When her eyes shifted to lime green she told me her name was Sharra. She said that no one wanted to hurt me – they were simply using me to trade for a friend. But in my mind were the five men they had slaughtered – huge, Pirenti soldiers who were not supposed to be easy to kill. Whoever these people were, they were dangerous and violent. They flew me on that glorious pegasis to a hut in the forest – a small wooden shack with nothing inside but a straw palette and a table without chairs.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, not expecting an answer.
‘We passed the border not long ago.’
‘We’re in Kaya?’
At the fear in my voice, Gidion glanced up sharply. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe.’
Which was a lie – Kaya was full of monsters and demons that wanted nothing but the blood of Pirenti folk. I followed the others into the cabin and allowed them to sit me on the palette. The two younger boys stayed outside, while Sharra and Gidion stood in the middle of the hut and watched me.
‘Who is the friend you wish to trade me for?’ I asked eventually, unable to bear the silence.
They said nothing, but their eyes sharpened.
I frowned, looking between them. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Nothing,’ Sharra answered. ‘Don’t be frightened. You’ll be home soon.’
Don’t be frightened?
‘Have you eaten, Roselyn?’ she asked, strangely gentle.
Dripping caramel all over our hands, his tongue on my chin. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. Let me know when you get hungry or thirsty, or if you need to relieve yourself.’
I couldn’t help but imagine what would happen when my husband learnt of this. I shuddered – Thorne had been born to destroy things.
Then again, it was quite possible that Thorne resented me enough not to go to the trouble.
‘Is this some sort of trick?’ I asked. ‘Do you plan to kill me?’
‘No,’ Gidion shook his head. ‘We know how life is in Pirenti. You are not your husband, or your queen. You’re barely more than a child.’
‘I’m twenty-one years old.’
‘Yes,’ Sharra murmured. ‘And when did he marry you? How old were you then?’
I’d been sixteen. Sometimes I look at you and think you’re still just a child, and then other times I think you must be the oldest woman in the world. He’d said that to me in the first month of our marriage. He’d stopped being fascinated by me not long after that.
‘If you wish to use me to harm my husband,’ I said flatly, ‘I will never let you.’
‘No, not that either. Like I said,’ Sharra explained patiently, ‘we just want to trade you.’
‘Who is your friend?’ I asked again.
They exchanged a glance. ‘She disguises herself as a boy,’ Gidion murmured. ‘Calls herself Avery.’
I tried to remember the name, but couldn’t.
‘She would have looked like a small, blond Kayan boy. She might have been captured or … killed …’
And then it struck me. ‘There was a boy in our dungeons. He was caught by Ambrose and taken to the isle. He had strange purple eyes.’
Gidion made a sound, a kind of gasp, then rested his head in his hands. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘What has she done to herself?’
I stared at his slender hands – they had ugly, knobbly knuckles, but they were trembling in a way that was not ugly at all.
‘You love this person,’ I stated.
Gidion lowered his hands and levelled me with a gaze that seemed far more honest than his earlier politeness.
‘Not even a thousand wishes could bring him back from where he’s been taken,’ I said. ‘The prison isle is the nightmare of this world.’
The Kayan man shook his head very slowly, disbelief colouring his eyes cobalt. ‘You’re supposed to be stupid. That’s what everyone says.’
I didn’t know what to say; I felt ashamed. ‘You have nothing to trade for,’ I muttered, looking away. ‘You don’t need me.’
‘We’d only have nothing to trade if she was dead. We can still get her back from the isle,’ Sharra said, mostly to Gidion.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe it could have been possible in another life, another world. But in this life, the prince took the boy himself, and there’s naught under the eyes of the Gods that can stop Ambrose from finishing what he starts.’
Gidion and Sharra both stared at me, and then Gidion said, very simply, ‘You don’t know Ava of Orion.’
I was about to reply when the reality of what they were saying hit me. I felt myself freeze in shock. If they were telling the truth, then that boy who’d been so cruel and brave in the dungeons had been a woman! No – it was impossible. Women weren’t made like that. Weren’t forged from iron like men.
I sat quietly, allowing myself to make wishes. I savoured my last few moments of life and freedom before I told them the truth that might very well condemn me to death. ‘Your plan isn’t going to work,’ I spoke softly and felt both sets of eyes focus on me.
‘Why is that, Roselyn?’
‘Because they won’t care that you have me. They won’t trade a single thing for me.’
‘Who won’t?’
‘Any of them. The Queen hates me, and my husband …’ I swallowed, closing my eyes a moment before meeting Sharra’s pale green gaze. ‘My husband doesn’t love me at all.’
As the moon rose outside the window, we lay down to rest. They gave me the palette, saying they would sleep on the floor. The boys outside would be on watch duty, so if I tried to escape, I wouldn’t get beyond them.
I wouldn’t try to escape. I wasn’t capable of such things. For six brief seconds I contemplated it, and then my mind was off somewhere different, somewhere between the clarity of numbers. Hours passed and I couldn’t sleep. I’d already counted the wooden slats in the roof, and then all of the nails in the wall next to me. Too many of my wishes weren’t coming true. It was throwing everything out of kilter. I wish for a pegasis of my own, one I can ride forever and never land. I wish I could live in the sky.
