by Grace Martin
I looked down at Ronan. Even asleep, he looked like Caradoc. I wanted so much for him to be Caradoc that it was like an ache inside me. But Caradoc was dead and nothing would bring him back. Caradoc was dead and Ronan was alive. Caradoc was dead and I was alive.
I leaned down and pressed my lips to his in a chaste kiss. He didn’t wake, so I kissed him again, tiny, soft kisses against his parted lips. His hand came up to stroke my face and I felt so warm and lovely I could have wept. My hands were resting against his chest. His other hand came up to stroke my back. He sighed against my lips and kissed me back.
I lifted myself away from him so I could look down at his face. He was still stroking my cheek, turning his hand to run the backs of his fingers against my cheek. He opened his eyes to look back at me and the moment seemed to stretch out to eternity. A small sound made me look away ‒ there, not ten feet away was Lynnevet, staring at me in disgust.
I flung myself away from Ronan. He let me go and I clambered to my feet. I wiped my mouth like a child. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. Ronan sat up. I kept babbling. ‘I’m sorry, I just, I don’t know, I-’
I stopped the flow of words with my own hand pressed hard to my mouth. Ronan got to his feet and it was all I could do not to turn and run for my life in the woods.
Ronan moved slowly and held up his hands, palm out to prove he wasn’t a threat. Caradoc had made that gesture to me once. I felt even worse for making Ronan think he’d done something to frighten me. ‘I understand,’ he said soothingly. ‘I do. It’s all right. I understand.’ And all the while he was gaining on me.
I shook my head, closing my eyes like a baby who thinks no one can see him if he closes his eyes. ‘You couldn’t possibly.’
‘But I do.’
I tried not to jump as he touched my arms. When I opened my eyes, he was very close, but he was only holding me with the lightest possible touch.
‘I didn’t just attend your trial,’ he said, which made me look up. His face was very solemn, like he was still at a trial. ‘I attended his trial too. I know what happened to you and I know why you’re nervous. It’s OK. I’m not going to hurt you.’
My breath was released on an involuntary sigh. I’d had to explain to Caradoc why I was afraid, trying very hard to explain that I wasn’t afraid of him, that I was just afraid. And here was a man who looked enough like him to be his brother, who already understood.
I pressed forward and leaned my cheek against his chest. His arms closed around me.
‘It’s not like you have anything better to do, like getting breakfast,’ Lynnevet said snarkily. Ronan and I broke apart. He looked around.
‘I’m not sure where we’ll find breakfast,’ he said.
‘But I’m hungry!’
‘Turn yourself into a fox and hunt it up yourself,’ I snapped.
‘Why don’t you?’ she snapped back. Sisters. Just love ‘em.
‘Fine.’ I turned myself into a wolf instead, partly because a wolf was a better hunter and partly because it gave her a bigger fright when I suddenly lunged at her and nipped at her heels.
I came back with a rabbit. I changed back into my own shape and threw the carcass at Lynnevet. She shrieked and dodged away. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘Someone has to skin it and clean it. I hunted it. You can skin it.’
‘No, that’s disgusting!’ she cried, still dodging away from the small corpse like it was going to jump up and bite her. Even alive, rabbits are not known for their ferocity.
Ronan intervened ‒ he was, after all, the only adult among us. ‘I don’t mind doing it,’ he said. Lynnevet turned her face away and made silly noises as he did it.
‘You’re such a child,’ I told her and started to make a fire.
Just as the rabbit was ready Ronan excused himself to “wash his hands.” Lynnevet reached for a piece of roast meat, arranged on a makeshift platter of the largest leaves I could find.
I slapped her hand. ‘No,’ I said.
‘What? I like it really hot,’ she said.
‘No, you don’t get any. You didn’t do any of the work, you don’t get any of the result.’
She reached out for the meat again and I slapped her hand again. ‘No.’ She tried again and I slapped her hand again. She stared at me.
Ronan came back, rubbing his hands together. ‘Right! Who’s ready to eat?’
Lynnevet stood up, resolute as a statue. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.
