Ash & Bramble (33 page)

“Ah,” the Godmother says, as if confirming something. “I see.”

I am about to speak when we are interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Cor bursts into the room. He is breathing hard and holding a sword; he looks pale, and his eyes are deeply shadowed. “Pen!” he shouts.

“Good,” the Godmother says. She raises her hands. “Hold there, prince,” she orders.

Cor stops, panting. Beneath his feet, brambles twine from the stone and wrap around his ankles.

“He has come to complete your story, Penelope, do you see?” the Godmother says aside to me. “So brave, so noble.” She raises her voice. “She is such a pretty girl, don't you think, Prince Cornelius?” She points at me, and I see now why she has dressed me so finely. We each have roles to play, the prince and I.

Cor finds his voice. “She is very much more than that,” he says, regarding me steadily. “But pretty? No.”

“Oh, well done,” I say, releasing a breath of relief. Cor is himself, resisting the pull of Story toward an ending that I know he wants much more than I do.

The Godmother frowns. “We don't have time for this,” she says impatiently. Moving with strange jerkiness, she crosses the room to where Cor stands. Brambles writhe up his
legs, binding his sword arm to his side. Swiftly she raises her thimble. Cor struggles, but the vines grip him all the tighter. The Godmother holds her hand to his temple. Blue light flares and Cor goes still. “There,” she says, satisfied. “Now let us try this again.” She leans forward, slipping something—a shoe?—into Cor's coat pocket, then steps back. “She is a pretty girl, is she not, Prince Cornelius?” she prompts, pointing at me as she did before.

“She is,” Cor says, staring blankly ahead. “You are so pretty, Pen.”

“You know very well that I am not, Cor,” I say desperately.

“You are pretty, Pen,” he repeats woodenly, and I can see that he has no choice but to play his part.

We make a triangle—Cor near the door, Owen bound against the wall, and then me, all of us entangled with brambles. The walls are vibrating now; the huge clock face glows like a full moon. There is an immense grinding, groaning sound, and the clock's hands come together with a clang. From overhead the first strike of midnight rolls out with a thunderous
boom
.

When the Godmother speaks, her voice takes on the deep echoes of the clock's second strike. “It is time! We will take up your story again where we left off.” She goes to stand at the center of the triangle; then she holds up her hand, the thimble on her finger glittering with an icy, blinding light.

The third strike roars out.
Boom
.

“Before the clock strikes twelve, you will go to your
prince!” she announces, taking a step toward me.

The briars holding Cor's arms loosen. His movements rough, he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the dainty dancing slipper that the Godmother had put there.

I finally understand. Owen interrupted this ending before; now I have to allow Cor to put the slipper on my foot and claim me as his own.

The clock strikes again and a swirl of a breeze tugs at the hem of my dress. “You will marry your prince.” The Godmother points toward Cor, but takes another step toward me. Her words have power; they speak with the weight of a thousand happily-ever-afters.
Boom
, the fifth strike. The weight presses down on me; I can barely hold up my head beneath it.

“You will become his princess.” The clock strikes again—
boom
—interrupting her. “Story will be satisfied!” As she speaks, she uses her thimble to trace a line in the air from me to Cor.

As the line connects us, I feel a powerful pull in his direction. “And if I don't?” I say through gritted teeth.

The seventh strike rolls out.
Boom
. Dust sifts down from the high ceiling. The Godmother steps closer and raises the thimble, and I feel an answering tingle of cold in my forehead. Then she turns the thimble on Owen with chilling precision. I gasp as another thorn rips into him, his arm this time. Blood drips. The eighth strike, and my ears are ringing so loudly that I almost can't hear the Godmother's answer. “If you refuse to play your part, the Shoemaker will die.”
The Godmother's hair has come loose and writhes around her head; the thimble flashes with cold fire. The ninth strike booms and the walls tremble.

The tenth strike.
Doom
. The air around us cracks and shatters. I'm running out of time. The weight of Story is so heavy; I brace myself, trying to resist it. The brambles fall from my legs.

I so desperately want Owen to live, and in that wanting my body takes an involuntary step toward Cor. He opens his arms as if to welcome me, the slipper clenched in one hand, but the smile on his face is really a grimace of pain.

The eleventh strike rises from the stone floor, an all-encompassing sound that is like a blow against my ears.
Doom
. “Go to your prince!” the Godmother shrieks. “It is the only possible ending.”

The silence before the last strike vibrates with anticipation. I take a deep breath. The
only
one? My arm weighs a hundred pounds, but I lift my hand to my face. I tap my chin with my finger. “
Do
I want that ending?” I tip my heavy head to the side, as if thinking. “I suppose I must choose.”

