In the dark, he was still like cut stone. His outline was tall and fine, with both elegance and boorishness in his limbs; a tongue that could be both the sharpest and the most foolish; fingertips filled with grace one moment, clumsiness the next. He was every contradiction and my mind was deciding how I would kill him as my eyes traced up – just as they had on that first night – to his face.
There was a rumour started once that Emperor Feckless had eyes of crystal. No one knew from where it had come. Some claimed it was started by a servant who’d glimpsed him without his blindfold. Others said it was a fanciful lie. Either way, it became myth. I had wondered, years ago on a night slept in the forest, how someone could possibly have eyes of crystal. I listened to all the rumours of him – he filled my mind night and day – and this one had sounded so foolish, so whimsical. I’d never had room for whimsy, and I’d imagined watching the life fade from his hidden eyes, no matter their colour.
Now as I looked at them I understood. They were otherworldly in their strangeness. Translucent, almost. Glittering with a thousand colours like the refracted light of, yes, a crystal. They belonged to a face that was made to wear masks, hundreds of them. A face that molded to each one, takings its shape, just as his eyes held no colour and all colours, so that he would always be nothing and everything. He was a trick of the light, a glimpse of a shadow from the corner of an eye. He was as insubstantial as a passing phantom, as sweet as the most ephemeral whisper.
He was temptation in its purest, simplest form.
Falco, fallen Emperor of Kaya, said, ‘You think you can will it not to be.’
I held still near the window except for the twitching of my fingers towards my knives. Dead in less than a second. The left thigh dagger through his throat. As easy as taking a breath, as slipping free the blindfold.
‘But no will is as strong as that.’
My jaw clenched. I was ablaze with endless fury. Who was he to decide what strength I possessed? I straightened my shoulders, defiance in every muscle. Use it. Use this rage.
‘How will you do it?’ he asked. His eyes darted over my body. ‘The dagger at your thigh? Or the one at your ribs? Where will you send it? Through my throat? My eye? Into my heart?’
Something caught in my chest. No one spotted my daggers. No one had ever, and I had taken pains to ensure he never saw where I placed them.
‘I won’t stop you,’ he murmured. ‘Even if I wanted to, I doubt I could.’
Falco moved restlessly to the cabinet, procured an old bottle of brandy and some dusty glasses. He poured two and left one for me on the windowsill, then made his way back to the door. He downed his glass and let it fall, empty, to the floor. The soft thud seemed to echo around the room. My eyes were adjusting in the dark to make out all the lines of his face.
‘Maybe I’m lying,’ Falco said. ‘Perhaps I would stop you. But I’m not sure either one of us could have expected the reason. Not before …’ He smiled wryly, almost perversely, and dropped his eyes from me.
Did people who were raised in the palace truly enjoy all this pointless talk? It occurred to me that he was donning this formality as a cloak – just as I wore my cloak of calm. Perhaps it was the only way he could endure this.
Falco licked his lips; they must taste of brandy, sweet and burning. ‘I’m not as fond of the idea of your death as I once was,’ he said. It fell into a silent, airless room. He cleared his throat and tried again, more simply. ‘I won’t let you die, Isadora. I couldn’t bear it.’
I wondered which version of him was speaking, which of the dozens of men who stood before me couldn’t bear the thought of my death. Which had been weak enough to fall victim to the bond, or had they all?
It didn’t matter. None of them would have to endure my death.
‘No words, little Sparrow,’ Falco murmured. ‘Never any words. I don’t deserve any, I suppose. I can’t hear your thoughts now, either. Only silence.’ He paused, and then an edge of desperation crept into his voice. ‘I’d give anything to understand the silence.’
I swallowed and it ached. I didn’t know how to speak. I had never learnt a single word but he had so many, hundreds and thousands of them. He knew so well how he might use them to manipulate.
‘You plan to kill me,’ Falco said. ‘But I came for something else.’
I shook my head, helplessly frustrated. Kill him, I begged myself.
