Thorne (Random Romance)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  Chapter 14

  Thorne

  When she lost consciousness I placed her in the carriage and rode it back to the fortress as fast as I could make the horses run. Osric had made it halfway. I had no idea why he’d followed me, but he had, and he climbed into the back with Finn and Howl and started to do something with eyes of white and skin of blue.

  I got us back to the fortress and carried her inside to the infirmary, and Osric stayed close, working his wards the whole time. Two days passed, and he did not sleep, and nor did I. I washed my blood-soaked dog and I paced the hallways. When finally he stopped, he was ragged with exhaustion.

  ‘She will live,’ he said on a sigh.

  And I hugged him close for a very long time.

  Days I sat by her bed. Ma sat with me, helping with medicines. Ava, Ambrose and the twins were in and out, spending time with us as much as they could afford. Ella and Sadie pinned the wings Finn had made them above her bed for luck. Osric came sometimes, and oddly enough he comforted me more than any of the others.

  We’d had the two soldiers brought in for questioning, because they’d turned out to be alive after all, but when Osric finally managed to get into their heads he said they were unreadable – that Finn had utterly scrambled their minds and there was nothing coherent left. I made him vow never to tell her what she’d done, but quietly I felt satisfied that they’d been ruined so utterly.

  One night under a red full moon I found myself alone with her. I felt a thousand years old from waiting. From longing. And so I slid into the bed beside her, curling her gently into the crook of my body. It felt illicit, somehow. Secret moments stolen without her knowledge. I wondered if she would remember her delirious words to me. Her words of love, so generously given in her last moments.

  I did not know how I would forge a life with her, only that I would.

  She shifted in my arms and at long last opened her eyes. We looked at each other, faces close. ‘I only said it because I was dying,’ she warned me, and I laughed and kissed her.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Finn murmured. ‘I’m sharing a bed with the prince of the barbarians and I don’t even know how I got here.’

  I smiled. ‘It’s a very boring story, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then make up a good one.’

  So that’s what we did. Day and night. I sat with her and I told her stories. Sometimes they were true stories of my life, Ma’s life; other times they were tales I had been told as a boy, myths or legends or even just nonsensical things I made up.

  Time passed and she recovered from a wound that should have killed her. I felt her come further back to life with each word I spoke – I, who had been such a quiet child, a silent young man. This was the most I had ever spoken in my entire life and probably the longest Finn had ever remained silent. Or mostly silent, in any case.

  She watched me and listened, and sometimes she asked questions if I wasn’t making sense, and she often pointed out that I should have told that part before that part, or I should have drawn out some section or another. She taught me the art of good storytelling, and always she touched me. A hand on the back of my neck. Fingers entwined with mine. A foot grazing my leg. Sometimes she made me take off my shirt so she could touch my tattoos and my scars. But there was never anything more than that between us, only a sweet kind of tenderness neither of us had experienced before.

  Each day she asked, ‘Have they come yet?’

  And I was forced to shake my head.

  I didn’t know where Jonah, Isadora and Penn were. I had men on the roads looking for them, because they should have arrived by now, or soon at least. But there was no sign.

  On Finn’s seventh day in bed I brought a box of my da’s records in and dumped them on the floor.

  ‘The dreaded journals,’ she said.

  ‘Records.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  I opened the first one, embarrassingly unsettled and trying to hide it. ‘Fourteen slain tonight. All Kayan. Seized with weapons of iron forged in the Vjort style. Possible spies? Look into forgeries in Querida region.

  She took a breath. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Here’s a lovely one. Sanra taken. Renamed. A woman sobbed from her window as I made announcement. Later found her home. Husband killed in war. Children required double rations.’

  I shook my head. ‘What a monster.’

  ‘That sounded to me like a man who followed the sound of a woman crying and gave her children extra food because she couldn’t feed them herself,’ Finn said.

