An Heir to Thorns and Steel Read online

  And then the convulsions took me and I fell.

  My shoulder preceded me into consciousness, jabbing a lance of pain through my chest with the regularity of a metronome. Following the furrows it cut along my ribs I found my waist—cold, very cold—and then my hip, uncomfortably ground against the floor. It took somewhat longer to reason that my clothes were damp, and to guess that the puddle beneath my waist was cold chocolate. I had to guess because I couldn’t see: that thin metal gleam nearby had to be my upended glasses.

  For a moment, I heard a voice in my head, desperate and distant: Help me, help me. My voice, almost, but made rich by age, like a wine, crying forward in desolation and despair. I hovered between the future and the moment, between my mute helplessness and the tainted magic of that cry.

  Through this strange state of disassociation I traveled, until the shape of my mind could hold thoughts, something other than that lonely voice. I had had a seizure in the chocolate parlor, in front of witnesses.

  I closed my eyes. Ah, God. Cruel and terrible and unjust God.

  “—rgan, Morgan... Morgan?”

  “I can hear you,” I said, my voice rough. The full weight of understanding bid fair to suffocate me. Ivy’s face, Ivy’s concerned eyes. This close I could count the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose and see the motes of green in her light brown irises, even without my spectacles.

  “Has it passed?” she asked. “Can you lift your head?”

  “Not yet,” I said. Shouting, that was what made her difficult to hear. “Who—”

  “Guy and Chester talking to the proprietor,” she said. “Surely it was something in the chocolate.”

  “God,” I said around my thick tongue and narrow throat. “It wasn’t poisoned.”

  “What else could it be?” she asked. “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. Some accident, perhaps…”

  They thought I’d drunk something foul. I wanted to disabuse them of the notion, not out of any desire to unburden my soul of my secret, but simply because it was incorrect. But I was too weak to protest and so I didn’t. My second episode in a day, on a spring afternoon when both nausea and seizures should be decreasing in frequency. I could only hope it was some terrible fluke.

  “We sent for a doctor,” Ivy began.

  Worse and worse. There weren’t so many doctors in Evertrue that I hadn’t met them all. “I don’t need a doctor,” I said. “I just need to find a bed and lie on it.”

  “But…”

  “No,” I said, and forced my arm to move until I could roll forward onto it and lever myself unsteadily upright. “I’ll be fine. Truly.”

  “God!” Radburn said, swooping on me. “What are you doing trying to get up? We thought you were going to die!”

  “I am patently not dead, or even dying,” I said. “It was just an episode.”

  “An episode?” Radburn’s eyes widened. “We thought that chocolate was going to bring your stomach up through your mouth.”

  I made a face at him. “If you’re going to indulge in hyperbole at least put some effort into it. That was appalling.”

  “He can’t be that bad off,” Guy said behind me. “He’s needling you.”

  “The proprietor said it wasn’t his fault of course,” Chester said, grabbing me under an arm. Radburn got the other. I hated needing their help. “He said he poured all our servings from the same batch, but what else could he say?”

  “Scared of the consequences,” Guy opined lazily.

  “Who’d be afraid of a handful of students?” Radburn asked, which was a far more reasonable observation. We liked our chocolate and books far more than we liked swords and cannon, though Radburn had an abiding interest in the latter invention and what he firmly believed to be their forthcoming revolution of military strategy. With the exception of Chester, who was never parted from his family weapon, none of us were even schooled in the sword; dueling had passed out of fashion with the aristocracy the Revolutionary War had displaced.

  “Here,” Ivy said. Chester and Radburn halted as she carefully set my glasses on my nose and smoothed the wires behind my ears. My hair hissed beneath her slim fingers. I could see her again. I wished I couldn’t. I wished the sight of me writhing on the floor had never darkened her eyes. “Are you sure about not waiting for the doctor?” she asked, brows crimping in worry.

  “I just need rest,” I said, and added for the benefit of the men, “I feel like I’ve been out all night.”

