Page 13 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

T he noise woke me.

Firewood popped and embers spattered and footsteps clicked, each sound a hammer strike against my temples. I opened one eye to a smear of stark color—white walls and an orange blaze from the fire. The world throbbed around me, squeezing too tight. I groaned.

“You’re awake,” Garret said from beyond my hazy eyeline. “Good.”

“What did you do to me?” I mumbled, easing myself up. I was lying on a hard sofa, the miserable heap of my skirts puddling off the edge. Gods, whoever designed a dress with this much fabric wanted courtiers to die painful deaths.

I touched my forehead, and my arm grazed the open side of a blazer. Garret’s blazer, draped like a stiff blanket around my shoulders.

I frowned.

“Other than rescue you from a group of brutes despite your own efforts to thwart me?” he asked. “Nothing. You fell asleep during the ride. Your body’s still working off that nightmilk, so you’ll feel bleary for a while.” A pause. “The food should help.”

My vision blinked into clarity. A teapot piped on the low table before me, alongside hot buttered scones and an herbed pie, steam ribboning through its lattice holes. Two pink sugar cubes had been prepared inside a teacup, the way I’d always liked.

And beside the food, reflecting the flames, sat Garret’s unholstered knives.

I whipped my head around, suddenly over-alert. Cold memory crashed into me. It was all here—the white sofas under flat-weave rugs, the glass ornaments on the bookcase, the orange blossoms sweetening the air—as if Wray Capewell’s office had been preserved in wax for a decade.

They say this will be mine someday , a young Garret had told me minutes before Briar had caught us here. But they’re wrong. I’ll have run away by then.

You can’t just leave , I’d said. Where will you go?

With you, obviously. Where else would I go?

The past swirled away, leaving the bitter dregs of the present. Garret had brought me to Capewell Manor.

Into the Hunters’ territory.

“You really should eat something.” He was talking again. “That much nightmilk will produce a headache unless—”

My specter gusted free.

A thud , then a grunt as my power pinned Garret against the wall, rippling fiercely, keeping him away from me as I scrambled for the door.

Silver flashed between his fingers. “Alissa, wait.”

I wrenched the door open—then pain , sharp as a blade on skin. My specter smacked back to my body, and my knees hit the floor.

I doubled over, whimpering. My specter quivered against my bones.

Through spotted vision, I saw Garret set a double-edged knife atop his desk. Put your dirty specter on me again , he’d once said, and I’ll cut through it, Wielder.

I’d always hoped he’d been bluffing.

Apparently not.

“Be gentle, please,” he said now, disapproving. He gestured to his face: the raw bruises; the nose gashed at the bridge; the left eye, puffed and bloodshot. “I just took a beating for you, if you remember.”

“Why did you bring me here?” I growled.

“It was closer than your estate.” His shoes clacked forward. “And holding you upright in that saddle wasn’t exactly easy. Do you know how much that dress weighs?”

I recoiled as his shadow loomed over me. But he only shut the door, locked it, and pocketed the key. Then he offered me his hand.

I ignored it.

“You can’t keep me here.” My specter was already convalescing; in a few seconds, I’d be able to unlock the door myself.

Garret sighed, withdrawing his hand. “And they call courtiers dramatic.” He turned toward the seating area. “If I wanted to keep you here, you would’ve woken in the hold.”

The hold.

I stood as the scenes flipped through my mind: the wagon, the dullroot ash, the instinctive recoil of my specter.

“There were people in that wagon,” I said with disgust. “Wielders.”

“Prisoners,” Garret clarified. “Briar’s prisoners.

” He took a medicinal jar from the low table and eased into an armchair.

He wore just his dark shirt tucked into tailored trousers, and his edges appeared softer than usual.

But he sounded sharper than ever when he said, “How do you think she’ll react if she discovers your father freed them? ”

My specter shuddered. It was exactly what I’d feared when Keil had ordered Father into Capewell Manor.

“You freed them,” I said.

“That Wielder’s ransom note suggests otherwise.

It was addressed to Heron, after all.” Garret set the jar on the armrest. Began unbuttoning his shirt.

“Briar was called away on business tonight. But she’ll return to the hold to find her prisoners gone, and that ransom note sitting in their empty cell.

I expect she’ll put the pieces together. ”

I gaped at him, blood rushing behind my ears. This was why he’d ordered Father to stay behind. So he could plant Keil’s ransom note in the hold.

And frame my father.

