I could see her mind racing, trying to take it in. ‘And how do you feel?’
I frowned, staring at her.
‘Tell me!’ she snarled suddenly, startling me.
I licked my lips, cracked my knuckles. Was this bitch serious? ‘I feel peachy,’ I told her sweetly.
‘You’re a half-walker,’ she whispered. ‘A ghost. Everything is dimmed except for the anger.’ She closed her eyes as if she could taste the words.
And so I understood. I was unquestionably the only person in this world who could have come to this conclusion, who could have guessed the truth. It was easy to imagine how she’d hidden it all this time, being something that no one in the whole damn world would ever assume. If all you felt was pure, poisonous hatred, your eyes would remain the one colour.
‘I’m not the first person to survive a mate’s death, am I?’ I asked her softly.
The Queen of Pirenti opened her eyes and stared at me. They had a tinge of red to them now – it was a hint of the anger that must be suffocating her. ‘I told you women were too clever,’ she murmured.
I could see it all so clearly. One day, before I’d even been born, this woman had lost her mate, and she’d let the anger of it consume her – such an easy, easy thing to do. This was not good. I didn’t like the way these discoveries were rattling at the certainties I’d erected. It made things suddenly unclear.
‘Why come here?’ I asked. ‘To rule Pirenti?’
She looked out the window, seeming to deliberate for a long while before answering me. When she did, her voice was devoid of any emotion. ‘It was a Pirenti woman who killed my husband.’
She let that settle for a while, like the dust I kept kicking up with every shuffle of my feet.
‘Don’t you think it’s perfect? To punish every woman in this Godsforsaken country for the actions of one?’ She smiled crookedly, vacantly. ‘I hate it here – I hate everything about this frozen, colourless land. I married a king and it was so easy to kill him and start my reign. My rulings weren’t so different at first – Pirenti has always been a violent place – but never have women here been as frightened as they are now. Never have they loathed their husbands more, never have they struggled for their lives this much.’
I felt dizzy. Without meaning to I sank to the floor, resting my head in my hands. It was too much. A monster stood before me – more twisted than any I had ever come across – and the truth was simple: I was more like this woman than anyone else in the world.
‘Though I’ve started thinking of late,’ the Queen went on softly, almost as though she was alone, ‘that instead of making the Pirenti suffer, I’ve done these people a service – the greatest service anyone could offer. I’ve taken away their ability to love. Love destroys; it is the most dangerous thing of all.’
‘No one can take that away from people,’ I said. ‘Not even a queen.’
She smiled, an empty, ugly grimace. I hoped to the Gods that I didn’t look like that when I smiled. ‘Go out into the streets of this fortress. Peer through the windows of the houses. Place your ear at the door of a bedroom. All you’ll find is cruelty.’
My eyes grew hot; an ache began in my chest, such a heavy thing.
‘My son ordered his own wife to be executed,’ the Queen said. ‘Is that not the vilest thing you’ve ever heard?’
I squeezed my eyes shut and despaired at the tears sneaking beneath the lashes. ‘Then you’ve never let yourself feel anything for another human since? Not even—’ and here my voice broke, ‘not even your children?’
She peered at me blankly. ‘It’s impossible. I am a half-walker, as are you. There’s nothing left in me to give a child.’
The reality of children came to me all at once, for the first time in my life. Sitting in this dank cell, I tried to imagine giving birth to a child and not loving it. I tried to imagine watching one grow and not loving it. Watching that baby’s eyes change colour for the first time and not loving those eyes more than anything. I couldn’t.
I could never.
With that understanding a new set of hands took hold of my heart and squeezed very tightly, very painfully. These hands pulled me in another direction. My mind found Ambrose, and then a few moments later it found, with confusion, Thorne. No wonder these boys were the way they were.
‘It’s not impossible.’
She looked at me pityingly. ‘You would have understood one day.’
