Chapter 14
Thorne
‘There’s going to be a change of plans,’ I told my mother. ‘I don’t want Roselyn killed.’
‘Why?’ she asked me, her eyes narrowing.
‘It’s unnecessary,’ I shrugged. ‘I overreacted.’
The Queen stared at me a long moment, and then slowly shook her head. ‘No.’
I blinked. ‘What do you mean “no”?’
Her eyebrows arched. ‘You don’t understand? It seems I’ve overestimated you – somehow.’
‘Ma,’ I snapped.
‘You made the choice. I made arrangements. It cannot be undone – it will not be.’
‘Execute someone else!’ I tried, something strange in my voice. It might have been desperation – I was unsure because I’d never felt it before.
‘We’ve already killed all the prisoners. The dungeon is empty.’
‘Then I’ll go out and find someone.’
She smiled, her teeth glittering in the dim light of her room. ‘What a savage you are, my boy,’ she murmured, and I felt myself go still. ‘I’m proud.’
I felt a deep discomfort steal over me. I was so tired – the Kayan man had been joining me in my bedchamber every night.
‘Did you … did you mate with a berserker to create me?’ I asked.
Ma blinked. ‘Of course.’
So Rose had got it right after all. To be honest, I hadn’t doubted her for a second. She had a sixth sense for detecting lies. I, on the other hand, never had a clue if someone was lying to me. I had trouble reading beyond what they said.
‘That’s sick,’ I said softly, holding Eloise’s eyes.
A flash of anger passed through her. ‘Why?’
I didn’t know why.
‘Is it any sicker than what the filthy Kayans do to each other?’
‘I don’t wish to talk about the Kayans right now—’
‘They murder the people they love,’ she hissed, rising to her feet. ‘The bond? It’s vile. They send people to war against us and get twice as many killed.’
She was right. I hated it. Hated the idea of the bond so much that when I thought about it I sometimes found it hard to breathe. The simple understanding I had of it was this: if I was bonded to Roselyn as all of the Kayans were to their partners, her life would always be in as much danger as mine, and such a thing was unforgivably cruel. Every time I was challenged for my throne, every time I went into battle, every time my life was threatened, so too would hers be. The thought made me sick. The warder who had made the binding between couples back when the world was young was a man who deserved to be scoured from the earth’s memory, and when I ruled over Kaya, I would find some way to erase the bond and its destruction.
A sound returned me to my mother’s study and I realised she had successfully distracted me from the reason I was here.
‘Are you going to kill Roselyn or not?’ I forced out.
‘I already told you,’ she snapped. ‘It’s done. You cannot unmake a decision like that. You must bear the weight of it.’
I closed my eyes. Felt bile rise in my throat, then forced it back down, along with the emotions that were rising with it. As I turned and swept from the room there was a sense of chaos inside me. The chaos built, and I started to feel the signs of an attack coming upon me. Get a hold of yourself. I had to find Rose – she’d calm me down.
She wasn’t in our room. A terrified servant told me she’d gone down to the common area.
‘Why in the name of the Sword has she gone there?’ I snarled.
The girl shook her head, trembling from head to toe. ‘I don’t know, Your Majesty. She was wandering this way and that – one of her phantom moods had taken hold of her.’
I swore in fury, then turned and ran down the stairs. Rose knew she couldn’t go to the common area! Eight sets of steps took me down into the front hall. This was where the soldiers ate their meals and spent their evenings gambling and wrestling and enjoying themselves. It was a hive of activity – of loud, snarling, violent fun.
I stopped at the base of the stairs and looked around. A few of the men closest to me saluted, but I ignored them, scanning the hall.
‘She’s over there, sire,’ a man told me, gesturing to the far side.
Storming through the crowds of soldiers and scattering them out of the way, I came to a small commotion in the corner. Six men surrounded Roselyn, and they were pushing her between them, taking it in turns to grope her. Well – fair enough. She’d wandered mindlessly into the lion’s den, knowing full well that it wasn’t safe for her to be here. What did she expect?
