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Read an Excerpt From Among the Thorns by Jennifer K. Lambert
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Romantasy
Read an Excerpt From Among the Thorns by Jennifer K. Lambert
Two sorceresses of unrivaled potential clash to claim the greater fate and the heart of prince charming.
By Jennifer K. Lambert
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Published on June 17, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Among the Thorns by Jennifer K. Lambert, a brand new romantasy set in the same world as Never the Roses—publishing with Bramble on July 14th.
Ambitious young sorceress Rose of Northbrooke is about to graduate. She’s the only known dream sorcerer of her generation and she’s a remarkable one—formidably powerful, strikingly beautiful, and destined for greatness. No wonder she has a prince of the realm trailing her skirts.But when rumors of dream magic gone awry reach her ear, Rose discovers she’s not the only oneiromancer of her generation. And she might not be the most powerful.In a faraway cottage, Thorn has lived a simple and isolated life. She’s kept hidden by magic that prevents her from wandering past the cottage fence. Thorn longs to be a part of the world, to learn more about her magic, to be rescued by a prince who could love her with his whole heart.When she discovers there’s another dream sorceress out there who has everything Thorn has ever wanted—freedom, education, prince and all—her acceptance of her isolation transforms into a hunger for everything she has been denied. Everything Rose has.When Rose and Thorn meet, they realize their lives have been a lie and their fates have been carefully planned by political schemers. The outcome is clear: only one sorceress can live in the open, reap all the glory of her kingdom, and claim the prince’s loving hand… condemning the other to a life of perpetual non-existence.
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Among the Thorns
Jennifer K. Lambert
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Among the Thorns
Jennifer K. Lambert
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The girl, Thorn, lived at the far edge of the world, deep in the forest where the trees towered and grew bigger around than she could reach with both arms. In her simple cottage and garden, she grew up alone and isolated—but she lived a thousand lives through her sorcery.
From an early age, she could lay hands on even a plain and empty brass box, and read the story better than in a book. Every object she touched offered illuminating glimpses of a world, shards of images that, pieced together, created a tapestry so staggeringly large and complex that Thorn could scarcely encompass it with her mind. All she knew was that, beyond the forest, there lived many other people in beautiful, crowded places called castles and citadels and cities. People with families that hugged each other and gave gifts with love. People who gave pledges of eternal affection with jewels that forever remembered those moments of intense emotion.
The world also held evil. She saw those tales, too, spun out in silent imagery, soaked in violent emotions. Jealousy and hate and greed drove people to terrible crimes. She was safe at the cottage, within the thorny boundary of the rose hedge that billowed and bloomed. Summer brought the heavy honey-gold blossoms, filling the air with sweet scent and the buzz of bees, but in all seasons, the black-emerald canes wove an impenetrable barrier, thorns curved like blades, protecting Thorn from the terrors of the world.
For a very long time, Thorn believed this was true. Her guardian, Jada, taught her how to use her magic, to touch the carefully bagged treasures and describe everything she saw and felt from them. Despite the moments of love and happiness she experienced, there were also terrible things, so she believed Jada that they were lucky to live where they did, safe and sound for always.
Thorn hated it when Jada would depart for a day or two or three, leaving Thorn safely inside the enchanted rose hedge where she wouldn’t come to harm. She greeted her guardian’s return with frantic tears and pleas to be allowed to go along the next time. But someone had to feed the chickens and milk Nessie the goat and make the cheese and butter from her milk, to keep up with drying herbs and storing root vegetables for winter, to put away fruits into jars of preserves.
Over time, Thorn lost her fear of being alone. She even began to look forward to the peacefulness of it, to the reprieve from worrying that she might make a mistake or reveal some fault requiring punishment and correction. And she looked forward to the stories she’d see in the trophies Jada brought back.
Thorn would sit in the library at the desk she’d used since she was old enough to take lessons and record the provenance of each new treasure. Through her psychometry, she could see anyone who’d touched the object, and feel their emotions of that moment. This was the remanence people left behind, an echo of their presence in the world. The most recent experiences were usually the brightest and most vivid, almost always some busy marketplace with a jumble of avarice and delight on both sides of the transaction as the object changed hands. She could then go back in time from there, tracing each instance someone had touched the object, all the way back to images of its maker, and how that person had felt creating it. Sometimes she could go back even farther, to the mining or harvesting of its component parts.
