Ash & Bramble

  As the joy of my realization washes through me, I turn back to the Godmother. “I can’t go to the prince,” I tell her, raising my leg and waggling my stockinged foot. “I rather like having just one shoe, you see.” My eyes meet Owen’s and I nod. Yes, it means. You. I love you. He’s staring at me with grim intensity, but as he makes sense of my words, he blinks and—amazingly—a smile lightens his eyes. For a fleeting moment, we are the only two people in the entire world. Even across the room, I feel connected to him, as if we are one flame, burning.

  “Stop looking at him!” the Godmother orders, and her voice has an edge of panic. The tension builds, and builds; the high-pitched whine of gears stressed beyond bearing fills the air, rising to a scream. She is close now, just an arm’s length away. She raises the thimble and I could struggle, but I no longer fear her power to turn me into Nothing. I let her reach out and touch me, right in the center of my forehead.

  A wave of sparkling cold flashes from the thimble, battering me with a blizzard’s fury. It is icy, and dark, and empty, and it wants to drag me in and rip me away from myself and reshape me into a puppet that will allow herself to be pulled to the prince, allow herself to be fitted with the slipper. But I am Pin. I am Pen. And I am flame, and all the bitter cold of the thimble’s nothingness cannot touch me. Story wants its ending? Let me give it a new ending, one shaped by my own choices. When I speak, my voice burns. “No,” I shout, bracing myself. “I do not choose that ending.”

  The last boom of the castle clock strikes not with sound, but with silence, a muffling wave of noiseless thunder that fills the room until the walls shudder. The Godmother’s mouth is stretched wide as if she is screaming, but no sound emerges. The waves of silence slam against me, but I stand firm, unwavering. Sparks and smoke seep from the floor, swirling around the room.

  The two huge hands of the clock crack at their base and waver, and like two spears tip away and plunge toward the ground. Slowly, silently, the clock face rips itself from the wall. Trailing stones, it leans outward and goes suddenly dark, and there is one more long moment of ringing silence before all sound rushes back and I hear a resounding crash as it shatters on the ground far below.

  CHAPTER

  40

  FREEZING AIR RUSHES INTO THE ROOM THROUGH THE GAP left by the clock.

  The brambles binding Owen to the wall turn to dust and he crumples to the floor.

  “Pen,” pants Cor, rushing to my side.

  “See to Owen,” I shout, without taking my eyes from the Godmother. This isn’t over yet.

  The Godmother stands in the middle of the floor. The icy wind swirls around her, ruffling her skirts and the ends of her snaky white hair. She stares back at me.

  The thimble on her finger glows with a dull blue light.

  “Story has its own shape, its own energy,” the Godmother grinds out. “It will always return.”

  Maybe. I step closer to her. “Your story is over, at any rate,” I say flatly.

  She tips her head back as if trying to bring me into focus. She raises the hand holding the thimble, but she knows that its Nothing has no power over me anymore. Its light goes out. Her fingers look almost transparent, and they shake violently as if she is shivering with cold.

  I reach out and take the thimble from her hand. Then, following a sense of heat and light, I dip my fingers into a pocket of her skirt and find the thimble that she had taken from me, my thimble. My hand closes over it, warming me, and I take it back.

  She closes her eyes and releases a breath. Slowly she sinks to her knees before me. She looks old, faded, defeated. Broken.

  I slip her thimble onto my own finger. It is sticky with cold; my finger feels frozen. Its glow intensifies again. I bend over the Godmother and brush a wisp of her dry white hair from her face.

  “You can have it,” the Godmother whispers, her voice thin. “The power is yours. Serve Story as I did.”

  “No,” I tell her. “We have come to the end.” Carefully I touch the thimble to the center of her forehead.

  “Pen, don’t do it.” I glance over my shoulder. Owen has a bloodstained hand pressed to his side; only Cor’s arm around his shoulders is keeping him on his feet.

  I look away. “I have to.”

  “Pen, no,” comes Owen’s voice, cracked and weary.

