DEDICATION
To my sisters, with all my love
Katie O’Shaughnessy
Maude Bing
Winnie Edmed
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Acknowledgments
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About the Author
Books by Sarah Prineas
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
STORY WAITS.
The hulking machine, its grinding gears—all silent, all still.
It was defeated once, long ago, but its time has come around again.
Story watches.
It sees a City that has forgotten that it once belonged to Story.
In the City’s people it sees complacence and ignorance.
It sees a Forest that has grown wild and abandoned, its enchantments unremembered.
Story plots.
Its City can be used, as it was before.
Its people will play their parts, as they did before.
And there will be more: Story will take its first step beyond the Forest to wider lands. More people will come under its sway, and its power will grow.
Story sets out its cogwheels, its driving pistons. It plans its devices: a beauty and a castle, a rose and three curses. And thorns. Always thorns.
And now, to set it all in motion . . . it needs a Godmother.
SHE IS YOUNG, just a girl, married to a man much older than she is, and she has found that he is stern, cold, even cruel sometimes. She has no love, no warmth, no happiness. She grows desperate, and then wild with her desperation. There is no way out for her but death.
And then she finds a thimble—as such things are meant to be found. It is silver without a speck of tarnish, and engraved at its base with brambles, but no roses. The thimble offers her power and she, who was powerless, seizes it. Story teaches her how to use people as devices; she learns avidly, glorying in her strength, where before she had been weak. Under Story’s direction she leaves the City and the Forest that surrounds it, and she causes a castle to be built, populating it with animal servants that her thimble has turned to people.
And then, and then.
The Godmother finds a man and a woman and with the cold touch of the thimble she takes their memories of who they were, and she breeds them to each other until the woman bears a child.
A GROAN, A howling of gears, and Story lurches into motion, and once it has begun, it is as inevitable as time and cannot be stopped.
Story will have its ending.
And this is how it begins:
Once there was a girl who lived in a forest cottage.
Upon her wrist she bore a birthmark in the shape of a newly opening rose.
A ticking triple curse was cast at the moment of her birth, and her
Time is running out.
CHAPTER
1
AT FIRST I THOUGHT THE VULTURES WERE FAT, ROTTEN fruit hanging from the branches of the dead tree. Then I blinked and saw their hunched feathers, their curved beaks as they watched me step out of the forest’s shadows.
I paused at the edge of the grassy meadow and sniffed. There was no oily, tainted smell of death. Whatever animal they were eating hadn’t been dead for very long.
One of the vultures dropped from its branch and spiraled to the ground. Half hidden by knee-high grasses, its naked head went down, jerked, came up again with something in its beak. Another bird followed.
The path would lead me across the clearing. I was searching for mouse-ear mushrooms, my guardian Shoe’s favorites, and they grew only on old oak stumps on north-facing slopes. Our cottage was farther up the valley, where there were only pine forests, moss-covered rocks, and ferns; I had to come down here with my basket for the oak groves. This path led to the village, too, though I’d never been there.
Well, vultures. They were just doing what vultures do.
“Hah!” I shouted suddenly, and waved my arm, and then took a corner of my apron and waved that at them, too.
Startled, they lifted from the ground and flapped heavily into the dead tree’s branches again.
Shifting my basket to my other arm, I set across the clearing. I meant to look away, but as I passed the place in the grass where the vultures had been feeding, I caught a glimpse of something that was not the fur and bones I expected.
A boot.
I staggered to a stop, closed my eyes for a mere second, and then looked.
Looked away, fast.
A man. A stranger. Sprawled. A flap of a hood over half his face, a splash of rusty-brown blood covering the other. The same blood stained the front of his blue coat. And there was something strange about his hands.
All of the air rushed out of me, and I gasped for breath. I staggered back, the dry grass whispering around my skirts, and then sat down hard. Still panting, I wrapped my arms around myself.
Dead man.
His hands were . . . claws?
From the tree, the vultures craned their wrinkled, hairless heads, watching to see what I would do next.
What I did not do was scream, or faint, or throw up. “All right,” I whispered to myself, my voice shaking. “All right.” There was nothing I could do for the man. His story was over, and panic wouldn’t change that.
Carefully, keeping my head averted from where the body lay, I crawled out of the long grass, got to my feet, and the smell hit me—rancid, wild, dead.
Dropping the basket, my head spinning, I fled, picking up my skirts, my feet slipping on the steep, pine-needly path that led back to our cottage.
The dead man. Somehow he’d gotten inside the boundaries that protected us from the outside world.
Growing more frightened, I splashed across the stream and continued, running past the cairn of moss-covered rocks that marked the edge of the cleared land around our cottage. The clearing had been carved out of dense forest and was edged with ferns and looming pine trees; on a low hill in its center was the stone cottage that Shoe had built, and like everything he set his hands to, it was well-made, cool in the summers and snug in the winters. The roof overhung the front to make a kind of porch, and on early autumn days like this, Shoe would bring his shoemaker’s bench outside to work. Behind the cottage was a stone well, and a shed where our two goats and six chickens lived, and our garden. The clearing was bright with afternoon sunlight and smelled of woodsmoke from our chimney.
