Isadora

by Charlotte McConaghy

Ambrose thought about it, balancing a piece of cheese on one of his stumps and then tossing it rather expertly into his mouth. ‘Hmm …’ he mumbled around his mouthful. ‘Warm. Good-natured. Bit cocky. Very loving.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’

  ‘He was.’ Ambrose smiled. ‘He really was.’

  ‘Did it feel … How did it feel?’

  ‘It felt like I’d known him all my life. Like he was my best friend and my brother and my lover all at once.’

  I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I stayed quiet, watching my uncle.

  ‘How are you doing, boy?’ Ambrose asked.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ I replied, because I did not yet know.

  ‘Did it help to meet your da?’ he pressed, knowing how much I had struggled with Da’s identity throughout my childhood.

  I nodded. ‘Very much. I get it now. What you meant about loyalty.’

  Ambrose nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry … that you didn’t get to say goodbye.’

  ‘That’s alright, mate. He and I know everything we might say to each other. He’s good like that. Always seems to understand things better than you expect him to – better than anyone else does, too.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said, thinking of how deeply he had changed my life. I cleared my throat, unsure how to say what I needed to next. ‘I love him. Unexpectedly, I love him. But, Ambrose … you know that when it comes to fathers …’ I hesitated, then met his eyes. ‘I wanted to tell you. You’re the one who has been my father, and I love you as one. Always.’

  His eyes widened, absurdly touched. ‘Thorne.’ He sighed. ‘My boy. You’re a son to me. I’m so proud of you.’ He cuffed me over the head with his wrist. ‘Now get. That wife of yours is going to need you very much.’

  ‘That wife of yours,’ a voice says now, interrupting my thoughts, ‘is actually extremely bored.’

  I sit up on my rock, resting my elbows on raised knees.

  Finn is perched on a huge round boulder, while Jonah and Penn frolic on either side. I watch as the boys leap for the ropes and start racing each other along the course named so long ago as the Siren Nights. They swing wildly from one rope to the next, precariously hanging over the waves of the ocean cave. Finn doesn’t watch their antics, her eyes fixed instead on me.

  ‘Did you hear me, beasty-boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then get going. Ambrose wants you. Your life awaits. Shoo.’

  I lie back on the rock and stare at the stalactites hanging from the roof of the cave. This was where I saw her for the second time, what feels an age ago. I glimpsed her first in a crowded city square, and then followed my house servant Winn here one night to discover the twins from the Cliffs of Limontae were running an illegal betting and rope hanging-climbing-swinging-jumping-or-whatever-it-was night. I’d thought her reckless and selfish that night. I was right about one half of that.

  ‘Thorne,’ she scolds now.

  ‘Leave him, Finn!’ Jonah shouts mid-swing. ‘Let him be.’

  She folds her arms stubbornly. ‘Let him be to spend his life with ghosts.’

  ‘I like that he can see us!’ Penn chirps cheerfully, arriving back on the rocks first and doing a nimble victory dance. ‘Nobody else can!’

  I flash Finn a smug look and she rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t encourage him, Penn.’

  It doesn’t matter where I go or what I do anyway. The three of them come with me. Sometimes Da does too, but I think he spends a lot of time with Ma and Ambrose as well, even if they don’t know it.

  Suddenly Finn is atop me, yellow cat eyes gazing down. I can’t feel her – I can never feel her. And worse, so much worse, I can no longer smell her. ‘Do you have somewhere better to be?’ I inquire.

  ‘No, but you do.’

  ‘This is my home,’ I contradict mildly. She’s always on about me and my life, about living it better than I am but I don’t let it bother me anymore. I live in the Cliffs of Limontae with Alexi, and I spend most of my time fishing or repairing the houses of the folk who live around me, or telling Alexi what his dead children have been saying about him behind his back. Ambrose, Ava and Ma take turns visiting me with Ella and Sadie – they’re as well loved here as I am. Falco comes a fair bit too, when he has the time, and I visit him in Sancia a lot.