Ronan stopped. ‘What? No, come on, Lynnevet, don’t think of it as a furry rabbit. We need to eat and this is food. If you don’t eat it now, then the rabbit died for nothing and that’s cruel. Come on, sit down with us and eat.’
And I realised that of all the nasty things I’d done, this was probably the worst. Sparrow had been anorexic since the year we’d been in Maldwyn’s care. Eating had always been a touchy subject with her. I’d known that if I attacked Lynnevet about food, that was the thing that would hurt her the most. She turned around and headed towards the river.
‘Lynnevet, stop!’ I called but she ignored me.
I looked at Ronan. He looked back at me. He clearly expected me to go after her, but my pride rooted me to the ground. ‘Aren’t you going…?’
‘No,’ I said.
He looked confused, but said, ‘I’ll go after her, don’t worry.’
‘I won’t,’ I muttered, but I waited until he was gone.
I don’t know what he said to Lynnevet, but she came slinking back with him. There was nothing to pack up, so I just stood up, dusted myself off and asked, ‘Are we ready to leave?’
We walked through the woods until we hit a road and then it wasn’t far to the next town, Farroen. It was left over from before the war and was built out in the open in a way that was guaranteed to make a hive-dweller nervous. Since we’d had a different home every year, Sparrow and I were used to open towns, but you could easily pick someone who hadn’t spent much time out of a hive. They would cower and watch the sky, waiting for a dragon to appear. Likewise, people who’d lived in the open wouldn’t cope well in a hive. Sooner or later they always broke down.
Farroen had once been a big town, but the war had been raging for twenty years now and there weren’t many people willing to live outside a hive. Or perhaps the place had been flamed by Darragh and his sons, back when I was the Bach Chwaer and Caradoc was alive.
Lynnevet had been very quiet on the way, but found her sharp tongue as we entered Farroen. ‘I don’t know why we’re even bothering to come here,’ she said. ‘We’ll just get caught stealing from the shops. We’d be better off stealing from some isolated farm.’
‘Shut up!’ I hissed, before she drew the attention of the local guards. The population of Farroen might be a quarter of what it used to be, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have guards. ‘I’ve been arrested more often than I’d choose lately, I don’t fancy it happening again!’
‘Quiet, both of you!’ Ronan said, as stern as I’d ever seen him. ‘This is an open town. Children and young people keep quiet in public.’ And earned my lasting resentment. Well, lasting until I was distracted by the danger of death, which was only about five minutes anyway.
‘We don’t have to steal anything,’ Ronan went on. ‘I have money. I'm a guard, not a thief.’
So, we went into a shop and acted like well-behaved young people and didn't say anything sarcastic or quarrelsome the whole time.
In the way of small-town shopkeepers everywhere, the old woman behind the counter added the three of us together and wanted to know why we didn’t add up properly.
‘Well, my, look at you two,’ she said, giving me a quick look and Ronan a long one. ‘You don’t look old enough to have a teenage daughter.’
And Lynnevet jumped right in, exclaiming, ‘Daughter? She’s my sister, stupid.’
The woman's eyes narrowed. Ronan clapped a hand that looked heavy on Lynnevet's shoulder. ‘My wife’s sister,’ he explained. ‘Her parents died in a Camiri raid, so we took her in.
’
The old woman shook her head. For a moment I thought she didn't believe him, but then she said, ‘Too many families broken up by the war. You're a good young man, sir, to keep your wife’s family together.’
And that was the end of it. Ronan paid for our food, put an arm around me and we left.
Outside the shop I heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Talk about that close,’ I said, taking a few steps to the corner of the shop.
Ronan was on my other side, Lynnevet a little behind us. I rounded the corner of the shop. A second later, Ronan yanked me back. Without saying a word, he suddenly pressed me up against the wall of the shop and planted a passionate kiss on my lips.
Well, after this morning I was totally OK with that. I admit, it took me a second to get my bearings, then I let my hands twine up around his neck and gave myself up to the moment.
I think he was more surprised at my response than I was, but he seemed quite happy to lose himself in it, too.
