Page 32 of Thorn Season
“I’m talking about business. Executing a handful for the good of all. You’ve benefited from that system, haven’t you? You should be gladder than anyone for the way things are.”
Guilt choked me, and I bolted to my feet.
“Why are you telling me this?” I spat. “To elicit my sincerest gratitude? Fine. Thank you for not driving a knife in my gut despite how much you clearly want to. Now retrieve that note from the hold. My father has suffered enough tonight because of yourbusiness.”
Garret’s cold laughter quickened my heart rate. “Has he?”
Then he stood and moved around the table. I lurched aside, banging my knee on its edge. He cast me a scathing look before kicking up the corner of the rug.
Acid scalded my throat. Dark blood encrusted the grooves of the white wooden floor—the ten-year-old evidence of Garret’s beating.
A beating he’d taken to keep Briar’s hands offme.
“Wray made me clean my own blood,” he said quietly, “as punishment for provoking Briar’s hand. But I never could get this out.” His bare chest swelled with a sigh, his tattoo shifting. “Do you remember that day? The booby traps along the halls. Our sprint through the escape tunnel. All to find the Hunters’ compass and protect you from exposure.”
“We wanted to protect all Wielders,” I said.
The slightest hint of a smile. “Maybeyoudid.” He kicked the rug back down, the slap of air stirring my skirts. “We wouldn’t have found it lying around here, you know. Spellmade objects are coveted, and their owners are deemedkeepers. It’s a sacred position.”
Because Spellmakers were once considered gods-touched individuals. Neither Wielder nor Wholeborn, they were the only beings who could harvest the molted specter left after a Wielder’s death to forge objects like the compass. And unlike Wielders, whose specters were connected to their being, Spellmakers had no allegiance to the power they molded.
So, to save themselves from persecution, Spellmakers had sold their services.
They’d become the pampered pets of monarchs, for they had tamed an inaccessible power. While Wielders were menaces, Spellmakers were silver knights. After all, power was only deemed dangerous when it couldn’t be commandeered by those in authority.
But Spellmaking was allegedly so taxing on the body that each generation had grown more riddled with sickness, scarcely making it to reproductive age.
And the rulers who had once revered them eventually ran them into extinction.
“Wray was the keeper of the compass then,” Garret continued, “and he kept it on him at all times.” He met my gaze, his left side aglow with firelight. “Wray’s death wasn’t a random murder in a Henthornian alley as everybody believed. He was killed for that compass. It hasn’t been recovered since.”
I startled. Garret’s adoptive father had died seven years ago. Forseven years, the Capewells had been separated from their device to track Wielders.
It was all I’d wanted as a child—unbounded safety. So I said now, with all the venom I could manage,“Good.”
“Is it?” Garret’s good eye tightened. “Briar didn’t tell King Erik about the theft at the time. Even when he was a boy of fifteen, she feared him, and she dreaded what he would do to the Capewells if he found out. Since Erik’s reign began, we’ve Hunted Wielders on information alone.” He inhaled slowly—an archer pulling back the bowstring before the release. Then: “Who do you think supplies that information?”
For a brief, blessed second, the words wouldn’t penetrate.
Then they pierced deep enough to hit bone.
Perhaps your father is not as innocent as you’d like to believe, Keil had said.
It had been years since the Capewells had propositioned Father to join their service. Because they’d accepted failure...
Or because they’d already succeeded?
“Your father’s position allows him to gather reports from the entire kingdom,” Garret said. “He tells us where Wielding has been suspected, and we follow up accordingly.” He continued, unaffected, asthough he wasn’t chipping away at me with every word, “He may not use a blade, but your father is as much a Hunter as the rest of us.”
I felt the fracture in my chest as a physical pain.
“You wanted to know why I’m telling you this?” Garret moved closer. “Why, after seven years, I’m telling youanything? Because I finally can.”
My eyes dropped to his bare wrist. To the hand he should’ve had to cut off if he’d removed the oath band himself. Briar was away tonight; she couldn’t have unlocked it. Which meant she’d never had the key.
And Garret’s oath band—the emblem of his betrayal—had been locked by someone else.
“No.” The protest felt dry on my tongue. Landed empty in the silence.
