Page 4 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

Every noble, upon their eighteenth season, would participate in a closing ceremony to swear fealty to the reigning monarch.

Though appearance was only mandatory on the first and last nights of the season, these eighteenth-season nobles were encouraged—no, expected —to pass the six weeks leading up to the ceremony in a first stay at court.

And this year marked my eighteenth season.

I’d told Father I could handle court for six weeks, but he’d been adamant. Sending his Wielder daughter to live at the palace would’ve felt like sending a deer into a wolf’s den, and he would only relax once these weeks of Rose Season had wilted off the calendar.

But with the festivity in full bloom tonight, he was on the brink of sweating through his coattails.

I grabbed his clammy hand and squeezed. “Back straight. Chin high. And by all the gracious gods, stay away from Rupert when he drinks. Last year, he breathed beside a candle and singed my eyebrows.”

Father actually cracked a faint smile at that. Then he briefly touched my cheek. “What would I do without you, my girl?”

Sudden guilt stabbed at me. He would unravel if he noticed the tinge of red paint staining my fingernails.

Returning his smile a little tightly, I descended the stairs at his side, one meringue joining the others on the white tray of the ballroom floor.

As the stench of roses swept over me, roiling my stomach, I inhaled the citrus-and-lavender perfume at my wrist. It was a trick Tari had learned at her mother’s clinic, and as usual, my nausea settled.

But it returned with a vengeance as I noticed Briar Capewell’s straw-yellow hair swishing through the crowd.

Father subtly angled himself between us.

He and Briar were first cousins on his mother’s side, and while Father and I had inherited most of our characteristics from the Paine side of the family—heavy brows, olive coloring, dark lashes around broody, almond-brown eyes—Briar presented a statuesque figure of creams and golds.

But today, her high cheeks blazed with florid anger.

The crisscross straps of her peach dress shifted with every violent footfall, threatening to reveal the Hunters’ Mark tattooed over her heart.

A defiant outfit choice.

The Crown forbade the Hunters from revealing their true identities, claiming that faceless executioners produced a greater fear.

But Briar Capewell, the head of the Hunter family, resented the powerlessness of anonymity.

When standing over a Wielder’s body, wearing the mask of the Hunters, she was horror incarnate.

But standing among the gentry, wearing the guise of a merchant, she was the bitter human equivalent of a lemon pith.

“The ship docked this morning, Heron,” she said, stopping before us. “Were you aware?”

“Hello to you, too, Briar,” Father mumbled.

“They’ve prepared the ambassadorial chambers.” She laughed roughly. “They should’ve prepared the dungeons.”

I frowned at Father. “An ambassador’s here?”

Father hesitated, seeming oddly reluctant to speak around me.

Briar said, “His Majesty is hosting an Ansoran ambassador for Rose Season.”

I fought to school my expression. Ansora, the Wielder-ruled empire across the sea, had always seemed like an illusion, glimmering at the map’s western edge.

While their ongoing conflict with our neighboring kingdom, Orren, had made their surrounding waters near impenetrable, the Ansoran mainland thrived with culture and prosperity, a haven for Wielders and Wholeborns alike.

And one of their ambassadors had journeyed here ?

“The king should’ve refused,” Briar said, popping my vision like a soap bubble. “Doesn’t he understand the risk?” She picked at a hangnail, uncharacteristically fidgety. “You’re a ruling lord. What’s the point of having influence at court if you don’t use it?”

“It’s not in my interest to influence our king’s political decisions,” Father said.

Briar’s lips thinned. “The Wielder will have free rein here. What if he gets his hands on your lovely daughter?”

Father tensed, but my specter was already rousing inside me. No wonder Briar looked so distressed.

“The ambassador is a Wielder?” I asked, breathless. “It’s been confirmed?”

“No,” Father said, his voice even flatter than his expression. This must be why he’d kept the news to himself. He’d wanted to avoid raising my interest, my hopefulness. He surely knew how much I wanted to meet another Wielder.

And he knew how dangerous that could be.

“All we know,” he continued, “is that the Ansorans requested an invitation for this year’s season. Their empress is known to be particularly vicious when affronted, and our king thought to preserve international relations.”

“With vermin ?” Briar spat.

Father flinched, and I almost flinched with him. The way most people said Wielder was usually insult enough. But now I imagined Briar spitting the word vermin at Marge and had to breathe deep to settle the spectral tug inside me.

A specter was said to be a natural extension of a Wielder’s physiology—a gathering of power not only governed by its Wielder’s intent but also deeply attuned to their subconscious. Their most primal and instinctive impulses.

Which was why, right now, my specter strained with my desire to yank Briar away by her hair.

“I suppose you know vermin better than anyone,” I said, heat clawing up my neck, “after so many years of scavenging around court.”

“Alissa,” Father warned, inching further between us. Rankling a Hunter was exactly what I shouldn’t be doing.

But even in her agitation, Briar seemed vaguely entertained.

“Your daughter’s tongue grows sharper each year, Heron.

You should train her to keep it inside that pretty mouth before it gets her into trouble.

” She smiled at me, and there it was—the only secret we shared, dripping like acid into the silence.

Because this was the exact smile she’d given me ten years ago, after she’d whipped her palm across my face.

Back then, I’d been too afraid of her to tell Father what she’d done. But she was no longer the greatest monster I knew.

I opened my mouth, but Father spoke first, his expression hard. “Be quiet, Briar.”

I startled, pride swelling in my chest. Father never risked standing up for himself against the Hunters. But he would always stand up for me.

Briar glanced at Father’s silver brooch: a circlet of penny blossoms, the Paine emblem.

