by Grace Martin
I slid down the wall, hating him with every fibre of my being. The noises I heard from the bedroom were breaking my heart. After the way he looked me this morning, after he’d been so kind to me, it seemed impossible that he could be in Aoife’s room, with Aoife, instead of with me.
I hugged my knees. I was trapped in the damn dressing room unless I stalked out there past the two of them. Then I heard him speak.
That wasn’t Caradoc.
I peeked around the edge of the door and caught sight of Aoife, wrapped around a dark-haired, tanned man. I ducked back behind the dressing room, my hand clapped over my mouth in case I cried out. I sat back down and got comfortable on the pile of furs.
I sat there all afternoon and into evening. They finally slept and woke and dressed and left the room. I came out of the dressing room and made it into the hallway without anyone seeing me. I felt unbearably smug. Not only was Caradoc still mine, I had information about Aoife that I fully planned on using for blackmail. The very thought made me happy.
It was late in the evening by now. I wasn’t supposed to be in the bedrooms so late, but they’d all be in the dining room at this hour and if I didn’t at least move the rushes around on Aine’s floor, I’d get into trouble.
Aine’s room never took long to clean. Aside from clothes, she didn’t have many more possessions than I did. What she had was always kept in spotless order and the only task I really had to do for her was to carry her laundry down to the basement. She even made her own bed.
I kicked the rushes around the floor a little bit and sprinkled a few more of the sweet-smelling herbs from my bag. I had Aine’s few items of laundry bundled in my arms ready to go downstairs when Aine herself hurried through the door. She shut the door behind her so quickly she nearly caught the hem of her dark gown in the door. She stood with her back to the door, her hair slipping down one side, her face flushed, breathing hard. I was right in the middle of the room. There was no way I could hide. We stared at each other with wide eyes.
Then she ran towards me, her full skirt flying. She grabbed my hands where I held her laundry. ‘Please don’t go!’ she begged in a whisper. ‘Please stay – oh!’
I didn’t have a chance to reply. She’d thrown the lock on her door, but it was only a slip of wire intended to give the illusion of privacy, not to hold the door against a determined assault. Someone tried the door handle for half a heartbeat before throwing their full weight against the door.
The door flew open and a knight stepped into the room, his dark chain mail jingling. Aine gripped my hand so tight I thought she’d rip the feathers out. He closed the door behind him and she whimpered. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. A sudden burst of rage exploded inside me. I edged forward little until I was slightly in front of Aine.
‘Get out,’ I said.
He took another step forward and threw his head back so he could look down at me. He was handsome but arrogant, and, if I read his face right, cruel. ‘I have a right to be with my betrothed,’ he informed me. ‘You… whatever you are… can leave us now.’
‘No,’ Aine whispered.
‘No,’ I said, louder.
He smiled. I think that smile before. Maldwyn looked like that when he won the draw to look after me and Elisabeth – not just the second time, I recalled. He’d smiled the cruel smile the very first time he’d seen me. He planned to hurt me from the very moment we met.
Somehow, that thought helped. If Maldwyn had been planning evil from the first time we met, then all the things he did to me had nothing to do with anything I did. I hadn’t goaded him into it, tempted him, confused him or angered him. The evil had been in him all the time.
‘Try and stop me,’ he murmured. ‘It might be fun to wrestle in feathers.’
I had no hope of stopping him. He was twice my size and still wearing armour.
‘You can’t stop us both screaming at once,’ I said. ‘This is a big place. Someone will come. And then you will be dead.’
That year that Maldwyn was our guardian the first time, he’d kept us in Cairnagorn, where no one would see as amongst the ruins. It never occurred to me that my voice could be used as a weapon, but it slowed the knight for a moment. I saw him weigh up the odds that he could kill me before raping Aine.
‘She is my betrothed,’ he said, but he was uncertain. ‘The Empress announced it tonight at the banquet. The princess may flee all she pleases; in the end she cannot escape me.’
