‘Doesn’t the sun shine there?’ Jonah had asked a very long time ago when we’d been four or five years old.
‘It’s hidden behind all the blood,’ Ma had replied.
Beyond that I couldn’t see him very well, but there was something about him that made me forget my headache.
‘Greetings!’ Sharn called to the assembled crowd. The public square was full – whatever news was announced this morning would be spread throughout Limontae by the time the sun went down. We loved to gossip, we Kayans.
A shout of response came from the crowd, a gathered ‘Ho!’ that made Sharn grin. She glanced at her bondmate and whatever she saw there made her curb her smile. Valerie was as stern as Sharn was flippant.
‘Peace prevails!’ she shouted next, and the resounding cheer was even louder.
The Pirenti man didn’t move a muscle. He surveyed the crowd with an expression that was completely unreadable; I was trying to understand it, by Gods I was trying.
General Brathe looked exceedingly unimpressed, but I only glanced at him before my eyes were pulled back to the outlandish stranger.
‘After eighteen wonderful years of peace, we must move forward even further,’ Sharn announced. ‘We’ve taken the first step in a unified world, but until now our borders have never been shared. We have not offered our homes to an ally as we should have. Today we welcome a man from the north into our country, a man who signifies our ties with progress and with peace.’
Something inside me started to move. I pushed through the people in front of me, shoving them unceremoniously out of the way. There were loud grunts of disapproval but I barely heard them. I was forcing my way to the stage and there was nothing else, for just a moment, but the need to see his face clearly. I didn’t know why, but I had to see that face. I reached the base of the stage and stared up at him, oblivious to all else. The sharp, clear angles of his face, his small, thin mouth, his severe jaw, and his eyes. His eyes. They were a startling shade of the lightest blue. So pale they almost looked white. Clear and crisp and distant.
In all my life, surrounded by people with eyes that changed to every imaginable hue, I had never once seen such a pale shade of blue. I wanted to know what it meant; wanted to know what the colour meant.
Then I remembered that in Pirenti colours meant nothing.
He was surprisingly young, actually – barely more than a child. Up so close I could see how far away he was. He barely stood there, on the ground. He was a million miles away, his angled face pensive and haunted. I had the strangest desire to reach out and catch all of his thoughts in my hands and hold them to my face so I could see them before they escaped. I wanted to see what colour they were; I wanted to see if they were as beautiful as his face was.
‘Finn …’ my twin brother hissed, coming up behind me with apologetic glances to everyone around us. ‘Damned impossible girl.’
‘Beside me,’ Sharn called, ‘stands the Crown Prince Thorne of Pirenti.’
Everyone in the crowd froze, stunned.
In the north there had lived a terrible man who’d spilt more blood than any in the world. He fed on Kayans, the legend went. Sucked their blood from their bones and kept their teeth as trophies. Slaughterman of the Barbarian Queen, he was the most dangerous man in the world.
In some legends it was told that he was part berserker, one of the monsters of the ice. But that was impossible, I told myself sharply, curbing my mind before it got away with me.
The name though … That name followed us into our nightmares. We went to sleep fearing Thorne the slaughterman. Well, I didn’t. But I’d never feared the normal things.
I took half a step – it was all I had room for. The people around me were close and panicked. But I smiled as the day became wildly more interesting.
‘Prince Thorne comes in peace,’ Sharn shouted quickly, sensing the unrest her words had created. ‘He is a peace envoy from the King and Queen of Pirenti, and he is here to learn more about our ways to further the understanding between our peoples. This is a joyous occasion – joyous!’
Nobody was listening. There was too much hatred, too deep in their bones.
Brathe stepped forward, his grizzly face evidence of all the battles he’d fought in the war. ‘Every person in Limontae – and Kaya, for that matter – is bound by law to treat this man with respect. He is protected by Kayan royalty, and by the precious treaty that has kept us all alive. We must protect the treaty. Any violence towards him will be punishable by death.’
