Brigands (Blackguards)

by “Melanie Meadors”

I grimace. “Easy. Now help me drag him to Patty-Anne’s room, then fetch my clean clothing. I may be gone for a few days, yet.”

  Catherine stops, fists deep in her sides. “I get anything out of this?”

  “I come back alive, you do. I don’t, you get my bed. On my honour.”

  Catherine rolls her eyes and blows a stray red hair from her face. “Full of shite, you are.”

  I wink at her, then set about to saving Jolyon’s pale ass once again.

  THERE’S AN ACHE blooming from the right side of my skull by the time I set out that evening. One of the other girls has fed and cleaned Augustus, and while I’m grateful, the massive raven is still cross with me.

  “Come now, Gus-Gus,” I coo, stroking her opalescent plumage. She cocks an amber eye at me, squawking shortly, then snorting in my face. I swipe the muck from my forehead and flick it away. “You done?” I swear she laughs, the trill in her throat mocking me. “Whatever.” Still, she does not allow me to climb her, her wing pushing me back each time I attempt. “Oh, for bleedin’ Mary’s sake, fine!”

  Pleased with herself, Augustus tucks in, lowering her head so I can push back the few feathers covering her ear. Softly, I sing to her, the ache of a time lost settling deep in my breast, yet I ignore it to comfort my companion.

  my body was your egg

  and your cries broke the sky

  at your birth

  my hatchling, see your first feathers

  wait for me before you fly

  She coos back at me, nuzzling her head against my side. I nuzzle back briefly, getting a strong whiff of the vomit still deep within her plumage. No wonder she’s irritated with me. To make up for it, I scratch just above her throat, then smooth my palm against her beak, both top and bottom. She eases even further, forgiving me just a little bit more for sullying her rather impressive coat. I smile as she opens her wing. I find the tiny step implanted in her side and swing the other leg over. I do not fully straddle her by any means; I had her bridle removed ages ago, allowing her to grow bigger and healthier than most of her engineered kind. Still, she manages to blend in with most others, never quite giving me away until it is too late for most.

  I lay against her back, the warmth of her body, the steadiness of her breathing grounding me, and for a moment, the nerves that had erupted within me after hearing Jolyon’s message calm, and I’m able to focus, able to envision my destination. I stroke the two hidden short feathers at the top of Augustus’s head and whisper, “Let’s go home.”

  She bristles, then takes off into the night air.

  I SIT ON the lip of the lead-paned window, my dagger poised in my grip, tip carving out the gunk beneath my nails. I steal a glance at my target through the distorted glass and feel an inordinate amount of emotion writhing within me.

  Drizana.

  Or rather, Princess Drizaniella of the Third House Torner.

  My sister. Half-sister, to be precise.

  To say we dislike one another is to be coy. There are no proper words within the confines of language to describe what we feel toward one another. At the thought of her, I find my fists impenetrable, the skin of my face taut with the heat of fury.

  I cannot speak for her, as I am not as well-versed in forked tongue, but I’m certain she feels something like the same for me.

  Bored, I ease the lock with the same dagger, the gunk silencing the shriek of ore against rust. Three crane women cluck at her, one fastening fresh water pearls against Drizana’s pale neck with her bright orange beak, the other fluttering her pale feathers fingers along Drizana’s severe cheeks, rouging the sickly white with expensive tinted powders. Yet another crane woman watches it all, her curved neck nearly straight as her beady eyes scrutinize every move.

  I shudder at a memory.

  My father’s creations and acts of heresy, these crane women, my Augustus, and many others. Until the kingdom found use for them, at least. Of course, this was after he’d been imprisoned and executed for his crimes against the nation, leaving the crown to my stepmother, Lady Mayne. I cannot say times before then were pleasant either. They hadn’t been since the death of my mother, seemingly ages ago. Yet, I can see her face as clear as the day dawns, her night black skin, her even blacker eyes. And the gentleness of her smile. My father took to reminding me I looked like her every night he tucked me in after she died, even in whisper once her name was banned from Kingdom Torner by Lady Mayne. Things only worsened with the hex of my sister’s birth. She took on my father’s ears and plump lips, while the rest of her is all her mother. All grace and ice and as white as the sun.