  I looked sharply at her. Then back at the page. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry. It’s from later in his life anyway,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘We need earlier records from when he was a teenager in the ice caps.’

  ‘Torturing people.’

  ‘Warders.’

  I looked up at her, surprised. ‘Are they not people?’

  ‘Maybe they used to be.’ She shut down then, curling onto her side and facing away from me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but because I didn’t know what I was apologising for it meant nothing. The anger inside her had not been born upon her kidnapping, only deepened. She had harboured a fury at the warders since the day they banned her from being who she was. I’d scented it clearly that night at the royal dinner with Lutius and Osric.

  I kept reading, not because I thought the words held any merit, but because I knew she couldn’t bear quiet. Nothing was in any order. I took pieces from all over the place. ‘A lord of Baath offered the highest dowry so it has been decided. I go tomorrow to inspect the girl. If she suffices we will wed quickly. Heirs are required.’

  ‘Ambrose beat back four at once. He has earned his place as my second. They will know better than to come at us. Her Majesty has proposed his journey to the north. I argued it was unnecessary.’

  ‘Three slain. One of them a woman. Cruelly, they send women soldiers. Her eyes turned white in the end.’

  ‘My wife counts. I buy her herbs to stall the panic. Her Majesty has demanded I send her back.’

  ‘Day two­hundred. No conception.’

  ‘Day three­hundred and twelve. No conception.’

  ‘Day seven­hundred and three. Remedies tried. Still no conception. Her Majesty suggests execution.’

  I stopped, unable to go on.

  ‘How he wanted you,’ came Finn’s soft voice.

  I frowned, returning the book to the box. ‘These are accounts of soullessness.’

  She rolled over to face where I sat on the floor. ‘Far from it.’

  We were quiet. I didn’t know what she meant.

  Finn asked, ‘Do you want to hear a story?’

  I nodded, though in truth I felt too raw to listen to any more stories.

  ‘When I was thirteen I loved a boy. He was sly and swift and he had orange hair and a thousand freckles. I liked how his eyes shifted azure each and every time he looked at me. I had a million different ideas of what this meant. I knew we would bond one day, when we were older. I had been practising my soul magic in secret. The warders had forbidden me from it, but I thought them cruel and foolish. The boy was one of the first to swing the ropes on the Siren Nights. He slipped, couldn’t regain his hold, too taken by the call of the sea. I knew what to do. I knew perfectly what I could do. If I entered his mind I could block out the haze of the siren seduction and give him clarity. He would be able to keep his hold. But I was blunt. My mind was a hammer instead of a needle. It went inside him and for a moment I knew all that he was. I could see every thought, every wish, every memory. I knew he loved me in a fashion but was more frightened of me than anything else. His brothers teased him about me and it made him deeply uncomfortable because the thought of me reminded him of his sister’s doll, the one he had admired in secret. He was equally ashamed about admiring me, which was curious to me at the time. And then the moment passed, and my blunt hammer smashed through his mind by mistake, killing him instantly.’

  Finn fell silent, and
I felt that silence deep down inside me. I sat on the side of the bed and reached for her hand, but she removed it.

  ‘The act I had taken killed me too,’ she said woodenly.

  I straightened, watching her face, not understanding.

  ‘It used me up. All of me.’ Her gaze was flickering with a peculiar translucency. It kept fading white and black and grey, one colour overlapping another as if she had a thousand layers within her eyes. ‘I was dead, but my brother carried my body home to Ma. She was a warder – a low tier warder, not very powerful, but trained in the arts of necromancy. She knew about life and death, the flicker between it, and knew how to whisper a soul back into its body. She sent her soul’s energy into mine and drew me back from the dark, even though it had been too long and she could not hope to survive. She restored me by tying my soul to my brother’s permanently, but perished in the act.’

  I tried to speak but couldn’t.

