Page 1 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

O f all the treasonous acts I’d ever committed, this shouldn’t have been the one to get me caught.

Red water streamed between my fingers with each frantic sponge-drag, but even my frothing assault of soap and vinegar wouldn’t erase the Hunters’ Mark on Marge’s door. I was only spreading the paint around, making a mess of the rose pattern Marge had drawn above the door knocker last summer.

So much for preserving her memory.

Footsteps clopped behind me and I spun, heart racing. The air was still fuzzed and dewy as a morning peach, the jewel-toned houses barely flushed with color; I had to squint to see the figures through the haze.

I exhaled in a sharp blast. Not the guards. Just some children racing across the mosaic-encrusted road, too caught up in their laughter to notice me. They rounded the corner, and the street returned to its sleepy silence, the silver penny blossom trees rustling like sequins in the wind.

But a few streets away, the market was yawning awake and exhaling the stench of roses. Soon, the festivity of Rose Season would drag locals from their beds.

I was running out of time.

I dunked the sponge into the bucket and slapped it across the door once more, scrubbing until vinegar fumes stung my eyes.

Marge had loved the first day of Rose Season.

Last year, she’d gorged on so many syrup-steeped confections that we’d had to cancel our Double Decks game, and I’d brought her mint tea instead.

I’d risen in the early hours of this morning and, remembering her sweet, grateful face, had known I couldn’t leave the Hunters’ Mark on her door one more day.

The tenth Hunters’ Mark to appear in the kingdom of Daradon within the last two months.

The Hunters had never struck so frequently within such a short period, and the sudden, inexplicable increase had left me with a permanent chest-fluttering feeling.

It had made the locals nervous, too.

Another Wielder living among us all this time!

I’d heard them whisper. I once let her watch the children!

As if Marge hadn’t also volunteered at the clinic, or salted the ice off her neighbors’ doorsteps, or distributed lemon baskets when her potted trees had overflowed.

As if her existence had been a scandal and her slaughter an inconvenience.

I clenched the sponge, water veining my olive-brown skin. Marge should’ve let them break their bones on the ice. I would.

Footsteps pounded again, and this time I recognized those long strides. I whirled as my best friend braced her hands on her knees, her black braid snapping around her hip.

“The guards,” Tari said, panting. “They’re coming this way.”

I swore, hurling the sponge into the bucket. Our hands scrabbled to clean the evidence. Water slopped and wood clacked, and robins scattered at the noise.

“There!” Tari pointed across the street.

Three guards ambled up the pavement, their silver-stitched uniforms gleaming.

I dropped to the doorstep and mopped the water, red streaking under my sponge like a bloodstain. “How did they get here so fast? You were meant to be watching!”

She winced, bending to help me. “I got distracted.” A green gem swung from her neck like a pendulum, flashing rainbows over her rich copper skin.

My eyes snapped up. “You left your post for that ?”

“It was on sale!”

“It’s fake!”

Tari faltered, then plucked up the gem. “Really?”

I stood, trousers soaked. “Do you understand what a lookout does?”

“Do you understand what a cleaner does?” She gestured at the mark, now bleeding down the door. “Gracious gods, it looks worse than when you started!”

“If my father finds out about this—”

The guards’ voices halted me, now audible over our bickering. Father was the least of my worries.

I hefted the bucket, tipping water down my blouse. Murkier water ribboned downhill across the mosaic tiles; the guards would follow that trail to the perpetrators. Tari could outrun them, but I couldn’t.

I looked toward Marge’s door and swallowed. Houses were always locked up after a Hunting.

“Alissa, don’t,” Tari warned.

But the guards’ eyes would land on us soon.

So, committing my second treasonous act of the day, I reached for my specter.

It reeled out of me like a thread from an internal skein, and I exhaled as the ever-present tightness eased within me.

Though invisible to everyone else, my specter looked to me like a mirage-shimmer rising off hot concrete or the eddy of air above a flame—rippling faster today on account of my rapid heartbeat.

I breathed deeply, settling the urge to feed out more than I needed. There was a reason I’d never knowingly met another Wielder: to Wield was to risk exposure.

One strand would have to be enough.

I poured the tendril through the keyhole, reshaping it to fill the cavity—one of the first tricks I’d ever taught myself—and the lock clicked open.

I shoved Tari inside and hustled after her. I relocked the door as gloom engulfed us, my specter lurching in protest when I yanked it back beside my bones. Our breaths puffed into the silence, dust spiraling past our lips like vapor on a snow-frosted night.

