by Patty Jansen
Tandor had them both in his grip. “Do you know who Tandor is?”
“He grew up with a merchant’s family in Chevakia.” Her jade eyes blinked, the eyelashes so perfect.
“Yes, but who is he? Why does he want your heart?”
“Or yours?” The eyes blinked again. Icefire whirled in their depths. The wan light slanting in through the window silvered the soft fuzz of hair on her cheeks. So perfect. He knew what he should do beyond doubt. Tandor must never get his prize.
He leaned over her, stroking her hair. “I don’t know what he wants, but I don’t like it. I think we should—”
“Sorry, but talk doesn’t make me free. I really must have your heart.” Her lunge took him by surprise. The knife cut his shirt at the shoulder and managed to draw blood. He gripped her arm to wrestle the knife from her. Flat on the ground, her face was so close. She struggled, holding onto the knife with white-knuckled fingers.
“Stop! Stop it.” Isandor’s blood roared in his ears. “He wants us to take each other’s hearts, so he will be the only person with icefire and a sane mind.” Without a heart, he would be like the blue giant—speechless and meek.
A tiny frown crossed her face. “How do you know?” Oh, so perfect.
He should do it now, he should . . . “I don’t know for certain, but that’s what I think.”
“But how could he want me dead? I’m a girl; I’m fertile; he’s my father. I’m the official queen. He could be powerful through me.” Tears blinked again in her eyes.
What she said was true. Tandor could be powerful through her, if he was her father, if. On the other hand, how easily could Tandor mislead a grieving girl by telling her he was her long-lost father.
He reached up and wiped moisture from the corner of her eye. “We’ll never find out, will we?” And when she frowned, he added in a low voice, “Because I’m not going to bring him your heart. It belongs to me.”
Then his lips were on hers and the blood from his chest stained the remains of her nightgown. His hands slick with his own blood, he touched those perfect breasts, feeling how her heart thudded against her ribs.
She responded. Reaching up, pulling him closer, deeper into the kiss, arching her back, pressing her breasts against him. Throbbing with hot desire, he ripped the nightgown from her shoulders. Her knife fell uselessly to the floor. She stiffened at the thud, and broke the kiss, her lips glistening with moisture. “Isandor, I . . . Tandor . . .”
He put his hand on her mouth. “Shhh, don’t speak. We’re safe here for now. Tandor is waiting at my house.”
“But the knight outside will know if neither of us does Tandor’s wishes.”
“We’ll worry about the knight later.”
He carried her to the bed and continued a struggle of quite a different kind, not sure what to do, since he had never done this before, but nature guided him where his experience failed. Even the groans like those he so hated coming from his mother’s sitting room burst unbidden from his lips. Warm and satisfied, she fell asleep in his arms. Isandor lay there, staring at her face, wondering how to get out of this mess.
To help her he needed to leave the palace. But Tandor’s spy stood outside. As soon as he left the room, the knight would check on the queen and see she still had her heart. Still in possession of his own heart, Isandor wouldn’t even get out of the palace. Maybe Tandor meant this to happen, because Tandor clearly wanted not just his heart, but both their hearts; they would both be slaves.
No, the only means to leave safely was to bring Tandor the heart—any heart. He had an idea.
Isandor slipped from the bed and picked his knife off the floor. Hands trembling, he thrust it deep into her chest. He worked quickly and efficiently, trying to think of the butchery and not of the woman he loved. Icefire flowed from his hands and filled the cavity in her chest. There was no blood. She didn’t even wake up.
Not much later, he kissed her forehead and sneaked from the room, leaving her asleep, blue and heart-less, his treasure pulsing in a pouch around his neck. The guard outside the door let him out, his face impassive. But when Isandor waited for the carriage down, the man glanced into the room and returned to his post, apparently satisfied.
* * *
Just before the sled came into the Slums, Isandor jumped from the seat. He tumbled into a bank of snow drift, and waited, sore and cold, until the sled had gone. Then he scrambled out of the snow and ran through the streets to the butchery.
His uncle was there, slicing at a wild bear carcass. He raised his eyebrows. “Isandor? You look like—”
Isandor didn’t care what he looked like. As if he’d been beaten up by Carro no doubt. “Quick, Mother has told me to get a fresh Legless Lion heart.”
Frowning, his uncle sloshed over the blood-covered floor to the bench piled with cuts of meat. “Just one?”
“Yes,” Isandor said, and when his uncle closed his meaty hand around his ware, he added, “Be careful.”
“Careful? Haha. I knew you were a funny one! This lion is dead as a stone.” He flung the heart in a bag, sloshed back and dumped his ware in Isandor’s hands. Ice-cold it was.
Walking home through the snow-covered alleys, Isandor warmed the heart with his icefire and with all the strength he could muster. He wasn’t trained, and had used much of his energy to fill Jevaithi’s empty chest, but eventually he made the heart pulse. It was a listless, dead sort of beat, not at all like the strong throb of Jevaithi’s heart which warmed his chest, but it would have to do.