The dire warning sent everyone hurrying home.
I stood a moment longer, not sure why, but aware that fascination had curdled in my fingertips and started to spread. My heart was pounding heavily. Jonah and Penn both grabbed my arms but I shrugged them off, staring up at the Pirenti man’s face.
The warder strode off the stage. Next went the bonded informants, followed by the general.
Now the prince stood alone. He was an easy target like that, utterly motionless. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance, as if he hadn’t realised the others had left. What could he be imagining in that head? Trying to picture a Pirenti prince’s thoughts was so far from my capabilities that a ravenous curiosity ignited in my veins. I’d never come across anyone as exotic or strange or as different to me as the sky was to the earth. I stared up at him, held taut by my fear and my fascination, and in that moment he looked down at me.
Our eyes met.
His blue stare was distant at first, though it warmed as he gazed at me. All the muscles in his face relaxed and then his eyes followed suit. At the corner of his mouth I saw a twitch. The twitch gave way to a smile, a real one, a thing made of warmth. A thing made to keep people alive. A thing that was beautiful beyond what I’d understood could exist.
A second later he was gone because the general had called for him.
I was left in the glaring sun with my two favourite people and a heart made of shattered stone.
Thorne
She was wild. That was the first thing I understood about the girl in the town square.
I was led up onto that stage so that the Kayan people could behold me, and even though I knew it was important, I wasn’t sure exactly what I could offer them that they would be pleased with. I wanted to try, wanted to give them something other than the memory of war. But I felt like a tamed animal on display and they were distraught. All of them. I could smell their fear, pungent and heady. It made my beast claw at my insides in excitement, but I swallowed him away, focusing on holding myself iron still.
It was always unsettling to scent terror and know I had caused it. My beast enjoyed it; I did not.
Brathe led the way off stage, which I thought was too soon. They needed to acclimatise the people to the idea of me, allow them time to get used to the look of me. But instead they rushed me off as if I was a creature of nightmare.
I thought of Ma and Da. In my mind they had always represented a kind of good and evil. There was a monster, and there was the lady who’d tamed him. I knew only the mother who had raised me, soft and gentle and disastrously vague. And I knew the legend of the slaughterman.
‘Your Highness,’ someone called from the side of the stage. Probably Brathe, since he seemed to be responsible for me. But before my eyes could move to him, they swept over the crowd and stopped.
There was a girl standing there. Not far below me. Still, in the middle of a broiling mass of uncertainty. Where everyone else fled, she remained.
Her tanned skin bristled with an undeniable movement, her yellow hair whipped about her face with a life of its own. Despite her stillness I had a sense that she never stopped moving, not for a single second. I had a sense that she was excited and loud and difficult. I had a million senses all at once and they were like a fist to the face.
Her short, slim body looked weak, but in the girl’s eyes there was no weakness. All I saw, in the yellow gaze, was laughter. And laughter, I’d become aware, was not something I was good at.
Brath
e grabbed my arm and wrenched me off the stage, but I pulled away from him and headed back into the crowd. People scattered before me – I even heard a few screams, for Gods’ sakes. True, I probably looked like a lunatic, lumbering down off the stage like that, but screaming?
Blindly I forced my way to where she’d been standing.
I was too late; she was gone. Instead all I found were people running in terror of me.
Chapter 2
Falco
A simple man was an unthreatening one. That was what I knew – one of the only things I knew for sure. It was not wise for a man in my position to be good at too many things, nor was it wise for him to allow his enemies to see the truth of him.
So when the skirmish broke out, my hunting party attacked on the border of my land, I gave an audible gasp of fear and cowed behind my horse.
‘Protect His Majesty,’ Petir ordered smoothly, and the soldiers of my guard surrounded me, their training making quick work of the rough group of southern rebels. Only when the six men were dead at our feet did I straighten.
