Free The Castle Behind Thorns by Merrie Haskell Page B

Sand.”
    Hesitant, he lay on his mattress. Perrotte leaned over, and he thought she was going to blow out the candle. But first she seized his hand and held it tightly.
    Then she blew out the candle.
    Though it was strange, holding her hand across the corners of their mattresses in the dark, Sand had no trouble falling asleep.

11
    Stars
    S AND’S BREATHING EVENED OUT ALMOST IMMEDIATELY , though his fingers twitched and squeezed Perrotte’s in his sleep. Eventually, Perrotte pulled her hand from his, and lay with one palm under her cheek.
    She had been so tired before. She had slept only briefly before going to fetch Sand from her old room. Now she was wide awake.
    Perrotte had never been a good sleeper, and maybe that was why she lived again. Death was the ultimate night, and she couldn’t keep her eyes closed even through that.
    Bad sleep was why she had come to be an observer of stars. Before her father remarried, there had been no questioning of her late nights and lazy mornings, or the reason that she needed doors in a tower ceiling and a servant to come prop them open for her, or star charts, or an astrolabe, or a tutor in the natural sciences.
    But then her father never recovered from a wound that baffled physicians. The Count felt he needed a son, so he married Jannet, the pious younger daughter of a family from Lower Bertaèyn, who spent more time praying than doing most anything else.
    For a while after her father remarried, Perrotte’s life had remained much as it had been. But slowly over the months, Perrotte realized that secret ice lurked in her new stepmother’s otherwise pleasant manner—narrow ice, tiny ice, that seeped slowly into every crack and crevice between people and widened them.
    The plan for sending Perrotte away to some convent had been sprung without warning; suddenly, her tutor, dear old Efflam, was being sent into retirement, while her father’s new wife paced around, ordering servants this way and that to prepare Perrotte for a journey. “You need proper religious instruction before you move out into the world of temptations and trials,” Jannet had said. “You need time for spiritual contemplation before you go to the Duchess’s court.”
    There had been no time to appeal to her father; the Count had gone to dance attendance on the King in Paris, and wouldn’t be back for a month. Perrotte had played chess with Efflam for years; she knew when checkmate was inevitable. All she could do now was guard the supply lines of her retreat, as it were; she had to make sure her special possessions came with her: her books, her maps, and her astronomic instruments. She had packed everything from her tower room, and her chests were prepared when Jannet came in for inspection.
    â€œSir Bleyz is ready for you, Perrotte. Now, what’s all this nonsense?” Jannet asked.
    â€œMy things,” Perrotte said.
    Jannet threw open one chest, then another, glancing with unconcealed disdain for what she found inside. “Unpack them,” she ordered Perrotte’s maid, Loyse.
    Perrotte stepped forward. “No. They are coming with me.”
    And just like that, Jannet had yanked the first thing out of the closest chest: Perrotte’s prized astrolabe, swaddled in silk. Jannet held it against her breast, above her swelling belly.
    â€œI’ll be taking this until you learn how to honor your new mother properly. Raoul! Yannig! Come in here. Take these chests away to my rooms. Perrotte will be traveling only with this.” Jannet had nudged a single clothes chest with her foot.
    The servants had all obeyed Jannet. How could they not have? She was their Countess; Perrotte would be the heir only until Jannet produced a son, which she might do in the next few months.
    Years later, in a room not far from the site of her dispossession, Perrotte pushed the memory away and sat up, groping for her candle. Sand’s breathing didn’t shift.