Page 101 of Thornlight

Maybe if he thought very hard of his mothers, and how much he had loved them.

Maybe then the girl would wake up.

.38.

The Impossible Whisper

Thorn lay with her kissed cheek pressed against the cold stone floor.

“Thorn?” whispered Quicksilver, through the tiny crack in the wall between their cells. The witch had discovered it shortly after Queen Celestyna’s guards had brought them downstairs to the dungeon. She had planted herself there, speaking to Thorn as loudly as she dared—that it would be all right, somehow, that they’d figure out a way to escape their cells.

That her sister, Brier, had done a brave thing.

That she’d noticed the queen’s soldiers looking full ofdoubt as they’d locked Quicksilver in her cell.

That Brier’s last words had been ones that might very well change the Vale forever: “Thorn, tell them the whole truth.”

“But you have to take those words and run with them, Thorn,” Quicksilver was whispering. “Honor your sister’s memory. Follow her courage with your own. I’ll help you. We’ll think of something, all right?”

But Thorn didn’t want to tell the truth anymore. Since watching first Brier and then Zaf fall to their deaths, she had not been able to say anything at all. She didn’t want to. She wanted to lie on the floor and press her palms against the ache in her chest until the Break swallowed the Vale into darkness.

“Thorn, please, say something to me.” Quicksilver’s soft voice buzzed around Thorn’s ears like a fly. “Thorn.Thorn.”

But Thorn could not be bothered by the Quicksilver fly.

She dredged up a small scrap of strength, enough to scoot away from the wall. She dragged herself into the middle of the room, curled up beside the stinking metal drain, and said, too quietly for anyone but herself to hear, “I’m sleeping.”

Thorn tumbled through exhausted dreams.

She saw Brier falling down the cliffs, and Zaf’s light divingafter her, and Bartos falling down the cliffs, and Brier falling down the cliffs, and Zaf’s light spinning through the air.

She swam through a black sea, sifted through dark waves. She called out their names, and the words echoed across the water:

“Bartos?”

“Zaf?”

“Brier?”

Thorn realized this sea was not a sea. It was the Break, and the waves were churning shadows.

Suddenly she was clawing through air, not water. She fell into darkness, without a scream and without fear.

After all, this was where Bartos and Brier and Zaf had gone.

It made sense to Thorn that she should go there too.

Thorn awoke to the sight of a soft gray sky beyond the one high window of her cell.

It was the violet-touched gray of dawn in the Vale. She had been in her cell for only a few hours, and yet it felt as though she had been lying on the gritty cold floor since the moment of her birth.

“Maybe Zaf managed to save her,” came Quicksilver’s voice, quiet and hoarse from all the whispering.

But Thorn did not allow herself that hope. She remembered Zaf’s hollow cheeks after arriving back in the Vale. The dull white of her skin, stretched tight and thin like old paper across her bones. The pale milk of her eyes.

Thorn’s own eyes, swollen and itchy from crying, filled with tears. The web in her belly shifted, grumbling quietly in protest—You weak simpering cowardly small unimpressive sniffly crybaby,it sneered—but that mean dark voice seemed far from her now, pushed away by the tight hot ache in her chest, and all the tears she had cried. And anyway, she didn’t care what the web had to say just now.

She rolled over onto her other side, turning back toward Quicksilver’s voice. The cheek Zaf had kissed met the cold air of her cell, stinging like a pin had pricked her.

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