The Castle Behind Thorns Read Online Free PDF Page A

found half a bucket here and three-quarters of a bowl there—anything that would actually hold material—and placed them on the table, and then began sorting foodstuffs into these jumbled containers. Onion chunks. Cracked cheese wheels. Dried peas mixed with gravel. Lentils mixed with ashes. Almonds mixed with grit. Bread crumbles. Apple bits, fig bits, and pear bits. Withered and halved lampreys, eels, salmon, pike, and trout.
    And turnips—endless ruptured turnips. Had the kitchen just received the turnip delivery for the whole year when the castle was sundered? It was the only explanation he could think of to account for the excessive numbers of turnips in the kitchen’s root cellar, buried in layers of sawdust. Someday he might have eaten everything else in the castle, but there would still be turnips left.
    Sand soaked half a haunch of venison in water until it plumped, then roasted it between two half-onions. “That’ll be quite nice,” he told Merlin.
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    A FEW DAYS LATER, Sand felt comfortable with his food supplies. The larders and pantries were refilling with his salvaged foods. He had eaten well every day, meals meant for a king, or at least a count. The night before, he’d roasted half a rehydrated peacock, and eaten broken pigs made of marzipan and sugar.
    He decided to make a second pass around the kitchen. He sorted the nonfood items—the many, many nonfood items—he didn’t think he’d ever be able to return to their original purpose, and tossed them into piles according to the material they were made from. Wood, after all, could be burned, whatever shape it was in, and iron was infinitely reshapable.
    Afterward, Sand scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom. He doused the floor with water painstakingly wrung from his well cloths, and swept the accumulated water, dirt, and debris out the door with a broom he’d mended with strips of leather.
    When he finished, he gazed at his clean, drying floor; at the tables filled with food that he was salvaging, sorting, and storing; at the nearly neat stacks of half-bowls and quarter–cooking pots; at the apple fragments he had soaked in water and now roasted on a spit with dustings of nutmeg and cinnamon; at the heaps of splintered firewood stacked in the corner; at the ripped dishcloths neatly folded and arranged on the mantel next to his falcon.
    He, Sand, had done all this. He had saved these things, sorted them, repurposed them, and made them work again.
    With his mended broom held above his head like a sword, he shouted: “I am Sand, lord of this kitchen!”
    Even though when he said it out loud, he could hear how silly it sounded, he knew that was incomplete. There was no one here to challenge his rule, no one here to tell him otherwise.
    â€œLord of this kitchen, and lord of this castle!” he yelled. It wasn’t even a bit satisfying; the kitchen had high ceilings to let the heat rise, but the sound didn’t really echo.
    Broom still held aloft, Sand ran into the great hall, and stood before the broken phoenix and swan crest. “I am Alexandre!” he shouted to the rafters. “And I am lord of this castle!”
    His voice rang out and returned. It was incredibly satisfying.
    And no one disagreed.
    Yet.

4
    Dark
    P ERROTTE WOKE IN DARKNESS IN A CRYPT OF STONE, with no memory of ever having died.
    She knew she woke from death, not from sleep. This knowledge dwelled with her, dwelled within her, deep in her bones, and even deeper in her mind.
    She did not move for the longest time. She did not think that she could move. She felt dry, withered even, and she felt that her skin drew moisture from the stones around her.
    She knew it was dark, yet she could see the minutest details of the stone of the niche where she lay. Darkness did not matter. Strange; there had been a point not that long ago, when she was small, when she had been frightened of the dark, when she had been scared