A Heart So Fierce and Broken

by Brigid Kemmerer

  I’ve always attributed that to skill and luck.

  “You could likely heal your injuries now,” says Iisak. “The boy’s as well.”

  “How?” says Tycho.

  Iisak’s eyes do not leave mine. “How do you learn to walk on two legs?”

  I frown. “Balance?”

  “Necessity.” His claws sink into my forearm.

  I swear and jerk back. Iisak holds fast, and I drag him with me. I try to swing at him with my free hand, but despite his size, he’s lighter and quicker than I expect, especially when he uses my forearm as leverage and swings around to kick me in the throat.

  I go down on my back, momentum shoving me through the dirt and rocks of our campsite and tearing open the wounds on my back. Pain explodes through my body. I need to think, to find the sword, to scream for help. He must have severed muscle and tendon because I can no longer move my fingers. Blood streams down my arm, but my eyes see stars and darkness.

  “Focus, Your Highness.” He’s kneeling on my chest. One hand still grips my arm, holding it up. Three long slashes run the length of my forearm. Blood seems to be everywhere. I can taste it.

  “Focus,” he says again.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, then open. I can’t breathe. Dirt and leaves grind into my back. This pain is a living, biting thing, pulling noises from my throat. Voices are yelling, wild shouts that I can’t make sense of.

  Iisak leans down close, until I see nothing but his eyes.

  “You’ve done it before,” he says, his voice more of a growl than a whisper. I feel frost on my skin where his breath touches. “Do it again.”

  My thoughts twist and spiral loose as more stars fill my vision. Everyone is shouting. Someone is dragging at me, but Iisak growls and holds fast, his claws buried in my arm. I can’t think. I can’t see. My throat is burning, my lungs screaming for oxygen, but the pain is so absolute that I can’t remember how to breathe.

  An eternity at Prince Rhen’s side, surviving his monster, surviving Lilith, surviving as a guardsman, and I’m going to die in the leaves beside a campfire because I was stupid.

  Suddenly everyone is silent. Soft fingers touch my face. “Grey.” Lia Mara’s voice. Her breath is sweet and warm on my cheek. She must be kneeling in the leaves. “You survived what Prince Rhen did to you. You can survive this.”

  My body feels weightless, as if it’s not tethered to earth. Stars aren’t just in my vision. They fill my veins and flare with every beat of my heart. Each pulse steals a bit of agony, until I feel as though I must be dead, because there was so much pain, and now there’s none.

  Lia Mara’s voice seems to come from a great distance. “Grey … breathe. You need to breathe.” She sounds breathless herself.

  “You feel the magic now,” says Iisak, and he sounds triumphant.

  I inhale, and those stars scatter, flickering down to almost nothing. But they’re there, tiny points of light throughout my body.

  “Open your eyes,” says Lia Mara.

  I blink and find her right above me. Her eyes are wide, gold in the firelight, her hair a shining curtain that hangs down over her shoulder.

  Iisak still kneels on my chest, and he draws my arm into my vision. “As you see, Your Highness.”

  The blood is gone. The wound is gone. All that remains is the scar that existed before.

  “Necessity,” says Iisak.

  Behind him are Tycho, Noah, and Jacob, all wide-eyed, their expressions frozen between panic and anger and relief.

  I look at the smooth skin of my arm, then at Iisak. I can’t find my voice.

  Then I realize my back doesn’t hurt either.

  “What just happened?” says Jacob. “What the hell is this thing?” His hand twitches, and I realize he’s clutching the sword.

  Iisak growls, and his wings flare slightly. Jacob lifts the weapon.

  “No,” I say, my voice a rough croak, like I’ve been screaming. Now that I’m aware of the stars in my bloodstream, they seem to flicker everywhere. I look up at Iisak. “Let me go.”

  He withdraws, moving to my side to watch the others more warily.

  I sit up gingerly, expecting my body to protest each movement, but it does not. Any ache and burn from the wounds on my back are gone. So is the pain in my thigh.

  I take a long breath and look at my forearm again.

