Isadora

by Charlotte McConaghy

  Goran gave a shout and lifted his fist high in the air. Within moments a hundred berserkers were giving the guttural shouts of battle – awhoo, awhoo, awhoo – and within the din I walked forward, placed my hand around Sigurd’s neck and lifted him off the ground.

  ‘You fashion yourself a king. But usurpers have small souls and small hearts, and are the smallest men of all.’

  His fear spiked, and his shame. I breathed them in.

  And that was when somewhere in this world Finn broke the bond between two lovers, using the power that had been born into my soul, and it caused my head to explode. I dropped Sigurd and sank to my knees, clutching at my skull.

  And the bastard slid his knife between my ribs.

  Ambrose

  As I lay in a tomb beneath the city, waiting to die, I looked at my hands and no longer recognised them. They did not belong to my body, to my heart or my mind; they were foreign, corrupt things. How did I once bear them with confidence and pride? How did I not see them for the weapons, the monstrous blights that they were?

  I saw the blood they spilt, the flesh they tore, the death they wrought. Untold pain, from these hands. Havoc, from each and every finger. They were strong – too strong, absurdly strong. Their violence … and always seeking to commit more. To fight and fight and fight and fight. This endless, unendurable scrabbling tooth and nail for life, but what was that life worth?

  Who was the man greater than the acts of violence he committed? That man did not exist.

  Cut them off. Look where they’ve brought you. Look how deep the violent hands of men have buried this nation –

  The semi-lucid thoughts ended there. My body had been brutalised and was not long for this world.

  Thorne

  ‘You coward,’ I grunted.

  Sigurd crouched over me. ‘They say it of you both, you know,’ he murmured. ‘Not just your uncle, but you too. That you’re immortals. Giants. Impossible to kill, impossible to vanquish. But what do you know? You have both proven human after all.’

  My head was throbbing. Whatever Finn had done had drained me to within an inch of consciousness. I couldn’t yet feel the wound from his knife, but I knew it must be deep for the whole blade had disappeared to the hilt. The Jarl whispered, just for me, ‘When I find her, I’ll have your mother against her will, and then I’ll do the same to that delicious little wife of yours.’

  There was blood seeping from my side and long, sharp steel embedded in my abdomen. It didn’t matter. Did he truly know nothing of what it meant to be King of the Ice? Even he, a man who called himself a son of Vjort?

  I rose. The battle chant rang out around me. Awhoo, awhoo, awhoo. I took Sigurd’s neck once more and this time I didn’t waste my breath on him. I sliced my axe down the center of his chest and then dropped the blade carelessly. I reached into his chest and wrenched out his heart. Then I devoured it while his body fell like a ragdoll to the cobblestones. I devoured it while all the souls of Vjort watched and my wolves howled.

  Never again would someone threaten my family.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Falco

  I sat up with a lurch and felt the ground beneath me sway. What? Eyes darting, I took in my surrounds with a dizzying sense of disorientation. I was in a small iron cage, hanging over a disastrous drop. Hanging in her own cage beside me was an unconscious Isadora. I lurched towards her and the cage swung dangerously, planting me on my ass. She was too far to reach, even had I not been swaying woozily. The cages hung on chains attached to long metal poles that protruded out over the rocky chasm. I couldn’t see what was above the lip of the chasm, nor could I see what was at the bottom of it, as the sun’s angle made the shadows below deep.

  Unease crept in and before I knew what was happening I had begun to breathe too fast. My hands were trembling and the swaying seemed to worsen. Stop it, I bid myself. You were born and raised at the top of a rocky aerie. You do not fear heights.

  I wrestled for control of myself by concentrating on my cage. I could find no door and no lock. If I stood … no, not even close. There was only enough room to kneel, and my head brushed the metal above. I could hold both sides at once, it was so narrow, and as I gripped, the hard steel edges bit into the skin of my palms. I gave a sudden roar of fury, wrenching at the metal, shaking the cage as violently as I could. I would break it apart, rattle it so hard it fell to pieces.

