Bitterthorn

ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationPart 1Chapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Part 2Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Part 3Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Part 4Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Part 5Chapter 28Acknowledgements PRAISE FOR BITTERTHORN‘Kat Dunn has spun a love story both intimate and epic. Bitterthorn is a perfect fireside tale, thick with suspense, yearning, and wild beauty – I loved every moment of reading it’SAMANTHA SHANNON, international bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree‘A moody and stylish Gothic tale that feels both fresh and timeless – a masterful meditation on grief, loneliness, and terrible love. Gutting and unforgettable’AVA REID, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Wolf and the Woodsman‘Bitterthorn is beautiful and haunting – the type of story that seeps into your bones and stays with you long after reading. Kat Dunn has spun a deliciously dark fairytale full of the agony and ecstasy of longing and desire, as well as celebrating the power of resilience and inner strength’KATHERINE WEBBER, Sunday Times bestselling author of Twin Crowns‘A haunting, atmospheric tale of two lost souls finding each other, and a love that will remake the world. Exquisite’SHELLEY PARKER-CHAN, Sunday Times bestselling author of She Who Became the Sun‘Both classic and novel, melancholy and tenderly wrought, Bitterthorn crackles with passion and warmth like a fire on a long winter night. With achingly atmospheric prose, Dunn has crafted characters I would die for and a love story as powerful and enduring as a fairytale. A must-read for fans of Gothic romance’ALLISON SAFT, New York Times bestselling author of A Far Wilder Magic‘Girl meets house. Girl meets witch. And oh, does it ever get deliciously interesting from there! Dunn has created a delicately spun cobweb of a fairytale that slowly unwinds a pattern of secrets, curses, love and betrayal – and finally settles around your heart and leaves you glad to have been captured’FREYA MARSKE, author of A Marvellous Light‘A Gothic, intimate tale of love and loneliness, the threads that bind us to others, and how a sacrifice for another can be spun into something strong and enduring. Kat Dunn shows that hope can be found even amidst bitter odds’HELEN CORCORAN, author of Queen of Coin and Whispers‘Bitterthorn feels like a fairytale: a beautifully wrought story of love that is as claustrophobic and unnerving as it is achingly romantic. Dunn’s prose is luminous’SARAH UNDERWOOD, author of Lies We Sing to the Sea‘Bitterthorn enthralled me from the very first lines to the final pages. With prose that reads like poetry, Kat Dunn draws on the threads of familiar fairytales and spins them into something wholly new, coloured with the atmospheric spookiness of a Guillermo del Toro film’LYNDALL CLIPSTONE, author of Lakesedge and Forestfall‘Beauty First published in 2023 byAndersen Press Limited20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA, UKVijverlaan 48, 3062 HL Rotterdam, Nederlandwww.andersenpress.co.ukAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.The right of Kat Dunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.Copyright © Kat Dunn, 2023British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.ISBN 9781787612464 To younger me,I’m so sorry.It is as bad as you think it is,but you’ll escape AUTUMN II was born from my mother en caul, swaddled in my unbroken amniotic sac like an insect encased in amber, and entirely apart from the world.I have, in all meaningful ways, been alone ever since.The doctor grimaced and slit open my cocoon with a knife, spilling fluid and meconium, and like a selkie, I slipped off my first skin to reveal another human one beneath.My mother was gone in an instant, fainting in shock at this living, squirming thing emerging from inside her.My father took longer to leave.I was presented to him, minutes old, in the antechamber to my mother’s room, cleaned off and wrapped in lace. I am told he politely enquired after my birth, and had the good grace not to be visibly disappointed that he had no son. A daughter was perfectly adequate, and I had sensibly arrived healthy and whole. My only crime was arriving at all, into the lives of two people who weren’t quite sure what to do with a child now it was here. I never doubted they loved me in their own way, but I understood clearly and quickly what I was to them: a problem to be solved.Who should look after me? Where should I be put? How could things be arranged so neither of them had to change their lives in any real way?I soon learned my job. A series of nannies and governesses shepherded me from nursery to school room and I saw my parents in slivers like the windows of a zoetrope: Mother dandling me on her knee before a dinner party, my father presenting me to guests as I recited Goethe. Every child is beholden to the gods of their parents, and I augured their meanings from careless words and gestures, made rituals to fit around their whims, and inscribed into my heart the rules