The Heart Collector

by Melinda Salisbury

  Contents

  The King of Rats

  The Heart Collector

  Mully No-Hands

  The King of Rats

  To the birds that soar high overhead, the kingdom of Tallith must seem as though it’s made entirely of gold. Around the coastline the sea glitters, lapping against the pale golden sand like a tongue. Beyond the beaches, beyond scrubland and lush forests, are bright fields of corn and maize, bobbing and swaying in the wind. A blonde woman stands in one of the fields, dressed in cloth the colour of sunflowers. A fat, naked baby sits in her arms, a golden ear of corn gripped in its hand. The villages are built with yellow stone, thatched with amber-coloured hay. Even the paths that wind between the cottages are gold. There is gold as far as the eye can see, all the way up to the castle, where guards armoured in gold plate keep watch over the seven gleaming onion-domed towers that stand like courtiers around the main keep of Tallith Castle.

  Inside the castle, every room is filled with the flattering light that only gold can give: reflected warmth and hope and splendour, from the stone, from the furnishings, from the thousand gilt and glinting details in the paintings that adorn the walls. Even the olive skin of the staff seems gilded as they rush to and fro carrying platters filled with sticky honey-drenched figs, almonds nestling in flaking pastry, and jugs of wine made with grapes plucked from the vine just as they turned golden.

  Along the wide passageways, polished candelabras gleam as bright as the flames from the candles they hold. In the throne room, the king sits on a tall golden throne, carved with snarling chimeras, their eyes studded with amber that catches the sunlight. On the king’s left stands his daughter, Aurelia, and to his right, his son and heir, the elder of the royal twins by sixteen minutes, Aurek.

  They are all the more striking because they are not gold.

  The royal twins look as though they have been carved from moonlight: pale skin that no amount of sunlight can colour; tall, slender bodies; ankles and wrists bird-fine and delicate; necks long and graceful. They seem to move a fraction slower than everyone around them, only adding to their ethereal grace. They wear their silver hair long and loose, flowing down their backs; from behind it is difficult to tell them apart. Only their eyes are the colour of honey. Truly they are the heirs of Tallith.

  Aurek, of course, will be the one to inherit the crown should the king die, and Aurelia will be heir if anything happens to Aurek – though the people of Tallith know that as long as Aurelia is around, nothing terrible will happen to her brother. Had she been born first, Aurelia would have been queen, for primogeniture is law in Tallith. Had she been a different sort of child she might have been married off to a noble from another land, to fill the coffers, or to add military support. But with Aurek and Aurelia being what they are, there’s no need to send anyone anywhere to keep Tallith secure.

  The twins were born with the gift.

  No one realized, at first, what it meant when they entered the world with their cauls still covering their faces, slipping from their mother with ease, to the gasps of the assembled surgeons and apothecaries. Aurek came first, screaming lustily the moment the veil was torn from his face, small fists beating the air; then Aurelia, silent and watchful, weighing up the world outside the safety of the womb. The discovery of their gifts did not come till later: a chance drop of blood on an iron marble; the gasps of the nannies when it turned to gold, followed by experiments where the royal twins were pricked, over and over, their blood collected until finally it became clear these children were not just royals, but gods.

  Prince Aurek sits in the window seat in the south-facing solar at the top of the Tower of Love. It is the tower he’s claimed as his own, because it affords him easy access to the kitchens and the stables, and also an excellent view over the part of the courtyard where the maids bathe themselves in small tin baths. His handsome face is sullen, his lips downturned and pouting. He pulls at a loose thread on his cuff, gold of course, winding it around his index finger until it becomes purple and throbbing, fat like a sated leech.

  “I’m bored,” he says to the room.

  The room does not reply.

  Prince Aurek is unaccustomed to being alone. As prince and heir there is a battalion of servants and tutors and sycophants eager for his attention. There’s usually a girl or two hovering nearby, her fingers waiting to glide snake-like over his skin, her chin tilted upwards so he can claim her lips if he chooses to.

