Thorne
Author: Charlotte McConaghy
Date: 2014-08-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Romance; Young Adult; Magic; Paranormal; Fantasy Romance; High Fantasy; New Adult; Supernatural; Science Fiction
Description: ‘the Chronicles of Kaya sweeps the reader into an unforgettable world’ Sophie Masson Lovers in Kaya have always died together, bonded in death as in life. But a cure for the bond has sent rumours like wildfire through the land. A team of young Kayans will be sent on a quest to find the answer and, with rebellion brewing, the very nature of love is at stake. The beautiful but reckless Finn has never shied away from danger, and ending the bond means more to her than anyone knows. This adventure sounds thrilling to her, but Finn has always been willing to risk too much, and for the first time mus
Publisher: Random House Australia
Rights: Copyright © Charlotte McConaghy, 2014

About the Book

Lovers in Kaya have always died together, bonded in death as in life. But a cure for the bond has sent rumours like wildfire through the land. A team of young Kayans will be sent on a quest to find the answer and, with rebellion brewing, the very nature of love is at stake.

The beautiful but reckless Finn has never shied away from danger, and ending the bond means more to her than anyone knows. This adventure sounds thrilling to her, but Finn has always been willing to risk too much, and for the first time must face the idea that she has something – or someone – to lose.

Crown Prince Thorne, in the neighbouring land of Pirenti, has grown up rejecting the legacy of his father’s blood, keeping caged the beast that lies dormant within. But the moment he sets eyes on the wild girl from the Kayan cliffs, his usual caution hasn’t a hope of surviving.

As the world crumbles around them, can Finn and Thorne cast off the shadows to find a love stronger than either imagined? Or is their true challenge to find a way to embrace the darkness within?

An enthralling romantic fantasy about finding true love against all odds, Thorne is the second book in The Chronicles of Kaya series.

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

About the Author

More Random Romance

Avery

Losing Patients

Down Outback Roads

Copyright Notice

Loved the book?

For my sister Nina

The people of Kaya die in pairs.
With the forging of the soul magic, so is forged an unbreakable bond between those in love. When one dies, so shall the other, and forever will it remain so … Unless in the turning of the world the day comes when one is born with both the frozen blood of the north in his veins, and the hot winds of the south blazing through his soul.
Then shall he, and only he, have the power to break the unbreakable bond.

– From the writings of Agathon, First Warder of Kaya

‘What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.’

- Werner Herzog

‘Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.’

- Sue Grafton, I is for Innocent

Chapter 1

Thorne

There are red clouds in the sky and they are dripping blood.

I tilt my face back to feel the drops on my skin and taste them in my mouth. They are acrid and familiar, their thickness as always a disturbing reality. I can feel them filling me up, filling me from the tips of my toes, up my legs, my stomach and chest, my arms, my neck, right up through my throat and mouth until they reach the very top of me. When I move all I hear is slosh, slosh, slosh.

And then I am leaking blood that is not my own, and it hurts.

‘Thorne.’

It’s feathers and rosewater and shadows, that voice. It’s every part of me that I like.

‘Thorne.’

The blood explodes from my skin, tearing me to pieces –

I felt a sharp awareness of my body, the giant hulking weapon I hated. I used it to orient me without opening my eyes. Rough linen sheets beneath me, rubbing against my arms and legs in an irritating way I was all too accustomed to. Smells hit me – lamb and rosemary stew boiling on the stove, and the scent of soap so familiar it filled me with comfort. Beyond those, as always, was the confusing smell of the ocean. This, I had always thought, would follow me to my grave.

I was aghast to feel the liquid still on my lips, trickling into my mouth, but when I licked it I tasted not the heavy iron of blood but the fresh salt of tears. I dashed them irritably from my cheeks and opened my eyes. In one lurching, graceless movement I was sitting up, looking at my mother. The rising sunlight made her seem wraithlike; her burnt ochre hair hung tangled around her porcelain skin and her eyes were very large.

‘Just a dream, Ma,’ I murmured. ‘I’m fine.’

She kept looking at me and I wondered where her mind was this morning. ‘You screamed,’ she said softly, her voice the delicate thing I’d known all my life. That voice was the thing I knew best in the world.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What was it this time?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Please?’

I hesitated, then decided as I did most mornings – but not every morning – that the truth was best for Roselyn. ‘I was full of blood. Not my own.’

Something passed over her eyes, too quick for me to interpret. ‘You’ve not spilt a drop of blood in your whole life, Thorne.’

I climbed out of bed and made my way to the kitchen. Sometimes I didn’t know what world she lived in.

Grabbing the oldest, stalest loaf of bread from the bench, I tore into it hungrily. Once I’d finished the loaf I sat at the table and let Ma serve me a big bowl of stew, then a second bowl. She poured me several glasses of goat’s milk, and the meal filled me up somewhat, though in an hour or so I’d be hungry again. My body annihilated food as if it thought it might starve at any moment. It was painfully inconvenient most of the time. Thankfully, the men in Pirenti understood. No, actually – they thought they understood, but they didn’t, not really. Not one of them truly knew what it was to yield a berserker’s appetite.

Ma put an unopened envelope on the table before me.

‘How many times?’ I asked.

‘Twelve.’

So I opened and closed it twelve times before I read it. Once I’d finished I looked at her swiftly. ‘When did this come?’

‘This morning.’

‘It’s from Ambrose.’

She went still like she always did when my uncle was brought up. Her brown eyes probed me, eyes that were vastly clever but more often than not absent.

‘He wants me for business. Says if it’s all right with you that I’ll be away for some months. Ava will stay with you while I’m gone. Which means the twins too.’

Roselyn loved the twins. She considered and I watched her lips move very slightly with silent numbers. Her eyes drifted to the window and she disappeared. I reread the letter, cleaned up after my breakfast and then sat down again without her noticing a thing.

‘Ma?’

Her eyes travelled a long way back to rest on me. ‘Of course.’

‘I don’t have to go. Ambrose would understand.’

Her eyebrows knitted together. ‘Don’t be silly, darling. I have to get used to it at some point – you’re a man now. I have work to keep me occupied. I’ll be fine.’

I reached out and took her hand. As always, I was a creature made of uncertainties. I wanted to stay – there was never an inch of me that felt okay about leaving her here alone. But I wanted to wander, too. I wanted to meet people my own age. I wanted to see something other than the endless oyster farms that spread before me, silver and flickering in the moonlight. I’d cut my feet on those shells a thousand times, and each time I’d smiled, because my own blood was nothing to fear.

I was anxious to stay, anxious to go, pulled in two directions, skin stretched over bones as if they belonged to a dried out old skeleton. And under those bones, under the skin and the flesh and the muscle and even under the blood, was something else entirely.

A monster trying to whisper his way out of my heart. Mostly I kept him caged. But he was cunning and he was strong, and sometimes the cage strained so hard that I knew it would not hold forever.

‘You could come with me,’ I suggested.

Ma tilted her head, thinking about it. Perhaps making wishes.

‘I’m not sure how I’ll control myself.’

Roselyn shook her head firmly. ‘You will be fine, my love. You know the rules. You know exactly what to do when you feel it begin.’

There was a question on my lips, a painful question. One I had never spoken aloud for fear of the answer. But the question had consumed my life, and if I really was supposed to be growing up, leaving home, then I ought to know the answer. ‘Did he fight it? Or did he give in?’

I watched the way her eyes gathered more depths, as they always did. Infinite depths where my da was concerned. She’d seen so many things in him that nobody else ever saw, understood so many things about him that were impossible.

‘In the beginning,’ Roselyn said softly, ‘he was more beast than man. That was when the blood spilt, oceans of it. But at the very end he fought like no ordinary man could. He fought with strength only his blood could have allowed him.’

‘He died fighting it then,’ I said flatly.

She shook her head. ‘On the day he died he’d already beaten it. He was a long way beyond it.’

I was a creature made of uncertainties, except for the one single thing I knew: I would never beat the beast.

I wasn’t strong like my da had been.

‘Do you know what the King wants you for?’ Ma asked me.

I met her eyes. ‘He’s sending me to live in Kaya.’ And for the first time in a long while Roselyn looked truly frightened.

The chill of the wind outside eased as I entered the royal rooms to see the fireplace blazing. At my heels walked Howl, my enormous white Alsatian and best friend; he would cry for me when I left, but I wouldn’t leave Ma without any protection.

A tall figure stood in the doorway that led to the princesses’ room. He was dressed in a magnificent grey fur cloak and had wind-bitten cheeks as if he had only just beaten me through the night. A smile spread his lips and the King of Pirenti took me in a rough hug.

‘You get uglier every day, kid,’ Ambrose murmured.

We looked at the two sleeping girls, their beds lying within a shaft of moonlight. They had their father’s dark hair, and when awake they gazed at you with eyes as violet and clever as their ma’s.

Howl took his place at my side; he was large enough that I could thread my fingers through his fur without having to lean down.

‘My feet lead me here every night,’ Ambrose admitted. ‘Just to watch them.’

They were miracle children, of sorts. Ava had been told by a warder physician that her half-walker soul would never bear children; her body was too damaged. And yet fourteen years later came twin daughters, much to their parents’ complete delight, and the joy of the nation.

‘What do you need?’ I asked softly.

Ambrose sighed, resting against the door. ‘A change is about to come upon Kaya. There might be a way to break the bond. Falco and Quillane are going to want to use it. Ava and I need you to stop that from happening.’

I frowned, looking sideways at him. ‘You would preserve the bond?’

‘We would. At any cost.’

‘Why?’

Ambrose didn’t respond, his eyes growing distant. I stroked Howl as I waited for my uncle to speak.

‘It will be dangerous,’ he said bluntly. ‘But we trust no one else.’

I clasped his shoulder. ‘I would be honoured, my King.’

Ambrose smiled again, looking at me. ‘I blinked and you became a man. How did that happen?’

I returned his smile, but the truth was that I had never really been a child to begin with.

Finn

All I wanted was a hat. Was that too much to ask? Jonah was at my side, elbowing me in the ribs at regular intervals, and Penn was tugging on my hair to get my attention. I felt likely to kill them both. The sun was beating down on my uncovered head, glancing off all the windows of the buildings around me, blinding me with its brightness, and we’d been standing here for over an hour. All of this might have been fine under normal circumstances – I usually liked public announcements – but there was a gallon of last night’s ale still making its way through my body, and I was very close to vomiting.

All I wanted was a damn hat.

‘It’s your own fault,’ my idiot brother told me smugly.

‘One more word and I’ll kick you in the groin.’

‘Do you know what this is about?’ Penn asked for the thousandth time. He was on repeat this morning. Sometimes when he got something stuck in his head – a question or a thought, a word or a colour or an image – it tended to come out of his mouth over and over again until someone screamed at him for mercy.

‘No,’ both Jonah and I replied forcefully.

‘But look,’ Jonah pointed out, ‘soldiers are here, and several warders, so I reckon it must be important.’

‘Do you think they’re finally going to address the rumour?’ I wondered aloud.

Eighteen years ago the first peace treaty in known history between Kaya and Pirenti was drawn up. Ten years after that a rumour started. I had no idea where it originally came from, but it had seemed like an incredibly nasty rumour. A cruel whisper that no one could believe: that there might, somewhere, be a way to break the bond.

As the rumour grew in strength, Kaya began to crumble. The very idea divided the regions, rekindling the oldest argument – was the bond a gift or a curse? Should we treasure it, or fight to survive it?

I wanted to know the answer more than anyone, because if it was true, and there was a way to end the bond for all Kayans to come, then I was going to be the one to break the curse once and for all, and no warder’s magic, no army of berserkers – nothing at all in the entire world – would stop me.

At the end of the public square was a raised wooden stage. This was where they held award ceremonies and punishments. I’d seen a Pirenti man hanged there, but that had been a long time ago. No one had been hanged since the peace treaty had started to take effect. Now the square was saved mostly for fairs, markets and performances, the countless swinging corpses of war just an unhappy, ghoulish memory that haunted the cobblestones.

I fixed my eyes on the stage and begged the Gods to let whatever was happening start soon. The sun, which I normally welcomed like a lover, was starting to become the worst kind of nightmare, seeping into my head and making it throb.

‘Can we go?’ I asked. ‘This is stupid.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ Jonah repeated.

‘What’s my fault?’ I snapped. ‘The sun? All these people? This stupid announcement?’

‘No, drinking too much and acting like a sourpuss.’

‘Sourpuss,’ Penn agreed with a secret giggle that nearly made me crack a smile.

The damned horn finally blew, and I groaned aloud in gratitude.

Several people proceeded onto the stage. The first was Brathe of Sancia, general of Kaya’s royal army. He was taller than most Kayans, and so bald that it hurt my eyes to look upon the glaring surface of his skull. Next came Sharn and Valerie, the two royal informants of the Emperor, ruling residents of Limontae. They were always dressed the same – in the gold of their eyes when they looked at each other. For eight years people had protested the fact that a bonded couple held such high positions. It was unsafe. But the Emperor had never done anything about it, which meant no one could.

Next came the head warder Lutius. He was terrifying as always, though in this moment his eyes and skin were a normal colour. His creepy white hair was worn in about a thousand braids, which I’d always thought looked hideous, frankly.

Famous as they all were, the first four people on that stage probably received all of half a glance this morning, because when the fifth emerged into the sun and climbed up onto that stage I felt an immediate hush befall the crowd, and then as though on the exhaling of a communal breath a frantic rustle moved through us. Whispers and fidgeting and general disbelief rose.

Because here for everyone to see was a giant of a man, and he was unquestionably from Pirenti. There’d been no one born in Kaya who had ever looked like that, not since the dawning of the world.

There was fear, then. Indelible fear. The crowd wasn’t prepared. Too many had died at the hands of the Pirenti pigs. For too many years we’d fought in the wars against them. Even for those of us like Penn, Jonah and myself, who were too young to have seen any violence, there was still a bone-deep awareness of danger that came with the northern giants. Parents and grandparents had been killed. Cousins and aunts and uncles. No family had been spared the savagery of the Pirenti. And not even peace could erase the fear or the grief.

I could feel it around me as if it were a living, breathing thing. And yet. In me there was nothing but a dark, destructive excitement. Against all better judgement, I loved it when life suddenly became unpredictable.

He was a monster of a man. The second tallest man on that stage came only to his shoulder, and only barely. His chest was an enormous barrel, his arms muscled like tree trunks. He wore his hair shaved very short like all Pirenti soldiers did, and his skin was pale and ghostly like a Kayan’s would never be.

‘Doesn’t the sun shine there?’ Jonah had asked a very long time ago when we’d been four or five years old.

‘It’s hidden behind all the blood,’ Ma had replied.

Beyond that I couldn’t see him very well, but there was something about him that made me forget my headache.

‘Greetings!’ Sharn called to the assembled crowd. The public square was full – whatever news was announced this morning would be spread throughout Limontae by the time the sun went down. We loved to gossip, we Kayans.

A shout of response came from the crowd, a gathered ‘Ho!’ that made Sharn grin. She glanced at her bondmate and whatever she saw there made her curb her smile. Valerie was as stern as Sharn was flippant.

‘Peace prevails!’ she shouted next, and the resounding cheer was even louder.

The Pirenti man didn’t move a muscle. He surveyed the crowd with an expression that was completely unreadable; I was trying to understand it, by Gods I was trying.

General Brathe looked exceedingly unimpressed, but I only glanced at him before my eyes were pulled back to the outlandish stranger.

‘After eighteen wonderful years of peace, we must move forward even further,’ Sharn announced. ‘We’ve taken the first step in a unified world, but until now our borders have never been shared. We have not offered our homes to an ally as we should have. Today we welcome a man from the north into our country, a man who signifies our ties with progress and with peace.’

Something inside me started to move. I pushed through the people in front of me, shoving them unceremoniously out of the way. There were loud grunts of disapproval but I barely heard them. I was forcing my way to the stage and there was nothing else, for just a moment, but the need to see his face clearly. I didn’t know why, but I had to see that face. I reached the base of the stage and stared up at him, oblivious to all else. The sharp, clear angles of his face, his small, thin mouth, his severe jaw, and his eyes. His eyes. They were a startling shade of the lightest blue. So pale they almost looked white. Clear and crisp and distant.

In all my life, surrounded by people with eyes that changed to every imaginable hue, I had never once seen such a pale shade of blue. I wanted to know what it meant; wanted to know what the colour meant.

Then I remembered that in Pirenti colours meant nothing.

He was surprisingly young, actually – barely more than a child. Up so close I could see how far away he was. He barely stood there, on the ground. He was a million miles away, his angled face pensive and haunted. I had the strangest desire to reach out and catch all of his thoughts in my hands and hold them to my face so I could see them before they escaped. I wanted to see what colour they were; I wanted to see if they were as beautiful as his face was.

‘Finn …’ my twin brother hissed, coming up behind me with apologetic glances to everyone around us. ‘Damned impossible girl.’

‘Beside me,’ Sharn called, ‘stands the Crown Prince Thorne of Pirenti.’

Everyone in the crowd froze, stunned.

In the north there had lived a terrible man who’d spilt more blood than any in the world. He fed on Kayans, the legend went. Sucked their blood from their bones and kept their teeth as trophies. Slaughterman of the Barbarian Queen, he was the most dangerous man in the world.

In some legends it was told that he was part berserker, one of the monsters of the ice. But that was impossible, I told myself sharply, curbing my mind before it got away with me.

The name though … That name followed us into our nightmares. We went to sleep fearing Thorne the slaughterman. Well, I didn’t. But I’d never feared the normal things.