Out of breath, I staggered up the path to the porch. Shoe’s workbench was there, but he was not. I darted into the cottage—empty. Out again, and around the back to the garden.
Oh, at last. “Shoe!”
He straightened, rubbing his back with gnarled hands. He wore his usual shapeless brown coat, and his gray hair needed cutting. Seeing me, his face wrinkled into a smile, and he set as
ide the shovel he’d been using to turn over the dirt. “I thought to have this done before you got back, Rosie,” he said.
I stumbled up to him. “There was a man,” I gasped.
Shoe’s face turned grim. He grasped my arm to steady me and examined me intently. “Are you all right?”
“No, no.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes, I’m fine. He isn’t. The man isn’t.” I caught my breath. “He was dead.”
Shoe frowned at me. “What were you doing outside the boundary?”
I knew why he was asking.
The valley we lived in was bound by protective magic, and that meant Shoe and I never saw anyone. In all the sixteen and a half years of my life, I had never seen anyone but him. When Shoe went to the village to trade the shoes he made for supplies, and to get medicine from a healer named Merry for his arthritis, he left me at home.
And that was all right. When I was small, our valley was enough. I knew where the magical boundary was, and during my wanderings I never crossed it, until I knew every twig and leaf and tree stump and moss-covered stone in the forest around our cottage. That was when the boundary began to feel like the high wall of a prison, keeping me in when I wanted to be out, exploring, meeting other people besides Shoe, seeing more than our tiny corner of the world. I had books, I’d read stories, and Shoe brought home letters from people outside—I knew there was more.
And so, not so long ago, I had crossed the boundary. Because I didn’t dare go to the village, I went the opposite direction, following a deer trail that led up the high hill at the end of our valley. Stepping through the boundary had been like parting a curtain made of stinging sparks, but I’d done it, and climbed on up the steep, rocky path, my heart pounding. Two hours later, near the top of the hill, I came to a stone outcropping, and there I’d stopped, panting, and looked over the valley, seeing our cottage and clearing—just a tiny patch of land from where I was standing—and beyond, the village in its own valley, the river running through it a glint of silver, and a thread of road winding away from it. Dusk was falling. Way in the distance, where the forested hills opened to a plain at the very edge of sight, was a smudge of lights amid deeper shadows. A city. Maybe the City, the one Shoe had told me stories about. Its lights winked at me. It beckoned.
I can’t come now, I’d whispered to it, as if the City could hear me, so far away from it on my little outcropping of rock.
My head full of new ideas, I’d stumbled back to the cottage, wild with the night, my hair tangled, my hands scraped from when I had fallen in the dark.
That was when Shoe had sat me down, taken my hand, and gently reminded me about the curse that hung over me. The boundary protected us, he said. If I ventured beyond it, neither of us would be safe.
Safe from what, I didn’t ask, and Shoe didn’t say, but after that night, I didn’t stray again.
“The dead man wasn’t outside the boundary,” I told Shoe.
He stared. “Where?” he asked faintly.
“The path to the village,” I answered, “but well inside our valley. Before the turnoff to the oak grove.”
One of the things I loved most about Shoe was the way I could always tell what he was thinking—his face reflected his every thought. But I’d never seen him look like this before. He went deathly pale, and closed his eyes as if he’d taken a blow.
Now I steadied him with a hand on his arm. “Shoe?” I had a tendency to fill up silences with words, but I swallowed down my chatter.
He shuddered and opened his eyes. They were a faded green, and shadowed by bristly gray brows. “The boundary has been broken,” he said blankly. Then he seemed to see me again. “Rosie.” He took a shaky step.
“You need to sit down. We should . . .” I looked wildly around. “We should go inside. Yes.”
Feeling shaky myself, I let Shoe lean against me as I guided him up the path from the garden to the cottage. Inside, I helped him take off his coat and sit on his rocking chair by the hearth, and added wood to the fire and checked the iron kettle. It was empty, so I hurried out to the well for water.
When I came back in, lugging the kettle, Shoe’s face looked gray, and he sat with his head tipped back, eyes closed. He whispered something and put his hand over his heart.
My own heart trembled. “What should I do?” I blurted. With shaking hands I hung the kettle on its hook and swung it over the fire. “I’ll make tea,” I said to myself. “Oh, and a blanket.” I hurried to Shoe’s tiny room and pulled the red woolen blanket from his bed. Returning to the main room, I crouched before Shoe’s chair and laid the blanket over his legs.
At last he opened his eyes. “Rosie,” he said faintly.
I took his hand. It felt icy cold, and I brought it to my cheek. “Shoe, what’s the matter? Is something terrible going to happen?”
