Page 7 of Thorn Season
“The gods don’t care about lemon cakes. Now stop scratching, and be glad you don’t look like you belong on a platebesidethe lemon cakes.”
Father eyed me and cringed. I’d heaped myself in Henthornian fashion this evening, with puffed pink sleeves hanging low off my shoulders and satiny skirts tenting below my corseted waist. I resembled a walking meringue—and my sweeping updo was the swirl of chocolate cream on top.
“You didn’t have to wear that,” he said.
“And miss the chance to trip over my skirts on the way to the dance floor? I was hoping to take a few centerpieces down with me.”
Father’s mouth barely twitched in amusement. He seemed especially fretful tonight. While Rose Season manifested at court as the annual social season—during which the nobles indulged in enough gossip, merriment, and rich foods to hibernate over the cooler months—its roots originated from a more formal tradition, which still held strong.
Every noble, upon their eighteenth season, would participate in a closing ceremony to swear fealty to the reigning monarch. Though appearance was only mandatory on the first and last nights of the season, these eighteenth-season nobles were encouraged—no,expected—to pass the six weeks leading up to the ceremony in a first stay at court.
And this year marked my eighteenth season.
I’d told Father I could handle court for six weeks, but he’d been adamant. Sending his Wielder daughter to live at the palace would’ve felt like sending a deer into a wolf’s den, and he would only relax once these weeks of Rose Season had wilted off the calendar.
But with the festivity in full bloom tonight, he was on the brink of sweating through his coattails.
I grabbed his clammy hand and squeezed. “Back straight. Chin high. And by all the gracious gods, stay away from Rupert when he drinks. Last year, he breathed beside a candle and singed my eyebrows.”
Father actually cracked a faint smile at that. Then he briefly touched my cheek. “What would I do without you, my girl?”
Sudden guilt stabbed at me. He would unravel if he noticed the tinge of red paint staining my fingernails.
Returning his smile a little tightly, I descended the stairs at his side, one meringue joining the others on the white tray of the ballroom floor. As the stench of roses swept over me, roiling my stomach, I inhaled the citrus-and-lavender perfume at my wrist. It was a trickTari had learned at her mother’s clinic, and as usual, my nausea settled.
But it returned with a vengeance as I noticed Briar Capewell’s straw-yellow hair swishing through the crowd.
Father subtly angled himself between us.
He and Briar were first cousins on his mother’s side, and while Father and I had inherited most of our characteristics from the Paine side of the family—heavy brows, olive coloring, dark lashes around broody, almond-brown eyes—Briar presented a statuesque figure of creams and golds. But today, her high cheeks blazed with florid anger. The crisscross straps of her peach dress shifted with every violent footfall, threatening to reveal the Hunters’ Mark tattooed over her heart.
A defiant outfit choice.
The Crown forbade the Hunters from revealing their true identities, claiming that faceless executioners produced a greater fear. But Briar Capewell, the head of the Hunter family, resented the powerlessness of anonymity. When standing over a Wielder’s body, wearing the mask of the Hunters, she was horror incarnate.
But standing among the gentry, wearing the guise of a merchant, she was the bitter human equivalent of a lemon pith.
“The ship docked this morning, Heron,” she said, stopping before us. “Were you aware?”
“Hello to you, too, Briar,” Father mumbled.
“They’ve prepared the ambassadorial chambers.” She laughed roughly. “They should’ve prepared the dungeons.”
I frowned at Father. “An ambassador’s here?”
Father hesitated, seeming oddly reluctant to speak around me.
Briar said, “His Majesty is hosting an Ansoran ambassador for Rose Season.”
I fought to school my expression. Ansora, the Wielder-ruled empire across the sea, had always seemed like an illusion, glimmering at the map’s western edge. While their ongoing conflict with our neighboring kingdom, Orren, had made their surrounding waters near impenetrable, the Ansoran mainland thrived with culture and prosperity, a haven for Wielders and Wholeborns alike.
And one of their ambassadors had journeyedhere?
“The king should’ve refused,” Briar said, popping my vision like a soap bubble. “Doesn’t he understand the risk?” She picked at a hangnail, uncharacteristically fidgety. “You’re a ruling lord. What’s the point of having influence at court if you don’t use it?”
“It’s not in my interest to influence our king’s political decisions,” Father said.
Briar’s lips thinned. “The Wielder will have free rein here. What if he gets his hands on your lovely daughter?”