I took half a step – it was all I had room for. The people around me were close and panicked. But I smiled as the day became wildly more interesting.

‘Prince Thorne comes in peace,’ Sharn shouted quickly, sensing the unrest her words had created. ‘He is a peace envoy from the King and Queen of Pirenti, and he is here to learn more about our ways to further the understanding between our peoples. This is a joyous occasion – joyous!’

Nobody was listening. There was too much hatred, too deep in their bones.

Brathe stepped forward, his grizzly face evidence of all the battles he’d fought in the war. ‘Every person in Limontae – and Kaya, for that matter – is bound by law to treat this man with respect. He is protected by Kayan royalty, and by the precious treaty that has kept us all alive. We must protect the treaty. Any violence towards him will be punishable by death.’

The dire warning sent everyone hurrying home.

I stood a moment longer, not sure why, but aware that fascination had curdled in my fingertips and started to spread. My heart was pounding heavily. Jonah and Penn both grabbed my arms but I shrugged them off, staring up at the Pirenti man’s face.

The warder strode off the stage. Next went the bonded informants, followed by the general.

Now the prince stood alone. He was an easy target like that, utterly motionless. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance, as if he hadn’t realised the others had left. What could he be imagining in that head? Trying to picture a Pirenti prince’s thoughts was so far from my capabilities that a ravenous curiosity ignited in my veins. I’d never come across anyone as exotic or strange or as different to me as the sky was to the earth. I stared up at him, held taut by my fear and my fascination, and in that moment he looked down at me.

Our eyes met.

His blue stare was distant at first, though it warmed as he gazed at me. All the muscles in his face relaxed and then his eyes followed suit. At the corner of his mouth I saw a twitch. The twitch gave way to a smile, a real one, a thing made of warmth. A thing made to keep people alive. A thing that was beautiful beyond what I’d understood could exist.

A second later he was gone because the general had called for him.

I was left in the glaring sun with my two favourite people and a heart made of shattered stone.

Thorne

She was wild. That was the first thing I understood about the girl in the town square.

I was led up onto that stage so that the Kayan people could behold me, and even though I knew it was important, I wasn’t sure exactly what I could offer them that they would be pleased with. I wanted to try, wanted to give them something other than the memory of war. But I felt like a tamed animal on display and they were distraught. All of them. I could smell their fear, pungent and heady. It made my beast claw at my insides in excitement, but I swallowed him away, focusing on holding myself iron still.

It was always unsettling to scent terror and know I had caused it. My beast enjoyed it; I did not.

Brathe led the way off stage, which I thought was too soon. They needed to acclimatise the people to the idea of me, allow them time to get used to the look of me. But instead they rushed me off as if I was a creature of nightmare.

I thought of Ma and Da. In my mind they had always represented a kind of good and evil. There was a monster, and there was the lady who’d tamed him. I knew only the mother who had raised me, soft and gentle and disastrously vague. And I knew the legend of the slaughterman.

‘Your Highness,’ someone called from the side of the stage. Probably Brathe, since he seemed to be responsible for me. But before my eyes could move to him, they swept over the crowd and stopped.

There was a girl standing there. Not far below me. Still, in the middle of a broiling mass of uncertainty. Where everyone else fled, she remained.

Her tanned skin bristled with an undeniable movement, her yellow hair whipped about her face with a life of its own. Despite her stillness I had a sense that she never stopped moving, not for a single second. I had a sense that she was excited and loud and difficult. I had a million senses all at once and they were like a fist to the face.

Her short, slim body looked weak, but in the girl’s eyes there was no weakness. All I saw, in the yellow gaze, was laughter. And laughter, I’d become aware, was not something I was good at.

Brathe grabbed my arm and wrenched me off the stage, but I pulled away from him and headed back into the crowd. People scattered before me – I even heard a few screams, for Gods’ sakes. True, I probably looked like a lunatic, lumbering down off the stage like that, but screaming?

Blindly I forced my way to where she’d been standing.

I was too late; she was gone. Instead all I found were people running in terror of me.

Chapter 2

Falco

A simple man was an unthreatening one. That was what I knew – one of the only things I knew for sure. It was not wise for a man in my position to be good at too many things, nor was it wise for him to allow his enemies to see the truth of him.

So when the skirmish broke out, my hunting party attacked on the border of my land, I gave an audible gasp of fear and cowed behind my horse.

‘Protect His Majesty,’ Petir ordered smoothly, and the soldiers of my guard surrounded me, their training making quick work of the rough group of southern rebels. Only when the six men were dead at our feet did I straighten.

Petir and Coll went through the bodies, but found only the tattoos of the Sparrow on the backs of their necks.

‘Your Majesty?’

I licked my lips, feigning discomfort with the corpses and motioning for a guard to help me back up onto my horse. ‘Home. But don’t mention anything to the Empress – she’ll be outraged at having missed the fun.’

A few of the men grinned, and we kicked our mounts forward over the grassy hills of Galincia. In the distance the city loomed, its red and gold walls a thing of sparkling beauty against the backdrop of the ocean. Carved into the cliffs, the sandstone city was an architectural marvel.

At the gates I pulled my blindfold tightly over my eyes and allowed Petir to lead my mount up the winding streets to the palace. As usual, the sounds of my city were how I lived it, learnt it. The trickle of lazy stone fountains. The clip clop of our horses’ hooves on the sandstone. The soft murmurs of citizens as I passed them by. I knew when we neared the markets as there was a clatter of noise – the shouts of haggling, workers dragging crates and getting ordered to hurry up, the cries and laughter of children as they ran through the stalls … Smells hit me – the light and tangy scent of citrus fruits, the deep scents of resin and various oils, stalls full of incense, horse shit and always the glorious smell of salt from the sea breeze.

At the stables, Petir helped me off my mount and guided me inside the palace, where at last I was able to take off my blindfold and my shoes. Padding across the cool marble, I traversed the airy chambers with their high roofs and open windows until I found her standing on the Eastern balcony. Dropping a kiss on the back of her neck, I was rewarded with an elbow to my stomach.

‘Oof. Mercy, Quillane.’

‘Don’t sneak up on me.’

‘Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.’

The Empress turned her cat-eyes to me, lips twitching. ‘Did you catch anything?’

‘Indeed we did.’ I flapped a hand flamboyantly. ‘Six Sparrows, as it were.’

Quillane’s angular face lost its amusement immediately. ‘Inside Galincia? Surely not!’

‘Actually, I’m quite sure, since the gruesome sight of their corpses will haunt my dreams for months.’ I shuddered, making a face of distaste. ‘They smelt quite horrid. Did you know dead bodies had such a stench?’

She shook her head at my idiocy, her straight black hair swaying silkily. I wanted to run my hands through it. But I always wanted to run my hands through it. The Empress Quillane was one of the strangest looking women in Kaya, one of very few born with jet-black hair and green eyes the shade of the skin of a lime. She had feline grace and strength in her muscles, but her skin wasn’t the bronzed shade of the coast-dwelling folk of our lands; instead, it was a pale shade of creamy white. She had endured whispers her whole life stating she looked more like she belonged in Pirenti, and before her election to power was even subjected to a warder’s proof of parentage.

‘We stray closer and closer to war with every passing day.’

‘We will not initiate civil war,’ I stated.

‘We won’t have to, Falco. It is coming for us.’

I shook my head, allowing myself a moment of gravity before I had to don the cloak of joviality once more. ‘Hundreds of years of war over, only to start fighting amongst ourselves. I am ashamed.’

Quillane sighed and rested her elbows on the sandstone balcony. Silently we watched the sea crash against the rocks below the cliff our palace perched upon. Gulls circled the sky above, screeching their joy at traversing the wind pockets.

‘What is it that they think this will achieve?’ she murmured.

‘They follow a madman who will not stop until he has led them all to destruction.’

‘And still we have no idea of his true identity.’

‘We won’t know his identity until he wants us to, Quill.’

I dreamt of him, some nights. The Sparrow. The man who, even now, gathered forces to wrest control of Kaya. I had come to understand that my fate and his were irrevocably entwined. And some nights, when I woke sweating from the terror of his approach, I knew that when he and I finally came face to face, as we must, only one of us would live through that day.

Quillane

I watched him out of the corner of my eye, wondering at the darkness of his mood. It wasn’t strange that my Emperor would feel the black dread of this looming war, but it was strange for him to allow me to see it.

It was a rare day that Falco of Sancia deigned to discuss anything serious, and I wanted to take advantage of these fleeting moments. ‘I want to meet with Brathe and Lutius.’

‘Must we?’ he moaned. ‘They’re so boring.’

‘It’s not the time to be alienating the warders, Fal. We’ll need them.’

‘They’re the reason we’re in this mess,’ he muttered. Which happened to be true. The warders were the ones who’d kept the truth of the bond from us all these years, and admitted their secret only when Queen Ava and King Ambrose of Pirenti had threatened to tear down their temples unless they spoke the truth at long last. Yes, in fact there does seem to be a way to end the bond, now that you mention it …

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said faintly, distracted by thoughts of the northern nation.

He sighed, eyeing me sideways. Falco, Emperor of Kaya, was an obscenely beautiful man. Golden hair tied at the nape of his neck, eyes the colour of diamonds, a wide smile of white teeth … Even I sometimes found myself staring at him in astonishment, wondering how such a man could have sprouted from the loins of two such plain parents. Taller in stature than most Kayans, he was lean and strong. It was a pity, however, that his body happened to be utterly useless. Unable to wield a sword or throw a punch, disastrously uncoordinated and full of cowardice, Falco’s only real qualities were his sense of humour and the secret compassion in his heart. His ability to make whomever he smiled at believe themselves to be the most important person in the world was both a skill and a detriment to him as, more often than not, the sudden absence of that smile would break the same person’s heart. Put simply, the man had charm. But he also happened to be an infuriating, idiotic, selfish bastard.

‘Fine,’ he sighed, ‘but only because you are looking particularly delicious today, darling. Did I mention that?’

‘The prince arrives today.’

Falco sighed as if he couldn’t care less. ‘The beast, you mean? I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about you and I going into that closet over there, and I want to talk about how I could teach you the meaning of both our lives with only my tongue.’

‘You may not want to talk about him, but he is all too real. We’ll have to receive him soon.’

‘And have him traipse in here with his bloodied animal skins and human bone jewelry? The man is a savage. He’d stain our pretty white marble floors with his filth.’

The serious discussion was over, clearly. Shaking my head, I turned to go inside.

‘Darling, you slay me,’ he laughed. ‘Just one little lick? I promise you’ll love it.’

‘I’d cut off that tongue before it came anywhere near me.’

‘You don’t know what you’re missing, love.’

Maybe I didn’t. But regardless of how pretty or how charming my Emperor was, regardless of how I loved him, he wasn’t the one I wanted.

Falco was born into his role, whereas I had been voted in. We were not married, nor bonded to each other, as that was illegal. He continuously tried to blur the lines though, unused to being denied even a single thing.

With my gauzy skirts billowing behind me, I returned to my private chambers and removed a key from around my neck. Behind the bookcase was a passageway. Only three people alive today knew about this passage and the chamber it led to. Falco was not one of them, and I’d die before I did him the disservice of telling him.

Securing the door behind me, I crept along the tunnel until I reached the bedroom and found her cross-stitching by the single window. Her blonde hair fell across her face as she looked up at me.

‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.

Smiling, she nodded. Radha had been mine for eight years. And for six of those I had kept her in this room. Each time my eyes turned gold for her, my heart broke a little at the cruelty of the life we led. The injustice of the ambition in my veins and the passion in my heart that meant she lived her life locked out of sight.

‘Did he fall from his horse again?’

I shrugged. ‘Probably. I couldn’t bear to ask.’

Radha gave a soft trickle of laughter. Everything about her was sweet and soft. I tried desperately to be more like her, but I was too cynical to keep it up for long.

‘He was attacked by six Sparrows.’

Radha paused, lowering her embroidery. ‘Oh, Quill.’

I nodded, slumping into a chair beside her. ‘They grow bolder every day.’

‘So what will you do?’

I shrugged.

‘You know what the answer is,’ she murmured gently.

I met her golden eyes and felt the bond pull at us both. An ache in my skin, in my bones and my gut.

‘Send soldiers in to control them.’

‘If I send soldiers they’ll see it as an act of warfare, which means there will be an ocean of blood shed. They are too many and too savage for us to expect any other outcome. I don’t want violence in my country.’

‘You will have it anyway, Quill. Making the proclamation to have your people seek out the end to the bond will excite everyone. And if you let the rebels grow in numbers and strength, if you fail to show yours, they will bring the war to you and the bloodshed will be much worse.’

I closed my eyes, resting my head against the chair. ‘I can’t make that decision on my own.’

‘You may have to,’ Radha told me gently. ‘What help will you get from Emperor Feckless?’

‘He’s not feckless,’ I muttered, without much conviction. Radha didn’t dislike anyone, but if she did, I believed it would be Falco. They’d never met, but she’d heard enough about him to be equal parts amused by his antics and exasperated with his failings.

I heard a rustle of silk and then she was upon me, her small frame sliding onto my lap, her lips tracing the shape of my jaw. ‘You’re a brave woman, Empress.’

My hands went to her hips. ‘I’m not. If I was, you’d live with the country’s eyes upon you, as you deserve, instead of hiding in here as if I’m ashamed of you.’

She made a soft sound. ‘You’d lose your throne.’

It shouldn’t matter, but it did. There were too many things I wanted to achieve. I wanted a new life for Kaya. I wanted peace. And I couldn’t fight for that unless I sat on the throne. ‘I want you out of here.’

‘I won’t be apart from you.’

A conversation we’d had every day for years.

‘How do you breathe?’

‘I think of you and it’s easy,’ she said, and then kissed me. A powerful hurricane consumed us; this was how she and I loved each other, with obsession and need and an impossible desperation.

But when those things waned, when we chipped away at them until they broke, what would we have left? Unbreakable, the bond was said to be. Some days I felt the untruth of this. Because when the day came that this life was too much for her, when she forgot who she had once been within the confines of this prison cell, and when she finally grew to hate me, what would the bond mean then? What would it be worth?

It was in moments like these that I wished my kingdom were a different place. In this different place, there would be no law against the Emperor and Empress having bondmates, and there would be no law against two women ruling together. And in this different place, Radha would walk free, and our eyes would turn gold, and everyone in the kingdom would see and rejoice instead of sending our corpses to sea.

Falco

I gazed at the row of naked women, all blindfolded. They sported various lengths of blonde hair; all had perfectly shaped bodies with perfectly unblemished skin. I grew bored just looking at them.

‘That one,’ I said, pointing to a girl with a birthmark on her thigh – the only girl with something remotely remarkable about her. My page led the others out and I waited in silence until the girl and I were alone in my chambers.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Eliza, Your Majesty.’

I moved closer, looking at her mouth, the pert little shape of it. Regardless of what I did to her tonight, she would never be allowed to look at me, lest our eyes meet and we bond. So the blindfold stayed on, and I bedded yet another copy of a woman, and we felt nothing for each other, and connected on no level at all.

For a moment, I turned my head and gazed at the chamber my parents had once shared. There on that same bed was where I’d found them, throats slit, bleeding onto the marble floor below. And in the room next door was where I’d found my brother and sisters, all slain, too. I could have another room if I wished it, but this was where I stayed, because I saw the blood and the bodies each night, and they reminded me of why I had to be this way.

A simple man was less of a threat. A foolish, incompetent man was underestimated and overlooked, even when he was an Emperor. He became an easy target, the kind of man enemies thought to erase without much concern. Enemies like the Sparrow.

Emperor Feckless they called me. When you walked your city streets blindfolded, your ears grew sharp and you heard things you wouldn’t otherwise. I heard all the whispers, all the rumours, all the stories about Emperor Feckless and his reckless narcissism. And because Emperor Feckless drank far too much and bed faceless women, that was what I did.

‘What do you wish of me, Majesty?’ Eliza asked.

I tilted my head, banishing a momentary desire to tear her blindfold free and lock eyes with her. ‘Tell me something interesting. Or clever. Or funny.’

‘I … I beg your pardon?’ she stuttered.

‘Tell me anything.’

‘I’m not sure … I understand.’

A sigh escaped me. I started to undress. ‘Forget it. Just lie down on the bed.’

Chapter 3

Thorne

‘The what?’

‘The Siren Nights,’ Winn repeated excitedly.

I gazed at him from the end of my bed. After the debacle in the square this morning I’d been shown to a large townhouse in the city where I would be staying while I was in Kaya. That was, until the truth of why I was really here became apparent to the Kayans.

The house was full of servants, which I found uncomfortable after having lived my life with only Ma. Every room buzzed with them as they rushed around to make sure everything was perfect, and I found myself wishing for quiet. Winn, who was the head of the household – despite the fact that he couldn’t have been much older than me – had bloody well tried to take my boots off for me before I’d forbidden him from such tasks.

‘What are the Siren Nights?’ I asked him, watching the way he drew back the curtains and used a lever to unwind a window in the roof with so much fervour that he nearly broke the handle off.

He paused what he was doing and eyed me. He was literally about half my size, with shoulder length, dirty blond hair and brown eyes that kept turning green. And he was the first person I’d met since arriving who didn’t look like he was about to wet his pants at the sight of me. All the other staff in the house had been stiff with terror and very, very small. ‘I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it, sire.’

I could feel mischief afoot and smiled. ‘Go on. I won’t say a word.’ In truth I’d gladly keep things from the general, the informants and the warder priest, none of whom had been particularly kind to me. I had yet to meet the Emperor or the Empress, who had not invited me to their palace in Sancia, which would really offend Ava if she were to find out.