Until I heard, above our combined breathing, a familiar voice. ‘The girl is an escaped convict. She must be returned to the guards in Caillen to complete her punishment. We believe there is a man with her: tall, red haired. He’s the crooked guard who helped her escape.’
I slipped my hands down the back of Ronan’s neck and caught hold of his hood, putting it gently over his distinctive hair. I had no idea where Lynnevet was.
‘Sure, I’ll keep an eye out for them,’ a man’s voice said. He must have walked away because the guard seeking us began to talk to someone else.
‘Ma’am, can you spare a moment of your time for a poor girl, stolen from her family by an evil man? She’s only sixteen and a local guard abducted her from her family home.’
Ronan’s lips left mine and he faced me with a look of hurt and confusion. I don't think it had occurred to him what people might say about him. That was how Caradoc had looked when Aoife killed him. I put my hand on Caradoc’s face that Ronan wore.
‘Oh dear, how dreadful,’ the woman said. ‘Is this a recent picture?’
‘Only last year,’ the man said, and I remembered the time the nicest creepyguardian got an artist to paint a portrait of my Sparrow and me. She'd been so sad at the end of the year – or she’d said she was, because we were going to leave her. And now that picture was being used to hunt down the only one of us still alive.
‘If you see her, let her family know. The father is here in Farroen. Ask for Maldwyn at the Dark King’s Head. He’s out of his mind with worry.’
‘Creepyguardians,’ I whispered. Ronan ducked his head to seal my lips with another kiss, but this time I was too busy fearing for my life to really enjoy it.
‘Oh, I will, I will,’ the woman said, and we heard her go on her way. The next time the man spoke, he was further away. The person must not have stopped because the man’s voice receded as he talked.
‘We’re safe for now,’ Ronan whispered, leaning his forehead against mine. ‘Where’s Lynnevet?’
We both looked around. Lynnevet was nowhere to be seen. Then we heard her scream.
I looked around. I couldn’t see her. She cried out again and I heard the voice of the man who had been asking about us. He was dressed in a hive guard uniform, but when he turned to drag Lynnevet behind him, I recognised his face.
There were only ever a dozen creepyguardians at a time, give or take on a bad year, and they all came to Caillen for the Solstice ceremony. This one had never won the lot, but I knew his face.
I wanted to hang back. I could have. I already knew Ronan would do whatever it took to protect me. I could have spun some story. I didn’t.
I just ran around the corner. Ronan followed.
I had no plan. I just ran at the creepyguardian pulling Lynnevet along by her arm. He had her arm pulled up high away from her body. If she pulled away from him any further, he was going to break her arm.
‘You let her go!’ I shouted.
The creepyguardian turned, pulling hard at Lynnevet’s arm. Ronan was faster than me. He brushed past me and landed one solid punch on the man and pulled Lynnevet away from him.
The creepyguardian went down like a stone. Ronan and Lynnevet ran back toward me, hand in hand, but my shout had attracted the local guards.
The guards surrounded us, but they didn’t rush towards us. They looked… uncomfortable. As I looked from Ronan, face grim, sword ready in his hand, to the other guards, I realised that he was still wearing the uniform of a hive guard. He was one of their own.
And, from the way that I was standing shoulder to shoulder with him, Umbra shining like a star in my brow, it was pretty clear that I was with him of my own free will. I also kind of hoped that it was clear that I was nineteen, not sixteen, and that those damned creepyguardians were the ones who were crooked.
We might have even managed to get away. The local guards were unsure and Ronan and I were grim and determined. Those poor guards ‒ they were probably decent men. They weren’t inclined to snatch at us without cause. I wasn’t going to be taken against my will again, and I didn’t want to hurt them too much, so I let Umbra unleash herself. With only the smallest effort, I summoned a massive wind. All the guards flew backwards and landed, unconscious, but not injured, in the dirt.
We might have managed to get away. We were so close.
But, circling high overhead was a dragon, and the wind from my magic reached them. By the time the Dragon Guards reached us we didn’t have a hope. The Dragon Guards beat Ronan into a bloody pulp. When Kiaran spotted me, and recognised me, I didn’t even fight anymore. I let the feathers cover my body and let Kiaran hold me too tightly as we flew to the White Queen’s stronghold at Cairastel.