  I know why he’s protesting. It’s horrible to lose all your memories, all your past, your very self. She took all those things away from every slave in the fortress and in the city, and from Owen, and away from me.

  “She deserves this ending,” I say.

  Calling up the power of the thimble, I press it to her forehead.

  And I take it all away from her.

  CHAPTER

  41

  PEN IS GONE, TAKING THE THIMBLES, TO SEE TO THE final defeat of the Godmother’s footmen in the city.

  Cor helps Owen from the clock tower with its gaping hole in the wall. He leads him to his own rooms, where the heavy wooden furniture is covered with dust shaken from the ceiling and the two dogs are cowering in a corner. He eases Owen onto the four-poster bed.

  “There’s a battle going on outside,” Cor says. “There’s got to be a healer around somewhere. Rest here. I’ll be back.”

  Owen closes his eyes and floats. He remembers only snatches of the rest of the journey from the Godmother’s fortress in the forest, and then blinking into consciousness in the clock room with the brambles wrapped around him. The moment where Pen broke Story. And then after.

  The pain from his wounded shoulder and from the thorns that slashed his side and his arm ebbs. His throat is parched with thirst, but he can’t summon the energy to get up and look for something to drink.

  He fades out for a while, then comes back as someone lifts his head. “Drink this, lad,” says a deep, rumbling voice. The Huntsman. He drinks, and feels liquid go down his throat and trickle down the side of his face and neck.

  “Can you get his sweater off?” Cor’s voice asks.

  A jolt of pain, and he fades out again.

  HE COMES BACK to himself. For the first time in a very long time, he is completely comfortable.

  He remembers another time of perfect comfort, a moment that is lost to Pen forever. The two of them, him and Pin, fleeing from the Godmother’s fortress, staggering with cold and hunger and fright, hiding in a hollow under the roots of a fallen tree. Then warmth and light and Pin across the fire from him. That moment, he realizes. As he watched her eat a bite of gingerbread. That was when he’d started falling in love with her. He knows that he will never stop falling in love with her, with Pin. With Pen.

  And she loves him.

  But it’s all tangled up in the brambles of Story and the thimbles and what she’d done to the Godmother. It’s not going to be that simple to figure each other out.

  He opens his eyes.

  The Huntsman is sitting on the bed, his back against one of the posts. His trackers sleep next to the fire with Cor’s dogs.

  Owen finds his voice. “Is Pen here?”

  “She came to see you while you were out.” The Huntsman gets off the bed and helps Owen sit up, stuffing another pillow behind his back. He turns away to pour something into a cup. “Can you manage this?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Owen answers, taking the cup. “Is she coming back?” He takes a drink. It’s water with something in it. A healing herb, he guesses.

  “Ah, well.” The Huntsman settles on the bed again. He rubs a hand over his bald head. “She’s gone with Prince Cor to East Oria to alert his mother, the queen, about what’s been going on here. The prince was in a great hurry to be away.”

  “But she’s coming back?” Owen asks.

  “I don’t know, lad,” the Huntsman answers. “But she’s given you something to see to while she’s gone.”

  He nods. Anything.

  THE NEXT DAY, when he can stay on his feet without falling over, the Huntsman fetches him from Cor’s room. They walk slowly along a passageway, heading deeper into th
e castle.

  “What will you do now?” Owen asks, as they stop to rest at the top of a stone staircase. He leans against the wall, feeling the pull of the bandages wrapping the cut on his ribs.

  “Ah, well now.” The Huntsman shrugs. “I was caught up in a story once, as you know.”

  Owen nods. “And it ended badly.”

  “For me it did,” the Huntsman says. “And for the girl I loved. Bianca was her name. She ended up married to a prince she didn’t love. I hear he died—took poison, they say—and she went to live in a cottage in the forest.” He smiles beneath his bushy mustache. “Living there with a bunch of cats, I’ve heard. I’ve a mind to go and find her.” He raises his eyebrows. “All right to go on?”

  Owen nods, pushes himself from the wall he’s been resting against, and they head down a set of narrow stone stairs, deep under the castle. The air is heavy and damp. A prison. The Huntsman nods to a guard, who opens a door and lets them pass. They go down another stairway and along a dark hallway lined with doors. In each door is a tiny window for looking at the prisoner inside.