  He always chooses to.

  Despite having seen only twenty-one summers, Prince Aurek has the appetites of a king and already has eight bastards in the royal nursery. His father is pleased, though he pretends not to be, rolling his eyes with barely disguised pride each time Aurek tells him of another child. The women are cossetted and pampered until the baby comes, then given a fat purse and sent as far from Tallith as possible. That’s what you do with brood mares, the king tells his son. You put them out to pasture when they’ve done their duty; it’s kinder. Aurek has wondered on occasion if the women really are sent away, or whether they are disposed of in a less sunny fashion – but he finds he can’t quite bring himself to care. For him, the thrill is in the chase and the immediate capture. Like a greedy spider, he doesn’t know what to do with his prizes once won, so he wraps them in silks and ignores them in favour of fresher meats until they disappear.

  The children, though, may be of some use. The king and Aurek planned to test their blood from birth, but Aurelia had an uncharacteristic storm at the idea of bleeding infants. Her distress and her threats were so great that the king capitulated and promised to wait until the children were five summers old. If they have the same gifts as their father, they’ll be able to use their blood to bring life to clay. They will be natural-born generals of an army of golems that feel no pain, need no food or rest. And they’ll be able to turn base metal to gold. If they can do this – if even half of them have inherited their father’s abilities – the future of Tallith is assured. And, with Aurelia’s gift, it is eternal.

  The king would like to see Aurelia married, so she too can have children. He could use more of what her blood can do. But he has to find her a husband who will stay in Tallith, and not try and take her away. That complicates matters.

  Prince Aurek sighs, peering out of the window. One of the serving maids, Selene or Celeste, he forgets her name – or never knew it – has been told to meet him here after the midday meal. He slipped the note into the bodice of her tunic the previous night. A new addition to the staff, he’d watched her during the meal, sucking duck grease from his fingers slowly, one by one, making her blush. He’d liked the way the rose-coloured stain had started beneath her neckline and travelled up along her throat before coating her cheeks. So he wrote the note on one of the scraps of paper he always carried with him, and pushed it down between her breasts as he passed her. Very few of the female servants have not received one of Prince Aurek’s notes. And none has ever refused his company before.

  The courtyard below is quiet, no swish of skirts hurrying to the tower to meet him, and he frowns, swinging his long legs down from the cushions that line the window seat, heedless of the dirt his boots have left on them.

  He walks moodily out of the room, his fingers dragging against the stone walls as he makes his way to the rope bridge that is his route back into the keep. All of the towers are linked to the keep, and each other, by a series of suspended bridges that only the royals and courtiers may walk upon. Servants, staff and commoners must walk below. Aurek spends hours strolling between the towers, allowing the citizens of Tallith to look up at him as he passes. But today when he glances down he fancies he sees scorn and amusement in their eyes, the suggestion that they know he, the crown prince of Tallith, was spurned by
a serving wench.

  He’ll have the girl whipped, he thinks. It will go some way to soothing his ego to see her stripped to her petticoats and then lashed. He’ll make sure he stands in front of her, will have someone hold her head up so she can see him as she’s beaten.

  He crosses the bridge, feeling cheered, when he stops dead.

  Ahead of him, paused in the act of nibbling the ropes and staring at him as though he were an oddity, is a large brown rat.

  Aurek takes a step forward but the rat holds its ground, its nose twitching. He takes another step but still the beast refuses to get out of his way. Aurek has never seen a real rat before and he doesn’t know whether to be curious or frightened. The rat has no such confusion. It watches the prince with black, unblinking eyes. One of its ears has been torn off, and recently – the blood is still wet. It’s only when Aurek pulls a jewelled dagger from his belt and throws it that it moves. It hisses angrily and skitters across the bridge as the knife misses, clattering to the ground below. It stops and looks back at Aurek before disappearing into an impossibly small gap in the wall.

