Page 166 of Thorn Season
I should have felt victorious. But I mostly felt tired. I was leaving so much behind: Tari and Amarie, my province, my people... and Garret.Garret, who’d chosen me over Briar when it had mattered most. She would kill him for it, if she hadn’t already. His death would be another weight on my conscience.
But right now, no weight seemed heavier than the weight in my pocket.
Slowly, I brought out the compass.
I’d seen no signs of mourning during my days in Avanford. No black pearls strung across the windows.
Erik had survived.
I will find you, Little Thorn, he’d whispered as he’d bled.It will be in my hands again.
The words had chilled me because I’d felt the truth in them. As long as I remained keeper of the compass, Erik would search the world for me. I was tempted to throw the accursed thing into the sea, just to be rid of it.
But... I couldn’t.
This compass didn’t simply identify Wielders, as the Capewells had believed. It possessed a greater purpose—a greaterpower. And though I was still assembling theories regarding that power, I knew one fact for certain: My father had believed that its power could be destroyed. Not lost. Not hidden away.Trulydestroyed.
His conviction had gotten him killed—which convinced me, more than anything, that he’d been close to finding answers. That the only way to stop Erik—to stopanyonewho shared Erik’s goals—was to finish what my father had started.
But I couldn’t do that without first understanding the true nature of the device in my hands.
I ran my thumb over the bronze case. Then I unlatched the clasp.
I hadn’t viewed the open compass since the first afternoon of my campout in Avanford. And now, just like then, the flash of light glanced up my blouse, across my vision, as I eased back the lid.
It’s as strong as diamond, Keil had once told me, with that dayglass shard in his hand.Under sunlight, it glows as if a rainbow has been captured within.
He was right. Beneath this open wash of sunshine, the glossy dome of the compass shone in vibrant hues.
Because, as I’d realized on that sunlit afternoon in Avanford... it was formed from dayglass.
The color shifted with every angle, radiating a dazzling light above its surface—the soft shimmer reminding me of a spectral ripple in the air. It was so entrancing that Keil had worried about Erik seeing a specimen of the material—not realizing that the king had possessed this one all along.
And now, under its translucent watercolor-swirl, the compass’s needle was beginning to stir.
I shut the case, snuffing out the haze of rainbow light. Stilling the needle before it could spin.
Ansoran Spellmakers had forged this compass from a material native to their lands. Erik had rendered his emblem in ancient Ansoran—had emblazoned it across his weapons and his Wielder prison. At first, I couldn’t fathom the reason. But for the last two days, the words on Keil’s note had bounced around my head:The language wasn’t as dead as I’d thought. Someone recognized the symbol after all.
Recognized, he’d said. Nottranslated. It seemed an important distinction.
And it was the only lead I had.
So, I tucked the compass into my pocket and turned, squinting across the opposite horizon. The secrets of the compass began in Ansora.
I would begin there, too.
Epilogue
Marge had come to learn that terror was a wet emotion. It was sweaty palms and watery bowels. It was tears and urine and hot, rising bile.
But mostly,mostly, it was blood.
This new prison already reeked of it. Judging by the amount of stale bread the wardens tossed into the cells at regular intervals, Marge had been here longer than she’d been in the last prison before it had started to collapse.
But in all the weeks combined, this was the longesthehad waited between visits.
The trials, as the wardens called them, usually took place once or twice a week. He never came in his finery. He dressed in a light shirt and trousers and walked up and down the rows of cells as if choosing a dog from a kennel.