  I don’t go to Pirenti. Pirenti is where the gaping dark waits. The violence and the ice. The man I became in Vjort haunts Pirenti. He is cast in the shadow of the great looming mountain. Here I am free of him, and I get to be in the place where Finn and Jonah and Penn grew up, with sand and sea and cliff. What more could a man want? Apart from being able to touch his wife, of course. Apart from being able to smell her.

  Penn asks me constantly about Isadora, as if he hasn’t been privy to the exact same information as me. No one has seen or heard from her in a year. Falco doesn’t speak of her, and he doesn’t look for her either. Not as far as I know. I can’t imagine what he feels for her. All I know is that if anyone dares to call her a traitor, they find themselves in very deep trouble.

  ‘Thorne,’ Finn says to me now. I sit up and she moves with me, straddling my lap though I can’t feel her there. ‘You two,’ she says to her brothers. ‘Go away.’

  ‘You go away!’ Jonah replies. ‘We’re climbing!’

  Penn grabs him and they both vanish.

  I meet her yellow eyes. ‘This isn’t good,’ she says.

  Oh, gods, I want to kiss her.

  ‘I’ve run out of patience with your moping. So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to stand up and leave this cave, and then you’re going to ride north into your homeland, where you belong, and you’re going to resume your job as prince. It isn’t the same there now. Ambrose is changing it and you should be helping him. Depending on duties and such, you’re also going to go north into the ice to spend some time with your berserkers. It’ll be good for you to get back to the beast for a while. Alright? Okay, good.’

  I say nothing.

  She motions to me like I’m a dog. ‘Come on, boy. There’s a good boy, up you get.’

  I can’t help laughing.

  Finn grins. ‘There you are.’

  My eyes trace her face. ‘I just want to touch you.’

  ‘You did,’ she says, settling onto my lap. She moves her fingers over my face, not quite touching. ‘And I just touched you, too. I touched your eyelids and your nose, and now I’m running my fingers over your lips.’

  It aches, my whole body aches with missing her.

  ‘Stand up, my love,’ she whispers. ‘You’re more than me and our bond, and you’re certainly more than this cave. So stand up and take the first step.’

  Does she mean the first step in leaving her behind? Because I won’t do that.

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘The first step towards whatever new life is waiting for you.’

  ‘I can’t do it without you. I need you to stay.’

  ‘But for how long?’ she asks sadly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answer her. ‘But longer. Stay longer.’

  And she says, ‘Of course, darling. I’ll stay as long as you need.’

  So I stand and leave the rock and the cave, and I start the journey north. Finn stays with me the whole way, and though we both know she won’t be able to stay with me forever, I hold onto her now for as long as I can, and it’s her smile and her eyes and her jokes and sarcasm that fight back the gaping dark so I can return home to where I belong: in the ice.

  Falco

  Choice, I’ve told my people, is the most important thing.

  I half believe that. I definitely believe in choice as a right and a necessity. But I also believe in other things. Like kindness. Generosity. Peace.

  And honesty.

  I believe in being who you are, whatever that might be. And if you don’t know what that is, then I believe in not concerning yourself with it so much that it twists you up and gets you believing that identity is the most important thing. It’s not. Identity means nothing, les
s than nothing. It’s just something that masks truth and essence and heart. You don’t need to name it or worry about it. You just need to be.

  I’ve decided something in the last year: I would like to be something new. Not one of my masks or versions. Not none of them or all of them, but something else. Something that is little bits of all those versions, but also new things as well.

  The new thing I’d most like to be is quiet. I never thought I’d miss the quiet of our cages, hanging side by side, but I do. So I will try to be that, but if I’m not I won’t worry about it either. I’m going to just be. And now that I have spent a year rectifying some of my twenty-five year reign, I can do that.

  When I was a boy I had a ma and da. I had two older brothers and one little sister. They had names and spirits, souls and smiles and gazes and words and thoughts and breaths and lives. I was a person who was loved. Drenched in love, a luxurious, absurd embarrassment of it.