‘What are you counting, Roselyn?’ Sharra whispered.
I rolled over, looking at where she lay on the floor next to my palette. ‘Nothing.’
‘Can’t sleep?’
‘I don’t sleep well without my husband.’
‘The husband who doesn’t love you?’ She propped herself on her elbow. Her eyes were the most amazing, unnatural shade I’d ever seen. They didn’t make sense, eyes like those. I wanted to understand how they worked, but didn’t dare ask.
‘We sent the message. If they are not at the border at dawn for the trade, we’ll let you go.’
I studied her face in the shaft of moonlight. I didn’t believe her, not for one second.
‘Roselyn, in Kaya we don’t steal innocent women and slaughter them. We fight our wars in self-defence.’
I’d never thought much about the wars Thorne fought. I considered violence and brutality a natural part of the world, but one that I already experienced enough of at home without seeking out more information. It had never occurred to me that my people might have instigated the violence – that this fighting could be our fault. Or that there were places in the world where brutality wasn’t an everyday occurrence. A sudden, new wish came to me: I wish I was from somewhere other than Pirenti. Too many wishes that couldn’t come true – I had to stop.
‘Why are you married to a man who doesn’t love you?’ Sharra asked me softly. Gidion was snoring gently on her other side.
Secretly, I thought the question was the stupidest I’d ever heard. Did she know naught of the world? How offensively entitled she seemed.
‘I didn’t choose to marry him. Nor did I choose for him to be disappointed in me.’
‘But … can’t you leave him?’
I stared at her. ‘Leave him? Leave him how?’
‘Break the marriage and leave the fortress.’
I squinted through the darkness, trying to see if she w
as making fun of me. ‘You do not simply break a marriage to a Pirenti man, let alone the Prince himself. You do not leave the slaughterman of the north, unless you wish to be hunted down and carved into a thousand pieces.’
Sharra’s mouth fell open. Her eyes shifted to a sickly yellow that reminded me of fear. ‘That’s awful.’
‘He is my husband,’ I reiterated slowly. ‘I belong to him. I am privileged.’
She shook her head. ‘Roselyn, it shouldn’t be like that. Does he hurt you?’
He hurts me less than everyone else.
‘Is that why you have those bruises around your neck?’
‘Stop,’ I murmured. ‘Please.’
‘Life shouldn’t be like that,’ Sharra went on. ‘It’s wrong. Men don’t treat women like that in Kaya.’
‘I was not born in Kaya,’ I told her simply. ‘I was born into another life. In the north it is cold.’
She didn’t reply to that.
A world had opened up between us, and I knew all of my previous wishes had been foolish. Something compelled me to ask, though, ‘Are you and Gidion married?’
‘No, we’re bonded,’ she replied. ‘We’re supposed to be married next season but with Ava gone … I don’t know anymore.’ Deep regret twisted her mouth. ‘We should never have let her leave. Or let her be treated so poorly. It’s just that it was … it was such a shock, losing him. Ava was such a bright thing, once. And now it sounds as though we’ll be too late to help her, and I …’
I didn’t know what Sharra was talking about, but Ava must have been the boy-girl’s name. She made more sense to me, with a different name. She was a woman who’d been beaten and caged, and thinking about her like that made it very hard for me to continue to hate her. ‘Bonded. Isn’t that what kills you all?’
‘If one of us dies, the other does too.’
‘An ugly fate.’
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘It’s perfect. Why would I want to live without Gidion?’
I opened my mouth but nothing came out – the truth of her statement came to me all at once. I wish I could bond with someone. No. I took the wish back and made another. I wish I could bond with Thorne. Then maybe he’d love me the way I loved him. I thought of the freedom a woman would have if her husband loved her with the same need with which she loved him.
‘You should think about coming back with us, Roselyn,’ Sharra yawned. ‘To live in Kaya.’
I blinked and stopped counting partway through a row of nails. For a moment, there were no wishes and no numbers inside me. There was only one thing. And he arrived at the hut moments later.
Ava
I woke to the setting sun shining through my window. Ambrose was silhouetted against it, tall and broad.
‘What happened?’ I asked, sitting up. I felt tired and sore.
‘You collapsed,’ he said, not turning. ‘They said you’re fading.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Some old guy.’
‘And you always listen to old guys?’
‘Usually.’
I breathed out heavily. ‘Right. Well it’s happened before. I always recover.’
‘Then you’re not dying?’ He turned to me. I couldn’t see his face with the sun shining so brilliantly behind him. It was throwing a warm light over the whole room.
‘I don’t know.’ Then I remembered who he was and a loathing so powerful stole over me. ‘You said you were there,’ I murmured. ‘when she was murdered. You were there, and you were a prince, but you did nothing. You just watched as your mother killed my mate.’
Ambrose’s gaze was dark. ‘Yes.’
‘That brother you miss so terribly is the slaughterman of Pirenti, the most loathed man in the world,’ I spat. I felt dizzy with hatred and frustration. I’d never felt so weak, so staggeringly impotent. I wanted revenge, but it was like trying to catch hold of air.