“
You
do not choose,” the Godmother says, and I see a flicker of unease cross her haggard face. “Story has chosen you.
Go to him!
”

Story grips me, huge, implacable. The air thickens; the weight of the last
boom
waiting to strike fills the room. I struggle to take a breath against it. “Oh my,” I gasp. I give the Godmother my wickedest grin. I am my mother's daughter
after all, the Witch, even without my thimble. A wind whips around me; dust whirls into my eyes. “But I hardly know what to say.” I am stalling, not sure what to do, I only know that I can't cross the room. I cannot let Cor put the slipper on my foot. I glance at Owen, where he is bound against the wall.

You do the unexpected thing too, Pin
, he said to me once. I can hear his voice as he says the words, feel the force of his steady gaze.

He knows me. And I know him. And oh, I am stupid, or slow, because Templeton was right. It is simple. Of
course
I love Owen. I love his steadiness and his stubbornness, the way his face shows his every thought, I love the way he thinks and the way he likes to talk, and the way he likes raspberry jam just as much as I do. I loved him when I was Pin, and I love him as Pen, and I love so much that he loves me, for who I am, because I am absolutely sure that he does.

As the joy of my realization washes through me, I turn back to the Godmother. “I can't go to the prince,” I tell her, raising my leg and waggling my stockinged foot. “I rather like having just one shoe, you see.” My eyes meet Owen's and I nod.
Yes
, it means.
You. I love you.
He's staring at me with grim intensity, but as he makes sense of my words, he blinks and—amazingly—a smile lightens his eyes. For a fleeting moment, we are the only two people in the entire world. Even across the room, I feel connected to him, as if we are one flame, burning.

“Stop looking at him!” the Godmother orders, and her voice has an edge of panic. The tension builds, and builds; the high-pitched whine of gears stressed beyond bearing fills the air, rising to a scream. She is close now, just an arm's length away. She raises the thimble and I could struggle, but I no longer fear her power to turn me into Nothing. I let her reach out and touch me, right in the center of my forehead.

A wave of sparkling cold flashes from the thimble, battering me with a blizzard's fury. It is icy, and dark, and empty, and it wants to drag me in and rip me away from myself and reshape me into a puppet that will allow herself to be pulled to the prince, allow herself to be fitted with the slipper. But I am Pin. I am Pen. And I am flame, and all the bitter cold of the thimble's nothingness cannot touch me. Story wants its ending? Let me give it a new ending, one shaped by my own choices. When I speak, my voice burns. “No,” I shout, bracing myself. “I do not choose that ending.”

The last
boom
of the castle clock strikes not with sound, but with silence, a muffling wave of noiseless thunder that fills the room until the walls shudder. The Godmother's mouth is stretched wide as if she is screaming, but no sound emerges. The waves of silence slam against me, but I stand firm, unwavering. Sparks and smoke seep from the floor, swirling around the room.

The two huge hands of the clock crack at their base and waver, and like two spears tip away and plunge toward the
ground. Slowly, silently, the clock face rips itself from the wall. Trailing stones, it leans outward and goes suddenly dark, and there is one more long moment of ringing silence before all sound rushes back and I hear a resounding crash as it shatters on the ground far below.

F
REEZING AIR RUSHES INTO THE ROOM THROUGH THE GAP
left by the clock.

The brambles binding Owen to the wall turn to dust and he crumples to the floor.

“Pen,” pants Cor, rushing to my side.

“See to Owen,” I shout, without taking my eyes from the Godmother. This isn't over yet.

The Godmother stands in the middle of the floor. The icy wind swirls around her, ruffling her skirts and the ends of her snaky white hair. She stares back at me.

The thimble on her finger glows with a dull blue light.

“Story has its own shape, its own energy,” the Godmother grinds out. “It will always return.”

Maybe. I step closer to her. “Your story is over, at any rate,” I say flatly.

She tips her head back as if trying to bring me into focus. She raises the hand holding the thimble, but she knows that its Nothing has no power over me anymore. Its light goes out. Her fingers look almost transparent, and they shake violently as if she is shivering with cold.

I reach out and take the thimble from her hand. Then, following a sense of heat and light, I dip my fingers into a pocket of her skirt and find the thimble that she had taken from me, my thimble. My hand closes over it, warming me, and I take it back.

She closes her eyes and releases a breath. Slowly she sinks to her knees before me. She looks old, faded, defeated. Broken.

I slip her thimble onto my own finger. It is sticky with cold; my finger feels frozen. Its glow intensifies again. I bend over the Godmother and brush a wisp of her dry white hair from her face.

“You can have it,” the Godmother whispers, her voice thin. “The power is yours. Serve Story as I did.”

“No,” I tell her. “We have come to the end.” Carefully I touch the thimble to the center of her forehead.