‘It’s a secret that belongs to the youths of Limontae,’ Winn explained. ‘Something that was started a couple of years ago by the twins from the cliffs.’

I waited for him to overcome his wariness.

A grin spread Winn’s mouth. ‘If you’d like, I could show you … I fear my description might be unworthy.’

I stood up. ‘Lead the way.’

I’d spent my life by the sea, but it was different standing at the headlands of Limontae. The sight below was beautiful and dangerous, and I couldn’t take my eyes from it. The cliff itself had been built into – there were hundreds of houses within its face, spreading from the very top all the way down to the sand of the beach. These flickered with glowing lights, and from this distance they looked like fireflies in the darkness. Beyond lay the ocean, and as we stopped to survey the view I realised that I had never known the sea as I thought I had. This was a creature as savage and unquiet as wolves’ teeth tearing at the shore. The water I lived beside was quiet and calm and glistened silver in the moonlight. Here there was barely any moon at all, and the surf was an enormous throbbing mass of black.

Although the cliff and the sea would have been enough to satisfy my wandering soul for one night, there was more beauty to behold. Along the headland, exploding out of the water, were seven enormous towers. Each was slender and straight, rising dozens of levels into the sky, and their surfaces seemed to be made of glass, winking in the starlight. I could imagine what they would look like under the sun. In all my life I’d never seen such feats of architecture. I’d thought Ambrose’s fortress to be tall, but it was as nothing compared to the shining towers of Limontae.

‘I’d heard of them, of course,’ I murmured. ‘But I never imagined them to be so grand.’

‘Aye, they’re a wonder,’ Winn agreed. ‘One for every subject of the academy.’

‘Do you go to the academy, Winn?’

‘No, sire – I look after your house.’

I looked at him, abashed. ‘Forgive me.’

‘Of course not, sire. Shall we continue? We need to hurry or we’ll miss the betting, and that’s the craziest bit.’

‘Where are we headed?’ I asked softly, for some reason feeling like I had to whisper. Winn pointed towards the first tower, but before we reached it he led me off the edge of the cliff. I couldn’t see anything below except rocks.

‘Are you any good at climbing, my lord?’

I shrugged. He led me over, climbing agilely down the rough surface to an invisible path, overgrown with shrubs and long grass. I followed far more slowly. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a very real discomfort with heights. I even struggled being near windows on the top level of Ambrose’s fortress. The darkness tonight helped me to trick my mind into believing I was not high on a rocky cliff. And facing the rocks made it marginally easier to concentrate on my feet and hands, taking each step at a time. I stumbled a few times, but soon made it lower into the grassy hills.

‘Are you well, Majesty?’

‘Yes, sorry. I’ve slowed you down.’

‘Not at all.’

We rounded a final corner, dropping out of view of the rest of the world. A huge sea cave opened up before us. We climbed over slippery rocks to reach the mouth, the ocean slapping dangerously close to our feet. If the tide were any higher, there would be no way to get into the cave.

Noises reached me over the crashing surf. Voices shouting. Winn grinned and led me further in. Just inside the mouth I stopped, stunned. The cave was vast – deeper and wider than I could see – and the roof was so high that I could barely make out the stalactites that hung from it.

There were at least fifty youths standing on the rocks; they looked like they ranged from between about fifteen to twenty-five years old. They were all yelling and gesturing at each other with a heady, frenzied chaos, but as I watched I realised there was actually method to their shouts. Standing on a big rock above the rest were two people. The boy was slim and wiry, with messy yellow hair and a lazy grin. He was watching the crowd of excited kids and occasionally murmuring something into the other person’s ear.

And that was when my heartbeat jerked out of time. Because I saw the girl standing next to him, and it was the same girl from the square. My wild girl with the bright yellow hair and the matching yellow eyes. And Gods, if I’d thought her wild this afternoon then it was nothing to how she seemed now. Animated and powerful and utterly gorgeous, standing up there on the rock like the queen of the ferals. She grinned with lazy enjoyment, unfazed by the manic surge of kids all trying to gain her attention. She’d been born here in this cave, on that rock, with people swarming at her feet.

As I watched she called out numbers and everyone would scream and shout their names until she chose someone and jotted his or her name down on a small piece of parchment. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I knew I’d never seen so many people my own age before.

Winn had gone to join the crowd, but I remained in the shadows, unwilling to ruin their fun with my presence.

Once the process of picking names for numbers, or whatever they were doing, had been concluded, the kids all moved to stand around the edges of the ever-increasing tide. Each new wave was more violent and higher than the last. If they didn’t finish and head out soon they’d all get trapped. Once everyone was positioned, two boys moved to the edge of the rocks. That was when I noticed that there were ropes hanging from the sharp stalactites above. They hung at intervals leading out over the water, two rows of them, few and far in between.

The boys readied themselves and then the Wild Girl shouted for them to start. They each leapt up to grab hold of the first ropes. Then they swung themselves back and forth, gaining momentum until they were flying high enough to launch themselves through the air and catch hold of the next rope in the line. My breath caught in my lungs, thinking the space too wide and assuming they’d fall into the churning death water below, but they didn’t – they caught the second rope, then the third, fourth, fifth and so on. Their hands had to be burning and their shoulders would be aching, but there were looks of such determination on their faces that I doubted they would feel anything until tomorrow. If they lived that long.

The kids on the rocks were screaming and cheering and passing wagers between them, while the two boys swung and leapt, swung and leapt, coming nearer to where I stood at the mouth.

‘Crazy, right?’ a voice asked me and I looked down to realise Winn had returned.

‘What are they doing?’

‘Racing,’ he shrugged.

‘But … why?’

‘Because it’s fun, sire.’

‘They could die.’

Winn nodded.

‘Have people died?’

His smile faded and he said, ‘Yes.’

‘Who thought of all this? And fastened the ropes?’ I didn’t know why I was asking – I knew the answer.

‘The twins.’

I looked at them. They wore identical grins, watching the race with anticipation. He said something to her and she threw her head back and laughed with such glee that it hit me in the stomach – I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone laugh like that before.

‘This is where it gets tricky,’ Winn informed me. The racers had reached the final two ropes at almost the same time, and were looking at each other as they steadily changed the direction of their swings.

‘Do they go back now?’

‘Yes, but they have to swap lines.’

My heart lurched with alarm, and I started to prepare myself for a swim. If one of those boys fell into the water this far out, they’d be dashed against the rocks, or else they’d drown from the violence of the waves. And there was no way I could stand here and watch that happen.

The boys had to time it perfectly, letting go of the ropes at the same time and twisting themselves through the air in such a way that they wouldn’t smash into each other. They avoided hitting very narrowly, and both managed to grab hold of their ropes. One of them caught it with only one hand and looked like he would fall, but managed to haul himself up. The other boy was faster, turning and heading back along his opponent’s line of ropes.

I didn’t let my breath out until they were both safely on the rocks. Although ‘safely’ was a loose term, given any wave could wash the whole lot of them off their feet. I cast a look up at the ropes.

‘Are they secure?’

‘Sometimes the stalactites break. That’s when it gets interesting.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘What’s with all the numbers and shouting at the beginning?’

‘That’s how they decide on the order of the races. Finn – that’s the girl – pairs people according to their best times. The numbers are the order in which people race. Finn and Jonah decide based on ability. The later you go in the night, the more dangerous it is because the tide’s risen. It’s safer to go at the start, but there’s more respect if you go at the end.’

Two more people lined up. This time it was two girls and I closed my eyes in horror. I realised quickly they were better than the boys as they were more nimble. One of the girls pulled out in front quickly, reaching the end and launching herself over to the other line. I watched as they approached each other, sure one of them would have to stop and turn around, but the girl in front swung herself over the slower contester, making it apparent that this was commonplace.

‘Do the twins ever race?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes. They mostly coordinate the whole thing, plus the other events.’

‘Other events?’

‘There are pegasis races on the planes, and they do skirmishes and battle contests with the students of the academy.’

I folded my arms. ‘Why? Why do all of this?’

Winn looked at me. ‘I don’t know. They just … do what they want. I think they’ve dedicated their lives to enabling the youth of Limontae to have fun.’

‘And the adults let them?’

‘About a year ago they made the whole thing illegal, so now it’s done in secret.’

There was a small boy with ginger hair jumping around the boulder, and I watched as he climbed up next to the twins. Jonah said something that made him giggle hysterically.

I couldn’t help but feel like this whole thing was a foolish waste of time. And if kids got hurt or killed, it was hardly worth the cheap thrills they got from it. The twins seemed high on their own power, elated with the craze they’d started.

‘Have you met them?’

‘No, sire.’

‘Do you know why they don’t race?’ I asked.

‘Maybe they got bored.’

I looked at him questioningly.

He smiled. ‘The twins haven’t ever been beaten on the ropes. They’re hellish quick. Finn especially. Not even her brother can catch her.’

I looked again at her brilliant white smile. It seemed careless, somehow. I still thought her beautiful, but now her beauty seemed edged with something else. A disregard. There was no merit in amusement if it was at the sake of someone else. And there was nothing I disliked more than selfishness. I longed to take away this new knowledge, longed for the girl I’d seen in the square, who was brave enough to stand still when everyone else ran. Now I thought that perhaps she wasn’t brave after all, just reckless.

‘I think I’ve had enough,’ I murmured.

‘Of course, sire.’

Before we turned to go, I asked my final question – the last question I would ask about the races. ‘Why do they call them the Siren Nights?’

Winn scratched his arm, thinking the answer through. ‘When you’re on the ropes, a strange thing happens to the mind, sire. The perils of the race are more than we can see from the side. As you swing further out towards the sea, the call gets stronger. There’s something about the cave that whispers in your head to let go of those ropes, to plunge into the water, a kind of siren call that makes your bones ache. Nobody knows where it comes from; some say there really are sirens in these waters. In any case, the true test of the race is not how well you can swing from the ropes, but the strength of a soul in denying the call.’

If that was what it took, I’d be dead within seconds.

Finn

I could feel the thump thump of all their heartbeats. The excited rush of their pulses. I could hear the wash and crash of the sea, edging its way towards us, beckoning for our souls. It set me alight, all of it. This was living.

I couldn’t bear to think of sunrise, when it would be over. But I was good at not thinking about things.

‘Don’t,’ Jonah murmured in my ear, and I looked down to see that in my hands were three small pebbles, levitating in lazy circles. I snatched them into a fist and shrugged, unwilling to be lectured.

And then I felt it. I’m not sure how I felt it, exactly. Or what I felt. But my eyes snapped up to see the hulking figure standing in the mouth of the cave, silhouetted by moonlight. I watched him watch me. I couldn’t see his face or his eyes, but I could feel his regard.

‘What in Gods’ names is he doing here?’ Jonah asked softly.

Penn swung up onto our boulder, singing loudly. ‘The northern beasts will come for our blood …’

‘Shhh,’ I murmured. It was occurring to me how much fun I could have with this. Nobody else had spotted him yet. They were all too focused on the racers.

As the girls finished the course, I pulled my brother to the ground and dragged him to the first rope. An excited surge of murmurs erupted at the realisation that Jonah and I were going to race.

‘What’s this about?’ my brother asked me.

I shrugged again, flashing him a smile. ‘An experiment.’

His eyes turned green with concern, but I was already jumping up to get a firm hold of my rope. Cheers exploded as we took off.

My blood started to pound, rushing in my ears. The sea wanted to take me in its mouth and swallow me whole. I ignored it for the moment, swinging my body and launching myself into the air, stretching as far as I could to catch the rope waiting before me. I was beating Jonah – he was fast, but he wasn’t as fast as me.

It was the burn that got most. Your hands were set alight by the ropes. But I barely felt it. I felt something different entirely.

As I got to the end, swinging across to return along the line closest to where the Pirenti Prince stood, I paused a moment, finding his eyes in the darkness. And as our gazes met, I took a very deep breath and pretended to fall from my rope.

My body plunged into the churning water with a painful crash. The key was not trying to fight the tide. Instead I let myself sink to the sandy bed below, and then I let the wild waves drag me back towards the rocks.

The water was plunging beneath and into a small cavity, bursting up through a hole at the back of the cave. I allowed the tide to wash me through this small gap, bracing myself to be cracked against the rocks. Then, as my air was running out with a painful urgency, I reached out with slippery, trembling fingers to haul myself from the hole before the next wave hit.

Gasping air, I scrambled up onto my boulder. Everyone was crowded around the water, shouting worriedly about what they should do.

I put my fingers in my mouth and let out a cracking whistle. The crowd jerked in surprise, turning to see me, and there was a relieved rush of laughter, coupled with some cheers.

Jonah, eyes scarlet with fury, pushed through them. ‘What were you thinking?’

I shrugged, searching for the prince. I couldn’t see him.

‘I feel like throttling you.’

‘I was only playing.’ I craned my neck, looking through the faces and bodies, but none were tall enough to be him.

‘He went in after you, Inney,’ Jonah snapped.

My heart lurched, eyes jerking to my brother.

No.

All the air left my lungs and the ground went out from under me. Time slowed to a stop, and I stood frozen within an awareness of what would happen to the world if the Prince of Pirenti were to die in Kaya.

And an awareness, too, of what would happen to me. To the way I got through the days.

My feet were moving before my mind had a chance to catch up. I was down from the rocks and flinging myself into the water. My brother’s shout echoed into the violent depths as I struck out. It was more difficult now, fighting against the waves. A fool‘s mission, this one, but I knew this cave and this tide as well as anyone could. And I could sense him being carried out and around the mouth, and if I didn’t reach him in time, his body would be smashed against the rocks.

After a few minutes I made it past the swell and into slightly calmer waters. ‘Thorne!’ I shouted, and saw the dark shape move in the distance. I pressed myself towards him, reaching his side just as a wave swept us forward.

Grabbing his shirtsleeve, I wrenched him sideways, using the momentum of the swell to take us into the opening of a smaller cave. I felt his body scrape across sharp rocks before we were dropped painfully onto the stone embankment.

I let my eyes fall shut a moment, catching my breath. His groan echoed softly in the small space. Dragging myself up, I saw that his left arm had been scraped raw.

‘Are you well, lady?’

‘I’m fine. You’re the idiot who jumped into an ocean cave!’

‘You fell –’

‘It was a trick! You shouldn’t have followed me!’ I felt unaccountably angry.

In the dark his blue eyes grew cold. ‘A trick.’

‘A joke. A bit of fun.’ I swallowed, trying to rid myself of the quick temper. He was completely silent, and no longer looking at me. After a moment I shrugged, letting out a helpless laugh. ‘I suppose it’ll make a good story.’

Thorne’s expression was blank.

‘Oh, come on. It’s funny, really. Unwind a little.’

He stood, towering over me. His waterlogged body moved slowly to the edge of the rock. ‘How will we get back?’

‘We’ll have to wait for low tide.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘Couple of hours.’

His expression seemed to say that I was the last person he wanted to be trapped alone in a cave with.

‘I’m Finn,’ I announced, extending a hand.

He hesitated, then gave a soft sigh, as though giving in to whatever reluctance he had. ‘I thank you for saving me, lady – it is a debt I will repay. My name is Thorne of Araan.’

The brute from the north had impeccable manners, it seemed. How funny.

But he didn’t reach for my hand. There was that. A snake of disappointment curled around me; I’d wanted the touch of his skin to discover the answer to what lay inside him.

‘I know. You are also the first Prince of Pirenti.’

‘You were at the announcement.’

‘I was.’

‘I saw you there.’

‘And I saw you.’

We eyed each other, and I contemplated all the truths I had, working out which would be more entertaining to divulge. In the end, it was easy. I knew exactly how to rattle him.

‘I’d know you from a thousand miles away, Prince Thorne,’ I murmured. ‘I’d know the feel of you even with my eyes closed.’

His eyes narrowed.

‘I’d know the feel of any Pirenti man with my eyes closed. It’s in my blood.’

He drew a breath, comprehension darkening his gaze somehow. Then he said, ‘You’re a warder.’

And I smiled.

Thorne

For thousands of years Pirenti and Kaya had known one truth. No one hated each other like the berserkers and the warders did. Dark and bottomless was the desire to kill each other, an immeasurable need, a kind of overwhelming truth at the heart of who we were. And no matter how many treaties were drawn up, no matter how many years of peace we enjoyed, there would never be an end to the hatred between a berserker and a warder.

Here she stood, my Wild Girl with the yellow hair and the yellow eyes, with the slyest of all smiles at her lips and the darkest kind of soul magic humming beneath her skin. It was amazing that I hadn’t recognised it earlier.

My beast exploded to his feet, rattling at the cage with a howl of blood lust. He wanted to destroy her, devouring her piece by piece.

I strode to the other side of the cave, trying to calm my trembling hands. I couldn’t make the mistake of touching her – I was sure that would open the cage.

‘Do you know what they whisper about you in the city, Thorne?’

I closed my eyes.

‘They call you a spy, come to take our secrets home with you.’

‘The Queen of my nation is Kayan. Don’t you think she could find her own secrets, if she wanted them?’

I heard her give a breath of laughter. ‘I didn’t say they were smart whispers.’

I had forgotten about laughter until this day, until meeting her.

I slammed my fist into rock, pain slicing up my arm and into my shoulder. I breathed through it, finding my centre within it. This was my body. My pain. It did not belong to him.

My lungs slowed, pulse calming. When I felt ready I faced her, squaring my shoulders. ‘I am no spy.’