  Blood speckles the leaves at my feet. My blood.

  “Jacob,” I say slowly, “this is Iisak.”

  “Iisak,” echoes Noah.

  “A friend,” says Lia Mara.

  Iisak straightens. “I have earned a place with you then?”

  I flex my knee, then touch a hand to my lower back carefully. I feel no pain.

  “Yes,” I say, and I can’t help the wonder in my voice. “Yes, you have.”

  After a day with nothing but stream water, the roasted goose tastes better than anything I’ve ever eaten. I all but tear the meat apart with my fingers. If Jodi could see me now, she’d make no comparison to noblemen. Tycho offers a piece to Iisak, but the creature makes a face, then says, “I will bring more.”

  His wings beat and catch the air, and then he’s lost to the darkness.

  Across the fire, Noah pulls meat from a bone and glances up. “Just when I think I have a handle on this place, something drops out of the sky to turn that on its head.”

  I give a humorless laugh.

  “Everything feels fully healed?” he says.

  I nod and pick every last morsel from my own bone.

  “May I see?” I go still, and he adds, “You had stitches. If the skin healed over them …”

  I nod, and he moves around the fire to kneel behind me. I lift my shirt, and a moment later, his cool fingers touch my back.

  “The stitches are gone,” he says, his tone thoughtful. “This looks like six weeks of healing.” He hesitates.

  I crane my head around to look at him. “What?”

  “I don’t know how your magic works”—he says magic like it’s profane—“but it didn’t undo what he did. The lash marks left scars.”

  When I say nothing, Noah tugs the shirt down and shifts to face me. “I can help you feel the worst of them, if you want to.”

  I don’t want to. I toss the stripped bones from my meal into the fire. “I have seen the back of a beaten man.”

  We aren’t speaking loudly, but the rest of our camping party has grown quiet, and I know their attention has fallen on me. I was already a spectacle in the courtyard. I do not like the thought of being one again. Especially not for this.

  Noah must sense this, because he eases away, returning to his spot beside Jacob.

  Without fanfare, another dead goose flops into the dirt, scattering leaves and making the fire flutter. Iisak descends more slowly, but he keeps his distance from the fire.

  Tycho moves to take the goose again, but I wave him back to his food and take the carcass myself. I need action.

  My fingers begin plucking, a long-forgotten skill that returns to my hands without effort. I focus on the sparks that seem to flow under my skin. Jacob was right—Rhen has nothing to fear from me. I do not want his throne. I do not want to harm him.

  But for the first time, I feel capable of offering something more than pain and torment and fear. “I can use this magic to heal Tycho?” I say to Iisak.

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  “You wish me to lay his arm open to the bone?”

  Across the fire, Tycho goes still. I can’t tell if Iisak is teasing, but his fingers flex, which makes me think he might not be. “No,” I say.

  “You are exhausted. Give your power time to recover,” Iisak says. “Try tomorrow night, perhaps.”

  I am exhausted—but a bit energized, too. I almost want to ask him to lay my own arm open again, just to feel the rush and swell of magic.

  “If we can spare another day to walking,” I say, “we should continue heading northwest without trying to secure horses. If soldiers are already
searching the town here, a slow pace will work to our benefit. Rhen would expect me to find horses and weapons and move quickly, especially if he suspects Lia Mara is with me and our destination is Syhl Shallow.” I glance across the fire, and her gaze meets mine.

  “How much do you think Princess Harper would tell him?” she asks.

  “If soldiers are searching in this direction? Everything.”

  “No,” says Jacob. “She knows I’m with you. She wouldn’t let him come after me.”

  I jerk feathers from the goose’s neck. “She may have no choice.”

  Jacob rolls to his knees. “Are you saying you think he’d hurt her?” His tone is vicious, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. “I’m going back. Right now. We should have made her come with us—”

  “No. I do not think he’ll hurt her.” A dark part of my brain whispers that I never would have expected him to do what he did to me, either. “Even if we are found, his guards will not harm you. He loves her. She loves him. Rhen is afraid, but we are all safer if she is within the walls of Ironrose. If she had come with us … I do not like to think of what Rhen might have done to come after her.”