  “And without the drinking,” Radburn said, shaking his head.

  “Or the debauching,” Guy agreed. “Cruel world!”

  I laughed around the weakness in my limbs, around the trembling in my body’s core. I let them help me out to the street and into a carriage. Waved off their concerns.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “At Languages.”

  “Poetry in the morning,” Radburn said. “Who the hell feels poetic before lunch?”

  “Later, Locke,” Chester said, closing the carriage door and sending me off. They were treating me like I’d over-indulged, not like an invalid. I wanted to weep for relief.

  I insisted on living on my own. My parents argued that I needed surveillance, not out of any concern that I might dishonor them but because they feared I might wake up paralyzed one day and no one would find me until after I’d died. I didn’t dare tell them that if this nameless malady were to kill me I would have preferred to meet my end away from staring eyes; my mother would have been appalled and my father, a man who'd never been seriously ill, would have imagined this an admission that I was feeling close to death. It would have made them fight harder to keep me in their house.

  As it was, the only way I could convince them to leave me in my modest student flat was by conceding to weekly visitations from Cliffton, a family retainer. By the time the carriage dropped me off he’d been and gone, leaving tea on the stove and a fire on the hearth. There wasn’t a servant in the family who didn’t know how much my joints ached, even in summer.

  I collapsed into the chair in front of the fire and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. Two episodes in a day. My protestations to Ivy notwithstanding, I would have to call on a doctor. Not today… I felt weak, translucent, as if the sun would pass through me, blood and bone. But tomorrow after class… tomorrow I would see Stirley, and perhaps a miracle would well forth from the fabric of the world. Perhaps he would finally know what was wrong with me.

  My chin nodded until it rested against my chest. I dozed before the fire, absorbing the heat. In that not-quite-sleeping my mind raveled together imaginings from history and folklore: the Red Prince streaked in gore atop the pile of corpses he’d starved into that ultimate submission, facing a gaunt King, dripping blood from innumerable wounds, the injustices of royalty against the land written into his flesh. Between them a sword thrust into the sticky scarlet earth wept thorns that crawled into the ground and clasped it in a tearing embrace until it opened and demons dragged themselves from the desperate clutches of their prisons. One of them turned to me and spread thin lips over a nest of needle-shaped teeth. A long, narrow tongue spilled from its mouth and it hissed, The Prince lives!

  I jerked awake with every limb, every joint grasped in the jaws of pain, in the embrace of thorns, a pain so excruciating my eyes watered and my throat choked on a sob of disbelief. I lurched from the chair and fell onto my hands and knees in front of the fire’s embers, my fingers in spasm. A fragment of a thought: What did I think to accomplish? I could go nowhere to escape. But my body insisted, blind in its belief. There had to be a way to leave it behind. I had to move. To pace. To shed the pain like water.

  Except that I couldn’t, and there was nowhere to go, and every flex of a muscle, every shift of weight across my taut skin, every blink of my tear-clotted eyes summoned it, so that my body played an insane tug-of-war, shifting the agony from a palm to a knee to a segment of spine, from the back of my head to my closed throat, tighter and tighter until I couldn’t move and I collapsed in a jer
king spiral coil on the rug.

  This, then, was it. It had to be. There could be no other end to this much pain except complete negation. I wept through the fire consuming me and waited for the sacrament of an ending.

  And waited.

  And waited and it didn’t come and it wasn’t going to come and I was going to live like this forever and I had never made plans for what I would do if I never stopped hurting—

  Again, the demon, hunched, spreading scaled and tattered wings like great black sails, like leprous storm clouds smothering a clean horizon. Its head was bowed over my groin—that searing, digging sensation was its thousands of narrow teeth chewing on my hip, exposing a curve of pearlescent bone. My gorge rose.

  The Prince lives, a voice hissed behind me.

  “No.” Was that me? Another demon had poured out of the red dark and fastened its mouth on my ribs. I writhed, desperate, despairing, and yet it was not the pain I protested when I screamed, “NO!”

