Isadora

by Charlotte McConaghy

  I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe, I was going to scream scream scream scream −

  ‘Ava!’ Thorne’s voice brought me back to the room, this cold stinking torture chamber. I breathed through my mouth until I knew that the next thing from it would not be a scream.

  I leant to hold my husband’s face. ‘Ambrose. Wake. Please, wake.’

  ‘Give him breath,’ Thorne prompted, feeling for a pulse.

  I pressed my mouth to Ambrose’s and breathed air into his lungs, just as he had done for me once upon a time in a watery cave on an island far away. His lungs inflated and I did it again, and again until he coughed and started breathing on his own. I sagged in relief, stroking his cheeks. ‘Ambrose. Wake.’

  He swallowed but didn’t open his eyes – they were swollen shut. A dry, rasping noise came from his throat. Not quite a word. And then a weary sentence: ‘There you are, pretty boy.’

  Ambrose

  Better I cut them off, before they strangle the life from my body.

  Had I not wished for this? Fate was cruel indeed. And sported a very dark sense of humour.

  Ava

  I sank over him, kissing his swollen eyes gently. ‘I’m here.’

  Ambrose grunted, smiling. When did he ever stop smiling?

  Thorne was seeing to the girl, who’d calmed considerably now that she could see and her bonds were untied. Most of her fear was undoubtedly from being left down here with only a dying man for company. She was very weak and frightened to her core, but she sat up and watched Ambrose with a fierce protectiveness, for which I loved her.

  ‘I can heal him,’ she said. ‘If I can see him and my hands are free. I have a little power in such things.’

  My eyes went to his hands, the fingers gently curled as though resting and well, and not separate from his body. His breathing changed.

  ‘Ambrose!’ I glanced at the warder girl. ‘Quickly – he’s going again.’

  She stood unsteadily and Thorne supported her to Ambrose’s side.

  I shook him. ‘Stay. Stay.’

  What kind of monsters brutalised people and then left them to die so badly? I could hardly bear it.

  The girl started to cry again. ‘They hurt him so much,’ she wept.

  ‘Don’t,’ I begged her. ‘Don’t cry. Please.’

  But she was overwrought. It was too much, this was too much to ask. She was just a child and she’d been tortured with this imprisonment, held down here for gods only knew how long. I wished I could do it but I’d never been able to heal anyone but myself – not even my bondmate.

  Thorne forced the girl to meet his eyes. ‘I can smell how much courage is in you, Maisy. Find it now.’

  She swallowed and her eyes shifted to a beautiful orange, the exact shade of her hair. She went to Ambrose and her eyes changed again, this time fading to white. She sagged and Thorne caught her, supporting her as she worked. I watched Ambrose’s horrendous wounds start to close over and the dark bruises gradually lose their colour. The swelling around his eyes shrunk back down until they looked almost normal again.

  But his hands didn’t reattach. I didn’t know if any magic had the power to make them, but I knew that this girl certainly couldn’t, not now.

  Once her eyes returned to blue, Thorne lifted her into his arms and held her tenderly. ‘Don’t take me from him,’ Maisy mumbled deliriously.

  ‘You’re both safe now, you can sleep,’ Thorne told her, and with a last look at me he carried her away.

  I turned back to my husband.

  He was conscious and looking at me. I tried to swallow my tears but they were thick and prickly. Because he knew. I could see it in that blue gaze of his.

  I helped Ambrose slowly sit up, and then he looked down at the stumps on the ends of his wrists where they rested in his lap. Next he took in the gruesome severed hands on the slab beside him. His hands. His very own. His lips were bleached-bone white.

  Desperate grief struck me and I wanted to find the heinous brutes who’d done this and torture them just as badly. Worse, I wanted to kill them and I wanted to smash my fist into this wall and break the bones in my own hands and I just wanted to fucking scream.

  It wasn’t fair. It was so desperately unfair.

  Then he spoke. Gently, honestly. ‘It’s alright.’

