Isadora

by Charlotte McConaghy

  It was the fact that she dropped the sword, and trusted me to be quick enough not to kill her.

  It was all of her, all that she was, the impossible nature of her strength and the matching blood on our necks.

  These were the reasons I fell in love with Isadora for the second time, and why I knew it to be a much harder fall. Because I knew her, knew all of these things about her. Standing here, in the middle of a roaring crowd, I was limerent, sick with love, mad with it.

  And I knew that this love – a love chosen freely – would actually be the death of me.

  Isadora

  I tore from the arena amid the chaos, losing him in the crowd. I ran through the corridors as fast as I could, ducking through doors and finding myself in the armoury. Falco was right on my heels and as he slammed the door shut behind him I gave a breathless laugh. His eyes flashed as he followed me around a bench. He moved left, so I moved left; it made him laugh and then launch himself over the table to push me against the wall. His mouth ducked to mine and hovered just over my lips, almost touching but not. I could feel the heat of his breath and it made me tingle.

  ‘Why did you drop the sword?’ he asked.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t kill me.’

  ‘How did you know?’ His body was hot along the length of mine, only a hair’s breadth or two between us. I couldn’t think straight, was scrambling to find some distance.

  ‘Because you’ve never killed anybody. Have you?’

  He let his hand travel down and link with mine, our fingers threading together. It startled me; felt more intimate somehow than any other touch.

  I swallowed. ‘I envy you that.’

  His eyes were red, I saw, and for a moment I thought he must be angry. But then I recognised it as my colour.

  ‘What colour are my eyes?’ I asked urgently.

  Falco swallowed. ‘They’re no colour. Like mine.’

  I breathed out. Our eyes had shifted for each other. And they were not no colour, but every colour.

  The door banged open. ‘Are you in here killing each other?’ Brathe boomed.

  Falco stepped away from me. I reached for clarity, putting distance between us. Our eyes returned to our own colours, the moment between us popping like a bubble or a dream, another dream, endless endless dreams I was no longer able to control.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Falco

  ‘We’ve found a weak spot,’ Inga announced as Izzy and I arrived in the kitchen. ‘In the corner of the library. We couldn’t feel it before because Sharn and Valerie weren’t allowing us access to the area.’

  Sharn had the grace to look sheepish, but Valerie simply folded his arms.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘How can we use it?’

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ Inga sighed. ‘It’s still warded powerfully, it’s just … comparatively weaker.’

  We looked at her, waiting. Isadora perched on the edge of a bench, while Sharn, Valerie, Brathe and Inga sat at the long central table. I hovered at the end of it, too much energy in my limbs.

  ‘With more warders we might be able to break through, but with only a score, all of which are third, fourth and fifth tier …’ She shook her head helplessly.

  ‘There must be a way to use it,’ I said, pacing back and forth.

  Isadora leaned forwards to grab my attention so I went to her, ducking my face close. ‘Warders use soul energy, right?’ she murmured. ‘There are plenty of people with souls in this place.’

  I straightened, considering it. ‘Could you use our energy?’ I asked Inga.

  The warder frowned, shaking her head. ‘It’s too dangerous. We’d need everyone and I’m not sure what it might do to them.’

  I glanced at Isadora, who shrugged. I agreed. ‘We risk death and get out of here,’ I announced, ‘or we sit and rot while the country goes to shit. Not much of a choice. But I’ll explain it to them and you’ll use only volunteers. Get your warders together and start preparing. Isadora – can you keep training the women? They respond to you.’

  I didn’t expect her to, but she nodded.

  ‘Brathe, keep pushing the men. We use every second we have left in here to harden up.’

  There were a few moments spent coming to terms with my new ability to give serious orders, and then they dispersed to their tasks while I went straight to the library to continue my search of the warder records. I knew there was something here, something important, and I was running out of time to find it.

  It was late when I came across some of the writings of Agathon, first warder of Kaya. He was the one who forged the first bond between lovers thousands of years ago, the one who’d then foretold of Thorne and Finn’s power to break that same bond. The furthest foretelling in history – a foresight so immense I couldn’t imagine his power.

  His story was sad, though. His bondmate was beloved throughout the land, so when she leapt to her death from the top of one of the shining towers in Limontae, the nation was distraught. Agathon had waded in and drowned alongside her, and these deaths had started the tradition of Kayan bodies being sent to sea.

  It was older, though, the human connection to the sea. Far more ancient than Agathon and his tragedy. It stretched all the way back to those first days of life, when we had washed up on the shore as a piece of driftwood. This was why we went back, because it was where we had come from in the very beginning. I found myself imagining, once again, the horizon beyond the ocean. My mind was fixated on it. I imagined taking a boat out into the waves and sailing it until I came to a new shore, to explore a new world. But unlike before, in this fantasy I was no longer alone in my boat.

  Rubbing my sore, tired eyes, I closed the book of Agathon and made my way back through the corridors, passing the other cells – no one was awake. Even Radha was asleep outside Izzy’s cell, her soft horse snores endearing as I crept past.

  Isadora was curled towards the wall. I watched her for a while, ordering myself not to do what I wanted to. I knew she didn’t feel the same way I did, and no matter how much I wished for it, she could not be forced to love me.

