by Patty Jansen
Jono screamed, his voice muffled into the wall.
“That hurts, doesn’t it?” he whispered into Jono’s neck. “You know what? It doesn’t hurt for me. I never knew that.”
He pushed harder. He was rock-hard now and should get this over with while it lasted, before he went limp and embarrassed himself.
“Ow! Stop. It hurts.”
Carro grabbed Jono’s hair from behind, arching his neck as far as it went. “Too right it fucking hurts. It’s meant to hurt. You hurt me. Many times. The tables are turned.”
Carro saw nothing, heard nothing. This was what he wanted to do to his father, his mother, to his sister, to the bullies in the streets. He was fighting, hitting them all back for pain they had caused him, slamming them into that wall. Carro won the fight, spilled himself with a triumphant roar. The feeling of ultimate power.
Carro withdrew, blood roaring in his ears. Jono was crying, and Carro tried to cut himself off from the sound. By the skylights, be a man! Even I didn’t behave like this when you did this to me.
But there was blood in his crotch.
Carro ignored it, did up his belt and maintained a stiff and angry pose while the boys scampered from the room. When they were gone, he slumped against the wall.
The sound of Jono’s cries would not leave him, and that feeling of power, and his unexpected lust. He kept seeing Korinne’s face, and the image of Farey’s eyes, the two Knights kissing in Rider Cornatan’s bathroom . . .
His nails bit into the skin of his palms. Tears burned into his eyes. Who was he and what gave him the right to do things like this?
* * *
He didn’t know how long he had been standing there when there were footsteps behind him. He whirled around to see Rider Cornatan coming into the room. The Supreme Rider said nothing, but approached Carro with quick steps.
“You’re back.” Carro heard a measure of relief in his voice.
Rider Cornatan’s face looked relieved, too, more relieved than a leader should be over the fate of a single young man.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He’d lost his quarry; then he’d found the invisible man but had fled from him. And the other Imperfect, the older man, was still at large. He hadn’t achieved anything, except that he’d punished his patrol as Rider Cornatan wanted.
Rider Cornatan shook his head. “This is bigger than you. Bigger than all of us, I’m afraid.”
“Is that what’s going on? What those riots are about?”
“The whole of the Outer City is in uproar over the young Champion’s dismissal. They see him as their champion. There are a lot of troublemakers on the streets out for a fight. They seem to have support from locals.”
The black pit in Carro’s stomach grew. “Just like when the uprising against the king started,” he whispered.
Rider Cornatan stared in the distance. He nodded, once.
“We must stop this,” Carro said.
“I don’t know that we can.”
Rider Cornatan met his eyes. Carro could guess what would happen next. As the only Knight from the Outer City, he would have to be involved in calming the people down. Except he could never do that. Didn’t Rider Cornatan know that Carro wasn’t exactly popular with many in the Outer City?
“I have an important mission for you.”
See? There it was. Rider Cornatan was expecting far too much of him. And he was going to fail.
* * *
Carro sits at the desk in the warehouse. His father is pacing the floor.
“You, boy, when you’re here, you’re nothing but the lowest-ranking of my workers. You do not chat to the customers, or to other workers.”
Carro nods and looks down to the columns in the book. For the last two pages, his handwriting has been atrocious, but his fingers are too cold to write properly. He wasn’t chatting to anyone; he was only accepting a warm drink from the girl in the office, who had felt sorry for him.
* * *
“Are you all right, boy?”
Carro shook the memory out of his head. By the skylights, he still hadn’t been able to get the ichina.
“I’m fine.”
Rider Cornatan frowned.
“Really, I’m fine.” Even to his own ears, he sounded nervous. “Tell me what you want me to do.” He might as well face the disaster head-on.
“I’m going to send you out of the city.”
“Sir?” That was the last thing Carro expected to hear.
Rider Cornatan looked away, almost as if he couldn’t bear to meet Carro’s eyes. The black feeling increased.
“The trouble started in the Outer City because we took the champion in custody for having lied about his condition. He used his evil power and escaped. At the same time, in a different part of the city, someone killed the Queen’s driver and her bears and destroyed her sled. When a new one arrived, Jevaithi and her escort were caught up in a riot. In amongst the fighting, we lost her. We’ve found no trace of the champion or the Queen. But someone freed the champion’s eagle. It took off for the mountains. We suspect that he released it himself, and that he’s with the Queen.”
Isandor with Jevaithi? Yet Carro had seen that look passing between them and he knew it to be true.
“I’m sending you with the hunters to go and find her. Understand that it’s a vital mission. If we can’t produce the Queen, the people of the City of Glass are going to turn against us.” He lowered his voice. “Unless we can find the Queen, the Knights will be slaughtered. The Brotherhood has become too strong, and understand icefire much better than we do. We must have the Queen, Carro.”