Finn sighed. ‘Pity. It would have been more interesting if you were.’ She was wandering the walls, trailing her fingertips over the smooth and rough edges of rock. ‘I’m not really a warder, you know.’

My eyebrows arched.

‘Not technically. They looked into my soul and decided it was unworthy. Apparently I have irresponsible tendencies and reckless desires. They say I’m uncontrollable, and could never be permitted rein of my own power.’ She smiled again, but this time it was cold. ‘So now I have all this energy under my surface and nothing to do with it.’

A part of me couldn’t help but agree with the warders for wanting to control her, but the other, more secret part of me couldn’t fathom how anyone would want to contain such a magnificent creature.

‘My brother trains with them. He has calm, an ocean of it.’ Her smile slipped sideways into something real, the first sign of softness I had glimpsed in her.

I wondered why she was telling me this. It occurred to me, looking at her now, that she was bored. And not in the slightest bit frightened of me, which was why the beast was so fixated on her. If she ever found out I was a berserker, I didn’t know what she’d do. But I didn’t like the thought of being someone’s entertainment.

I cleared my throat. ‘My companion said the Siren Nights aren’t just about climbing, but in denying the call of the sea.’

She tilted her head to watch me.

‘He said you win these nights whenever you compete.’

Still she waited.

I cracked the knuckles in my hand ‘How do you deny the call?’

Finn smiled. ‘You think I’d give away my best secret to a man I just met?’

I ducked my head, embarrassed for having asked.

‘Let’s see how well trained you are.’ She looked sideways at me. ‘Are you going to admit why you’re really here in Kaya? Or are you going to obey aunty and uncle?’

I met her gaze and didn’t blink. ‘I’m going to obey aunty and uncle.’

She laughed, eyes turning a beautiful lilac that made them seem less like they should belong to a cat. ‘Good boy. I’ll have it out of you eventually.’

Falco

On my balcony where no one could see me, I practised. I practised all kinds of things – swordplay, archery, knife throwing. I practised dance steps and mathematics. I studied maps and charts, history books and literature from both Kaya and Pirenti. I practised my accent, practised making my voice sound simpering or drunken. Practised cruelty and disinterest, practised feigning desire.

Some of it I practised using, and some of it I practised hiding.

All so that I would be the complete picture of a man recognisable to the Sparrow as an easy target; so that I would be Emperor Feckless.

When I was done with my own training I walked down to the armoury to be given my daily lesson. Petir, my bodyguard and trainer, offered me a sword that had been designed for a weaker arm than mine.

I took it and we began the tedious task we repeated daily. I had to hand it to him – he’d never given up, even though it seemed impossible I’d ever improve.

‘Hold it firmer, Your Majesty,’ Petir ordered for the thousandth time.

I would have quite enjoyed telling him that his own grip was too tight. That he often stepped too wide to his left to compensate for a childhood wound that had never healed properly, and subsequently left his right side unguarded every few moves. I would have quite enjoyed telling him that if he ever came up against a decent opponent, he’d be made quick work of.

But I didn’t, of course. I fumbled my sword and let it drop to the ground, taking a slash to my right shoulder.

Quillane arrived in time to witness this last embarrassment and I saw the flash of shame in her eyes. It found a hole in my guts, that shame – a very old wound that I tried not to acknowledge too often.

‘Darling,’ I called. ‘Your beauty distracted me.’

‘Everything distracts you.’ Her dark hair swayed as she gestured for me to follow. ‘Come. They are waiting.’

I felt the heat of the sun first, and then came the sound of a sea of people all whispering and murmuring below us.

The silk of Quillane’s dress rustled as she lifted a hand, and I heard the crowd fall silent in wait.

I wished I could see their faces. I wished to see all of them, all the faces of the people who followed me without question, even when I was a fool and an embarrassment. I wanted to look into their eyes and somehow thank them for the loyalty, wanting to beg them just to wait a little longer, until Sparrows no longer plagued us, while at the same time wanting to chastise them for not demanding more of their Emperor.

My Empress said, ‘People of Kaya. The truth has at last been revealed to us.’

Finn

Surprisingly, when we finally made it back to the city, our disappearance wasn’t the first thing on Jonah or Penn’s lips. Instead, it was word from the Emperor and Empress: in a week’s time, there would be a proclamation made about the bond.

My bones felt frozen, all the sound in the world fading to a dull roar.

Through it I heard my brother add, ‘Anyone who wants to hear it is invited to the holy city of warders.’

This was it. I had to get to Sancia.

And that was when I saw Thorne’s face. He looked almost as determined as I felt.

Chapter 4

Quillane

Falco, Emperor of Kaya, light of my life, apple of my eye, most beautiful man in the realm, was drunk. Again.

I wanted to throttle him.

‘I’m not!’ he argued. ‘I was drunk last night.’

‘So now you smell of death and sex,’ I snapped. ‘What a wonderful impression you will make.’

His eyebrows arched woozily. ‘Death and sex? What do such things smell of?’

I gritted my teeth and turned away from him.

‘Come on,’ he laughed. ‘The warders think so little of me already, I doubt they’ll care that I’m hung over.’

‘Again.’

We sat in a small litter, its walls covered in dark drapes so that no one might spot us. The rise and fall of the footsteps carrying us was making him queasy, by the look of his greenish skin. I didn’t know why I was arguing with him today, of all days. Falco’s need to charge blindly through life and destroy everything in his wake was something that came from a dark place, a particular night many years ago. I didn’t fight it; such a fight would be like trying to cup a tidal wave in my hand. He wanted oblivion, and I didn’t have space in my heart to try and show him that there were other things to want.

Today, though. Today I had a measure of my own restlessness, and the tidal wave I faced was not Falco’s grief, but my own fear of the inevitable. I needed him by my side for this, but he only ever lagged behind.

We were led, blindfolded, into the warder compound on the top of the cliff. When secured safely in the uppermost chamber, Falco’s guard Petir undid the cloths and we were able to see again. He, like the other servants in the palace, was allowed to look upon us because he was already bonded and posed no danger of bonding to us.

I took a deep breath of the sea air, moving to the edge of the marble slab we stood atop. No walls guarded the drop, no glass shielded against the screaming winds up this high. A sea eagle screeched loudly and flashed right by my head, making me forget, just for a moment, what a debacle my life had become.

A sound came from behind us, and I turned to see that Lutius and Brathe had arrived. They both sank into a deep bow. Lutius, as head warder, was permitted to rise first, and then Brathe, our army general, followed suit.

‘Greetings,’ I said, moving in to give them both a kiss on each cheek. ‘It’s been too long.’

‘Your Majesty, it has,’ Brathe replied, his eyes softening as they did (I’d been told) only with me.

‘Did you get more bald?’ Falco asked, blinking at the glare from the general’s skull. Brathe simply shook the Emperor’s hand.

‘There are things to discuss,’ Lutius said curtly, cutting straight to the matter at heart, as always. With a wave of his hand, stools and a table rose smoothly out of the stone floor and we sat, surrounded by sea and sky.

‘The prince,’ Lutius prompted.

‘We have a prince?’ Falco asked quizzically.

‘The Prince of Pirenti,’ Lutius snapped, making Falco give an exaggerated ‘ah’, and a quick wink at me. Did he think I found him amusing? Because I most certainly did not.

‘You met him?’ I asked.

‘We did,’ Brathe said. ‘He is not what we expected.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Young and quiet and very well mannered.’

‘Will he cause problems?’

‘I can’t imagine so, Majesty. He seems intent on enjoying Limontae as a guest. I have heard that he keeps mostly to himself.’

‘You didn’t bring him here with you?’

Brathe faltered, looking between Falco and I. ‘No, Majesty – I wasn’t aware that I should …’

I rounded on Falco, who was inspecting his impeccably manicured fingernails. ‘Did you not extend the invitation?’

He looked up. ‘Was I meant to?’

My eyes turned furious steel grey.

Falco sighed. ‘Oh dear. Ava is not going to be happy about this.’

‘You think we can afford to insult the King and Queen of Pirenti along with the bloody Sparrow?’ I hissed.

‘I’ll send the invitation now,’ he shrugged, as if it didn’t matter in the slightest.

‘He won’t get here in time! The announcement is in four days! If you’d sent it when I asked you, he could have been escorted by the general himself, but now you expect the Prince of Pirenti to traipse across the land alone?’

He looked at me, spreading his hands helplessly. ‘I thought he was meant to be a big scary monster from the ice? Can he not make a simple journey without help?’

‘He is a child,’ I said softly. ‘A child in a foreign land, where everyone he meets is likely to hate him.’

Falco shrugged again, this time with disdain. ‘I would hardly call nineteen years old a child. When I was nineteen I was Emperor of a nation and half the world was out for my blood.’

‘And what an Emperor you have made,’ I said softly.

Falco’s expression changed, but only very slightly. I saw the rare shift in his eyes, a tinge of tangerine hat was the only hint my barb had wounded him at all.

Steeling my temper with a deep breath, I turned back to the warder and the general. They wore similar expressions of resigned disappointment. A look I was so accustomed to in the presence of Falco that I had given up concerning myself with it.

‘Moving on,’ I said flatly. ‘May I see the map?’ Petir brought forward a map of our lands, divided into realms. We used him as more than a bodyguard when we were out of the palace, as it was necessary for us to limit contact with people. ‘Here is where the Sparrow’s men have been spotted.’ I pointed out a section of land well within our very own region of Galincia.

‘They have breached the borders?’ Brathe asked quickly.

‘They have. Falco’s man Petir took them out, but there will be more.’

‘It’s time to send troops into Querida and Ora to quell the uprising. Their land outspans our own.’

‘It is not their land and ours,’ I said crisply. ‘It is all the same land – we are all Kayan.’

‘And what of those in Yurtt?’ Lutius asked mildly. ‘What would you call them?’

Once, not so long ago, Yurtt had been called Sanra, and it had been a region of Kaya. But the slaughterman of Pirenti had won too many battles and he had taken our furthest region for his own, changing its name and subjugating its people.

‘What about Yurtt?’ I asked, feeling a coldness come upon me.

‘You have heard the whispers that the Sparrow hails from that forgotten region?’

‘Not forgotten.’

‘You have never negotiated for it to be returned to Kayan rule,’ Lutius pointed out, his pale, milky eyes probing me in a way that I hated.

‘I have had nothing to offer in return, and I cannot risk starting another war over one region.’ Guilt made me sick, but I swallowed it. Falco, of course, stayed silent throughout this. I had no idea what he thought of the region so often called the forgotten. It was more than likely he didn’t care.

‘If Yurtt follows the Sparrow, he will have control of three full regions, which is as many as you control, Majesty,’ Brathe pointed out. ‘And if we must fight,’ Brathe hedged softly and I braced myself at the tone of his voice, ‘then we must do so without the curse of the bond limiting our numbers to half what they should be.’

His idea was simple. Because so many of our soldiers were bonded, when one was killed, two died. Therefore we’d spent hundreds of years losing battles because of the bond. But now we had a way to end this curse – if there was anyone in this country strong enough and brave enough to set out and find it. Gone would be needless death. And gone would be my need for secrecy. Gone would be the days of keeping Radha locked out of sight, of Falco and I having to cover our eyes wherever we went.

‘You have the full scroll?’ I asked Lutius.

He nodded and produced an ancient looking piece of parchment, upon which were the writings of Agathon, first warder of Kaya. Magic had kept the document from perishing, but there was no way to know how old it truly was, or how the world had looked on the day it was scribed.

I tried to imagine a place without the bond, and was reminded, all too abruptly, of our violent neighbours to the north and what had happened to them over the centuries when they’d had nothing to remind them of the power of love.

I shivered a little, though the afternoon was warm.

‘The winners of the tournament will each receive a copy of it, to be kept solely in their possession, with a tracker and a ward for secrecy,’ Brathe said. I nodded, reading the words again. They were burnt into my soul already, and I knew that in this matter, Falco was just as excited as I was. He probably grew tired of bedding women who couldn’t look at him and marvel over his beauty. Whatever the reason, we were in agreement: this tournament was the most important thing that would happen in Kaya for thousands of years, because the winners were our only hope at a new life.

The people of Kaya die in pairs. With the forging of the soul magic, so is forged an unbreakable bond between those in love. When one dies, so shall the other, and forever will it remain so … Unless in the turning of the world the day comes when one is born with both the frozen blood of the north in his veins, and the hot winds of the south blazing through his soul. Then shall he, and only he, have the power to break the unbreakable bond.

Thorne

Da pulls his face from the hollow curve of the girl’s neck, licking the warm blood from his lips. In it he can taste her innocence. It is yellow like her eyes. She makes a sound, a lazy murmur of confusion, then her gaze alights on him as he crouches over her, covered in her blood. The sound turns to one of terror and she tries to escape, but she is too weak and he is giant in his power. He ducks his head for another taste –

It was scent that crashed through the nightmare of my father and brought me stumbling into wakefulness. The scent of furious boredom, of excitement and grief all at once.

Ma told me once that Da had had an unrivalled sense of smell – that he could scent the subtle details of a person’s emotions. I hadn’t ever told her that I could do the same because if I said it out loud somehow the connection between he and I became too strong. Another monstrous piece of him I had inherited.

My big, ugly knuckles clutched at the unfamiliar sheets as I peered around the unfamiliar room. There were none of the usual smells or sights to orient me. Instead there was a room I was unused to, and a blonde girl sitting beside the window.

She was watching me with eyebrows arched in curiosity. As soon as I spotted her, she promptly went back to filing her nails. ‘Nightmare?’

I clenched my fists to stop them from trembling. It was too strange, having the echo of her in my dream and now sitting here in the same fading light as me.

‘I wonder what Pirenti Princes dream of that could scare them so.’

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked softly.

‘I followed you.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘Climbed in through the roof.’

I peered up at the sky-light, then back at her, lost for words. ‘You’ve just been sitting here? How long was I asleep?’

‘Hours and hours and hours. I nearly killed myself from boredom.’

I climbed out of bed, wondering if this was normal behaviour for Kayans. I wasn’t sure what to do, felt uncomfortable at having her alone in my bedroom with me.

She led the way out into the marble kitchen, which also had an opening in the roof for the first stars to fall through. It was a beautiful aspect of Kayan architecture; here they could afford to keep their houses open because of the warm weather. In Pirenti you’d freeze in a house like this.

A few servants scampered away at our approach, except for Winn, who stopped dead at the sight of Finn.

Her eyes alighted on him and narrowed like she’d spotted prey. ‘Hello.’

He couldn’t speak. I felt instant kinship with the boy, since she seemed to have a similar effect on me. I could see immediately that he was a little in love with the idea of her, and too amazed by her closeness to come up with any kind of response.

‘This is Winn,’ I supplied, and he shot me a grateful glance.

‘A pleasure,’ Finn smiled. ‘I’ve seen your face. At the races, maybe?’

He nodded faintly. ‘Forgive me, I know it’s supposed to be private …’

‘Do you know how to keep a secret, Winn?’ she asked softly.

Winn swallowed, audibly.

‘If you know how to keep a secret, you can come as many times as you like.’

He nodded hurriedly. ‘I would never …’

‘Come and say hello to me next time,’ she implored, which might have seemed kind if it didn’t seem so much like a cat playing with a mouse before eating it.

Winn cleared his throat, then set about lighting the lamps in the living room and pouring us both wine. He vanished before I could tell him to stay.

Finn and I looked at each other. She clearly didn’t feel any of the discomfort I did. It occurred to me, rather belatedly, that she was the first girl my own age I’d ever met. And I already knew little pieces of her, enough to know that she was one of those women – the ones who took pleasure in their power over men. A woman too used to her own beauty, too desirous of the forbidden. Too clever for the world.

‘You’re a curious man, Thorne of Araan.’ Finn started wandering the house, running her fingers over the surface of everything. She liked to touch, it seemed, but didn’t reach for the wine offered her. ‘Why is it that a man from Pirenti would care about the Kayan bond?’

I frowned.

She smiled an infinitely sly smile, watching me out of the corner of her eye. ‘You’re not very good at keeping secrets, are you, Thorne?’

I didn’t say anything.

Finn seemed too big and loud and vibrant to fit inside this house. I could sense her wanting to be outside, under the vastness of the sky where she had room to move.

‘My lady. Are you not expected home for the night meal? It grows dark …’

‘You speak very prettily for a northern brute.’

I blinked.

Finn smiled again. ‘It does grow dark,’ she agreed. ‘We’d better go.’

‘We?’

‘You’re coming to dinner at my house.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

She gestured for me to follow her out into the night. I couldn’t think of how not to follow, so I followed. Feet clipping against the cobblestones, I took a breath of warm night air, willing my heart to slow. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why this woman wanted me in her home, or why in the world I was going along with it.

People skirted widely around us, not wanting to get too close. We walked towards the towers and the ocean. I recalled Winn telling me last night that the twins came from the cliffs. But that memory made me think of the cave, and the ropes, and the children risking their lives simply to earn that smile of Finn’s. It was glorious, but it was not worth dying for.

‘This must all be very strange for you,’ she commented.

‘You have a beautiful country,’ I murmured. ‘I am fortunate.’

Finn glanced at me, lips twitching. ‘You don’t have to be so polite. There are no royal officials around, waiting to report you.’

‘I was taught that manners show respect.’

‘And who taught you that?’

‘My ma.’

‘The two of you must have a wonderful time, being polite to each other.’