  The Huntsman stops them before one of the doors and opens the little window.

  “You’re to decide her punishment,” the Huntsman says. “Her ending.”

  Owen peers into the cell, which is small, cold, and damp.

  An old woman in the ragged remains of a blue silk dress sits on the floor, her back hunched against the stone wall. White hair hangs down around her face, which is pale and blank.

  The Godmother.

  Or what’s left of her.

  CHAPTER

  42

  I SPEND WEEKS WITH COR IN EAST ORIA, MEETING HIS mother, the queen, and explaining to her during excruciatingly long and formal meetings what Story is and how dangerous it can be. I show her my thimble and the Godmother’s and tell her about their power. The queen doesn’t seem to realize how easily Story could rise again to threaten the land, even though so many people from her own kingdom disappeared, stolen out of their lives to serve in the city or the fortress. “You might open your eyes,” I tell her acerbically, “and look about your realm every now and then to see what’s been going on.”

  Obviously, we don’t get along.

  All the while I miss Owen. It’s a constant, almost physical ache, this feeling, and I realize that when I first awoke in the cinders in my stepmother’s house it was Owen that I was grieving for. The loss of him, when we had only just discovered each other.

  It is quite possible that I am going to lose him all over again.

  Before leaving the Godmother’s city, I went to Cor’s room to tell Owen that I was going.

  “He’s still out,” the Huntsman had said as he met me at the door. “He’s a strong lad, but he was pushed too far this time.”

  Cor’s room was full of dark wood, heavy tapestries, a wide fireplace. I only had eyes for Owen in the canopied bed. On quiet feet, I approached. He was so still, so pale. One of his hands was folded around a crumpled edge of the sheet, as if he’d fallen asleep while holding on to it. I could see bandages wrapped around his chest and his arm.

  “Hello,” I whispered. I sat on the bed and took his hand. Turning it over, I traced my fingers along the calluses that lined his palm. He was just a shoemaker, and he was so much more than that, too. He was everything. All I wanted to do was to crawl into the bed and wrap my arms around him; I wanted him to turn his face to me and open his eyes just for a moment.

  But he slept on. With trembling fingers I reached out to brush aside the lock of sandy hair that had fallen over his closed eyes.

  From the doorway I heard footsteps, and then the rustle of movement as the Huntsmen got up to meet someone in the hall. A low murmur of voices. I was being summoned; it was time to go.

  “Good-bye,” I whispered, and I brought my face down and laid my cheek against his so that I could hear his quiet breaths in my ear. Then, softly, with a feather’s touch, I kissed him. I got to my feet. And it felt as if I was tearing myself in half, but I did it; I went to the door, and I went out, and I left him.

  NOW I AM so afraid that our time together has ended. Story treated Owen so cruelly; he might have already left the city to go back to his family in Westhaven. I wouldn’t blame him if he did. And I did a terrible thing, taking the Godmother away from herself, even though he asked me not to. At the moment I did it, it seemed necessary. Now I’m not so certain. She had to be stopped, but maybe there was a better way.

  Cor has made plans to come visit the city as soon as he can leave East Oria. He hopes to find homes for all the animals—especially the dogs—that the Godmother turned into footmen in her service, and who turned back when Story’s power was broken. He’s been helping the former slaves from the Godmother’s fortress find new lives for themselves, too. Some of them returned to their Befores, but for others too much time had passed. They can only go on, not back.

  AT LAST IT is time for me to return to the city. “We need to come up with a name for it,” I tell Cor.

  “Write to me when you get there,” he suggests. His dog Bunny, who is expecting puppies, nudges his leg and he reaches down to stroke her long ears. “Tell me what the people are calling it.”

  He has given me a fine black mare to ride. Templeton and Zel are saddling their horses too, in the courtyard of the royal residence. They’re to be my bodyguards on the ten-day trip.

