Read The Castle Behind Thorns for Free Online Page B

but there were two indisputable facts that proved it: No longer did a stuffed falcon sit on the mantel, and a thin scrape from the escaping bird’s claw now lined his cheek.
    He could not think overly much about it. What logic was there to follow? The falcon had been dead—indisputably dead, stuffed and mounted and then broken in the sundering—and now it was alive, the first living thing that Sand had seen inside the castle. It made no sense! Not a single, solitary lick of sense.
    Sand went on about his day of mending and cleaning and straightening, while the scratch on his face went from burning pain to dull stinging and then to vaguely annoying. Spring returned by noon. The snow melted everywhere that the sun reached, and feeble winter hung on only in shadows.
    Sand settled down with pieces of several different buckets and finally considered how to take them apart and mend them into one, good bucket. He was no cooper, but the hard parts of bucket construction, the parts he knew little about—the selection of wood, the cutting and dressing of the staves, and all the words of the trade that he’d heard but didn’t really know, like flagging and jigging—were already done for him. He just had to bring the staves tight together again so that water couldn’t leak out.
    â€œAnd what does it matter?” he muttered to the bucket staves laid out before him as he inexpertly tried to fit them. “I’m no worse off than I was before if this doesn’t work.”
    The first few times, it did not work. Buckets were sized by eye, and none of the staves from the candidate broken buckets quite fit together. Sand cautiously shaped a few of the staves with a half-chisel, knowing it wasn’t exactly the right thing to do but not sure how to do what he needed to. The real craft of coopering lay in this part of the process, but the magic of it lay in the next step, when coopers used steam heat and iron truss hoops to shape their barrels and buckets. Since he possessed no real artistry with wood, Sand decided to move on to heat and iron. He understood heat and iron better than he understood anything else.
    One of the buckets still had a proper base hoop intact and in place. Sand added staves from other buckets, and added an upper hoop from yet another bucket, slipping it down over the outside of the staves. He dug out a small pit in the smithy and built a good fire in it, then set half a tilted cauldron of water to boil. He placed the bucket over the cauldron, waiting for the steam to soften the wood. It took a while, but when eventually he started hammering truss hoops, driving them down over the widening staves, it all came together.
    It should not have worked. His joins between staves were terrible; he did not possess the right tools; he did not fully understand the principles of making a watertight bucket; and this sort of work took at least a journeyman’s eye to supervise a raw novice like him. But somehow, once he had hammered the last truss into place, he had made something watertight.
    Or so he assumed. The bucket held his small amount of test water just fine. But when he threw the bucket down the well, attached to his bed-linen rope, the weight of the full bucket was too much, and the linens drew apart. He lost half the rope and the whole bucket down the well.
    He wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. A whole day’s work on one bucket, and it was gone down the well! And yet—the bucket had obviously held enough water that it had been too heavy for his makeshift rope.
    He laughed first. It had hardly been a rope at all; just some tied-together sheets, not even braided, let alone twisted and back-twisted as befit proper rope.
    And then he cried, just a little. Agnote would have pointed out his rope problem long before he lost a bucket, and kept him from such a stupid mistake. Grandpère would have suggested taking the time to braid the sheets on the first day, even