Page 62 of Thornlight

“And now she’s fighting her way across Estar, risking her life for all of us, to find more lightning in the eastern mountains. More witches to kill.”

“If there are even any witches left at all,” Gert muttered.

Brier drew in a shaky breath, remembering the anger burning hot and blue in Zino’s eyes.

Stormwitches.Lightning.

“Those children who tried to attack you,” she said. “Those children who have...” But she couldn’t say Mazby’s name. “If they’re stormwitches, how did they get out of their lightning? Has that ever happened before?”

“Not once,” Gert said. “Far as we knew, theycouldn’t.”

“Maybe not all the witches were trapped in storms when the Vale broke,” Eldon answered. “Or maybe whatever magic trapped them is finally wearing off, after all these years.”

Brier forgot her Thorn self, and snapped, “So it’s possible forthem to get free, then, only most of them can’t, because you’ve killed them.”

She paused, her voice giving out as the last piece of truth finally became clear.

“And becauseBrierhas killed them too,” she whispered, a numb feeling spreading through her body. Her feet and hands were cold and heavy as stones.

Eldon turned away to gaze sadly out the tiny window beside the door.

“The queen has no choice, Thorn,” said Gert. “It’s them or us.”

Brier’s mind whirled to keep up. So Queen Celestyna knew too. She knew, and the harvesters knew, and, probably the queen’s soldiers knew, or at least some of them.

Everyone knew except for her.

A terrible, cold thought fell into her heart.

“The unicorns know too,” she whispered. “Don’t they?”

Farver wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Brier was glad. She didn’t want any of them to look at her, ever again, and she didn’t want to see them, either, and she didn’t want to think about Noro, her dearest friend, knowing this horrible thing and keeping it from her.

How could friendship with a liar be anything but a lie?

“I’m tired,” Brier said faintly, which was true, and then, “I need some time to think,” which was also true.

She turned away on the bed, curled up into a tight knot, and when Farver tucked the blanket around her, she whispered two lies: “I understand why you did it. And don’t worry. I won’t tell my sister.”

When Brier awoke an hour later, her mind felt a little less fuzzy, and carried a plan.

.24.

The Witch Without a Monster

Through a pair of tinted goggles set in brass frames, Thorn watched Quicksilver’s friend work.

For protection, the witch had given goggles to Thorn and Bartos, until their decidedly ordinary eyes adjusted to the radiance of the Star Lands. It was such a bright country, Quicksilver had told them, because since the War of the Wolves, witches had come out of hiding, and magic was returning to the land.

The Thorn of the past, who had not yet seen her sister burned, nor been sent off to Estar, might already have begun sketching a picture of the place in her mind, and planningwhat paints she could use to color it.

But the Thorn of now worried her hands in her lap, as if she were molding a shape out of clay, and tried to ignore the strange twists of her gut.

The twists felt almost like nervousness, the kind of nervousness that made her want to scratch and scratch at her legs and arms, but it also felt like something different. Something new.

She’d felt it in the nests of those awful giant birds, when she’d snapped at Bartos—a nugget of something unfamiliar in her belly. A little like hunger, a little like fear, a lot like anger. Hot and snapping and pinching and snaking—and growing.

Now, it felt like not just a nugget, not just a spark, but a fist.

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