  Suddenly, Drizana’s cold eyes flick up in the mirror, meeting my heated gaze. She counts a moment, then gasps rather dramatically, the tips of her fingers brushing the plane of her adorned breastplate.

  My mother’s sapphires.

  Hex and doom, this creature astounds me with her audacity.

  The crane women flutter at Drizana’s alarm, wings flapping uselessly and shedding white feathers everywhere in the massive room.

  “Oh, calm it, Jacqueline!” I groan, dropping from the window sill. The crane women back away, crowding around Drizana as she pretends to weep, ready to sacrifice themselves in honour of the kingdom that enslaves them. I stop advancing, truly sickened by the sight of them and their so-called honour. “I have no business with you women, only my sister.”

  Jacqueline, the head mistress, rears up, plumage raising high from her narrow head. Her neck curls. “You have no sister here, Aelian,” she says, the voice of a brief point in my childhood nearly bringing me to tears. My bladder wishes to void itself as my back and arms remember the peckings. So much torn flesh, too many nights fighting fevers of infection from that disgusting bill.

  “Fuck off, Jacqueline, and let me have my say. Then you’ll never have to see me again,” I say, gripping the handle of my dagger even tighter, my arm curled behind my back.

  She huffs, flutters, but makes no move to leave. The other women stay as well, though I can feel their nerves from across the room.

  “Leave us, Jacqueline.” Drizana. She’s over her vapours. Amazing turnover. I’m rather impressed.

  Jacqueline lends me her left eye as she gathers Drizana under a wing. “Are you sure?”

  “I am,” Drizana says staunchly. The women separate to reveal my sister’s glare. Those hazel eyes refuse to blink, even after the doors to her chambers close with a thud. “What in the seven hells brings you here?”

  I smirk. Such unbecoming language from a lady-in-training. “Your death, dearest sister.”

  Still she stares, unmoved. “You speak in riddles, and I have no time. Prince Christopher awaits my company.” She turns on her ottoman and resumes her primping. She’s quite adept at it alone. The thought of the crane women angers me even more.

  “Someone wants you dead, Drizzy.”

  She stops mid-tuck of a wavy curl, her fine fingers twitching just slightly. She hates the nickname almost as much as she hates me.

  “Then you’ve clearly failed your mission, stealing my attention like this,” she resumes, voice even haughtier than before. I want to stick her neck, cut out the muscle to her condescending lilt. Feed it to Augustus.

  “Because I am not entirely stupid, you see,” I say, taking a slow step towards her. She glances at me quickly.

  “The drink hasn’t rotted your brain quite yet? Pity.”

  I’m on her before she can stick the pearl comb into the tufts of her perfectly coifed hair, my gloved fingers deep within the bouffant, curling and tugging to expose her long neck. She gags on air, eyes widened in shock as I slowly drag the dagger’s flat edge against the delicate flesh.

  “Trust, I have no qualms in killing you, dear sister, but first, I must clear this slate. I want your death clean and the blood strictly on my hands as I dance in it. Do you hear me?”

  She has no choice; my breath is hot against her cheek, my lips brushing against the shell of her ear. I want to bite it, tear it off with my teeth, ch
ew on its flesh. But I let her go instead, flinging her head forward.

  “Pray I do not solve this soon. For your sake and your mother’s.” I turn, tempering the temptation to take my mother’s necklace, and walk back from whence I came, jumping out of the window with one leap. I duck back in. “And don’t you dare call the guards on me. There are others looking for you. I merely have a head start,” I lie. I want to strike the fear of several Hades within her. By the look on her face, I am successful. “Enjoy your courtship, Drizzy.”

  And I slam the window closed before falling below to Augustus’s awaiting back to fly back into the night.

  I RETURN TO my quarters to find Jolyon sitting on the edge of my dressed bed, stripped of his fine silks and garbed in a night gown. It’s freezing in the room, yet he doesn’t seem affected by it. I pause at the threshold until better sense hits me, and I shut the door.