Petir and Coll went through the bodies, but found only the tattoos of the Sparrow on the backs of their necks.
‘Your Majesty?’
I licked my lips, feigning discomfort with the corpses and motioning for a guard to help me back up onto my horse. ‘Home. But don’t mention anything to the Empress – she’ll be outraged at having missed the fun.’
A few of the men grinned, and we kicked our mounts forward over the grassy hills of Galincia. In the distance the city loomed, its red and gold walls a thing of sparkling beauty against the backdrop of the ocean. Carved into the cliffs, the sandstone city was an architectural marvel.
At the gates I pulled my blindfold tightly over my eyes and allowed Petir to lead my mount up the winding streets to the palace. As usual, the sounds of my city were how I lived it, learnt it. The trickle of lazy stone fountains. The clip clop of our horses’ hooves on the sandstone. The soft murmurs of citizens as I passed them by. I knew when we neared the markets as there was a clatter of noise – the shouts of haggling, workers dragging crates and getting ordered to hurry up, the cries and laughter of children as they ran through the stalls … Smells hit me – the light and tangy scent of citrus fruits, the deep scents of resin and various oils, stalls full of incense, horse shit and always the glorious smell of salt from the sea breeze.
At the stables, Petir helped me off my mount and guided me inside the palace, where at last I was able to take off my blindfold and my shoes. Padding across the cool marble, I traversed the airy chambers with their high roofs and open windows until I found her standing on the Eastern balcony. Dropping a kiss on the back of her neck, I was rewarded with an elbow to my stomach.
‘Oof. Mercy, Quillane.’
‘Don’t sneak up on me.’
‘Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.’
The Empress turned her cat-eyes to me, lips twitching. ‘Did you catch anything?’
‘Indeed we did.’ I flapped a hand flamboyantly. ‘Six Sparrows, as it were.’
Quillane’s angular face lost its amusement immediately. ‘Inside Galincia? Surely not!’
‘Actually, I’m quite sure, since the gruesome sight of their corpses will haunt my dreams for months.’ I shuddered, making a face of distaste. ‘They smelt quite horrid. Did you know dead bodies had such a stench?’
She shook her head at my idiocy, her straight black hair swaying silkily. I wanted to run my hands through it. But I always wanted to run my hands through it. The Empress Quillane was one of the strangest looking women in Kaya, one of very few born with jet-black hair and green eyes the shade of the skin of a lime. She had feline grace and strength in her muscles, but her skin wasn’t the bronzed shade of the coast-dwelling folk of our lands; instead, it was a pale shade of creamy white. She had endured whispers her whole life stating she looked more like she belonged in Pirenti, and before her election to power was even subjected to a warder’s proof of parentage.
‘We stray closer and closer to war with every passing day.’
‘We will not initiate civil war,’ I stated.
‘We won’t have to, Falco. It is coming for us.’
I shook my head, allowing myself a moment of gravity before I had to don the cloak of joviality once more. ‘Hundreds of years of war over, only to start fighting amongst ourselves. I am ashamed.’
Quillane sighed and rested her elbows on the sandstone balcony. Silently we watched the sea crash against the rocks below the cliff our palace perched upon. Gulls circled the sky above, screeching their joy at traversing the wind pockets.
‘What is it that they think this will achieve?’ she murmured.
‘They follow a madman who will not stop until he has led them all to destruction.’
‘And still we have no idea of his true identity.’
‘We won’t know his identity until he wants us to, Quill.’
I dreamt of him, some nights. The Sparrow. The man who, even now, gathered forces to wrest control of Kaya. I had come to understand that my fate and his were irrevocably entwined. And some nights, when I woke sweating from the terror of his approach, I knew that when he and I finally came face to face, as we must, only one of us would live through that day.
Quillane
I watched him out of the corner of my eye, wondering at the darkness of his mood. It wasn’t strange that my Emperor would feel the black dread of this looming war, but it was strange for him to allow me to see it.
