by Rachel Dunne
Anddyr felt like there were worms in his stomach, twisting with the sick fear of not having his skura, writhing with the hatred of wanting it so badly. “You . . . you could tell me to stop. You said I’m yours now. You could command me to stop taking it.”
Etarro looked so sad that it made Anddyr hate himself more than he already did. “That wouldn’t be real, Anddyr. I can’t give you your freedom, no one can. You have to choose to fight for it, if that’s what you want. You have to choose to be a better person. I think you can do it, but I won’t make you.” The boy’s eyes went distant suddenly, that familiar, far-off look he got when something from the future flickered before his vision, or when a god spoke in his mind. As he refocused, coming back from whatever he’d seen, a sound between a sigh and a whimper left him. Ghostlights danced around his face, their eerie light making him look something less than human. “I’m so sorry, Anddyr,” he said. “There is one thing you have to do. When the time comes, you have to try, no matter what happens, no matter how it looks. You still have to try. And when you do . . . I’ll forgive you. You need to remember that, Anddyr. I’ll forgive the choice you have to make.” He did turn then and faded through the ghostlights, leaving Anddyr alone once more, wedged uncomfortably behind the Icefall, his mind clear enough for a spark of anger to take root.
Anddyr fought against the ice caging him, twisted his shoulders, tried to find something with his free hand that he could grab for leverage, scraping off more of his face on the ice. If he could get out, he could chase after Etarro, demand answers, take his skura back . . .
Fear hit him then, a crippling thing. He’d only had the one jar of skura, and oh, he was sane enough for the moment, but that would pass and quicker than he’d like . . . and then he’d be left a mad, drooling mess, with no way even to relieve that, and then . . .
He’d once heard a commoner tell the tale of a man who’d gone so crazy he’d died, but that was utter foolishness, as silly as dying of a broken heart. Madness wouldn’t kill a man. It would, though, make a man do foolish things, and foolish things were apt to get anyone killed.
Anddyr started to fight again, putting all his long muscles to the task of freeing himself from the cubby behind the Icefall. He pulled, he twisted, he pushed; he lost more skin than a flaying. His hands grew so cold from gripping at ice that he became convinced his fingers would snap off and he wouldn’t even notice.
There was no way to track time in the Cavern of the Falls. He could convince himself the ghostlights moved in some sort of pattern, that when two drifted across each other’s path in a certain way, that meant an hour had passed; that the spiraling movements of one meant another hour had gone by; that when one fought with the enormous bird that swooped into the cavern, it had been an hour more; that when each ghostlight exploded into a shower of fiery flowers, it meant he was going to die there, trapped behind the Icefall. When the ghostlights began talking to him, giggling and whispering of his death, it began not to seem so silly that a man could die of madness.
There was pain—pain like he had never known before. The sort of pain that ground his bones to dust, that sliced slowly into flesh, that twisted him away piece by piece until there was nothing left but a fiery, throbbing pain, the core of his being, the sum of his parts.
There was laughter that echoed around his skull, around the cavern, around the world. It set his teeth on edge, ground them down to gums; made him bash his head against the surrounding ice as hard as he could, hard enough to fill his ears with blood instead of laughter, hard enough to batter a hole through hair and skin and bone and crush his brain to pulp, hard enough the ice shattered around him and fell in a sharp wave, heavy and drowning and slow as a single drop of blood.
The Icefall was gone, or he was gone. He lay on the floor of the cavern, flat and still as stone, and the ghostlights winked down at him.
Free.
The word whispered under the laughter, and it tasted of clean breath, of warm flowers, of gentle-spoken promises. It shuddered through him, setting his nerves alight, mixing with the pain at his core to create something steady and sharp.
Now fight.
He flew apart, flinging all the pieces of himself, scattering in all directions as they said their Fratarro had. When his limbs sped back into place, stitching themselves together, making him whole once more, he was standing. His feet against the ground were heavy and solid and feelingless as ice.
He ran. My choice.
His vision swirled with blue and white, painting the shadows, illuminating the monsters that lurked there. The colors clouded his sight, sending him careening into walls. He fell, scraped his knees and hands, got up and ran more, crashed into more hard stone.
Now fight.
He could feel his fingers twitching, guided by some dim and whining part of his mind, a part of him that was barely himself, or maybe he was no longer his own self. His fingers twisted, and light blossomed around him, and a tingling shuddered over his skin. The whimpery piece said he was hidden now from the lurking monsters. The running piece, the color-swirling piece, the crashing piece, didn’t care.
Through the colors, through the blood dripping over his eyes and falling like snow, he saw a face. The face of dreams, the face of kindness, the face of love. He would find her. Find her, and save her, and they’d be free together. He would prove himself worthy of her smile. He would be better than he had been.
My choice.
Something hard pressed into his head, scraped along the length of his body. The whimpery piece said it served him right—a blind-running fool was bound to crash into a wall eventually. The blue veil parted, and the white, falling away from his eyes in a wash of blood. His head hit the floor, bounced with a wet squelch. Even the red faded away.
