Why had they sent their assassin this way? ‘Is it part of their plan that I should be brought down by a man who can’t even look at me before he takes me to my death?’ I growled. ‘Is there no honour in your people at all?’
The man gasped and pulled off his blindfold, revealing a pair of long-lashed dark-brown eyes. He’d gone so pale I thought he was going to faint. A spot of blood had appeared on his lip where he’d bitten down on it. He stared at me and whispered, ‘It’s you.’
I stared back at him. ‘Of course it’s me. Who else were you expecting?’
‘You … You are a witch – the immortal witch of the Tower. So how can you also be … her?’
Against the whiteness of his skin, his hair was starkly black and his bloodied lips were scarlet. A shudder rippled through me as I remembered my dream. ‘What do you mean?’ I said quietly.
Something flickered in his eyes. ‘You haven’t turned me to stone.’
‘What?’ My wonder was ebbing and I was beginning to think he was touched.
‘They said you would turn any who laid eyes on you to stone.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand any of it. All I know is that you’re just –’ he swallowed – ‘you’re just a girl.’
I couldn’t help a bitter smile. ‘Is that what I am now? And who are you?’
‘Me? I’m – I’m Kasper. Kasper Bator.’ Seeing my baffled expression, he added, ‘Nobody important.’ He looked miserable. ‘I don’t understand. Are you a witch?’
‘A witch?’ I echoed. Inside me a little seed of hope was growing. Why he had come I had no idea, but I knew that I must not let this chance slip away. ‘Of course I’m not a witch. Though I’ve wished I was often enough. Is that what you’ve been told?’
‘Yes,’ he breathed, staring at me. ‘An immortal feya witch who helped the Prince of Night.’
I gave a bitter laugh. ‘The Prince of Night has his own power. Why should he need a witch to help him?’
He flinched at this. ‘I don’t know. It is what we have been told.’
‘And now?’ I ask. ‘What do you think now?’
‘All I know is that I heard you …’
‘Please,’ I urged him, ‘you heard me where?’
‘This afternoon – I heard the Commander speaking to you.’
‘What?’
‘I heard him say you were to die on the morning of your eighteenth birthday. And I heard you.’ He looked at me wildly. ‘I heard you ask why you had to die …’
‘How can that be?’ I asked. ‘The Commander told me that weeks ago.’ I backed away from him. ‘Is this some kind of cruel hoax your people have devised?’
‘What?’ The young man paled. ‘No. I swear by the Angels that I heard it today. When I was …’ He passed a hand over his forehead, where beads of sweat had appeared. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said in a hollow voice.
‘Neither do I.’
‘Then it’s true? They want to …’
I reached for the comfort of the crystal heart and tried not to tremble as I spoke. ‘Tomorrow, I am to die.’
‘Angels preserve us,’ he burst out. ‘How can this be? If you are not the witch – then who are you? Why are you here?’
I looked at him, searching his face to see if he truly did not know. But all I saw was confusion and bewilderment.
Drawing myself up, I said, ‘I am Izolda, the only child of the Prince of Night, and I have been kept as a hostage in this Tower since my capture on my eighth birthday.’
‘No,’ he breathed. ‘The Prince of Night had a child, yes, but she died when she was only …’
‘When she was only eight.’
‘Why has your father not –’
‘Why didn’t he move heaven and earth to find me? Why didn’t he let it be trumpeted everywhere that humans had stolen his only child?’ I bit off the words. ‘He did not because he could not.’
‘Why?’ he whispered.
‘My father knew that if he said one thing about it to anyone, or if he stirred one finger outside our country, the Supreme Council would kill me. That was the price they made him pay for the war he waged on your people. Those were the terms. My capture defeated him. My imprisonment has made him keep the peace – and the silence. He cannot ask for anyone’s help. Not ever.’
The young man gave a heavy sigh. ‘Why do they want to kill you now after all this time?’
‘Some prophecy, I was told.’
‘What prophecy?’