What made Thorn an especially effective psychometrist was that she could go so far back and see and feel so much.
With her powerful gift for psychometry, Thorn excavated the deepest levels of an object’s history, which meant her provenance revealed more than anyone else’s. She’d identified several lost artifacts created by celebrated artisans, fetching Jada a pretty pile of coin—very necessary for the two of them living alone, with no support from anyone else.
Left to her own devices, Thorn sometimes fell down the rabbit hole of tracing the remanence of some irrelevant component of an object. It slowed her down, becoming distracted by some sidenote of history, and Jada detested dallying. But Thorn couldn’t help being drawn in by the stories she saw, like those images of an exotic land made entirely of sand where a jewel had been mined or the surprising and horrifying twist when a bit of leather that appeared to be animal turned out to be human. She had to know everything, unable to look away even when the story turned out to be terrible.
Thorn had learned to balance her curiosity with efficiency, quickly establishing the provenance needed for maximum resale value and then indulging herself with tracing the deeper histories. She especially loved when she found romances tied to the objects. It happened most often with jewelry, given as tokens of love or promises of happy ever afters. The vibrancy of those emotions persisted in the gifts, along with images of kisses and embraces. Thorn lingered over the shimmering sensations of intimate affection, especially savoring the pieces that remembered being worn on the skin that lovers kissed and caressed.
Experiencing those secondhand memories of loving and being loved, so unlike her solitary, friendless life, gave her both hope and a sense of despair. A different way of being existed, but she didn’t know how to find it. Eventually, she realized she would never find anything different unless she left the cottage. Only Jada could pass through the brambles surrounding them, so no one ever visited and Thorn could never leave.
For a very long time, Thorn never questioned that essential truth.
Until one day she did.
It was a day much like all the days before, except that it was an exceptionally lovely summer afternoon. Thorn had fed the chickens, gathered eggs, milked Nessie, cleaned the kitchen following breakfast, started the dough for the day’s baking, and weeded the vegetable bed. Then, with Jada napping and a bit of time to herself, she took a new treasure—a jeweled belt buckle—out to the willow tree by the pond. She’d already catalogued it, meticulously writing out the relevant provenance. But on impulse, instead of putting the buckle back into its velvet bag, she’d slipped it into her pocket. She would put it back before Jada noticed its absence. She only wanted to play with it a bit more, to savor the lovely sense of it. And the prince she’d glimpsed inside.
As a jeweled buckle, it was pretty enough, and gems usually fetched good coin. In this case, though, Jada had been especially excited, suspecting it had belonged to someone of importance. She could improve on the resale value with a bit of royal cachet.
As Thorn received only images and emotions from the remanence lingering in an object, she couldn’t tell who exactly the royal had been. She could, however, describe him and the people around him: the rich clothing, the servants, the older man with a long red beard who touched it right before, who wore a crown—surely a king—and the person before that, a wealthy jeweler excited to see a royal court. The royal must be a young prince. He posed before a gilded mirror wearing the belt buckle, pleased with the flashing gems, the warmth of approval in the gift. He had glossy golden hair that waved to his shoulders, bright green eyes, a lovely smile. Thorn transcribed all the details she could glean about the jeweler, the origin of the gems, keeping to herself the sorry state of the miners in that distant underground tunnel.
Thrilled with the success of her purchase, Jada treated herself to a glass of afternoon wine and lay down for a celebratory nap—giving Thorn a golden opportunity to savor the presence of the prince in the buckle just a bit longer. Because, more than his sense of physical appearance, Thorn loved his lighthearted nature, a natural humor and attractive enthusiasm for life.
He seemed to be around her age, unusual for the treasures she examined. Under the willow tree, Thorn revisited that sparkling moment of the gift-giving, some kind of celebration, the king handing the prince the belt buckle, how much joy the gift had brought him. She was sorry the buckle had been later taken from him, stolen by a desperate servant who sold it to Jada in a back alley.
Thorn sorted through and memorized other moments of sheer happiness from times the prince wore the buckle: him taking classes in dancing and swordfighting, riding horses through forests, a pair of hounds always with him. On the more poignant side, she recognized a loneliness in him that mirrored hers, a deep sadness, a feeling of not fitting in. Exploring those echoes of his heart reassured her of two things: that she wasn’t the only person in all the world to feel that way and that one could be a wealthy royal, surrounded by hordes of people, and still feel as alone as a girl in an isolated cottage. That someone out there had both—her gray loneliness and those moments of joy—rendered her hopeful and longing for more.
