Isadora

by Charlotte McConaghy

  Demon, demon, demon. I’d heard the word before but this was the first time I’d been old enough to understand it.

  I stopped begging then because it was suddenly clear that they were not here to help me. They’d put me here. And I would never beg again.

  No.

  No.

  This is not now. In the house in Sancia I twisted one of my knives from its hilt and sliced it through the flesh of my thigh. My consciousness was reeled back from the cage and I returned to this room and this time with a brutal whoosh and a bloom of blood.

  This was how I did it. Pain, and dreaming. Knowing the precise moment my knife was needed to tether me to my body. It was the trick no one else had learnt; it was how I alone killed warders. Lucid dreaming.

  I’d first learnt to control my dreams while in the cage. I chose where they took me and how I could spend my sleeping hours. When I escaped I began to sleepwalk through the forest in this same lucid state, and after some years I could control that, too. So that now, as I stood within the dream realm, my body stood in the waking world. My body moved while my mind dreamt; I was a reflection of myself, a lake-still reflection.

  I moved from the house and into the dark; I was invisible to magic, no matter how powerful the warder. Lucid dreaming was naught but a trick of the mind – it blanketed me in a state between dreaming and waking, the plane that magic did not inhabit. But I stayed silently to the shadows because, though impervious to magic, I was still in my body and could be spotted by eyes.

  It was strange, this dreaming land. Nothing was quite as it looked when awake. Things had a less defined edge. Colours bled into each other, were more vibrant. Objects moved at unusual speeds, and I was often in danger of seeing things that weren’t real. I had gone a little mad with the strangeness of it when I first discovered the ability as a child. I had dreamed myself beyond that cage and it had been so seductive that I had struggled more each day to return to reality. Eventually I nearly wasted away, having spent too long sleeping. But this, I understood, was what it meant to enter the subterranean realms.

  The small warder who’d hit me today was on watch duty atop the city wall, as I’d hoped. In my dream state I approached him. He didn’t hear or see me, intent on the grassy hills beyond the city. The sky above him was full of burning shooting stars, thousands of them. Things too beautiful to believe were always part of the dream.

  My hands moved to my knives, drawing two. They were liquid in my fingertips. I could have killed the warder in a painless, fearless instant. But I didn’t. I let my footsteps make a sound and watched him whirl to face me. A look of disbelief crossed him, chased by confusion. He didn’t recognise me. Not with my altered skin and hair.

  ‘Who are you?’

  I licked my lips. They felt too dry, like I had swallowed a gallon of seawater.

  ‘You’re in breach of the curfew –’ He stopped, sensing something. They could always sense something terrible. I thought it must have been a truth about the human race: we always knew when we were about to die. When all possibilities and future paths ceased. When the culmination of who we were and what we had achieved came to pass.

  Or perhaps that was me being whimsical.

  He saw the knives then, and moved his hands. Whatever wave of energy he’d sent at me was impotent. He tried again, this time probably seeking to reach inside my mind. He failed.

  I decided to speak. That was how cruel my hatred had become. A thousand glittering raindrops fell free of my mouth. ‘Found you.’

  He frowned as recognition dawned upon him. ‘The demon child.’

  ‘Why do you follow them?’ I asked. It was a trick. A way to take advantage of this last moment of life, when people felt so vastly vulnerable, so desirous of connection or meaning that they would answer anything, reveal any truth, give up any piece of themselves. A strange subterranean realm of its own.

  The warder shook his head, shaken and pale. He didn’t understand what was happening, and yet he did. ‘They have power that dwarfs the rest of us. They freed me from the prison.’

  I felt prickles against my spine and darted a glance over my shoulder to see that there were needles injecting themselves into each of my vertebrae. Not real.

  I always gave them words, in the end, these poor dying victims. Because I was taking everything from them. More than everything. I was taking the possibility of anything. Which meant they deserved something from me. ‘You chose wrong,’ I told the warder softly. ‘Serving the Mad Ones has brought you death.’

