The Castle Behind Thorns Read Online Free PDF

to death—
    Well, not to death. She had died of something else entirely. She knew that; she knew fear had not killed her.
    Yes, she had once been afraid of the dark, but now the dark was friendly. She had spent much time in the dark, and it was no enemy. Darkness had simply been a place to rest before returning to the world.
    It was troubling. Why had she not been in Heaven? Had she been such a sinful child after all, that she had been consigned to Purgatory instead?
    Before waking here, now, Perrotte would have been frightened or troubled by this line of thought, but nothing really frightened her anymore.
    Timeless time passed. Her fingertips twitched at her sides, then her wrists moved. Her chest rose and fell. Her lips and throat were so dry. She swallowed convulsively, barely finding the moisture in her mouth to do so. A taste lingered on her tongue, a flavor left behind in a mouth so arid it might as well be a tomb in a desert. What was the flavor? Sweet yet tart. Fresh yet moldering. Living yet dead.
    Memories flashed through her mind like summer lightning. They were there, the memories of being dead, waiting to be coaxed down from the clouds.
    And before that ? Before being dead, what did she remember of dying?
    Those memories are behind the door .
    She imagined climbing off the stone couch where she rested and staggering to her feet. She didn’t move her legs yet, though. She lay still, breathing, remembering how to breathe, remembering how to live, and trying not to dwell too much on the whys and wherefores.
    She had died, and then she had undied. That was all there was to it.

5
    Anvil
    B Y THE NEXT MORNING , S AND WISHED THERE REALLY was someone else in the castle, someone to challenge his dominion over it. Just a little bit.
    He was terribly lonely. Growing up in the little house attached to the smithy across the valley, with his stepmother’s drying herbs hanging from every rafter and a pair of younger half sisters constantly underfoot, he had always longed for just a little quiet and privacy. But now he drowned in quiet and privacy, and found himself talking out loud—to himself, to his falcon, to the objects he repaired, to the rooms he set right.
    Sand stayed as busy as he could, because when he wasn’t busy, he found himself climbing to that empty, highest room of the castle, to look out across the valley of cherry orchards and asparagus fields to his parents’ house. It was too far away to see his father, Agnote, or either of his sisters with any clarity, but he could sometimes make out figures moving around, and the sight comforted him.
    In the other direction, he strained to catch sight of his grandparents’ house but he could only see the chimney and the smoke from Grandmère’s kitchen fire.
    Discontent, he turned back to studying his father’s house, squinting to see more clearly. Would anyone ever look across and see him staring back? Would anyone ever see the smoke from his fires and think: Perhaps that is where Sand has gone?
    He wished that he had not spent the last year arguing with his father.
    For twelve years, he had agreed with his father about his life’s plan. He was not meant to be a blacksmith, no matter how much he wished it so. He worked in the smithy when he could, learning as much as his father would allow; but most days, he was forced to walk down the hill to study as much reading, rhetoric, and philosophy as the village priest would provide—which, thankfully, was not much. His father wanted him to go to university someday, and Sand never disagreed.
    But then Grandmère had sprained her ankle, and Sand had been sent to spend a few weeks helping out his grandparents. Commonly in a smith’s household, all its able-bodied members helped out with the forge from time to time; Grandmère herself and Sand’s own mother had both been accomplished smiths. Likewise, Sand had been pumping the bellows for his father since he could remember,