Free Nettle Blackthorn and the Three Wicked Sisters by Winter Woodlark Page A

been looking for
something. I
wonder what?
    The siblings spent the rest of the morning in the musty attic,
crowded with brown boxes stacked upon one another and old leather
trunks. The rafters were thick with spider webs, and the small
dirty window provided a dull light, bright enough for them both to
work with.
    Bram had found an old bird cage, not made from metal but
woven from thin dried branches with thorns which put Nettle in mind
of rose branches. She had sourced him a toolkit and he sat on the
floor creating a trap of sorts from a collection of odd bits of
wood, cardboard and string.
    Nettle
sat beside him, cross legged, as she sifted through a tattered old
shoe box filled with photographs. The collection had been taken
when she was a toddler, obviously by her father, as they mainly
captured her and her mother, Briar.
    She hadn’t appreciated, until looking at the photographs,
just how much Bram resembled their mother. Petite, with slight frames,
there was an air about them both that was mischievous. While Bram
had her full lips and extraordinarily wide mouth, his radiant skin
lit his hair into a deeper shade of amber than his mothers, and
whereas her face was heart shaped, his was a little more broad and
boyish.
    Nettle stopped flicking through the photographs, to rest upon one in
particular. Her mother was caught mid-laughter, her head pulled
sideways as Nettle, a chubby baby with a mop of dark unruly curls,
tugged on a lock of molten honeyed hair. Her mother’s vivid
turquoise eyes, framed by feathery brows, were flicked wide with
merriment. She was hugging Nettle with long golden arms that seemed
to sparkle.
    A wretched longing overwhelmed Nettle’s senses and her
throat began to choke up. Briar looked beautiful and young and
vivacious and so in love with her baby daughter. It wasn’t fair, why
did she leave?
    She hated feeling this way, of loss and want and
emptiness. Was life really that bad Briar couldn’t bear to be around
them any longer? These questions weren’t new, she’d asked herself the same
thing over and over again, year after year. Had she done something,
that made her mother not want her anymore? Was she the reason Briar
left? And even when she rallied a resolve to let Briar go, forget
about her, and all those silly feelings of inadequacy, inevitably
it always ended with anger and rage.
    How dare she walk out on us! A fire of abhorrence and fury exploded
within, it was like a ball of crackling energy that had to be
released in some physical way. Nettle tore the photograph into two
pieces, then three, then four, before being crumpled and thrown
into the air to scatter all over the attic floor. It felt good,
satisfying, justified even. But Nettle couldn’t erase the memory of
her mother gazing adoringly at her baby. Nor could she ever
permanently let go her bitter resentment toward Briar.
    Bram had
his head in a large cardboard box, his voice was slightly muffled.
“Hey take a look at this.”
    Pleased for
some sort of distraction, Nettle shuffled over. When Bram’s head
reappeared from the box, he gave her a baffled look. “Are you
OK?”
    “Of
course I am,” she replied, a little taken aback and
annoyed.
    “Oh,
OK,” he said in that way, she knew, he didn’t believe her. “It’s
just you’ve got that moody-brow-thing going on.”
    “ Huh?” She had no idea what he was talking about.
    He pointed at
her nose. “When you’re cranky, you have that furrow across the
bridge of your nose, is all. And your lips kind of pucker up.”
    Nettle ran a
finger between her brows and eased the sullen crease, while
relaxing her mouth. “I didn’t know I did that.”
    “Yeah,
well, we sure do,” he said. He cast a glance at the torn photograph
behind her. “You’ve been doing it a lot, since coming back
home.”
    Why wouldn’t I , she scowled, Briar is everywhere her e. There was nowhere to be free of
her. She
realized she had fallen into that moody-brow-thing again, and
rearranged her