The vulnerability left Falco’s face. Instead a blunt thing formed his features. ‘I wanted you to know. We’re digging a tunnel. I will send for Pirenti and they’ll march south to meet the people we smuggle from the city.’ His voice dropped. ‘When everyone is safe I will turn Dren and Galia to dust and memory. I will scorch them from this earth for the pain they’ve caused. I vow it on my life. If you’ll help me, my quarrel with the Sparrow will be held in abeyance until Kaya is free. Then she may formally rally for a throne without my interference and the people may vote her into power – and you will have what you always wanted, without the bloodshed. Neither of us needs to die.’
Did he think it was power I wanted? I only wanted freedom. From magic, and pain, and from him.
He couldn’t see that offering me an alliance was asking me to freely enter a prison. So why did his words fill me with such treacherous longing? A sound left me, one of panic. The magic of the bond was seducing me to crawl blindly back into my cage.
‘Isadora −’ He started towards me but I threw a dagger that pinned his shirt to the wall. He stopped. Blood bloomed through his sliced tunic.
I had another blade drawn and raised in warning.
The pain in his shoulder found its way into mine. I felt it so clearly, as though I were the one who’d been wounded.
‘Alright,’ Falco said and there was an ocean of weariness in his colourless eyes.
Before I knew it my second dagger was flying through the air. It thunked into the wood of the wall directly beside his other shoulder, catching and pinning the fabric of his tunic. Buying more time. I didn’t have enough time.
Falco looked down at the dagger, then calmly removed it and let it fall to the floor. I threw another and this one took him through the flesh of his thigh, through the flesh of my thigh. My fourth dagger sliced through a piece of his ear, a piece of mine. I watched blood trickle down his cheek.
I drew a fifth dagger and we both knew it would be the last.
A moment passed between us, an infinite moment. We stood before the endless dark. The endless, cold, ocean dark. No longer was he a distant name in my mind’s eye, but a man. A brave and cowardly man, a selfless and selfish, foolish and clever, cruel and kind man. A creature of a thousand faces, and right now all of them were gazing inside me.
He broke the silence: ‘It’s alright. If you have to.’ And I could see in those clear eyes that it really was alright, if I had to.
Tears slipped onto my cheeks. ‘How could you?’ I whispered, the first words I’d spoken. The dagger dropped with a clatter to the floor. I became a fool of fate once more perhaps she had always known I didn’t stand a chance. Perhaps everything in the world had known I would lower that dagger, except I. My heart split down the middle and opened wide. Here I was, and here he was, and I couldn’t fight it anymore.
With my eyes squeezed shut I heard him move and then I felt him. His hands on my body. The length of me pulled against the length of him. He felt enormous and too-hot; his smell overcame me, his skin rubbed mine raw. A sound left my mouth, an animal sound, one of pain and hunger but then his mouth was upon mine, swallowing it, swallowing all of me, my entire soul.
‘Isadora,’ he whispered against my lips, ‘no one is strong enough to fight against this tide.’
And wasn’t that the joke of it. That I had honestly thought I would be. Salt spilled from my eyes as he stole my clothes from me, and my skin from me, and he stole my body and my life and my soul and everything everything.
His mouth tasted my breasts and ribs and hips. I drew his tunic over his head and saw the
wounds I’d inflicted. His blood smeared my fingers as I touched the broken skin at his shoulders, his ear, his thigh.
Something reared awake in me, something roaring aloud with horror. I shoved him away and held my hands out between us, held them so he could see the red of his blood staining them.
‘This is what I am. This.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘I’m death. I’ll be the death of you,’ I said, agonised.
Falco smiled. ‘You’re the life of me.’
He knocked my hands out of the way and held me to the glass of the windows. His eyes shifted to gold, still crystal, and I felt sad for him, sad that he should be bound to such a creature of ugliness, when his heart was so beautiful.