I didn’t bother replying – not if she was going to mock what she didn’t understand. Finn brought me to the edge of the cliff and through a small iron gate. There were steps carved into the side of the cliff. Finn and I descended these a few levels, then turned left to follow a winding path. The view was stunning, even more so than it had been last night, because now the sun was casting a brilliant golden glow over the sea. There were people everywhere – sitting out on their porches, enjoying the sunset, singing and playing music. Children careened along the stone paths and there were crowds of families down on the sand, taking advantage of the perfect summer night. Smells hit me – salt, seaweed, fish and spices, a heady mix that made me hungry and calm at the same time.

I was struck by how beautiful it all was. The sense of community that filled the cliff side was something I’d never come across before. I now understood what Ava had been trying to create in the fortress for the last twenty years – a place where people shared laughter, food and music.

The only problem here seemed to be me. Wherever we walked people stared at me with anything from wariness to open hostility. Finn greeted them all, completely ignoring their expressions. But I couldn’t move past the notion that there was danger in the air, and that I had brought it with me.

Finn stepped up onto the porch of a small house. It had no door – rather, the entire front was open to the spectacular view, and I had the sense that you could walk out and drop right off the edge of the world without meaning to. There was nothing to stop you, nothing to catch you. I wondered how her parents had managed to raise children in such a dangerous spot and a shudder went up my spine as I accidentally moved too close to the edge.

The front half of the house was an open kitchen and living room, and like most houses in Kaya, its roof opened up into the sky. Even though the house was small, it felt spacious.

Finn loped inside to greet her family, who met her with a great eruption of noise and laughter. There were three men – her twin brother, the small red-haired boy I’d seen at the race, whom I did not think related to her by his scent, and an older man who was clearly her da by the look of his face. I stopped and watched, feeling like an unwanted intruder – like their bright, physical warmth should remain untouched by the one who lurked in the darkness.

The boys caught sight of me and stopped dead.

‘What’s the matter, Highness?’ Finn asked innocently. ‘Is our house too small for you to fit within?’

I cleared my throat nervously and gave a quick bow of my head. ‘Greetings.’ I edged forward slowly, not wanting to alarm anyone.

‘Who have you brought, Finn?’ the older man asked, his eyes searching my face warily. He looked tired and haggard, and stood with a clear stoop to his back.

‘My name is Thorne, sir. If it’s not appropriate for me to stay I will leave.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Finn said with a roll of her eyes. ‘They just feel emasculated by you, Thorne.’

Embarrassment sliced through me, but her family ignored the comment, obviously more accustomed to her careless barbs.

Her da’s name was Alexi and he spent the next hour in the kitchen, calling for his children to smell or taste something for him, and demanding they explain the results in terms of colour, which I didn’t understand in the least. I sat quietly at the table and listened, bewildered, to Finn saying things like ‘that one tastes of smoky autumn’ or ‘this one’s too hazel’ or ‘can’t you put more sky in it?’

Her brother was called Jonah, and though I could see uncanny similarities between them – the quickness of amusement and the sharp cleverness – I could also see the stark contrasts. Where she never stopped moving, he was still. Where she was loud and full of laughter, his smiles were soft smirks and he seemed more prone to gravitas. Where she gave voice to everything on the tip of her tongue, he held his, and I found myself liking him more with each moment that passed. If it were not for the cold gazes he sent my way, gazes unmistakably tinged with white, I might almost have been able to pretend I was welcome here.

The little red-haired one was Penn, and I saw from my first glimpse of his eyes all that was missing from his mind.

‘Your hand is huge,’ he said as he shook it, unable to look into my face.

I simply nodded, because it was huge. It made Finn grin, but I kept my eyes on the boy. He was covered in freckles and he had deep chocolate eyes that watched my body with an odd kind of awareness. The top of his head barely reached my ribs.

‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ he asked me next and I felt the blood drain from my face.

Finn smiled; her teeth looked almost sharp in the candlelight.

‘It’s a fair question,’ Jonah agreed, eyes hard. ‘Go on, Majesty – answer him.’

I didn’t look away from Penn, nor did I say anything. I might not have been good at lying, but I was very good at keeping silent, and if these people thought they could earn my secrets with little more than probing gazes and disconcerting confidence they were mistaken.

Penn read my silence, and I knew he knew the answer without me having to say anything anyway. ‘Fish for dinner!’ he announced excitedly, and the moment dissolved.

The wooden dining table was carved through with all kinds of sea creatures. Penn sat beside me and traced the grooves cut into the wood absently, as if he’d done it a thousand times and his fingers had been born to fit within them.

‘Here’s where the sea ends,’ he pointed out. I looked at where the grooves ended with the wood, as if the world had dropped away into nothingness.

‘Here’s where the sea ends,’ he repeated, and I nodded. ‘Here’s where the sea ends.’

Jonah sighed. Finn sat opposite me and watched my face, waiting to see if Penn’s repetition would make me uncomfortable, as I assume it did most.

‘How many times must you say it?’ I asked Penn.

He looked at me, surprised. So did the others, for that matter.

‘Seven.’

‘Four more then.’

Penn finished and fell silent.

‘How many pictures are there on this table?’ I asked him.

The boy’s eyes lit up. ‘Thirty-four,’ he answered proudly. He started counting them for me, pointing out each one with relish. I listened carefully and didn’t interrupt him.

When Penn was done, I asked, ‘Do you live in the cliff?’

He nodded, less excited.

‘How many steps away?’

And just like that, he was bouncing in his chair with uncontained delight. ‘Four hundred and twenty-two. That’s if I follow the path, but when I go over the roofs it’s only two hundred and twelve.’

‘Do you count birds as well?’

Penn shook his head, looking thoughtful at the idea. ‘Crabs,’ he explained with a grin. ‘But birds is a good one. There are plenty around here.’

‘Finn and I saw a pelican on the way. I reckon you could have fun counting those. How many types of crabs are there?’

As Penn launched into an explanation about all the different kinds he’d read about and then spotted, I realised Alexi was standing in the kitchen, listening. Finn and Jonah were both watching us. I knew about counting: I fell asleep each night to the soft sound of it coming from the next room.

When the meal was served, Alexi said a prayer. ‘We give thanks to Agathon and we honour all those lost in his name.’

It surprised me – Agathon was the first warder of Kaya, the man who’d forged the bond back when the world was young. It seemed very strange to me that a family would worship him like a God, when he had brought them insurmountable pain. Then again, it wasn’t my place to understand Kayan ways. And I had witnessed first hand how much love existed between bondmates. After all, I was on a mission to preserve what Agathon himself had created.

On my plate was a whole fish, its black eye gazing sightlessly up at me. It had been stuffed with something, and the smell of it was delicious – it had been way too long since I last ate.

‘What’s wrong?’ Finn asked me.

‘Nothing at all. I apologise, I was just … I’ve never eaten fish whole.’

She laughed as though this was hilarious. ‘Pick the flesh off with your fork, like this.’ Reaching across the table, she deftly dissected the fish for me. I caught the scent of her and it made something inside me far hungrier.

I put a piece in my mouth and was instantly stunned by the flavour. It was full and spicy and creamy. Everyone at the table laughed at my expression.

‘It’s amazing,’ I told Alexi, who nodded as though this was obvious.

‘It’s Da’s famous spiced cod,’ Finn explained.

‘Famous spiced cod,’ Penn agreed around a mouthful.

I grew quiet, enjoying my food and listening to their easy chatter. Alexi wore a wedding ring, but no one mentioned a wife. He wasn’t eating his own food, nor did he smile once, and I saw Finn watching her da at regular intervals, her expression unreadable.

Penn was mostly quiet, focused on his food. A few times he said ‘famous spiced cod’ under his breath, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

‘So, Your Majesty,’ Jonah said.

‘Please, call me Thorne.’

I watched his face. I could see in this boy a kind of bristling protectiveness. This was his house, his family, and it was his sister who had brought me here to threaten all of that. I understood. It was natural to protect what was yours.

‘Why are you here, Your Majesty?’ he said pointedly.

I glanced at Finn. There would be no help there; she seemed to enjoy my unease.

‘I’m here for the treaty, Jonah.’

‘So you say. But do you know what they’re whispering about you in the city?’

Not again. I cracked my knuckles under the table.

‘They say you’re a spy, come to take all our secrets home to your berserkers.’

I wished they’d come up with something a bit more imaginative. My eyes grazed each of their faces and it occurred to me suddenly that this had all been planned. I’d been brought here into the lion’s den to be interrogated by this strange little family. Irrational anger bloomed in my chest, mostly directed at myself. Of course the girl didn’t have any other motivation to invite me here. She simply wanted to poke at the bear through the bars of his cage.

‘What do you think a berserker would want with a Kayan’s secret?’

No response.

‘I haven’t come to spy, or to hurt any of you.’

‘Then why?’ It was Finn this time, and there was something hard in her voice. ‘Why come here?’

The strangest words bloomed in my mind and mouth just then, but I bit them back, utterly bewildered by them.

Instead I said nothing. I would not repeat myself. If anyone in Pirenti treated a man this way they would probably wind up dead or brutalised. Obviously, Kayans didn’t understand when they were offending a person’s honour.

‘He can’t bring himself to lie,’ Jonah declared.

‘I must excuse myself,’ I said, rising. ‘I thank you for the meal.’

They watched me walk to the door in silence, and then she called, ‘Wait.’

I wanted to leave without doing as she’d asked. I wanted never to see her again. But I turned and met her eyes across the room, bound by some strange power she’d cast over me.

‘Forgive us. We don’t mean to frighten you away.’

A part of me hated her, which was strange because I had never hated anyone in my entire life. Well, except for my da. But this girl seemed to effortlessly bring out all the worst parts of me.

‘We’ll see you at daybreak.’

I frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Because you’ll be travelling with us to Sancia.’

My mouth opened but nothing came out.

Finn of Limontae stood and moved a few paces closer to me. In the candlelight she looked dangerous, her eyes glistening with something reckless.

‘It’s why you’re really here, Thorne of Araan. To break the curse of the bond. I want the same end. We might as well travel together.’

And I realised that what I’d thought in the cave was right – she simply wanted danger in her life, wanted adventure and strife and excitement. Which was why the words I had nearly replied were so ludicrous.

She’d asked me why I’d come here, and I’d very nearly replied, for you.

Finn

When I was five and my eyes changed for the first time to black, I asked Ma what it meant.

‘It means you have a soul, my love,’ she had answered.

I hadn’t understood at the time, only when I got older. She’d always tried to teach me that it was as important for our eyes to turn black as it was for them to turn yellow and blue and red and green.

But she hadn’t understood what that meant, not truly. She didn’t understand that the colour of loss, the colour of death, was unbearable, because she’d never had any cause to understand. When she was gone, I made up my own mind about a soul. About what it needed. I wanted no shame in my eyes. No fear or pain or hatred. And I certainly didn’t want loss.

But that didn’t stop my eyes from turning black more than any set I knew, for what Ma had neglected to tell me was that black was also the colour of wanting. And when a soul was too big for its body, that soul sustained itself by yearning for things.

And so it became almost impossible for me to look at myself in the mirror.

After dinner Da retired to bed, exhaustion ravaging his body. Jonah hadn’t spoken since Thorne left, and for once I couldn’t interpret his silence. It was an odd awareness – that he was thinking things I couldn’t read.

Penn was still obsessively running his fingers over the carvings at the edge of the table. They showed the ocean dropping away at the end of the world, and I’d imagined falling off that drop so many times that I’d almost convinced myself it was how I was going to die one day.

I walked into Da’s room, sinking onto his bed. Placing a cool cloth on his forehead, I watched him toss and turn in the grips of fever. It was like this every night and some days.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry this has taken so long. But I will end this, I promise.’

Needing air, I walked onto our balcony and made my way slowly down the steps. Another beautiful night, but something was tapping at the edges of my calm, whispering to me with a kind of sick urgency.

I hadn’t truly believed that the rumour could be true. That there could be a way to break the unbreakable bond. But why else would Emperor Falco call us to his city? Why would he make such a spectacle of it if the whispers weren’t true?

I reached the sand and let my bare feet sink into the coarseness of it. It was late and everyone had gone to bed. The beach was empty; the night was full. Moving to the water, I let the waves lap at my ankles and looked up to realise I was wrong. There was another figure on the beach, some few hundred yards down. And with a strange ache in my chest, I knew who it must be.

I walked towards him and saw him turn in the moonlight. Catch sight of me. Stiffen in surprise. Neither of us spoke as I arrived to stand beside Thorne. We dipped our toes in the cold surf, not looking at each other.

There was, inexplicably, something alive in the space between our bodies.

I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut very tight as if to block out his overwhelming, silent presence. The waves were loud in my ears, too loud.

‘It’s gone,’ Thorne murmured.

I looked up into his face.

‘I never thought it would be.’ His lips quirked. ‘Your smile.’

I looked away. ‘It rests sometimes.’

‘I don’t like it when it’s gone.’

‘I thought you were angry with me.’

‘For seeing the truth of me?’ He shook his head. ‘No. I could never be angry with you for that.’

‘Then you’ll come with us tomorrow?’

He was silent a long moment. ‘What benefit would travelling together bring us?’

‘You’d gain a guide. I know Kaya. I can get you there more quickly. And travelling with a group of Kayans is far less likely to earn you a knife in the back than travelling on your own.’

He considered this. ‘And you? What do you gain from my presence, Finn of Limontae? Would it not endanger you and your brothers?’

‘We’re tougher than we look.’ I folded my arms, watching the ocean. ‘I already told you, Prince Thorne. I find you curious.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘I’d love to see the feathers you ruffle along the way.’

‘Entertainment,’ he said flatly. ‘That’s what you want.’

‘Don’t we all?’

He shook his head but stayed silent.

‘Don’t you want to have an adventure?’ I pressed.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Why? Doesn’t standing still bore you?’

He glanced at me. ‘We aren’t all afraid of the quiet.’

My heart lurched. For a second, I hated him. ‘Then what are you afraid of, Mighty Prince of Pirenti?’

‘Heights,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘Deathly so.’

I blinked in surprise. ‘Truly?’

Thorne nodded and I laughed, relieved for it.

‘Penn is not your brother, is he?’

‘Not by blood.’

‘How have you come to be so close to him?’

I shrugged. For some reason I didn’t like talking about Penn to other people – they were inevitably curious about him, but I always thought of him as private and ours. Which was stupid, I supposed. ‘He has no parents. Was being raised by his grandma, but she’s … difficult. Her mind went a long time ago, and as you can imagine that’s not a great environment for someone like Penn to grow up in. He was just another child of the cliffs at first. But he was lonely and we fell in love with him, and he just sort of … joined the family. Sometimes he lives with us, sometimes he doesn’t.’

‘Will he go with you to Sancia?’

‘Of course.’

‘You don’t think it … dangerous?’

I glanced at Thorne. ‘I’ll give you a piece of advice, Prince. Don’t underestimate Penn.’

He nodded, but I didn’t think he’d really believe me until he saw for himself what our little friend was capable of.

‘I want to swim,’ I announced, wading forward. I wanted to be away from him, from those eyes of his.

Thorne’s hand jerked out to grab me. ‘Careful.’ He didn’t touch my skin. I was acutely aware of it. Instead his hand stayed safely in the folds of my shirt.

I turned back to him, surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Because there are people in that house waiting for you to come home.’

‘You think the touch of the ocean would keep me from them? I grew up here, Thorne. I live in this water.’

‘So you don’t need to be careful?’ he asked quietly. ‘Ever?’

‘Why?’ I pressed again.

He didn’t respond this time.

‘You’re so careful you’ll grow old and brittle,’ I warned.

‘Maybe so,’ he answered, sounding old and brittle, and I felt instantly bad. I wanted to know what his life was like, what he’d seen, what he’d lived through. He was too old for his body.

He said, ‘But you are careless with life.’

I swallowed, panicked. My eyes had gone green, edged with silver. His stayed the same. As they always would.

I knew what colour all the pieces of us were meant to be, but I’d never known what colour the bits in between were. I’d never known how red they’d be. Never known what the touch of the air between two bodies felt like, never guessed it would be sharp and soft and brutal, or pale, pale blue.

We stared at each other, and the moment stopped. Like the greatest fool in the world, my eyes slid to match his hue.

And that was that. There would be no more quiet moments with this man. No more words spoken softly at night over the crashing of waves. There would be no more looks like these, no more eyes changing to blue or black. I would make certain of it.

I took off my clothes, all of them, ignoring his intake of breath, and then I plunged into the sea. And I did it just to annoy him.

When I surfaced he’d disappeared, the darkness swallowing him up, and I was alone again under a sparkling black sky.

Thorne

I’d never considered colour before, never understood that it could say so much, explain so much. But here with the Kayans, who understood colour to mean emotion, I was painfully aware of how inadequate my own imaginings of feeling had been.

She was as wild as my first impression of her had been; her eyes shifted like leaves in a storm.

But there were stronger things in the world than any colour an eye could shift to. Things like my beast.

He could never be allowed to have her. So I’d walk away as many times as I had to.

Chapter 5

Finn

‘You are not bringing three packs.’

I looked at my brother, then back at the three packs I’d stuffed full to the brim. ‘Why not?’

‘Explain to me how you’re going to carry them.’

‘Well …’ I smiled sweetly at him.

‘No way. I’m not helping you indulge your clothing fetish. You couldn’t possibly need this much stuff.’

‘We’re going to Sancia! It’s the fashion capital! How am I supposed to know what to wear before we get there? And who knows how long we’ll be away.’

He shook his head with disbelief. ‘You’re bringing one pack, light enough to travel with.’

‘But –’

‘One.’

‘You, dreaded brother, are the bane of my life,’ I grumbled, moodily unpacking. In response he kissed me noisily on the cheek and I shoved him away.

