curse was the thing that would devour the Vale at last—and it would do it soon.

And there was only one way to stop this from happening.