Isadora

by Charlotte McConaghy

  My heart broke and a desperate sound left my throat. Why was he not fighting?

  ‘Do what you promised me!’ Ambrose yelled before Sigurd’s fist slammed into his cheek, shattering it.

  He sank to one knee, then rose again as the butt of an axe swung into his guts.

  ‘Fight!’ I screamed at him. ‘Ambrose, please fight!’

  ‘Your promise!’ he roared.

  Sword, no. Unruly panic in my chest. Disbelief. How could he ask me to leave him? I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly.

  ‘You can,’ said someone at my elbow as I smashed my axe into a man’s throat. My father. Motionless within the madness. ‘Do as he says,’ Thorne told me. ‘Get to the girls.’

  And with them both bidding me the same thing my resolve broke, the walls gave way, and I fought a path to the door.

  ‘Cowards!’ I heard Sigurd yell as I burst outside. ‘See how the Prince flees and the King cowers?’

  A few men followed but I hacked them down. My last sight of Ambrose, over the heads of his swarming enemies, was of him nodding to me in gratitude. And then he was hammered so hard in the head that he hit the ground and disappeared from my view.

  A desperate sob left me. Howl gave a mournful bay; he didn’t understand what we were doing. There was blood through his white fur and he moved with a limp. How could I do this? How could I ever leave? How would it be possible not to drown in this wretched guilt?

  Ambrose.

  ‘Move!’ Da urged. ‘The children!’

  So I turned and I sprinted towards the castle, my lungs floundering with grief and an endless, endless self-loathing.

  There were soldiers guarding the castle when I arrived, men who had not been here an hour ago. Horror made me nauseous as I sprinted up the steps and swung my axe through four men. Smashing the locks on the door, I was inside and charging through the corridors within minutes. Servants fled but I found one cowering by a window.

  ‘Where is my family?’

  She wept, clutching at my feet. ‘They came for them.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The Jarl’s men.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know, Highness! They were in their rooms!’

  I ran up four flights of stairs and arrived at Ella and Sadie’s chamber, only to find the door wide and the corpses of six soldiers scattered in the hallway. The twins and my mother were nowhere to be found.

  A terrible sound left my mouth and I slammed my fist into the stone wall, smearing blood. My legs gave out and I sank to my knees, sobbing wretchedly. Howl whimpered and tried to lick my face but I pushed him away.

  The voice came again. This voice that plagued me, haunted me, wouldn’t leave me for one single second. Was he my conscience? A ghost?

  Was he the worst part of me, or the best?

  He said, ‘No son of mine weeps when his family must be found. Rise to your feet, and follow their scent.’

  So I rose to my feet. I drew a deep breath through my nose. And I started tracking.

  Chapter Ten

  Roselyn

  I used to make wishes. Little wishes and large, wishes for each moment of the day and a great many moments that didn’t yet exist. But no longer. Wishes were a fool’s hope, and I’d learned long ago they didn’t help anyone. I didn’t count much either, not like I once had. It didn’t have the same effect on me, just a whispered linking together of things that served no purpose once linked.

  People still talked about me, but it was no longer to cruelly comment on my strangeness or my oddities – now they whispered with concern, with pity, wondering how I could still be so lost and what they could do to shift this melancholic cloud I lived beneath.

  I didn’t mean to be sad. It wasn’t a choice. I felt terrible when someone’s energy was spent worrying for me. But I couldn’t change it, couldn’t cast it off.

  It was simple. I loved him so, and he was gone.

  When the soldiers came for me I thought, for one single, brief moment in time: at last.

  But the thought that came after that one single brief moment in time was a thought that stayed much longer, would stay for always, for all the beats of my heart, however long they might last.

  This thought was just as simple, as all the things in my life were. I thought: the girls.

