Read an extract from A Hunger of Thorns by Lili Wilkinson.
Nan is very particular about tea.
She orders a personalised blend from an under-the-counter botanica on the wrong side of town, and it gets shipped to her in bulk, a large wooden crate filled with vacuum-sealed packages. Nan decants them one by one into a floral tin with creaking hinges.
Halmoni bought her an electric kettle years ago, but Nan refuses to use it. She fills an ancient cast-iron kettle with rainwater from the tank outside the back door and lights the gas burner with a match.
Nan doesn’t ask if I want tea. The kettle is already on, with curls of steam and faint whistles escaping from the spout. I have made the journey downstairs from my bedroom, now there will be tea. Tea is non-negotiable.
I push aside five cross-stitched cushions, Nan’s knitting basket, and two cats to make a space on the couch, and sit down. Princess Bari stalks away, offended, her tail twitching, but Gwion Bach clambers into my lap and starts kneading my thighs. His claws sink through the thin layers of my dress and the brand-new stockings that Halmoni bought me just for today. I imagine the pinprick holes widening and splitting into ladders, and I feel a brief surge of wicked satisfaction. But these stockings are fancy enchanted ones and will not ladder, so I will remain neat and respectable. Put together is how Dr Slater would phrase it. Today, I have to be put together, even though I’m falling apart.
Nan takes a pinch of tea from the floral tin and leans out the back door to sprinkle it on the doorstep, over the deep engraved marks of overlapping circles and daisy wheels that keep our house free of mischief. She opens another tin and fishes out a handful of thrupenny biscuits, which she plunks onto a china plate without ceremony.
‘Orright, Miss Maude?’ she says to me.
Gwion Bach finally deems my lap sufficiently moulded to his requirements and settles himself into a furry brown puddle. I rub behind his ears, and he purrs.
Nan reaches up to an open shelf cluttered with canisters, vases and ugly little figurines of big-headed shepherdesses and frogs playing musical instruments, and takes down cups and saucers, painted with pink and yellow roses. A reading, then. When it’s just tea, Nan uses Halmoni’s Buncheong stoneware cups, but white porcelain provides better contrast for reading tea leaves.
The kettle on the stove begins to whistle in earnest, a plume of steam billowing to the ceiling. Nan briefly holds each cup over the steam – to cleanse them of any deceit – then lifts the kettle and splashes boiling water into the teapot.
Nan’s teapot is the stuff of family legend. It’s large enough to hold up to ten cups, and it is truly the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen. It’s pastel-pink china, in the shape of a soppy-looking cat’s face. Huge baby-blue cat eyes stare unblinking, fringed with curled painted lashes. An open grinning mouth leers beneath feverishly rosy cheeks.
She replaces the kettle, where it resumes its shrill whistling, then swirls the water in the teapot to warm it before emptying it over the sink. After that she takes her tarnished silver caddy spoon, its handle engraved with entwined pennywort and milk thistle, and measures out four spoons of tea leaves – one for her, one for me, one for Halmoni, and one for luck. She fills the pot halfway with boiling water – it’s too big to fill all the way, unless we have company. Then she pops on the lid and leaves it to steep.
‘Now, then,’ she says, smoothing the front of her tweed skirt, which flows neat and sombre over outrageously pink Lycra leggings. ‘How you feeling, love?’
Her crinkled, watery eyes see too much, so I look away, over towards her workbench, where bunches of drying rosemary and sea holly hang over row upon row of little jars – crushed eggshell, salt, rusty pins, feathers, bits of bone, rowan ash. There’s a half-finished poppet there, button-eyed and bound with red and silver thread. A love charm, probably, for some moonsick client. Or maybe good luck for a student – exams are coming up soon.
Nan’s still watching me. ‘Fine,’ I tell her. ‘I’m fine.’
She is clearly not satisfied by this answer, but she doesn’t say anything. She pulls a bottle of milk from the fridge, and Hangul and Huw appear as if from nowhere, winding themselves silkily around her ankles. Gwion Bach twitches an ear but doesn’t move from my lap. Princess Bari slips in from the garden and positions herself next to the milk saucer and makes loud, yowling demands. Nan bends creakily and splashes milk into the saucer, and Gwion Bach leaps heavily to the floor and pads over to join his siblings, his fat belly swaying below him like a furry pendulum.
