Thorne (Random Romance)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  Thorne

  I stopped by the next room before I left. Isadora, Penn and Jonah – who was now awake – were sitting around the fireplace.

  ‘I’m leaving now. For the ice. I go alone.’

  Jonah looked at me. ‘Hold, brother.’

  The name struck my heart and I felt both Finn’s love for him and my own erupt in my breast.

  ‘I dreamt long.’

  I moved closer, searching his face. It was with great fear that I saw his eyes had shifted to white. But it wasn’t the white Kayans seemed to harbour when they felt hatred. This was the strange sapping of colour that the warders had. It was in his voice, too. Something older, something more knowing.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  Jonah smiled a little sadly, still heartbreakingly young and human. ‘I guess I graduated. A little early, as it turns out.’

  ‘Are you …?’ My voice broke. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I dreamt of Penn’s parents and a mass grave. I dreamt of sparrows circling the holy city. I dreamt of bloodshed on the sandstone, a great deal of it. And treachery. The worst kind. I must go back to Sancia and warn Falco and Quillane. Finn will refuse to come with us, so I cannot protect my sister. I must ask you to do this for me.’

  I took his shoulders and gripped them tightly. ‘Until my last breath.’ Even if it meant I had to destroy every last scrap of love between she and I, break every vow I’d made to her – even then, I would protect her from her greatest threat: myself.

  Jonah embraced me. I felt, peculiarly, as though I didn’t want it to end.

  ‘We go with Jonah,’ Isadora told me, and it was the gentlest I had ever heard her speak. ‘We will do our best to get him there in time.’

  ‘And protect him,’ Penn said.

  I hugged the small boy fiercely. ‘You be careful,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t ever let them compromise who you are.’ He nodded, knowing I meant his parents, knowing it with a courage that astounded me.

  ‘My life is the richer for knowing the three of you,’ I told them.

  The innkeeper – who I vowed to endow with riches beyond his wildest dreams for having facilitated a secret bi-racial royal wedding many would kill him for – equipped me with ice shoes, ropes, a pick and a hammer, plus a fur thicker than my own and rations enough for a month. I promised him even more wealth to watch over Finn while I was away, knowing he’d need an army of helpers to stop her from getting herself into trouble.

  My breath made thick clouds as I walked north into the ice.

  Day broke and the sun lit it like an eruption of flames or a sparkling, dazzling expanse of glitter. Through it ran long chasms so deep they were blue like spider-veins. It seemed too vast, entering the very edge of it. It seemed impossible.

  But it was not. My da had done it.

  As would I.

  Days passed as I ran at a steady jog; I didn’t have time to walk. I barely stopped for breaks, slept in snatched hours here and there. I focused on the beat of my pulse, concentrated on keeping it steady and slow as I ran. My feet dug into the ice with each step, the snow boots lined with small metal spikes. Several times I ran too close to a fissure and nearly fell to my death. There would be no climbing out of a chasm like that. It would sweep you down into the bowels of the earth and wait for you to perish.

  Slowly – too slowly – I reached the shadow of the mountain.

  And Gods, it was mighty. I’d never laid eyes on anything its like. Splintering into the sky with a divinity I hadn’t expected, it cast its baleful eye upon me as I ran closer and closer.

  The cold, I realised, was what killed. I had to exercise my toes and fingers to make sure the blood kept flowing or I’d lose them to frostbite. My cheeks and nose were red and chapped, my lips cracked like a drought-ridden riverbed. I made the mistake of sucking on the ice for hydration – it dropped the temperature of my body to dangerously low levels. After that I let the ice melt in my pack before I drank it.

  And always I ran, while wolves howled around me.

  I’d lost track of how many days had passed when I first saw them – half a dozen shapes moving towards me from the base of the mountain. I stopped and crouched to gain my breath while I waited.

  Their identity became clear quickly. It was in the way they ran, in the size of their figures, the disciplined and easy movements atop the ice.

  Berserkers.

