Page 36 of Thorn Season
“My girl.” His voice broke; his mouth trembled. “Are you—?”
“Did you kill my mother?”
Father froze. The color drained from his face.
He was dressed in rumpled ballroom attire, his hair disheveled, sleepless shadows curving under his eyes. He’d waited all night for my return, surely fearing the worst.
And yet he suddenly looked more fearful now than I’d ever seen him.
“Please leave us, Amarie,” he said quietly.
A sniffling shuffle marked her exit. The door clicked shut.
He began, “How could you ask me tha—?”
I slapped Keil’s ransom note onto the floor, slicing through Father’s last word. Garret had salvaged the note from the hold before I’d left Capewell Manor, and the sight of it seemed to puncture a hole in my father, air rushing from his chest.
“You’ve killed so many others.” The acknowledgment blistered my throat. “It’s a fair question.”
With my kidnapping, Keil had rescued five Wielders from the Capewells’ hold. I didn’t know if Father had handed their names to Briar. But judging from his tortured expression, they wouldn’t have been the first.
Father wetted his parched lips. “I loved your mother,” he rasped. “I never hurt her.”
“Did she know what you are?”
“It—it wasn’t like that then. Alissa—” He started forward again.
I staggered back.“Don’t come near me.”
Father stopped. His face crumpled with devastation.
My father was the person I used to call for in my nightmares; the person whose arms I’d launched into after waking, whose chest I’d nuzzled against for shelter. Now here I was, lurching away from him. As though he were one of the monsters he used to shield me from.
I saw the moment it broke his heart.
He slumped onto his claw-foot desk, rattling an empty brandy glass. Dawn was breaking beyond the one domed window, washing the mahogany study in bruised shades of yellow. “When Briar told me the compass had been stolen, I felt only relief. For the first time, they couldn’t Hunt. They wouldn’t discover your specter.” His hand quivered down his face. “But months passed without a Hunting, and it drew King Erik’s notice. Briar needed an informant. If I had refused, she would’ve chosen another.”
“You should have let her.”
Father’s head snapped up. “You were a stubborn, reckless child, and became more reckless as you grew. You believe nobody notices when you trip people, or twirl coins, or unlock doors.” He gave a bark of pained laughter. “Or scrub away Hunters’ Marks at dawn.”
I flinched; Lidia must have told him I’d been to Marge’s house.He’d known, and he’d buried it with the rest of his fear.
“I could never influence you.” He gulped, then said stiffly, “At least this way... I could influencethem.”
I curled my hands to stop them shaking. “Like you influenced Garret?”
Father swallowed again. “Garret was hand-selected as an infant during the Starling Rebellion. Briar believed nobody could make a better Hunter than a boy orphaned by Wielders, and she convinced Wray to take him in. Wray delayed Garret’s training, but after he died, Briar wanted to initiate the boy at last.” A long, wobbling breath. “But Garret was not what he should have been. He never feared your specter. He was in awe of it—ofyou. I knew, as long as Briar trusted him, he could help keep you safe.”
“You made him keep your secret,” I whispered, disgusted. “You locked an oath band around his wrist. How did Briar never question it?”
“I told her I’d made him promise to stay away from you, and she approved. Your friendship was a distraction Garret couldn’t indulge in if he were to reach his full potential.”
My specter shuddered to the surface, rising faster than bile. “He was thirteen. And you let her turn him into—” My sentence fractured, branching out in horrific variations.A Hunter. A monster. A murderer.
Father hung his head. “She turns us all eventually.”
He pulled the neck of his shirt, and a deep horror seized me.
