Thornfruit Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Girl in the Market

  Little Ghost

  Touched

  Lyrebird shift, 30th Triad of Orsha, 761

  A Natural History of the World

  One Smoking Hell of a Mess

  Lyrebird shift, 12th Triad of Hirsha, 761

  Half-Truths

  Rosefinch shift, 20th Triad of Hirsha, 761

  Doubt Is Prayer

  Honeycreeper shift, 2nd Triad of Pyer, 761

  A Dog and a Wolf

  Lyrebird shift, 15th Triad of Pyer, 761

  Teeth Out

  Lyrebird shift, 6th Triad of Alaksha, 761

  Bad Habits

  Lyrebird shift, 8th Triad of Alaksha, 761

  Thin Black Scars

  The Soul of Virtue

  Smoke and Fire

  Notoriously Unreliable

  A Trick of the Light

  And There Still the Curling Vines Do Grow

  Read on for an excerpt…

  Nightvine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Thornfruit

  Felicia Davin

  Contents

  1. The Girl in the Market

  2. Little Ghost

  3. Touched

  4. Lyrebird shift, 30th Triad of Orsha, 761

  5. A Natural History of the World

  6. One Smoking Hell of a Mess

  7. Lyrebird shift, 12th Triad of Hirsha, 761

  8. Half-Truths

  9. Rosefinch shift, 20th Triad of Hirsha, 761

  10. Doubt Is Prayer

  11. Honeycreeper shift, 2nd Triad of Pyer, 761

  12. A Dog and a Wolf

  13. Lyrebird shift, 15th Triad of Pyer, 761

  14. Teeth Out

  15. Lyrebird shift, 6th Triad of Alaksha, 761

  16. Bad Habits

  17. Lyrebird shift, 8th Triad of Alaksha, 761

  18. Thin Black Scars

  19. The Soul of Virtue

  20. Smoke and Fire

  21. Notoriously Unreliable

  22. A Trick of the Light

  23. And There Still the Curling Vines Do Grow

  Read on for an excerpt…

  Nightvine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2018 Felicia Davin

  All rights reserved.

  For J, who knows everything about me.

  1

  The Girl in the Market

  TEN YEARS AGO

  WHEN EV was three years old, a wave had crashed into the cliffs of Laalvur. As the flood waters had drained from the lower city back into the ocean, they’d left a giant dead medusa speared on the splintered wreckage of the harbor. The monster’s carcass had lethal tentacles as long as three men lying end to end. It had taken six people to lift its massive bell.

  It was a horrible story—medusas killed people, and so did waves—and Papa always made it worse by saying words like oozing and gelatinous. But Ev still wished she’d been there to heave it off the ground and throw its corpse back into the ocean. Or maybe she could have saved someone from drowning. The heroes in her favorite books were always doing things like that.

  Ev was twelve now and her life hadn’t offered much in the way of adventure, but she remained hopeful. She zigzagged down the narrow street after her father and their cart, ignoring the slap and clatter of donkey hooves, wooden wheels, and leather sandals against the stone and straining to hear the water instead. A whole ocean of it, her father had promised. But the harbor was still another steep turn or two beneath them on the path, and Ev couldn’t see that far down.

  Papa said sometimes the sky and the stones of the city were so red that they made the ocean look red, too. Ev had been to Laalvur before, but she could only conjure a vague memory of orange-brown cliffs pierced by dark doorways and people everywhere, even on ladders between the street levels. Her best friend Ajee didn’t believe her when she said she’d seen the city. She’d sworn up and down she was telling the truth, but she hadn’t come back with any good stories.

  “Did you see a shark? Or a medusa? Or a wave?”

  Ev hadn’t.

  Ajee said it was dumb to want to be like people in books when Ajee and Ev were just going to live in the village of Orzatvur their whole lives, where there were no sea monsters and no princesses to save.

  It didn’t matter what he thought. He wasn’t here. Now she was old enough to help bring their cart to the market, and she’d walked all the way from the farm with Papa. Her dog Tez had tried to follow her, and some of her cats, too, but she’d shooed them all away at Papa’s orders. She had to do what he said if she wanted to come back every week. Then she’d finally see something exciting enough to impress Ajee.

  When they arrived at the lowest level of the city, Ev could hear and smell the ocean before she saw it. Even when they pushed their way from the thronged street into the open market—where everyone was unloading carts of ripe cheeses and fruits, vendors were already calling out their wares in singsong chants, and there were pack animals jostling and squawking chickens in cages—the smell of fish and salt was in every breath, and the water lapping at the city’s edge was a rhythm beneath the noise.

  There weren’t many open spaces in the lower city, squeezed between the cliffs and the water as it was. Laalvur was named after the old god Laal, who’d supposedly laid his body down to make the Dayward side of the world. The cliffs were his right hand, with four rock fingers reaching into the sea and a long stretch of the city curving along the low, marshy coastline like a thumb.

  Ev and her father set up their cart to sell fruit in the market, a cove between Laal’s middle and ring fingers, which were called Arish and Denan. The inlet and the neighborhood that clung to the cliffs like algae were both called Arishdenan.