  I closed my eyes. Went to him and threaded my arms around him. Kissed his cheeks and his eyelids and his lips. ‘I’ll protect you,’ I whispered fervently. ‘I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again. I don’t care how many come. I’ll face them all.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, my darling, but you won’t need to,’ Ambrose told me. ‘Not in the world I’m going to build.’

  He didn’t move his arms to embrace me, not yet, but he kissed my lips and he whispered, ‘I saw him. I saw Avery.’

  My heart seized. I looked into Ambrose’s eyes as they shifted to a blazing gold.

  ‘He was perfect,’ my husband said, and he was smiling, this man who had just been tortured almost to death, who had just lost both his hands. He was smiling.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Isadora

  I woke to find myself dry and clean in a room made of heavy stone and draped in tapestries of wolves. My shoulder was bandaged, as were both my palms. The bed beside mine held a sleeping Falco, his head also heavily bandaged. And in the corner was the boy with dark eyes. He watched me unblinkingly as I awkwardly pulled myself upright in the crisp bed.

  ‘I’m Davin.’

  ‘Isadora.’

  We watched each other. He brought me a cup of water and I drank greedily. He didn’t seem interested in speaking, which was a relief. After Davin and I had sat in silence for some time, a woman entered. She was tall and broad as a man, with the gentlest brown eyes I’d ever seen.

  ‘How are you feeling, little lady?’ she asked me.

  I nodded in thanks.

  ‘My name is Elsa. We forced fluids into you, but you won’t be right again until you’ve eaten your weight.’ She pressed a compress to my forehead. I forced myself not to flinch away from the touch.

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘He has a crack in his skull. It will mend itself with time. If he wakes, he will be alright.’

  ‘Why …’ I cleared my throat. ‘Why are you helping us?’

  Elsa peered at me as though she didn’t understand the question. ‘Because you were injured and poorly, child. What kind of people would refuse to help?’

  I swallowed. ‘But even … even with my appearance?’

  Elsa’s wide smile made her quite pretty. ‘I think perhaps you were born in the wrong country.’ Then she checked Falco and walked for the door. ‘Come, my love,’ she said to Davin.

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I mean … he can stay.’

  Elsa nodded and left the child. He peered at me just as he had been. ‘Here we worship a snow and ice goddess. She looks just like you,’ he said, round eyes unblinking.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘But the goddess Skaði is not only a goddess of ice,’ the boy went on. ‘Before that, always, she is a goddess of the hunt. She drapes herself in salt and ice and hunts with the wolves of the mountains. She married, but the huntress in her was too cold, too ravenous, and overcame any love she had. She returned to the ice to live the lonely life of the hunt.’

  I stared at him, feeling a prickle on the skin of my arms. At his age I hadn’t yet learned to speak, let alone speak like this.

  Davin broke the spell cast by his words with a grin. ‘If you believe that stuff, anyway.’ He shrugged quickly to dismiss the story, then brought in a board and pieces so we could play chess. The pieces were a little different to the ones used in Kaya, but I got the hang of it quickly and didn’t let him win, to his frustration.

  ‘Move your hersir forward three squares and you have her, kid.’

  We both turned to see that Falco was awake and watching our fifth game.

  Davin did as he said.

  ‘Cheating,’ I
pointed out.

  The boy grinned as he knocked down my king.

  The three of us played as the light faded. Falco spent the whole time helping Davin. It embarrassed me how much better at chess strategy Falco was than me. Elsa eventually returned and was pleased to see Falco awake. She sent Davin to fetch us food and then hovered, checking us both. She didn’t ask any questions about where we were from, even though Falco was blatantly Kayan. I wondered if the Pirenti men would be so accommodating, then remembered how carefully they had carried us, how gentle their deep voices were as I drifted out of consciousness.

  What blindness, what assumption. The kindness I had found here was unlike any I had experienced in Kaya, except from Penn, Jonah and Finn. Thorne, I realised, was the only other truly kind person I had encountered; the discrepancy between how we saw these northern folk and how they really were astonished me. Kindness, offered freely, was the rarest of treasures. This I only learnt after escaping the cage.

