The Thorn Court Archives

Reserved for readers who answered the Crown’s call before release.

Chapter One

The Night the Sky Burned

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The night the sky burned, I wasn’t thinking about fate or legends, or the kind of power that ruins families. I was thinking about smoke—thick and bitter, scraping my throat raw with every breath. I was thinking about the taste of ashes on my tongue, the sting in my eyes, and the way blood clung to my hands, tacky and dark, as I tried to save people I’d known my whole life. I’d always thought of my hands as meant for healing—stitching torn flesh, grinding feverfew, catching newborns, slippery and wailing, in the dead of winter. That night, they shook so badly I could barely hold a bandage, let alone stop anyone from dying.

I tried anyway. You do the next thing, and then the next, even when you know it won’t be enough. People screamed. The fire roared so loud it swallowed every other sound—except the praying, which turned to sobs and then to silence. I remember the color of Briar Glen’s houses as they collapsed, thatched roofs going up fast, pine beams snapping, resin hissing as sparks spat into the night. I could see the shapes of people I loved, and a few I didn’t, running in and out of that mess. There weren’t enough of us. The fire was quicker.

Nobody here forgot what lived in the woods or what the mist could take. My mother, Lyessa, certainly never did. We were raised on rules, not lullabies. Don’t stray near Veilwood after dusk. Don’t answer voices in the fog. Don’t let anyone—especially anyone beautiful, especially if they had eyes like silver—learn your name. That night, as the smoke thickened and I wrapped my burned hands and pressed linen to wounds I couldn’t heal, I wondered whether any of her rules would save us now. I’d never really believed in monster stories. Not until I was living through one. Monsters didn’t always look the way you’d been warned.

My mother was Briar Glen’s healer and its quiet keeper of old ways. Her hands always smelled of rosemary and lavender—herbs, blood, and the earth beneath her fingernails from digging roots or graves, depending on the season. I used to think she was untouchable, even when she was tired or sharp-tongued, grief carved into the lines at the corners of her eyes. She called me “little thorn” more than anything else. Sometimes it sounded like love. Other times it didn’t.

When storms rattled the cottage windows and the wind tried to get in, she’d sit me by the firelight and braid my hair, humming border songs too old for prayer books. I’d almost believe we were safe—if only for the length of a song. Even then, there was something restless in her. On winter nights, when the snow pressed close, and the world felt thin, she’d redraw ward sigils by candlelight, her hands shaking just enough to give her away. She whispered prayers I never learned the words to, her voice flat and urgent, as if survival were more than stitching wounds and boiling willow bark for fever.

Every cottage along the border carried iron above the door and ward marks beneath the windows. No one spent that much effort protecting themselves from stories. “The Fae are beautiful,” my mother would say. “The way venom is beautiful, little thorn. Don’t ever mistake kindness for mercy. Not from them.”

She never spoke of why the old stories began. Only that surviving them mattered more than understanding them.

Warnings disguised as fairy tales filled my childhood—thorn-crowned kings, stolen brides, shifting woods, and monsters so lovely you barely noticed your name was gone. I tried not to believe them, but every so often, someone would vanish, and everyone would fall quiet for a few weeks. The healer’s trade was learned at her elbow—how to set a bone, how to measure a fever, which roots were safe to chew, and which would drop you in your tracks. But there were things my mother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—teach.

Sometimes wounds healed too quickly under my hands. Animals quieted around me when they shouldn’t. The neighbors noticed. They respected the healer, but respect doesn’t mean trust. Especially not here. After she died—after the sickness took her and left me with the cottage, her satchel, and all the fear she’d tried to keep at bay—I did what I had been taught. I treated burns, delivered babies, dug graves, and drew my own sigils in the quiet hours before dawn, hoping I remembered the ones that mattered.

But whispers followed me—too skilled, too strange, touched by the same peculiarity people blamed whenever livestock vanished, or children woke screaming. I buried those parts beneath work, routine, and rituals passed down from someone braver than me. It was almost enough. Until the last week of her life, when my mother’s fever broke through her control. She grabbed my wrist with a strength I didn’t know she had left and studied me as if she were seeing something far away.

“If the Veil ever calls your name… run.”

She said it like a final order, like a truth heavier than any medicine or prayer. I didn’t understand it then—why she sounded so desperate, why she wept when she thought I was asleep, or what she had been protecting me from. But I remembered. And when the attack finally came, I understood the terror she had spent her life preparing for. The Wild Hunt had come, and every reassurance we’d whispered to ourselves died with its arrival. All I could do was hold a sobbing boy and pray it hadn’t found me too.

Briar Glen was dying. Something screamed beyond the flames—a sound so unnatural that even the horses reared. Flames chewed through thatch and snapped across rooftops, devouring what little safety we’d ever had. Every scream was someone I knew. I staggered through the village green, my satchel banging against my hip, smoke clawing at my lungs as panic and instinct fought for control.

People ran. They fell. Fae blades flashed through the street—faces too lovely, hands too bloody, moving like the border nightmares we’d all grown up fearing. I saw Old Maeve’s boy disappear under the slice of a blade. I saw Mara Fen screaming, arms reaching for someone lost in the fire. I wanted to help, but the world was moving too fast for me to reach anyone in time.