At court, jewelry meant status. Rubies glittered from every corner, emeralds winked under crystal chandeliers, pink diamonds dripped from my own earlobes.

And while Father’s brooch sparkled with dark blue xerylites—coveted gemstones native to Vereen—Briar’s only adornment was the Hunters’ Mark over her heart.

The tattoo she wasn’t allowed to reveal.

Her cheeks became blotched again—an angry, resentful red. “My lord,” she conceded with a mocking air, her entire face puckering as though from a nasty taste. Lemon pith indeed .

Father turned to me, eyes shadowed. “Why don’t you go and find Carmen?”

With a glare at Briar, I departed. But as the ball raged around me, I didn’t search for my friend. I began examining each garment for a rising sun, the Ansoran insignia.

I had to find the ambassador.

I wouldn’t return here until the last night of Rose Season, and he might have left by then; I couldn’t lose my only chance at meeting another Wielder.

I wouldn’t expose myself, of course. Despite Father’s fears, I wasn’t that reckless.

But maybe just knowing of another Wielder’s specter would be enough—more than I’d had with Marge.

I hastened, growing giddy with anticipation, when Lord Rupert of Creak planted a mustache-tickling kiss on my knuckles and started rambling about the vineyard he’d acquired in Avanford.

“Oh, you’re not serious.” I scrunched my nose just so. “Avanish wine is horribly tart.”

“Tart?” Rupert adjusted his monocle. “Why, Fiona adored the stuff, gods rest her!”

I internally winced at the mention of Father’s late wife, a Creakish noblewoman I’d never met, but whose name I exploited with my every breath.

Lady Fiona’s death had occurred so shortly after my birth that Father had been able to pass her off as my mother without raising suspicion.

If these nobles discovered I was actually the bastard child from Father’s secret love affair, they would want me stripped of my title.

And if they learned my birth mother had been a Wielder , they would want me dead.

“I’ll make a connoisseur of you yet, dear girl,” Rupert continued. “I’ll send you a case for sampling. That ought to change your mind.”

He puffed up as though he’d won the argument, and I slipped away as a Parrian merchant approached him, eager to offload a case of rum.

After twenty more minutes of searching, I collapsed against the dessert table and downed a flute of sparkling wine. I was raising another, surveying the crowd, when a familiar voice said, “He’s not here.”

I lowered the flute as Garret slid beside me.

“The ambassador,” he clarified, his knowing gaze sweeping my face. “He’s making his appearance tomorrow.”

Hope flooded out of me as quickly as it had risen, leaving me hollow.

“It’s your eighteenth season.” Garret leaned back against the table and adjusted his bronze cufflink. “You’re bound to meet him during your stay.”

“I’m not joining court this year,” I said, surprised at the bite in my voice. Even more surprised that it wasn’t directed at Garret.

Each time I Wielded, I knew I scored another stress line into Father’s forehead, spun another silver thread into his hair.

And because Wielding was the most selfish thing I could never stop doing, I tried to appease him in everything else.

I didn’t push him to acknowledge the increase in Huntings; I didn’t push him to talk about my birth mother; I didn’t even push to join court for my eighteenth season.

But when I’d agreed to stay home, I hadn’t realized he’d been keeping me from another Wielder.

“Shame.” Garret’s faint, genuine smile pierced me through the ribs; it made his face seem softer. Younger. “I saw that trick you pulled on Rupert.”

It was Carmen, the princess of Daradon, who’d first taught me how to charm Rupert into sending me gifts. From there, I’d learned the secret to getting anything from anyone:

Never ask a person for what you truly want; wait until they offer it freely.

“You’ve always thrived here,” Garret said. “It’s your craft.” I tensed, waiting for the insult. But he left the compliment as it was—an invisible hand reaching across the chasm between us.

I stood a little straighter. Smacked that invisible hand away. “That’s what happens when you’re born into nobility.”

“Tell your father that.” He nodded toward a dim alcove, and I went taut.

Father usually spent these balls cloistered with the Jacombs of Dawning, his closest acquaintances at court.

But tonight, he was still shrinking under Briar’s tirade.

Probably paying for having shut her up within earshot of the gentry.

My specter squirmed. With my next exhale, I let it breach my bare skin. I unspooled a tendril across the cool marble floor, feeling the satisfying stretch of release from deep inside me. Then I slipped it under a nobleman’s shoe.

The man stumbled. And crashed right into Briar.

I chuckled under my breath.

Garret grabbed my arm, his soft smile gone. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” I wrenched away, all innocence. “I can’t help that she’s more sour tonight than usual. Though I’m surprised she has time to pout about the ambassador when she’s so busy with her nighttime excursions.” My tone turned bitter. “Ten Huntings within two months is bound to wear a person out.”

“Lower your voice.”

As Briar scrambled under the nobleman, I remembered her tight, anxious expression from earlier. And I understood what it meant.

“Oh,” I breathed, smiling grimly. “Don’t tell me the leader of the king’s Hunters is afraid of one little Wielder.”

Garret reached for my wine. “Maybe you’ve had enough.”

I pulled back. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me what to do.”

I was turning when Garret seized my wrist. He tugged me toward him and I gasped, stumbling into the space between us. Wine fizzled over our fingers.

“Is this fun for you?” he hissed. His stare bore down on mine, turning me rigid. “Seeing how far you can push before—”

“Before what ?” I gritted out.

His grip contracted around my wrist.

Before I expose you , I waited for him to say. Before I decide you’re not worth keeping alive .

My specter reared, and I was moments away from lashing it against him when he abruptly released me and dropped his gaze. A coiffed blond head crept into my eyeline, and my specter shriveled tight.

Then His Majesty King Erik Vard of Daradon asked, “Lady Alissa, may I have this dance?”