  Cor gives me a leg up into the saddle. Apparently I’ve ridden before, because my hands know just what to do with the reins, how to set my feet in the stirrups and balance my weight. I check my coat pocket for the thimbles. “Keep working on your mother,” I tell him. “Try to convince her that she must remain vigilant.”

  “I will,” he assures me. “I hope you and Owen will be very happy.”

  I nod, but I can’t answer.

  Because I know very well that making my own choices and living a real life is harder in some ways than living in Story. Owen can love me and I can love him, but we still might not be able to be together.

  Templeton and Zel and I travel for four days through the queen’s realm and then six more days through the forest. Every night when we stop, Templeton makes me practice my staff-work. “You never know when Story will rise again, Pen,” she warns. “You’ll have to be ready, just in case.”

  As we ride, I think about all the misery caused by Story and the Godmother. The unhappiness of ordinary people, not just princes and princesses, but the ones trampled on or cast to the side or left behind. Marya and Tobias. Natters and his Missus and their apprentice who was like a son to them, who died in the Godmother’s fortress. And all the other slaves kidnapped from their homes, their memories erased. The Huntsman and his lost Bianca. Lady Meister. Dulcet’s beautiful voice silenced and Precious’s talents, all set aside for the pursuit of an appropriate ending.

  And Owen, with his scars, and his rare and fleeting smile.

  I’M NOT QUITE sure what to expect when we arrive in the city. Before leaving with Cor, I’d spent two days using my thimble to give back the memories of everyone living there. They might have all gone back to their Befores; the city might be empty, abandoned.

  We arrive on a bright afternoon on the edge of spring. To my surprise, the streets are bustling with people going about their business, looking perfectly content and normal. None of them are wearing blue. The streets of the upper city are not quite as terrifyingly clean as when I lived here before; the lower city seems not as dark and twisted. The air even smells different—dankly of the river, and of frying meat and baking bread, woodsmoke, and a faint whiff of drains. The castle has been repaired; new stone covers the huge hole in the tower where the clock face used to be.

  While Templeton and Zel go to find us an inn and stable our horses, I walk through the streets to my stepmother’s house. She’s not really my stepmother, I know, but it’s still how I think of her. Once she gets over the fact that I’m wearing trousers—“as no proper lady should!” she exclaims—she and I sit down for tea and talk. Sh
e’s been ill—her heart, she tells me. Dulcie, she says, has become a professional singer. She gives wildly popular concerts and has a studio where she teaches voice lessons. “And Dulcet misses those dogs you left behind with us,” Stepmama tells me.

  “Maybe the prince will bring her a puppy when he comes to visit,” I say. I smile, wondering if Cor likes music. He has such a lovely, deep voice; I’ll bet he’s a wonderful singer.

  Stepmama goes on to tell me that Precious has opened a dress shop and has three seamstresses working for her. They’ve asked about me, she says.

  In the Before, Dulcet and Precious weren’t her daughters. She knows this, but she will not mention it. It is enough that they are her daughters now, that she is not alone.

  “I’ve wondered about you too, Penelope,” she says. “I’m very sorry about . . .” She sighs. She looks bleached, thinner, her hair gray. She is another one that Story used for its own ends.

  After kissing her on the cheek, I go up to the picture gallery at the top of the house to see my mother’s picture. I’ve realized how strange it is that the picture is here. I didn’t live here in my Before; the house never felt like a true home. Yet here my mother’s portrait stands in this neglected room with a layer of dust as fine as ash covering her face, dulling her eyes, the forest tangled and wild in the background.

  Perhaps the Godmother, confident in the rising power of Story, left her here on purpose. Like a trophy: the Witch, defeated.

  I still have no memory of my mother. It doesn’t seem to matter as much as it used to.

  I can only go on, not back.

  AFTER LEAVING MY stepmother’s house, I head for the lower city. On the way, I stop at a bridge over the river. I pull the Godmother’s thimble out of my coat pocket. It chills at my touch and glimmers with a cold light against the palm of my hand. I pull out my own thimble and compare them. Not so different in looks. Both are untarnished silver; both have an entwined line of brambles engraved around the base, but my thimble has its roses, too. And its warmth.