  Time and the greed of men changed that. I changed that. I am drenched in love once more, and this time I have earned it. Not just the love of my new family, but of a whole nation. They have forgiven me so generously that I am endlessly humbled by the human spirit. I will never forget my first family, but I will enjoy the second, because there is no one, not even a feckless Emperor, who doesn’t deserve that.

  I go to Elias and Sara’s house a lot, and sometimes, when I can convince them out of their shyness, they come to dine with me at the palace. Wes and Anders come too.

  I have been working very hard towards an end, using every skill I kept hidden, every piece of knowledge or wisdom I held secret. And when I made my announcement to my city there was an overwhelming cry of support, one that stretched throughout the world. I stood on my balcony, with the city of Sancia gathered in the rebuilt streets below, and I looked down at it all. I remembered Jonah and Penn and Finn dying there on that street, and so remembering I made my announcement.

  ‘Greetings, Kayans!’

  A cheer went up, and I smiled, enjoying the sensation of simply looking down at them without a blindfold.

  ‘We have been through a terrible tragedy. It will live in our history as a time of darkness and loss. For that I can never make redress. I will remain responsible for this time, I will carry the burden of it always, just as I will carry the burden of the man I was.’ I paused, gazing at their faces, thousands of them. They were quiet, every one of them listening. ‘I was not the man you deserved as a ruler,’ I said. ‘I was a weak man, a cowardly one. One unworthy of you. But hear this. The woman I love believes in choice above all else and has inspired me to make a decision. To make a change. Throughout the history of Kaya we have been ruled by royal blood. Five decades ago we introduced a second ruler, one decided by the people who would rule alongside royal blood.’

  I took a breath. ‘I am henceforth abolishing royalty. From now on both rulers of Kaya will be elected by you. Merit will reign. The people will rule the people. I am no longer your Emperor.’

  A gasp went up, a sound of collective shock. Voices rose in shouts and cries and cheers. There was a wall of noise and movement, and I stood listening and watching it all. Quillane proved the best Empress Kaya had seen in a long time, and she’d been born in poverty, raised in the Cliffs of Limontae. She was chosen because of her passion and her knowledge, her cleverness and discipline. She’d been everything I wasn’t. Kaya needed more rulers like her.

  So now the elections are underway. Fifteen candidates have put their hands up and been sponsored by their communities, more than half of them from the Sparrow’s realms. They are passionate and hard-working, and I feel inspired by them all – I feel excited by our nation.

  Meanwhile, I sleep and dream of wings. I wake and think of sparrows. I eat and drink and breathe. I am.

  But I am also waiting. Until I, too, am free.

  Isadora

  In dreams we will find each other.

  I dream of him each night, and each morning I wake to realise he’s not really here.

  It started with Penn’s death.

  I drowned in that moment. I don’t remember where I stumbled to, but it was away. Falco let me go, and my last memory of him is of turning to realise he was watching me, his eyes gold.

  My feet carried me away, the wound in my stomach tearing further and drenching me in blood. I’d been wrapped in a dream of flight, unaware of what was happening around me. In the real world, the two people I came across were so ludicrously coincidental that it made me wonder about fate, yet again.

  Ryan, from the palace, with whom I had shared my humiliation. And the girl. The girl I saved from the dozen warders, the one who begged me to run with her, the one who said she’d never forget. Her name was Lila, and amazingly, Ryan was her husband. She recognised me before he did, gasping in horror, trying to lift me, begging him to help her. I know her, he’d said, and she had replied, so do I, so help me, you muppet!

  I must have told them to take me to the house I’d been living in. The one on the very edge of the coastline, where Falco and I made love for the first time. Ryan and Lila cared for me, hiding me, and before anyone could come looking for me I bid them take me to wherever they lived.

  And so it turned out that I was taken aboard a boat and sailed out to sea. There I recovered, on the lapping of the waves I had always feared. They lulled me to sleep each night and woke me each morning. I dreamed and sleepwalked, and I couldn’t always control it, but Ryan and Lila took turns watching me while I slept in case I moved to throw myself overboard in the night.