  Arishdenan held the second largest harbor in Laalvur, after Hahim. Small boats were docked all along the sunny length of Arish and the shaded length of Denan, so the inner harbor bristled with masts. The docks and decks of the harbor and the market had been rebuilt in Ev’s lifetime, since the wave nine years ago. The wood already creaked with weathering from salt and sunshine, but the boats bobbing next to it were painted blue and yellow. Fresh, brilliant colors in defiance of the fearsome sea, with lyrical names to match. From where she stood next to her father, Ev could see a small vessel called Her Heart as Constant as the Sun.

  The sun was indeed constant and fierce, scattering gold reflections on the water and striping the red cliffs with shadows. The water near the city was dark and brownish, not the brilliant red reflection of legend, but even that struck Ev as strange and beautiful. From far back, sheltered between the pillars of Arish and Denan, Ev could only see a slice of sky and ocean, and still, she’d never seen anything grander.

  Farther out to sea, there were ships anchored in the water. Ajee had better believe her this time.

  “It must go on forever,” she breathed.

  “It’s nothing but salt and poison,” Papa said. He’d unloaded half the cart while she’d been staring. “Except for the islands, but those have their own dangers.”

  “It’s not poison.” Ev was too old to fall for that. The medusas were poisonous, but not the water itself.

  “It is if you can’t swim.”

  Papa had been all over the world, from his home in Adappyr, where it was so hot that everyone had to live in an underground city, all the way to Estva, where it was dark all the time and people built walls out of ice. He used to work on a ship. He’d been as close to the islands as anyone ever got. Ev loved his stories. She’d never been anywhere at all.

  “Don’t wander off,” her father warned. “Or I won’t bring you with me next time.”

  Ev heard people speaking Laalvuri, Adpri, Ha
piri, and languages she didn’t recognize, and she saw pale-skinned Nalitzvans and Day tribeswomen in robes, but hardly anyone stopped to buy something. The vendors called out the same chants over and over, and a priest of the Balance gave a loud, droning sermon about how the good, civilized people of Laalvur must root out superstition and let go of their false fears of magic. It is the Year 764 of the Balance, he was saying. The time has come to embrace the truth. No one was paying attention to him. Sometimes pamphlet-sellers strode through, crying out the latest news and rumors. Her father haggled with a customer over the price of melons and berries.

  Food odors thickened the hot, still air. Why did anyone eat fish? Ev didn’t care if priests said that eating the flesh of animals was part of God’s Balance. It smelled gross.

  Ev should’ve brought her book. Papa didn’t like her bringing books everywhere because they were so expensive, but if he didn’t want Ev to read them, then he should stop buying them for her.

  She was in the middle of a series called The Sunrise Chronicles. All the books took place in a magical world where the sun moved across the sky, and Day and Night were times instead of places. In this strange world, people could stand in one place and see the sun at one hour and the stars in darkness the next. Ev had never seen the stars. The only darkness she knew existed in windowless rooms, a luxury manufactured by humans. The sky over Laalvur was always red-gold, and the sun hung in the same low spot all the time. The idea that the sun could disappear—that the whole sky could turn black—enchanted and chilled her. What a changeable, chaotic world that would be.

  More importantly, at the exact location of Ev’s bookmark, the evil Regent had just locked his niece, Aurora, in a tower for speaking against him, and now it was up to the hero, a clever and dashing wanderer named Vesper, to save her.

  Vesper was secretly a prince from another land. Ev knew because she’d read the six-novel series twice already, mostly by the green glow of lamplight in her dark bedroom, hours into the shift of the Honeycreeper when she ought to be asleep. She’d be happily on her way to a third reread if only Papa had let her bring volume two.

  Ev sighed and sat down on the stones to sweat in the shade of the cart. She slouched. Her mother would be horrified.

  That was when Ev saw the girl.

  She thought it was a girl, anyway. It was definitely a kid, a little younger than her and a lot smaller, crouching under one of the other carts. Hair the color of mud. Rags the color of mud. Long tangled hair the color of—well, Papa should stop complaining about how often he had to haul water because his spoiled daughter loved bathing so much.

  Ev froze. It wasn’t just that she’d been caught staring. The other girl was round-eyed with terror. Trails of sweat cut through the filth on her skin. She was staying so still that she was trembling with the effort of it. Tez had been like that, before Ev had coaxed him out from under the bush where she’d found him.

  Ev put a finger to her lips, and then, when her father wasn’t looking, she reached into the cart and stole a handful of thornfruit. Their hard, brown rinds pricked her palm.

  She lobbed one—carefully, casually—under the cart, so that it rolled to a stop within the girl’s reach. The girl stared. First at the fruit on the ground, and then at Ev.

  Ev caught her eye, and then plucked a thornfruit out of her hand and held it up to demonstrate. She dug into the rind with her thumbnails until it split and popped open, revealing its sweet red insides. She pinched the fruit from its casing and ate it.

  The other girl’s hand snapped out from the folds of her clothing. She snatched the thornfruit from the ground. She brought it so close to her face that her eyes crossed when she looked at it, and she squeezed it until it was nearly flat between her fingers. Satisfied with her examination, she imitated Ev’s demonstration, peeling off the outside and dropping it. Then she popped the red part into her mouth and swallowed it.