  And the small man, with his small body and his small soul, straightened his shoulders and became bigger than I imagined him to be. ‘Better death, than that prison,’ he told me simply.

  So I nodded and killed him with two blades through his neck. Stars exploded from the wounds. He slumped to the ground and bled over the stone, his blood tiny waves in an ocean. I watched. I always watched, right until the end. Even though hundreds of sparrow wings brushed against my face to remind me of the desolation of my soul. To remind me of beauty in the same moment they reminded me of my lack of it.

  Demon. Guard your precipice.

  I knelt and used the same knife to cut a sparrow into his forehead. The skin there was delicate. Most of the blood had already left through his neck. There was not much of a mess, and I managed not to stain my hands.

  That was when it happened.

  I’m coming for you, little Sparrow.

  The words tugged me sideways into the very thing I had spent the last six months trying to avoid. I was yanked violently from crouching over the dead warder to find myself standing in what I could only assume was Falco of Sancia’s dream.

  Huge feathers brushed against us, buffeting us upon the stone walls of whatever place we stood within. They were both gentle and rough at once.

  ‘Sparrow,’ Falco said, and it echoed eerily.

  He fought through the feathers, reaching me and pressing me to the wall. He was all long pale hair and sharp lines and painfully glittering eyes. He was all … He was all. ‘I’m coming for you, little Sparrow,’ he said again, and then a rose bloomed from his mouth. The wings of the birds pressed at us; I felt their soft force on every inch of my skin.

  No.

  With all the strength of my will I wrenched myself from the dream and back into my body, the feel of his fingertips against mine tingling even after I’d gone.

  I woke beside a dead body. I lurched upright, not breathing, unable to suck air into my exhausted lungs. My head and neck ached. Reality was brutal. Here everything looked blunt and ugly and normal. There was just a body, dead and carved, no burning stars or oceans. The city wall was empty and I was awake and nothing but a murderess.

  I ran. All the way home, keeping silent, keeping invisible. Climbing the back wall and stumbling into the courtyard and sagging to the ground. I couldn’t help the trembling of my knees, the way my breath was rattling.

  I’m coming for you.

  I couldn’t have this. I would not.

  It was Penn who found me, in the end. Penn, who didn’t expect me to talk like everyone else always did. He sat beside me and when he took my hand in the dark I knew, somehow, that he understood exactly what it felt like under the surface of the lake. He gave me peace, just a glimpse of it, and I loved him for it.

  The world made its monsters. Humans forged them with care and dedication. Twenty-six years ago I was born and in the twelve years that followed I was created – forged with care and dedication, into a monster.

  And what was it that determined one to be monstrous?

  Simple. It was hate.

  When the Emperor of Kaya came for me, what would he find but that?

  Chapter Three

  Falco

  Thorne moved ahead of me, swifter and more silent despite being twice my size. I followed, allowing myself to drop back a few paces and watch the ground for any signs of disturbance in the underbrush.

  We were tracking reindeer and the pack wasn’t too far ahead. I had no trac
king skills, but Thorne could smell them from miles so it hardly mattered. Watching him was most of the experience for me. He melded with the forest, with the earth. He was animal, here in the wild.

  He crested a rise and flattened himself to the ground. I approached loudly on my belly and crawled clumsily to his side. In a valley below was the herd of reindeer, grazing happily. I drew my bow and arrow, but Thorne reached to stop me.

  ‘What do you plan on doing with that?’ he asked.

  ‘Look impressive.’

  ‘Is it the animals you’re trying to impress, brother?’

  ‘It’s you, Thorney, always you.’

  He snorted and settled in to simply watch the deer. I relaxed beside him and there were long minutes of silence.

  ‘Your thoughts are so loud they’re likely to scare the herd away,’ Thorne commented.

  ‘So you’re a warder now, are you? What is it with everyone in this damned place wanting to spy on what’s in my head?’

  Thorne just smiled.