  The metal held; my palms bled.

  What the fuck was going on?

  The racket I was making finally reached Isadora. She stirred, and I felt a wild stab of relief at the mere thought of not being alone here any longer.

  But as her eyes opened and she saw it, her cage and this chasm, a terrible scream erupted from her lungs.

  And in that sound I realised why we were here, why this was the punishment the Mad Ones had chosen over all others. Whoever Isadora had become was because of this cage. It was what had scarred the inside of her sick, twisted heart. Here lived her madness.

  She didn’t stop screaming. I reached through my bars for her, but I was so far away and she couldn’t hear me saying her name over and over, begging her with it, all she could hear was the swell of her own screaming, as though something had snapped in her mind. It went on and on until her throat was hoarse and nothing more would come out, just a rasping scrape and a gasp of pain, and then she curled into a ball and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

  I was sick with the horror of it; I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t make it stop. Night fell and she continued to weep. Morning rose and she continued to weep. She rocked back and forwards in her ball, covering her eyes with trembling hands. I tried to soothe her but I could think of nothing to say except her name, over and over as a mantra, like I was Penn. She needed to be touched, but I couldn’t reach her. Even when we had been bonded, I realised, I hadn’t been able to reach her.

  My fury faded: it was impossible to hate someone who suffered so badly. Instead I closed my eyes and listened to the result of the world’s cruelty.

  As the sun sank on our second day in the cages, Isadora abruptly stopped crying – I could have started with relief. She looked utterly exhausted. But instead of falling asleep as I’d expected her to, she sat up and blinked swollen eyes.

  ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘Are you alright?’ An immeasurably stupid question. ‘I …’ Fuck, what could I say? ‘That was … that was really scary, Iz.’

  ‘I’m alright,’ she rasped.

  ‘Do you … Where are we? What is this?’

  She rubbed her eyes. ‘Not yet.’ And then she rolled into a ball and slept. I forced myself to do the same, even though my nerves were shattered and I couldn’t shed the sound of her weeping from inside my pulse.

  A cage was not a good place to sleep. My muscles twisted and cramped and as I woke all I wanted to do was stretch but there was no damn room. Grooves were gouged all over me from the sharp-edged metal, and my wounded hands throbbed. With a groan, I wriggled around to see that Isadora was already awake, the morning sun shining on her white hair.

  ‘Massage your muscles,’ she told me, sitting cross-legged.

  I rolled my neck painfully. My stomach was rumbling with hunger pains and my head was pounding from dehydration. I wasn’t sure how long we could survive here without food or water. But now that the wailing had stopped I was determined to find a way out. I set about inspecting every inch of the cage, as well as the chain above. It was solid, no sign of the forging joins. Which meant the damn thing had been sealed by warder magic.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Isadora said.

  She’d never seemed so listless. So … adrift. It was easier to be angry with her now she was composed, but those hours of agony were etched on me for life. ‘When were you here?’

  She didn’t reply. I followed her gaze and saw a flock of tiny birds in the distant sky. Isadora covered her mouth with her hands and gave a soft whistle. She did it twice more, and then we waited.

  Two small birds circled closer
and then landed on her cage, peering inside inquisitively. My mouth fell open in astonishment. It closed when Isadora’s hand darted out to snatch one of the birds and snap its neck. She brought the dead creature to her face and whispered something to it, and then started to pluck its little feathers. I didn’t say anything, but she felt my gaze. All she offered was, ‘Sparrows.’

  Sadness struck my heart. I felt ill-equipped for it, and wondered how long she’d had to survive on the meat of sparrows. When she finished plucking the bird she poked it through the bars and made as if to throw it to me.

  ‘Wait!’ I scrabbled to stick my hands through. ‘Don’t – you should eat it.’

  ‘I’ll catch another.’

  ‘Well – wait, don’t throw it.’

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said. I kept my hands still as she tossed the dead bird straight into my palms, her aim as always perfect.

  Pulling it into my cage, I couldn’t help feeling repulsed. ‘How do I cook it?’