Nan carefully pours milk into the teacups. Milk goes in before tea, to protect the drinker from any malicious contaminants that may have found their way into the tea caddy. Always whole milk, never skim or almond or (good people forbid) soy. Sugar, lemon and honey are strictly forbidden. Also banned from our house is Earl Grey, decaf, herbal teas for anything other than medicinal purposes, and those fancy charmed tea bags where the brew doesn’t oversteep and the little paper tab never falls into the cup when you pour the water in.
Nan does allow Halmoni a canister of hyeonmi-nokcha, which I secretly prefer, but Halmoni drinks mostly coffee anyway.
The cats’ saucer is emptied, and Gwion Bach leaps back up to my lap and settles down, then decides I’ve gotten all out of shape again and rises to his feet to knead me back into position. Hangul and Huw tumble out into the garden to chase mice, while Princess Bari cleans her whiskers and watches, aloof.
‘Are you ready for today?’ Nan asks.
I don’t know how to answer that question.
Nan lifts the hideous teapot with two hands and carefully pours tea, first into my cup, and then her own. No tea strainer, of course. A little splashes onto the kitchen counter as she sets it down, and she twitches a smile.
She presents me with my cup and saucer, and offers me the plate of thrupenny biscuits. I take one and dunk it into the tea, pausing to inhale fragrant steam. The biscuit crumbles soggily in my mouth, warm milky tannins blending with sweet apple cider and caraway.
‘What even is a vigil anyway?’ Nan says conversationally. ‘Is it like divination? Are they expecting someone to have a vision of her?’
‘Dr Slater is going to lead us in contemplation,’ I tell her.
Nan makes a face. She’s not a fan of Dr Slater and his wellbeing regimen. ‘What right does he have? He isn’t her family.’
‘He’s the school principal. A community leader,’ I offer.
‘As if anything that man does is going to bring the poor girl home. And doing it on the eve of an egg moon too. People just don’t have any sense.’
My mouth is too full of biscuit to reply.
Nan falls silent as she sips her tea, and I glance out the window towards Halmoni’s stained-glass studio, wishing she’d come in.
‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ she says. ‘You and Odette haven’t been close for years.’
Four years. Four years since I got my period, my magic dried up, and my best friend broke my heart.
I’ve reached the bottom of the cup, the tea turned bitter and lukewarm. A few tea leaves wash into my mouth, and I press them between my teeth.
Nan puts down her own cup. ‘Right, then,’ she says, and reaches over to pick up my cup in her left hand. She swirls the dregs three times sunwise, then inverts the cup over my saucer. Muddy liquid seeps out around the rim. She taps three times on the base, then lifts the cup again and examines the remaining tea leaves clinging to the white china.
I shift uncomfortably, and Gwion Bach pauses his rumbling purr and flicks an irritated ear. I look around the little room bursting with overstuffed armchairs, cushions and luridly coloured crochet rugs. The walls are crowded with framed pictures – flowers, more big-headed shepherdesses and family illustrations. I see Nan and Halmoni’s wedding portrait, the oil paint faded with age. There’s a watercolour of Halmoni visiting her parents in Pisi-Geiteu. Mam, wearing cap and gown as she graduated from university. Me in pen-and-ink as a fat-cheeked baby.
‘Something has been lost,’ Nan murmurs, squinting into the cup. ‘You have a wild road ahead, Maude.’
I didn’t need a reading to tell me that.
‘But there are good things too.’ She turns the cup so I can see it, and points. ‘See there? That’s a rose. Love is waiting for you. And here? This is the sun, which represents power.’
She goes small and silent, and I know she’s thinking about Mam. Power only leads to trouble. Power is illegal magic, wild and unpredictable. Power makes you end up in a detention camp, your mettle – magical life force – drained to make commercial potions and glamours until there’s nothing left and you return as a mindless husk, or a corpse laid out cold on the front door.
Nan lets out a faint, breathy sigh and turns back to the cup. She frowns, and despite myself I lean forward.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s . . .’ Nan’s eyes dart to mine, as sharp as thistles.
I peer into the cup. ‘It looks like a bird’s wings.’
Nan purses her lips but doesn’t respond.
I have a sudden, vivid flash of memory, of the chirping song of leaf warblers and the trickle of Cygnet Creek.