He was talking himself into it. I had to stop him. ‘In the end,’ I conceded. ‘This is not the end. She is a princess. If she does not arrive at her wedding a virgin, then all she has to do is name you as the man who stole her virginity and you will die.’ I had an odd moment of déjà vu. I couldn’t explain it. It felt like I’d heard these words somewhere before. ‘Her virginity is a matter of state. She will be examined before her wedding night. This is not a secret that you can keep.’
Aine was behind me, clinging to my arm. The knight glared at me and looked over my shoulder at the princess. ‘When we are wed, you will be mine,’ he ground out.
‘But not before,’ I said. I’d won. Good grief. I had won!
He turned to leave and took a step towards the door. The next thing I knew he’d spun around and hit me across the face so heavily I fell to the ground. Through eyes swimming with tears of pain, I saw him grab Aine and force her backwards, pressing her up against the wall. He forced a kiss on her lips, holding her chin hard in his hand and forcing her head back against the stone wall. Through ringing ears, I heard her muffled cry of distress, heard her grunt of pain as he shoved her hard against the wall.
Then he let her go. He chuckled, like it was genuinely funny to see her cower. ‘No one can complain about a little kiss, can they?’ he asked. He left the room, giving me an absent-minded kick along the way that sent a splinter of pain running through my blood.
Aine stayed where she was, pressed against the wall, gasping for air and whimpering. She brought her hand up to her face and scrubbed her mouth and chin, trying to wipe away that abominable kiss. She drew in a dozen ragged breaths then darted across the room to slam the door shut. She leaned against it, trying to catch her breath.
I tried to get up. The knight had kicked me in the ribs and I felt a lancing pain as soon as I tried to move. Despite myself, I let out a small cry.
Aine turned and hurried over to me, her dark skirts pooling around us as she knelt. She put a gentle hand on my shoulder. ‘I can help,’ he said, so softly I had to strain to hear her. ‘Please promise you won’t say anything.’
‘Who would listen to a featherskin?’ I asked.
Aine stretched her hands over me. A familiar golden glow appeared around her fingers, filling the space between us. Magic. I drank in the sensation. Even though it wasn’t my own magic I was hungry for the taste of it. The pain receded, replaced by a sweet warmth. With it, eventually, came the realisation that if Aine was using magic then somewhere in her ancestry was tainted blood ‒ Camiri blood.
The Empress had Camiri blood, that much was common knowledge, but it was one thing to be the all-powerful, quixotic and cruel ruler of a dozen conquered nations, it was quite another thing to have foreign blood and be the stepdaughter who never managed to win the affection of her stepmother. I’d forgotten until that moment. Quiet, mouse-like Princess Aine was also the Dark Queen of Camaria.
I mulled it all over as I lay close to the dying embers of the fire that night. Caradoc, Maldwyn, Aoife and her lover, Aine and her betrothed, and behind them all, Elisabeth. Always Elisabeth.
I found myself, unexpectedly, more and more in the company of Princess Aine. She was afraid that if she went anywhere alone that the knight ‒ his name was Cai ‒ would be waiting for her. I suggested discreetly that maybe a maid would be a better person to accompany her than a dirty featherskin, but she was convinced that I was some kind of protection.
This meant I had to bathe, really bathe. It was deeply unpleasant. I fel
t like I was being sucked under the water by the weight of my sodden feathers and pulled up by the feathers’ buoyancy, all at the same time. Aine even insisted on soap. My feathers were such a mess afterwards that it took the pair of us more than an hour to get them to lie flat again, but even I had to admit, they gleamed.
It was the first time I left the castle since Darragh brought me there. I’d heard stories about what the world was like before the Ruin of Cairnagorn, but thus far I’d had to content myself with rumours. They in no way prepared me for the reality of a world that had not spent nearly two decades in flames.
I know I spent my life in hiding, but we had to live somewhere, and we had to travel every year to get to Caillen. I’d seen streets and markets and houses and crowds before ‒ or at least, I thought I had. Now I saw streets that were paved with cobbles and there weren’t even any cobbles missing. I didn’t have to look down all the time to make sure I wasn’t going to step into a pothole. There were no ruined houses, no scorch marks. Even the ordinary people were well dressed, their clothes colourful and fine. I couldn’t stop looking. Even before I was clothed in feathers, I hadn’t had new clothes for years.