‘I don’t know. Oh, please, Guard Bator, whatever you were told about me, this is the truth – the absolute truth,’ I cried. ‘Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.’
Our eyes met for a long moment. He gave a low groan and put his head in his hands. ‘In the Angels’ name, what have we done?’
‘You have done nothing,’ I said, recovering from that long glance which had goose-pimpled my skin. And the tremble started in me again, because whatever small respite this encounter had brought me, my fate had not changed. It was midnight, and in three and a half hours, I would be eighteen. And that would be the last morning I would ever see. The thought was so bitter that I could not stop a small cry escaping.
‘Princess, what is the matter?’
All of a sudden I was so angry that I wanted to scream, to hit him, to shake him till his teeth rattled in his head. Was he such a fool? Did he not understand? I managed to control myself enough to say, ‘In just a few hours I will be eighteen and I will die.’
‘No,’ he said, absolutely calm. ‘Not while I can do something about it.’
I looked at him, my heart pounding with a hope I dared not express. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why would you help me?’
He looked straight at me, his gaze steady as rock, his voice quiet and clear. ‘Because I love my country, Princess. I love it too much to want to stain it with innocent blood.’
And that’s when I knew without a doubt that magic is real, even in this place, and that it had come to my rescue at last.
Izolda
But fear dies hard. ‘I’ve been shut up here for ten years. Escape is impossible.’
‘I know where all the guards are,’ he said, smiling, and gestured to the dumb waiter. ‘We’ll have to leave the way I came. I’m afraid the space is a bit tight, but there’s no other way. And we have to leave now.’
I looked at him. He was so determined, so certain of himself, and it scared me. What if he was leading me into a trap? What if he was just giving me false hope?
He must have understood the expression in my eyes, because he said, ‘I swear by all that is holy to both you and me that I will get you to safety. But we do not have much time. Please, gather what you need and let us go.’
I nodded and hurriedly went to my drawers. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know what to take.’
‘Take only the strictest necessaries, Princess.’ He flashed a little smile. ‘A change of clothes – a cloak, some boots, if you have them. The slippers you’re wearing won’t last two minutes out there.’
‘I don’t have any boots.’
‘Never mind.’ He smiled more broadly. ‘We’ll find you some in the scullery. Er, nothing too fine or fancy, Princess,’ he added as I lifted out a silk dress.
‘Oh.’ Feeling like a fool, I quickly put the dress aside and selected some underclothes, a clean shirt, a nightdress and a thick skirt. As I fetched my cloak I thought, How can he smile? Does he have no sense of the danger we face?
‘Here, take this,’ he said, giving me his blindfold. Seeing my confused expression, he explained. ‘Wear it like a mask around the bottom of your face so only your eyes are showing. Pull up the hood of your cloak, hold it tight around you, carry that bundle as though it were laundry. There you are – you could pass for one of the Magus’s servants at a quick glance.’
I did as I was told. Reckless he might be, but slow-thinking he was not. He proved that even more in the next few seconds. He crossed to my dre
ssing table and picked up my hairbrush. ‘You permit, Princess?’ he said as he extracted three hairs from it.
I nodded dazedly.
Going to the diamond-paned window, he pulled off one boot and brought the steel-capped toe down hard on one of the glass panes. He had to do it twice before it smashed in a jagged pattern.
‘What are you doing?’
‘We don’t want them to think we escaped via the dumb waiter,’ he said. ‘We want them to think you escaped a different way.’
‘But that hole isn’t big enough to let a mouse through! And there’s a sheer drop below. They won’t be fooled for an instant.’
He smiled again. ‘Wait and see.’ He rummaged in his pocket and brought out a small dark-coloured shell. Placing it on the windowsill, he arranged the strands of my hair in a crisscross pattern above the shell, two vertical, one horizontal. The redness of the hair shone bright against the dark shell. He looked at me. ‘They keep telling us about the black ships.’
My scalp tingled. The hairs represented masts. The shell was the hull of a boat. It would look like a spell. ‘But they know I’m not really a witch. And even if I could use magic, it does not work here.’
