Closing my eyes, I summoned the worst part of me, the part that enjoyed my power and its control over people. I feared this part of me, but I let her reign. She made me strong – impossibly strong.
I took hold of the warder’s soul with an iron grip, and then I ripped it from her body.
She sagged, stripped bare. Her eyes blinked quickly. All the white left them and they returned to a deep brown shade, the same brown her hair turned.
‘Only human,’ I murmured. Corruption slithered through me and I felt the desire for cruelty, heady like a rush of adrenalin. I wanted to hurt her. Wanted to hear her screams.
‘Finn,’ a rough voice said, reaching beyond the terrifying malevolence I was drowning in. ‘Come back,’ Thorne said.
I met his weary, pain-filled eyes. There was blood pooling around him. I wanted to go to him, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t.
I had made my choice. I’d given the darkness dominion. And now there was no turning back.
Will I kill again?
Yes.
So let the blood on my hands be my own.
‘You once asked me how I do it. Win the Siren Nights and deny their call,’ I whispered. ‘The answer is simple: you don’t deny it. You give in to it.’
‘Finn –’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him, to my mate. ‘But I do not give you permission to die, Prince Thorne. The world has need of you yet.’
And then I let the darkness consume me, ravage its way through my body, my soul too big, too big. It stole everything.
I sank to the ground and felt myself die.
A last thought drifted to me through the shadows. A miracle – that love found a place within the darkness to survive.
Chapter 22
Thorne
She slumped to the ground just as Goran and his berserkers arrived. They were out for blood.
Goran went to Eanna, who now seemed unaware of the world after whatever Finn had done to her. Without any warning the berserker King smashed his fist through her chest and wrenched out her heart. Then he devoured it, blood swimming from his mouth and all over his hands.
The berserkers gave a chilling roar of approval, beastly and chaotic and never to be powerless again.
I was barely aware of it.
Because on the ground was Finn, and she was dead, and I could feel it.
It was my heart being ripped out and eaten. My soul that had been stripped and ravaged. I wanted to go with her, wanted it so much that I was consumed by the sudden yearning for death.
Please, Gods, let me die with her.
But.
I do not give you permission to die, Prince Thorne.
And so.
I had lost a great deal of blood, and I had had my soul flogged by a thousand lashes. A part of me was trying to die with her. I’d never been this weak in my whole life. But I gathered everything that was left in me and I ordered, ‘Let me down.’
Goran crossed to stand before me. He was euphoric in his newfound freedom. He exuded animal strength. ‘Why would I do that, boy?’ Blood dripped from his lips.
I had never – never – expected to be the one to speak this word. But times were changing. The world was falling. I had to set it right.
‘Challenge,’ I barked. And the cavern fell silent.
‘I accept,’ Goran said.
They let me down, and I had barely the strength to stand. Goran loomed over me, power in every one of his muscles.
Gods. I was going to die here, fighting an impossible foe.
My eyes rested on Finn’s body. The curve of her shoulder. The long, slender limbs. Her blonde, tangled hair. That mouth, the shape of it. The dark eyelashes resting on her freckled cheeks. All those places I had touched and kissed and loved.
A high keening was released from my broken heart. It stole up and up, right into the top of this mountain and beyond it, up into the sky, the infinite roof of the world. My soul bayed like a crippled animal.
But then I felt him. Deep inside, in his cage. He stirred from his slumber, scenting the air and stretching his muscles. Slowly he came alive, and slowly, as if by an interminable, inevitable will, I felt him fill with fury.
Rise, I whispered to him. Rise, brother.
He did. Oh, he did.
My eyes turned red and the bloodlust exploded in my veins. I was ravenous.
Goran and I ran at each other and collided with brutal impact. I was expecting his strength but even so it shocked me. We grappled and he slammed me to the ground. All the air left my lungs but I rolled him, landing a blow to his face, another, two more before –
He threw me off and hammered his shoulder into my ribs, cracking them. His left fist swung into my shoulder, crunching the bone there and sending my head blank for a second. But no time for blank. My limbs were trembling with pent-up adrenalin as I blocked his next blows and threw a right into his gut. When he punched me in the side of the head I knew it was going to be too much. He was too strong, I too weak.
He was King of the Ice, a man who fought every day of his life to keep his throne in the harshest conditions known to man, and I was a boy who’d spent too long in the safe embrace of his mother’s hut and been terrified of any conflict at all.
I stopped being able to block his blows. Each one landed. My body was alight with pain, but I was too dazed to be aware of it. A fist in my ribs, cracking them, a fist in my cheekbone, cracking it. One in my chest, stealing my breath.
Impossible. How had I imagined this to go?
As I took blow after blow after blow, scrabbling to stay on my feet and lessen their impact, a strange thing drifted to me on a current of memory.
A story. Told to me by my uncle for the first few years of my life, told so often it became a truth, a mantra, until the day I couldn’t take it anymore and asked him never to speak it again.
We watched the boy in the snow as he fought an impossible fight. He was smaller, weaker, less skilled. He was just a boy.
A left hook clipped my jaw and I tripped backwards, ducking beneath another blow aimed at my nose.
