Page 60 of Thorn Season (Thorn Season #1)

T he air was rich with the apricot-golden light of high summer, the sun making rainbow shimmers through my lashes.

Our host of Verenian nobles drifted through the scene, full and happy and inhaling the heady scent of roses—for the flowers sprouted everywhere, shedding to the cobblestones in a red-pink petal sea.

Fiddle music and laughter tinkled all around.

And heading the congregation was King Erik, his blond hair shining, his cape catching the breeze. He smiled broadly at the citizens of Henthorn, and many were so enthralled that they forgot to bow as he passed. To those, he offered the sweetest smiles.

We turned the corner, and there began the oohs and aahs. Because, though taller and narrower and washed amber under the fierce Henthornian sunshine, the jewel-colored buildings might have been plucked straight from the streets of Vereen.

The citizens fed off the excitement, throwing more roses at our feet. One grazed my ankle. I winced as the thorn nicked skin.

“Can we go now?” I looked up at Father’s face, fragmented by the sun’s glare.

“Don’t be rude, my girl. The Opal shall be the capital’s new crafts district, and the people are excited. We must honor them as they’ve honored us.”

I pouted. If they wanted to honor the kingdom’s craftspeople, they could’ve chosen a better song. Judging by the strident voices at the end of the street, half didn’t know the words. They certainly didn’t know the tune.

Father clasped my hand. I’d told him not to do that. I would turn fifteen this year, and I didn’t want to seem like a child in front of the other nobles.

I began pulling away when I noticed a deep groove between his brows. I stood on tiptoe to see what he was looking at.

King Erik’s guards were closing ranks around him, their silver-toed boots glinting.

Through the gaps of their armor, I saw a thicker jumble of people, moving with more agitation than the celebrators lining the streets.

The fiddle music died out, giving way to a thunderous clacking.

Because those agitated people were pounding the cobblestones with the butts of wooden staffs, crushing the roses until that heavy scent scratched the back of my throat.

They hadn’t been singing. They’d been calling out names . Zelda Jean, Tavis Kimba, Ruby Clay.

“Sympathizers,” Father whispered.

The word ignited in the dry heat. I elbowed between the nobles and stopped at the front of the crowd. To everyone else, the sympathizers must have appeared wild-eyed and rowdy. But to me, their faces were blazing and righteous.

These were the sympathizers—the Wholeborns— of Daradon, campaigning for the lives of Wielders. For lives like mine.

A wave of emotion swelled and crashed within me as Father clambered to my side. He gripped my shoulder, about to pull me back, when the guards shifted again.

The king emerged from their formation.

King Erik was only three years into his reign—untested, as Father would say. The people still waited to see how he would manage the Execution Decree and its ripples.

But this new district was proof, wasn’t it? That King Erik was different from past rulers, finally channeling funds into the capital again.

As the young king amiably approached the sympathizers, I felt the first stirrings of hope. He would hear their objections. And slowly, he would implement change.

“My friends,” he called, quieting them. “There is no cause for animosity here. Please, celebrate this new district with your fellow citizens. Show our guests from Vereen how we pay homage to their craftwork.” With one broad sweep, King Erik looked around to our throng of nobles.

I jolted as his ice-pale eyes skimmed mine—a bland, brief glance that inexplicably raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Or else return to your sacred Backplace,” the king went on, “where the monarchy has generously allowed your freedom of speech. This day is for festivity. Join us or be gone.”

The citizens yelled in agreement, the fiddler playing a little lick to send them off.

But the sympathizers stood firm. Then one of them walked forward: a rugged, white-haired man who must have been powerfully built before age had worn him away.

“Lilliana Swan,” the man boomed out. “She was my wife. Your coward Hunters came for her while she slept and left their heinous mark on our door. I won’t rest—we won’t rest—until we have our justice.”

Another surge of noise from the sympathizers. More discomfort from the nobles. I was breathing so fast through my open mouth that my tongue had gone dry.

