Page 47 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

T he door ricocheted off the wall before slamming shut behind me.

Keil had been pacing his ambassadorial chambers, arms crossed over his chest. His face slackened as he looked between me and the door. The door he’d locked. “How did you—?”

“Your cronies nearly got my friend killed last night,” I said, storming forward.

Keil blinked. Shifted. Then his face became guarded in a way I’d never seen it. “From what I heard,” he said slowly, “they saved your lives.”

“Was that before or after they tried to interrogate us?”

He assessed me with a gaze void of his characteristic charm. “What were you doing in those tunnels?”

“Vereen is my province. I could’ve been hosting a tea party in those tunnels and you still wouldn’t have the right to ask me that. So, unless you plan on kidnapping me again, I’m asking the questions. How long have you been plotting a secret alliance with Carmen?”

Keil went rigid, and I knew I’d struck truth.

The realization had emerged only after the night’s chaos. The meeting between Carmen and Dashiel at Backplace; the deliberate kiss she’d planted, as if she’d known someone would be watching. Keil had been in the city that night—but not because he’d stolen her Bolting Box. He hadn’t needed to.

He’d been the one to deliver it.

He’d likely left it in Carmen’s lounge before catching me in the bedchamber. When Carmen had deposited the box in her vanity drawer, he’d played along, offering enough information that I wouldn’t suspect him.

But that meeting had made us wary of each other; while I’d believed he was after the compass, he’d believed I was after their secret—to use against them, perhaps, as another piece of leverage.

Crossing paths again near Backplace had solidified our respective theories.

I’d never considered that he’d entered the time and location into that Bolting Box.

That he’d been a part of Carmen’s secret meeting.

And there could only be one reason for the secrecy.

Why play a king’s bride when I could play king? Carmen had said. Because she wanted Erik’s crown. And she would use Ansoran support to get it.

Keil had never been searching for the compass at all.

“I understand why she would need you,” I said. “But what does Ansora get out of it?”

Keil’s jaw ticked for three long breaths.

“Fine.” I turned. “I’ll ask her myself.”

“Wait.”

I faced him, eyebrows raised.

“If this gets out,” he said quietly, “Wielders could get hurt.”

“ Your Wielders?” I scoffed. “After last night, I think I can reconcile myself to that event.”

I swiveled again, only to crash into Keil’s specter.

My own specter blazed to life with a force that shook me. And in that white-hot second, I knew I was the stronger Wielder between us. I knew I could tear Keil’s specter apart if I wanted to—could splinter it out like a eurium blade, until he felt the pain deep in his bones.

I forced myself to rebalance, to bury the strength.

“Not just them,” Keil said, oblivious to my internal battle.

He stepped closer and lowered his voice.

“My sister journeyed here before me as an envoy of a different kind. With the Huntings rising so rapidly, she and Carmen were working to find vulnerable Wielders and offer them safe passage out of Daradon. That’s when the Hunters found her.

That’s why they kept her. They realized she was reaching out to other Wielders, but they didn’t know why. ”

I straightened, taking it all in.

So we keep them for weeks? Lye had said last night. Until it’s done?

He’d been referring to the date on the shipping documents I’d found in Carmen’s chambers. Not a means for her own escape... but for the escape of Wielders.

This was why the empress had sanctioned Keil’s rescue mission but hadn’t let him travel to Daradon without diplomatic immunity. Because if the Hunters had discovered Carmen’s plans with Ansora—if they’d managed to torture the information from Keil’s sister—it would have been enough to start a war.

“Carmen was helping to locate these Wielders?” I asked.

“Yes. And in return for aiding our people, my empress will support her claim to the throne if and when she chooses to make it.”

“The Wielders—how did Carmen find them?”

Keil went silent. He couldn’t come up with an answer.

But I could.

Was Nelle the keeper after all? After months of brutality, was she now using the compass to “help” Wielders and put her daughter on the throne?

I laughed in disbelief, lightheaded. “And your cronies think I’m fooling you.”

Keil remained stone-faced. “Carmen is not fooling me.”

“You’re so sure about that? You’ve known her for less time than it takes milk to turn rancid.”

“And in that time,” he said firmly, “she’s given me no reason to question her motives or her sources.

Every connection she possesses, she’s used for our aid.

She disclosed safe, secret naval routes for our Ansoran vessels, and now she’s helping Wielders find refuge—innocent people who would otherwise be slaughtered. ”

“Yet she fed you false information. She sent your Wielders to those prison tunnels, didn’t she? And they were conveniently empty. Aren’t you curious as to how she knew about them?”

“I’m more curious as to how you knew about them. You’re the one who rifled through Carmen’s belongings and followed her to Backplace. You’re the one who possesses a eurium knife bearing the same symbol as the one in those tunnels.”

“Yes, I suspected they would tell you as much.” I reached into my pocket for the parchment on which I’d drawn the symbol.

I’d overlooked it before. But to have been etched into their weapons and blood-painted in that Wielder prison, this symbol had to hold significance to the copycats—a name or location or something else entirely.

It could lead me straight to the keeper who’d ordered my father’s murder.

My specter throbbed in vicious anticipation. Because whether or not the symbol led to Nelle, I would be ready.

Keil’s face was unreadable as I tossed the parchment on the lounge table.

“They said the symbol is ancient Ansoran. Read it.”