  And here, at their head, was their leader. The King of the Ice. Berserker lord of the mountain. His name was Goran and he had been King since my father killed the King before him. Over thirty years.

  He was huge and scarred, but beyond that – at a deep, instinctive level – I could feel his strength. Scent it, resonating through the air around him.

  And as he drew nearer, it felt to me as though I was coming home, at very long last.

  They said nothing as they surrounded me. All a head taller. Giant-like, in their animal skins. There was a restless, rabid quality to them. Rage threaded beneath their surfaces.

  I knew that if he were awake, my beast would be shivering in delight, prowling his cage. He would send a deep, guttural desire into me – the desire to fight. But so too would he recognise kin, like ambrosia in my blood.

  He did none of these things; he was like a corpse, so still was he inside me.

  I drew myself up and gazed at Goran, who towered over me.

  Then I bowed my head to him. ‘King of the Ice.’

  His eyes were red. Perpetually. For the beast lived him and he lived it. They were one and the same.

  ‘Son of Thorne,’ he said, voice deep and resonant.

  ‘I’m not here to challenge you. I come only for information, and to find illegal warders.’

  He cocked his head, smelling me.

  My hairs pricked up, skin tingling.

  ‘Once,’ he said softly, ‘I would have destroyed you, Prince of Wolves, for daring to trespass. A man goes north and there is only one reason for it: to challenge. But now beasts are caged and the north has become hated by its sons. The world is falling.’

  I didn’t understand, but I didn’t have to: they knocked me unconscious.

  Finn

  I was caged and carried, and to be honest, it was a blessing. I would never have made it on foot, and that was the whole point of getting myself captured. It was too far, too cold, too deadly. I had no idea where I was going, and one misstep would mean I was lost forever.

  They were berserkers, I knew immediately. I’d been expecting warders, but I got four berserkers, emerging from the ice. They ran and ran, carrying me with them in a wicker cage. They didn’t speak or stop, and I felt dizzied by their strength. I moved in and out of consciousness, cold beyond comprehension. The only times they paused were to feed me and massage my limbs, and I slowly grew to hate these moments, for the burn of muscles being brought back to life was unbearable, and my body started to wish for oblivion.

  I couldn’t count the time passing. I had no concept of it, trapped in my delirious hallucinations. Sam was always there in my head, swinging from that last rope. Moths fluttered endlessly around my face and body, and it was beautiful to me that each time their gossamer wings touched my skin they lit it up so that it glowed effervescent.

  I thought often of the prophecy. Its words whispered through my mind, taunting me. He will be of one soul and two faces. He will speak with two voices and feel with one heart. He will be servant and ruler. He will know moon and earth. To break the bond will be to break him.

  It made no sense that we should need to find information elsewhere. The clue itself should have provided the answer.

  One soul, two faces. Two voices, one heart. Servant and ruler. Moon and earth.

  If not twin girls born to a father of the north and a mother of the south, then … who?

  Who?

  The next time I came to consciousness I was in a cave. The earth beneath me was cold and hard, but it was not ice. I blinked, rousing myself slowly and trying to see through the darknes
s. I was still in a cage – that much was clear. This one had steel bars dug down deep into the ground. There were other cages around me, opposite and on either side. They seemed empty, at first. And then I was met by the slow, eerie sound of many people breathing.

  Slowly they took shape and my skin crawled with a nameless horror.

  Bodies lay in corners and shadows, barely alive.

  Something scraped behind me and my heart slammed in fear. I whirled, peering into the darkness.

  I saw her eyes first. Glowing. She shuffled forward; she was inside my cage with me. Her hair was shaved off. Her body was so thin it looked like a skeleton with papery skin stretched over it. She was a wraith with white eyes.

  Trembling, I pushed myself back against the bars.

  But she simply looked at me, this walking corpse.

  ‘Are you … are you all right?’ I managed to ask in no more than a whisper. She made no reply. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I had a name once,’ she rasped, voice painfully young. ‘But I do not remember it.’

