by Jen Williams
Vintage looked back from where she had been circling the crystal. Bern was leaning against the wall, his eyes shut.
‘I’ve had to cut myself off from them, as much as I can anyway.’ He opened his eyes and looked at the floor. ‘But I can still feel them in the background – Aldasair, Sharrik, Tor. Something bad has happened out there.’
‘Fuck my old boots.’ Vintage rubbed her hands over her face. ‘I had hoped inspiration would strike, my dear, once we were in here.’ She gestured at the crystal. There was an alien landscape caught inside it, just like the one Nanthema had been trapped in. ‘I know so much more than I did! But it’s still not enough. You have your axe? I think we will need to do this the most obvious way, as much as that pains me.’
‘Break it? If we do that . . .’
‘We don’t know what will happen. So, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, let’s try it!’
Bern slipped the axe from its loop, and hefting it, came towards the crystal. Within it an alien landscape waited, but despite her curiosity Vintage was happy to ignore that. Theirs had never been an especially robust plan, and this was exactly where it could all go to shit. After all, hadn’t Esiah tried to free his son from the crystal by smashing it, and failed? But it was the only idea they had, and Vintage was a firm believer in the potential genius of last-minute intervention.
Bern held the axe high and to his side, the considerable muscles in his shoulders and arms bunching, and then swung it. The blade hit the crystal with an unpleasant discordant ringing, but it did not break. As far as Vintage could see, there wasn’t even a scratch.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Keep going. It may need weakening.’
Bern did so, striking again and again and again. He did not seem to tire – Vintage suspected that, back in Finneral, Bern the Younger was no stranger to chopping wood – but the crystal did not shatter. Eventually, he stood back, the axe at his side.
‘Try again.’ Vintage swallowed down the surge of panic in her throat. ‘Perhaps try a different place? There could be a fault line . . .’
‘These things were made to last for centuries. For longer than that.’ Bern was staring at the crystal, although Vintage couldn’t tell if he was looking at its surface, or the alien landscape beyond. ‘Stretches of time we’ll never be able to understand. I can almost feel how long it was, but if I go too close to that, I can feel my mind starting to get ragged at the edges. When Aldasair destroyed the crystal in the Broken Field, it was already cracked.’ He smiled. ‘There might be another way, though.’
Fastidiously, Bern slipped the axe back into his belt, and pressed his hand with its embedded crystal to the surface of the shard.
‘Bern? Bern, what are you doing?’
‘I’m going to give it something else to think about.’
For a long moment, nothing happened. Vintage glanced back to the door, wondering how they would get back if this went wrong, if the others would be able to pull them out before whatever had happened outside ended them all. And then, the shifting landscape of boiling green sky and yellow sea inside the crystal began to drop away in pieces, being replaced by something else.
‘Bern?’
The big man was lost to her, his green eyes staring deeply into the crystal as though everything he’d ever wanted was inside. Gradually, she saw a new landscape forming. There was a sky white with snow clouds, and in the distance, a thick green band of trees that was almost black. She saw flagstones of marble, streaked with mud, and unlike the alien world it was replacing, there were people here – men and women and children, crowded around colourful tents and a tall, elegant fence. It was, she realised, a place she knew very well – the Eboran palace.
There were campfires and all the people, she saw, were wearing winter clothes. There was a figure standing in the midst of it all, looking lost, and he seemed to shine more brightly than anyone else there. It was Aldasair, somehow younger and less careworn than the Aldasair she knew, his long auburn hair a tangled mess, his clothes faintly dusty. Vintage could see every detail of him; the particular crimson of his eyes, the line of his jaw, the way his hair fell against the collar of the old-fashioned blue jacket he wore. It was a memory that blotted out everything else, and all around them, the Behemoth began to wail its protest.
‘Oh Bern,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘You are a bloody genius.’
‘We have to help him!’
Vostok was already diving towards the sticky, oozing presence of the queen, and Noon had her arms up ready to give everything she had. Tor had disappeared into a fat black cocoon, looking very much like he was waiting to be eaten by a giant spider, while the queen herself crawled around it in mid-air, like some vast hybrid between woman and insect. Fire, green and violet, tore through the sky, but the queen threw up a wall of shifting ooze, and it curled harmlessly against it.
Dimly, Noon was aware of the others. Kirune was coming towards them, teeth bared, while Sharrik, Jessen and Helcate had descended on Celaphon, crowding the big dragon so that he could not move or reach them. Noon felt a surge of gratitude at that, and again became aware of the connection between them all – how had they not felt it before? They were family.