  It was weird, and funny, but Ev didn’t want to scare the girl by laughing. Instead, she tossed her another one. It landed a little closer to Ev than the first.

  The girl crept forward, still trying to stay hidden under the cart. But she accepted the gift.

  Her hand was so thin. Under all the dirt, her face was thin, too. She must be an orphan. She must not have a home. Ev’s chest went tight. What had happened to this girl? Who had let it happen? Why hadn’t someone protected her?

  The priest of the Balance had said something about this in his sermon. He’d told a terrible story of families abandoning their own children on the Temple steps, if the parents feared the child was Unbalanced. Some people dreaded that word and preferred to say touched. The priest stressed that the Temple would, of course, take care of any children found on its threshold, as the sacred Balance required and as the Temple had always done, but that such action was not necessary—there was no such thing as magic.

  Was that why this girl was alone in the market? Had her family abandoned her because they thought she had magic? And if her family had abandoned her, why wasn’t she in the Temple Street orphanage?

  Ev didn’t know if magic was real. The priest had said, “The good people of Laalvur do not live in the grip of superstitious fear.” According to him, Laalvuri were not the barbarians across the sea in Nalitzva, who slaughtered all those suspected of magic. The people of Laalvur—proper, decent folk—welcomed all kinds. Some children were strange. Madness was part of the Balance, too.

  The priest had said all that, so it must be true, but still Ev couldn’t imagine her parents abandoning her, or any parents willingly leaving their child on the Temple steps, no matter how strange.

  But she knew from living on the farm that people sometimes left litters of kittens in sacks on the side of the road. Cruelty was part of the Balance.

  But so was kindness.

  Ev held out her hand with half a dozen thornfruit in it. The girl reached out, but her arm was too short. She would have to crawl out from under the cart. In the shadows, her eyes were wide and dark. She shook her head minutely and pulled back, drawing her baggy tunic around her.

  Ev pushed herself to her knees and leaned forward.

  It was just enough movement to get her father’s attention. He immediately saw the girl and Ev’s outstretched red hand, and snapped, “Ev!”

  The girl darted out, knocking into both carts, spilling and splattering a fall of ripe fruit all over the stone. Another merchant, seeing split melons and crushed berries on the ground, yelled “Thief!”

  Ev stood up and shouted, “She didn’t steal anything!” She’d never shouted that loud in her life. But no one was listening, and Ev’s father grabbed her shoulder and kept her from running into the fray.

  The girl had spindly legs but she was nimble. She wove between the carts, colliding with crates of produce and people alike. A man caught her with one hand. She yelped and stabbed her sharp little elbow into his stomach. He let go.

  Then she was off again. Ev wanted to run after her and help her, but her father was still holding her back, and the girl was too far away now. Instead, Ev bit her lip while she watched.

  The girl might run down the length of the harbor. From there, she could head around the narrow point of Arish into the next V-shaped inlet, Hahimarish, or she could take the switchbacked path up into the higher levels of Arishdenan and the hills of the city beyond. Either might be enough distance for the merchants to give up on following her. She’d caused some chaos, but she hadn’t actually stolen anything, and she was just a girl.

  She did head for the upper city, but not the way Ev expected. The girl ran deeper into the market. Then she scrambled up the steep wall to the next street. She moved like a spider, side to side, using her hands and her bare feet to hold onto the rough stone.

  A man latched on to her ankle. She kicked him off.

  Ev’s mouth dropped open. The girl was so small and the man’s grasp had been so solid. Ev knew how hard it was to get free of someone’s hand, since the boys at school grabbed her all the time. You ha
d to wrench free right at the weak point of their grip, where their thumbs met their other fingers, or else it didn’t work.

  The girl hadn’t done that. And her kick hadn’t even connected with his face. The man had grabbed her, she’d jerked her leg, and his hand had just opened. Almost like he’d been shocked by the feel of her skin.

  The girl kept scrambling up the red cliff face of Arish. Why was she going up? How was she going to get away?

  Laalvur was cut into the cliffs, with one street that zigzagged from the top of each cliff to the bottom. Some sections of the path had shortcuts—stairs cut into the stone, when the grade wasn’t too steep, or ladders when it was. The cliff faces of Arish and Denan were connected by a network of wood and rope bridges, crisscrossing Ev’s view of the sky.

  The girl pulled herself up to the street. A few men from the market had run after her, taking the long way around. They might have caught her, except there was a ladder directly in front of her. She jumped on it and started to climb. The men followed. She grabbed the top rung and stomped on the face of the man behind her.

  Barefoot, and so small, she couldn’t have done much damage. But the man was surprised. His foot slipped, knocking into the man behind him, and all three of them went down in a pile.

  There was a lot of shouting. The girl dodged everyone in her path. This time, she was running toward Arish Point, rather than into the V of Arishdenan. Ev twisted to watch her.

  They were going to catch her. Someone had to do something. The girl was so far away now, but maybe if Ev ran, she could still get there in time. Ev just had to get free of her father’s grip. She stepped forward, and he spoke.