  Be reasonable, I begged myself. Be wise. Find some measure of self-preservation.

  And yet. Powerless once more, I moved against all better judgment to slide into her bed and wrap my arms around her. If I had a choice at all, then I would choose to plunge beneath the surface of her lake and hold onto her as tightly as possible, no matter what either one of us had done to the other.

  She stirred, but didn’t push me away. Instead she threaded her fingers through mine. I pressed my lips to the crook of her neck and breathed in her scent, and we stayed like that until morning.

  When I woke it was to find that she’d turned in the bed and was watching my face. Her eyes looked huge and bloody up this close. I blinked sleepily. ‘Have you come from somewhere wondrous?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No lucid dreaming?’

  ‘Not since the night we broke the bond.’

  I searched her pensive face, unsure what to say about such a loss. ‘You’ll get it back.’

  Her hands were clenched so tightly the knuckles were white. I reached down and gently eased their stranglehold on the sheet.

  ‘What are you … Why are you in my bed?’

  My heart sank.

  She sat up against the wall. I remained where I was, reclined and comfortable. I stopped being comfortable the moment she said, ‘Quillane. What about Quillane?’

  I closed my eyes, turning my face into the pillow.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, Falco.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ I admitted wearily. I shook my head and rose to dress. She wanted me to punish her – probably indefinitely – just as she would punish herself, but I didn’t have the energy for it. I didn’t know if I had forgiven her, or if I ever would. I didn’t know if I was allowed to. But there was no space in my heart for fury or hatred.

  ‘We should get started on the day.’ Without waiting for a reply I headed for
a quick meal and then got back to work in the library. I was trying to scan through hundreds of years’ worth of records of warder activities, plus all their training techniques in case there was anything about covering weaknesses.

  I needed to find Ambrose. He’d been trying to teach me how to kill warders, but one or both of us had been failing miserably. Apparently his brother, the late King Thorne, had been the one who excelled at it – the slaughterman found a way to make himself completely impervious to warder magic, and had been in the north torturing them for information. As far as we knew he hadn’t done it by sleeping; he’d found another way. And it certainly wasn’t as simple as Ambrose seemed to think it was – his only method of teaching was to repeatedly tell me to ‘clear my mind’. Shame I wasn’t able to ask the slaughterman himself.

  Groaning, I let my forehead fall onto the page of a book.

  I felt a hand trace lightly over my hair and looked up to see Isadora. The touch was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and as she slowly rounded the table and took in the chaos she seemed far away again, the touch like something I’d imagined. I could see her circling with wary suspicion, unsure if she was the predator or the prey after this morning. Trying to feel me out, trying to see through my facades. She didn’t trust me one bit, I realised, but I’d never given her much reason to.

  ‘Taking a break?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How are they going?’

  A shrug.

  ‘I can’t find anything. I need more eyes. Want to go through that pile for me?’

  ‘I’m a poor reader. It would take me hours to get through a page.’ She made it back around the table to my side, tracing her hand idly along the books.

  I snatched her fingers and placed a kiss to her palm. ‘I’ll keep you anyway.’

  She removed the hand to flick me in the temple, hard.

  ‘Ow. Careful – you told everyone that’s the death blow.’

  Isadora smiled. ‘If I could flick people to death I’d save myself a lot of time.’

  ‘Oh. You’re not very good at jokes, are you?’

  I watched her walk through the stacks of books and wondered if she could understand their titles. How strange to be almost blind to the language of text.

  ‘Radha’s entertaining everyone by stretching her wings,’ Isadora murmured.

  I smiled. We’d hopefully be out of here by tonight so I had to get a move on. My current scroll brought me up to the start of my reign twenty-five years ago. There had been less than a hundred warders in Kaya at that time, only one of them a first-tier – Osric. Which meant he was obviously a lot older than he looked. Lutius had been training as a novice at that time, but he’d been flagged already as a possible head warder when he graduated. From what I could gather it was something about the type of energy coupled with the type of mind. But obviously not even their careful choices yielded any security, since the man least likely to be corrupted by his magic had been the worst traitor of all. I scanned accounts of magic use throughout the first few years of my reign, looking for more on Lutius but something else caught my eye.

  The warders I dispatched when I was ten to find the murderers of my family, Callius and Raziel, had both nurtured future-telling gifts, which was why I’d chosen them – foresight was the hardest thing to evade. They had searched for two years and reported regularly that they’d found nothing, and then they’d relocated to continue a more permanent watch on the border in case the killers had gone north into Pirenti.

  But this scroll identified Callius and Raziel as having lived in Sanra – or Yurtt, as it became – for a full twelve years after I dispatched them, until the day they both died. I’d been informed that their magic had worn through their bodies – they were both very old at this point – and they’d perished on the hunt. Only it now seemed like an awfully big coincidence for them to have died on the same day. And why hadn’t I been told that they were living in Sanra?

  Then there was the fact that twelve years was the same exact amount of time that Isadora had hung in her cage – in Sanra. Which might not mean anything, and yet … I frowned, thinking it through, reading for more information. Izzy had come to sit on the edge of the table to watch me. I felt on the cusp of something and it was making my heart pound.