  They go silent. I continue pulling feathers.

  After a moment, Tycho says, “What is he afraid of?”

  “Magic.” I pause and wonder how much to keep secret—but surely it makes no difference now. “Rhen was cursed before. He suffered much, and Emberfall was nearly driven to ruin. He fears being cursed again.” I glance up. “He fears me.”

  “He knows you,” says Jacob. “You’re not Lilith.”

  Noah is studying me. “It might not matter.” He pauses, and his voice is grave. “Getting free of the curse—then learning someone else might be able to hurt him again, someone he once trusted …”

  I swallow.

  You trusted me once. What have I done to lose it?

  You left.

  Perhaps I lost before I even began.

  “Harper told me a little about what you went through,” says Noah. “And she was only here for a short while.” He glances at Jacob. “Rhen’s been tough to live with over the last few months.”

  Jacob snorts. “Yeah, because he’s an arrogant jerk.”

  Noah doesn’t smile. “Or because he has PTSD.” Before I can ask, he says, “Post-traumatic stress disorder. It happens when you’ve been exposed to something terrifying. I used to see it a lot in soldiers. Or abused kids. It’s like your brain can’t turn off the fear.”

  I glance at Tycho and think of how he shied away from those soldiers in Jodi’s tavern. Rhen has always been cool and composed, the pinnacle of control. But I keep remembering the shadows in his expression in the courtyard and wonder how much of that hid what he was truly feeling. For the first time I wonder if he’s truly trying to protect his people—or if he’s trying to protect himself.

  Either way, he wants me dead. It shouldn’t matter.

  I look back at the goose in my lap. I hold the bird as close to the flames as I can, letting it singe the feathers dry. Once those are also stripped from the body, I stand, but Iisak is already there. He makes quick work of the poultry, and I lay the meat across the stones.

  He’s licking the blood from his claws again, and I try to stop myself from wondering if he did the same with mine. It’s unsettling to think that he was trapped in that cage for so long, having conscious awareness of everything that was done to him. Kantor jabbed his sword into the cage that day, for nothing more than a bit of sport. It’s not the same kind of humiliation as what Rhen did to me—but it’s not altogether different either.

  “If you have magic,” I say to him, my voice low, “how were you kept in a cage for so long?”

  “My magic is not the same as yours,” he says. “Yours comes from within, while mine comes from the wind and the sky. I can breathe frost and borrow snow from the clouds.” He holds out a hand and blows air across his palm. Frost collects on his skin—but only for a moment. It melts almost instantly, and he shakes the water into the leaves.

  “But it’s summer,” I say, understanding. He was nearly dead when Worwick rolled him into the tourney. I thought it was because of the canvas covering, but maybe it was more.

  “Yes, Your Highness. Here, it is summer.”

  Motion catches my eye, and I find Lia Mara has moved forward to turn the meat on the stones in the fire. For the daughter of a queen, she doesn’t seem to flinch from anything—not even the prospect of work. Her hair is lit with a red glow, her curves in silhouette.

  She must sense my gaze, because she looks up, so I quickly avert my eyes back to Iisak. “Did you know what I was, when we were at Worwick’s?”

  “I knew you were a magesmith the instant I tasted your blood.”

  The words bring a cool wind, and I shiver.

  “You so fearlessly put your hand in the cage,” he continues, “so I thought you knew, that your surprise was a farce for that foolish man. Our people were once great allies, as I said. I thought you would free me once night fell.”

  “And then I didn’t.”

  He smiles, teeth glittering. “You did eventually.”

  “I freed you to free myself,” I say to him.

  “And I would have cut your throat if it meant the cage would open.” Leaves rustle in the trees above us, and his wings snap open. He launches off the ground in search of new prey, his voice carrying back to me. “Do not fault yourself for choices you believed were right in the moment. It is not princely.”

  I grunt and stare after him. “I’m not a prince,” I mutter under my breath. I drop my gaze to find the fire, but instead I find Lia Mara watching me.