When we were ready (carrying one measly pack each) we stopped outside Da’s bedroom. He was tired today, too tired to get up. Jonah sat on the bed and spoke to him, but I waited by the door, something hardening inside my chest with suffocating severity.

They both looked over at me, but I couldn’t go in. I couldn’t.

I looked at Da across the room. ‘My girl,’ he said to me, then he touched his fingers to his lips and sent me the kiss. I did the same, touching my lips. My teeth were clenched so hard I thought they might shatter. Then I walked out of the house I’d lived my entire life in, and some part of me didn’t know if I’d ever make it back here.

Thorne was waiting for us on the road. The sun was high and he had his face turned up to enjoy the warmth of it. I caught sight of him and felt a quick heat curl in my stomach. Travelling with the hated Prince of Pirenti … this trip was going to be fun. I’d see to it.

Penn bounded ahead and jumped on Thorne’s back as though they were long lost brothers.

‘Traitor,’ Jonah muttered.

The prince turned and saw us, lifting his hand. ‘It was generous of you to offer to travel with me,’ he greeted us. ‘I’d be grateful to take you up on the offer, if it still stands.’

His eyes found mine.

‘Only if you carry my pack for me.’

‘Of course,’ he offered quickly.

I laughed. ‘Gods, I’m kidding. This is going to be fun.’

Thorne blushed.

‘You’d better be able to keep up,’ was all Jonah said to him. Between my manipulation and his rudeness, what a great impression we must be making for our country. I had no idea why the poor guy even wanted to travel with us.

The four of us set off down the road, packs slung over our backs. I whistled in the morning sun, feeling lighter with each step.

We came to the edge of the farm that belonged to Linas of Rora and I took a good look around before hoisting myself over the fence.

‘What are you doing?’ Thorne asked me, alarmed.

‘Best apples in the whole region.’

Jonah and Penn climbed over and the three of us ducked low in the long grass.

‘You’re thieves now too?’ the prince asked, and despite his polite tone, I could hear the disapproval hidden beneath the words.

I winked at him then crept forward, on the lookout for Linas’ dogs. I’d spent most of my life stealing these apples, and it had only taken a few bites from the sharp canine teeth to instill me with a bit of caution. As we reached the tree I swung up into the branches, while Jonah and Penn kept a lookout below. I lobbed a few down to my brother, then climbed higher, wanting the juiciest fruit from the top.

Poking my head over the highest branches, I had a good view of the road below. Thorne was a still figure upon it, arms folded, back turned to our criminal activity. I couldn’t help smiling with amusement at the giant pole he seemed to have stuck up his backside.

Picking as many of the best apples as I could, I stuffed them into my pockets and started swinging down. I was nearly at the ground when I heard the barking.

A thrill struck through me and I jumped recklessly to the ground, tumbling hard and scraping my whole right side.

‘Penn, grab the dogs,’ Jonah told him and then we sprinted for the fence. Penn gave a low whistle and the dogs ran straight for him. I glanced over my shoulder to see them stop at his feet and give a soft whine as he made them submit with a few motions of his hand.

Grinning, I lunged for the fence and hurdled over it, landing with a kick of the dusty road.

‘Where’s Penn?’ Thorne demanded worriedly.

‘We left him to be eaten,’ I replied, opening my pack to grab a juicy red apple. Looking straight at Thorne, I took a huge bite and gave a groan of delight. Jonah laughed and munched on his ill-gotten fruit too.

Thorne went to the fence to look for Penn, but the boy was already climbing back over. The dogs had followed him, tails wagging for love of him.

I threw Penn an apple as we set off.

‘Will I offend your delicate sensibilities if I offer you one?’ I asked Thorne. He shook his head, and I figured by the look on his face that it meant no to the apple, not the question.

‘She’s the meanest old bag in the realm,’ Jonah defended us.

‘So she deserves to be stolen from?’

I rolled my eyes, walking ahead so I didn’t have to endure Thorne’s extremely boring self-righteousness.

‘You’re good with dogs,’ I heard him say to Penn.

‘They’re good with me,’ came the boy’s response.

Jonah caught up to me. ‘Why did you invite the stiff?’

I shrugged, not really sure now. ‘Thought it might be fun.’

‘It’s like having Da along,’ he muttered and I cracked a smile. ‘There’s something … off about him. Do you feel it?’

I glanced over my shoulder at Thorne. He was listening intently as Penn recounted one of his favourite stories about his grandma’s dog. I knew exactly what Jonah was talking about – there was something distinctly unsettling about the northern prince. Something that chafed on a deep, instinctive level. Like a scent, but more intimate.

I nodded once and admitted, ‘I think it’s why I invited him.’

We stopped for lunch on a hill covered in wildflowers. Penn started picking and threading them together into a garland, too distracted to eat. Thorne was inhaling an impossible amount of food, and I couldn’t help but share an amazed look with Jonah. I wolfed down some bread and cheese myself, then hopped to my feet and moved to the very top of the hill. From here I could see the ocean, as the road we were following hugged the coast closely.

Thorne appeared at my side. ‘Are you in pain?’

I frowned, not understanding. He gestured to my arm, and I realised it was scraped raw and covered in dirt from when I’d jumped out of the tree. Beads of blood had slid down towards my wrist.

‘You didn’t notice that?’

‘It’s barely a scratch,’ I scoffed. Something about my warder blood had always made me more able to deal with pain than most. I had so much adrenalin running through me that I often didn’t notice wounds until they got bad.

‘It needs to be cleaned and wrapped.’

I shrugged. ‘Later.’

Thorne walked to his pack and removed his canteen, plus a bandage. I watched, surprised, as he wet the material and used it to wipe my arm clean. It stung slightly. ‘What are you doing?’

‘You may be intent on an early grave, but I’d rather not watch you get there.’

I smiled slowly. ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t add to the number of people who die each year of a scratch on the arm.’

I watched his face closely and saw it: the edges of his lips twitching.

Thorne handed me the bandage and told me to wrap my arm; he hadn’t touched my skin even once in the process of cleaning it, and the realisation peaked my curiosity. In the cave, it might have been purely circumstantial that he hadn’t shaken my hand. I had offended him with the trick, after all. But to be so careful now felt deliberate and I was immediately suspicious. Though I normally tried to avoid touching people, I determined to feel Thorne’s skin before the day was out.

As I bandaged my arm he went to pack up our lunch remains. Penn had finished his garland and presented it to me with a flourishing theatrical bow.

‘For you, my lady.’

‘Thank you, kind sir.’

I settled the flowers atop my head, feeling Thorne’s gaze upon me.

‘Don’t your friends give you gifts, Thorne?’ I asked him pointedly, daring him to explain why he seemed to be staring at me with such disapproval.

His eyes dropped a moment, then met mine bravely. ‘I don’t have any friends, Finn.’

Which pretty much made me feel like the worst person in the world. ‘Oh,’ I blurted eloquently.

Penn presented him with a second garland. ‘Of course you do.’

Thorne stared at the boy, and then he reached out to take the flowers and put them on his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and it was such a sweet moment that I knew I shouldn’t wreck it, but I honestly couldn’t help it. A laugh bubbled out of me and then I couldn’t contain it – I was giggling hysterically at the sight of the big brute wearing flowers on his head. Jonah started laughing too, and then, thankfully, so did Thorne. Pretty soon we were all cracking up. And I knew why he’d wanted to travel with us, even though we hadn’t been in any way welcoming: he had no one else.

By sundown we’d reached a small town with a seaside tavern in which to stay the night. As we pushed our way into the crowded dining hall, I grinned to see that it had been decorated with fishing nets and sand all over the floor. Shells adorned the walls, and beautifully carved pelicans sat on the bar.

Every patron stared at Thorne, and I saw with chilling clarity several gazes turn white. It became obvious how much danger we were all in, and I grinned. Jonah requested two rooms and I ordered us some ale. I’d be damned before I cowed in fear from these bigoted idiots. Shoving my way back through, I saw that the boys had found us a booth, and I slid in beside my brother.

‘Cheers!’ I announced, clanging my pitcher against Thorne’s and spilling half his drink on the table.

He was watching the people around us with a calculating gaze. Penn was fidgeting nervously, sensing the animosity in the atmosphere. Jonah simply gazed into his ale moodily.

‘Gods almighty,’ I sighed. ‘You lot are boring.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid, Finn,’ Jonah warned.

‘Me?’ I asked innocently. ‘Have I ever done anything stupid in my entire life?’

Despite his mood, it made Jonah laugh.

Thorne wiped the spilled ale with his sleeve and I saw my chance, reaching out to do the same and pretending to bump against him. He was too swift though, removing his arm before I could get skin to skin. He gave me a funny look and I arched my eyebrows innocently.

Three men arrived at our table, fishermen from the village. Wind-bitten cheeks and blond beards. Hard, white eyes.

‘Your kind aren’t welcome here,’ the one in the middle said to Thorne. That hadn’t taken long.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘legally they’re welcome anywhere.’

The fisherman scowled at me. ‘The great northern brute needs a little girl to speak for him?’

‘Careful,’ Jonah said. ‘You’ll sound like the northern brutes yourself with a sexist comment like that.’

‘Stand up and face us,’ a second man said.

Thorne rose slowly to his feet. I could see the reluctance in every one of his muscles. And a terrible kind of resignation. They weren’t expecting his size, regardless of what they knew about men from Pirenti. He towered over them, and I saw their expressions turn to fear. Which meant there would be violence here. I could feel it.

My hands came up without me noticing. Jonah grabbed them, squeezing them tightly to stop me from doing anything illegal.

‘We’re not afraid to face your kind,’ the fisherman said and to his credit, he didn’t sound frightened.

Thorne leant forward, a strange light in his eyes, and he breathed in deeply through his nose. Very softly, so softly I almost missed it, he murmured, ‘Your scent says otherwise.’

It struck cold inside me. And I think it did the same for every person who heard it. But the difference between them and I was that I also felt a deep, gut-wrenching thrill.

Several things happened at once.

The fisherman’s hand went to his cutlass –

Jonah rose to his feet –

Thorne reached out –

I lurched forward –

And then everyone froze.

Somehow, there was a glinting knife at the neck of the fisherman. I blinked, peering around to see what looked like the glimpse of a ghost in the tavern. She was snow white and blood red. She looked like a demon and had appeared out of nowhere. And she held two long, sinister knives to the man, one at his carotid, the other at his kidneys.

‘Move and you’ll spill all over the floor,’ she told him gently. And Gods there was something terrifying about the sound of her voice. Something in the desire of it. I couldn’t tell if she was a child or a woman, so small and slender was she. Hair and skin so white it was purest snow; eyes of the bloodiest red I’d ever seen.

‘What the fuck?’ the fisherman grunted, then hissed at his friends, ‘Do something.’

We now had the whole damned tavern watching us in alarmed silence. I imagined this must be what it was like for Thorne all the time in his own country – fighting in tavern brawls and the like – but here it was unusual for a Kayan to draw a blade against anyone. Or it had been, before the Sparrow had gained power over the south.

The fisherman’s two friends pulled their cutlasses free and my mind raced, trying to work out what to do, but – once again – I was saved any effort.

The girl moved, so fast I barely caught it. Her right knife swept out to take the man at her side through the fingers; his blade fell to the ground along with three of his digits. At the same time, her left knife nicked straight through the other man’s ear, taking a chunk of it, and then both knives were back in their original spot without the slightest hint that she’d moved at all.

Screams rent the air; both men dropped to the ground to clutch at their wounds as they sprayed blood all over the sandy floorboards.

Jonah groaned in horror at the sight of the fingers on the floor. Penn started to sing, a warbling melody of sound. But it was at Thorne that I looked, because at the sight of the blood, his eyes had turned as red as the girl’s. Which was not possible.

My heart ratcheted out of control, pounding with painful speed. Pirenti eyes didn’t change colour. They couldn’t. Not unless …

The sound was seeping out of the world. All I could see and hear was the prince as he faded from his own face and started breathing with a kind of animal hunger. A low growl erupted in the back of his throat; a sense of otherness in the way he moved towards the writhing men.

The back of my neck prickled; Thorne was a berserker. And he was going to destroy the lot of us.

‘It’s the blood fever,’ I heard the ice girl breathe. ‘I can stop him.’

I glanced at her; it was obvious how she meant to stop him, standing there with her knives already dripping blood.

A mighty fist hammered into the fisherman, knocking him flying. Thorne then lifted the man who’d had half his ear cut off. With one hand around his neck, the man looked like a rag doll in the giant’s grip.

‘Your Majesty!’ Jonah shouted, but I doubted Thorne could hear.

He shook his toy, then flung him away. I watched as the huge man barrelled into several other patrons; the tavern was in a flurry of terror now. They were all scrambling to get out, but it was so crowded that people were getting trampled.

Thorne moved towards them.

And then he stopped. I watched, knowing. I watched him lift his face and take a deep breath, scenting the air.

I watched him turn and fix his red eyes on me.

He could smell the magic my skin was drenched in. He was berserker: of course he could smell it. Thorne moved towards me; a sick, broken part of me was excited. My trembling hands reached for his chest; it was burning hot and like a brand against my skin.

‘Finn!’ I heard Jonah yell.

I looked only at Thorne, up into his bloody eyes. He returned the gaze, but he didn’t recognise me.

‘Thorne,’ I said softly, almost a whisper. ‘Come back.’

He blinked and I got exactly what I’d wanted – his bare hand reaching out to take my neck. It felt, at first, like a lover’s caress. Then it tightened.

And within that skin to skin, I felt it. The weight of his heart. As was my gift, my curse. One I could not control, no matter how many warders forbade me from using it. Thorne bore the heaviest heart I’d ever encountered, a soul too much a burden for any man or woman to carry. There was an entire world crashing down on him, bending him, bending him so badly I didn’t know how he had not yet snapped. I felt a howling echo in my ears; against my face there was snow falling and my breath was so cold I could see it. I was dizzy with the understanding of him, with the intimacy.

And I didn’t care, in that moment, if he squeezed the life out of me. I could feel chaos and destruction fry the air, and behind my eyes there were whispered screams; I wanted them gone from my head.

My air was cut off. But I held his eyes, and I didn’t blink.

That was when we heard it, both of us at the same time.

A soft, high voice, counting quickly. It was Penn, panicked and desperate. He counted to block out the fear. Counted every time he felt uncomfortable or nervous. And as he counted now, the sound of those numbers reached something inside Thorne and he blinked. Stopped squeezing my neck.

The counting continued and I saw him come back.

Red seeped away and became glorious blue; the violence in his hand grew tender.

‘I’m here,’ he whispered, voice scraping. ‘I’m here.’

Thorne

Shattered bones and torn muscles. Thoughts too fleeting to hold onto. A whirlwind of movement around me, of screams and shouts and the overwhelming scent of blood, but within it all, one thing that was still.

Her. Bright yellow eyes. Red welts around a long, slim neck. She led me through the chaos and up into a darkened room. I felt myself sink onto a bed and seep away.

Finn

I watched Thorne nose-dive onto the bed and pass out completely. My heart was hammering in my chest from the skin to skin. I couldn’t believe what I’d felt in his heart – it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The kind of creature that was as far from human as I could imagine. Who was this man? Obviously the unease Jonah and I had both been feeling since meeting Thorne was because of his berserker blood, which we could have had no way to recognise, never having come into contact with one before.

Age-old enemies, warders and berserkers. It struck me as I watched him sleep that I‘d acquired more excitement than I’d bargained for when bringing the northern giant along. A slow smile curled my lips. Carefully I reached my bare hand out, daring myself to touch his arm. With astonishment, I saw that my fingers trembled ever so slightly as they drew closer –

‘Finn,’ Jonah snapped, and I jerked away.

We had rented two rooms and my brother hauled me into the second, where waited Penn, looking agitated.

‘Jone, I need to –’

‘Hush, Inney.’ He paced and we watched him like school children. ‘This will keep happening,’ he declared, as if it was a decision. ‘We should leave him to find his own path to Sancia.’

My mouth fell open. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Do I sound like I’m joking?’

‘You want us to leave a prince alone in a tavern after he’s been attacked?’

‘I don’t think he needs help protecting himself!’ Jonah snapped. ‘Am I the only one who witnessed that?’

‘I will stay with him,’ a soft voice said from the door. We all turned to see the snow creature with her red, red eyes. Her skin was such a pale shade that it was almost translucent – I could see the faint lines of blue veins from here, like feather-thin cracks in marble. The white hair hung cut straight over her eyes – eyes dusted with lashes of whitest white.

I sensed something in my brother and glanced at him to see that he wore an expression unlike any I’d witnessed on him before. I braced myself, terror striking. This was it then. He was going to bond, and leave me.

We were all expecting it, the three of us. But when she met his eyes for the first time, hers stayed bloody and his were the deep blue of an ocean floor.

A breath left me, one of extreme relief. I wasn’t ready to let Jonah go, nowhere near ready. He was mine.

‘Who are you?’ I asked her.

‘My name is Isadora.’

I crossed to shake her small, delicate hand and within that touch I felt an endless, glass-like sphere of water, so calm it belied reason. I stared at her, lost within the sensation of it, utterly enthralled by her. No one was naturally this calm.

She withdrew her hand and I regretted the absence of it immediately. Swallowing, I muttered, ‘Thank you for what you did.’

Isadora tilted her head, eyes searching me and deciding on something, though I knew not what. She turned without a word.

‘Wait. I have no idea who you are.’

‘I’m the reason you’re still alive.’

‘Penn is the reason I’m still alive.’

