Read Online The Castle Behind Thorns by Merrie Haskell - Free Book Online

stop!” Sand shouted, reaching for her hand. He hesitated a bare fraction of a second, torn between helping her and obeying her order not to be touched. She heard him, though; her hand froze just in time, hovering over the thorns twining in her hair.
    She dropped her hand and stepped back—but the thorns hung on. Perrotte untied the strings of the cap under her chin, took another step, and then with a vicious jerk, pulled her head away. She grunted. The thorns retained Perrotte’s cap and several dozen of Perrotte’s golden-brown strands, but she was free.
    â€œGod’s guts,” she swore, rubbing her scalp.
    Sand’s arm itched furiously. “That was a close thing,” he said. “I almost died of blood poisoning when just one thorn got me.” He rubbed his old wound, surprised by his casual tone.
    At the word “poisoning,” Perrotte shuddered, staring at the little scrap of silk that had been her cap. Slowly, it was pulled from view by the shifting brambles of the thorn hedge.
    Sand scraped at his arm with his fingernails and regarded her curiously. Perrotte slammed shut the portal, spun on her heel, and left the tunnel. In the outer courtyard, she stopped, staring up at the thorns towering over the castle walls. Her eyes seemed unfocused.
    â€œPerrotte?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
    â€œA memory of a memory,” she said absently. Her eyes cleared, and she fixed her keen hazel gaze on him. “Well. Here we are, then, trapped in Castle Boisblanc, where everything is broken.”
    â€œI’ve mended a few things,” Sand said.
    â€œSurely,” she said, almost arrogant.
    â€œSome of which are at the bottom of the well,” he said, remembering the bucket he’d lost just before she’d appeared. He didn’t want the bucket to become waterlogged, and he certainly wasn’t going to wander around child-minding Perrotte all day. He wasn’t quite sure how to take his leave of her, so he sketched what he thought might be a courtly bow, and hurried off toward the smithy, muttering, “Excuse me, then,” under his breath. And notably, not referring to her as his lady.
    â€œWhere are you—” she called after him, but he didn’t stop.
    He wasn’t angry, he told himself. What did her ingratitude and high-handed manner matter? He had things to do. He had a castle to repair.
    He was sorting through his pile of scrap metal, looking for something that wanted to be a hook, when she caught up with him. He ignored her, and chose a likely-looking bar of steel, jagged on one end from the sundering. He no longer remembered what the steel had been, or where he had found it before bringing it to his scrap pile, or even if he had found it. It might have been in the smithy’s scrap pile from the beginning. Iron was too easy to reuse and too hard to wrest from the earth to ever throw any of it away.
    â€œWhat are you—?” she began, but he cut her off by noisily shoveling charcoal into the forge.
    â€œI’m doing what I do,” he said roughly. “I’m mending.” He arranged his tinder and kindling, struck a spark, and pumped the bellows, enjoying the way the flames grew into a blaze and roared.
    â€œMending?”
    He didn’t say anything. He piled charcoal around the kindling and pumped the bellows furiously. Smoke died away as the kindling was consumed and the charcoal took light; he spread the lit coals wider, and piled more charcoal on top.
    He regretted that building a fire was a relatively slow process—he’d like to be at the stage of hammering things before she asked any more questions.
    But a good fire couldn’t be rushed, even with a bellows. Fortunately, Perrotte said nothing further. He didn’t look at her, hoping she would leave if he ignored her. But when he glanced away from the fire, she was still standing there, watching him work.
    Once the fire was