By the time he returned to the house, he trembled with fatigue and cold. The sled waited outside; the curtains of his mother’s indecent room had been pulled aside.
Tandor sat by the fire, looking up, but saying nothing. A carafe of bloodwine stood on the table next to him, spreading its heavy scent of spirits in the room.
Isandor walked across the room and handed Tandor the bag.
Tandor still said nothing, but placed it on the table and reached inside, a greedy look on his face.
Isandor expected an explanation why he needed this gruesome thing, or maybe just a word of thanks, but Tandor took a carving fork off the table, with two teeth, each as long as a grown man’s fingers. With a squelch, he drove it into heart and, still beating, he held it into the fire.
A smell of burnt meat spread through the room, adding to the suffocating air.
Tandor sat there quietly, turning the fork around as if a simple piece of game was on the end. Occasionally, he took it out of the fire and studied the heart, which had stopped beating and had gained a uniform dark brown crust.
He nodded, and slid it off onto a plate, grabbed a knife and sliced a piece off. He picked it up and, fingers running with oil, put it in his mouth. “Wonderful.” He chewed.
Isandor said nothing. He couldn’t. He could only watch as Tandor cut another slice and ate that, too, wondering how Tandor could eat this, what he would believe to be his daughter’s heart, and wondering how he could refuse if offered a piece.
But Tandor didn’t. And that made Isandor think.
Because if the meat had tasted wonderful, he would have offered Isandor a piece, just for the cruelty of it. But Tandor didn’t offer Isandor some. And that had to mean something. Finally, he could no longer contain his curiosity. “I take it you’re not doing this for malice or spite.”
“Malice has little to do with it,” Tandor said, munching his way through another bite.
That made Isandor think even harder. If someone ate your heart, did you die?
Tandor answered for him, waving in the air another piece speared on the end of his knife. “If someone eats your heart, you’re forever theirs. They obey you.” He popped the last piece in his mouth.
Facts connected. “Like
the driver of the sled.”
A grimace came over Tandor’s face. “Very smart, boy.”
“But you would do that to your own daughter?”
“She told you that, did she?” Tandor pushed himself up from the chair and walked around Isandor. “What else did she tell you? About her imprisonment? About how her mother died young of the dreadful ailment that kills hundreds in the city every day? Of the fact that icefire protects you against it? Of the fact that I’ve been protecting imperfect children because they are the ones who will survive, and breed and be powerful rulers?”
Isandor’s mind whirled. Protecting Jevaithi by wanting to eat her heart? With all the will in the world, he couldn’t believe that.
Tandor chuckled. “It did happen as I have planned, didn’t it? I can see it on your face. You fell in love with Jevaithi and planted her with your seed.”
Blood rushed to Isandor’s cheeks. He hadn’t quite thought of that particular consequence of his actions. Then he thought further. If, if Tandor was telling the truth and Jevaithi would have a child, would the child be imperfect, and have icefire, as all imperfects? And by eating their hearts, wouldn’t Tandor acquire their strength? And wasn’t that what Tandor wanted? An army of heartless people, lending him their icefire, and their strength? The heat of Jevaithi’s icefire throbbed against his chest. Tandor must never be allowed to have it.
Tandor still circled. His footsteps clacked on the slate floor. “I was also right in predicting that you wouldn’t bring me your lover’s heart. I’m not easily fooled, Isandor.”
Isandor’s breath caught. A deep chill went through him.
Tandor stopped, turned around and reached for the sword above the mantelpiece. “That does not change my situation. I want the Queen under my influence. When you go missing, she’ll come after you. So now I’m afraid I’ll have to control her through your heart.”
“No!” Isandor yelled. He grabbed the carafe of blood wine, hurled into the hearth and bolted for the door.
* * *
The living room exploded in a ball of fire. Isandor ran into the bedroom, almost crashing into his mother, who was packing her travel case on the bed. Going to the palace.
He took no notice of her indignant cries, nor of Tandor’s shouts and the crack of fire from the living room, but dragged the chest from under his bed, hurled it out the window and jumped after it into a frozen heap of rubbish.
Out into the street he dragged the chest. The sled and the driver stood there motionless. Isandor shouted at the blue man, but he didn’t show a sign of having heard. Then he whistled hard. As he had suspected, Carro was again drinking at the meltery, and his eagle could not resist the whistle to which he had been primed. The eagle came.
The feathers of the outstretched wings touched the walls on both sides of the street. Talons spread wide and crunching the ice, he landed before Isandor, who tied the chest to the eagle’s harness, mounted the great bird’s back and whistled.
With slow wingbeats, the eagle rose over the roofs of the Slums. Up here, the cold air bit into the bare skin of Isandor’s hands and face, and his wooden stump kept slipping out of the stirrups, but he hung onto the harness. The white plain passed under him, to be replaced by the jagged shapes of the Floes. He nudged the eagle down until it sailed low over the ice.
The owners of the hearts were already waiting for him. Three White Bears, two Legless Lions and four great Tusked Lions, their blue outlines ghostly. Isandor unhooked the chest from the harness. It fell, bounced twice and broke, spilling its precious contents over the ice. Jars shattered; hearts bounced up, releasing showers of icefire. His icefire, Isandor realised, locked up for years.
