The Master of Misrule by Laura Powell Read Free Book Online Page A

growing.
    At first the shoots were so small that they looked like flecks of soot on the snow. But quickly, very quickly, they knotted themselves into spreading snarls of spikes. Sharp black spikes that thrust wickedly against the soft white—dark tangles that grew so thickly and so fast that in moments there was an impenetrable circular hedge, nearly seven feet high, around the threshold.
    Flora’s first instinct was to push her way through the thicket, but she was immediately forced back, her arms and wrists scored with dozens of bloody scratch marks. With horror, she saw that each thorn was in fact a tiny, glinting sword.
    In her desperation she began casting about for a fallenbranch, or even a stone, to fight her way through. It was then that she spotted a small gap in the hedge a few yards to the right. There was an increasing time delay in moving her limbs, as if the signals from her brain were slowing to a crawl, but she managed to squeeze clumsily past. “Oh God,” she said aloud as she found herself in a narrow, winding lane between the hedge and another wall of briar-swords. “It’s the maze.”
    The snow on the ground gnawed icily into her wet feet. Her eyes watered. The scratches on her arms stung. But she welcomed the pain and the cold: they were signs of life. It’s not over till it’s over, she told herself grimly as she dragged her body along the twisting path.
Every turn is left
, Grace had said. Her sister had given her the key to the maze, and her only hope of reaching the threshold.
    It was a simple trick, really. One of those things that should be easy when you know how. But as Flora’s progress became limited to a cramped hobble, even her thought processes started to stultify. There were moments when she began to forget what she was supposed to be doing, what the point of all this wearisome movement was. It seemed as if she had been wandering in the web of briars forever—that this was the only world there was, and all that she had ever known. She didn’t care even when the thorns caught her clothes and tore her skin. They had stopped hurting now. When she couldn’t recall if she had gone left at the last turning or not, it didn’t seem to particularly matter. Nor did the little bundle of wire and thread that she was for some reason cradling to her chest.
    White snow, black thorn, red blood. Turn and turn again. Except that sometimes it was the ground that was powdered black, the sky a scalding white, with black blood on the red thorns. Was she in a maze of briars or a cage of swords? Turn and turn again.…
    It was when Flora rounded the last corner out of the maze that disaster struck. At the sight of the threshold, her senses recovered a little, and she was able to lurch forward on a brief energy surge. But her balance was gone and she fell stiffly to the ground. She tried to put out her hands to steady herself, and the doll tumbled from her weak grasp, becoming snagged on the briars at the base of the thicket. When she tugged at it, the wool only became more deeply ensnared.
    Her fingers were too clumsy to untangle the thread, her hands too feeble to free the doll from the piercings of countless tiny black swords. She knew that this was a dreadful thing, a calamity, but as the swaddling lethargy increased its hold on her, she could barely remember why. And the more she plucked at the doll, the more hopelessly snarled its threads became, until it no longer resembled a manikin, just an untidy nest of black wool in a bramble hedge.
    Flora tried to call out to her sister, but she couldn’t open her mouth properly and the words emerged as a whimper. More than anything, she wanted to lie down in the white softness, let darkness and stillness bind themselves into every fiber of her being, cocooning her in peace. But the thought of Grace pushed her onward, even though she had only the faintest memory of her now. And so, just as her sister haddone five years before, Flora began to crawl toward the