  The Prince lives, the voice repeated, with hideous amusement.

  “No-the-Prince-is-dead,” I sobbed, unable to breathe, choking on my own bile. Hot rivulets of blood ran down my side and narrow tongues scraped them off my glistening skin. History mingled with the present; story with reality. If they would speak only the language of folklore, I would do anything to make them leave. “Executed. Gone. No more.”

  If you were right, the voice whispered, moist breath on the curve of my ear, if you were right, then we could not be here. But we break free. And we will consume you.

  I moaned.

  We know you. And you are ours. The point of a slick tongue traced the inner curve of my ear and I couldn’t squirm away. Ours. A parody of a lover, learning my skin until it hovered near the canal and then jammed inside, plugging it closed. A spear of pain erupted behind my eyes, so bright that my body and I denied it even as my back arched off the ground. White brilliance blotted everything away.

  Now, I thought. Now I will lose consciousness and when I wake it will be over...

  ...but I didn’t. Something sucked the agony out of every limb in my body, replacing it with nothing. I felt hollow, strewn across the rug like a broken doll. And yet my relief was so vast my weeping renewed, though my eyes ached and my throat had gone hot and tight.

  A fluke. It had to be a fluke. This weakness that constrained me from rising was the product of a fevered imagination, just like my delusion of being eaten alive by demons. A product of too much reading by candlelight. And that prickly empty sensation, the one that felt like the promise of lightning to come, the one that made me feel that if I so much as twitched the pain would swamp me, clogging every extremity to dreadful surfeit... that too was a conjuring, a bad dream.

  But I was not in the habit of deceiving myself. I stared at the sullen embers on the hearth, my cheek painfully pressed against the rug, and knew that something had changed. My disease had grown fangs, teeth... and voices. The first two were horror enough, but the latter....

  I had always feared for my health. But the prospect of going insane was unbearable. As the embers clicked and settled on their way to ash, I struggled to control my breathing, to will strength into limbs gone as limp and weak as wet paper. Could I? I could. I rolled onto my aching knees and trembling wrists. From there I staggered to my feet, grasping wildly for the wall. I caught it before I fell, but my fingers did not have the strength to maintain a grip and I slid almost to my knees before I recovered.

  I stood, but hunched. My clothes clung to my body, sodden with rank sweat. But somehow I reached for a coat and forced myself out to the street to hail a carriage. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. I had to see a doctor.

  “Young Mister Locke!” the doctor’s wife exclaimed, peering up at me from behind the door. “At this hour to come calling!”

  “Forgive me, ma’am,” I said. “My need is urgent. May I speak with your husband?”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll fetch him directly. Wait you here.”

  I leaned against the door frame, my misery finding completion in the rain that had started halfway to the doctor’s residence. My breath still felt labored, as if my chest could not completely expand. A moment of hysteria moved me to wonder if one of the demons had cracked several of my ribs.

  The sound of shuffling feet preceded the full opening of the door. Of the four doctors in Evertrue, I chose to return to this one: James Edmund Stirley, who neither lied to me nor treated me like an exceptionally interesting laboratory specimen. He was human in his bafflement and as good as any scholar for attention to detail and I trusted him. He had never cured me, but no one had. I no longer expected that miracle of any human being.

  “Morgan,” Stirley said. “You look a sorry state. Come in before you catch a chill.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I managed three steps into the foyer before Stirley had to catch one of my arms in a dark brown hand.

  “Good God!” Stirley said. “You’re shaking already. This is nasty weather for you to be traveling in.”

  “I know,” I said. “It wasn’t my intention, I promise you.”

  He guided me into the room off the foyer that served him as a reception area, with sturdily upholstered chairs in wine and bronze brocade, walls paneled in dark wood and wallpaper repeating the rich color schemes: mahogany, merlot, bronze and midnight blue. The fire on the hearth beat back the wet air and smelled wonderful, aromatic with resin and sap. Heat had never felt so good, so soothing.

  God, I was afraid. All my senses felt battered to a raw sensitivity.