Then all rational thought vanished as a wave of tremendous anger pummelled into me. A roar left my mouth, and everyone in the hall turned in alarm. I didn’t wait for them to stop – I charged into the circle. The man who was clutching Rose by the hair blinked in surprise, but had no time for anything else. He was a big man – one of the captains of my army. That didn’t matter. I lifted him into the air as if he weighed nothing and brought him down onto the ground, smashing his spine into pieces on the floor. He didn’t make a sound, but the others did.
‘Forgive us, sire!’ one of the men bellowed hastily, but I turned to him and dealt him a mighty blow to the head, crushing his skull. My breathing was coming in ragged gasps. I’d never be able to stop. The soldiers were scattering out of the way, but I wasn’t done. I grabbed one by the shoulders and flung him into the wall. He’d wake up with some broken bones, but at least he’d wake up.
‘How dare you?’ I raged, fury engulfing me. I’d cornered three of them against the wall, and they winced at the danger in my voice. I could barely see anything except red.
‘We’re sorry!’ one of them said.
‘You’re sorry?’ I snarled. ‘Sorry? What care have I for your regrets? No one touches my wife but me. Do. You. Understand?’
They nodded quickly. Every man in the hall had crowded in to see what was happening, and some of them watched with grins on their faces. Others looked wary of me – they were the smart ones. At this point, I would gladly have slaughtered the whole damn lot of them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Roselyn huddled on the floor, eyes tightly closed, her lips moving soundlessly.
‘If it happens again,’ I said softly, ‘I’ll kill you all, and I’ll enjoy it. Understood?’ They nodded once more. I clenched my jaw, trying to get a hold of myself. The bars of the cage were perilously close to giving way. I grabbed Roselyn’s arm and pulled her to her feet, then marched her out of there, calling over my shoulder, ‘Bury the dead yourselves – I don’t want the servants doing it.’
I walked her straight to the dungeons. ‘You know why you’re here.’ I flung her into the cold stone room. There was no one else in here anymore. I’d killed them all. She was alone, and as I stood there her big brown eyes gazed up at me, seeing right into me, understanding me better than I understood myself.
Breathing out, I rested my head on the bars. ‘Why’d you go down there, Rose?’
She didn’t say anything.
‘You can’t do that – just wander anywhere you like. It’s dangerous. They could have hurt you very badly.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because you’re a woman and you’re beautiful, and they lust after you. If you walk right into their hands, then you can expect them to do nothing less.’
She thought about that for a moment, eyes resting on the ground. Then she smiled, a dry quirk of the lips that held no humour at all. ‘I thought humans were different to animals.’
I thought of my mother, mating with a man in order to breed a loveless weapon. I thought of the way my men had treated my wife. I thought of the beast inside me.
‘So did I,’ I told Rose, ‘but I think we were both wrong.’
I lay alone in my bed, hating every second of it – it felt wrong without her. And that’s when it hit me – this was what it would be like every night when she was dead. Roselyn wasn’t the stupid one – I was. I felt drenched in my own fear and knew my response today hadn’t been about anger. It had been about the terror of seeing her harmed.
I’d lived my life for one thing – my country. My queen and my people and my land were what mattered. I’d always been exactly what they needed me to be. So what happened when I was no longer that man? Women were supposed to mean nothing. And yet one had made me hard, another had made me soft. They controlled me, the two of them, and a part of me hated them for it. The other part knew it was useless to fight. I was changed, somehow, and I was no longer good enough to belong here.
‘You’re almost there,’ the Kayan man said, appearing next to my bed again. I closed my eyes, trying to ignore him. In the end, though, I was too curious.
‘Almost where?’
‘You almost have it. You’re right, you don’t belong here – but it’s not because you aren’t good enough. She’s the one who isn’t good enough.’
‘Who?’
He gave me a steady look.
‘My ma,’ I breathed out. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that.’
‘Of course there is. You’re one of the deadliest men in the world. You just use your deadliness for all the wrong things.’