  I read to them for hours tonight; they were unsettled, their little hearts beating fast in their little chests. They’d never been so far north, and nor had I. It was a strange, masculine place, an ugly place for all its lovely old architecture. Within Vjort’s walls there was a restless aggression, a heavy kind of energy. I found myself thinking of these men who were born and raised here, bound for the life of a soldier, fed into the army with no say, no choice, no awareness that there should even be a choice. They must lead very lonely lives, very small lives, within these walls. Or perhaps I was simply judging what I didn’t understand.

  Sadie wanted the tale of the wind nymphs, but unusually Ella disagreed – she was mostly inclined to allow her sister the choice in these things. Tonight she asked to hear the tale of the marriage of the ice goddess to the sea god, so her sister shrugged and nodded.

  ‘Finn’s told us before,’ Sadie said. ‘It’s a good one.’

  I flipped through the book and found the right page, then read to them of ice and sea, and the distance between lovers from different worlds. When I finished, Sadie said, ‘The book doesn’t tell it like Finn does. When she speaks of the screaming of the wind and the gulls you can really hear them, like they’re in your head, and when she describes the snow on the fir trees you feel cold! Truly.’

  Ella peered out the window at the naked tree branches that scraped their sharp fingers against the glass. She wanted to get out as much as they wanted to get in.

  ‘Finn has a silver tongue,’ I murmured to Sadie. ‘Sleep now.’

  In truth I was worried about Ella, about the fever that kept coming and going with no understandable cause. Each time I beat it down, it returned. Her cheeks were flushed and warm when I felt them once more, so I gave her more of the cooling draught.

  ‘Could you tell us of King Thorne?’ she asked me suddenly.

  I frowned, surprised by the queer urgency in her voice. ‘It’s late, darling.’

  ‘Did he love the cold?’

  I thought about it, nodding. ‘A little. I think perhaps he loved that it had no hold over him like it did others.’

  ‘Ella loves the cold,’ Sadie said solemnly. ‘More than normal.’

  ‘She’s a Pirenti child,’ I replied. ‘It’s in her blood.’

  ‘But I’ve no berserker in me,’ Ella argued. ‘Not like Thorne and Thorne.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So it doesn’t make sense.’

  I stroked her hair off her forehead, considering. ‘I think that what anyone is and is not doesn’t have much to do with sense. We just are. Inexplicably.’

  She sighed and threw off her covers. ‘I want Ma.’

  ‘And Falco,’ Sadie added.

  ‘I know you do, darlings. It won’t be too much longer before you see them.’

  ‘Where’s Da?’ Sadie asked.

  ‘He went out with Thorne to work. He’ll be home soon.’

  ‘Can we have the window open?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Absolutely not. You’ll freeze.’

  She sighed again – she was getting very good at sighing – then rolled over and shut her eyes. Sadie kissed me on the cheek and I doused the lamps, closing their door behind me. Turning in the dark, I got a fright at finding Erik waiting in the shadows of the corridor.

  ‘My Lady,’ he said softly.

  I inclined my head. In this light I couldn’t make out the tattoos on either side of his skull, around his ears where the hair had been shaved short. The rest he left long and braided. I couldn’t see his eyes, either, but I knew they were a dark, dark brown, almost black and sometimes frighteningly bottomless.

  ‘You’re very good with them,’ Erik said
. ‘Some are born mothers.’

  ‘I’m not their mother,’ I explained quickly, embarrassed to be thought of as Ambrose’s partner by this strange man.

  ‘I know you aren’t,’ he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

  ‘Oh. Forgive me.’

  ‘I only meant …’ He paused, and it was almost as though I could hear the echo of his deep, melodic voice throughout the silent hallway. ‘I have heard stories of you, Lady Roselyn.’

  Oh no. I felt myself shrink in preparation for a blow.

  But he said, ‘Stories of the woman from the coast of oysters who spends her life helping people, and raising her boy to be the kind of gentle that shifts the world. It sounds like a beautiful life you’ve led. A life that means something.’

  I swallowed, overwhelmed. Because it was and it did, and I’d never heard it spoken so.

  ‘I will watch over you tonight, my lady,’ Erik told me gently. ‘You and the little ladies.’

