Page 74 of A Treason of Thorns

At last we reach a jutting piece of headland that looks eerily familiar. The beach here is no longer sand—it’s stony shingle, and the cliffs have jagged edges. The water below is inky blue where vegetation grows from the ocean floor, and lighter in the sandy spots where sea plants cannot thrive. It’s all just as Burleigh showed me.

“Over here!” Esperanza shouts, beckoning to Alfred and me. She points to a worn trail, hidden behind a clump of gorse, and the three of us slip and scramble down it to the shingle below. Once we’re at sea level, it’s easy to see the thing we’ve come for—a yawning cave mouth, halfway up the cliff, safe beyond the high-water mark.

Espie clasps my hand in her own and squeezes. “We’re nearly there, Violet. Look what you and Burleigh have managed.”

I bite my lip and nod. The ascent to the cave looks daunting. There’s been an attempt made at hewing a stairway into the rock, but it’s a rudimentary effort, somewhere between stone steps and rough handholds.

Without a word, I begin the climb, not needing to look back to know Alfred and Espie are following. Halfway up, I’m forced to stop a minute, clinging to the rock face like a barnacle or a bit of cliff grass as my head spins.

“Alright, Vi?” Alfred asks from beneath and behind.

There’s something strange about this place—something deeply right and wrong all at once. It feels like Burleigh, though my House is miles and miles away. By the time I pull myself up into the cave, my legs won’t stop shaking.

“It’s got to be here,” I tell Esperanza breathlessly as she pulls herself up into the cavern. “I can feel it.”

The cave isn’t very large. Perhaps the size of my bedroom at home, its interior is almost entirely bare. A few stalactites cling to the ceiling, and loose stones rest in the sunken areas of the uneven cave floor. I don’t know what I expected, to be honest—perhaps something with an entrance submerged at high tide, that bored deep into the cliffs, full of passageways and twists and turns, rife with places to hide a chest containing one of the things I most desire in this world.

This is little more than a hollow in the hillside. A place for a handful of bats to take refuge and for swifts to nest. It is not a place for hidden treasure—indeed, there’s nowhere to hide it.

“It doesn’t look like much, does it?” Esperanza says uncertainly.

I stand at the cave mouth and peer out. There’s no mistaking this bit of headland, the small rocky island just off the coast that’s barely large enough for three people to stand on. I am where Burleigh wanted me to be.

And there’s the spinning of my head, the trembling of my legs,the sense that Burleigh is very near, to confirm the House’s directions.

“Let’s spread out,” I tell Alfred and Espie. “I want every inch of this cavern combed over.”

They take the walls, running their fingers carefully over the damp stone, searching for any cracks or seams that might hold an oilskin-wrapped package containing the deed. I get down on my hands and knees and travel foot by slow foot across the cave floor, feeling for patches of soil or indentations in the rock, and turning over the loose stones.

We go over the cave once, and by the time we’ve finished, the sun is high overhead, casting much of the cavern into shadow.

“Again,” I say.

Alfred and Esperanza are pale with worry, but they don’t protest. We search every nook and cranny a second time, and then a third. By the end my stomach is an empty pit and I’m weak as water.

“Vi.” Espie rests a hand on my shoulder. “It’s not here.”

“How can that be?” I protest. “Burleigh House showed me this spot. And I canfeelit here. We’re in the right place.”

“Your father thought he’d discovered the deed’s whereabouts,” Alfred says. “And yet never found the deed itself. Perhaps it’s a mistake.”

“I don’t understand where we keep going wrong.” I bury my face in my hands. “This can’t be happening. Not again.”

“You should eat a sandwich,” Esperanza says. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“Espie, I can’t.”

We climb back down the cliff face, and twice I nearly fall,overwhelmed by Burleigh, by regret and sorrow and magic pulsing through the earth. By time we get off the beach and to the top of the trail, we’re losing daylight. I have to stop for quite some time beside the gorse bush, legs trembling beneath me. But by far the worst is my heart. I can’t feel it at all—it’s as if someone’s cut it out of my chest with surgical precision, leaving me no more than a shell of the girl I was.

I have failed in my purpose. I have failed my House.

I’ve failed Wyn.

How can I go back and let Burleigh have its way? How can I do what I’ve been raised for, be the Caretaker I was brought up to be, when it means watching the friend of my childhood, who is much more than that to me now, give his life to save my House?

27

NO SOONER DO WE GET TO THE INN IN ST. IVES THAN THEsky opens up and pours. Rain lashes at the windows, the fire backs up and smokes, and there’s no possibility of us starting for home until tomorrow at the earliest.