  Aurek forgets all about the maid who rejected him. He crosses the bridge into the keep and marches to the throne room where his father sits listening to petitions. He waves away the herald and strides up to the king, taking his place at his right. Aurelia already stands at her father’s left. When the petitioner, a minor lord from the cut of his tunic, bows and scrapes his way out of the throne room, Aurek bends to his father’s ear.

  “I believe I just saw a rat,” he declares.

  “I told you,” Aurelia says with some satisfaction. “Now will you believe me?”

  Although they look almost identical on the outside, Aurek and Amelia are opposites in every other way. So when Aurek demands that they begin a hunt for the rat immediately – that they take the tower apart if need be – Aurelia rests a hand on her father’s shoulder, her face full of concern.

  The king turns to his daughter. “What do you counsel?” he asks, earning her a glare from her brother.

  “We wait,” she says simply. “I love rats no better than my brother, and I do not like the thought of them inside the walls of our home, but it would have happened sooner or later. The ships go to and from the port so often now that it was only a matter of time before rats came to our shores. Let us hold back from extreme action and allow nature to take its course. The stable cats will solve this problem. Should any other rats venture between our walls, they will remember the taste of this rat’s blood and hunt all the harder for its kin.”

  The king gives his daughter a searching look. “Very well. We will let nature take its course.”

  Although he’s tried to love them equally, Aurelia has always been the king’s favourite child. She’s so very like her mother. His loves his son deeply, but he sees too much of himself in Aurek. And whilst Aurelia can’t make gold, she can make something more valuable. A drop of her blood, added to water, creates an elixir that heals wounds and illnesses. If taken daily, it stops time itself. With the elixir, he could remain king for as long as he wishes. For as long as he needs to.

  Aurek, it seems, has not realized this yet.

  It appears that Aurelia is right. The following morning, the kitchen staff, wrapped tightly in their blankets on the floor of the larder, and under the long table that spans the kitchen, are awoken by the shrieks of the scullery maid. Rising to box the maid’s ears for waking her, Cook finds herself weak at the knees at the sight of the decapitated rat on the kitchen floor. She aims a quick slap at the girl and then tells her to clean it up. The scullery maid does so, sobbing all the while at the cruelty of cats. She thinks of them as friends, feeding them the scraps that no one else wants. How could they be so ungrateful as to leave a headless rat in her path?

  But the stable cats must truly despise the scullery maid. As the weeks pass, she cleans away the bodies of so many rats that she’s stopped crying about it. She sighs, resigned to the task, while across Tallith, men, women and children do the same. What once was an act full of horror is now as commonplace as emptying the messpits or cleaning out the pig-pen. Aurek smirks nastily at his sister every time a new complaint is brought to the king, but the king takes his daughter’s word seriously. If Aurelia says nature will take its course, then he will allow it to.

  He advises each home to purchase a cat. He has his scribes write up edicts proclaiming food is to be cleared promptly away once a meal is finished, to be stored in locked chests and boxes, not left in bags on shelves. He demands all holes are filled, gaps in walls boarded up. Pets and livestock are to be fed under watch, not left alone with their food. He will soon show the rats they are not welcome, and they will go back to where they came from.

  The rats become bolder the hungrier they get. When the sacks of grain they had in such plentiful supply disappear, they use their teeth to gnaw holes in the locked chests. When these are removed and hung on ropes from the rafters, they turn their attention to the livestock, biting chickens and ducks, new-born lambs and puppies. Their attempts to survive make them increasingly ruthless, until one morning the king is woken by his son, screaming that a rat has bitten one of his bastards on the cheek.

  This is the final straw. The king cares little for an attack on his pantry but greatly about an attack on his treasury, and that is what the rats have done by biting one of the children who may have blood that makes gold.

  Aurek was banking on that.

  The king chastises Aurelia for not warning him that rats will bite children. Aurelia is tearful and filled with remorse. Had she imagined that would happen, she says, she would have agreed with Aurek from the start.

