Page 33 of Thorn Season
Garret’s expression hardened. “I vowed to help him maintain your safety. I vowed to keep you out of this world—to never reveal the work he did or why he’d had to do it. I promised to say whatever it took to keep you away, and I regretted it the moment he locked the clasp.”
The floor seemed to tip, the cruel memory replaying.Put your dirty specter on me again, and I’ll cut through it, Wielder.
He’d said the words with so much hatred. But his hatred had been for my father.
Because myfatherhad forced those words out of his mouth—had put that oath band around his wrist.
My father had stolen Garret out of my life.
“Tonight gave me an opportunity.” Garret spoke faster now, the dam broken. “I told your father I wouldn’t retrieve those prisoners until he unlocked the band.”
Oh, gods—the Wielders in that wagon... Had Father caused their imprisonment?
Had he caused Marge’s death?
“I was at your estate this morning,” Garret ploughed on, heedless of my unraveling, “because I was begging him to free me from my oath. To let me tell you everything before it was too late—”
“Enough.”I went to stride around him, but he blocked my path.
“Alissa, you have to hear this—”
My specter whipped out before I’d consciously released it.
Garret thwacked sideways into the bookcase, then hit the floor. A glass ornament shattered beside him. He was climbing to his knees when I stormed away.
“Don’t you want to know what happened to Marge?”
The words landed like a punch, and I spun. “I know what happened to her.” My voice hitched. “I know what Briar did.”
“Not Briar.” Garret’s open shirt flared in and out with his heavy breathing. He took a parchment from the shelf behind him and tossed it across the floor. “Check for yourself.”
One glance at the page, and my stomach dropped. This was the list Garret had mentioned. The list of confirmed Wielders in Daradon.
Each name had been penned in Father’s handwriting.
“Your father didn’t give us Marge’s name,” Garret said. “He wouldn’t have. He doesn’t want you to know the faces of the people he’s killed.”
The people he’s killed.
I forced the words aside, fists trembling. “Then, how—?”
“Your kidnappers wanted your father to empty the hold. To release the dozen or so Wielders we should’ve amassed over the last two months. I wasn’t lying when I said we didn’t have them. But I lied about why.” Garret grimaced and hoisted himself up, his palm pecked with bloody glass. Terror seized me as he captured my stare and said, “Alissa... The person who stole the compass isusing it.”
10
“It started in Parrey ten months ago,” Garret said. “A name your father hadn’t provided. A Hunting Briar hadn’t approved.” He picked the glass out of his skin, shards falling at his feet. “Then another, in Avanford. Two more in Henthorn. Again and again, we found our mark painted on houses we hadn’t targeted, each mysteriously filled with dullroot ash. We’re equipped to burn dullroot inside our wagons,” he explained, “but not inside our targets’ houses.
“At a Creakish site, we discovered the trick.” He extracted a small steel canister from his pocket, blood trickling down his wrist. “Their devices produce a concentration of burnt dullroot to incapacitate Wielders without even touching them.”
Horror held me still. It was how Marge’s lounge was coated in ash, and how Tari had still smelled its bitter burn a week later. It was why Marge hadn’t been able to fight back.
“Briar’s been reproducing the devices,” he said. “This is one of her more successful prototypes.”
My specter writhed as he returned the canister to his pocket. He could have deployed it at any time. Could have stopped me from striking him. Instead, he was bleeding into his sleeves.
“We reduced our own Huntings to keep the pattern unchanged,”he continued. “A Hunting every month or so. We didn’t want the king, or the citizens, to notice anything amiss. And that worked...”
“Until two months ago,” I finished quietly. When the Huntings had increased inexplicably.“Why?”