That longing folded in with an indefinable restlessness, a kind of hunger that had begun to plague her. Some of it came from the dull ache of her menses, which had started only the year before and continued to arrive with inconvenient regularity. Jada said that meant she was becoming a woman like her, but that made no sense to Thorn. Jada had pale skin, redly chestnut hair, and blue eyes. Thorn already stood taller than Jada, topping the short and slender woman by a handspan. Would Thorn get shorter again, her brown skin and black hair lighten, her dark eyes turn to blue?
When Thorn wondered aloud about such things, Jada laughed and called her stupid girl.
The hunger refused to subside, instead blooming lush as the honey-gold roses and pricking her as sharply as those wickedly curved thorns. The craving for something became tangled up in those intimate moments the jewels recalled so vividly, the needing and wanting and loving, which made Thorn want to fall into dreamy fantasies, a reverie of those sensations and emotions. Now she added the prince to those dreams, imagining him coming to rescue her, like in the fairytale books. He would love her and kiss her and give her a jeweled ring to prove it, providing her with one of those shimmering moments of joy she so envied him.
Except that he didn’t know she existed. How would she ever find him when she was forever tucked away in the cottage? How would he find her if no one but Jada knew she even existed?
She had to find a way into his world.
“When I’m finished becoming a woman,” Thorn asked very politely, after she’d snuck the belt buckle back into its bag, alongside the provenance she’d penned, “will I be able to go with you then, beyond the fence?”
“No.”
“Then when?” Thorn persisted. “I’d like to see the city someday.” She knew better than to mention her fantasy of meeting the sunny prince.
Jada laughed her most scornful laugh. “The city is not for you, my little country mouse.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not safe for you.”
“But when I’m a woman.”
“Especially not then.”
“But it’s safe for you.”
“Yes.”
“Why you and not me?”
“Thorn.” Jada said her name on a sigh. “We are different people. No two people in all the world are alike, thus none of them lead the same lives or follow the same rules. I may leave this place; you may not. It’s a simple rule and one you’ve known all your life. You’re a stupid girl, but even you should be able to understand this basic truth.”
“Doesn’t what I want matter at all?” Thorn demanded in growing frustration.
At this, Jada stilled and turned to look upon Thorn. In these moments, her physical stature ceased to matter and she dwarfed Thorn in every way. As it did when she was displeased, Jada’s magic unfurled around her, seeming to take the shape of giant white wings, her hair frosting and rising also to bristle with a life of its own.
If Thorn didn’t immediately apologize and promise to do better, those powerful wings would enfold her until she couldn’t move, her body drowsy as if she slept, though she didn’t feel sleepy in her head. She hated it. So, Thorn didn’t understand what drove her now to defy Jada, to run the risk of her displeasure, the suffocating suppression of those unseen wings.
Except that she wanted the joy that awaited her in the outside world more than she was afraid.
“Thorn.” Jada spoke her name with quiet menace, the wings of power stirring the air currents. Thorn quailed inside, but made herself stand tall. “You are allowed to want some things. But I have a duty to you. A sacred responsibility I have devoted myself to since you were born. All your life, I have protected you from danger. I know what’s best for you. Have I made myself clear or do you need me to contain you, for your own good?”
Thorn’s brief rush of courage ran out and she shook her head. “I only asked,” she protested meekly.
“You used to be such a sweet girl,” Jada observed. “I don’t know what I’ve done for you to be so unkind to me, so ungrateful for all I’ve given you—and given up for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” her guardian mimicked in a whiny voice. “I have some more objects for you to evaluate. You can make it up to me by being useful. I need to be able to sell these in the city on my trip next week.”
“You’re leaving again already?”
“Yes, I told you that.”
Thorn didn’t think she had, but she didn’t argue, of course. Instead, as she obediently catalogued the rest of the items, Thorn contemplated how she could turn the alone time to her advantage. Maybe she could use the opportunity to try to figure out how to pass through the fence like her guardian did. Jada always followed the garden path to the far end, where the deep shadows of the forest draped lavishly over the arched gate in the rose-covered fence, and she somehow opened it. Thorn had always been made to stand well back by the cottage, unable to see clearly. A few times, Thorn had tried the gate. The latch never budged for her.