  Falco asked Elsa the same questions that I had, and more. When she was gone we ate our food quietly.

  ‘They don’t know who we are?’ Falco asked softly as we sank onto our pillows.

  I shook my head.

  ‘How did we get here?’

  ‘You collapsed, but their scouts found us,’ I lied. ‘They had a carriage.’ I didn’t want him to know I’d carried him.

  ‘Fortuitous,’ he said. ‘Are you well?’

  Another nod. It seemed to satisfy him, for he shut his weary eyes. ‘In the morning we’ll part,’ he said with a yawn. ‘And the world will be righted once more, you and I on different paths going in different directions.’

  I felt my pulse quicken.

  ‘Before we do, we should discuss strategy,’ he added. ‘Your people and mine will need to work together until we have our end. So perhaps for a while it will be a similar path after all.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll ride north and then east. I need to find Ava and those from the city. I hope the Pirenti managed to reach them in time.’

  ‘Do you think they know we’re out of the cages?’ I asked softly. Dren and Galia.

  ‘No idea. Let’s hope not.’

  I rolled to lie on my back and peered at the tapestry on the opposite wall – an ice-swept mountain glistening with blue fissures. It reminded me of my skin. I let my mind reach out to that northern wilderness, so unforgiving that no one dared go near it. I ought to have been born there, where no one could see me.

  I contemplated my lie and couldn’t endure the thought of Falco knowing the truth of how I had carried him. Just as I couldn’t endure his pity, the thought of him feeling indebted to me was equally repulsive. Cutting all ties, except in a political capacity, was a wise idea.

  Silence ticked on, as did the night. Falco fell asleep but I remained awake. Sleeping this close to him, in a bed not a cage … something happened. His hands found me, in the dark. His mouth on my body. His tongue against mine. Pieces of him inside pieces of me. My breathing quickened and I was back there, in that glass room overlooking the ocean as he made love to me with the strength of his beautiful body and I felt it again, that thrill of knowing a secret of his, one nobody else knew, the secret of what his heart felt like −

  ‘Do you think about it?’ Falco asked suddenly, shocking me half to death. ‘The why of it?’

  I gathered in my treacherous thoughts and stuffed them inside my overheated body. I knew what he meant, and it caused a frightened thump of my heart.

  ‘The reason we bonded,’ he clarified. ‘Do you think about why? I can’t help worrying at the meaning of it. Thinking about why we were fated to each other.’

  I licked my lips, clenched my trembling hands. ‘I don’t believe in fate.’

  ‘I know that well,’ he murmured. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’ve been right all along, and it’s just a big joke. A chaotic mistake.’

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘Either way,’ Falco went on softly, ‘it’s … I feel … very lonely. Without you.’

  Tears slipped beneath my lashes and down into my hair. And I didn’t say anything, but it wasn’t because he didn’t deserve my words. It was never honestly because people didn’t deserve my words. It was this curse of mine that meant I never had the words to speak. I was caged within my own body, with none of Falco’s physics or mathematics to get me out, with only an endless, lonely lake of calm for company.

  I woke with dawn and listened to the birds singing the return of the sun. I went to the window to look out at the garden and breathe that fresh rain smell. Flowers of every colour bloomed. I spotted Davin through one of the rose bushes and without hesitating I swung over the windowsill and dropped onto the wet grass. It felt nice under my bare feet as I crossed to the boy’s side.

  He was standing by a fish pond, skipping stones.

  I picked up a few and joined him. When he grew bored, he knelt and put his hands in the water. I watched curiously as he sat very still and waited. Fish returned from hiding to resume their exploration of the leafy depths. Several swam through Davin’s hands, but he didn’t move until the arrival of a particular fish. Closing his fingers gently, he caught the white creature and held it there in the water.

  ‘Go on, touch it.’ He grinned at me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He feels nice. Go on.’

  I reached into the water and traced a finger along the smooth scales of the fish. It had fins tipped in orange.

  ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ Davin asked. I looked at the sheer pleasure on his face and couldn’t help smiling. Was this what it meant to enjoy a life? To grow and learn by finding joy in such simple things? My heart yearned for this, to be able to have this always, but as I straightened I knew it was never mine to wish for.

  He released the fish and we watched it swim a while longer.

  ‘Davin!’ His ma’s voice reached us from the house and we turned back. Davin sprinted across the grass to meet Elsa, but as I approached I could see all was not well.

  ‘There you are!’ she said to me. ‘Come inside, little lady.’

  I didn’t particularly enjoy being called ‘little lady’, but Elsa said it with such endearment that I found I wasn’t really bothered by it.

  ‘There’s been a change in your friend’s condition.’

  I froze. Elsa prodded me towards a kitchen table, where a man who must have been her husband sat. He was huge, but I couldn’t tell if his girth was fat or muscle. Probably both. ‘My husband Jarl Garth, son of Gus.’

  I nodded to him, too distracted for a proper greeting.

  ‘He’s the ranking Drenge here,’ she added. Which meant he was in charge of the village and surrounding lands because he was both the strongest warrior and had the oldest bloodline.

  ‘My friend?’ I asked.

  ‘I have women in there with him now.’

  I turned to go to him.

  ‘Hold, child. Sit down.’

  Though it was the last thing I felt like doing, I sat stiffly.

  ‘The bleed in his head has started again,’ Elsa said gently. ‘He did not wake this morning when I tried to rouse him.’ She paused and then reached to touch my hand. ‘He will not wake again, dear.’

  I stared at her blankly. ‘For how long?’

  ‘He will not wake ever.’

  That didn’t make any sense. I was just speaking to him last night and he’d been fine. A terrible panic was taking hold of my chest. Very calmly I said, ‘He must wake. Do whatever it takes, please.’

  ‘There’s nothing more to be done,’ she said. ‘I’m not a surgeon, but even if I were I wouldn’t cut into a man’s head. It would only kill him quicker.’

  ‘Where is the nearest surgeon?’

  ‘Three villages north,’ Garth rumbled in the deepest voice I’d ever heard.

  I stood.

  ‘He won’t make it that far,’ Elsa protested. ‘And a surgeon will make no difference. Truly. Spend this time holding his hand and bidding your goo
dbyes – it is a rare chance at the end of a life.’

  I looked helplessly at this woman. She didn’t understand.

  ‘The magic,’ Garth said. ‘Your Kayan black magic. It would save him.’

  I stared at him. ‘There are no warders in these parts. Not for hundreds of miles.’ I killed them all.

  And then it occurred to me. ‘The prison,’ I whispered. There were no warders so far south, except in the prison that sat deep within the dead forest, where even my people dared not trespass. ‘I will take him there. Do you have a horse I can use?’

  ‘I have none to spare, I’m afraid,’ Garth replied.

  ‘Please,’ I tried.

  ‘It isn’t a matter of pleading for them. I truly have none to give you.’

  I could force them. There were knives in the kitchen that I could reach before either of them knew what I was doing. I could steal their horses. Those were things that I could do with ease.

  Or I could try for words.

  Drawing a breath to calm my heart, I met Garth’s eyes. ‘Do you know of the unrest in Kaya?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then you know of the massacres taking place.’ I floundered, not knowing how to continue. With a breath, I drew myself up. To do this, I would demand more of myself. I would channel Falco’s cunning tongue. ‘You have shown me such kindness already, I don’t wish to ask you for anything further. But for what it’s worth, know this. That man is no ordinary man. He is the fallen Emperor of Kaya and he must live to regain his throne or the Mad Ones in the east will finish with Kaya and turn their power to Pirenti. They will take control of the entire world and the massacres will never stop.’

  Elsa had gone white with shock. Garth didn’t blink. Slowly he passed a hand over his face. With a look at his wife he said, ‘I can’t ask my men to give up their horses – they depend on them. But I can give you mine. Hallr isn’t fast, but he is strong enough to carry you both and his fortitude will not fail.’

  I felt a great rush of disbelief. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, unable to express my gratitude.