Mercurial Naomi Hughes (suggested reading txt) 📖

wouldn’t, either. His knees had already been weak and at this new threat, they seemed to liquefy entirely, and made him stumble forward into the sword’s point. Its razor-sharp edge bit a stinging line across his chest.

All thoughts of flowers vanished. He threw himself backwards and fled.

At his back, a door slammed. “Mama!” called the imperious girl. “There’s an intruder in the garden!”

“It was just a boy. I saw him a moment ago,” said the man’s voice mildly. Then, a second later: “Why do you have my sword?”

As Theon dove into the rosebushes, he heard sharp footsteps and then a woman’s voice. “Nettle Sarai Melaine-Ironheart,” said the witch in a foreboding tone, “have you stabbed another boy with that?”

“He fell into it,” said the girl, unrepentant.

A door slammed again. The witch was coming after him.

Heedless of the path, Theon threw himself straight through the rosebushes in the direction that he hoped led homeward. He barely felt the sharp thorns scrape over his skin, barely noticed the beads of blood that welled up in their wake. He was foolish. He was weak. He was terrified.

And, he realized a minute or two later, he was lost, as well. He stumbled through a hedge and onto a path and spun around there, searching for signs of anything that looked familiar, but all he could see was the night sky with its dazzling stars and the smoke from the cottage winding through them. There were wandering paths all around but he could see from here that many of them led to dead ends, to carved-out clearings with ponds and benches and wrought-iron arches draped in wisteria.

Impatient footsteps snapped against the paving stones not far away. He turned himself in a direction that was opposite from the smoke and the footsteps both and plunged through another rosebush. This one, though, was not as permissive as the bushes he’d shoved through earlier. It was full of heavy yellow-orange blooms like flames, and like flames, they seemed to want to consume him. The thorns were nearly as long as his fingers. The branches were thin and creeping and hungry; they embraced him, and he could not escape. He tried to back out of the bush in the way he’d come but every movement sent thorns burrowing deeper into his skin. He was caught, a fox in a snare. Drops of his blood spattered against the roses. Dizzy with fear, he cried out.

A shadow fell over the brambles. Something bladed and metallic glinted in the moonlight. The hunter had come to retrieve her prey. Another cry caught in his throat, but with all his might, he held it down. A small bit of courage had found him at last.

The bladed thing slashed downward, and then slashed again, and again after that. None of the swipes touched him. Instead, the thorned branches began falling away until he stood in the midst of a felled rosebush, blooms and chopped-off twigs scattered across the ground all around.

The witch stood before him.

Her dark hair was as wild as her daughters’. Her eyes were brown and carried an expression that looked both annoyed and faintly curious. A carnage of petals clung to her curls and her shoulders, falling like sparks when she took a step toward him. The bladed thing caught the moonlight again: a pair of long, sharp gardening shears.

She extended her free hand toward him. “Come out, little rabbit.”

“Are you going to eat my liver on toast?” he demanded, unwilling to move until he had at least some assurance that it was safer out there than in here amidst the demolished roses.

Her brow arched gracefully. Her eyes flickered with some emotion that was no longer annoyance or curiosity, but instead something like sadness, or perhaps regret. She shuttered it away quickly. “The night is yet young,” she mused, as if she were indeed considering eating his liver on toast, but perhaps only when it was closer to midnight.

Her answer made him feel oddly comforted. If she were planning to do awful things to him, she seemed like the sort of person who would simply do them, not make threats that sounded like jokes in that cool, amused voice of hers. He stepped out of the rosebush.

Several branches were still stuck to him, their thorns buried too deep in his clothing or skin to fall away when they’d been cut. She saw them and frowned. She reached out and, heedless of the thorns as they dug into her own skin, pulled the branches away. Her hands were strangely gentle. “Why are you in my garden, rabbit?”

“My name is not rabbit,” he dared.

“A brave rabbit you are,” she remarked. “What’s your name, then?”

“Theon.”

She waited, pulling another branch away from him. A drop of her blood smeared on his sleeve.

“I was here to take a flower,” he admitted at last. “For my sister. To prove I am not a coward.” He braced for punishment.

She only responded mildly, “You don’t seem at all cowardly to me.”

“You called me a rabbit,” he pointed out reasonably.

She pulled another branch full of thorns away from his leg. He winced in pain. She answered him, “Rabbits are not cowards. They are simply very frequently afraid. There is a difference.”

He could not believe he was having a conversation with the witch. The whole scene had taken on a sort of sideways, otherworldly quality, and it made him less cautious than he would normally be. “What’s the difference?” he asked.

She pulled the last branch off him, dusted an errant petal from his shoulder, and stood back. “How one chooses to respond to the fear,” she said, and then glanced over to where the cottage’s smoke trailed into the sky. “You had best go in and be seen to. No sense sending you home like this.” She turned and pointed at a path that looked, to Theon, exactly like all the other paths. “Follow that one until you reach the cottage. Tal will take care of you. Tell him I’ll be in