The Cruel Thorn Court

A great hall does not stop for anybody. The music swells, the dancers keep turning, and a boy goes down on the black marble floor while three weeks' worth of visiting nobles spin past him as though he were a dropped handkerchief. Her mother used to say that thorns remember everything. Every hand that brushed them, every wind that bent them, every drop of blood they drew. Cora is thinking about that as Finn crumples, his knees folding like paper in a rainstorm, and nobody else notices yet. Strings and a wood-flute, something light and trilling from the other court's repertoire, dancers in crimson and gold. She is already moving. The crowd parts badly. She pushes through shoulders and elbows, through silk and velvet and the sharp perfume of nobles who travelled three weeks to sit at her family's table. Somebody's heel catches her skirt and she tears free and hears the fabric go. Her brother lies on his side with one hand splayed on the marble, his chest heaving in the wet ragged rhythm she has learned to count through the small hours. His lips have gone the colour of ash. She reaches for his shoulder. She never touches him. A hand closes on her wrist first. What follows: a root in fire, the boar and the briar, a feast of ashen roses, words that burn going out of the mouth, a locket attached to a debt, and ash worked into ink. *And if that's a crime, then I'm guilty. But I'm not a traitor. I'm not a spy.* She thinks about Alistair in the archive, in the garden, in the thirty seconds before the court is called to order. She thinks about him when she is supposed to be thinking about her brother's lungs. She has stopped arguing with herself about it, and she is not going to start again. Not for the court, not for the queen, not ever.