My vision adjusted... and my blood chilled.

I’d imagined broken glass and upturned furniture—evidence of Marge’s struggle before the Hunters had forced dullroot, the specter poison, into her veins to trap the power beneath her skin.

This scene was somehow more disturbing. Because the lounge was exactly as I remembered, with the paint-speckled table and four mismatched chairs—for Tari, Lidia, Marge, and me.

Yet an unnatural layer of gray dust carpeted every surface, giving the impression of years of neglect.

As though Marge was already long forgotten by the world.

“It’s only been one week,” I whispered.

Tari’s angular face tightened with concern. “Are you all right?” she asked. Because she must have known how this room would affect me.

She knew my horror flowed alongside the deep, aching guilt of survival.

I shakily set the bucket down and approached the table. Once a month, Marge would shuffle the cards here for Double Decks. Tari and Lidia would pretend not to cheat while Marge and I would roll our eyes, and we would all trade town gossip over hot lemonade.

Now only one mug occupied the surface. Mold feathered in its center, Marge’s burgundy kiss crusting the rim.

In a gut-wrenching flash, I imagined my own bedchamber deserted like this: a half-empty glass of pomegranate tea sweating onto my vanity, the dark strands of my hair straggling around a wide-tooth comb. The last pieces of me, outliving the whole.

“Remember last summer,” Tari murmured, “when we moved the table outside? Lidia hid a pair of queens up her shirtsleeves, and they flew off...”

“But there was no breeze,” I said softly. “I remember.”

“Do you think Marge...?”

I’d asked myself similar questions all week: Had Marge ever Wielded her specter around us undetected? Had she, like me, suffered under the strain of constant confinement?

“She always hated when Lidia cheated,” I said.

Sad laughter. “Only because she didn’t know how to cheat herself.”

My heart panged at the memory of Marge’s eye twitching with every bluff. Had she tried lying to the Hunters when they’d come, hoping the eye twitch wouldn’t give her away?

Tari shuffled closer, dust pluming under her boots. “Do you smell that?”

I inhaled. My wet blouse clung to my chest. “I smell only vinegar.”

She shook her head. “It smells bitter. Like something burning.”

I frowned at the hearth. The smell of a fire wouldn’t have lingered unless someone had sneaked in more recently.

“The door was locked,” I said.

“Locks only stop Wholeborns. Maybe Marge had family she didn’t tell us about.” Tari spoke with tentative encouragement, but I trampled my flaring hope.

Tari had spent her early childhood in Bormia, where the small Wielder population lived unprosecuted; though a Wholeborn herself, she’d already met more Wielders than I would knowingly encounter in my lifetime.

I’d once petitioned Father to arrange for our passage there.

But Bormia didn’t accept refugees, he’d said, and even if it did, Daradon’s ships couldn’t cross the choppy waters into their territory.

Since then, I’d imagined finding a fellow Wielder in this prison of a kingdom. We could learn from each other, confide in each other. We wouldn’t be alone.

But Marge had been here all along, and I’d never guessed that we’d been concealing the same secret. She’d always seemed so free with her laughter—so different from everything I’d expected to find in another Wielder... So different from me.

Even if I miraculously crossed paths with a Wielder again, it would lead to the same painful ending: I wouldn’t recognize them as an ally until it was too late.

Swallowing a knot of emotion, I reached for Marge’s dusty table—

I gasped, my specter heaving me backward at the first touch.

“What is it?” Tari asked.

I scrubbed my hand across my trousers, gaping. The dust hadn’t felt like dust. And now my specter coiled deep inside me, squirming with the effort to get out, out, out —

A silhouette darkened the curtains. “Anyone in there?”

Tari and I shared a panicked look. Then we clambered under the table, elbows digging into ribs. The dust-flurry threatened to tickle up a cough, and my specter twisted again.

The door handle rattled. “Hello?”

“I’ll go,” Tari murmured. “Stay inside.”

I grabbed her wrist. “No.”

“It’s fine. I’ll feign parch fever.”

“And do what? Sneeze all over them?”

She rolled her eyes. “Parch fever makes people disoriented. I’ve seen it at Mama’s clinic.”

“Disoriented people don’t scrub Hunters’ Marks off doors.”

“No?” She flung a hand to her forehead, eyes saucer-round. “But I thought this was my house, sir.” Her whisper pitched up and down in hysteria. “The vandals must’ve come overnight!”

I gave her a deadpan stare. “They’ll never buy that.”