  He opened my door for me, then bowed his head before shutting it between us. I undressed and pulled on my nightgown quickly, shivering in the cold. Rushing into bed, I drew the covers over my head and cocooned myself in a dark little nest. I listened to the screaming of the wind through the trees and thought of the way Finn did indeed describe it into life.

  I was lifted by this wind, picked up and carried into the sky. I was danced and thrown about, somersaulted and caterwauled like a winged creature, one designed not for earth but for flight. I stayed here in the sky for such a long time that I forgot what body I truly inhabited, I forgot which body made a prison for my soul.

  But without warning I was reeled back into it, into my flesh, bound by a sudden and impossibly powerful knowing. My mother would have called this a black knowing, a premonition. She would have kept it secret for fear of being branded a witch. But the knowing would only have stayed and buried deeper, just as it was doing to me now.

  My son was in danger.

  I didn’t wish for him – to wish would condemn him to fool’s hope. To wish would make it never come true. But I sent him silent prayers and thoughts, and I tried very hard to settle my heart back in its place and cast out the ugly foreboding.

  A noise from beyond the window drifted up. Hurried male voices and the clang of steel. I threw off my covers and peered out. In the courtyard below I could see soldiers. And then came the sound of them inside the castle.

  This was Ambrose’s castle, in a city of our nation – we were among friends, and there was no need to fear anything. And yet the presence of those men felt wrong in some way I couldn’t name, the sounds they made felt wrong. I donned a robe and padded to the door. In the hallway I didn’t spot Erik until he returned from the stairwell at the end with a sharp, ‘Back to your room, lady!’

  ‘The girls,’ I breathed, ignoring him and heading for their room. They were both still in their beds and looked at me curiously. ‘All’s well,’ I said.

  ‘No matter what happens, stay in the room,’ Erik bid me, making my heart stutter.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I fear Sigurd’s men may have come to detain you. Lock the door, barricade it and don’t open it, not even to me.’

  With cold terror turning my stomach to liquid I locked the door.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Sadie asked.

  ‘Shhh.’ It was freezing in their room as I moved between their beds, reaching to stroke both their foreheads.

  ‘Aunt Rose,’ Sadie demanded. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure, darling. Erik thinks there may be some danger, but we’re very safe in here.’ I remembered his instruction and moved to push the dresser in front of the door. The girls ran to help me, and together we got the heavy wood in place. I didn’t think there was much that could break through such heavy locks and barricades, but for safe measure I also lifted one of the side tables on top of the dresser.

  The noises intensified, footsteps and voices. I heard Erik’s muffled voice say, ‘No one enters.’

  A scuffle, the sounds of pain, of weapons clanging, bodies hitting walls and floors. I didn’t know what was going on, but my heart was racing, a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead.

  It occurred to me suddenly that they would get in, no matter how well we’d barricaded the doors. Eventually someone would get in. Looking around swiftly, I noted the large wardrobe and gathered the girls into it. ‘In here. Don’t come out for anything. Close your eyes, block your ears and count to one thousand, do you understand?’

  Ella nodded but tears welled in Sadie’s eyes.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ I bid her. ‘You must be silent. All will be well.’

  ‘But you – you have to hide too.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, darling, I promise.’

  I closed the doors on them and turned back to the room, thinking quickly. The beds. I moved to push them together, but they were heavy and it hurt my back. When they were as close as I could get them, I threw the bedcovers over, making the twin beds appear like a larger single. Then I crawled into one side and kept my eyes trained on the door.

  More noises in the hallway, the constant sounds of fighting. Which meant he was still alive out there, still defending our door.

  My teeth were chattering and I felt so cold. Fear, I told myself. You must be stronger than it. But this was too cold. This wasn’t normal. As I looked up and saw the window ajar, recalling Ella’s desperate desire to have it open, terror struck. Because the branches of that tree were jerking as though someone was climbing it.

  Move move move I screamed at myself. But I was frozen.