But we all watched together as he wore down the older, bigger man. Wore him down with nothing but heartbreaking determination. He fought on for hours without a weapon, hours and hours, and then at long last he killed the King of the berserkers, a mighty beast of a man, cutting out his heart for all to see.
I took a jab to my chest, managed to block the second.
An impossible victory. And Thelle, the berserker King, happened to be Thorne’s father.
An impossible victory. But that wasn’t me. I didn’t have that kind of strength.
Goran hit me in the temple and I went down. Dropped to my knees, swayed there. He stood over me, enjoying the rabid cheers of his men.
So this was it. This was how I died. A relief, not to have to endure too long without her.
I thought of Ava and Ambrose, of Sadie and Ella. I heard their laughter, wished for them love and joy. I thought of Howl, who had been my best and only friend for so many years. Of Jonah and Penn and Isadora, thankful to have met them, thankful to have been touched by their friendship.
I thought of Ma. My beautiful, gentle, sweet mother. In my heart I bid her farewell. A last regret – that I didn’t know if she would survive losing us both.
But I could scent the violence coming off Goran in hot waves, and knew it was mere moments before he finished me.
And then it happened.
Time slowed. Paused around me. A hallucination, probably. Because there he was again. My da. Only a few paces away, watching me on my knees as I waited to be killed.
But there was no disgust in him this time. No cruelty. Instead I saw with my own eyes all the things people had feared and loved him for. I saw strength and courage and loyalty, and even – here at the end – a measure of sweetness.
‘Have courage, my boy,’ he said softly. His voice was rough like it had been shredded once. It was warmth. ‘You are far stronger than you think.’
I’m
not. It’s over.
‘Do you wish to know the answer to it all?’ he asked me.
I nodded. Possibly I nodded. Wasn’t very aware of my body anymore.
Thorne, my father, moved closer and looked into my eyes. He smiled the smile of a wolf and I realised how I loved him. ‘Stop fighting him,’ Da said. ‘He’s you.’
And then he was gone, and I was awake, at long, long last.
A howl rent the air. My beast’s howl burst from my mouth. The long, dangerous sound of the hunt. You don’t deny it. You give in to it.
Goran and his men grew still. I saw a new awareness in his eyes. I saw excitement. These were men who loved to fight. And I was going to give him one worthy of remembering.
I rose to my feet.
My beast was loose. There was no cage. He filled every inch of me; he was me. And we were strong.
I flew at Goran, smashing him in the face once, twice. My iron fists went into his guts, his abdomen, his ribs and chest. I felt bones crack beneath my hands. Blood splattered from his nose and mouth as I hit him there again, then slammed him to the ground. My blows were too heavy – they’d debilitated him and he couldn’t get back up.
Power flowed through my muscles. It had taken no time at all.
I had him down, and I had my hands at his neck, and if I wanted to I could tear his head free. I did want to. But it wasn’t like the blood fever had been every other day of my life. This was strength without the mindlessness. This was me, every part of me, the violent and the gentle. I was in complete control.
I looked into Goran’s eyes and saw a deep well of respect and contentment. He had been beaten by the stronger man, and there was a balance to that. A rightness.
My hands dropped and I stood.
‘To the death,’ he managed.
I shook my head. ‘I do not kill kin of mine. I would have you live to fight beside me, brother.’
There was a long silence. This wasn’t how berserker law went.
But I was their King now, and they knew it.
Goran rose slowly, trembling with the pain of his injuries. ‘It would be my honour,’ he said, and with a last look into my eyes he sank to his knees and bowed low before me.
Every single berserker under the mountain did the same.
I looked around at my men, and then I lifted my fist high into the air and gave a roar of triumph. They roared with me, fists pounding on their chests, battle cries let loose to fill the entire cavern with an almighty burst of sound.
My beast and I grew larger than this whole mountain. And we wanted vengeance.
Later, when the battle-haze had faded somewhat, I was able to see that it was a victory, and a turning point. It was an ending to one life, the beginning of another.
But it was hollow, because without Finn life meant an absence of laughter. It meant grey and bleak and cold. It meant loneliness in its purest, most unbearable form.
Fitting, I supposed, for the King of the Ice.
Chapter 23
Thorne
There were six Jarls and they stood to take my orders. Goran was to remain my second, the mountain’s Hersir – in charge while I was away.
‘Wait for me,’ I told them. ‘I will return for you. And then I will lead you south to war.’
Eyes filled with hunger. Beasts at their surface, aching for battle.
I lifted Finn into my arms. Her hair had faded and was now closer to white.
‘We will bury her for you,’ one of my men said.
‘No. I will take her to the sea.’ My Salt Girl.
I bid them farewell, and then I carried her out into the ice.
I walked with her in my arms for a day. I didn’t stop for food or water. And as night fell the wolves came. I heard them howling to the moon, their mournful cries the very sound of my own lonely heart. Soon their bays drew closer and I knew they were circling us.
A note of despair struck me. I needed to at least survive long enough to let her body rest at sea, but I didn’t have anything left in me to fight them – I didn’t want to fight.