King Erik smiled kindly upon the man. “Your wife was a criminal, my friend. And you are a criminal for keeping her hidden from the law. But I see your anguish... and I offer you a pardon. Accept it humbly, and take your boisterous companions away with you.”

A tense, swollen silence ensued. The man drew a long breath.

And then spat at the king’s feet.

A gasp rushed through the Opal, like a whooshing through leaves.

“You are no king,” said the man.

King Erik smiled again—a kind of smile I’d never seen on anyone before. Father’s hand went rigid on my shoulder.

Then the guards pounced. In a scuffle of boot-stomps and clanging armor, they tied the man to a lantern pole. He panted wetly, his lip bleeding from where they’d been too rough.

“Your words are treasonous,” said King Erik, all mildness and composure. “Do you wish to recant?”

The man looked toward his fellow sympathizers—toward those warriors, those criers of justice. They would tear at those ropes. They would make the king listen. I looked with him, already bursting with trust and bottomless gratitude—

And found a sea of gaping mouths.

Their staffs clattered to the cobblestones. The fury drained from their eyes.

The man lifted his chin, resigned. “I won’t recant the truth.”

King Erik sighed but did not seem disappointed. He nodded, and one of the guards drew a wickedly thin knife from his belt. The blade flashed light in my eyes, and before I’d blinked out the dazzle-spots, the guard had slashed through the man’s shirt, baring his torso.

Father’s hand slackened, sliding off my shoulder. He stood frozen in horrified attention.

“And now, friend?” asked the king. “Now will you recant?”

The man spat again, the glob full of blood. “I do not fear death.”

King Erik laughed, bright and careless, and I wondered how I’d ever seen him as anything but a beast. “And why should you?” he asked. “There is no suffering in death.”

The man lasted twelve seconds before the shriek tore from his throat.

They started at his ribs, peeling away the skin as surely as flaying a deer. The man writhed and the crowd writhed with him—at the blood and tissue and gore, all glistening wet and red in the afternoon sun. When asked again to recant, he shook his head, tears streaming. They moved up to his chest.

Someone in the crowd threw up. Someone else was screaming. But the sympathizers only watched in sickened silence as their friend was skinned alive at the Opal.

The minutes spiraled into eternity. His screams grew savage, his sobs breaking. Pinprick flies roved around the open mess of his body. The nobles had pressed their hands to their ears, and Father was crying quietly beside me.

And I knew a single, biting truth: Nobody would save this man.

A numbness spread over me as my specter breached the surface. Distantly, as if through the waterlogged air of a dream, I fed a tendril toward the man. I shuddered when I reached his bloodied skin.

As I looped my specter like a noose around his neck, he squinted into the distance and mouthed the question , “Lilliana?”

Tears misted my vision. I drew a deep breath and tasted the rose stench, mixed with the metallic reek of blood. And though my bones wanted to crack under the weight of the task, I tightened the noose.

The man’s next scream broke off with a gasp.

In my periphery, I glimpsed a blur of indigo movement: King Erik stiffening, his face tilting toward the crowd.

But I didn’t loosen my hold, even as the man’s pulse thundered under my specter. Even as his body convulsed, fighting for air he couldn’t inhale.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Sweat dripped into my lashes, stinging my eyes. His pulse slowed—the final dregs of his life laboring against my power.

Then his body went limp. His gaze stilled on that point in the distance.

My face was wet. Perhaps I’d been bleeding, too.

I reeled my specter back, but it didn’t feel the same inside me. It felt dirty. Tainted.

“His heart gave out,” a guard said, his voice far away.

The king waved a dismissive hand as if this entire scene bored him, and he ordered the body burned for all to witness.

I’d killed a man. The fact that it had been a mercy didn’t make it any less awful.

I wiped my hands down my dress as if to clean them from the deed. The deed I could never share with anyone, not even my father. The deed that had dimmed something inside me.

The flames consumed the man’s body before anyone made out the red marks around his throat.