  ‘That’s it. That’s the story everyone wishes they knew. I walked a night with the dead and heard them screaming, and now they scream behind my eyes every night and every day, unless my poor brother is there to help me bear the burden of them. A fate he was never supposed to endure.’

  Closing my eyes, I was awash with a sadness so profound I knew it to be a part of me, as it was a part of her. It was all so clear now. All the pieces of her I hadn’t been able to understand.

  ‘Your da. He’s survived a long time.’

  ‘Broken and humiliated,’ she replied. ‘He is a true half-walker. Not like Ava, who laughs and loves. Da is a shell. And soon he will die, murdered by me just as Ma was.’

  ‘Finn. Hess said it was not your burden to bear. Any of it.’

  ‘She also said Sam would have fallen anyway. Don’t you see how much worse that makes it all?’

  She could have let him fall. Then she would have remained a normal girl, her brother would not have had his life stolen, her ma would not have died, and her da would not be fading as we spoke.

  I nodded. There was no use in trying to take away this knowledge, or argue with it. No use trying to lessen her pain – that would never happen. Instead I reached for her hand once more, and even though she tried to move it from my touch, I took it and held it too firmly for her to be able to escape it. Reaching for her cheek, I cupped it with my other hand, tilting her face towards mine.

  ‘You find joy in so much,’ I told her softly, holding her eyes. ‘You laugh, and you love so many things at once. I would that everyone could endure their pain with so much courage. The world would be a far better place.’

  The moment stopped, and I didn’t know how she would react, my Wild Girl whose behaviour would forever be a mystery to me. She was as likely to scream at me as anything else.

  But she didn’t. Finn reached out and ran her fingers through my short hair, stroking it gently. Her eyes shifted one more time and then stopped, resting on the pale blue colour I saw when I looked in the mirror. I knew with perfect clarity that when eyes shifted to another person’s shade it was because something had been shared or felt or exchanged, some intimacy so sweet it stole everything else and left only love.

  ‘Let’s get this mess sorted out,’ she suggested, breaking the spell. She slid onto the floor and opened one of the records, and after a moment I did the same.

  Some time later Finn said she was being driven mad by the walls and ceiling of her room, and needed a change of scenery. So we moved to the library to continue our reading. We were trying to find any records of the time Da had spent in the berserker mountains, but so far had come across nothing. The earlier records contained no ice, but they were certainly dark and twisted by bloody deeds and a very confused mind.

  The black haired ghost taunts me, I read. He sees everything and I can’t escape him.

  Ava and the twins found us surrounded by dusty scrolls and books; she looked at it all with distaste while Ella and Sadie found their favourite book and sprawled on the floor to read it. ‘How can you stomach it?’ the Queen asked.

  ‘Reading? Or reading about Thorne?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Either.’

  ‘You’re definitely Falco’s cousin,’ she muttered. Then added with a smile, ‘It’s actually really interesting. Like being privy to a different species of human. He was meticulous with his information and his training. I mean, sure, he slaughtered a whole bunch of people, but if you want to be ruled by a scary tyrant, then at least this one was good with his paperwork.’

  The joke didn’t land very well. I couldn’t stomach much more of my father’s emotionless sentences and lists. Ava, the only one of us who’d known him, did not smile.

  I looked at my aunt, sensing something warring beneath her surface. ‘What is it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘We know why Roselyn and Ambrose loved him,’ Finn said. ‘But what about you?’

  Ava stared at her, something in her shifting eyes. They faded to a very pale lilac, so pale it was almost white, but not. Not quite. Looking at me, her expression was flat. ‘Let me be clear,’ Ava of Orion said with a glance to make sure her children weren’t listening. ‘I did not love this man. I spent the most important years of my life hating him. Your mother and uncle have every right to forgive and forget – everyone survives loss in their own ways – but I do not, and I never will.’

  I’d never heard her say anything like it before. She went along with the toasts in his name and she spoke warmly of him to her daughters. I realised what a generosity it was towards the people she loved.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ Finn asked.