‘Why are you here?’ I whispered tiredly. ‘Haunting me?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘Because I killed you?’
He tilted his head slightly. ‘Thorne,’ he murmured slowly, ‘you know why I’m here.’
‘I’m … changing, aren’t I?’ I whispered. ‘Beginning to understand.’
He nodded, peering at me in the darkness. ‘Understand what?’ he prompted.
‘How much of a monster I am.’ Ignorance was definitely a lot easier. Knowing how depraved you were did nothing but tear you apart even more.
‘But it also gives you a chance,’ the man said, responding to my unspoken thought.
‘How do I make you go away?’ I asked him through clenched teeth.
He shrugged. ‘You know the answer to that too.’
A word he’d said to me on the first night he’d visited me rose to the surface of my mind. It was a frightening word. One that seemed impossible, indefinable, unreachable. ‘Redemption,’ I murmured.
My ghost nodded. ‘Redemption.’
Roselyn
Knowledge was frightening. Realisations were frightening. Change was the most frightening thing of all. As I lay in my cell, fingering the cracks in the floor, imagining how my very own pegasis would look to distract myself from the reality of what had just happened, thoughts kept popping into my head, and I didn’t much like them at all. What they all led to was one simple fact – I was trapped here, in a place where I didn’t belong.
I wished I were still blissfully unaware, as I had been my whole life. It didn’t make sense to know such a thing, when there was naught I could do about it. It only tore me apart, very slowly. Because with it came another thought – a question, really – if I did have a way to escape, would I take it, knowing I’d never see Thorne again?
Sometime late into the night, I heard footsteps descend the steps into the dungeon. Whoever it was came to stand outside my cell, but it was so dark I couldn’t make them out. Then a scent reached me – the stench of blood – and I knew who it had to be. Terror struck me, in the way it only did when I was in the presence of this woman.
‘Roselyn,’ the Queen said, her voice high and cold.
I couldn’t speak. I should have addressed her, but I couldn’t. A shadow moved behind her, and I realised she wasn’t alone – of course she wasn’t alone. Vincent was with her, as always, and he smiled at me from behind her, his eyes twinkling with a sick kind of desire. There was only one person more frightening than the Queen, and that was her personal bodyguard.
‘Don’t fear, my darling,’ she murmured, and each word was like a knife slicing inside me, soft and slithering and deadly. ‘This will all be over soon enough.’ She paused. ‘Tell me, do you love my son?’
My voice broke. ‘Of course.’
‘Which one?’
I blinked, stuttering, ‘Thorne.’
‘Then why are you so cruel to him?’
‘I … I don’t …’
‘You humiliate him,’ she said simply. ‘You’re an embarrassment to our name. A girl like you – helpless – sitting by the side of the most powerful man in the country?’
There seemed to be something in my throat that was making it hard to breathe, hard to speak. But her words – those last words – confused me. ‘I thought … I thought we were supposed to be helpless at the side of our husbands. I thought that’s how you wanted us.’
She moved so that a shaft of moonlight glanced across her face and I could make out her expression. ‘Perhaps I’ve misjudged you. Maybe this stupidity of yours is all an act, and really you’re a snake, slithering its way into my family, preparing to strike.’
My mouth opened, but it took a moment for words to come. ‘You must not have believed me when I said I loved your son.’
‘I must not have,’ she agreed calmly. Then she shrugged, smiling slightly. ‘Well, either you’re stupid, or you’re acting like you are, but whatever the case, it matters not in the end. It will all be over soon enough. The solstice is in five days’ time.’ And then she left, whistling softly as she climbed the stairs and disappeared. Vincent stayed a moment longer, and the cold touch of fear was so severe that I almost lost my mind. Water gushed in my ears, waves crashed and threatened to pull me under. He grinned, his teeth sharp and deadly. And then he slipped soundlessly from the dungeon and I was dry again.