  She didn’t reply, and then she laughed. It was a striking sound, trickling water and falling ash. But I abruptly saw myself through her eyes: a spoilt, entitled palace brat. I steeled myself and bit into the raw flesh of the small bird. It tasted awful, and I struggled to keep it down.

  ‘It will make you sick the first time,’ Izzy warned me, ‘but your stomach will get used to it.’ She was busy seducing another sparrow to land on her cage, and let out a few more trills.

  Indeed it did make me sick. The only blessing was that I managed to get most of my head out of the cage to vomit.

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Rain.’ She shrugged. ‘And urine.’ I made a face and she smiled. ‘It’s wet around here. It rains every few days. But if you have to drink your piss, catch it in your boot.’

  ‘How did you learn all of this?’ I asked her, but she didn’t reply. ‘How did you get out the first time?’

  She caught a second sparrow and killed it effortlessly. As she plucked it she said, ‘I was meant to survive the first time. They needed me alive. When I fell ill they came to treat me, and I escaped. But you and I are meant to die out here. There’s no one coming to check our health.’

  ‘So – what? That’s it? Settle in and wait to die?’ Just like that my anger rekindled.

  We sat in silence for a long time. I peed and caught it and drank it, and it was gods-awful. I tried to work my muscles as much as possible, doing sit-ups in the small space, hindered by the sway of the cage. Isadora sat utterly still as if in some kind of trance. Another night passed and we both slept a few uncomfortable hours. We didn’t speak. I couldn’t bring myself to address her or look at her, and she was silent by nature. If I didn’t break the quiet no one would.

  I used the time to think of Quillane and strengthen my anger. I told myself stories of her, as I did of my family – that was what you had to do to ensure the dead didn’t fade with time. But they did fade. They did. And the stories became all that was left, drops of water in a desert. I would never let go of these stories of Quill and our time together. I tortured myself again and again with the possibilities, the what ifs. What if I hadn’t been feckless? What if I had ruled alongside her as she deserved? What if I’d been all that I could be? Would she have loved me?

  It was nice to fantasise that she would have, but the truth was plain. I had asked her outright on our last night together. She could never have loved me because she’d always been in love with someone else.

  It came to me that I hadn’t thought of Quillane in this way since before I was bonded to Isadora. A kind of uncurling took place inside me, an easing. I was free to think and feel what came naturally to me. Free to mourn the woman I loved by choice.

  But that was when Isadora began to speak. And as her words reached me, and settled upon me, I hated her. I hated her. Because she was making it impossible for me to hate her at all.

  Isadora

  I didn’t remember the hours between waking and sleeping. I knew I had behaved poorly and embarrassed myself, but it was all a blur. Once the shock was purged from my system I felt sane, and miraculously calm. This was, after all, the world I knew best. No matter the fear, no matter the despair.

  And so.

  We sat in our cages, he and I, and I came to understand that this was not quite the world I knew. It had one quite extraordinary difference – his presence. This was why I spoke. Into the quiet of our third night in the cages. Or maybe it was because there was no lake anymore. And that meant the end of everything.

  ‘I don’t remember a time before this cage,’ I said, my voice still rasping painfully. We were both watching, not each other, but the starlit sky. ‘I must have been brought here as an infant. At first they delivered me food and water. Gave me blankets to stay warm. Later they made me find my own sustenance. They called me Demon. A demon child to guard the precipice against monsters. In a cage where I belonged.’

  I closed my mouth, regretting it, regretting every word. Fear made a mockery of the momentary courage speaking had taken.

  Minutes passed and then he asked, ‘How long?’

  This was it, wasn’t it? The moment that would change the way he thought of me forever. I’d never wanted another soul to know this truth about me, to understand in which conditions I had been forged, to pity me or think me weak for it. But this was a man my whole existence had been bound to until only very recently. This was a man I could no longer hate.

  ‘Twelve years.’

  There was an infinite silence. I stretched and shifted within it. And then I looked over to see that he had rested his face in his hands.