I swallowed. ‘I’ll tell you a secret, shall I?’ I caught and held her eyes. ‘I’ve fallen in love twice in my life. The second time was very recently. Weeks ago, days ago.’
The Queen stared at me unblinkingly for a long time. Her pale blue eyes darkened to navy. ‘I told you not to lie,’ she whispered. I barely heard her. ‘You’ll pay for this.’
Neither of us blinked as we gazed into each other’s eyes.
A sound came from behind her – footsteps descending the stairs. A figure appeared. A man who was smaller than most in Pirenti, normal in every other way, except for his eyes, which were unnaturally black.
‘Your Highness,’ he whispered, his voice hissing like a snake’s. Though he was addressing the Queen, he never took his eyes from me.
I felt cold, feeling that gaze – cold in a way I’d never known. This could only be one man – Vincent.
‘They are waiting for you. The finals are about to begin.’
She stared at me a moment longer, then seemed to get a hold of herself, her famous composure sweeping back over her features. ‘I look forward to our next meeting,’ she told me, all hard edges and glimmering malice once more. ‘I’ll leave you in this cell to contemplate impossibilities.’
The two of them left and I sat alone.
I thought of his life here. His life at fourteen, when his mother had sent him to be tortured in a northern barracks. I thought about when his brother had disappeared into the ice, leaving him alone to be challenged by men bigger and stronger than he. I thought of whatever he’d done to make Roselyn fall in love with him. I thought of when he’d taken me on that ship and he’d saved my life again and again, breathing air into my lungs when every rule he’d ever learnt told him that my death was something to rejoice in. I thought of his life now, of his heartbeat, which beat inside my chest with a rhythm far steadier than my own. I thought of his hands and his kisses and his touch. Of his eyes when they shifted to gold, and even when they didn’t, when they were a perfect, pale blue.
I’ll send your body back to the sea. I’ll do that for you.
And then I stopped thinking about Prince Ambrose of Pirenti, because he was destroying me.
It was an hour later when the full force of my captivity slammed into me like one of those soldier’s punches.
Roselyn.
Roselyn was about to be executed, and I wasn’t going to be there to rescue her.
Chapter 21
Ambrose
When I turned fourteen, my ma had never once called me by my name. I knew because I had been listening very closely and marking the things that she did call me. Never speaking to me, of course, but always about me. Runt, she would say, mostly. Sometimes it was just boy. But occasionally she would refer to me as the cub, and this was the one I never understood. Thorne refused to tell me the meaning of it when I asked him, so it came to be that I asked my father.
‘A cub is what the ancients used to call baby wolves,’ Rourke had told me. This label raked at my fourteen-year-old pride.
‘Baby?’
He looked sideways at me then, his grey eyes so different from mine, expression subtle as always. If there had been anyone in this world more like a wolf than Rourke of Araan was, I couldn’t have imagined such a person – not at fourteen, not now. Tall and lean and made entirely of wiry muscle, he made not one sound when he moved. He was more shadow than man, I had thought once.
‘When you show her the truth of yourself,’ he told me that day, ‘remember the words she speaks. They will help.’
I had been confus
ed. ‘What truth?’
‘The truth of what you are, of what you will be.’
And bracing myself, I had asked, heart pounding, ‘And what is that, Da?’
My father had looked at me properly, and he’d smiled a very sly smile then. He simply replied, ‘A giant.’
It was a cold, cold winter’s day four months later when I killed him.
In the crypt, it felt colder than death. My hand on the stone of his tomb was near frozen. My brother stood behind me clasping my shoulder, and as he started to speak he pulled me back there, to the day of all days – the day that had changed me into the kind of man unable to bear the cold of his homeland.
The slaughter room was full and sparkling, prettier somehow with the snow falling outside the mighty window. I watched Thorne kill from beside Ma’s throne. Already twice my size at seventeen, he was a fearsome thing to behold, drenched as he was in red.