  And then he was at the window, swinging it wide, unhindered by the lock and jumping heavily into the room. He was a large man, fat through the belly but broad in the shoulders.

  I sat up, placing my feet flat on the cold stone floor.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked me. ‘The princesses.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Where?’ He took two strides and smacked me across the face.

  Wincing, I drew a deep breath. ‘This is my room. They were put in another down the hall.’

  He looked at the bed, glanced around, seemed to believe me. I prayed with everything I had that the girls would remain silent in the wardrobe. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Roselyn.’

  ‘Then it’s true.’ He sounded as though he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘The wife of the slaughterman really is in Vjort. What could have possessed you to be so stupid?’

  A hammering came at the door. ‘My lady?’ Erik’s voice called. ‘Roselyn!’

  My teeth started chattering.

  ‘Have you any idea how much we hated him?’ the soldier asked me. ‘Do you know how many fathers and sons and brothers he killed?’ He shook his head and that was when I saw his eyes go to the wardrobe.

  Panic struck, and I knew what I must do to distract him. I knew, too, what the words would cost me. But I also knew that if there was going to be violence here tonight, then I would do what I must to ensure it was not bestowed upon the children in my charge. I stood suddenly, movement enough to draw his gaze back to me, and then I spoke very clearly, channeling the cool disdain I’d seen in Ava: to protect her children, I would become as much of her as I could. ‘All of them weak men, foolish and ambitious enough to challenge him. They deserved no other fate.’

  It was a beacon for his fury. He leant close and I caught sight of a red beard and rotten teeth. His breath stank awfully of rum. ‘From whatever bloodied underworld he is condemned to, the slaughterman will watch this.’

  The man shoved me back on the bed and ripped my nightdress up. His hands pinned my arms and throat painfully, then one hand moved to undo his breeches.

  ‘Roselyn!’ My name was being screamed over and over again from behind that door – perhaps he heard the man’s voice within, or perhaps he could simply tell something was wrong. Either way Erik wasn’t getting through in time. I had barricaded us in too well. I had no illusions as to my ability to fight, and n
one for any mercy that might live in this creature atop me – I was a woman and he wanted to debase me.

  And so.

  I moved my eyes to the window, to the long scraping tree branches, and I counted all the ones I could see. I counted softly under my breath until it unnerved him and he mashed his meaty hand over my mouth, and then I counted silently in my mind. I let the numbers reach out and cloak me in their calm; I let the numbers protect me as I came to understand what true violence was.

  I understood, too, how to be more than it. It was, after all, a small price to pay to stop him from finding the children in the wardrobe.

  Once upon a time I said to my husband, ‘I thought humans were different to animals.’

  And he replied, he who understood such things, ‘So did I. But I think we were both wrong.’

  When it was over the soldier straightened, retied his breeches and started shoving the dresser from the door.

  I pulled my nightgown over my legs, tightened my robe and wiped the blood from my lips. Scrape scrape went the branches against the glass, seeking always to get in. Thump thump went the beat of my sluggish heart, seeking to get out.

  The door was unlocked and crashed open under the force of Erik’s hammering blows. The red-bearded soldier had his sword ready and sliced it down upon Erik as he bowled in. With impossibly fast instincts the hirðmenn dropped low to avoid the blade and swept his axe through the calf of the soldier. A scream rent the air, and as Erik rose he smashed the end of his axe into the soldier’s skull. I looked away so I wouldn’t have to see any more of it. Not one single second more of it.

  I will have no more violence in my life. More foolish words spoken to my husband. There seemed no end to my naivety.

  ‘My Lady?’ I heard Erik pant.

  But I didn’t look at him. One thing mattered only. I went to the wardrobe and opened it to find Ella and Sadie huddled on the floor in each other’s arms, eyes firmly shut. The sight of them nearly undid me, but we were far from safe yet. I helped them climb out, soothing them with murmurs. They emerged, wide-eyed and shaken. Both were staring at me and it was clear they knew something bad had happened. I gave them a reassuring nod, and asked Erik, ‘How do we get out of here?’