Worse, a feeling of repulsion made her skin itch all over, until Thorn couldn’t bear to stand so close to the gate any longer. That same feeling plagued Thorn any time she came too near the briar hedge, the golden roses seeming to lift their heavy blossoms to stare menacingly at her, the leaves peeling back to reveal curved black thorns ready to pierce her skin. Thorn knew that sensation meant wards. There were wards on the bookshelves Thorn wasn’t allowed to access, the enchantment blurring the titles of the books and pushing against Thorn coming anywhere close.
If Thorn wanted to pass through the gate, she needed to learn to overcome that repulsion long enough to find a way through the wards. She had no talent for wardmaking, but maybe she could break wards? Undoing wasn’t the same as doing. Thorn could methodically test the forbidding briars to see if she could determine what kind of wards twined through them. Probably she wouldn’t be able to escape this time, but maybe she could learn? Or maybe she couldn’t.
The thought saddened her immeasurably. She was trapped, perhaps forever.
It didn’t help that her seat faced the bookshelf with the large piece of polished amber holding a butterfly poised in flight. None of its color remained; its once brightly scaled wings had leached away into deeper shades of tawny ocher, like the golden roses outside when they faded into brittle remnants, leaving this skeletal shadow preserved for all time. It might be melodramatic, but Thorn saw herself much the same way. Her life over before it began, she might exist forever in this safe bubble, all her color gradually leaking away and leaving her a remnant of the person she might have been.
Fuming about it all, Thorn channeled her simmering frustration at her hemmed-in life into the psychometry analysis. Soon enough she had a detailed provenance for all seven remaining objects. They might be boring, but that also made them quick to get through. At least none had been soaked in violence. But, under their onslaught of impressions, she was already losing the lovely feelings from the prince’s belt buckle, too easily forgetting how that felt, how he felt. She couldn’t keep it, but—the rebellious thought bubbled up in her mind—perhaps she could keep a little piece of it.
Feeling terribly brave and quaking inside with fear at being caught—though she could hear Jada’s snores echoing down the hall—she unpacked the belt buckle, careful to keep the creases of the paper intact. Working swiftly, she pried out a tiny jewel from the edge, from a place no one would notice, hopefully. With any luck, the next buyer wouldn’t see the gap, or they’d think it lost by accident. Surely no one would guess that meek and obedient Thorn had taken it.
She pressed the tiny gem into a bit of sealing wax and secreted it in her apron pocket, checking first that no holes would allow it to escape her, and made herself take meticulous care in rewrapping the package and tying the strings to hold it closed. There.
Giddy with the unaccustomed power of disobedience, and with Jada’s snores still audible, Thorn decided to look for books on rune-breaking. On the far side of the library, two walls of shelves held the locked and warded books too dangerous for Thorn. When she was littler, Thorn had tried to read the titles on the spines, straining her eyes in frustrating attempts to read the letters that blurred, bounced, and jigged out of meaning. Even if she resisted the itchy repulsion of the wards and put one eye right up next to the words, they refused to make sense.
Thorn considered those warded shelves, which certainly contained useful information. She couldn’t access them until she learned to break wards, however, so that made for a neat circle that led nowhere. Instead she searched the shelves she was allowed to access for elementary books on runes.
Then, realizing the snoring had stopped, hearing Jada’s steps approaching the library door, Thorn snagged the leftmost book at random, stowing it in a deeper pocket of her skirt, then scurried back to her worktable. Making a show of stretching, she pretended to be surprised by Jada’s entrance.
“Is it time to make tea already?” she asked, then gestured at her documentation. “I just finished,” she added, surprised at how easily the lie came to her lips. She hadn’t outright lied to Jada since she was a child, and part of her braced for her mentor to know, as she always did, to scold her, for the punishing wings to batter her.
But Jada did not notice. She simply scooped up the sheaf of documents, perusing the information with tight-lipped satisfaction. “These will fetch a pretty bit of coin. And yes—time for you to bake the scones and get the tea brewing. Make some of those cucumber and goat cheese sandwiches, too, with the crusts removed. I’ll be there in a bit.”
With a relieved sense of having narrowly escaped a stinging punishment, Thorn turned to go—though she couldn’t help glancing back at what seemed to be a glaring hole where the book had been. She should have adjusted the spacing. She almost confessed at that moment, the text burning through her skirt.
Jada glanced up from boxing the artifacts with their documentation. “What?” she snapped. “The scones won’t bake themselves and you know I hate it when tea is late.”