  ‘Would you have been saved if I’d reclaimed Sanra?’ he asked, and I could hear the tears in his throat.

  I’d imagined this all my life. A chance to hold someone accountable. I could tell him the truth, I could punish him with it. But I found, quite simply, that I no longer wanted to. I knew – I knew – that even despite his hatred of me, the truth would cause him terrible heartache. He was not a selfish ruler, but a cunning one, a ruler disempowered by the brutality of his family’s death.

  A world opened in the sky above me and I gazed up at it, at the thousands of stars and through them. To punish someone for the cruelty done to me would be selfish and very small.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Iz,’ he demanded, moonlit tears in his crystal eyes. ‘Don’t. If we had come here to Sanra to take it back from Pirenti, this never would have happened to you.’

  ‘Pirenti didn’t do this,’ I told him. ‘It was warders who offered me as tribute in hope that the gods or their magic would banish the Pirenti. They were mad, Falco. Corrupted.’

  ‘I could have stopped them.’

  ‘You didn’t know.’

  ‘I should have!’ he gasped, and then he was weeping. This was a very old sorrow, a deep shame, the kind of grief that builds from the loss of self, of identity, of the life you were meant to live. Who was ever strong enough to shoulder the weight of such unfulfilled possibilities? The weight of what if? There was nothing as destructive as waste.

  At least I had never been born to be anything. I had never risked anything in this cage, had never needed to become anything. But Falco had been born huge, and had been forced into something small small small. He had spent his entire life on the knife-edge of risk, in constant danger and under perpetual threat. Those things were their own cages.

  ‘You were my other half,’ Falco said into the darkness. ‘I should have known somehow. I should have felt it, and come for you.’

  Falco

  Days passed and we ate more raw bird meat. I stopped getting sick. I’d pointed out that I was losing a lot more energy and fluid, vomiting up the rancid food I ate than by just sitting quietly and not eating, but Isadora pointed out that it was worth the initial danger because I would acclimatise to it before I died of starvation. It was wet season so it rained most afternoons; we drank as much as we could, catching water in our shoes, drinking it before it seeped away.

  But I was goin
g stir-crazy. I needed out. My body was fading, weakening. My mind was full of nothing but twelve years. It made no sense to me, how someone could endure that. And a child. Someone who was meant to be developing into a human being, learning about the world and life and her place in it. There had been no one to show her love or kindness. What did make sense now was her inability to connect with people, and her violence. But, frankly, after what she’d been through I was surprised she wasn’t a raving lunatic.

  I noticed she was keeping the bones of her sparrows, piling them in the corner of her cage. ‘What are they for?’

  Isadora shrugged, looking bored. ‘I killed my captors with these. Not much good now. Must be habit.’

  She was much smaller than me so she had room to do pull-ups on the top bars of the cage. I watched her athletic form as she reached fifty, watched her muscles tighten and release. She was strong, despite her size.

  ‘When did you learn the knives?’

  Isadora’s eyes moved immediately to the bottom of the chasm and the darkness down there. She let go of the bars and tucked her knees under her chin. ‘I learned aim because of the monsters.’

  I frowned, peering into the depths. I couldn’t see anything, and wondered if the ‘monsters’ might exist as nothing more than a facet of a little girl’s frightened mind.

  ‘They’ve been quiet,’ she murmured, ‘but they’re down there.’ Shaking her head, she added, ‘The knives came when I got out. I practised when I lived in the forest.’

  ‘And your army?’

  ‘Started small. A handful found me. Sheltered me. When I was … not good. I hadn’t yet learnt to speak, so they helped me.’

  More silence fell. I had never experienced such long bouts of quiet. I’d spent my life surrounded by people and questions and requests. With Isadora there was none of that. She asked of me nothing. There was only contemplation, and it was confronting. Within it there came a kind of stillness. The quiet I’d never understood in her. I used it to think about what she’d been through, about my part in her life, about what she had done to Quillane and Radha. And I used it to examine myself, though I had no idea what I would find.