Sadly I prepared myself, but as the wolves crept close enough for me to see their glowing eyes in the darkness, they did not attack.
They moved to my side and sank to the ice, and then they pressed their bodies around Finn and me, wanting to keep us warm during the night.
The moment built inside me, swelling to an unbearable ache. For the beauty in the world. For the loss.
I buried my face in the white fur of a wolf, and I wept.
Finn
Somewhere between life and death there were screams.
I was trapped within them. They’d been coming for me for years, since the night I was twice-born. Fear became a new reality. Timeless, weightless fear within this endless existence of screams.
I couldn’t get out.
I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself over the others.
I sobbed and begged and moaned but none of it made a difference. There was nothing solid or quantifiable. Just fear.
And then, through it all, came my brother.
Jonah stood within the cacophony and he smiled. My soul swelled with the sudden existence of love, here in this gloom.
‘Time to go home, Inney,’ he told me gently.
A sob of relief. Followed too quickly by reality. ‘How?’
His eyes shifted to my yellow. He was so full of love. Had always been so full of love. Where did he find the capacity for it?
‘Take mine,’ Jonah said. My life.
Tears spilled down my face. ‘Oh, Jone.’ I didn’t expect us to be able to touch, but we could. He gathered me into his arms.
‘He will need you. I’m not needed by anyone.’
‘Untrue.’ Vastly, immeasurably untrue. I looked into his face. ‘Hear this. I would rather an eternity of torture than to take your place and condemn you to this. Nothing in life or death could make me do that to you.’
His eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s my job, Inney. I’m your brother. It’s what I was made for.’
My heart clenched in agony. ‘No. No. You were made for a big, brilliant life, full of joy and love and laughter. You were not made to share your life with me. Keep it to yourself now, and enjoy every minute of it. It is yours.’
‘I’ll miss you every second of every day,’ he whispered.
‘I know. I love you.’
We held each other for a time, and then I allowed the bond between us to sever and dissolve, setting him free of me at long last.
Jonah vanished and I was alone again.
No, not alone. Surrounded.
It occurred to me that these were people. People who had once lived in my world, had lived lives of their own, just as difficult and lovely as mine. Instead of giving in to my fear, I tried to shift it for a moment. I tried to listen to the screams and hear them for what they were. And that was when I knew that there was no reason to be frightened of the dead.
Because they were trying to tell me something.
You decide how strong you will be. And you decide what fate you will have.
Thorne
I woke from nightmares so thick and heavy I thought I would drown in them. I had been carrying Finn for over a week now. The sun was brilliant and so bright as it bounced off the ice around me. The end to it drew nearer. I shielded my eyes, allowing the dream to linger in my mind, despite the despair it left.
Screaming. Within which was something … I strained my memory, trying to grasp it –
You decide how strong you will be. And you decide what fate you will have.
I blinked, sitting up. The words thundered around inside me, again and again. I thought of all that had led us here. Prophecies and dreams. Words of people we didn’t know, leading us here, to Finn’s death.
One of you will die.
And suddenly it was not enough. I was not content to allow that to be the way of the world. Or at least of my life. No one told us to die and then expected us to just roll over and do it.
&nb
sp; I looked at Finn’s face, lifeless and blue with cold. She’d been gone a long time. But the truth was still there inside me. The reason I was still alive. Our bond endured, somehow. I had not let it go, not allowed it to sever.
‘I refuse for our lives to be decided by prophecy,’ I told her. ‘I will decide my own fate.’
And saying so, I felt the bond and I pulled on it. Pulled on all the threads that bound the two of us together. In my blood was the power to break this bond, and every bond in the world. But Eanna had told me that I also bore the power to change the bond, to strengthen it.
So that was what I did.
I put all of my newfound strength into it, thanking my father as I did so, because it was he, in the end, who had allowed me to find this strength. I made the bond between Finn and I the strongest thing in the world, a thing bound by iron and shadows, by gold and black and red. I made it from all of my light and all of her darkness. I made it from both of our ghosts and all the paths that had been laid out before us. And I was able to do this because I was more than just a man or a beast now; I was man and beast, both together, finally at peace with my own soul.
Once before Finn had been brought back from death. And I did not think it was only because her mother was a warder. I thought it was because no one in the world had loved Finn as much as her ma had, and it was that immeasurable love that had drawn her daughter back into the world.
‘Finn,’ I whispered. ‘I will carry some of your burdens and you will carry some of mine. I need you to help me be strong. I need you to help me stop the falling of the world.’
That was why Agathon made the bond in the beginning. Because he understood that sometimes life was too heavy a burden to carry alone, and he wanted us to be able to share it. I saw how beautiful such a bond was, in its essence. I saw not the destruction of it. Not the death of it. But the love it allowed, the life it gave birth to.
I knew I would never wish it gone from the world, even if it meant the end of us both one day. And I would spend my life helping people to survive it, to understand that they could, that they had enough strength to do so – they just didn’t know it yet. Just as my father had done for me, I would fight to help people see the truth of their own strength.
Thorne (Random Romance) Page 33