‘You are of the blood of Night,’ he said with a shrug. ‘How can they be sure?’
He was right. It would at least give them pause. For the first time, I felt my own smile awakening in response to his.
As Kasper stepped into the dumb waiter and beckoned for me to follow, I took a last look over my shoulder at the room that had been my home for so long. Oh, there were no regrets. How could there be? Was I anxious? Yes. Afraid? Yes. But I was also hopeful. Exhilarated. And I even felt a strange kind of peace. For even if I were to die that night, I would not be alone. Not anymore. And so, with a lift of the heart and a catch in my throat, I turned back to Kasper and said, ‘What are we waiting for, then? Let’s go.’
The platform was, as he’d said, a tight fit, and we were unavoidably crammed up against each other, our limbs touching, our hearts beating close together. But I didn’t have time to think about it because the heavily laden platform plunged so swiftly that it was all I could do not to cry out. We landed almost instantly, with a bone-jarring jolt, and emerged into a stone cellar that suddenly brought back a half-forgotten smell to me – the smell of rock …
Cautious not to linger, we hurried through the cellar and into a cool pantry. No one was about. He stopped briefly to grab some items off the shelves, and we were about to hurry on when a large dog trotted in, obviously intent on raiding the pantry too. My heart skipped a beat, for dogs can smell even the slightest trace of feyin blood, and I have more than a trace from my father’s side, though my mother was human. Its hackles rose, it stared at us with wild yellow eyes and would have no doubt raised the alarm if Kasper hadn’t grabbed a ham hanging from the ceiling and thrown it across the room. The dog snatched the ham and raced off to devour it in peace.
Breathing a sigh of relief, we slipped out into a scullery, where we snatched up a pair of shabby boots that were a little big but not enough to be a real problem. Then we passed through a doorway into a back courtyard, and from there to a kitchen garden, through a gate and onto a path that wound down to a large wooden building. ‘That’s the main boatshed,’ Kasper whispered. ‘There’ll be someone on guard there, but I’ll find a way. Stay here, behind this bush.’
I crouched there for what seemed like hours, my palms sweating, my heart beating so loud I was sure it could be heard. It was the first time I had been out in the open air for so long, and it was a shock. The night was dark. There was no moon – only stars, pricking the sky like tiny silver arrows, and the world suddenly felt so very big and I so very small with no stone wall of tower or cave to protect me.
Protect me? What was I thinking? Had my long years as a prisoner turned my insides to jelly and my mind to mush? I had escaped at last and here I was yearning for the prison again!
No, not the prison, my heart told me. I was yearning for a much older memory. Images of my father’s underground halls came flooding back to me. The deep lake that lies at the border of my lands, the beauty of the salt crystal caves, sparkling like stars, the muted light that is made part of shadow, part of golden glow, the little waterfalls like rippling silver hair, the humming industry of the salt mines, the brightness of the underground city, with its salt stone spires and towers and glasshouses full of flourishing crops, my people dancing like fireflies, and my splendid father, on his crystal throne, smiling as I played around his feet. Even the memory of the unpleasant creatures that skulked the darkness beyond our city, such as the carnivorous cave goblins, couldn’t blunt my longing.
I nearly screamed as a hand fell on my shoulder. ‘It’s only me,’ came Kasper’s voice. ‘I’ve found us a boat. Come quick.’
Kasper
I’m not the world’s best sailor, having never been to sea. But I do know about rivers and rowing, for at home everyone knows about that. On my way to the boatshed, I’d remembered an old rowing boat that people used sometimes for a spot of fishing, just off the island. I recalled, too, the last time I’d seen it, pulled up on the shingle on the far side of the shed. With any luck, there’d be no need to ask anyone anything, as long as the guards were inside the shed.
They were. The Angels were smiling on us that night. Cautiously, I made my way to where I’d last seen the boat. And there it was, complete. Though it was heavy, I had no choice but to carry it to the water; I couldn’t risk the noise dragging it would make. Carefully, I carried it right to the water’s edge and wedged it with a stone so it wouldn’t escape.