Chapter Eight
We all knew where Cairastel was, but I’d never seen it. The creepyguardians who’d raised me and Sparrow had worked very hard to keep us from the attention of the Queens, so we’d never gone anywhere near here. Twenty years ago, it hadn’t even existed. I’d flown past it once, when I was coming back to Rheged after being in Camaria. Back then it had been bare, but even then, it was remarkable.
It was a mountain range, for lack of a better word. A huge mountain range that split the Thousand Counties in two, and from it rose spires of rock, hundreds, thousands of feet into the air. Each spire varied in size, from barely a few yards across to one that had to be easily a mile from one side to the other.
Some were so close together that you could jump from one to another, if you weren’t concerned about crashing to your death into the thousand foot drop below you. Others were so far apart that no bridge could span them.
The spires had been uninhabited then. There were stories about bold climbers ‒ and foolhardy climbers ‒ who challenged each other with greater or lesser success to climb to the top of each spire. There were more than two hundred spires in all and back then they were uninhabited except by birds and small creatures who didn’t ask more from life than a few inches of dirt and a bit of grass. Rough grass and a few brave plants grew on the top of each spire, but they were mostly bare except for the forest of flags the climbers had left on the lower peaks.
Now all the flags were gone and the peaks had been scoured clean. Many of them were still scorched. Many of the spires seemed to have a different shape from the flat peaks I’d seen flying back to Rheged that day. The peaks were… lumpy. As we flew closer, I realised that there must be a hundred dragons, curled up on top of the peaks to sleep.
Buildings were perched on top of the larger spires ‒ and some of the smaller spires too. As we wheeled into the fortress, I saw one building occupying every spare inch of a spire that couldn’t be more than a yard wide. Many of the spires were now connected by soaring bridges so light that it didn’t seem possible they could hold any weight.
Aoife had created a marvel. It was a thing of beauty, even in these dark days, and so inaccessible that only a dragon or a bird would be able to approach it.
The guards’ dragons landed on a broad spire several hundred metres across. One
side was built up into sheds and once relieved of their passengers, the dragons headed towards the shelter. Most of the guards headed towards a bridge to cross to the next spire but a small group of guards still held the three of us.
Ronan and Lynnevet didn’t fight, and neither did I. Lynnevet was just quiet, but Ronan looked like he was going to pass out or die. He’d taken a terrible beating. One of his eyes was nearly swollen shut and a smear of blood had dripped from his mouth and down his chin.
They took us across several bridges, but the last transition was different. They put us into a cage that was attached to a rope above and swung the cage out over the edge of the spire, hanging it over the impossible depths of night below. Lynnevet screamed. Ronan seemed to wake up, but he realised quickly that their movements would only make the cage swing more. He put his arms around Lynnevet and she clung to him, her fingers tangling in his bloodstained shirt, hiding her face against him. I sat a little way apart from them and tried to keep my breakfast down.
The cage moved slowly as it was transferred from one spire to another, swinging from its rope. At the other side of the chasm, another guard caught the cage and guided it into a space set apart for it. He opened the gate and Lynnevet and Ronan stumbled out of the cage together. Lynnevet was still clinging to Ronan, making it difficult for him to walk. I followed them, carefully keeping out of the way.
The guard didn’t do anything to us, just grunted at us and said, ‘This way.’ We were in a small, walled off section, a little building with no windows that was only open to the entrance of the cave and one door in the opposite wall. It was set up like the guard lived there, with a bed and a chair and the remains of a meal on a table.
Ronan swayed and groaned. I thought he was surely going to pass out, but the guard kept us moving through the little half-open hut (or half-shut hut, depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, or if, like me, you think you’re hilarious).
We went through a door into a little courtyard. Ronan disentangled himself from Lynnevet, so he could lean over to brace his hands against his thighs, dropping his head to assuage the dizziness. Even so, he managed to murmur something soft and reassuring to her. The guard locked the first door behind him. He was very careful with the second door. He positioned us near the door, ready to shove us through the second he opened it.
