Page 20 of Thornlight

Brier waited, listening, but she couldn’t see or hear a thundered thing.

She limped down the stairs, then grabbed her father’s knobby walking stick from its spot by the front door and leaned hard against it as she hurried down the dirt path to the city, Mazby clinging to her shoulder. She shoved past soaked green fronds, wiped itchy raindrops from her nose.

Hundreds of people rushed through the streets of Aeria, along the outer road that wound along the clifftops toward the Fall Gate. Brier shoved her way through the crowd.

“Move!” she shouted into the din. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m—”

Mazby squawked. “You’re nobody!”

And that shut Brier up. She clutched her collar shut, hiding the lightning burn from view.

She was Thorn Skystone for now. Not Brier;Thorn. A sweep, and not a very good one. A quiet girl, a dreamy girl, a girl who made art out of other people’s stinky, grubby trash—

A stupid girl?

Brier pushed down against the bad feelings twisting in her throat. She’d called Thorn stupid yesterday, and it had been such a terrible thing to say—and not true, besides.

Thorn wasn’t stupid. Thorn was simply herself. It wasn’tThorn’sfault that she’d been born without something useful in her blood, like a talent for lightning. Just like it wasn’t Brier’s fault that shehadbeen born with such a thing.

At last the crowd stopped, gathering near the Fall of the Sky. The air roared with the sounds of rushing water. Mist danced in shifting clouds, tugged by the wind racing up the cliffs.

The crowd stood as densely packed as a brick wall. Brier let out a growl of frustration, wiping her clammy forehead, breathing hard through the pain seizing her chest. If Noro were here...

“Over here!” Mazby’s shrill little voice called.

Brier found Mazby hovering above the chimney of a nearby cottage. He searched past the crowd, wings flapping—and then his yellow eyes widened. He sank onto the chimney and raised one tiny foot, sharp with talons.

“Thorn?” he called out.“Thorn!”

Brier’s pounding heart dropped to her toes.Thorn?

Gritting her teeth, breathing hard, she moved as quickly as she could around the crowd, until she was very nearly at the cliff’s edge, where tangled green ferns and twisted black trees trembled in the wind. Leaning against her walking stick to catch her breath, her chest smarting and her legs shaking, Brier squinted through the mist and saw what Mazby had seen.

Where the River of Clouds met the River of Storms, rapids rushed and roiled and then spilled down the cliffs in an enormous waterfall—the Fall of the Sky. Set into the rocky black ridges that flanked the rapids was a giant circle of white stone, cut in half right down the middle, and this was the Fall Gate. Whenit was closed, it served as something like a cap over the most dangerous thundering rapids and the treacherously slippery riverbanks. When it was pulled open by huge mechanisms of chains and pulleys that only the royal guard could use, each half-moon piece of the Gate rumbled back into slots carved out of the nearby ridges. The twin rivers’ rushing water roared without any cover, and mist sprayed everywhere.

The Gate was open now, and a procession of people and horses were walking straight into the waterfall. No, that wasn’t right. Brier stared, her heart pounding as loud as the rivers. The people and their horses were in fact starting down a narrow road, slick with water, that zigzagged down the cliffs to Estar. The entrance had been closed off by the Fall Gate, but now the road stood open and waiting. It would take these people behind the Fall of the Sky and down the cliffs.

Brier knew that road. It was one of the only safe cliff roads left; most of the others had crumbled, torn from the cliffs by the Gulgot’s spreading darkness. It was the road the Vale’s soldiers traveled to get to Estar and the Break. It was the road Brier hoped would soon bring her parents home from the war.

And Thorn and Noro and a team of royal soldiers were marching down this road, through the mist, to Estar.

They wereleaving.

“I don’t understand.” Mazby fluttered over and wrapped himself around Brier’s walking stick, his feathers pressed flat against his body. “Where are they going?”

The pain in Brier’s chest was making her vision black and spotty. She cupped her free hand around her mouth, hoping her voice could be heard over the buzzing crowd, and screamed at the top of her lungs.“Brier!”

Thorn, on Noro’s back, whipped her head around at the sound of Brier’s voice.

For one second, their eyes locked—dark to dark, frightened to frightened.

Thorn raised her hand and shouted something back, but Brier couldn’t hear it.

Then the horns blasted again, and the two heavy stone pieces of the Fall Gate slid closed. A grinding noise as the mechanism worked, and then a great slam like thunder, and the rivers’ roar grew a little quieter, and the air cleared of mist, and Thorn was gone.

Thorn wasgone.

Brier stood at the cliff’s edge among the soaked ferns and trees for a long time. No one was paying attention to her, and she wouldn’t have noticed if they were. She stared and staredat the closed gate until something soft nudged her palm with a miserable bleat.

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