I was lying on my back, gazing up at the canopy of Peg Powler, the weeping willow. Odette hung upside down by her knees from a branch, her crackling white-blond hair brushing thick clay and exposed tree roots. We were about eleven, and Odette had just experienced her first-ever kiss, with Omar Courtenay. It had not come close to realising the romantic fantasies that we’d played out in our games, and Odette was feeling mightily disillusioned.
‘The problem with getting rescued by handsome princes,’ she was saying as she swung back and forth, ‘is that boys are disgusting.’
I nodded in happy agreement. ‘Vile.’
Real boys were nothing like the dashing heroes in the stories I spun for Odette under the willow – all noble, tortured souls with tragic backstories and dark, mysterious eyes. Real boys never spoke in poetry, nor were they utterly devoted to us, and us alone.
‘On the other hand,’ Odette continued. ‘What if I get whisked away by a dark lord, or kidnapped by a dragon? Who will rescue me?’
‘We could rescue each other,’ I suggested dreamily, watching a leaf warbler flit from one willow branch to another.
Odette kept swinging from the tree branch. ‘Tell me how you’d rescue me. If I was locked in a tall tower, with no hope of escape.’
‘Well,’ I said, sitting up and letting my mind start to weave together the threads of a new story. ‘First, I’d climb the stairs—’
‘There are no stairs, Maude,’ Odette shrieked. ‘No stairs, no ladders! The tower is so tall, the top is shrouded in cloud. Its walls are so smooth, there isn’t a single handhold.’
I knew the answer even before she had finished speaking. I always knew how a story would go. Halmoni explained to me when I was little that everyone had a gift, and that mine was storytelling. To me, telling a story felt exactly like doing magic – reaching for invisible threads and weaving them together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
‘I’d find a witch to cast a spell on me, to give me wings so I could fly to the top of the tower.’
Odette grasped the branch with her hands, then flipped her legs backwards until she was standing upright again. Her hair took a second to settle, floating around her shoulders as if it obeyed totally different laws of gravity. Her face was serious. ‘That sounds like powerful magic,’ she said with a delicious shiver. ‘It’d come at a cost.’
Odette had no idea what magic was powerful and what wasn’t, but I nodded anyway, because in this case she was right. Wings – real, functional wings, not just a glamour – would take an impossible amount of mettle – of life force. Maybe more than there is in the whole world.
‘Would you give up your sight?’ Odette asked. ‘Your voice? Your firstborn? A happy memory?’
‘To rescue you? Of course.’
Odette chewed on a fingernail. ‘So you fly up to the tower, and I climb onto your back, but before we can jump out the window, the dragon returns. And it’s hungry. What happens then? What do you do?’
The gurgle of the creek seemed to dim around us, and the sun went behind a cloud. Peg Powler, always such a gentle embrace of a tree, suddenly loomed over us, long tendrils reaching, searching, clawing. A cold wind moved the branches, bringing the tree alive, a green dragon intent on devouring us, right down to crunching bone. A cloud of glimmer moths burst from the branches overhead, their abdomens glowing bright blue.
I looked up at Odette. She was beautiful the way princesses in stories are beautiful – big eyes, pixie nose, cascading silvery hair. But there was always something behind her beauty. A raging fire, seething with heat. People were drawn to her, like moths to a candle. But her fire could burn a person right up. Omar Courtenay wouldn’t be the last boy who wanted to be with her. Ahead of us, there were parties and kissing and glamours and periods and all the other terrifying obstacles on the hard road to grey adulthood, every step crowded with grown-ups telling us to be nice, nice, nice.
It was far more terrifying than any imaginary horror I could dream up.
‘How do you defeat the dragon, Maude?’
In that moment, I wished we didn’t have to take that grey road. I wanted to stay a child, playing games with Odette under the willow. We were wild – wild in the way that only little girls can be. No matter how hard people like Odette’s mother and Dr Slater tried to shame us out of it.
I clenched my fists. ‘I would smash it with my wings.’
Odette grinned, tooth-bare and fierce, a growl sounding at the back of her throat.
A Hunger of Thorns
by Lili Wilkinson
Be swept up in this brilliant, witchy, Victorian Premier's Literary Award-winning tale about forbidden magic and missing girls who don't need handsome princes to rescue them.
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