“Pen, don't do it.” I glance over my shoulder. Owen has a bloodstained hand pressed to his side; only Cor's arm around his shoulders is keeping him on his feet.

I look away. “I have to.”

“Pen, no,” comes Owen's voice, cracked and weary.

I know why he's protesting. It's horrible to lose all your memories, all your past, your very self. She took all those things away from every slave in the fortress and in the city, and from Owen, and away from me.

“She deserves this ending,” I say.

Calling up the power of the thimble, I press it to her forehead.

And I take it all away from her.

P
EN IS GONE, TAKING THE THIMBLES, TO SEE TO THE
final defeat of the Godmother's footmen in the city.

Cor helps Owen from the clock tower with its gaping hole in the wall. He leads him to his own rooms, where the heavy wooden furniture is covered with dust shaken from the ceiling and the two dogs are cowering in a corner. He eases Owen onto the four-poster bed.

“There's a battle going on outside,” Cor says. “There's got to be a healer around somewhere. Rest here. I'll be back.”

Owen closes his eyes and floats. He remembers only snatches of the rest of the journey from the Godmother's fortress in the forest, and then blinking into consciousness in the clock room with the brambles wrapped around him. The moment where Pen broke Story. And then after.

The pain from his wounded shoulder and from the thorns that slashed his side and his arm ebbs. His throat is parched with thirst, but he can't summon the energy to get up and look for something to drink.

He fades out for a while, then comes back as someone lifts his head. “Drink this, lad,” says a deep, rumbling voice. The Huntsman. He drinks, and feels liquid go down his throat and trickle down the side of his face and neck.

“Can you get his sweater off?” Cor's voice asks.

A jolt of pain, and he fades out again.

H
E COMES BACK
to himself. For the first time in a very long time, he is completely comfortable.

He remembers another time of perfect comfort, a moment that is lost to Pen forever. The two of them, him and Pin, fleeing from the Godmother's fortress, staggering with cold and hunger and fright, hiding in a hollow under the roots of a fallen tree. Then warmth and light and Pin across the fire from him. That moment, he realizes. As he watched her eat a bite of gingerbread. That was when he'd started falling in love with her. He knows that he will never stop falling in love with her, with Pin. With Pen.

And she loves him.

But it's all tangled up in the brambles of Story and the thimbles and what she'd done to the Godmother. It's not going to be that simple to figure each other out.

He opens his eyes.

The Huntsman is sitting on the bed, his back against one of the posts. His trackers sleep next to the fire with Cor's dogs.

Owen finds his voice. “Is Pen here?”

“She came to see you while you were out.” The Huntsman gets off the bed and helps Owen sit up, stuffing another pillow behind his back. He turns away to pour something into a cup. “Can you manage this?” he asks.

“Yes,” Owen answers, taking the cup. “Is she coming back?” He takes a drink. It's water with something in it. A healing herb, he guesses.

“Ah, well.” The Huntsman settles on the bed again. He rubs a hand over his bald head. “She's gone with Prince Cor to East Oria to alert his mother, the queen, about what's been going on here. The prince was in a great hurry to be away.”

“But she's coming back?” Owen asks.

“I don't know, lad,” the Huntsman answers. “But she's given you something to see to while she's gone.”

He nods. Anything.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
when he can stay on his feet without falling over, the Huntsman fetches him from Cor's room. They walk slowly along a passageway, heading deeper into the castle.

“What will you do now?” Owen asks, as they stop to rest at the top of a stone staircase. He leans against the wall, feeling the pull of the bandages wrapping the cut on his ribs.

“Ah, well now.” The Huntsman shrugs. “I was caught up in a story once, as you know.”

Owen nods. “And it ended badly.”

“For me it did,” the Huntsman says. “And for the girl I loved. Bianca was her name. She ended up married to a prince she didn't love. I hear he died—took poison, they say—and she went to live in a cottage in the forest.” He smiles beneath his bushy mustache. “Living there with a bunch of cats, I've heard. I've a mind to go and find her.” He raises his eyebrows. “All right to go on?”

Owen nods, pushes himself from the wall he's been resting against, and they head down a set of narrow stone stairs, deep under the castle. The air is heavy and damp. A prison. The Huntsman nods to a guard, who opens a door and lets them pass. They go down another stairway and along a dark hallway lined with doors. In each door is a tiny window for looking at the prisoner inside.

The Huntsman stops them before one of the doors and opens the little window.

“You're to decide her punishment,” the Huntsman says. “Her ending.”

Owen peers into the cell, which is small, cold, and damp.

An old woman in the ragged remains of a blue silk dress sits on the floor, her back hunched against the stone wall. White hair hangs down around her face, which is pale and blank.

The Godmother.

Or what's left of her.