The girl gave me another one of those searching looks. She reminded me of a doll, her features so pretty and small it seemed as though she’d crack at the first touch. ‘I want only his safety,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘His safety means the safety of two nations.’

‘Do you work for the Emperor?’

‘I work for myself, and for Kaya.’ She disappeared without a sound.

I turned to Jonah and Penn. ‘Guess we’ll deal with the creepy death angel at another juncture. For now, we go nowhere without Thorne.’

My brother met my eyes and his turned yellow for love of me. ‘You’d let him be the death of us. Why?’

I drew a breath. I believed, and always had done, that there was a reason for everything. My fascination for dangerous things had led me to Thorne, and now he was going to lead us to the one thing I wanted most. ‘He’s the one who’s going to help us save Da. I know it.’

Thorne

I dreamt of walking along the beach with Finn, our hands entwined, and then of a man who looked like me turning to her and devouring her with violent, bloody hands and teeth. I woke with the image of her mangled body on the sand, and my father’s footprints leading away from it.

It was still dark and I was in another unfamiliar room. For the second time I found myself alone in a bedchamber with a woman I didn’t know. Not the same woman, not the wild one. It was the white and red one. The knife-wielder. She was perched on a stool, staring blankly at the door.

Feeling my regard, she turned her eyes to me.

‘Who are you?’

‘Isadora.’

‘What are you doing in my room?’

‘Watching.’

I rubbed my eyes, struggling to sit up. My body ached something fierce. ‘For what?’

‘Those who seek to kill you in your sleep.’

It came back to me in a rush – the tavern and the fishermen. Finn’s yellow eyes as I squeezed her neck, and a sweet counting voice reminding me of the boy I tried so hard to be.

‘Why did you help me?’ I asked, but Isadora said nothing. I took a breath to smell her and caught no hint of animosity. Nor did I smell fear, but there was definitely a certain wariness that intensified as I sat up. Which meant I did not trust her, but for now I did not fear any malicious intent from her. ‘Where are the others?’

She gestured to the room next door.

‘They need a guard more than I.’

Nodding, Isadora cast me a look I couldn’t read. ‘You are a long way from home.’

‘I suppose I am. Though we often forget that Araan hugs this very same ocean.’

‘I speak of your true home.’ Then she added, ‘King of the Ice.’

I frowned, but couldn’t think of how to reply. Felt suddenly disoriented. Isadora rose silently; everything about her was like a wisp of smoke. The softness of her voice, the fluid grace of her movements, the way she was there and then gone.

I sat for a moment, then rose to pour myself a cup of wine to calm my nerves. Something was scratching at me, at all of my edges … I felt swelteringly hot and pulled my shirt off urgently, trying to get air onto my burning skin.

There was a soft knock on the door and I padded over to it. In the darkness of the hallway she looked small and young. But as she stepped past me and into the flickering candlelight, as soon as I saw the expression in her eyes, I knew: Finn of Limontae knew exactly what I was, and that made her very dangerous.

‘I didn’t tell them,’ she murmured. ‘But I could.’ There was something hard under her voice. An edge of granite.

Warders and berserkers. Born to kill each other.

I walked closer and took a deep breath, tasting her smells and allowing them to sink inside me. No intent to harm on her skin, but then again, what powers had a warder in cloaking her scents? How could I possibly trust what I smelt upon her?

‘How did you know?’

She tilted her head, a slight smile playing at the edge of her lips. ‘Magic.’

‘How –’

‘Does it happen a lot?’

‘What?’

‘The blood fever.’

I licked my dry lips. ‘Who died in the Siren Nights?’

She blinked. ‘What’s that got to do with –’

‘Please, just tell me.’

‘Why would I do that?’ Finn ran her fingers idly over the windowsill. ‘Why don’t you tell me how many people the beast within has harmed.’

‘Did you read my mind?’ I pressed. ‘Is that part of your warder magic?’

Finn rolled her eyes, sighing. ‘No, Thorne. I didn’t read your mind. I can, if you’d like, but you’ll turn into a drooling pile of mush on the floor.’

My eyes narrowed. ‘But some warders can?’

‘Certainly.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s commonly known –’

‘How do you know what happens when you try to read a mind?’ My heart was beating a funny rhythm, because I knew. I knew what the answer had to be.

She turned her eyes to me, and they were black, abruptly. It was unnerving seeing such a gloriously bright gaze disappear to be filled with something that looked like it belonged in the darkest shadows of the earth.

‘His name was Sam. The boy who died during the Siren Nights. I know everything about him, every intimate secret he ever possessed, and I know because I tried to read his mind while he was swinging along that rope, and I killed him.’

A great chasm seemed to open up inside me, but there was nothing in Finn. No expression, no regret. Just that gaze of hers, the gaze that waited for my reaction, and craved it.

‘Will you laugh at the idea of such entertainment?’ I asked softly, unaccountably hurt by her, and angry with myself for being baited by a creature as broken as this one. ‘You do love to laugh.’

‘I do,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps if you laughed more you’d be less likely to cause a mass slaughter every time you lost your temper.’

I felt heat rush to my cheeks. We looked at each other in the candlelight. She was clever, but seemed so sheltered from the reality of the world. Did she really value human life so little that she would encourage its risk for fun? I wondered if she’d seen real death, real violence, if she’d ever truly lost anything – and if she hadn’t yet, I wondered if it would make a difference to her careless nature.

Finn’s eyes dropped to my chest and I became suddenly aware that I stood in only my breeches. ‘I’ve never seen one,’ she murmured, moving closer to peer at my skin. Her voice and scent had changed, dropped to something sweet, and I reeled at the disorienting shift in her mood.

‘One what?’

‘A tattoo.’

She moved right up close and I had to turn my face away from the sight of her. It caused something to hammer against my ribcage. Abruptly, desire clawed at me, and I was shocked by it, by its existence and voracity.

Her finger lifted to trace the shape, and I knew in the moment before our skin touched that I would let her this time, that some sick part of me didn’t care if it woke the beast within and he destroyed us both. But a hair’s breadth before she connected, Finn changed her mind and dropped the hand. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘It’s supposed to be intimidating.’

She gave a breath of laughter. ‘It’s that too.’ Next she appraised the design on the back of my shoulder, moving around behind me so that I could feel the heat of her against my spine. My tally was there – the eighteen marks along my vertebrae – but she didn’t ask what they were a count of, and I was relieved.

She moved to my front again, bending close to my ribs to look at the bird poised in flight, and the wolf with his head tilted back in a howl that sat over my heart. Oyster shells covered my left arm, and these she traced with fingers that did not quite touch, as careful as if she expected to feel the bite of their teeth. The last tattoo was on the inside of my wrist, a slender rose bud with a stem of prickly thorns.

‘Are they stories, these tattoos?’

‘Pieces of stories, maybe.’

‘And who knows these stories? Who have you given them to, Prince Thorne?’

I swallowed, confused. ‘No one. I … Who would want them?’

She straightened as a strange expression passed through her eyes. ‘Why didn’t you want me to touch you?’

So she’d noticed. I shook my head slowly, unsure what to say. Shame was hot like an iron poker in my belly. Here was the mortifying truth of the kind of creature I was. To tell her meant giving her ammunition, but maybe it would also warn her. And though in moments I truly, deeply disliked her, I would die before I hurt her.

‘The beast wants to destroy everything,’ I murmured. ‘But I think, most of all, he wants to destroy you.’ My voice was low without me meaning for it to be. ‘I could lose control of him at any moment, and I wasn’t sure, if you touched me, if I could …’

Finn shivered, turning her face towards mine. ‘I’m not scared.’

‘I know you’re not.’ Her scent was nothing like fear.

Then she said, ‘I want to kiss you.’

I blinked, straightening. There was wickedness in her eyes. ‘Because you think me a play-thing. But you don’t understand.’

‘I understand perfectly.’

‘You’re selfish,’ I said bluntly. ‘You would poke the beast because you don’t care about the outcome, you want only chaos, and you don’t have a single thought for what it would do to me to harm you.’

‘You’re scared of him, aren’t you?’

My mouth opened but nothing came out.

‘Thorne,’ she said clearly, ‘I want to kiss you.’

I was angry and freaked out, but the worst thing of all was that I wanted her to kiss me too. ‘And do you always get what you want?’ I managed to breathe.

Finn considered. ‘Yes.’

Without warning a laugh bubbled up inside my chest and escaped me.

It made her lips curl into a grin. ‘There it is,’ she murmured. ‘The first time I’ve heard it. It’s lovely.’ She moved closer. ‘I want to kiss the corner of that laugh,’ she whispered. Leaning closer, I could feel her breath on my lips. ‘Will you let me, Prince Thorne?’

As if, in this moment, there was a way for me to deny her anything.

‘Finn,’ I warned, and then I felt her lips on the very corner of mine. Something erupted inside me. Something so powerful I thought it would break free of my skin and incinerate the earth we stood upon. The cage within shook and I almost lost my hold on it, even so soon after the last loss of control.

But in that instant – in that one, impossibly stretched out moment – she jerked away from me.

Her eyes flickered ebony scarlet azure lime maroon tangerine – and then stopped abruptly on her normal shade of yellow. She was breathing quickly, as completely rattled as I was. She turned her back on me, walking several paces away, and I tried to calm myself, unsure what in Gods’ names was going on.

I watched, feeling utterly dazed, as Finn finally smiled an unbearably cold smile. ‘You’re just a boy,’ she murmured. ‘You’d take it too seriously.’

A deep breath of air left me and I felt the beast quiet down in his cage. It was like being liberated and destroyed at the same time. She felt nothing; she wanted only a thrill, and the idea of danger. She killed people and felt nothing. She had rot in her heart, and cruelty.

‘You’re probably right,’ I said softly. ‘My apologies, lady, for the way I’ve spoken to you tonight. I am not myself.’

Finn’s eyes dropped with disappointment. She left the room, and I knew that even with the rot and the cruelty, my beast wanted her. I didn’t know if he wanted to destroy her, or if he just wanted her, and what’s more, I didn’t know what the difference was.

Finn

Foolish, foolish girl. I had known what it was to touch his skin, and yet I had kissed him anyway.

I wanted nothing and no one except as a distraction. I wanted loud and bright and fast and wild. I didn’t want quiet; I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it. Because in the quiet I heard the screams and I heard her voice whispering to me over and over and I couldn’t make it stop.

And when my lips touched his, even for just a moment, less than a moment, I felt the dark heart of him creep out to take hold of me, and the world went so quiet it was like a tomb.

Chapter 6

Falco

It was hot under the sweltering sun; I could see a single drop of sweat running down the back of Quillane’s neck and I wanted to lick it off.

‘… which part?’ I heard her ask Petir.

‘That section there, Your Majesty,’ he answered her.

I moved forward to drape an arm around Quill’s shoulder and peer down at the area he’d pointed out. Before us was an enormous training course that had been built and erected on the sand of the city stadium. Volunteers would partake in the course, and only the most successful contestants would be selected to set out in search of what we’d now started referring to as ‘the curse-breaker’. Privately, of course. If anyone who was bonded ever heard Quillane or I refer to the bond as a curse we’d be in trouble.

The section Petir was gesturing to was supposedly the most dangerous bit of the course, a climb that if failed, didn’t look very pleasant.

‘Is that safe?’ Quill asked worriedly.

Petir glanced at me and I shrugged. I’d given him the orders. I stood by them. ‘His Majesty wanted it to be challenging …’

Quillane turned her green eyes to me. ‘Then it’ll be your fault if people die? That’s fine by me.’

‘No one’s going to die,’ I smiled. ‘We’ll have warders at each interval in case something goes wrong. If they can’t get through something like this, then they’re not likely to be able to manage much in the real world.’

What went unspoken was the very real possibility that the curse-breaker could be hidden in any number of the uninhabitable areas of our country, and if that were the case, we’d probably never reach it.

‘Says he who would likely fall to his death on that first rope there,’ she murmured.

‘How cruel you are, my love,’ I replied, planting a kiss on her neck. ‘Have the preparations been finished?’

‘Yes, Majesty,’ Petir answered.

‘And have you tried the course?’

‘I have.’

We both looked at him, waiting.

He blushed bright pink. ‘I … did not do well, I am afraid.’

I snorted with laughter. Quillane sighed. ‘What catastrophe have you cooked up for us now, Fal?’

‘It’s hardly my fault! You just love to blame me for everything.’

‘When the shoe fits …’

‘Away with you, Petir,’ I demanded. ‘I want to ravish my Empress.’

Petir vanished with remarkable speed.

‘You may want to, but you’re not going to,’ Quill muttered, shoving me away.

I clicked my tongue. ‘I don’t understand this. When will you let me have you?’

‘You’re not my bondmate.’

‘And we’ll never have one! So why not enjoy ourselves?’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that I’m simply not attracted to you?’

I blinked. ‘No. Never.’

She laughed, turning to descend the steps onto the sand. I followed her and we wandered through the course, peering up at each section. I’d designed it months ago and delivered the sketches anonymously to the architect. I was pleased to see now that he’d followed just about every specification I’d made. It would not be for the faint of heart, this course.

I watched Quill swing up onto a large wooden ladder.

‘Careful,’ I warned. There were no warders here to stop her from falling.

She balanced lithely on the narrow beam at the top, arms flung wide. I moved beneath her, though what I could do if she fell I had no idea.

‘We’re not all as clumsy as you,’ she pointed out.

‘Just be thankful that one of us is an easy target,’ I muttered.

I saw her turn in the moonlight to peer down at me on the sand. ‘What do you mean?’

I shrugged quickly, flashing her a grin. ‘Nothing.’

‘You think you’re a target?’

‘We both are, darling.’

‘But you more so than me? Why?’

I tilted my head, considering how truthful to be. I supposed it couldn’t do her any harm to know what I meant. ‘There is a clear path for anyone to tread should they want to dispose of me.’

‘And what path is that?’

‘Well, consider this. I spend an inordinate amount of time alone in bedrooms with women I’ve never met.’

Quillane’s eyes flashed aubergine with alarm. ‘You think one of the girls you bed is going to assassinate you?’

I laughed. ‘It’s how I’d attack me. Anyone with half a brain should see the opportunity in it. I can hardly imagine the Sparrow failing to spot it. And given I have no chance of defending myself …’

‘Then why do you continue to meet with them?’ she exclaimed.

I winked at her. ‘Because, Quillane, I really, really love women.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘There’s something terrifying about how foolish you are, Falco.’

‘Oh, come now –’

‘If you were killed, how do you think I would manage?’

I closed my mouth, good mood fading. Antagonising her wasn’t all that fun when she actually started to get upset.

‘Do you think I can do this on my own?’ she pressed.

‘I know you can,’ I replied honestly.

‘I shouldn’t have to. You should care about me, Falco, and your people, and your country more than you care about bedding whores.’

I didn’t know what to say. The truth was easy: I cared about nothing more than I cared about my country and my people and my Empress. I’d die for any one of the three, a thousand times over. I hated fucking faceless women every night.

But the truth had no place in the life I’d built for myself.

I wondered, not for the first time, if Quillane would love me were she to meet the man behind the mask.

‘All I have to say to that,’ I said bluntly, ‘is that I’d stop seeing every single one of them if you would come to my bed instead.’

Her gaze shifted russet with disgust and she turned angrily to climb down from the obstacle. In that moment I saw her foot slip.

I was moving before she’d even started to fall, no thought for the consequences. Her long limbs collided with me and I twisted myself beneath her, taking the weight of her fall and sparing her the impact that would have broken several bones, if it had not killed her. I hit the sand awkwardly and felt ribs splinter. Air left my lungs in a great rush and stars shimmered in the inky sky, woozy and dancing across my vision.

‘Falco!’ I heard her cry, scrambling to get off me. Her face swam above me; her eyes looked a brilliant aquamarine.

‘By Gods I love you,’ I heard myself say, and then I quite promptly passed out.

It must have been only moments before I opened my eyes again, as no one had yet arrived to help.

‘Fal?’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Gods. I thought I’d lost you for a moment there.’

‘Please. You are heavier than you look, but you’re still not heavy enough to kill me.’

‘You’re a delicate flower,’ she pointed out. ‘Who knows what could be the end of you.’

‘I’ll try not to take offence to that.’ Slowly I sat up, pain slicing through my chest and side. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. Thankful that you were clumsy enough to get in my way. Can you walk?’

I could have, but instead played it up. ‘The pain is terrible.’

‘Wait here then. I’ll get help.’

I watched her dash across the sand towards where our guards would be waiting at the entrance of the stadium, and then I allowed myself to lie back down and wallow in emasculation.

When the Sparrow is dead, I promised myself. When the Sparrow is dead, you can be everything she needs you to be. You can win her heart.

Quillane

After securing Falco comfortably in his bed with a warder’s magic healing his ribs, I snuck down the lonely stone tunnel to Radha.

She was curled on her bed and she looked very pale.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked quickly, sinking down beside her.

Her inky eyes opened wearily and she nodded.

‘You don’t look well, love.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t get any fresh air.’ Staring at her, I made up my mind. ‘I have an idea. Come with me.’

‘This is a mistake!’ Radha whispered as she snuck along the corridor behind me. Her eyes were covered with my blindfold so that if anyone spotted us, they would think I was taking my pleasure with her, and would not realise that her eyes turned gold for me. I would have to deal with the fact that someone knew I preferred the company of women later – a necessary risk in order to get Radha out of that cursed prison cell.