  “You are a prince,” she says quietly.

  Maybe it’s the stars in my blood, or maybe it’s the lack of pain in my back or my leg. Maybe it’s the fact that I feel as though I finally did something right.

  I don’t know if I’ll follow her into Syhl Shallow. I don’t even know if I’ll survive the next few days. But for the first time, the word prince doesn’t make me flinch.

  And for the first time, I don’t say a word to correct her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  LIA MARA

  By the third day, Grey estimates that we’ve covered seventy-five miles, always staying close to the creek. Iisak reports castle guards and enforcers in the towns when we draw near. We may not have horses, but Iisak swiped an array of supplies and weapons in the dead of night. We each have a dagger now. Two bows, though only one quiver of arrows. Two more swords. An iron pot that allows us to boil water and cook more than just roasted fowl.

  When we rest at night, Grey tries to use his magic to heal Tycho, but he’s been unsuccessful. I can sense his frustration, but he doesn’t share his worries with me—or with anyone. Tense exhaustion seems to be a companion that silently follows us through the forest, and it’s the only companion I have. We travel together, but there’s a clear division among our party: Noah and Jacob, Grey and Tycho. Iisak keeps to the skies, leaving me to walk alone.

  By the fourth night, the summer heat has grown oppressive, and everyone is bitter and snappish. Grey and Jacob have been sniping at each other for hours, and I’m ready to pick up a bow and shoot them both. Even Tycho has left Grey’s side to sit against a tree on the opposite side of tonight’s campsite, where Iisak has taken roost in the darkness of the branches. A frost-coated leaf drifts down from above, and Tycho catches it, grinning. “That’s a neat trick.”

  I can’t help but smile at the wonder in his voice.

  On the other side of our campsite, Jacob is arguing. “We stole weapons,” he says. “I don’t see why we can’t steal horses.”

  “One weapon would not be immediately noticed,” says Grey. “Five horses would be—and their tracks easily followed.”

  “Yeah, but on horseback, we could get away faster.”

  Grey’s expression is cold. “On horseback, we are a larger target—”

  “I’m going for a walk,” I say. My sister could be challenging in h
er own way, but at least we never bickered. “I’ll take the bow. Perhaps we can eat something other than wild goose.”

  “Look,” says Jacob, not even paying attention to me. “I left one jerk of a prince behind. Don’t be too quick to fill the role.”

  I scowl and sling the quiver over my shoulder, then head into the forest with the bow.

  Silence immediately greets me, warm and welcome in the slowly darkening twilight. The bow is sleek and heavier than I’m used to, the polished wood like satin. I circle the camp in gradually widening arcs, moving farther away as the sun begins to disappear. I take aim at a rotted log about a hundred yards away and let an arrow fly. The arrow sinks right into the softened wood, only a few inches below where I hoped. Maybe the weight isn’t as bad as I thought.

  I stride through the trees to fetch the arrow. When I straighten, movement flashes in the distance. I freeze.

  A deer—no, a buck. Large and brown with beautiful dapples across its hindquarters. Two hundred yards away at least, but as wide a target as I’ll ever get.

  I raise the bow and nock an arrow on the string.

  Suddenly every hair on my neck stands up. I hold my breath.

  I’m not alone. I don’t know how I know, but I do.

  I spin, ready to fire.

  A hand catches the bow, gripping the arrow in place, and I gasp, staring up at Grey. The point of the arrow sits against his chest.

  Fury flares like a torch in my belly. He must see the words ready to boil out of my mouth, because he shakes his head quickly and puts a finger to his lips, then points.

  The buck has been joined by three deer.

  Grey is so determined and self-assured that I expect him to wrestle the bow away from me, the way he claimed the sword from Jacob.

  He doesn’t. He lets go of the arrow so I can turn back around.

  I’m painfully aware of the position of my fingers on the bow. I wait for a correction of some sort, a comment on my stance or a question of my ability, but he’s silent at my back. I draw the bowstring tighter and release. The arrow flies.

  The buck falls without a sound. The other deer scatter in a burst of motion.