  ‘I don’t care what he did to me. It was his wife he hurt, repeatedly. And to me that’s unforgivable, no matter how long he’s been dead.’

  A wave of queasiness hit me and I closed the book before me with a snap. All these puzzle pieces were not making a whole. I could no better understand the man now than I had a month ago. And maybe that was the truth of it: that there were no answers, no wholes left to be found. He would always be a mystery to me, existing only in words spoken with bias and memory.

  Ava put her hand on my shoulder and admitted, ‘I was never capable of much complexity though, kid. In that way I was like your da.’ She swallowed and gave an uncomfortable smile. ‘He and I were similar in a lot of ways.’

  After that she left us to babysit. Finn saw that I’d lost interest in the records so she sang a loud, crude sea-shanty that made me laugh reluctantly. Ella and Sadie watched her raptly, seeming torn between thinking her either the best or the weirdest person ever.

  Osric came by late in the afternoon. ‘I’m glad to see you well, Finn.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, a tad stiffly.

  Osric sat next to me, peering over my shoulder at the record I was pretending to read.

  ‘Any idea why warders would be working with Pirenti men to kidnap Kayan girls?’ Finn asked him bluntly.

  He shook his head. ‘Those warders were not trained by us. They are illegals. I imagine that’s why they wanted you.’

  ‘I’m not an illegal!’

  ‘Technically, you are.’

  We both stared at him.

  ‘You used your power,’ he shrugged.

  ‘To get free!’

  Osric spread his hands. ‘Yes. Still illegal.’

  ‘Osric,’ I started.

  ‘I won’t say anything. I have no love for the warder rules and regulations. I am more powerful than any of them, and yet I have no place in their hierarchy because I am apparently too selfish by nature.’

  Which was patently not true, evident in the help he had freely given.

  Finn’s gaze softened. ‘Idiots,’ she muttered.

  ‘So how can we find out who they were?’ I asked.

  Osric turned to Finn. ‘You touched their skin?’

  ‘Sure, but I was two seconds away from eating dirt. I have no idea who they were. And the warders left me with nothing either – they made sure I couldn’t touch them.’ She pondered for a while, then frowned.
‘The soldiers had tattoos on their hands. Both of them. I thought it odd at the time.’

  ‘Arrow heads?’ I asked quickly and she nodded. A sigh slipped from me. ‘Then they were soldiers from the barracks in Vjort.’

  Finn gave a bright smile. ‘Well then. Looks like we’re going to the most dangerous city in the world!’

  ‘Please try not to look so happy about it.’

  Osric nodded suddenly. His eyes had gone distant. ‘You must leave tonight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve seen it. Something to do with the timing. Something will happen when you get there, but I don’t …’ He shook his head, shrugging blithely. ‘That’s it. That’s all I got.’

  ‘Prophecies and visions,’ I said. ‘Ruling our lives. What if you hadn’t said anything just then?’

  ‘But I did.’

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out except a sound of pure frustration.

  Finn grinned. ‘Thorne has trouble with the concept of fatalism.’

  ‘Fate is a tricky mistress,’ Osric agreed mildly.

  I looked down at the journal in my hand. My father’s large, neat handwriting described his battle tactics for an upcoming skirmish on the borders of Kaya.

  ‘I want answers, Thorne,’ she told me.

  Meeting her eyes, I nodded. ‘To Vjort we go. It’s on the way anyway.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘The berserker mountain.’

  She said nothing, but her eyes changed again to pale, pale blue and she got up to join the twins on the floor. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look unimpressed at a potential adventure.

  The reality was this. If my da knew something about the bond, and he learnt it while under the mountain, then maybe, just maybe, it was the only place left in the world that still bore that knowledge. I didn’t know how, but frankly I didn’t have much else to go on.

  Aside from that – aside from it all – the ice had been calling to me my whole life. Perhaps it was time I stopped denying it.

  Falco