  This pleases the prince, who has never forgiven his sister for holding more than her fair share of their father’s love. Although they were close when they were young, sharing that eerie bond that occurs when children swim together in the womb, able to talk without words, to know where the other is without being told, to feel their sibling’s pain as though it was their own, after their mother died, Aurek decided his sister was competition for his father’s love – a contest he should by rights be the unchallenged winner of.

  “We’ll hunt and kill them all,” Aurek growls.

  The courtiers nod their heads. Aurelia stays silent and Aurek thinks it’s because she has been cowed, proven wrong, and therefore defeated. He allows himself a smile at his victory.

  A month later Aurek and his band of rat-killers have destroyed sixteen rats between them, the stable cats thrice that number. In that time some three hundred rats have spawned new litters of mewling, hungry mouths, each litter between seven and fourteen rat-kittens. In another five weeks many of these have reached maturity and are breeding themselves. Six months after Aurek first saw the rat on his way out of the Tower of Peace, there are eight times as many rats in Tallith as there are citizens. Rats run openly along the poles that hold up the golden curtains in the palace. Rats dare to run under the tables in the great hall during feasts. Prosperous, bountiful Tallith is paradise: food never runs short, and predators are few and far between.

  It is when the king wakes one morning and realizes the pleasant, delicate fingernails on his chest do not belong to his late wife, but to an especially large, skewbald rat that he decides enough is enough. He knocks the rat across the room and bellows for his council to convene at once.

  The girl who lies in Aurek’s bed in the Tower of Love tries to cover herself when the knock comes at his door. The prince looks at her in disgust. He shouts to the messenger that he will be there anon, then he demands that she continue with her task.

  Aurelia is sitting in her window in the Tower of Wisdom, watching the sea in the distance. She rises when she hears footsteps on the stairs, opening the door without waiting for the knock. She has been waiting for this summons, preparing for it. It has left an ill feeling in her stomach, a sense of dread, inevitable and consuming. It’s too late, she thinks to herself. Too late. But what is too late, she cannot say.

  They
have come from across the sea. It has taken them forty days and nights, the final three of which have been racked by a storm so powerful that the holy man aboard the ship blesses every sailor and passenger, and offers them sacrament, even if – especially if – they do not believe. Whether the gods take pity on the ship, or whether its crew are better or luckier sailors than others, the storm passes, the ship rights itself and, on a beautifully clear summer morning, the rat catcher and his children sight the port of Tallith.

  They make for a breath-taking tableau, the rat catcher and his children. Their skin and eyes are dark silk, in contrast to velvet paleness of the Tallithi royal family. They stand tall and slim, their hair pulled away from their faces, woven tight against their skulls, emphasising their long, high cheekbones. Their eyes are framed by an impossible amount of dark lashes that brush their eyebrows when they open their eyes wide with amusement as the king offers them gold in return for their work. Their generous lips quirk when the king pledges palaces and servants to them, lips that, on the face of the rat catcher’s daughter, Aurek finds his eyes drawn to again and again.

  She is, without question, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and desire for her makes his stomach squirm as though he’s swallowed a nest of live eels. She, for her part, keeps her gaze locked on a spot just above his head; no demure downward glance for her, no submissive dip of her chin. His gaze travels her body as his father and hers bargain the price for Tallith to avail itself of the rat catcher’s services. He notes the tone in her arms, the promise of muscle there, and the proud set of her shoulders. Here is a woman worthy of his attentions; here is one worth pursuing. He wonders how long it will take for the rat catcher to do his work; whether he’ll have time to seduce her.

  For the first time in his life, as his eyes roam over the stubborn tilt of her jaw, he wonders if he’ll be able to seduce her. Whether he’ll be desirable to her.

  “We have no need for your gold,” the rat catchers says, his voice deep and clear. “Nor your palaces or jewels. We’re wealthy. We want for little.”