Thorn fled for the safety of the kitchen.
* * *
Later that night, under the tent of her bedcovers, Thorn made a small light. Minor pyromancy was another of her weak skills, useful primarily for surreptitious reading past her bedtime—and for venturing into the dark, cramped, and decidedly damp root cellar. She pressed the sealing wax holding the jewel to the underside of her bedframe, where she could drape her hand over the side and caress the surface of the jewel, the prince’s sunshine like another light in her dark night.
With one finger near the gem, and lying on her side with her back to the door, just in case Jada came to check on her, as she sometimes did, and ready to snuff the light at the slightest sound, Thorn read the opening chapter of the kiddie primer on runes in disbelief.
She’d been lied to.
It shouldn’t come as such a shock—after all, Thorn had been dancing around the edges of this discovery for quite some time—but she hadn’t expected this level of deception. For all that the primers on rune-scribing had emphasized the critical importance of perfect execution, it turned out that wardmaking could be accomplished without runes. In fact, by sheer luck, Thorn had picked up a text whose author disdained runes as a method for warding, entirely because accuracy could be so critical, which made them useless for a sorcerer under duress or distraction.
The author, a sorcerer named Stearanos Stormbreaker, advised employing runes only for permanently installed wards, such as on a castle—or probably like the ones woven into the rose hedge—and only when they could be regularly reinfused with warding magic by their maker. Thorn allowed the book to close, contemplating the implications in wonder. That must be what Jada did when she left: she reinfused the permanent runes with warding magic.
More important: the warding magic worked separately from the runes. Jada had made them sound like one and the same, but clearly they were not. Jada might have even hired some other sorcerer to inscribe the runes on the cottage fence when it was erected, or in the climbing roses themselves, and the sorceress had simply activated and deactivated them as she left and returned.
All of which meant that Thorn could use the techniques this Stearanos indicated he’d describe later in the book to modify the wards to allow herself an opening in them. She didn’t need much, just a small gap for her to slip out, perhaps find a village.
Eagerly, inspired and excited as she hadn’t felt in a long time, Thorn flipped to chapter 20: “Thinning, Fraying, Penetrating, and Shattering: Four Methods for Breaking Wards.” Reading quickly, she committed the instructions to memory. This way, she could return the book before she started making breakfast, before Jada was even awake.
* * *
“Remember,” Jada said, checking the bags Thorn had packed for her, “you will stay within the perimeter of the garden during my absence.”
“Yes, Jada,” Thorn replied meekly.
“Don’t ‘yes, Jada’ me, missy. I haven’t forgotten your rebellious questions. I must be able to trust that you’ll stay safe inside the fence.”
“I understand,” she said, instead of “Yes, Jada,” but she must have sounded wrong, because her guardian focused on her, the sound of suffocating feathers beating in the distance.
“If necessary,” she said softly, “I can make it so you can’t leave even the cottage.”
“But then who would tend the chickens and Nessie?” Thorn pointed out. She didn’t know what Jada meant by this new threat, but she was sure she didn’t want to find out.
“Don’t push me on this,” Jada warned in a quiet voice that was always worse than shouting. “If you give me any reason to believe that this new rebelliousness of yours will lead to the testing of boundaries any more than you’re already doing, I will confine you to this cottage. Or worse,” she added darkly. “Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now, go on down to the root cellar.”
“The root cellar?” Thorn echoed, fear striking her heart to a faster beat, cold sweat immediately trickling down her spine. She hated the cellar with its damp smell and the worms dangling palely out of the dirt walls. Needing the brightness of it, the bravery in him, she put a hand in her apron pocket, lightly touching the prince’s presence in the gem she kept there by day.
“Yes, Thorn. The root cellar. Don’t try my patience. Go.”
She didn’t dare drag her feet, but Thorn couldn’t make herself hurry as Jada followed her through the kitchen. Opening the door, she peered into the unlit pit, chilly even in summer, the wooden steps down more like a ladder than stairs. “For how long?” she asked.
“Longer, if you don’t get down there right now,” Jada answered, the magic wings wrapping around Thorn in silent threat. “Or do you need help?”
While it wasn’t that much of a drop, it still hurt to land on the hard-packed floor, so Thorn quickly climbed down.
“Count an hour,” Jada instructed, “and then you can come up. I’ll know if you cheat. Understand?”
“I understand.” She shivered already.