A vital mission all right, but why would Rider Cornatan send him with vastly more experienced hunters?
“Maybe you ask why I entrust you with such an important mission.”
“Yes, I’m not experienced enough—”
Rider Cornatan drew something from his pocket and he gave it to Carro: a bundle of velvet, heavy in his hand. “It is because I trust you like no other.”
“Sir, what. . . ?”
“Open it.”
Carro folded the material back.
Inside lay a golden medallion with worked, scalloped edges and patterns stamped into the flat surface. A finely made gold chain hung from the eyelet at the top.
“Do you recognise this, boy?”
Carro ran his finger over the surface, depicting a Tusked Lion rearing on its hind flippers. He had seen this in his books. He swallowed. “Isn’t this . . . the crest of the Pirosian House?”
A smile curled one corner of Rider Cornatan’s mouth. “Very good. The crest of the Pirosian House indeed. You might have read, too, that there are only two of these medallions.”
Rider Cornatan took the medallion from the velvet, unfastened the clip on the chain. He looped both sides around Carro’s neck. He refastened the clip and arranged the medallion on Carro’s chest, a satisfied look on his face. Carro held his breath, but still smelled the waft of musk and harness oil that hung in the Supreme Rider’s clothing.
“Only two. One of these medallions belongs to the male heir of the Pirosians; the other, my son, belongs to his successor.”
His heart thudding, Carro looked up into the wrinkled face. “You’re . . .” He hardly dared say it. “You’re my father? My real father?”
The smile grew.
“But why . . .” All that hostility, all those sniping remarks, the cryptic questions, the nastiness. The man he’d known as his father had been paid to look after him. Just like he knew Senior Knights would deal with their successors.
“Why have you grow up in the Outer City, with a man hardly worth his spit and a woman who would have been better off a whore?”
Carro flinched, felt a brief urge to defend the man and woman he’d known as his parents, but then a feeling of rightness descended on him. He had never fitted in. His father had always hated him. His mother, too. He’d looked too different from his sister to believe they were related. He’d just assumed that his father had used
a different breeder for him and his sister, but now . . .
“I’ve not shared my rooms with a woman; that is not possible for me since Riders have sworn off such pleasures. But as Pirosian heir, I needed a successor. So I paid a young virgin of the purest Pirosian blood to give me one, for good money, and then hid you in a place I knew my enemies would not look and would not recognise you. The Thillei are more slippery than you think.”
Yes, they were, Carro realised. The Thillei had tried to subvert him by letting Isandor befriend him. How could he have been so blind?
He clutched the medallion in a white-knuckled hand. He’d been stupid, stupid. “I won’t let you down. I’ll find our Queen.”
Rider Cornatan’s face hardened. “Listen, son. I’ll tell you another secret. Jevaithi isn’t our Queen. When the Thillei emperor was deposed, the people didn’t want another dictator, so the Pirosian clan offered our female heir, since it was agreed that we should only have queens.”
“Does that mean you are Jevaithi’s father?” I am royalty?
“No, and that is where the problem lies. But we need to go further back than that. After the people had ousted the old king and instated the Pirosian queen, the Thilleians were desperate to recapture the throne. First, an agent infiltrated the palace and raped our queen. She fell pregnant, but the palace midwives managed to safely get rid of the child before it was born.”
A visible shudder passed over Rider Cornatan. “That was probably just as well. The child was . . . not normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you heard of the legend of the crossbreed? The children of the purest Pirosians and the purest Thilleians?”
Carro did remember from the books. Old prints showed demon-like figures with claws and wings. He nodded. “But I thought those were all stories.”
“Some of it no doubt is untrue, but when we have the time, I will show you a sample preserved in a jar in the palace birthing room. It’s not just any sample, but this very child, as big as your hand, but already showing its animal nature. Old measuring equipment showed that the creature—I won’t use the term baby to describe it—attracted an inordinate amount of icefire. It even used the evil power to change its appearance into shapes too horrible to contemplate, before it had left its mother’s body.”
“The child was alive?”
Rider Cornatan nodded, once, pressing his lips together. “When the healers took it from the poor queen’s womb, yes. It took five people to kill it.”
Carro felt sick.
“Anyway, after that disaster, the Queen was shaken, of course. We chose one of us to father the queen’s child as soon as she recovered. It was done, and she gave birth to a healthy girl. However, we had never caught the Thilleian agent who was the father of the abomination. Soon after the birth of our princess, he, or someone else, came back and took the newborn baby, replacing her with another of the same age, who looked exactly like her, but grew up nothing like the Queen. You do know that Maraithe’s mother killed herself?”