  ‘What would you do?’ I asked him.

  He considered silently. ‘Go.’

  ‘Even if it’s a trap?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They won’t want me to go. They want me to do something, but they don’t want it to be anything I could stuff up.’

  He turned to me, my young friend, and said, ‘Are you, or are you not the Emperor of Kaya?’

  I met his eyes. ‘And what are those words but a title?’

  He shook his head. ‘Make them more. Give your people someone to believe in. I know you can, I just don’t know why you choose not to.’

  As I rose to my feet the beasts below sensed my movement and fled, but I didn’t care as I walked angrily down the hill.

  The trees were dense, making it impossible to see the sky. I wasn’t sure how I knew. How I suddenly … sensed. But I did. There was a shift in the nature of the air, in my lungs, my heart, my ears and nose. I knew her with every sense, felt her with all of me.

  A huge breath filled my lungs and I saw her.

  First it was her thick dark hooves, and then her long, glorious wings. Her nose was slender and inquisitive as it poked down through the canopy. She descended in slow, dreamy arcs, gracefully finding a path through the trees and letting the sunlight catch the glistening snowy plumage of her wings. Some maddening part of me could feel her intent, her pride, her desire to please me, just as I could feel every one of her heartbeats, and the muscles in her flanks, and the wind in her feathers.

  I walked without hesitation to her side and ran my hand over hair that was as dark as her deep, liquid eyes. She stamped her hoof, tossed her mane and took a snorting breath. The warmth of it made my skin prickle with delight. I could see fierce adrenalin coursing through her powerful muscles – she was a wild creature, not born to be tamed or ridden. But when she nuzzled her face into my side I felt it. Our bond.

  The threads of our souls reached out and connected.

  I pressed my face to hers, breathing in her warm scent. It was not like the bond I shared with Isadora – this one held no death within it, only life. Only love. In its tender touch I was remade.

  ‘You’re just in time,’ I whispered.

  Thorne put his arm around my shoulders as we watched her launch up into the sky and fly away, her black tail trailing behind like a dark comet. ‘Why didn’t you ride her?’

  ‘She has more important things to do.’ I smiled.

  ‘What will you name her?’

  ‘Radha.’ Thorne wouldn’t understand, but I added, ‘Quill would have loved that.’

  Then I grabbed his arm and pulled him at a run towards the fortress. ‘Come on, Thorney. Alert the messengers – the ladies of Kaya should beware! Their handsome scoundrel of an Emperor is returning to them.’

  Thorne covered his laugh with a cough. ‘Their idiotic Emperor.’ But he added, ‘Good man.’

  I lay on the floor of Ella and Sadie’s room, looking at the moths plastered over their ceiling. ‘This fixation definitely means something psychological.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. You’re lying,’ Sadie said. She was draped on the top of her wardrobe as usual, which I always found impressive given I could see no reasonable way of her getting up there. Her fingers brushed against the ceiling, and I was sure she was watching the moths just as I was.

  Ella was on her bed, drawing quietly. She had become less interested in the insects than her sister, which I found curious.

  ‘What do you think I’m lying about?’

  ‘The reason.’

  ‘You think it sounds false that an Emperor would want to free his people?’

  ‘No,’ Ella answered for her sister. Having a conversation with them meant interchanging constantly. ‘But you sound false.’

  ‘I want you to keep working on the wings,’ I told them, a lump forming in my throat.

  ‘You must love someone there more than you love us,’ Sadie said, her voice floating down from the ceiling.

  ‘No,’ I managed, and then I was crying. Abruptly, ludicrously. Meeting my pegasis had ripped something open within me, something that had too many raw nerve endings. ‘I don’t want to leave you.’ I played a role with the twins too, but it was one that felt truer than most.

  Ella wriggled from her bed to my side, and Sadie swung down to drape herself over my other side, and in their arms I couldn’t help it – I wept like a child.

  ‘You’re a chrysalis,’ Ella whispered, ‘about to be reborn.’