‘Cub,’ Ma said without looking my way. I hated the word, hated her, but was surprised that she’d actually spoken to me. ‘See how he uses his knife? Between the ribs?’
I watched, feeling numb to it all.
‘Let us pray that one day you have the strength to hold a blade like that. Though I won’t hold my breath.’
That was when Rourke of Araan, banished Prince of Pirenti, arrived at the slaughter room of the fortress.
Many years before, my ma had married King Rythe. When he proved infertile, she had slept with his brother, Rourke, in order to conceive me. The indiscretion had left Rourke banished by his own brother, and it had forever been a mystery why Rythe never executed him for treason. I understood, and Thorne did, too. It was something only brothers could understand – how fiercely they loved each other. In any case, King Rythe had died not long after, leaving Ma to rule alone, with her two sons by her side.
Thorne and I had been sneaking out to Rourke’s seaside cabin for as long as I could remember. He was my king, my god, my idol. He was everything I wished I could be, until this day, when he burst into the slaughter room and announced, ‘I challenge the second prince to his throne.’
Everything went quiet then. Silent, like the depths of the ocean, and just as airless. I was like to drown in my own heartbreak. I did not understand – could not even come close.
Thorne stepped forward, shocked, eyes crazed and unpredictable, but I shook my head at him and after a moment of silent pleading, his hands dropped to his sides, his huge knife clattering to the marble floor. I’d let him kill his own father for me – I would not make him kill mine, too.
I still hadn’t moved, hadn’t been able to, but Rourke walked right into the middle of the room where a space was being made for us. My eyes searched out his, terrified of what I might find there, full of disbelief and the notion that surely, surely, this had to be some kind of joke. My father stared back at me, eyes grey as always, but without their usual sly gaze or wolfish grin – there was only deadness. There was nothing at all behind his gaze, just a flat determination that I knew was going to be the end of one of us.
It occurred to me to lose. I could die here and now and not have to endure the aftermath. But in my veins there had always been a certain need, a craving for life, and perhaps even an understanding of my own fate. So I stepped forward, removed my weapons, and faced my father.
The Queen hadn’t said a word. She could stop this – a banished man had no right to challenge – but everyone there knew that this moment was beyond law. It was about honour and pride and worth. The ex-prince wanted his throne back, even if it meant killing his own son. And who in the world could ever stand against a will as strong as that?
I could, I realised suddenly. I could stand against it.
‘As you wish,’ I said softly, voice quivering.
He was so much bigger than me, so much faster, so much more skilled. I only survived because his first blow was such a mighty one. Lowering his head, Rourke charged me, connecting with my chest and pummelling the breath from my lungs. It threw us both back, way back, stumbling with the sheer force of his attack, until we flew straight through the window, entwined as if one.
Spinning through the air, we scrambled and struggled, and I managed to twist myself on top of him just as we hit the ground. A terrible sound exploded, a WHUFF of shattered earth and snow bursting up around us. My sight went for three seconds, then burst back along with the throbbing of my body. Broken bones and dislocated sockets made it almost impossible to move, but I did. I dragged myself up my father’s body until I was staring right into his face.
Blood trickled from Rourke’s mouth, ears and nose but he was conscious still. Reaching down, I pried his dagger from his belt and moved it painstakingly up to his throat.
Our eyes met.
‘Go ahead, cub,’ he murmured through the blood.
I blinked, more wounded by the word than the attack. ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Own that title,’ he growled. ‘Own every title anyone ever gives you. Make it yours, and then they will never forget your true name.’
A building ache in my chest, like a sob I had to keep swallowing. ‘Why?’ I whispered. ‘Why did you do this? You’ve never wanted the throne back.’
He tried to say something but a gurgling cough was all that came out. It sounded like two words, but I couldn’t hear them properly. With a very small smile and a jerking nod, Rourke bid me proceed. There would be no more words.
With one hand on his forehead, almost a loving gesture, I cut my father’s throat and watched the life go from his dark eyes.