‘You’re monsters, all three of you,’ I hissed.
Ambrose folded his big arms over his big chest. It made so much sense to me now, his size and strength. When they challenged him for his crown, he killed them all. He had to, had to make sure he was able to. I’d heard the stories about the two princes. No one tried to challenge them anymore – they were too savage, too impossible. It was the quickest way to dig your own grave.
‘Calm down,’ the prince ordered flatly. ‘You’ll pass out again.’
A gasp of fury left me and I flung myself out of bed. I hit him in the chest as hard as I could. He didn’t block me. He stood still, so I hit him again and again. I went for his ribs and his lungs, wanting to steal the breath from him, and then I hit him in the face, harder than I’d ever hit anyone before. His head snapped back, but I punched him again. I punched him until my arm ached and I couldn’t breathe from exhaustion. There was so much sorrow in me, deep in my guts. It hurt and it screamed and it made me want to bleed.
Finally he grabbed me by the arms and held me still while I struggled wearily. ‘I hate you – you disgusting, evil man.’
‘I know,’ he growled. ‘I know, Avery, but stop – you’ll hurt yourself.’
I sagged, wrenching myself out of his clutches and stumbling to the end of the bed. When I looked at him my eyes turned white, and I put all of that hatred into my voice. ‘I would rather you had let me die than owe you the debt of my life.’
Ambrose looked dangerous; something in him was coming alive at the sight of my eyes shedding all colour. This was how the warders he had murdered would undoubtedly have looked at him. This gaze was what he had been born to fight. But all he said was, ‘You owe me nothing.’
‘I hate you but I owe you everything. Where am I supposed to go from there? What am I supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know, but calm down, would you?’ he snapped. ‘You’re acting like a brat.’
‘I hate you.’
‘I know that – we’ve covered it. Don’t you think I’d like to go back and save the girl, if it would make you happy?’
I was unable to look at him. There was a huge purple bruise forming around his left eye, and a cut had opened up along his cheek.
‘I can’t change shit,’ he snapped. ‘I can’t change the fact that my mother is a monster, and she was so cruel to Thorne that she turned him into a beast. I can’t change how she enjoys hurting people and wants us to be the same.’
I stared at him, feeling oddly deflated. ‘And what of you?’
‘What about me?’
‘What did she do to you?’
‘Nothing – she ignored me. I didn’t exist to the Queen until I was fourteen and she realised I had the potential to become a soldier. I was a small kid until then – the runt of the family.’
‘The runt?’ It was difficult to believe, until I remembered the man in the dungeons who was supposedly his brother – a truly monstrous man.
‘When she realised, she sent me to the army barracks in Vjort for some northern punishment.’
‘What’s northern punishment?’
‘At sixteen all men from Pirenti are sent to the barracks up north for hazing.’
‘But you were—?’
‘Fourteen. That’s not the point.’
‘What’s hazing?’
‘Hazing is being tied to a tree, naked in the snow, and being left there for days. It’s being burnt in your sleep with brands. It’s being denied rations and having your weapons blunted and your armour stolen, and being set loose with the wolves. It’s anything and everything you can think of to torture a person, and they didn’t go easy on me because I was the Prince – my mother made sure of that.’
I felt queasy, imagining him as a little boy sent into that kind of nightmare. The scars along the length of his spine made sense now. ‘How did you survive it? How could anyone?’
Ambrose shrugged. ‘None of it bothered me much. It’s just hazing – so it has been for an age and so will it exist long after I’m gone from this world.’
‘It’s torture, Ambrose. It bothers everyone.’
I swallowed. ‘Why did they fear you so much?’
He looked at me, then, and didn’t say a word, but there was a glint in his eyes that made me cold inside. It was obvious – very, very obvious, why people would fear him.
I slumped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. ‘How do you stand living in such a country?’
‘It’s so easy for you to judge, isn’t it, Avery?’
‘Yes.’
I heard him sigh. ‘You’ve got no bloody clue. Things are more complicated than good and bad. Don’t you think there’s value in being able to protect yourself and your family? In being able to fight and win wars?’
‘But what are you fighting and winning for? There’s no reason to any of it.’
He crossed the room and idly knocked his knuckles against the wall, as though a fist was all he could make with his hands. ‘We fight so we don’t die. It’s that simple, and it will always be that simple.’
‘You’re a simplistic fool.’
‘Maybe so, but I know what I love and what I hate. That can be enough.’
‘It’s not enough for me.’
‘Because you want to prod and poke and control everything. You’d love to change the world so that everyone is the same as you.’
‘Bullshit!’ I protested. ‘I don’t want to change anyone!’
‘You’re constantly trying to change me.’
I opened my mouth to argue but nothing came out. I stared at him, and suddenly I was laughing. ‘But you need to be changed.’
After a moment he cracked a smile. ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh, pretty boy.’
‘Don’t get used to it, pig.’
‘Don’t they teach you manners in Kaya, Avery?’
Avery (Random Romance) Page 14