I traced his face tenderly, hardly able to believe myself capable of such gentleness. A spell indeed. He seemed as astonished as I was, and there was a moment then, as we looked into each other’s eyes, a moment in which my heart spoke and his heard it. All of me, it said silently. Falco closed his eyes as though the words hurt, and then he kissed me so deeply. His lips tasted of brandy after all – they were sweet and he was sweet and it wasn’t anything like what I had expected from this poisonous thing between us. It wasn’t twisted or toxic – it was love. His large, slender hands were on my jaw, my throat, my breasts, they were at my hips, pulling them against his, they were lifting me and pressing me to him and all the while I was diving into the lake, destroying its calm, its glass surface. There was no lake inside me now, only a roiling, violent ocean.
‘Iz,’ he murmured, as he pulled down every barrier, every defense, built me a new world of intimacy and held me within it. I couldn’t escape as he pressed inside me and we moved together, for once I could not look away, and I was dying aching living living. It was everything, all at once, and it was the loss of everything; it was knowing, finally, how it felt to have someone inside my body and inside my heart; it was closeness, the closeness of him, of his shape and his skin and his mouth and his eyes – what a miracle, the fact of him – and then with a mighty wonderful rush of fire it was over.
I breathed quickly as he held me. Our hearts pounded in time, each as stunned as the other. His hand was against my spine, the other cradling my head. My mouth rested on the sweaty skin of his shoulder and the taste of him was sweet and salty. Slowly the burning became too much, too scorching; it was hollowing out my insides like a husk. I disentangled myself from his lean, strong body and hurried to get dressed.
Falco remained where he was, naked and staring at me. I could feel it but I couldn’t look back at him, terrified of what might happen if I did.
‘Come home with me,’ he said. ‘Come home and we’ll work it out together, all of it. We don’t have to be parted anymore.’
A new life splintered away from mine and ran its course alongside. I saw this second life in all its details and truths. I would become his Empress or his bride, or simply his lover. We would touch and kiss and make love with this same delirium, a delirium that would never fade, never, because it was magic of the maddest, cruelest kind. We might find some way to fight the warders together. We might take back Kaya. Maybe we would rule the nation together, from the throne he’d been given before he could have possibly been worthy of it.
Maybe, in this second life, we would have children and a family, as the fates had created us to do. Maybe we would be in love, and happy.
But here was what I knew: it would be a lie. It would scrape us raw from the inside out because none of it, not a single moment of it, would have been by our choice. This fantasy had never been mine; I was not the creature in that imaginary life. That creature had not been born in a cage.
I turned away from him and felt his hand along my spine like a brand. I needed this to end, to be ruined, and for his hate to return to the cabin. In his hate would I find my armour. Protection from the simple truth that I loved him.
‘I killed her,’ I said. ‘I killed your Empress and her lover, the night we met. I murdered them with the daggers I planned to use on you.’
With the absence of his hand, my back was cold.
I heard him dress. Heard him walk to the door. I couldn’t bear to look at him, only listened to the sounds of his movement, his body, the rustle of his clothing. But as he stopped at the door, I forced myself to turn.
Raw grief lay in his face. But something else, too, something more difficult. A brutal kind of disappointment. It was a rotting sickness within me.
‘War,’ I said flatly. An explanation, of sorts. The only hint of regret I would admit to.
‘What war?’ he asked, holding so desperately to his composure. ‘There was no war.’
‘You waged war on your people when you forgot about them. I gave you fair warning – years of it – that I would strike back. And if you were too foolish or too arrogant to acknowledge that and prepare yourself for it, then you truly are Emperor Feckless.’
He remained silent a long while. ‘Did you come to the palace to kill me because you knew I couldn’t put up a fight? Because I was an easy target?’
This was a fate he had reaped for himself, and I owed him the truth. I nodded.
Something crossed his gaze. Something bitter. ‘How did you know about Radha?’
I licked my lips and tasted his brandy on them. ‘You followed the Empress. My spies followed you. You discovered the tunnel to Radha’s sleeping quarters, so they discovered the tunnel. I knew that killing the unprotected mate of the Empress would also kill Quillane, and this would weaken you for my attack.’