  “Do not blame the girl. I asked to be in here,” he says as I cross the room to strip myself of my weapons.

  “Why?” I start a fire and rub my gloved hands against the burgeoning flames.

  “I feel… safer,” he says. He sounds as if he’s in a trance. As if he’s been traumatized and cannot face reality without shattering.

  “What is it, Jolyon?” I ask, sitting in a wingback. I ease my boots from my feet, rub the arches, then stick them close to the fire.

  He doesn’t move for a bit, and I don’t make him, exhaustion eating my bones. “I remembered something.”

  I look at him, yet he is still unfocused. This isn’t good. The carrier of a blood-print is to never remember the words spoken. Aside from sensitive information that puts their lives in certain danger—and in Jolyon’s case, it is already too late—the act itself is harsh and unforgiving in memory. It can drive a person mad, those chemicals floating about, the flashes of the ritual performance tearing at their sanity.

  A single tear drops from his unblinking eyes, and I rush towards him, the tug of affection beating my pride into submission. I cup his cheek, turning his face just so until he has no choice but to look at me.

  “What is it, Jolyon?” I ask again. “What do you remember?”

  He watches me, eyes tracing mine, then my lips until he captures them in between his. The kiss is sloppy, shy, like the first one from ages ago. He settles in quickly, remembering our unofficial lessons behind the rose garden, and I kiss him back until we’re both breathless.

  The son of a gravedigger and a nursemaid. The broken, orphaned princess violating her exile.

  How tragic of us.

  He holds my face between large, calloused hands, his eyes swimming as he watches me.

  “You will not survive this, in body or in mind or in both, I fear,” he whispers. I frown, and he presses his lips to mine one more time. “Woodrow. The name I recall is Woodrow.”

  For a moment, I cannot breathe. My throat becomes impossibly dry, and the bed disappears from beneath me.

  The name I recall is Woodrow.

  My father.

  He is alive. After all these years. After his execution.

  My father is alive.

  And he wants my half-sister, his own daughter, dead.

  “Sweet bleedin’ Mary,” I say just before sliding to the floor.

  MY FATHER WAS a broken man long before his marriage to Lady Mayne.

  The advisors of our old House, turned common servants, entrusted to me the idea that my mother’s death had done him in. His heart was never to repair itself, no matter the circumstances. No merger of kingdoms, no mad creations, not even the birth of his precious porcelain daughter. He carried on mumbling to himself, hobbling from one end of the Torner castle to the other until nightfall, when he’d poke and prod and scheme until the morning light. He ignored his frosty wife, scowled at his newborn daughter, balked at servants decades in his care.

  He never cooled to me, though, still calling me his little birdie and teaching me to fly on back of Augustus and others like her, others less fortunate in their fate.

  He whispered lovely stories of my mother, of us all together in a kingdom of ebony skin and lush oases in a landscape of unforgiving sands. He told me of riches of the earth, a hot sun, and cleansing rains. I longed to be in these places, especially during the weeks upon weeks of heavy, silver clouds in this God-forsaken country.

  He’d sing me to sleep with the same refrain every night:

  my body was your egg

  and your cries broke the sky

  at your birth

  my hatchling, see your first feathers

  wait for me before you fly

  But eventually his madness caught up with our stolen moments of affection.

  The night before he was arrested in the name of Torner, my father sat the foot of the bed, not looking at me, seemingly mesmerized by the roaring fire.

  “I have failed you, my sweet Aelian,” he’d said.

  “Papa?” His voice scared me. I didn’t like the way it sounded, as if he were crying.

  “They killed your mother, little birdie, and I tried so hard… so hard to bring her back, to avenge her—”

  He broke down then, his broad shoulders shaking with his sobs.

  I held the comforter to my mouth, shivering with the ferocity of a fever until he left an hour later.

  It would be the last time I saw my father alive.

  I AWAKEN WITH the smell of the devil in my nose.

  “Bleedin’ Mary, that shit stinks!” I scream, flailing my arms for fresh air. Too many bodies crowd me, and I push out again.