I sagged in relief, shivering in the cold. Using what little strength I possessed, I pushed the memories out, finding inspiration in my husband’s iron cage and making the bars in my own mind strong enough to forget.
Some time later I heard more footsteps and braced myself for the Queen’s return – perhaps she wished to torture me further. Instead I was met with the heavy boots of my husband. Thorne opened the bars and slipped into the cell. He was holding a huge pelt of animal fur, and he draped it over us both as he sank to the ground next to me. I didn’t understand, but the simple act, and the closeness of him were suddenly too much. Tears spilled out of my eyes and I covered my face with my hands, knowing he didn’t like me to cry in front of him.
He didn’t get angry, or leave. He put his arm around me and drew me into the crook of his side, one hand in my hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how else to be.’
I looked up into his face, into his deep blue eyes. One tear spilt onto his cheek, and something possessed me to lean up and kiss it away. I tasted the salt of it on my lips. We were in a new world, a new world that lay within that single tear. He’d taken my hand and led me into it, and it was so bright that it hurt my eyes. In this new world, you told the truth – all of it. Even the truths you’d kept hidden from yourself.
‘I’ve spent my whole life wanting,’ I told him. ‘Just wanting. I want everything. I want too much. And I think, maybe … it’s leading me away from here.’
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against mine, drawing his hand around to rest against my cheek. ‘You want everything,’ he muttered, ‘and yet I’ve given you nothing.’
I felt tears trickle all the way down over my chin and onto my neck.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he said, his voice deep and rough. ‘And now we have to leave.’
A sound escaped my mouth and I pulled back. ‘What?’
‘We have to leave here, Rose. I did something so foolish, and the only way to escape it is to leave this fortress.’
‘Where will we go?’ I whispered, barely daring to believe. This was something I’d never let myself hope for – to escape with Thorne.
‘South along the shore,’ he said, his eyes moving out of focus as he thought about his plan. ‘We’ll follow the oyster farms and then cut inland until we get to the other side of Pirenti. We can find somewhere to live far enough away that she won’t be able to reach us.’
I blinked very quickly. ‘Am I dreaming, Thorne?’
Suddenly he smiled, the rare smile. He was so handsome.
A new world. Where you told the truth. Where you were brave. ‘I love you,’ I told my husband for the very first time.
Slowly he nodded. ‘I know. I know that now, finally.’
Ava
After I threw my ring into the ocean, and a piece of myself with it, we went to bed. Ambrose believed we would be leaving the next morning, but I had a different plan. I didn’t sleep a single second that night. I rose while the moon was high and sat at the dressing table. Casting a look over my shoulder at his sleeping form, I felt my eyes change to gold, and knew I was doing the right thing.
I reached for a piece of parchment and a quill, and began to write.
You and I were not forged to love one another. That was a mistake.
Please don’t follow me.
A.
Ambrose
I awoke to find Ava gone and only that note in her place. I had no words and no thoughts and nothing left inside me. She hadn’t stayed, after all.
Ava
The guards saw me and let me pass. They were watching for a teenage boy, and tonight I had left my hair loose. I hiked through the jungle, keeping the water at my side. They had no vessels here, but there would be ships at the prison.
By midday, that’s where I found myself. Crouched in a thick copse of bushes on top of the hill, I peered down at the mighty stone building. It was perched on the edge of a cliff, the drop from which was enormous.
A ship was docked and currently unloading two prisoners. At least a dozen Pirenti guards lined the path to the prison, mighty axes slung over their backs. I watched the pair of smaller figures led past them, spat on and kicked as they stumbled their way into the stone fortress.
If I could sneak past those guards I’d be able to stowaway on the ship. It might prove difficult staying hidden and feeding myself on the journey back – it was supposed to be several weeks before docking in Pirenti – but there was nothing left to do but try, no other way to get off this island.
Don’t choose a memory over a flesh-and-blood man who loves you to oblivion and back.