Aine took me among the Camiri settlement too. It was more familiar. Most people wore old clothes, with the careful kind of patching peculiar to the poor. Even here I stood out, but people were less obvious about their curiosity, their eyes slewing sideways to follow me when Aine and I walked past.
We were on a mission of mercy. We distributed bread and second-hand clothes with our own fair and feathered hands. Aine was almost unbearably compassionate, and I wondered if the Camiri resented it as much as I would have.
Caradoc had a plan for how we were to get Darragh to take the next sphere when he returned to Rheged. The plan was subtle, clever and something I couldn’t have come up with in a hundred years, but I’d decided against it for purely personal reasons. Darragh had hurt me, hurt me badly, nearly killed me, and I’d sworn that no man would ever get away with that again.
Caradoc had put the sphere carefully into a little box. He had no idea I wasn’t going to follow the plan. Although, really, he should have known me better by now.
Chapter Seven
I waited. Two weeks this time. The moon was full again and I’d been outside every night. Caradoc had locked the door to the roof but a) it wasn’t the only door that led out to the roof and b) even the window with the best-cast magic lock in the world yields easily to a well-cast half brick. Despite the cloak of feathers, I started to feel the magic simmering inside me again. It was like waking up, like becoming myself again. I wasn’t going to be able to bring the magic to the surface unless I was pushed to the limit, but if my own plans went awry, I was going to need all the help I could get.
Darragh arrived in state and the Empress held a special banquet for him. From my position high above the feast, I watched Caradoc taking stock of him. Darragh’s days were numbered, but I wanted to be the one to count them down to zero.
Darragh woke the next morning to find me sitting on the wooden foot of his bed, a figure crouched low and covered in dark feathers, watching him. I raised my arms like wings and saw him wake and nearly wet himself.
‘Good morning.’ I let my voice slide, thick and deep over the silk coverlet until it shivered up his spine.
‘What are you doing?’ Darragh demanded, not quite able to keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘I’ll call the guards ‒ you’ll never recover from the beating!’
‘I wouldn’t call them if I were you,’ I drawled. ‘If you want to lose another pair of guards, feel free to call. You’ll be dead before they arrive and I will have disappeared.’
‘But you can’t use magic under a featherskin!’
‘I found a loophole.’ I grinned. I was wound tight with excitement and desire for vengeance. This was my chance to have revenge on every man who ever hurt me and I was going to make it count. The magic was easier to reach than I’d thought, so just for effect, I raised my hand and shot sparks from the fingertips. I snapped my fingers and they coalesced into a ball of flame that I flipped this way and that, allowing it to burn off the little feathers on my hands until the stench of it made Darragh crawl up the bed a little, wrinkling his nose.
‘How ‒ how can you be doing that?’ he asked, the tremor in his voice obvious now.
I laughed again and watched him shiver. ‘Magic!’ I whispered. I tossed the ball into the air to hover over his head. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. I dropped from the bedrail and crawled up the bed towards him, casting immobility over his legs as he tried to kick me away. For once in my life, I felt powerful. I felt like a predator. It made me laugh again.
When I reached his lap, I sat down on his legs, still half crouching like an animal. I opened my hand to reveal the incongruously pretty little box in my palm. Darragh kept looking from my face to my hand to the ball of flame that dropped to singe his hair every now and then.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, pale eyes meeting mine.
‘It’s vengeance,’ I whispered. I took his chin in one hand and wrenched it forward in a gruesome parody of a kiss. The other hand tilted the box towards his face. At the last moment, as the sphere rolled towards his exposed tongue, Darragh saw what it was.
He screamed.
I wasn’t ready for the convulsive movement he gave, and he knocked the damn ball onto the bedcovers. I used the hand holding his jaw to shove his head back against the headboard and quick as a flash I picked up the seed with my other hand and pushed it into his mouth, sliding it along the side of his teeth, so he couldn’t bite me, until it went down his throat. He choked, coughed… and swallowed. I sat back on his legs, eager to see what happened next.