  ‘Look for these names,’ I told her, showing her Callius and Raziel on a scroll.

  She peered at them and I saw her lips move as she sounded out the letters. Her face suddenly cleared as the letters became words. She was stone and iron. She was calm fury. ‘These are the names of the first two warders I ever killed.’

  I went still, a terrible dread blooming in my heart. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they were the men who put me in the cage.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘What, Falco?’ she asked quickly, seeing my expression.

  ‘Do you know why they did it?’

  ‘I told you. Superstition.’

  I shook my head, tearing through scrolls to find the stack of reports from Sanra in those years. I read through Callius and Raziel’s accounts of their time in the region. They had been reporting back to the warders with an entirely different set of information to what they’d been sending me. And what I read made my blood go cold.

  ‘What?’ Isadora demanded, and for the first time since I’d met her she sounded scared. I got to my feet, pushing the chair out so quickly that it nearly toppled over. I didn’t have any words, had no idea how I could explain this, or what it meant, or how she would … Shaking my head, I gathered up the scrolls and headed quickly for the door.

  ‘Falco!’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing you need worry about.’

  Isadora

  I didn’t allow myself to think about whatever had happened in the library. Falco had read something that deeply unsettled him, something about Callius and Raziel, whom I had killed, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. So I wouldn’t waste time on it.

  Every prisoner had offered their soul energy in the service of breaking out, even those who loathed the magic. The warders took hands, while the rest of us waited around them. Falco was atop Radha, who flew up to the barrier above so he could press free once the weakness in the ward had been ruptured. He thought his energy was going to be drained along with everyone else’s, but I had spoken privately with Inga and Brathe and they’d agreed that he would not be used – even if the rest of us perished, Falco must live.

  A wall of energy smashed against me, taking my soul with it. A collective groan sounded as we all sank to our knees. Blood trickled from my nose and ears. I hadn’t expected it to be this bad. Through the pounding in my head I watched Inga and her warders. Just as the pain threatened to overcome me she gave a terrible scream and the pressure ended as abruptly as it had started.

  My body felt boneless. As my head hit the ground I saw wings beating across my vision, and then his pale eyes as he lifted me onto our pegasis. ‘It worked,’ he told me, and then his gaze erupted into flames. I gasped, reaching for him.

  ‘Falco – your eyes!’

  He stared at me, unaware. I twisted my neck to glance behind. Something was coming, I could feel it. The walls of the prison burst into flame but Radha wasn’t moving, and when I pulled at Falco he wouldn’t come. The sound of mighty wings beat behind us, drawing ever closer.

  ‘Run!’ I told him.

  He shook his head. ‘This is real. Don’t you get that?’

  The prison finished burning and there was a blizzard of white-grey ash, dancing and falling upon his skin and hair and in his eyelashes. It leeched the colour from him until he looked just like me, nothing but a white, colourless creature.

  Had I turned him into this? Had I made him what I was?

  ‘Run,’ I whispered, ‘Run.’ And this time I meant for him to run not with me, but from me.

  Falco

  With the severing of that first ward, the magic of the entire prison crumbled. It unraveled like spools of string and as I landed Radha in the de
ad forest outside the prison walls, I watched an impossible thing.

  The forest came back to life.

  Blackened bark fell away from skeletal trees leaving them brown and green with budding new life. Withered grass found green, wildflowers bloomed and a huge breath of air was taken into the uncurling leaves of the canopy above. It was so beautiful my breath caught in my lungs, and I wished Isadora had been awake to witness it.

  Those who were able emerged from the prison. Most were deeply fatigued from the magic, while others remained unconscious. We spent the night under the newly awakened trees, waiting to recover. I made sure Izzy was wrapped tightly in her cloak, and I had Radha lie beside her, though it was warm so far south. It was more for comfort than temperature. I didn’t want her to wake alone.

  I checked on my people and discovered that two had died in the escape, and though Brathe told me I ought to be relieved it was not more, I felt the deaths keenly. Inga had not yet woken. She looked pale and clammy, more so than anyone else. I sat quietly with Brathe for a while as he held her hand. Next I checked on Sharn and Valerie, who had both woken and were seeing to others with admirable aplomb. It was like walking through a battlefield. The unconscious bodies laid out on the grass made it seem like a great fight had taken place. But I knew we had yet to see the real beginning of bloodshed. That lay ahead.

  I circled back to Izzy and found her tossing restlessly in her sleep. As I sank to the grass beside her I heard her teeth grinding, and then words forced through them. ‘Run, run … run.’

  ‘Isadora,’ I said, touching her shoulder. She lurched awake, breathing wildly. ‘Easy, it’s alright.’

  Blinking, she struggled to sit up and lean against Radha’s warm belly. Her hands moved of their own accord to thread through the horse’s wing feathers.

  ‘What were you dreaming of?’

  She shook her head a little, her eyes fixed on something distant, careful not to stray towards me. We were several hundred meters from the rest of the prisoners, behind a large fir tree for privacy. But even here, so alone with her, she felt terribly far from me.