A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel, #1)

by Sierra Simone

she was dreaming on her feet while everyone else was walking.

I give a vague nod, not wanting to admit exactly how Drunk Librarian I’d gone on him before I came here.

“You have an untouched library, and I could be the first person to learn its secrets. It’s like an untouched canvas to an artist or a new dig for an archeologist. How could I resist?”

Every time I think of leaving, I ache with wanting to stay. I can’t make myself go. It’s like I’ve put down roots without even wanting to, and I don’t mean family roots because my aunt and uncle have always been here and I only barely remember my dad and his parents. I don’t mean friend roots because I don’t really have any of those. I mean the kind of roots that happen privately between you and a certain place. Like you come to a place, and instead of planting a flag and saying mine, the place plants something in you. The place claims you, it knows your name and the crooked corners of your heart, and you’ve pledged yourself to it before you’ve even realized what’s happening. That’s why I’ve stayed, that’s why I can’t leave. Thornchapel knows my name and the crooked corners of my heart, and it wants me to make promises that I’m going to keep.”

“I hate him because he deserves it. I hate him because once upon a time, I gave him a piece of my heart.” He closes his eyes, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “And then he fed it to the wolves.”

“Your brand is a mess,” Delphine says, and I laugh, but when I look back at her, she’s giving me a very solemn look. “Well, I mean, I don’t really need a brand,” I say, flipping a page. “I’m not selling anything.”

His eyes are no longer windows but doors and mysteries and gates that I’ll never unlock. That privilege belongs to someone else.

Again, I feel that curl of fascination, that hunger to gobble up all the desolation around me and pronounce it delicious. To tramp through wet grass and squint into the wind and feel so very, very alive in all the slumbering wastes around me. To find the tiny flecks of life in the midst of all that winter—tiny snowdrops and buttery celandine and sprays of blackthorn blossoms, new and fragile against the chilly air. I’ve always been a summer girl. The girl who spends hours and hours at the pool, the girl who loves heat and thunderstorms and gardens, and trees so heavy with leaves that they whisper in even the barest breath of wind. But here…here I think I could be a winter girl too. I think I could learn to love the cold and the wet and the quiet.