Closing my eyes, I forced his voice from my head. He had no right to speak words like those. Even now, even with my certainty, there was still a person inside me clawing to turn back, to find him, screaming her fury at being dragged away from him, when all she wanted was his skin and his voice and his eyes for however many minutes were left in the world.
Keeping low, I crept down through the long grass, eyes peeled for the guards and their patrol routes. Most had gone inside now, but a few milled about, restocking the ship and readying it for the journey home.
I waited for a gap in their work, then slipped silently into the water. It was icy cold, and salt infused every inch of my body. The waves were rough, and they buffeted me back against the hard shore several times before I got enough purchase to strike out for the ship. Fingers finding the wood, I searched around for the anchor rope I’d been aiming for. Finding it, I surfaced, keeping only my eyes and nose above the water, watching for the guards. If I’d been doing this properly, I would have waited in the hills for several days, watching the patrol routes, taking note of the guards’ patterns to make sure I had a safe path onto the ship. But I didn’t have the time – I had no idea when the ship would depart, and I couldn’t risk missing it. So my approach was rushed and careless.
I snuck onto the deck, keeping low and alert, and I ran straight into a cluster of Pirenti guards.
‘Ye’ve got tae be jokin’,’ one of the men said softly, grinning in disbelief. He had tattoos all over his face. ‘Must a been sent ’ere by the Gods ’emselves, a Kayan whore for our amusement.’
‘Where did you come from, girl?’ another asked me, his eyes dark and serious, unlike his delighted companion’s.
I straightened, readying myself. This was bad – very, very bad. I had three options. I could turn and dive back into the water and swim for my life. I could let myself be captured, as I inevitably would be. Or I could fight them, and try to kill at least one before I died.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ the dark-eyed man ordered me, sensing my restless aggression. ‘Answer me – where did you come from?’
I said nothing. There were four of them. They all had weapons, but none were drawn. I had nothing but a knife in my boot and a belt looped around my waist.
Face Tattoos stepped forward a few paces, still smiling. ‘Mayhap she’s a Scrap come back fer more.’
Dark Eyes shook his head, watching me closely. ‘This one’s never been here before. Her skin’s unscarred.’
I swallowed, preparing myself.
‘Take her to a cell.’
Face Tattoos advanced happily. He would not be happy for long – my promise to him. Rage came – it took me in its hands and cleared my head of everything. It moved inside my lungs and my veins and my bones and my muscles. It made me strong. He reached for me; he was slow and stupid and he underestimated me. I would only have this advantage with the first man, so I had to use it quickly. Ducking low, I slid beneath his hands, reaching for my knife and twisting in the same moment to slash up through the thick artery in his fat thigh. A bright spurt of blood flew through the air and splattered over the wood. A scream left his mouth, higher than I would have expected from someone of his size. But then again, size had absolutely no bearing on how you handled pain, nor how you faced fear.
I didn’t wait to see his reaction – the wound was so deep that he’d bleed out quickly. I kept moving through my slide, launching myself to my feet and spinning into a heavy kick that took the second guard in the side of the head. He went down, and I used his falling momentum to help me slash through his throat.
The other two were moving now, coming up behind me. I felt a blow to the head as I turned to face them, but tilted in time to take some of the weight from it. Dark Eyes was clearly in charge and in Pirenti that meant he was the strongest fighter. He had drawn his axe. It was a massive thing, so heavy I doubted I’d even be able to lift it. The other guard was still stupid enough to attack me with his meaty fists. To his credit, if one of those fists connected properly with my head, I’d be out cold, or dead, but I wouldn’t let him get near me with those things. Dodging a huge swing from the axe, I jabbed forward, going for the other guy’s stomach, the vulnerable spot between the ribs – jabbing once, twice, so fast he couldn’t manage to avoid the third stab. It got him in the guts, and I went in for two more jabs, tearing the wound right open. Unfortunately the axe was still coming at me as I finished off the third guy. It sliced through a thin piece of the flesh in my shoulder and caused me to stumble sideways. I managed to regain my balance in time to turn and see the huge wooden hilt of the axe coming straight at my head.