‘Let him go!’
The queen’s face split open, revealing row upon row of small white teeth, marching all the way down her throat.
‘This? He is already dead,’ she said. ‘We have seeped inside him and snuffed him out. Would you like his corpse? We understand that humans value that sort of thing.’
Noon screamed. In response, Vostok flew straight into the shivering web of fluid, jaws snapping wildly. The queen spun away from them carrying the cocoon, only to be faced with Kirune, his jaws wide. She recoiled, splitting into numerous threads as she did so.
‘It will be good to kill you myself, for once,’ the queen said. ‘I feel I have missed so much.’
The spiralling threads curled around them, snapping around Vostok’s chest and legs, tightening and shifting with every movement. Several fingers of the substance surged over Noon’s stomach, crawling rapidly up to her throat. Repulsed, she tried to pull them away, only to find her fingers sticking to it. Kirune roared, and glancing up she saw he had been caught in the web too. The big cat was furiously thrashing back and forth, biting at the threads that held him.
‘Vostok, can you move?’
The dragon roared her reply, her blast of violet fire cut off abruptly as the tendrils of the Jure’lia curled around her snout. Noon looked back to the cocoon that contained Tor. Perhaps, if she concentrated all of her winnowfire in once place, if she took all the energy she dared from Vostok, she could create an explosion big enough . . .
And then, all around them, the burrowers and the mothers and the winged-men began to drop from the sky. Hundreds of them, unmoving, their insectile legs held out at stiff angles, falling like a grotesque rain. There was a wordless, discordant cry from the queen and abruptly the bonds holding them grew slack, slithering back towards the corpse moon like thousands of panicked snakes.
‘What . . .?’
The cocoon that was holding Tor dissolved and Noon found herself watching as he fell, turning helplessly through the open sky.
‘Tor!’
Kirune was already there. The big cat dived, falling through the air and catching Tor like a kitten catching a ball of yarn. Meanwhile, the corpse moon, incredibly, was moving away towards the mountains and away from Ebora, although there was something lopsided about it. Celaphon and Hestillion had broken away from their own fight and had flown away as if startled. Sharrik and Helcate peeled off after the corpse moon to retrieve Vintage and Bern, and Noon found herself watching Kirune fly back up to them, Tor hanging from his teeth by his shirt.
‘You knew he was not dead,’ said Vostok, quietly. ‘We all would have felt it.’
Noon sat back in the harness. Her head was thumping steadily, and her ears ached as though someone had punched her. At some point in the fight one of the burrowers had torn the flesh of her
upper arm, and that side of her body was hot and sticky with blood.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But the idea of it was enough.’
For a long time Vostok did not say anything at all. Instead, they watched as Sharrik and Helcate returned from the Behemoth, carrying their precious cargo. In the distance they could still see the huge purple dragon, flying in circles over and over, until it turned away, following the corpse moon over the mountain. Weary and sore, Noon reached out to the others via their newly forged link and, as one, they flew back, heading towards the broken buildings of Ebora. The sun was sinking towards the horizon, Noon noticed with surprise. How long had they been fighting?
‘It’s over,’ said Vostok. ‘This battle has been won, at least.’
56
Tor sat up in bed, reaching to the side table for the bottle of wine. He poured himself a glass, but did not drink it. The taste of Noon’s blood was still in his mouth and he wasn’t quite ready to wash that away just yet. It had been three days since their battle with the corpse moon, and with Vintage’s stern instructions and the blood, he was feeling quite recovered, but still – he was happy to rest a while longer. He was still having nightmares, ones that he could not dream-walk his way out of. In these dreams, the oozing mass of the Jure’lia queen swallowed him up again and again, flowing into his mouth and up his nose, cutting off his air supply and blinding him. The dreams would fade, he hoped. Wine would help, and blood.
‘Were you tempted?’ asked Noon. She was sitting in a chair by the bed, her legs drawn up to her chest. She still had a bandage around the top half of her right arm. ‘When Arnia asked you to stay there?’
Tor pressed his lips together. ‘I can honestly say that I was not. Staying in the same place forever. Does that sound like me?’
Noon made a small, noncommittal noise.
‘It was another kind of trap,’ continued Tor. He swirled the wine in the glass; it smelled of spring, grassy and sharp. ‘A pretty one, maybe. One that looked a lot like how things used to be here. But it wasn’t Ygseril’s sap that was keeping Arnia young.’