  ‘What is this place? Why are you here?’

  ‘It is the dreamless nightmare. And I am here because I fell in love.’

  She spoke more. Slowly and at great length. Whatever agony was inside her wished to come up, to get free. But even her words did not present her with any kind of salvation.

  They were, all of them, half-walkers. The most wretched creatures to walk the earth, as the nameless girl described them. The warders had taken them and brought them here. Then they had killed one mate in each bonded couple, and used their twisted magic to keep the second mate alive against their will. These poor souls were half-walkers not because they had chosen to be, not because they were strong enough to be, but by force. The idea of it was heinous.

  Every single one of them wanted, with a longing I had no words to define, death. I was more frightened of accidentally touching their skin than I had been frightened of anything in my life.

  To break the bond will be to break him.

  At the end of this journey through ice and ghosts, one of you will die.

  Two faces, one soul.

  It wasn’t fitting, I couldn’t make it fit, but Gods it felt close. Warders making half-walkers. Why? Their power lay in the soul magic, in the power of the bond. This was Agathon’s legacy. Break the bond, and the soul magic unravelled. I didn’t know this, not for certain, but I had always guessed it might be the case. I imagined it would be very difficult for us to convince the warders to let us break the bond, once we’d found the answer, but I had always known it would be decided not by warders but by the Emperor and Empress of Kaya. It was why warders could not be rulers – there was too much potential for corruption.

  So warders making half-walkers made no sense.

  But it did explain Hess’ prediction. If either Thorne or I was killed, the other could be kept alive by magic. One of you will die … It will only be one of you.

  Two faces, one soul.

  And like that, it fit.

  I knew.

  It was Thorne of Araan. It had been him all along. I didn’t know how he fit as a son of the north and the south, but perhaps that was me. My soul, as half of his. We were the two faces, the two voices, now that we’d been bonded.

  To kill one of us and keep the other alive, souls severed from each other, would mean breaking the bond and breaking it for all Kayans.

  Thorne

  Under the mountain I was brought to a large cavern and chained to a steel pole.

  ‘Why?’ I asked the Ice King.

  ‘Because it pleases her,’ was all he replied.

  The berserkers left me and I waited. Long hours. The manacles about my hands kept them above my head and caused a fire in my shoulders.

  At last she came. A warder. She had long white hair, blue skin and white eyes, and she was the strangest creature I had ever seen. She did not seem real, not in any way I knew how to recognise. There was something distant in her face, something completely unapproachable.

  ‘My name is Eanna,’ she spoke and her voice was so full of magic that it made me physically ill. ‘I am a first tier warder banished from using my power by the warders of Kaya.’

  I wondered why she was telling me.

  ‘I have nothing to hide,’ she responded to my thought. ‘I want you to understand what has brought us both here. It will make it all the sweeter when I destroy your mind.’

  ‘Was it you who broke free of the prison?’

  ‘No. I facilitated it. To release the true Emperor and Empress of Kaya. Those who have the power to unite the world as one.’

  Penn’s parents.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘The boy would have been a very powerful weapon, had he not been born mind-addled. Even without him, they will be taking the holy city as we speak. And when Kaya belongs to them, they will turn their eyes north to take Pirenti.’

  My hackles rose. ‘They’ll never succeed.’

  ‘They already possess the berserkers under the mountain, greatest weapon of a blood-soaked nation.’

  So that was what was going on up here. I hadn’t been able to fathom why the berserkers would be working with their mortal enemies, but now I got it – the warders had control of them.

  ‘What is it that you’re doing up here?’ I demanded. ‘You took the bonded couples, didn’t you? Why? To break the bond?’

  ‘No. We don’t wish it broken. Only changed.’ Her eyes flashed with something excited, and it was the first emotion I’d seen in her. ‘The bond will be remade. Deeper, stronger. A bond between the rightful rulers of the world and their servants. A bond between warder and man.’