“It already has,” he said sadly. He closed his eyes. “I’ve told you . . .” He paused to take a breath. “About how the boundary was made.”
“The Penwitch,” I breathed.
Without opening his eyes, he nodded. “She created it, and it is tied to her. If it’s broken it means that she is . . .”
It meant she was dead. I didn’t want to say it out loud.
From the time I was a tiny girl, Shoe had told me stories about the Penwitch, how brave she was, and powerful, and how she was always fighting to prevent some great evil from arising. He told stories about the Penwitch’s friends Templeton and Zel, too, and the faraway kingdoms of the world, and the City. I still remembered the first time he’d told me how the Penwitch had brought me to him.
“A story is shaped by the one who tells it, Rosie,” Shoe had begun. “The teller chooses where to begin, what to leave out and what to leave in, and where to end. Every time we tell a story, it is different.” He gazed into the fire, musing aloud. “We have a kind of power, we storytellers. I wonder if it is enough . . .” He trailed off, then took a steadying breath. “We just have to be sure we’re living our own stories, Rosie, and not ones laid down for us by . . . well, by something else.”
“Do you have a story, Shoe?” I’d asked, leaning my head against his knee. His gnarled hand had stroked my hair.
“Yes,” he’d answered after a pause. “But it’s too long to tell you tonight.”
“Because you’re old,” I’d said, with the wisdom of an eight-year-old child. “What about me? Do I have a story?”
“Everyone has a story,” he’d answered. He’d gazed down at me, his face wrinkled and kind in the light from the flickering fire. “Maybe yours began when you were brought here.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d ever lived anywhere but with Shoe in our valley. “Tell me!” I pleaded. When he didn’t speak, I prompted him. “Once upon a time . . .”
Shoe picked up the thread of the story. “It was a dark night, and the old man—”
“You,” I interrupted.
“The old man,” he continued with a nod, “who wasn’t quite so old in those days, was working by candlelight on a pair of new boots, when a knock came at the cottage door. In stepped the Penwitch, rain-soaked and wild and holding a tiny baby wrapped in a blanket.”
“Me?” I’d asked.
“You,” Shoe confirmed.
“Where did I come from?” I asked.
“She didn’t say. Out in the world somewhere.”
This was new to me too. Before that I hadn’t realized there was more to the world than our valley, and the forest beyond it.
“‘She is under a curse,’ is what the Penwitch said,” Shoe went on. “She handed the baby to the old man. ‘Guard her well,’ she said. And then she used her magic to set the boundary around the valley.”
“And then what happened?” I asked. In stories, something always happened next.
But not this time. “I think maybe that was just a prologue, Rosie,” Shoe said, smiling down at me again. “The rest of your story hasn’t really begun yet.”
The Penwitch had returned a few times when I was still a bab
y, but had always been called away. She had been away for many years, though some of the letters Shoe brought home after his visits to the village were from her, I guessed.
But I had never fully realized it before. Shoe had loved the Penwitch. I could see it in the hunch of his shoulders and the pallor of his skin. For all that time he had loved her. And now she was gone.
At the hearth, the kettle boiled. Scrambling to my feet, I fetched the teapot from its shelf and brewed some tea, adding honey and bringing a steaming mug to Shoe. Carefully I took his cold hands and wrapped them around the cup. His eyes flickered open. He sighed. “You’re a good girl, Rosie.”
“If I am it’s because you raised me to be good,” I told him. “Will you drink some tea?”
He didn’t answer. His face seemed set in deeper lines, weary and old.
“I put some honey in, just as you like it,” I went on. “Or would you rather have some goat’s milk?” Then Shoe’s hands went limp, and the mug of hot tea tipped. Before it could spill, I caught it, and set it on the floor. I knelt and took his hand, gazing up into his clouded eyes. “What can I do for you, Shoe?” My heart was pounding now; he wasn’t just stunned, he was really sick.
His hand moved. “I’ll do better in bed,” he said at last, his voice a whisper.
“Yes, yes, I can help with that.” I jumped to my feet. “Just wait a moment, and I’ll help.” Feeling almost frantic, I went to Shoe’s room and turned down his sheets and plumped his pillow, and then hurried back to him, to unlace his boots and take them off. “Lean on me,” I urged, and he did, so heavily that I stumbled under his weight as we trudged into his room. He almost fell into his bed. I helped him lie down and pulled up the sheet and fetched his blanket from the floor by the rocking chair, tucking it gently around him.
“Is there anything else?” I asked, clenching my hands together. “What can I do?”
When he spoke, his voice was a whisper. “I’ll sleep for a while, Rosie. It’ll be all right.” Then he gave a deep sigh.
I backed out of the room and closed the door softly. “It’ll be all right,” I repeated to myself. “It’ll be all right.” I felt twitchy with the need to do something. It was late afternoon; the setting sun shone in the open front door. “I’ll make some dinner,” I decided. “Maybe he’ll feel better after something to eat.”