“I can’t,” he said.

My voice darkened. “You owe me a favor, Ambassador.”

“And the terms were specific: Any favor that is within my power to grant. This is a dead language. Even if any living being could read this symbol, I wouldn’t know how to find them.” He shook his head and said carefully, “You can’t demand this of me.”

“As long as I know what I know, I can demand anything of you.”

He flinched as if I’d struck him. He looked me over, aghast. “Where is your honor?”

“You would lecture me about honor? You came to Daradon on the pretext of friendship while planning to support a coup for Erik’s throne.”

“You’re defending him now? He is—”

“He is what , Ambassador?” I stepped up to him, holding his stare. “What do you have to say about the king who holds your life in his hands?”

Keil’s eyes sailed over me again, disbelief mingling with pain.

My conscience tugged at me. Whatever other cruelties the empress of Ansora had committed, Garret had misread her intentions in sending her ambassador to court.

Keil had never wanted the compass; he’d only wanted to help the Wielders of Daradon—the people he considered his own.

He wanted to save them from these Huntings, just as I did.

But he was working with Carmen to do it. He believed he was doing the right thing by trusting her—and that was precisely the problem. Keil gave his trust too freely, and to the wrong people. Even when he’d believed I was after his secret, he’d trusted me .

Carmen and her mother might very well be responsible for the rise in Huntings; Carmen might now be leading these Daradonian Wielders into a trap . But Keil wouldn’t believe it until their bodies lay scattered around him.

And he certainly wouldn’t believe that she had anything to do with my father’s murder.

Even if I did.

The irony was crushing: For the first time since we’d met, I was sure Keil wasn’t my enemy. But as long as he remained blind to Carmen’s manipulations, as long as she and her mother remained the most likely suspects in my search for the keeper... I would have to make him one.

We seemed to harden in the same moment, each resigned to our positions on the battleground—on opposite ends, as we had been all along.

“I’m sorry, Lady Alissa.” He drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “I cannot help you. And I do not believe your threats.”

It could’ve been the words or the severity of his tone, but I knew this was no longer the man who’d trailed his specter down my spine atop the balcony. Nor was this the ambassador who’d handled those dullroot glass shards with a feigned smile.

This was the soldier who’d fought in the Western War. The commander of the Wielders who’d attacked my estate.

This was the man who saw me as a Hunter’s daughter.

So I would give him a Hunter’s daughter.

“You’re not only gambling with your life now,” I said, dangerously soft. “What do you think Erik will do to Carmen when he discovers she’s trying to steal his crown?”

“You wouldn’t throw her to the wolves,” Keil said. He sounded uncertain.

“No?” I lifted my chin, my smile dripping poison. “Dare me.”

Keil swallowed, and I knew he saw the truth in my eyes. Saw that, for the first time, I wasn’t bluffing.

“Carmen is a good person,” he bit out.

I choked on a laugh. “You still don’t understand?

There are no good people . Your Wielders aren’t good, and the princess isn’t good, and the sympathizers you watch in awe aren’t good.

Shall I tell you how I know that? It’s because I watched them, too.

I watched them drop their staffs and fall silent as one of their own was dragged forward.

I watched as the king’s guards tied the man to a lantern pole and the king ordered them to—” I gasped, my specter surging.

After four years, that day at the Opal still had so much power over me.

“The sympathizers just stood there ,” I said through my teeth. “The guards didn’t need to hold them back. Because nobody tried to stop it.”

Keil’s face had lost its color, stunned and bewildered. But he recovered quickly. “They were afraid,” he said.

“They were cowards . Erik tested them that day, and they failed.”

“And what of you?” Keil narrowed his eyes. “If your beloved husband-to-be delivered the same sentence to another, what would you do?”

“It doesn’t matter what I’d do. I don’t profess my beliefs and then back down when those beliefs are challenged.”

“How could you, when you have no beliefs to profess? You have faith in nothing but futility and hopelessness. I pity the way you must live.”

“Of course you do. Because despite your honor and your faith and your untested beliefs, you can always return to your empire. And it won’t matter how many Wielders you save along the way or how many battlefields you return from.

You will always be free to Wield as easily as you breathe.

” A sneer curled my lips. “Look around you,” I said. “Everyone else is suffocating.”

My heart was slamming, fire rushing to my cheeks; my fists shook at my sides. Keil saw it all—my violent pain and resentment—and his own anger guttered, as if my unraveling had brought him back to himself.

His brows gathered, his gaze searching, searching, like I’d sparked something in his awareness, and he could almost see me clearly—

Dangerous. Too dangerous. I turned before his understanding took root.

“Alissa.” Keil’s hand closed around mine, and I ripped away.

“Don’t.”

Don’t speak my name with that familiarity. Don’t look at me with that wretched affection in your eyes.

Keil must have read the words in my expression because his face took on that pained look again.

“You have no right,” I snarled.

He retreated, his almost-discovery evaporating with the movement. “I’m sorry.”

Keil had only been half-right that night in the city. I always looked for the worst in people, but I hadn’t in him. I’d gotten swept away in the current of him, so quick and unexpected that even now, something deep within me panged at having extinguished the light in his eyes.

I steeled myself against the feeling. I’d already risked losing my secret to him.

I wouldn’t risk my heart.

“You have one week to get me that translation,” I said, leaving. “Or you can all hang together.”