I watched this tear through him, this terrible truth. That he was responsible in more ways than one for the deaths of Quillane and Radha. I felt his poisonous pain in my veins, his airless grief in my lungs.
‘But you knew I had no hope of fighting you, or protecting myself. So why did you need to weaken me?’
I tried to draw breath. The truth, all of it. There was no point if it was not all of it. ‘I wanted to torment you, before you died. That is … it’s the nature of the kind of thing I was. Am.’
Emperor Falco stared at me for a long time, and then finally he turned for the door. ‘I may have been Feckless, but what need does Kaya have of a ruler so cold and merciless she would slaughter innocent women?’
What need indeed.
He left me, as I’d known he would when he learned the truth. We were enemies, born to reap each other’s deaths. The second life running alongside mine faded and fell away, rotten petals on an old bloom. My chest ached with shame. For the lives I had taken, but also for something else. Shame for having a soul that surrendered to the tide.
Chapter Twelve
Ava
I stood at the back door and watched the storm rage. Behind me Finn, Jonah, Penn and Osric played dice on the living room floor. Candlelight flickered, casting long shadows.
‘Your mind is like reading an open book,’ Osric addressed Finn lazily.
‘I have nothing to hide, Os,’ she answered. ‘Read away.’
‘My point was that you need to work harder on your shield.’
I listened vaguely to the two of them bicker, my mind many miles north with my daughters. They would be asleep by now, if their da was behaving. I ached at the thought of him putting them to bed. How many more nights would I miss if I had to rule Kaya? The thought of being parted from them permanently, or of separating the three of us from Ambrose, was equally unendurable.
My mind turned to my cousin and his strange behaviour. I’d watched Falco lose weight over the last fortnight. He was giving most of his food rations to the others, but while that was a generous gesture, he was coupling it with taciturn moods and shifts in temper that made the household worry. The already rampant scepticism about his character was thriving.
Apparently Finn was thinking similarly, because I heard her ask, ‘Can you read Falco the way you read me, Os?’
I turned to look over at where they were playing.
Osric shook his head. ‘I would never presume to.’
‘Why are you so loyal to him?’ Jonah bit out.
‘Because he deserves it,’ Osric replied.
‘Why?’
‘Courage.’
‘What courage?’ Jonah snapped. I felt my eyebrows arch in surprise at his venom.
‘Don’t speak of what you don’t understand, boy,’ Osric said.
Jonah shook his head, pushing his pebbles into the circle to bet.
‘Big spender,’ Finn commented.
‘Big spender, you’re a soul bender,’ Penn sang loudly, making us grin.
‘I’m fairly certain you could make anything a rhyme,’ Finn told him.
‘I’m sure you’re right, given enough time,’ Penn sang, and Finn applauded him before glancing back at Osric. ‘Maybe you ought to presume, Os. Because he’s acting batty.’
‘Falco has a natural shield. I’d have to break through it and it would ruin his mind.’
‘I hear his thoughts all the time,’ she argued.
‘Surface thoughts. You don’t hear anything of what’s going on beneath.’
‘Slippery bastard,’ Jonah muttered.
The room went silent as we stared at him.
‘Have a care what you say about the Emperor of this nation, to whom you owe your fealty,’ I said coldly. ‘Especially when you sit within earshot of those who are loyal to him.’
The boy blushed bright red and lowered his eyes. ‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean it.’
Lightning flashed through the dark sky above. They’re only children, I reminded myself. But I felt surrounded by them, and I wanted my husband. He would cut through it all in that way of his, with that smile of his. He’d understand what was wrong with Falco at a glance – Ambrose understood people better than anyone I knew.
Osric appeared beside me and we watched the sky. ‘I could help you unlock it.’
It had become apparent to me, on a prison isle twenty years ago, that I would have made a good warder if I’d been trained as a child, for I had the ability to manipulate the soul energy. Because I’d never practised, the power lay dormant inside me. I knew Osric had been training Finn in her soul magic for the last six months and she’d flourished under his tutelage, though you wouldn’t know it for all their arguing.
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