Free . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was still colder’n death, but the blanket helped. Rora gave up on picking the lock—not really giving up, she told herself, just taking a break from it—and instead sat for a while with the quilt wrapped around herself. It still held some of the boy’s warmth, and it caught up what little warmth she had left and held it gentle, like a pile of kindling just before it takes the spark, and Rora’s bones finally started to thaw. She even slept for a bit, her body heavy with cold and tired, her mind heavy with the things she didn’t want to think about.
One thing Rora’d learned, though, was that good things never last.
The head black-robe had said he didn’t need her, and maybe there was some truth in that, but there was some lie in it, too. She wasn’t too surprised that when light began to creep down the tunnel, it was the head black-robe and his cronies come calling again. Maybe he didn’t need her, but he’d talked about options, and having more’n one was never bad.
“Welcome back,” Rora said, warmth making her cockier than she maybe should’ve been.
Even though the head black-robe didn’t have any eyes, his brows knitted up like he was narrowing them at her. He said something to one of the other black-robes, too quiet for Rora to hear, but it sent the man scurrying back up the tunnel. To Rora, he said, “I came to see if you’d like to be reunited with your brother.”
That sent a chill back into her, sure enough. “What?”
“Your brother. Surely you haven’t forgotten him already?”
“Don’t know what you mean,” Rora said, even though she could suddenly hear her heartbeat. There was no way they could’ve got Aro . . . was there? Hells, it’d be just like him to get impatient and get some stupid idea in his head to come rescue her . . .
The head black-robe waved a hand. “No matter. Clearly you’re tired of the topic.”
Curse the man to the bloodiest of all the hells. She couldn’t ask about Aro without admitting she had a brother, and even if the black-robe already thought he knew that, admitting it would be giving him power. It was a special kind of torture, being smart enough to know when you were being played, but not smart enough to figure out how to get around it.
; “I feel we should get to know each other better,” the black-robe said, a shadow of a smirk on his face. “You are our guest after all. Why don’t you tell me your name?”
“Because I’m not stupid,” Rora spat. Not that stupid at least. She half suspected that Neira’d already told him her name, and he was just playing some kind of power game. If that was true, Rora sure as hells wasn’t going to let him win at it.
“Come, now. What harm is there in a name?”
“What’s your name?” The blanket’s warmth felt a little bit like armor.
He didn’t answer right away, and she was about to call him a hypocrite, which was a great word she’d picked up somewhere. Aro, probably; he always had big words that surprised her when he trotted ’em out. She didn’t get the chance to use it, though, since the head black-robe did give her an answer: “My name is Valrik.”
Usually, she would’ve snorted and called him a liar, maybe gotten to use her big word after all. But a thought poked at the back of her mind. You won’t die, so long as you hear the truth when it’s given. The far-eye back in the Canals, he’d never bothered muttering predictions about stupid things like people telling little lies—or maybe he had, just no one’d ever taken notice of the small stuff. The little twin had told her to listen for truth, but it couldn’t really matter if she believed the black-robe’s name or not. Still, it was enough to keep her words in her mouth—and maybe that was a good thing, considering he might actually know something about Aro.
“And your name?” the black-robe poked.
If they had Aro, Rora knew her brother wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut—that just wasn’t one of his skills, especially not if he was threatened at all. If it was between bending or breaking, Aro’d bend in whatever direction he needed to. More, he’d lived with the name Falcon for near to a decade, but he’d always been forgetting it. He wouldn’t know better than to give his own name, and she didn’t think her own would be far behind. So if this black-robe didn’t know her name, that meant they didn’t have Aro. Then again . . . he’d been different since they’d left Mercetta the first time. He’d been just a little tougher, a little smarter. Maybe he’d learned when to keep his mouth shut. “Shouldn’t you know it?” Rora asked the black-robe. “Someone told me a long time ago that the shadows knew my name.”
That shut him up for a while, and Rora smiled inside her cocoon of warmth. She didn’t think he had Aro, and she could stand anything, so long as her brother stayed safe.
She’d forgot about the black-robe who’d scurried off at the start, but she remembered him when he came back down the tunnel with a few friends. The friends were of the ice-faced variety, some of the swordsmen who’d popped up out of nowhere in the Icefall room and killed all her knives. Anger warmed her up even more, so that she would’ve felt downright cozy if it wasn’t for the rabid-dog fury near boiling over.
“I’d like my blanket back,” the head black-robe said quietly as the swordsmen split around him, heavy steps coming toward the door of the cell.
Under the blanket, Rora coiled her body like a snake, ready to spring. She said, “Then come take it.”
A key flashed, clicked in the lock. Two of the swordsmen stayed in the doorway, their big bodies overfilling the opening, and the third took steps toward Rora, one hand stretched out toward her. She let him come, waited till he bent down to snatch the blanket from her shoulders, and then she burst. She flung herself forward and sideways around him, and her trailing leg thunked into his ankle hard enough she maybe heard bones breaking—ankles were soft things, when you got down to it. She got her feet under her quick and, holding the blanket tight in one fist, took two long leap-steps toward the door. Her hand flew out, the blanket soaring like a net and hitting one of the swordsmen square in the face. She got a foot planted, a knee bent, and with her muscles nice and warmed up from the blanket, she jumped. Small as she was, she still got high enough to get an arm around the swordsman who didn’t have his head covered, driving her shoulder right into his neck. He made a nice gurgle as he fell backward. Rora got her arm free of him before his back hit the ground, came up in a half crouch on his chest, and grinned up at the black-robes who were the only thing left between her and freedom. She got her feet under her, put her head down, and ran for all she was worth.