Hit by a tidal wave of grief, I fell sideways off his chest and onto my back. His arm was beneath me, almost as though he was holding me. Cold snuck inside, cold from the earth straight into my heart. The snow all around me was covered in blood. Above there were faces, dozens of them gazing out the window. My brother’s face was there, and my ma’s.
‘A prince of wolves you are indeed,’ she said, a voice drifting down to me through the falling snow. From then on she only ever called me Ambrose.
‘Why did he do it?’ Thorne asked me now, a tired urgency in his voice.
I shook my head – after all these years I still had no idea.
‘It didn’t make sense to me,’ my brother continued. ‘It rankled me. Why did he not draw his blade and attack you that way? Why tackle you out that window, where you’d both almost certainly die?’
I swallowed, but didn’t have the answer. I didn’t have any answers and I never had – that was what plagued me.
‘I couldn’t let it go.’
‘You and me both, brother,’ I murmured.
‘He loved you. You were his greatest joy.’
‘Don’t.’
‘I went hunting for an answer,’ Thorne said.
I jerked around to stare at him. ‘I don’t want to talk about this. You have to stop.’
‘Ambrose, listen. I know what happened.’
‘He lost his mind – wanted the throne. I killed him for it. It’s taken me years to come to terms with that – don’t dredge it all up again.’
‘Ambrose,’ Thorne said, looking into my eyes, ‘he didn’t do it.’
I stared.
‘Your father never challenged you. Not truly.’
‘What the Sword are you talking about?’
‘It was Ma.’
‘Thorne—’
‘Vincent.’
I froze. My mind started spinning, putting the pieces together. No. No, no, no, no, no. The earth seemed to have gone from beneath my feet.
‘Not drawing a weapon was the only way he knew how to fight the hold,’ Thorne said. ‘The only way he could try to protect you.’
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, willing myself back to that day. His eyes had been so dead, so unlike him, and his movements had been stiffer than usual. He hadn’t walked with that same sly grace. His words, right at the very end, before he’d died – they had sounded like I tried.
It fit. It all fit. A great moan left me, a terrible sound. Sinking
to my knees, I curled in on myself.
‘She wanted him dead, and she wanted to see what you were capable of. Kill two birds with one stone.’ Thorne’s voice echoed off the walls of the crypt.
‘How long have you known?’ I whispered.
‘Since the month after. Eventually I went to her and she told me the truth.’
Betrayal struck, more painful than any of my injuries had ever been. I looked up at him. ‘You let me think, all these years, that my father wanted me dead. You let me question, over and over and over again. It plagued me, never being able to make any sense of it.’
‘I know,’ Thorne replied, pained. ‘I know, brother. She ordered me not to say a word. I obeyed.’
‘Is that all you do? All you can ever do?’
‘It was.’
I closed my eyes again, unable to see him.
‘We’ll kill her,’ he said softly, sinking to his haunches before me. ‘We’ll kill her together, brother.’
I shook my head. ‘Leave me be, Thorne.’
‘Ambrose—’
‘Leave.’
I heard Thorne hesitate, then leave me alone in the crypt Stiffly, I got up and climbed onto the stone coffin, lying with my back flat against the cold granite.
Staring at the roof, I ran my fingers over the edge of the stone. ‘You were more of a giant than I’ll ever be.’
The flame of a torch flickered and I watched the pattern of shadow it threw on the wall. As I lay there I allowed myself, for the first time in eleven years, to really remember my father, and how I had loved him. It was like being immersed in ice-cold water – it was a shock to the system, a sudden gasp of air when my lungs had died long ago. Memories flooded me, so many of them, hundreds of moments of life shared with this man – this strange, complicated, good man.
The truth hit me then: I should have known. I should not have been so quick to lose faith in the love he’d had for me.
‘She called me a prince of wolves,’ I murmured to him. ‘Those were the words she spoke. Before this day is out, I’ll show her what they really mean.’
Avery (Random Romance) Page 31