It was a rare day that Falco of Sancia deigned to discuss anything serious, and I wanted to take advantage of these fleeting moments. ‘I want to meet with Brathe and Lutius.’
‘Must we?’ he moaned. ‘They’re so boring.’
‘It’s not the time to be alienating the warders, Fal. We’ll need them.’
‘They’re the reason we’re in this mess,’ he muttered. Which happened to be true. The warders were the ones who’d kept the truth of the bond from us all these years, and admitted their secret only when Queen Ava and King Ambrose of Pirenti had threatened to tear down their temples unless they spoke the truth at long last. Yes, in fact there does seem to be a way to end the bond, now that you mention it …
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said faintly, distracted by thoughts of the northern nation.
He sighed, eyeing me sideways. Falco, Emperor of Kaya, was an obscenely beautiful man. Golden hair tied at the nape of his neck, eyes the colour of diamonds, a wide smile of white teeth … Even I sometimes found myself staring at him in astonishment, wondering how such a man could have sprouted from the loins of two such plain parents. Taller in stature than most Kayans, he was lean and strong. It was a pity, however, that his body happened to be utterly useless. Unable to wield a sword or throw a punch, disastrously uncoordinated and full of cowardice, Falco’s only real qualities were his sense of humour and the secret compassion in his heart. His ability to make whomever he smiled at believe themselves to be the most important person in the world was both a skill and a detriment to him as, more often than not, the sudden absence of that smile would break the same person’s heart. Put simply, the man had charm. But he also happened to be an infuriating, idiotic, selfish bastard.
‘Fine,’ he sighed, ‘but only because you are looking particularly delicious today, darling. Did I mention that?’
‘The prince arrives today.’
Falco sighed as if he couldn’t care less. ‘The beast, you mean? I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about you and I going into that closet over there, and I want to talk about how I could teach you the meaning of both our lives with only my tongue.’
‘You may not want to talk about him, but he is all too real. We’ll have to receive him soon.’
‘And have him traipse in here with his bloodied animal skins and human bone jewelry? The man is a savage. He’d stain our pretty white marble floors with his filth.’
The serious discussion was over, clearly. Shaking my head, I turned to go inside
.
‘Darling, you slay me,’ he laughed. ‘Just one little lick? I promise you’ll love it.’
‘I’d cut off that tongue before it came anywhere near me.’
‘You don’t know what you’re missing, love.’
Maybe I didn’t. But regardless of how pretty or how charming my Emperor was, regardless of how I loved him, he wasn’t the one I wanted.
Falco was born into his role, whereas I had been voted in. We were not married, nor bonded to each other, as that was illegal. He continuously tried to blur the lines though, unused to being denied even a single thing.
With my gauzy skirts billowing behind me, I returned to my private chambers and removed a key from around my neck. Behind the bookcase was a passageway. Only three people alive today knew about this passage and the chamber it led to. Falco was not one of them, and I’d die before I did him the disservice of telling him.
Securing the door behind me, I crept along the tunnel until I reached the bedroom and found her cross-stitching by the single window. Her blonde hair fell across her face as she looked up at me.
‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.
Smiling, she nodded. Radha had been mine for eight years. And for six of those I had kept her in this room. Each time my eyes turned gold for her, my heart broke a little at the cruelty of the life we led. The injustice of the ambition in my veins and the passion in my heart that meant she lived her life locked out of sight.
‘Did he fall from his horse again?’
I shrugged. ‘Probably. I couldn’t bear to ask.’
Radha gave a soft trickle of laughter. Everything about her was sweet and soft. I tried desperately to be more like her, but I was too cynical to keep it up for long.
‘He was attacked by six Sparrows.’
Radha paused, lowering her embroidery. ‘Oh, Quill.’
I nodded, slumping into a chair beside her. ‘They grow bolder every day.’
Thorne (Random Romance) Page 2