Next time the eagle circled, the animals were whole. The bears’ blue fur had turned white and the lions were mottled and lazed on the ice floes, the way they were supposed to be. That was one wrong turned right.
He whistled at the eagle, who once more took to the heights, flying towards the jagged peaks of the City of Glass. In the pouch against his chest, he kept one last heart to be returned.
On the eagle flew, and on. Isandor kept looking over his shoulder, but saw nothing that should worry him. Above the dark blob of houses that was the Slums hung a haze of smoke from the fires stoked with dung bricks. One such bricks he kept in his saddle-pouch, in the hope it would be tough enough for the job.
When the eagle crossed the city boundary, Isandor tapped the animal on the neck, a gesture he remembered from his training. It gave a cry to its comrades on the ground, letting them know who he was.
Isandor urged the bird on. They didn’t have much time before his trick was discovered. Carro would already have reported the eagle missing. One of those many sleds down there could be carrying the news.
Higher, he urged the bird, and higher, circling the palace tower. Most windows were dark and lifeless, many missing glass, but a fire blazed behind the topmost unbroken window, and a gleam of white shimmered inside.
Jevaithi.
He hurled the dung brick.
It hit the window.
And bounced off with a clear tone of singing glass.
No, Jevaithi.
Isandor grabbed that tone, held it with his icefire, and it grew, and grew, as if feeding from the building. Icefire, locked inside the buildings of the city.
Still, the tone grew, and the air vibrated . . .
The glass shattered. Shards twinkled in the air like diamonds, all down the side of the tower. They crashed into the street in a tremendous roar.
Isandor reined in the eagle. It alighted in Jevaithi’s room, in front of the hearth, hissing at the flames that leapt wildly in the sudden rush of air.
Jevaithi was there, in her nightgown, on the bed.
Isandor slid off the eagle’s back, lifted Jevaithi in his arms. The blue glow from her body tainted his hands and crept to the pouch around his neck, where her body sensed her heart. She reached out for him, without speaking.
He whispered, “I’m sorry I took it, but I’m here to give it back.” He yanked the pouch from under his shirt.
She shook her head.
A deep dread settled in Isandor’s chest. She didn’t believe him? She wouldn’t forgive him? Could she even hear him?
But then she said, “I want you to keep it.” Her voice was wispy and ethereal.
“But I already have a heart.” He stood there clumsily, holding the pulsing pouch. Then he had an idea. “Take mine.” His hands trembling, he gave her the knife. She wouldn’t take it at first, but he pressed the heft in her single hand; it was ice-cold. “Go on, it’s only fair.”
“I love you Isandor. I don’t want to hurt you.” Her bottomless eyes looked uncertain.
“Did I hurt you when I took it? Did you even wake? You have the icefire, like me. You can do it. We draw icefire from this city. It is all in your bones. You can’t fail, not here. I want you to have my heart, so I can never hurt you again.”
She took the knife in her only hand and hefted it above her head in a glint of metal. Isandor closed his eyes.
The pain of icefire sliced through him, but he kept his lips firmly together. Her hand, warm and dainty, slid inside his chest. Every fibre of her life connected with his. He saw her tower room prison, her mother, laid out on a bier. He saw himself lunging for her, then kissing her, then with his eyes closed in the magic moments of making love. She saw—he felt—the steady heartbeat of the child growing inside her. A cripple child with icefire, which should never fall in Tandor’s hands.
She lifted out his heart, pulsing vigorously. For a moment, she stood there, then she brought it to her lips and kissed it, blood tainting her lips. The love that flowed through him brought tears to his eyes. He took her heart out of his pouch and did the same, looking i
nto her bottomless stone eyes and her white marble face.
“I love you Isandor.”
“I love you Jevaithi.”
They both slid each other’s hearts in their chests.
The pain of icefire spiked through him like an electrical storm. For the duration of that tempest, he clung onto her, and she onto him.
Then all was still. Shards of glass glittered all over the tower room. The fire had gone out. On the ledge, where once had been a window, the eagle clicked its beak.
“We must flee before the knights come.” Colour had returned to her face and her voice sounded normal.
“Or Tandor.” Isandor jumped onto the eagle, pulling her in front. The bird hopped to the edge in two jumps and launched itself into the sky, flying north.
A Word of Thanks
* * *
THANK YOU very much for reading The Icefire Trilogy.
As author of this book, I would appreciate it very much if you could return to the place where you purchased this book and leave a review. Reviews are important to me, because they help readers decide if the book is for them.
Also be sure to put your name on my mailing list (http://eepurl.com/qqlAb), which I use exclusively to notify subscribers of new fiction. All other chat about my writing or worldbuilding and interaction with readers happens on my blog Must Use Bigger Elephants (http://pattyjansen.com/blog/), which you are welcome to follow.
About the Author
* * *
PATTY JANSEN lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. She has also sold fiction to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Redstone SF and Aurealis.