Brambles: A Thorn Short Story by Intisar Khanani (free ebook reader for pc .txt) 📕

“Do you know,” my mother goes on in a low voice, “how hard I have worked to keep the throne for your brother? Almost, we were exiled! We nearly lost it all—and you would have grown up a nothing in a foreign court, and then even less, if we could not prove our usefulness. I have kept you both here, kept your power and title for you, and this is what you do? Do you know what it has taken to make an ally of Daerilin—do you understand that it is his support that kept our throne? And now you have destroyed his daughter, publicly revealed her as a liar and a thief! All for some nameless servant.”

I stare at the ground. I am sorry, sorry for what my mother has gone through in order to hold onto the throne. But is that all that matters to her? Holding onto power, regardless of everything else? Isn’t the point of ruling to also take care of those below you—as Emmanika tried to tell Valka? Although she’d also counseled Valka not to make a scene—and that is precisely what I did.

“Know this,” my mother says softly. “You have chosen your future. I must keep the throne for your brother, and if that means you fall for your stupidity, then fall. There is no one here who will catch you.”

Her words cut through me. I dip my head, but I cannot keep the tears from leaking out of my eyes. “Mother,” I say, my voice breaking. “Please. Valka would have—”

“Get out.”

I manage to choke back my sobs just long enough to close the door behind me.

I stand in the shadow of the courtyard watching a pair of servants hastily load trunks into a carriage. A torch burns before the hall, and in its light the carriage appears like a great, hulking beast, hunched over and lying in wait.

Foolishness, that. A carriage is just a carriage, after all. I rest my cheek against the rough wooden wall beside me. There is Valka now, walking sullenly behind her elderly aunt and traveling companion. She casts one fierce, angry glance about the empty courtyard before clambering up. Daerilin will remain here through the summer, as he promised, but Valka has been disgraced past reprieve. There will be no stay through the summer months for her, no betrothal to announce in the fall.

I watch as the carriage door closes, and the servant at the back straps on the final trunk. The driver shakes the reins and the carriage trundles forward, rattling over the uneven cobbles. I watch the carriage as it lumbers out the great wooden gates, pulled open for it; watch as the sentries slowly shove the gates shut, and even after that I stand, staring at their dark form, my ears straining for the faint sound of the carriage’s passage.

There is no undoing what I did today. And perhaps I don’t want to undo it, but oh how I wish it had happened differently. I grasp the edges of my cloak and wrap my arms around myself, as if I could warm myself with wool and solitude alone.

Inside, I drift down the halls. I do not want to go back to my room, to the elderly servant who took me under her wing after my father died—I do not want to discover what she thinks of me now, if she judges me as harshly as my family does. So, instead, I find myself treading the stairs again, up to the hallway where Valka stood, brooch in hand. I stand, staring at the hallway, dimly lit by lamps set in sconces along the wall. Our luminae stones, as my brother is so aware, light only my mother’s room. Here, there are shadows and the occasional flicker of flame, and a sense of darkness. More foolishness, I suppose, for there is darkness everywhere, just as there is light.

Still, I wrap my cloak tighter about myself, even though it is warmer in here, warm enough that my palms are sweaty in their layers of wool.

“Alyrra.”

I turn to find Maralinde coming toward me. She watches me and I watch her in return. Surely she, at least, is still my friend? But then why does she seem so distant?

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” she says when she is even with me.

I nod.

“Father isn’t going to ask your mother for anything. Not after that.”

No, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t dare ask for a concession when my mother’s greatest concern will be placating Daerilin, the man whose family has been disgraced through his. Even if it was Valka who did wrong and not Emmanika. Even if it was my words that brought Valka down, and not really Maralinde’s family at all.

“I’m sorry,” Maralinde says quietly, “but I don’t think I’ll be writing to you this summer.”

I grip my cloak tighter. “You think I’ll turn on you?”

“I think my father can’t afford Daerilin’s hatred. Right now, this is about you and Valka, the way the court’s talking about it. That’s how it has to stay.”

I nod woodenly. There’s nothing else I can do, no words I can find. Maralinde never cozied up to Valka, never simpered at my brother, because she did not like what she saw. She said she liked me. But that is no longer enough in the face of what I have done.

She stands a moment longer, the shadow of regret in her eyes, and then she walks on to her room, leaving me alone.

It will get better, I tell myself as I trudge slowly through the halls to my room. It has to get better.

“Going somewhere?” My brother steps forward from where he leans against the wall, his face hard and ungiving, as if it were carved from ice.

I pause at the top of the stairs. It is morning now; Maralinde has already departed with her family—I watched them from across the courtyard, watched how she never even glanced toward