Good things never last.
The blanket got caught up in her legs, thrown by one of the swordsmen who then landed on top of her as she went down swearing. He was twice her size and weighed five times as much, and there wasn’t much you could do to fight against that. She spat and kicked and scratched, but he got an arm around her neck, and that was pretty much the end of it.
She ended up in the cell again, back pressed to the cold floor as air and eyes came back to her. By the time she got to sitting, the swordsmen’d locked the door again, and taken the blanket out with them.
The head black-robe shook his head at her. “That was . . . ill-advised.”
Rora rolled her tongue around inside her mouth, tasting blood where she must’ve bit her tongue or cheek; she gathered up a gob of blood and spat it toward him, but it spattered against one of the cell bars. She couldn’t even get that right.
“We don’t have to be enemies, you know,” the black-robe said. “You would be treated very well here. A suite of rooms all to yourself, servants to tend your every need, warm meals whenever you should want them. You’re a twin. Fated, some would say, to be here. You belong with us—you only need to stop fighting that simple fact.”
Rora sat silent, nursing her hurts.
“I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about the Fallen. We’re deemed evil, horrible people bent on destroying the world. But we are people, the same as those who live outside these high stone walls. We have ambitions, dreams, fears. We make mistakes, and we celebrate our triumphs. We are not the monsters we have been painted.”
Rora ran her tongue over her teeth, found one that wiggled when she pressed on it, tasted more blood. She felt double cold, after being reminded what warmth felt like and having it taken away.
The head black-robe stepped up to the cell bars, which would’ve been a stupid thing if Rora’d been able to muster up any more fight. Behind bars and a locked door, facing a handful of black-robes and three big swordsmen who probably wanted her blood, trying anything else would be pretty stupid. The black-robe stuck his arm between the bars, and another basket dangled from his fingers, just like the one that’d been full of food the first time, the one she’d shredded.
“So you’ll let me freeze,” Rora said, spacing out the words, “but make sure I die fat?”
“You have not yet earned a blanket.”
Rora snorted. “What, do I have to slaughter a few goats first?”
The head black-robe set the basket down on the floor of her cell. “We make fearsome enemies,” he said as he stepped back, “but valuable allies. You’ll be sure to let me know when you’d like to see your brother.” Then they left, the whole lot of ’em, taking the light with them. It was easier to believe, in the cold quiet, that maybe they did have Aro . . .
No, if they had her brother, they could’ve brought him down, paraded him in front of her. They had to be bluffing, and she could face down a bluff. She just had to keep herself from thinking about her brother stuck in a cell like this, cold and whimpering and wondering where she was, when she’d save him . . .
She just had to not think about it, and the best way to stop thinking was to do something else.
There was strong, and then there was stupid. Rora could pretend she wasn’t hungry, that she was amazing enough of a person she didn’t need food to live. That would be stupid, though. So she crawled on hands and knees until she found the food basket, more bread and cheese, but it had taste and put a comfortable feeling in her belly, and that was really all you should ask of food.
It was an honest surprise when light came creeping down the tunnel again before she’d even finished the crust of bread. “Miss me already?” she called out
around a full mouth. It was just the head black-robe and more of his ice-faced friends, none of the other black-robes. That didn’t feel like a good sign. Then she saw the littler body in with the swordsmen—the boy-twin, Etarro. He was pale to start with, but it didn’t seem like there was any color on his face now. Just fear.
“There are rules here,” the head black-robe said, and his voice was hard, though there wasn’t any meanness in it. If anything, there was a touch of sad lurking under the words. “We are a society like any other. When a rule is broken, punishment is given. Etarro.” He knelt before the boy, his old knees popping, and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Do you know what you have done wrong?”
The fear was still in the kid’s face, but you wouldn’t know it from the calm way he spoke. “I did what I believed to be right.”
“And that, sometimes, is the wrong thing to do.”
Rora still didn’t quite understand what was happening, not until after the swordsmen had already pushed the boy forward, unlocked the door to her cell, pushed him in. It was only when they were locking the door back up, with the boy on her side of it, that warm anger flared up in her again. “Right,” she called to the black-robe, “I see how much it helps to be your friend!”
The old man spread his hands. “Justice is not always kind. The right path is not always easy to walk. Life is a heavy thing, made of complex emotions and difficult choices. That is the way of things. Etarro made a choice, for which he knew the risks, and he must now face the consequences.”
The kid stood there shivering and pale, but it almost seemed like the fear had melted off his face, and Rora suddenly understood. It was a trick, and the kid was in on it. “So you think if you leave him here with me for a while, he’ll convince me everything’s roses and sunshine with you lot? Few minutes of talking with the kid and I’ll just give everything up?”