Then I hurried back to the Princess. When I touched her, she jumped and stared as though I were a demon come to claim her soul. The poor girl was as scared as a hunted deer. Looking at her then, so lovely with that flame-red hair and those wide green eyes, I knew that nothing we’d been told by our government made any sense. My whole world had shifted and would never be the same again. ‘It’s only me,’ I said gently. ‘I’ve found us a boat. Come quick.’
We hurried down to the strand, reaching the boat without incident.
Helping her aboard, I said, ‘Lie down in the stern and pull the cloak over you, Princess. I’ll push the boat out and jump in after.’
She did as I said, without question or hesitation. I pushed out the boat and waded alongside it until I was waist-deep in water, then I tumbled in. She was lying huddled in the stern of the boat, unmoving. From the island all that would be seen – if any eyes happened to glance our way – would be a single fisherman with what I hoped might look in the dark like a bundle of netting at his feet.
I set to with the oars and was soon pulling well out of sight of the boatshed, giving the main jetty on the mainland a wide berth. The only sound was of the swish and clap of the water.
Finally, we reached the mouth of the Fish River, which, if you followed it all the way up, led you into some of the wilder parts of the region, to the west of my own. Manoeuvring carefully into the current, I guided the rowing boat into the calmer waters beyond. The river was wide here but soon narrowed, flowing between high banks. All this time, the Princess did not move a muscle or make a sound. So still was she that I thought her asleep.
I had never felt less like sleep. I was wide awake. Every sense on high alert, every muscle straining, every beat of my pulse reminding me of the enormity of what I was doing – pitting myself against the Council, helping a prized prisoner to escape. I wondered how long it would be before they realised I, too, was gone. Despite my ruse, they’d soon put two and two together. And then they’d go hunting. We had a day to get ahead of them, no more.
I already knew where we’d go. Not to Fish-the-Moon, for that would be the first place they’d go looking. Not to the White City, with its swarms of informers. And nowhere near the Nightlands, for though the Princess was likely to want to go home, her father truly was our sworn enemy, and I was no traitor. Ha, that’s not what the Supreme Council will say when they find out wh
at you’ve done, whispered a little voice in my mind. They’ll claim you were in league with him all along. Of course they won’t mention anything about killing an innocent. They’ve lied to the people for years. Why would they not lie again?
I brushed the little voice away. Now was not the time to ask myself such questions. Not a time to brood on the reason for their lies. Not a time even to wonder how they could imagine that the cold-blooded killing of a young girl could keep Krainos safe. No, I thought grimly to myself as I worked at the oars, the only useful thing I can ask myself right now is: Can I ensure we will get to our haven safely?
My thoughts were interrupted by the Princess’s whisper. ‘I’m all pins and needles. I must sit up.’
‘Do that,’ I said cheerfully. ‘There are a few cottages dotted about, but everyone should still be asleep. Not even a faint candle-gleam to be seen.’
The Princess flung back her cloak. Her red hair caught the starlight as she sat up gingerly and looked around. ‘Where are we?’
‘Heading up the Fish River,’ I said. ‘If that means anything to you.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not exactly an expert in the geography of your country.’
‘No,’ I said dryly, ‘of course you’re not. Well, all you need to know, really, is that where we’re heading, you’ll be safe.’
She looked at me with a startled expression in her eyes. ‘You mean, this is the way to my father’s lands?’
I met her eyes. ‘No. I cannot do that. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not,’ she said, surprising me. ‘I mean,’ she added, looking away, ‘I would like to go home. But I can’t. Not yet.’
I was relieved but also a little puzzled. I’d imagined I’d have to argue the case for waiting. Part of me wanted to ask her questions. Another part knew she wouldn’t want to answer. ‘What I meant was that we’re going to a place that is safe from the people who will be coming after you.’
‘And you,’ she added softly.
‘Yes, and me. It’s safe because no one knows it exists.’
The Crystal Heart Page 3