My cheek smarted with a phantom pain—made worse by how small this room made me feel. Briar had hit me here, had battered Garret when he’d only been a child.

If she believed that Father had infiltrated her territory... she would tear him to pieces.

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered. “My father has done nothing to you.”

Anger flashed in Garret’s eyes. Then they iced over again. “I can retrieve the note before Briar sees it.” He unscrewed the medicinal jar. “But I’ll need a reason.”

My specter bristled, and I was about to ask whether keeping all his teeth was a good enough reason—

Then I glimpsed his wrist. And my legs weakened.

Garret’s oath band was gone. The vow he’d sworn to the Capewells, the promise that had bound him for seven years... He’d been released from it.

How?

He parted his shirt, wincing, and my gaze trailed down his torso: the Hunters’ Mark tattooed over his heart, the hard planes of taut bronze skin... and then the angry red blossom across his ribs. He dipped his fingers into the jar, and spread the salve tentatively across the bruise.

I could strike him against his injury. I could unlock the door and run. But I didn’t know where the Capewells kept their Wielder prisoners; I hadn’t even realized they kept prisoners until tonight.

I wouldn’t find that ransom note before Briar returned.

And Garret knew it.

I drifted toward the glow of the fire and sat rigidly on the opposite sofa, the low table creating a barrier between us. The collar of Garret’s blazer skimmed my neck, and I shrugged it off, having forgotten I was wearing it.

He frowned when I tossed it aside.

“What do you want?” I asked, shaking despite the warmth.

Garret tipped his head back, shutting his eyes as he exhausted half the jar onto his ribs. I gritted my teeth at the insult; if he was closing his eyes, he didn’t consider me a worthy opponent.

The column of his throat bobbed with the words “A thank-you would be nice.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You should be. Do you know how hard it’s been to keep Briar off your scent all these years? There are thousands of Wielders in Daradon, all practicing self-restraint. But you like to spin coins and trip nobles. You like to make my job that much harder.”

I straightened, baffled by the claim that Garret had been actively protecting me.

Then his other statement took hold. And my specter tingled.

“ Thousands ,” I breathed.

“The Avanish family on Laurel Street. The baker who runs the winter market.” He opened his eyes, watching me through dark lashes. A mocking smile ghosted his lips. “I have a list, if you like.”

“Why aren’t they—?”

“Dead?” He sat up and closed the jar, his torso gleaming.

I suddenly wished I’d struck him before the salve had numbed the worst of the pain.

“Two centuries ago, Wielders comprised a quarter of Daradon’s population.

Kingdom-wide tensions made it easier to pass the Execution Decree, but the Crown couldn’t target them all at once.

A single specter can be more physically powerful than ten Wholeborns, and even the weakest specters have the advantage of invisibility.

Given the chance to fight, the Wielders would’ve won.

“Instead, the Crown anointed a group of mercenary brothers—your ancestors—as Hunters, and gifted them a Spellmade compass to track Wielders. These brothers targeted Wielders after nightfall, in every corner of Daradon, so nobody could predict the next victim. Two Wielders might have lived in opposite houses, one chosen for the Hunt, the other inexplicably spared. When enough Wielders are left behind, a phenomenon occurs. The Wielders count themselves lucky. Grateful , even. To preserve that good luck and avoid discovery, they stifle the only power that could save them. They slink into the shadows of society, and a civil war is avoided. After all, Wielders can’t unite if they’re hiding from one another.

And those who try to unite... Well, they’re dealt with harshly enough that none follow in their footsteps.

” He spoke these last words pointedly—with something like satisfaction.

There had only been one attempted uprising in recent history: the Starling Rebellion. While that rebellion hadn’t lasted long enough to unite Daradon’s Wielders, it had cost many Wholeborn civilians their lives.

Civilians like Garret’s birth parents.

How had I never considered it before—his own quiet resentment? The personal vengeance that must have transformed each kill into a catharsis? Hunters had executed my mother... but Wielders had slaughtered both his parents.

“So, we all deserve it, then?” I asked, horror-struck. “Because of the crimes of the few?”

He looked at me, long and hard, the intensity prickling my scalp.

And I realized I would rather be back in those tunnels with my kidnappers.

I would rather be anywhere than in this room, with the happy little teapot and the sleepy heat kissing my brow.

Because despite the seven years of frost between us, I’d never felt fearful of Garret.

Until now.

Now I felt like a Wielder alone with a Hunter.