  I learnt how to sail the boat. I healed. Neither Lila nor Ryan spoke to me overmuch, understanding that I needed quiet. I found it easy to be sweet and gentle with them. I found kindness easy, for the first time. And I had what I most wanted: solitude. A place away from other people, away from weapons and violence and those who wanted to harm me. I wept most nights with the relief of it. Of not needing my daggers. And I didn’t know how I would ever go back, now that I’d been freed.

  Ryan comes to sit with me tonight, hauling in his fishing net and casting dubious glances at me. ‘I met him once, you know.’

  I don’t ask who – it’s obvious.

  ‘He was surprising. So surprising I didn’t realise who he was until he tried to save you.’

  I nod a little, not sure what he wants me to say.

  ‘You know everyone’s talking about what he’s done.’

  I smile: does he think I have some telepathic way of learning information from way out at sea?

  ‘We had a message,’ he says. ‘The Emperor of Kaya has made a decree – one that will go down in history.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I say quickly. I don’t think I can hear it. Hearing about him makes me want him too badly, makes me seriously consider going back to him. And that’s foolish because I’m nothing now, I’m not any of the things he fell in love with. I’m not strong or determined or able to protect him. I can’t fight, or kill, or lucid dream. I can’t even use my daggers.

  So I just fish, and watch the stars.

  ‘You and Lila aren’t bonded,’ I say, which is meant as a question.

  Ryan shakes his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Does that not … concern you?’

  ‘Why would it?’

  ‘What happens when you meet your mates?’

  He shrugs a little, hauling the nets up and up and up. ‘We won’t love each other any less.’

  ‘It’s powerful magic,’ I warn.

  Ryan smiles. ‘Yeah. But it’s natural, right? Not forced, like the warder stuff. The bond’s part of us.’

  I shake my head. He doesn’t get it.

  ‘It is,’ he insists. ‘I know enough people to see – if it happens to us it’s not going to make us feel pain. It’s not about that. It’s about love.’

  I place my cheek against the wood of the boat. My heart is beating too quickly and I must slow it. On this ocean I survive by not recalling. I can’t recall how badly my plan failed, how many people died for that failure.
I can’t recall Penn and Jonah. I can’t think of Falco. He isn’t mine. Not as I am now. My dreams envelop me until I can’t escape them, and he’s in all of them, always.

  I sit with my cheek to the wood until morning, when I realise we are angling back towards shore. ‘Supplies?’ I ask Lila as she darts past me to angle the masts. She doesn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘Lila.’

  She stops. Turns to me and takes a breath. ‘I owe you my life. I’ll do anything for you, Iz. Anything. Even if you don’t want me to.’ Then she dashes off.

  And I am left watching a small dinghy row out from the palace dock, closer and closer and closer.

  My body is frozen as he draws near and then climbs up the rigging. His hair is still short, though not as short as I cut it. His nose is still crooked, I see, as he hoists himself up onto the deck and turns to face me. His eyes are still crystal, bright in the morning sunlight.

  ‘Hello, little Sparrow,’ he says warmly. I close my eyes and hear him move near. ‘Did they warn you?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I’ve always known exactly where you are,’ he says. ‘I dream it.’

  ‘But you didn’t come.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting,’ Falco says.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For you. To find yourself again. To recover, heal. To be alone, to have quiet. To just … be free of it all.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ve been getting things ready.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To leave.’

  I stare at him, not understanding. His lovely face in the morning light is so dear to me I can hardly stop myself from reaching for him.

  ‘All I want,’ Falco says, ‘is away. I want the horizon, and new worlds, and to sail as far as I can. I want discovery, I want quiet. And you, my love. I want you most of all.’

  The breath catches in my chest. ‘I’m not who you think I am. Who I was.’

  ‘Then I’ll love whoever you are.’

  I clench my trembling hands.

  ‘Pain isn’t cumulative,’ he murmurs with a shrug. ‘Whatever we’ve been through can be left behind on that shore if we choose.’