Page 89 of Thorn Season
He shut the door softly behind him.
As the silence took on the weight of his words, I realized the gentry had been right. The Jacombs had known they were housing Wielders... and they hadn’t cared. Now, they would dig through a Dawni forest to exhume the bodies of their staff. To offer them the funeral they deserved.
That kernel of hope glimmered inside me again, almost within reach. It was a foolish hope. A desperate hope. But as the memory of Keil’s specter rose, free and warm and rippling with unchained strength, I wondered if it was a hope worth nursing.
Finding the compass and stopping the copycats would offer me safety, but never happiness... because I would still have to confine my specter.
And I didn’t want to die before I’d gotten the chance to breathe.
Slowly, with a tentative, searching touch, I reached within myself.
My specter resided dormant and shapeless inside me, vaguely uncomfortable as ever, producing the straining background ache I’d learned to live with. But upon deeper inspection, I realized that its regular thrum had taken on a slight squirming quality—a manifestation of my worry and frustration since Junius’s information about Kevi.
I drove further into the power, and it was like peeling back a tulippetal to reach the dense, pollen-rich center. There seemed to be folds here. All constantly feeding off my energy and emotion, gently pulsating with my heartbeat... all ineffably, undeniably,me.
I swallowed and withdrew my touch, somehow afraid to keep unfurling. Caught instead with the urge to wind an internal rope around those petal layers to hold them together.
Had my mother died with restraints around her own power, not realizing that her daughter would suffer the same fear of exposure? Was she buried in another forest, her grave unmarked? I might’ve walked over it during my autumn strolls, unaware of the atrocities under my feet—
The air rushed into me. As a Dawni woman, Kevi’s wife might not have known about the xerylite mines under Vereen, whose locations were supposedly lost. So, she’d looked in the wrong place: above the earth.
She should have looked beneath.
I grabbed my cloak and ran for the stables; the night was ripening but I couldn’t delay. Father held all those mining records, including how to enter the tunnels.
Happiness would have to wait.
My search wasn’t over yet.
The midnight journey to Vereen blurred with frenzied thoughts and thunderous wheels over cobblestones. Then I was tumbling from the carriage, telling the coachman to return to Henthorn without me.
The sight of home was a balm to my agitation. I ran up the front steps and burst through the doors. The hinges squealed, and a chill seized me.
I squinted into darkness. Amarie usually left the protectioncandles burning in the foyer all night.
I hung up my cloak. “Father?” My voice bounced off the polished walls. “Amarie?”
Silence.Emptiness.
I drifted through the lower level, thethump-thump-thumpof my heartbeat rising for no tangible reason. Everything was in its place... and yet the air skittered with dread.
Something wasn’t right.
A squeaking sound halted me outside a linen closet. I rattled the doorknob, my specter winding between my fingers. The squeaking intensified.
No—not squeaking.Whimpering.
I plunged my specter through the keyhole and yanked the door open.
Amarie shook under the linens, arms shielding her bruised head. I dropped and grabbed her wrists. She tugged against me; a sob tore up her throat.
“Amarie, it’s me!”
She looked up, eyes bloodshot. “Alissa?” Her voice croaked with another sob.
“What happened?”
“Y–your father.”