“Good girl. I’ll see you in a few days.” She shut the door, quenching the summer sunshine from above.
Thorn crouched on the cellar floor, not wanting to sit in the damp, counting the minutes until she could climb out. She made a small light to keep her company, mentally practicing the ward-breaking techniques, rewarding herself by revisiting the prince’s memory of a ride through the woods for each repetition. When an hour plus a little extra—just in case—had elapsed, Thorn climbed up the steps, easing open the door into the kitchen. The cottage was quiet. Thorn was alone and free to attempt her escape.
Just in case Jada came back for something she’d forgotten, Thorn resolved to wait for dusk. She completed her chores for the day. She milked Nessie and bedded the goat down in the little shed for the night. She put the chickens in their coop, too. Neither Thorn nor the dangers of the world could penetrate the wards, but animals could. The foxes and forest cats would love a goat or chicken dinner, given the opportunity. Once they lost a hen, one of Thorn’s favorites, an excellent hen, iridescent black with face tufts that she’d named Esmerelda and who’d wormed her way through the rose hedge and escaped. Apparently the wards kept only Thorn safe. She missed Esmerelda still.
At last, the light turned from golden to violet, signaling the end of the gloaming and the arrival of twilight. Thorn strolled slowly, sedately toward the garden gate, as if someone or something might notice if she made any sudden moves. Although she’d looked out that small portal in the fence many times, she saw it as if anew. The white picket fence extended in an arc, making a trellis for the roses. Their black-emerald canes wove a dense barrier in and around the fence, the leaves bristling with tiny blades, the thorns long and curved, the buds and blossoms heavy, glowing with buttery light in the purpling shadows, as if they’d soaked up the sunset colors, radiating back the warm pink-tinged golds, their thick, sweet scent heavy in the still sum-mer twilight.
The gate filled the opening, though not completely, closing off the only briar-free aperture. The silvery lines of the runes shimmered along the wooden slats of the fence and through the roses themselves, sending out their unfriendly prickles for her to go away. Resisting the discomfort, Thorn made herself trace their precise, perfect lines with a questioning fingertip, careful of the thorns.
Jada’s magic, as familiar as Thorn’s own, infused the runes, but—as Thorn had wondered about—they’d been drawn and established by someone else. Her psychometry confirmed it, giving her an image of a tall, brown-skinned, and dark-haired man. He’d done the work with avid ambition and a fierce desire to protect—and as long ago as Thorn had been alive.
A thousand questions flooded her mind, but she set those aside to focus on this task: to see if she could thin the wards enough to open the gate.
She didn’t need to retrieve the book to do this. Thorn had developed her memory to perfectly reproduce the instructions from the text. She did get out the journal she’d put in her pocket. Precise documentation of all magical experimentation was good practice. So, Thorn had gotten her pink leatherbound journal off the shelf. Embossed with gold roses, the plush blank book had been a gift from years ago. Thorn had found it so pretty, the perfection of its creamy parchment pages too pristine to spoil. She’d never been able to bring herself to mar them with writing.
Now it would hold notes that would lead her to a new life, one where she could go to the city herself and purchase all the blank journals that caught her eye. She’d found a kind of company in writing down her thoughts and expressing her feelings.
Carefully noting the date and time, Thorn labeled the entry as attempt number one. She also recorded which technique she intended to employ. If the first didn’t work, she’d move to the second, and so on. She refused to allow any potential failures to dissuade her.
She unraveled the ward with meticulous patience, loosening it just enough to ease open the gate a narrow width that allowed her to gaze out into the darkening forest. The woods marched dense with the columns of trees. Birds sang their evening song in the canopy. And a path led away from the gate, weaving through the trees to a distant road. A road that led to the greater world. Waiting for her.
Allowing herself to feel the triumph of the moment, to savor the sweet taste of incipient freedom, she finally relaxed. She had succeeded.
Jada need never know. It would be her little secret. And in the morning, she would—
“Thorn,” Jada said, appearing suddenly on the path before her as if from nowhere, a wealth of rage layered into that single, quiet utterance of her name, invisibly potent wings unfurling in a promise of punishment that set her heart frantically pounding.
Jada’s voice rose to a scream like a fox in the dark night. “What have you done?”
Excerpted from Among the Thorns, copyright © 2026 by Jennifer K. Lambert.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Among the Thorns</i> by Jennifer K. Lambert appeared first on Reactor.
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