Page 21 of Thornlight
Unsteadily, she sat down in the bright green ferns and held a trembling Mazby in her hands. The crowd dispersed quickly. A brown-skinned woman soothed her crying child. A ruddy-cheeked man glanced fearfully at the sky. Soon there was only someone’s lost cap, abandoned in the mud, and the spray of the roaring waterfall.
Brier closed her eyes. They were dry, but all the same she felt as though the Fall Gate, when it slammed closed, had cut a piece of her deepest self in two.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” she whispered, “or where you’re going, but come home soon. Come home safe.”
Then Brier imagined that her whisper could travel, and sent it zipping down the cliffs so it could find its place in Thorn’s heart.
Standing on the highest terrace of her tower, Queen Celestyna watched as Brier Skystone, her unicorn, Norojedzia, and five of her own best soldiers disappeared through the Fall Gate. A low rumble shook the castle. From below, in the Break, came dim flashes of lightning.
“Do you think she’ll do it?” came Orelia’s small voice. “That burn on her chest looked so painful, Tyna.”
“What?” Celestyna rubbed her aching temples. She hadn’t shut her eyes for more than an hour at a time in the past few days.
A stormless sky tended to do that to a child of Westlin.
Especially if that child was a queen.
Especially when everyone expected that queen to somehow bring the storms back, as if that was in her power to do.
Celestyna stared at the eastern horizon, her eyes burning. Orelia was right; the burnhadlooked terrible. And the girl was young,tooyoung, hardly older than Orelia.
But Celestyna had no choice. Burn or no burn, Brier Skystone was the girl with lightning in her veins. There was no time to wait for the girl to heal. They needed eldisks, and if anyone could find more lightning, it was her. And when she came back with Norojedzia’s crackling horn full of lightning, the people of the Vale would cheer for her—and for the wise queen who had been clever enough to send her in the first place.
Maybe Brier would come back with so much lightning that the Gulgot would die at last, burned by a fresh supply of eldisks, and the Break would close. Those who had fled the countrywould return, and all would be as it should. The secret anchored in Celestyna’s blood would remain secret forever, and Orelia would never have to carry it herself.
And if Brierdidn’tcome back...
Well, Celestyna knew what shewouldn’tdo, even if Brier Skystone died the moment she set foot in Estar. Celestyna would never,nevermarry anyone. Once, Celestyna had asked her mother if her father had known what he was getting into, when he married the young queen of the Vale. And her mother had smiled, her eyes sharp but sad, and said, “Tyna, darling, love makes a fool out of even the brightest mind.”
Celestyna had long ago decided she would never drag another person into her family’s awful mess. Some blood should never be touched, and Hightower blood was the foulest of all.
A single word slithered through Celestyna’s mind:Queenie. She saw the faint image of an old woman wrapped in furs and chains, sitting at the mouth of a cave.
Shuddering, Celestyna remembered the sound of her dying father’s voice as he explained the truth: “There is a witch in the mountains, a single witch left alive after the breaking of the Vale. She is called the Fetterwitch, and she crafted a curse to save us all, but she needed flesh and blood to finish it....”
“Tyna, what’s wrong with you?” Orelia’s voice trembled. “Why aren’t you listening to me?”
Celestyna shook herself and knelt before her sister.Queenie.The Fetterwitch’s voice still whispered in her mind. Her blood tingled, as if she had spent the day in the lightning-charged storm halls, which housed the royal forges. It wanted someone to help carry some of her burden.It could be a friend,her pounding blood seemed to suggest in the Fetterwitch’s sly voice,or a partner in love, or a sister....
Celestyna shoved away those frightened, fretful thoughts and caressed Orelia’s cheek with trembling fingers.
“Darling one,” she said, “why are you crying?”
Orelia dashed tears from her eyes. “What if Brier dies on the journey? What if she can’t find lightning in the eastern mountains? What if thereisno more lightning?” Orelia drew in a shaky breath. “What will we do then? The Gulgot will crawl out and turn everything to darkness.”
Celestyna swallowed all the things she had been longing to say for two years: what the lightning of the Valereallywas, and how her deepest, most secret fear was that Orelia would find out.
“Brier won’t die,” Celestyna said firmly. “She will bring home so much lightning that the skies will burn silver, and theGulgot will be so frightened, he’ll crawl back down to the deep, deep heart of the world, and never come up again.”
Orelia gave her a watery smile. “You really think so?”
“Of course. Didn’t you hear me before? She has a nose for lightning, that Brier Skystone. The best harvester we’ve had working for us since Mother and Father died. If anyone can find us the lightning we need, it’s her.”
Orelia threw her arms around Celestyna’s neck, and as the queen hugged her sister, stroking her shining golden hair, her smile disappeared. She stared blearily at the starless eastern skies and thought things she would never have said aloud, not even in the privacy of her empty rooms:
What if the eastern storms cannot save us?
What if the lightning of the Vale is the only of its kind?