  I hoped she was right.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  We looked up to see Finn in the doorway. She smiled gently, and I abruptly felt light as a feather and utterly, blissfully carefree. Ella and Sadie jumped to their feet and twirled ecstatically around the room, taking pieces of cloth to act as wings and brushing them sweetly over my face. I laughed softly, the bubble of joy lifting me to my feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked Finn, realising she must have been manipulating this feeling for us.

  ‘It’s just a moment,’ she murmured. ‘A moment without burden.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Seems so.’

  I wanted to touch her. Wanted to kiss her lips and her face and her eyelids and her breasts. I wanted to hold her and fuck her and have her.

  She tilted her head and I felt normalcy return, and with it that heavy weight. A breath left me, knowing she must have heard most of those thoughts. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘Not your fault.’ Then she turned those yellow eyes to me and said, ‘Falco, I’m coming with you to Kaya.’

  Thorne

  ‘No. Please don’t.’

  She looked at me, my wife, and didn’t need to say that she had to. I could feel it. I also knew I couldn’t go with her, and that was a brute force to my chest. The wild called, but this woman called much louder.

  ‘You won’t be here either,’ she reminded me. ‘We both know you intend to go north.’

  It was true. I had to go back for my berserkers and I couldn’t take Finn with me. The thought of her waiting here for me, however, was far more pleasant than the thought of her creeping into the most dangerous city in the world. Her warder powers grew each day and I had no idea how she expected to hide them from Dren and Galia. But I didn’t say any of that, because her brother was trapped in Sancia, and that meant she was going.

  Finn draped herself on top of me, lowering her lips to mine. Our breath mingled, heartbeats fell into time. Her yellow hair brushed my face.

  ‘How long will you love me?’ she whispered against my mouth.

  ‘Always.’

  ‘And how long will you live when I die?’

  I swallowed, felt my heart break. ‘As long as I can.’

  She whispered while kissing me: ‘I’ll come back to you. We will see each other again, Thorne, I promise.’

  Ava

  Who would imagine life after death would be so rich?

  My husband paced back and forwards, fury and fear given full reig
n in his mighty northern form. The girls were in bed, but at this rate he would wake them. I didn’t mind – if they woke it meant more time with them.

  ‘This is idiocy,’ Ambrose raged. ‘You would truly risk it? Risk all that we have on a suicide mission?’

  I watched him, letting his barrage of fear wash over me. I did this all the time – let the sight of him or the girls wash over me and envelop me in the sweet disbelief of joy. It had taken me many years to come to terms with what I was feeling and to accept it as my right, instead of pushing it away as though I was not worthy of it, or as though its power lay only in taunting me before its disappearance. Joy, now, was so commonplace that it was actually rather ludicrous. Life after death had become an embarrassment of riches.

  I understood that even if, in some horrendous twist of fate, it did disappear – all this love – I was still better for having had it in the first place. Just as I was better for having loved and lost my Avery.

  I smiled and spoke to him now. My first mate, the one whose life had been cut so tragically short. How impossible is this husband of mine.

  And in my heart Avery smiled in return and said, as he had done before, How boldly he loves, petal. Who has ever loved so boldly as Ambrose of Pirenti?

  Together we watched Ambrose pace our living room and rage at me for the thing that might part us forever, if we were unlucky. For this terrible knowledge that I must go with my cousin to help him seize back our country. Falco would be useless on his own. And I trusted Ambrose to take care of our children, who meant more to me than anything.

  The King of Pirenti stopped suddenly in the middle of the room. His words fell away. And like some kind of phantom had passed through him, he shook his head and started laughing at himself, and at us. He laughed a lot, my husband.

  I crossed to him. He was so much taller than I, so I looked up at those wide lips, at the pale eyes and the scarred face. It was not as scarred as my own – no face ever was – but he certainly bore the marks of many attacks.

  ‘These scars,’ I murmured, running my fingers over them. ‘Do you know what I once thought about scars?’