Carro nodded. Performers in the melteries still sang about the tragedy.
“That was because she couldn’t live with the hatred she felt for her baby daughter, a baby that wasn’t hers. You hear? Maraithe was a Thilleian impostor, but none of us realised. We thought we had eliminated all Thilleians.”
But, Carro thought, that meant—
“Maraithe grew up normally, and never showed any sign of who she really was. We relaxed and, at that time, still suspected nothing. Things were good; the evil had been ousted. But then Maraithe reached maturity and we needed to find a father for her child. We thought to consider all possible candidates fairly. Some Senior Knights were engaged in battles of words and occasionally swords. Maraithe demanded a say in the matter as well.”
Was that usual? Carro wondered, and then realized that there was no “usual”. The system hadn’t been in place long enough.
“Anyway, it was all a very lengthy process, and while we were debating a suitable father for Maraithe’s children, time passed, and passed. Maraithe was twenty-nine, and all of a sudden, she was pregnant. She had said nothing, and one day she came into the Knights’ Council in a tight dress that was stretching around her belly.” He shuddered with the memory. “We put on a brave face, since it was much too late to ask the midwives to abort the child. The people had noticed her pregnancy, and you know how popular the queens are. For all we knew back then, it didn’t really matter who the father was. But it did. Maraithe gave birth not two moon cycles later. Early, the midwife said, but she was carrying twins.”
“Twins?”
“Yes. Jevaithi and a boy.”
“What happened to the boy?”
“He was left on the ice floes.”
“He was . . . Imperfect?”
“Yes. So is Jevaithi. That is the dreadful secret we keep. Jevaithi hasn’t a drop of Pirosian blood in her veins.”
Carro’s head reeled. Queen Jevaithi Imperfect and no one had ever noticed? No wonder the queen hardly ever showed herself. Here was another betrayal. He’d sworn his allegiance. To protect her with his life. As many Knights did, he’d dreamed of her many a night, wanted her in his bed.
Rider Cornatan continued, “Now it appears that our enemies have taken Jevaithi back. I don’t know what they plan to do with her, but with the potential of icefire, they could destroy everything and kill us. I don’t think she’ll have any hesitation in helping them. She hates us badly enough. That’s why we must act now, before she has a chance to learn to use icefire. You must bring her back to calm the people. We must have her back here to control her. That’s why I’m sending you. I trust no one else.”
Carro wasn’t trusting himself at that moment. Jevaithi was a Thilleian? A betrayer? A feeling of sickness welled up in his stomach.
“And the hunters?”
“My special team. You’ve met Farey.”
“Yes.” Carro fought to restrain a blush. Then he had another thought: every man in the Knighthood had known who he was all along? Now he understood the remarks the Tutor had made about his status.
“Find her and bring her back here, son, before it’s too late and the evil spreads. Promise me.”
Carro straightened his back. If he was highborn and Rider Cornatan said he was trustworthy, he must be. He’d sworn allegiance to the throne not to Jevaithi.
“I promise.”
And what about Isandor? Capture him too? His friend?
If that’s what it took to get his father’s approval . . . Isandor was not his friend anymore; he shouldn’t be.
Rider Cornatan looked into his eyes. “Can you say the word to me, just once?”
“I promise, Father.”
Rider Cornatan let go of his hands and closed his arms around Carro’s shoulders.
“I love you, son. Never give up. The City of Glass belongs to the Pirosian House.”
Chapter 26
* * *
THE EAGLE stretched out its feet, flapped huge brown and white wings and landed on the snow-covered hillside.
Isandor unlooped his arms to release Jevaithi. She slid from the saddle into the snow, stretching her arms and stamping life into her legs. He unclipped his harness and followed her down, drinking in the silence after the roar of wind in his ears for so long.
The surrounding landscape bathed in soft pastel tones: pale blues of pristine snow, the golden light of the sun low above the horizon, and pink and orange hues of the sky.
Isandor squinted into the sunlight. The mountains rose at his back, and long shadows cast the valleys between the foothills in blue shadow. The City of Glass was well out of sight, almost a day’s flying distance away, but he felt its constant pull inside him. The City of Glass was his home; it was Jevaithi’s home. She was the queen and all the people should listen to her. They should go back and get rid of the Knights. They should . . .
A soft sound yanked him from the uninvited thoughts.
Jevaithi ploughed through knee-deep snow
to a wooden hut half-hidden by a stand of gnarled trees. She pushed open the door—it creaked, causing a big slab of snow to slide off the roof—and looked inside.
Anything? He was still feeling shaken, wanting to be rid of that need to return. He didn’t want to return.