  “That’s the whole bloody point, Aelian,” a gruff voice snaps back.

  I hiss as my head explodes red with pain. “How lovely of you to grace me with your presence, Madame Flora.”

  “Shut it, Aelian, and eat some food. You refused the plates from your drink night and you’re not dying on my property.” The large, red-headed woman in an impeccable jade-green dress moves with familiarity around the room that has been mine for ten years, setting a small table near the fire with four dishes (three meat, one vegetable), a decanter of red wine, and a ripe, beautiful orange.

  “Where in Hades did you find that?”

  “’Twas a gift. Don’t ask too many questions. I’ve girls knockin’ on scurvy’s door,” she says in one breath. “Your guest saw his way out after tendin’ to you. Left you this.” She waves an envelope just out of my reach. “You’ll get it once you eat. Both his and my orders.”

  I snort, pushing against the warmth filling my chest. “Fine.”

  She leaves the room and my stomach betrays me, growling loudly at the scent of succulent braised lamb, stewed oxtails, and roasted chicken. I devour all three, pick at the vegetables, and polish the decanter, a slight buzz enlivening me.

  I knock on the door twice, and Madame Flora waddles back in. She inspects the plates, sniffs at the fire, and then, once satisfied, hands over the envelope.

  “Gussy’s resting, so you’ll not bother her tonight, yeah?”

  I nod, though I’m hardly paying her any mind. I turn the envelope over twice before breaking the plain black seal. My breath is stolen at the sight of my father’s script. I quickly read the contents, then throw the sheet of paper and the envelope into the fire.

  “I will need Fauna,” I say without looking at her. I am mesmerized by how quickly the words are devoured by heat and flame. “And I will need my dagger.”

  Madame Flora nods, then hurries away.

  I, in turn, prepare to see my father, the man who I thought had been executed thirteen years ago.

  THE CLOISTERS WAS a place of mystery and thrills for me, before it became synonymous with my mother’s tomb. She’d been found hanging in the open center, a threadbare noose swaying from the extended arm of my father’s statue. It was poetic in a sense. My mother had always hated this country, had wished to return to our true home, a home I barely knew myself.

  This is where I find my father. In the open. Sitting below where my mother’s feet had been.

&nb
sp; He’s paler than I remember, most likely from hiding, the olive of his tanned and scarred skin turned sickly green. His curly mop is now long and scraggly, his green eyes rheumy and unfocused.

  He looks like death. And I want nothing more than to hold him.

  But as I approach, an all-encompassing fury takes hold and before I know it, I strike him across the cheek, twisting his head hard to the left, blood spurting from his nose. The wine runs hot in my veins, but I stop myself from striking him again.

  “I deserve that,” he whispers. Whether it’s lack of use or fear that tightens his throat, I’m not sure, but I hate the sound of the scratchy baritone that used to sing me to sleep. “And more.” He chortles. I want to hit him again. I slide to cobblestone with him instead.

  “They don’t deserve this land,” he says after three crows land near our feet. He is barefoot, three of his toes missing. I want to weep. “They don’t deserve you.”

  It is my turn to chortle. “They’ve exiled me. I spit in their faces and stay, murdering their constituents for a few pfennigs.”

  “More than a few, from what I’ve heard, and more than mere peasants,” he says with a smile.

  The pride in his voice almost makes me smile back, but I staunch it. “Where have you been?”

  “There’s no time to explain that. I’ve already spent too much time in the open.” He turns to me, but I stare straight ahead, afraid to look into the eyes I inherited. “You did not do as I asked.”

  “No.”

  “Smart girl.”

  I shrug one shoulder. “Always have been.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  I turn to him then and my heart stutters, my vision clouding. “You left me,” I say. “You left me to those… things, to her heartlessness, to the very dungeon they cast you in before your—”

  I stop, realizing I have no idea how he’s here. How did he escape those flames? How did he break free of the chains that bound him to the stake he screamed against? I can feel the heat, feel the iced fingertips of Lady Mayne holding my head in place so I was forced to watch. When I closed my eyes, Jacqueline was ordered to peck until I opened them.