Something shrieked somewhere inside the smoke. One of the riders wheeled toward it, disappearing into the flames before I could see what he’d been chasing.

Then everything changed. A hush fell, sudden and wrong, as if the village itself were waiting for the worst to arrive. Even the Fae stilled. Ash drifted between us. I felt my body tense, every instinct screaming to run. But my legs locked. I couldn’t look away.

His armor was black, etched with silver thornwork that gleamed in the flames. He stood a head taller than every man around him, broad-shouldered and powerfully built beneath the armor. Moon-pale hair fell across his brow, and his face looked carved from winter stone. Yet it was his eyes that stole my breath. Pure silver. Unnatural. The color of moonlight trapped beneath ice. When they fixed on me, something deep inside me recognized danger. Beauty had no right to belong to a creature like him.

Every warning she’d ever given me was true. Yet some traitorous part of me still tracked his every move. Little thorn, never kneel, never beg.

I stood my ground, fists balled. My heart hammered hard enough to crack my ribs. I wanted to spit at his feet, run, drag every survivor with me, and never look back. He dismounted in silence, his shadows curling around his boots, making the earth itself look unwilling to touch him. The Fae bent their heads. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

The nightmare halted in front of me, every inch what we’d been raised to dread. “Elara.” The sound of my name on his lips sent a chill through me. No stranger should know my name. I had never seen him before. Yet he spoke it with unsettling familiarity. I stepped between him and the nearest survivor, though my legs shook. “You aren’t welcome here,” I snapped, my voice raw from smoke and hatred. “Go back to the dark that birthed you.”

Something flickered in his expression—regret, perhaps. But it vanished in the next breath, replaced by a blank mask that revealed nothing. He reached for me. I tried to jerk away, but I wasn’t fast enough.

It started as pain. Heat tore through me, sharp and sudden, ripping away all memory of who I was. My knees hit the dirt as the world spun and a mark ignited on my wrist. Gold light twisted with black thorns beneath my skin, and terror crashed through me. I had never seen the symbol before, but I knew it all the same. Every child in the borderlands had heard the stories, passed down through countless generations. My stomach dropped. Why was it on me? The mark belonged to legends, not flesh. Certainly not mine. I gasped, but it wasn’t air I needed. It was an end to whatever had just been unleashed in me. I tried to pull away, but the Dark King’s grip locked me in place as if I were nothing more than soil to be claimed.

It hurt like marrow being split open. Fire raced through my veins, into my ribs, until it reached the center of me. There was no place inside me the pain didn’t touch. My body arched, fighting to be free, to stay mine. Villagers screamed. Someone dropped to their knees, sobbing. Amid the chaos, I heard my name. Elara. Not spoken. Mourned.

The world narrowed to the magic tearing me open. I tasted blood. My hands clawed at the dirt. Behind my eyelids, I saw flashes—fields burning, shadow and gold, memories that weren’t mine. Rage burned hotter than the mark.

Beneath the fear, my body betrayed me. While every thought screamed to run, something inside me reached for the power instead of recoiling. Worse, I recognized it, as if it had been waiting for this moment. His face shifted. Shock rippled across it, as though he were seeing his own undoing. He spoke—one word, rough, broken. “Mine.” The word scraped through the air between us.

I wrenched my arm, snarling, “Let me go!” I would have done anything to be free. He didn’t move. “You are bound.” I spat at him. “I would rather die!”

His eyes met mine, and for an instant something cracked through the mask before it vanished. “That,” he whispered, “is the one fate I will not allow.”

I screamed. The sound tore from my throat, raw and ragged. I felt the villagers’ stares and saw the horror on their faces as the mark spread across my wrist.

“Thornbound,” an old woman breathed.

Gasps swept through the square.

“She’s Thornbound.”

I was Elara. I clung to that truth even as the magic scoured everything I had been. But the mark burned, the thorns took root, and I feared there might be nothing left of me when it finished.

Briar Glen disappeared behind a curtain of smoke. Every memory felt suddenly out of reach—my mother’s voice, the smooth stone of the cottage hearth, the taste of river water at dusk. I watched the roofs collapse, sparks rising like a last goodbye. I thought I saw soldiers turning back toward the burning village, but the smoke swallowed them before I could be certain.

I was dragged through the wreckage by hands colder and stronger than steel. He held me upright when my legs gave out. Everything my mother had tried to prepare me for seemed to end there, with me being taken instead of saved.

The Veil was no longer just a border. It was a wound I was forced to cross. The mist swallowed the last of the village, stinging my eyes and clinging to my skin. The air bit harder. The scent of pine vanished beneath the damp earth and wet stone. Even the silence felt different. I heard thorns scraping against one another beneath the mist, their branches twisting as we passed.

They had called me Thornbound. Behind me, Briar Glen burned. As the Dark King, Caelen Duskryn, led me into the Kingdom of Thorns, I made a promise: I would survive this. If fate wanted to break me, it would bleed for the privilege.

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