‘What they did,’ said Noon slowly, ‘was unforgivable. They didn’t just steal the blood of those people, they took their lives too.’ She looked up at him. Her hair had fallen to one side, exposing the crude batwing tattoo on her forehead. ‘Generations and generations of lives. And it will be generations more before those people recover from it. Things like this, they leave wounds that fester. People who step on others, who crush them so they can live comfortable lives . . . they should be destroyed.’
Tor nodded, watching Noon carefully.
‘Are you all right, witch?’
She smiled lopsidedly. ‘It’s given me a lot to think about, that’s all.’
‘We all have a lot to think about.’ Tor took a sip of the wine. ‘We might have won the battle, but the Jure’lia are out there still, and I don’t think they’ll let us get away with the same trick twice. We need to get stronger, and fast. The amber tablets might help, but we’ll need assistance from other places too. Bern has sent messages to his family in Finneral, letting them know he’s still alive, but perhaps we can forge a greater alliance with them.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m not quite sure what’s going on between Aldasair and Bern, but I think we’re going to be growing a lot closer to the Finneral royal family.’
‘They are in love,’ said Noon, simply. ‘That’s what is going on between them.’
There was a long silence then, and Tor regretted drinking the wine. All at once the taste of Noon’s blood was all he wanted.
‘Speaking of which,’ he said, feeling suddenly faint for no reason that he could see, ‘maybe we should have a talk. I have been thinking, that is to say, the last couple of weeks have made some things clearer to me that should have been, well—’
‘Maybe later.’ Noon untangled herself from the chair, not looking at him. ‘I have some things to do.’
Tor watched her go. After a while, he filled his glass to the brim and drank it all down, ignoring how the sharp taste stung at his eyes.
It felt like all of Sarn lay below them, but in truth it was simply the low hills of the outer plains, and beyond that, the teeming stretch of life that was Mushenska. Noon leaned into the wind, enjoying how it ruffled her hair, and the tangy taste of the sea on her tongue.
‘The others are not going to like what we do here.’
Noon smiled, although it felt strange and stiff on her face. Reaching forward she pressed her hand against the warmth of Vostok’s scales.
‘So what?’
The dragon laughed reluctantly. ‘We don’t need more enemies.’
‘No. But they’ve been my enemy since I was eleven. They took my life and stole it, as they’ve been stealing the lives of women for hundreds of years.’
Beyond the lights and smoke of Mushenska, the grey sea stretched across the horizon, and, rising from it like a dark fracture against the sky, were the towers of the Winnowry.
‘The actions of cowards,’ said Vostok, disdain thick in her voice. Noon grinned, more naturally this time, and she narrowed her eyes at the sight of her old prison.
‘Let’s go and burn it all down.’
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Acknowledgements
I look back at this book and I’m not really sure where it came from or how it came to be – except that I know, of course, that a whole bunch of people helped me to wrangle it into existence.
Big thanks to the brilliant Frankie Edwards, who has jumped on this runaway trilogy-train with all the enthusiasm and panache of a bad-ass Indiana Jones, and thanks as ever to the fabulous Claire Baldwin, who continues to keep it on the tracks – I couldn’t ask for better editors. Love and gratitude to my extraordinary agent, Juliet Mushens, whose excellent advice was key to bringing The Bitter Twins to life. Juliet isn’t just a fantastic agent of course; she just happens to be one of my very favourite people and dearest friends – saltmates 4 lyfe. Huge thanks as ever to those writer friends who offer endless support and periodically listen to my ranting (usually about people hating on Star Trek): Den Patrick, who knows where the bodies are buried; Adam Christopher, who advised on disposal; and Andrew Reid, who helped me put them there.
This book is dedicated to my dad, who wasn’t in my life for long but certainly left an impression. I think he would have been dead chuffed that I became a writer, and I think he would have loved these books, with their weirdness and grossness and swearing. Credit must go to my mum, who not only put up with all my usual nonsense this year, but also looked after me while I recovered from an operation – this involved watching The Crown with me and baking me chocolate chip rock cakes, so I had a pretty good time for someone missing an organ. And of course as ever I must tip my hat to Jenni, my oldest friend and first source of wisdom.
Lastly, all my love and eternal gratitude to my partner Marty (known to some of you, for complicated reasons, as Doug) who continues to believe in these books, and my ability to write them, during those times when I’d rather crawl into Skyrim and never come out. Love you babe.
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