I held out my arms as I felt the magic tingle along my skin. The feathers fell away, revealing my own skin and the long locks of hair began to dance freely on their own again. ‘Look!’ I cried. ‘Look!’
Darragh only made a sound. ‘Guh.’ The sound brought joy to my heart. It seemed only fair that Darragh should have a chance to speak as I had once spoken. I looked back at him. He was utterly still: transfixed. His eyes were glazed. His skin… it looked sort of funny. I was distracted from the falling feathers because something very, very weird was happening to Darragh. For the first time I realised that Caradoc had never told me what would happen next. Was this supposed to happen?
Now I was as transfixed as Darragh. He was going green. Not the muddy green someone goes when they’re about to throw up but a shiny, emerald green that would be pretty on a hummingbird but not so much on a man. Good God, was this supposed to happen?
I opened my mouth and screamed for Caradoc. He was there in a moment, so fast that my suspicious mind didn’t know what to make of it, looking from me to Darragh quickly. He threw his cloak over me in the same moment that I realised I was naked and straddling a green man. In the same movement he pulled me off Darragh and set me on my feet beside the bed.
‘What did you do?’ he demanded, urging me towards the window
‘I just made sure he knew that he wasn’t in control of me!’ I shouted, wrenching myself away from him. ‘Now tell me what those so-called seeds are doing to him!’
‘They’re not supposed to be doing this!’ he shouted back, an arm flung out to point at Darragh. ‘What did you do? Did you touch the seed?’
Why was he more concerned for the seed than he was for me? ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Well, just for a second. I dropped the little bastard and Darragh was putting up a fight.’
Caradoc swore viciously. Say what you like, you can’t deny that the man had a rich vocabulary.
‘Why didn’t you listen?’ Caradoc cried. ‘Why couldn’t you just do what you were told? Look what you’ve done!’
‘What have I done?’ I asked. ‘What was supposed to happen?’
‘It was supposed reveal his glamours, undo his spells,’ Caradoc snapped. ‘The seeds would have hatched in his belly and all the truths about him would have been revealed. When those truth
s were revealed, the feathers were going to fall away and everyone imprisoned by him would be free. But now, you’re out of the feathers, but who knows what will happen to everyone else?’
‘Who do you care about, Caradoc?’ I shouted. ‘Because I know it’s not me.’
‘I would have killed him for you, Emer,’ Caradoc snarled.
From behind us, I heard a laugh, not human, but not animal enough to be anything but a laugh. Darragh was swelling now, his belly enormous, his neck lengthening, his head tilted back at an impossible angle, staring blankly at the ceiling where the ball of flame still danced. As I watched, his head lowered to look directly at me and the smile on his face stretched from ear to leathery ear.
‘What are you becoming?’ I asked him.
The abomination that was Darragh just smiled some more. His silver eyes shone against his green scales. Caradoc spoke, then, but his voice was different. ‘I am taking my true form. A form of power. And no one will be able to stand in my way. No person in the Thousand Counties will ever tell me what to do again.’ It was Darragh’s voice, coming from Caradoc’s throat.
Caradoc clamped his mouth shut. He thrust an arm towards the window and hurled a blast of magic towards it. The glass shattered. Darragh’s arms were stretched out behind him and a web of scales was growing between his arms and his body. His head touched the ceiling now. He filled half the room.
Caradoc took three steps towards the window and leaped out of it in a smooth motion, his arms sprouting feathers and turning into a bird in that heartbeat of a moment when he hung suspended in the air before he flew away. He flew away without even looking back at me. I followed him, but on the windowsill I paused and looked behind me while I got my wings in order.
Darragh nearly filled the room now. He took a lumbering step towards me as his massive shoulders shrugged a hole in the ceiling. He drew in a deep breath and I saw a lick of flame at the corner of his mouth, curling around his fangs.
With a cry of alarm that was half-human, half-bird I leaped out the window. Darragh’s flame singed my feathers and I screamed again as I burned, but I kept flying. In moments I was away from the castle and into the early morning streets where I was just another bird.