  I couldn’t grasp it, until she sent the vision into my head and I understood, finally. I saw all of Kaya and Pirenti held captive by the warders, bonded to them unto death, unable to fight or escape. Where could one escape to, if his very soul was bound to his rulers?

  ‘You’d die when they did,’ I breathed.

  ‘No. Not if we have you, Prince Thorne.’

  I shook my head desperately.

  ‘You have in your blood the power to break the unbreakable bond. We wish to use that power to reshape a new bond, one that allows ordinary men and women to die without killing their masters.’

  A world of servitude. It sent a shiver of repulsion into my heart.

  ‘I won’t let you do this,’ I said. ‘I’ll die first.’

  ‘That is precisely what we desire,’ Eanna answered.

  And then she began to torture me.

  Here he stood, torturing men and women with the cold edge of his axe. Here he stood, slaughtering Kayans in a room made of marble. Here he stood, watching my mother in the dungeon cell he reserved just for her. Here he stood, watching her scream for mercy as her head slipped beneath the surface of a mighty ocean.

  I roared in anguish. ‘Get out of my head, warder filth!’

  But she didn’t. She sent more painful visions into my mind. They were sharp and precise, but what was worse was the sense that they were all real, far too real. It was too much. I didn’t want to see him this way, even though I’d always known him to be a monster. My weary heart couldn’t take it. Because what was worse was when she showed me the truth of my own dream.

  A girl with yellow hair and yellow eyes being devoured by a monster, the man who’d created me in his image. But when he looked up this time, into my eyes, I finally saw that the monster was not my da.

  It was me. It had been me all along.

  Finn

  I could hear his screams. They came from somewhere close, the agony in them raking at my insides like the talons of a mighty bird of prey. I shook the bars of my cage, screaming with him, demanding to be let out. I could not get to my power; they had cowed it with their own magic – the magic that lay heavy upon the air with a stench of rot. His poor heart, oh Gods his heart. I could feel it in my chest and it floundered wildly, out of control and beating as though on its last legs.

  ‘Thorne!’ I screamed, again and a
gain until my throat was hoarse and no sound came from my mouth.

  A huge man appeared in the darkness of the cave. His eyes glowed red and I could smell his musky scent like one smelt a wild animal in the forest. The other prisoners shrank away from him, but I yanked on the bars with ferocity.

  ‘Step back,’ he ordered bluntly.

  ‘Make me, coward.’

  He unlocked the metal and I lunged at him, no idea what I meant to do but out of my mind with worry. The man caught me and threw me over his shoulder as if I were no more than a small sack of meat.

  I grabbed the back of his neck with my bare hand, wanting to know. It was ice and sky and blood blood blood. He was burdened, this man. But that burden sat high, near to his surface. Below it, in his heart of hearts, he was uncomplicated and happy. He knew his place; he was animal. That was how I knew he was the berserker King.

  ‘Let me go,’ I begged. ‘This can’t be what you want. It’s an abomination.’

  ‘All warders are abominations,’ he murmured. And I couldn’t help agreeing. It was the power, the horrible corruption of it. They were humans, after all. Liked to pretend they weren’t, that they were above it. But they were born and they died, and they wanted all the same things the rest of us did.

  Which was what became so unforgivably dangerous.

  The brute of a man carried me down a twisting tunnel, at the end of which we emerged into a large cavern. And shackled at the centre of it was Thorne, unconscious but hung upright by his hands as though he was about to be gutted. It looked like he’d been there for hours and hours. Streams of blood ran rivulets down from the manacles at his wrists.

  I struggled like a mad thing to get free, but it was no use. I was chained to a pole opposite Thorne’s.

  When the berserker was gone a warder entered. She gazed at me, her eyes shrewd and all-seeing. The air of this cavern stank of her, felt heavy with the residue of her power, and it was this power that had let off the horrible stench of rot. I could feel her delight, though she showed me none of it. And as she turned to Thorne I knew she meant to make me watch his torture.