  “So what brings you here?” Stirley asked, pouring me a snifter of brandy.

  I stared moodily at it. Chocolate I enjoyed. Alcohol, with its impairment of my thinking, I found less tolerable. I was always the secret sober around those who drank. “I had two incidents today: vomiting and a seizure.”

  “Two?” Stirley’s hand paused in pouring his own drink.

  “And then I had... an episode,” I said.

  “An episode,” he repeated. “Like a seizure?”

  “Like a seizure,” I said, the words seeming to slow. “But instead of losing consciousness and control of my limbs, I felt pain.”

  “Pain where?” he asked, sitting across from me.

  “Everywhere,” I said. “Not a lick of skin was spared. No joint. No bone. No muscle.” I took a long breath. Even recounting the memory of it raised the specter of my desperation.

  “You’ve felt pain before,” Stirley said.

  “Not like this,” I said. “Never like this. Everything before was an ache, a nagging thing. Fatigue. This was... nothing like that.” I hated dramatics, but I felt compelled to finish, “I thought I was dying. It surprised me when I didn’t.”

  “A change,” Stirley said with a sigh. “Two episodes and pain? Your disease may be evolving into something more virulent.”

  “There’s something else,” I said. I had to get it out before I could choke it down, conceal it beyond even my ability to face it. “I... had a delusion.”

  “A hallucination?”

  “No,” I said. “At least, they didn’t appear in the room with me. I went there, to their field.” It occurred to me that I could not recollect ever seeing the place I’d ended up. I supposed I’d dreamed it from nothing.

  “‘They,’“ Stirley repeated.

  “I dreamed demons were eating me,” I said. “I was patently awake, though the pain made me wish otherwise. Doctor, I’m afraid I’m going mad.”

  “If you were in as much pain as you say, I can’t imagine not having a delusion,” Stirley said. “I wouldn’t fear for your sanity quite yet, Morgan.”

  “I am worried,” I said. “No one even knows what afflicts me, much less how it will progress... but I can’t go having multiple seizures and panicked pain-induced visions of winged horrors while at school.”

  “And you’re asking me now what we should do,” he said.

  “You are the doctor.”

  He shook his head. “You won’t like it.”
<
br />   “I believe you,” I said. “I still want to know what you suggest.”

  “I think it’s time you re-thought the poppy.”

  It was a measure of how deeply the episode had perturbed me that I didn’t immediately protest. “I don’t want to drug myself.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it will dull your senses. It will weaken the seizures, perhaps even keep them at bay. And it will certainly make short work of the pain. You might not even notice it if you take enough.”

  “If I take enough, not only will I continuously dream cannibalistic demons, I will end up dead.”

  “And if you don’t?” Stirley said.

  I set my glass aside untouched and put my head in my hands.

  “We can control the dosage,” Stirley said. “You don’t have to take the amount that addicts do to hallucinate. It’s not as if we’re consigning you to a life in a whorehouse. For what we know, your body is so wracked it’ll soak it before you can reach the threshold of pleasure.”

  “But you don’t know,” I said, hard put to keep the misery in my heart where it remained imperceptible. “You don’t even know what’s wrong with me.”

  “No,” Stirley said. “But we can treat symptoms, as we have since you arrived on my doorstep.”

  “I want to be well, Stirley,” I said. My voice was hoarse but that was the limit of my histrionics. I thought of Ivy. “I want to live to be old.”

  “No man knows the hour,” Stirley said. “If I fall outside tomorrow, I may die on the street and you will outlive me by a dozen years.” He shrugged. “Had you consulted me months ago, I would never have predicted you to live so long; I’ve never known a man to vomit daily without dying.” He shook his head. “No, Morgan. We have no evidence that your condition is killing you. It’s just improbable that it hasn’t.”

  Improbable. I closed my eyes.

  “Let me give you the poppy and dosing instructions,” he said. “Keep it. If you have another sequence like this one, then you can take it. Perhaps this is an isolated event and you’re worrying without cause.”