Grabbing some equipment, we crept out to the east wall gate that opened onto the cliffs. Radha was nimble and sure-footed, not needing any help to climb down to the small jetty at the very bottom of the cliff. It sat in a tiny abandoned inlet, this jetty, but had one single boat tethered in case of an emergency. We climbed into it and cast off, taking an oar each and striking out. I could feel her coming back to life surrounded by the sea. Salt was in our blood.

When we reached a calm stretch of ocean we threw our fishing lines in and sat back to wait for any nibbles. We’d fished every day in the first years of our bonding. Now I couldn’t remember the last time we’d gone.

‘You’re not really going to break the bond, are you?’ she asked softly.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. ‘I might have to.’

‘How could you even entertain the idea?’ Radha demanded incredulously.

‘For you.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t need it. It’s you who is too frightened to make the change this country needs.’

I didn’t rise to the bait. We’d been fighting way too much of late, and I hated it.

‘You would sever what’s between us,’ she whispered, and I could hear the tears in her throat.

I closed my eyes, feeling the weight of this idea settle upon me. The weight of all the bonded Kayans who would feel the grief of it, if I were indeed to order the bond broken. I’d been born with such ambition in my veins. Such a need to help. But the more choices I had to make that felt wrong, the wearier I grew of it all.

I found myself wishing, in the dark quiet of night, for a life in which all that was required of me was to love my mate. That was a big enough burden for one person, surely. An infinite enough joy. Instead I made impossible decisions and I had no one at all to help me.

Taking a breath, I looked at Radha.

‘I don’t need the bond to love you,’ I told her. ‘I will do that no matter what magic exists in the world.’

Something pulled on her line, and when she reeled it in there was a fat, wriggling fish on the end of it. We both burst into laughter for the sheer pleasure of it.

Finn

Around us as far as the eye could see was grass. Endless fields of yellow, waist-high grass. The five of us were spread out, wading through it under a hot sun. Isadora was a few hundred yards ahead, but even though she was short, there was no way we could lose sight of her, glowing under the sun as she was. Jonah watched her without blinking from where he walked beside me. Despite the fact that I had told her she wasn’t welcome to join our travelling party, I’d been out-voted. She’d offered us her swords for the journey, and the boys all thought it was wise after last night to have another who could fight in our party. They were right. I simply didn’t trust her.

Thorne was keeping pace out to the right, his neck on a constant swivel to check for any signs of danger. And Penn brought up the rear, trailing behind with a song on his breath, slashing a long stick through the grass.

My footsteps felt heavy today. I couldn’t seem to shake the remnants of last night from my skin. The idiocy of what I’d done. Of course Thorne wasn’t the right person to relieve my boredom with; he thought everything was a matter of gravest import. Yuck.

Sometimes the darkness that crept in felt like a physical sensation over my skin. It prickled, grew hot and sticky and sore. In my head there were whispers made of shadow, and as they brushed against me they sent revulsion down my spine.

For a few years I spent a lot of time letting this darkness build until it was so thick it felt like wading through tar. I would push myself to endure as much of it as I possibly could. I outgrew that, because as the years passed, the darkness became more frightening, and I now had no wish to toy with it.

‘Inney?’ Jonah said suddenly, pulling me to a halt. ‘You’re too full.’

‘I’m fine.’

He took both my hands and even though outwardly I sighed there was an immense relief blooming within me. I watched my brother as his eyes faded to milky white and he started draining the blackness inside me. With every passing second I felt lighter, more whole, more energised. A bubble of laughter escaped my lips, and Jonah let me go. He smiled at me, but I could see what he worked to keep hidden: the weary ache that all my fury and grief made him endure each time he took it from me.

I felt a moment of purest love for my brother. Of rapturous happiness. He was all I could ever need, he and Penn and my da. I didn’t need anything else but them, and sky, endless sky under which to run.

Thorne and Isadora had come to a stop a few yards away, watching us silently. Neither asked us what we were doing, but I could tell they were curious and wary both. I didn’t want their eyes on me, dampening the brightness in my chest. So I leapt into a bound over the grass, weightless as I dashed forward, running and running and running.

Thorne

It was like seeing a shadow pass over something and then disappear, leaving it to shimmer in the sunlight. Finn had been different this morning. As if a sea had passed through her, threatening to drown her. It had preoccupied me, thinking it must have something to do with last night. I had been rude, and now regretted it terribly. Ma would be ashamed of me. Despite the fact that I disliked Finn’s character, I hated to think I’d made her uncomfortable – or anyone, for that matter. I had little experience with women, so perhaps I had.

But then I saw Jonah take her hands and she was lifted up and spun around like a leaf in a wind pocket. I stared in astonishment as she took off across the field, Penn dashing after her, the two of them laughing with an abrupt freedom.

Jonah approached Isadora and I. He, on the other hand, had dark hollows under his eyes and stood a little less straight.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

He looked between us, hesitating. We turned together and continued on our path. After a few long minutes, Jonah murmured, ‘She gets overwhelmed.’

‘By what?’

‘When we were taken as children to the warders for our tests, they took one look at Finn and declared her soul too big for her body.’

I waited for Jonah to explain, but that seemed to be all he was willing to say on the matter. I tried to process it. What did it even mean? I couldn’t grasp the implications. Somehow, though, when I thought of Finn and how she was … It made an odd kind of sense.

‘What must you do to help her?’ I asked.

‘I try to drain some of it. Lessen its power over her.’

‘Drain her soul?’ I stopped in my tracks.

‘Better than letting it incinerate her from within, wouldn’t you say, Highness?’

I reminded myself to keep walking. We covered about a mile without speaking, but my mind wouldn’t leave the conversation alone.

‘What of you?’ I pressed.

Jonah glanced at me. ‘What about me?’

‘When you drain her, Jonah. It harms you?’

The boy didn’t say anything. His jaw was clenched and he wouldn’t look at me. I cracked the knuckles on my left hand, hesitating. I didn’t really know how to express my thoughts, but for some reason couldn’t hold them in. ‘Your generosity of spirit humbles me,’ I blurted clumsily.

Jonah’s eyes flashed silver. He seemed lost. His mouth opened and then closed. Something hard flittered across his gaze. ‘Mind your business, Prince.’

‘Forgive me.’

It was around midday when Finn finally stopped running. She had literally been going all morning, much to my complete astonishment. She seemed perfectly happy, but something about the manic adrenalin she was exerting made me uneasy.

My head was tilted up to watch a lone hawk circle the sky when I heard her gasp.

‘There’s danger ahead.’ She shot off again towards the forest at the edge of the grasslands.

‘Then don’t run towards it!’ Jonah exclaimed as we all sprinted after her. The world grew dark as we entered the cover of trees and the sun was blotted out. I drew my axe from my back even though I wasn’t supposed to be armed while in Kaya.

A group of travellers were up ahead. I could see six of them, as well as another who’d scouted further ahead. Finn was approaching them as though she intended to barrel in there and attack them all without a moment’s thought. What was wrong with the girl?

I shared a glance with Isadora, whose eyes flicked to the trees pointedly. I nodded, splitting off from the others and making my way into the brush. I picked up the pace, curving around to the side of the group so I could watch as Finn arrived.

‘More pioneers to the holy city,’ she said with a brilliant smile. The six men turned swiftly, taking in the twins, Penn, and then Isadora. Their eyes all narrowed to see such a strange looking person. I couldn’t imagine what her life must be like. I hadn’t exactly been welcomed here, but at least in Pirenti I was safe from the hostile looks; Isadora was a pariah even in her home country.

‘No,’ said one of the men. He was short and slim like most Kayans, but he had eyes as cruel as anyone I’d ever met.

‘No? Then where are you headed?’

He gave a short laugh of disbelief. ‘Whose business do you think that is?’

‘They’re just kids, Sin,’ one of the others reminded him.

The scout had circled back and was doing exactly as I was – sticking to the cover of trees and watching. He had no idea I was directly behind him, and he wouldn’t know – not unless I wanted him to.

‘Not too friendly, are you?’ Finn pointed out mildly.

‘Not too friendly,’ Penn agreed like a cheerful little parrot.

Sin folded his arms. I could see him getting annoyed. ‘And you’ve got a big mouth, girl. Maybe I can use that big mouth for something.’

A few of the others chuckled.

Finn didn’t seem remotely bothered by their lewdness. Jonah, on the other hand, was growing angry. I could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the way his hands kept making small circular motions, as if to conjure something.

‘Where have you come from?’ Sin asked.

‘Limontae.’

‘Then tell me, kid. Have you seen any warders on the road?’

Finn tilted her head, curious now. ‘Hmm … That’s a tricky one. What do warders look like?’

Sin’s brows knitted, unable to tell if she was being serious or not.

‘She’s daft,’ another man muttered.

‘Don’t give me that,’ Sin snapped.

‘Well, I may have, but it’s hard to tell,’ Finn shrugged. ‘And when men aren’t friendly my feelings get hurt.’

‘You want me to be friendly?’ Sin asked softly, moving closer. She didn’t step back, but I saw Isadora’s knife glinting in her hand and knew Finn was relatively safe for the moment. There were seven of them, though. No one could take on that many single-handedly.

Unless that someone was a berserker.

I really, really didn’t want to deal with the blood fever again so soon. Not when it meant sending me to sleep for a good twelve hours afterwards and a body of aching bones.

My beast had a different point of view on the matter. He wanted out.

And as Sin reached out to touch Finn I found that for the first time in my life I agreed with my beast. I heard her say, just before their skin connected, ‘I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.’

‘And why is that, pretty one? I thought you wanted me to comfort your hurt feelings.’

‘The thing is … I have a friend who wouldn’t like it too much.’

Sin looked at her three friends – Penn was tiny, Jonah was a teen boy, and Isadora looked as harmless as a snowflake. The man grinned in amusement. ‘Is that right? What would this friend do to me, if I were to run my tongue down your neck?’

A great snarl erupted inside me; I was about to lose control. I was aching to lose control. Nothing mattered but the fact that he was about to touch her.

Finn smiled, and even from where I stood hidden in the bushes I could see the coldness in her eyes, the incredible, sparkling malice. It made something inside me hungry. ‘I think he might get rather angry,’ she purred. ‘He does that.’

Sin was getting impatient. ‘Have you seen any warders or not, girl?’

‘I see warders every day.’

‘Did you see any on the road?’ he clarified, as if she were a simpleton. ‘A group of them?’

‘Oh dear, you’re making me nervous and now I can’t remember.’

‘Are you all this idiotic?’ he snapped, looking at the other three, but they remained blessedly silent. Jonah actually looked like he was starting to enjoy himself. ‘I’ll ask an easier one then. Have you seen any bonded couples travelling the road?’

‘Oh! Yes!’

Sin grabbed her upper arms. ‘When? How many?’

‘Oh,’ Finn murmured, looking down at his hands on her body. ‘You forgot.’

Sin followed her eyes, not understanding.

‘I warned you, didn’t I? Poor Sin.’

It appeared I was being summoned. Stepping forward, I plucked the scout by the back of the neck and carried his squirming form into the clearing. Everyone turned to look at me with various degrees of alarm. Sin’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. But Finn met my gaze with a smile, as if we’d all walked into her lovely little trap.

‘Step away from her,’ I ordered Sin, trying to remain calm.

‘You … you’re not allowed a weapon,’ he declared, panicked.

I dropped my axe onto the grass. ‘Does that make you feel better?’

Finn gave a trickle of laughter. Gods, let me be calm.

‘Let him go,’ Sin demanded. ‘We haven’t done anything. We’re just searching for –’

‘If you don’t stop touching her this second,’ I said slowly, ‘I’ll tear your fingers from your hands.’

Sin realised he was still gripping Finn and with a jolt of horror let her go. The five other men had drawn their swords.

‘That’s hardly fair,’ Jonah pointed out.

‘Bit hypocritical, really,’ Finn agreed with a sniff.

The twin idiots were going to get themselves killed one day. I tried to concentrate on Sin. ‘Stand your men down or I’ll tighten my hand and this neck breaks.’

He gave a quick wave and they all lowered their weapons.

‘Next time you meet travellers on the road,’ I warned, ‘be kind. You never know who’s hiding in the bushes.’

I dropped the scout and picked up my axe. The men scattered, leaving us. I waited until their scents drew far enough away that I knew they weren’t going to circle back for revenge, then I turned on Finn.

‘There’s danger ahead?’ I snapped. ‘You created the danger!’

She smiled beatifically. ‘Did I specify the source?’

Isadora had probably tired of the childishness, for she strode forward, picking up the path again. Penn was climbing trees and swinging from branches like a monkey. Jonah loitered by his sister, probably concerned about the level of my fury.

‘I’m not a trained bear,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘You can’t prance around antagonising people, then clap your hands and have me pop out to clean up your mess.’

This seemed to amuse her, for she laughed as she picked up her pack and carried on. ‘Clearly, I can.’

‘Never again,’ I snarled.

‘Oh, Thorne. Relax. They were disgusting, vile human beings. Trust me on that. I gave them the chance to be nice and they chose to be revolting instead. They deserved a lot worse than you gave them.’

I shook my head, clamping my mouth shut. She didn’t care who got hurt, as long as it was entertaining.

‘Didn’t a tiny part of you enjoy that?’ she prompted archly.

‘No.’

‘Really? How dull.’

‘You had no idea how dangerous they could have been, Finn.’

‘That’s true,’ she agreed. ‘But I do have a fairly reliable way of guessing: I think it’s safe to say that not one of them was ever going to be as dangerous as you are, Thorne.’

I didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day.

Finn

Well, I’d definitely pissed off Thorne, so I gave him a wide berth and caught up with Jonah.

‘Why do you think they were looking for warders and bonded couples?’ I asked.

‘Dunno. Probably bond protesters out for a bit of “bloody justice”.’

I chewed on my lip, thinking about it. His answer did nothing to slake my curiosity. Something had been strange about it.

Jonah elbowed me and nodded towards Thorne. ‘Poor guy looks like he’s swallowed a sour grape.’

I had to agree. We giggled.

‘You should be gentle with him,’ my brother conceded.

‘Why?’

Jonah shrugged. ‘Because he’s gentle with us.’

My eyebrows shot up. ‘Speaking in defence of the dreaded northern brute now, are we?’

‘He’s not as bad as I thought, is all.’

‘I thought he felt off to you.’

‘He’s … nice.’

‘Mmm. Nice is boring.’ But even as I said it, I knew better.

We arrived at the gates of Sancia as night was falling. The crowd waiting in line for entry was enormous. Families were relaxing in or on top of their carriages, men and women lined the road, sitting or lying on the grass. People played music and told stories as we took our spot at the back of the line, settling in for a long wait.

I edged up behind Thorne. ‘Have you forgiven me yet?’

‘Have you apologised yet?’

I smiled. ‘Shouldn’t you get to jump the queue, being royal and all?’ When he didn’t reply I pressed, ‘And how come you didn’t take a royal carriage or something?’

‘I like to walk.’

‘I see. Will you be staying at the palace?’

He shook his head.

‘They didn’t invite you, did they? That seems … rude.’

Dropping his voice so that I had to lean closer to hear, he said, ‘If I informed my aunt and uncle, there would be a problem. I don’t wish to start conflict.’

‘Do you think they’re making a point of it?’

‘They’d better not be, given it’s peace time.’

I found myself feeling extremely curious about it all – the politics of the world he lived in, the complexities of the life he must lead. I could imagine it was pretty complicated, ruling nations. Did Thorne like his role? Did he wish to be King? Would he be good at it? It occurred to me that I didn’t really know much about him. I hadn’t asked.

‘What’s she like?’ I asked. ‘Your aunt.’

Thorne glanced sideways at me. ‘Why?’

I shrugged. I didn’t want to admit that I’d spent most of my life imagining her. She filled my dreams, the half-walker Queen of Pirenti. ‘She’s the most famous woman in the country.’

‘In both countries.’ A pause, and then, ‘You may meet her one day.’

‘I may?’

Hanging there like that in the air between us, the words almost sounded like a threat.

I couldn’t help but give an exasperated laugh. ‘Well, I’ll apologise on behalf of the Emperor and Empress of Kaya, since no one else has. While you are here you should be shown some Kayan hospitality.’

‘Like the kind you’ve shown me since I arrived?’

My eyebrows arched – he had a little more fight in him than I thought. ‘No, like some fun. You’re so serious, Thorne.’

‘A lot is at stake. Someone ought to be.’

Which, I supposed, was fair enough. But just to annoy him I rolled my eyes.

In the end we were picked out of the crowded line-up. Assumedly, Thorne had been recognised and a message was sent to the palace, because royal guards emerged and guided us into the city. When Thorne declined their offer to stay at the palace, we were shown to an inn, where our rooms were paid for by the guards. Thorne was polite of course, but he obviously wasn’t impressed, because he sent them away with a message for the palace: that he was quite content to look after himself upon his first stay in Kaya, and the Emperor and Empress need not worry themselves.

I was impressed by the veiled insult, but kept that to myself.

That night while the others slept I pulled my clothes on to creep downstairs and find mischief.

‘Don’t, Inney,’ Jonah murmured from the bed next to mine.

‘I can’t sleep,’ I whispered through the darkness.

‘Try. I can’t come and rescue you from some debacle tonight. I’m too tired.’

‘I won’t cause a debacle, I promise.’

‘Finn,’ he said more firmly, ‘I’m too tired.’

‘And I’ve got screaming behind my eyes,’ I told him softly, and padded out.

In the end, he did come to find me. I’d had too much to drink and was picking fights with people bigger than me, so he carried me home and put me in bed and kissed my cheeks and held me tightly and prayed for my soul. And I was glad for the alcohol in my veins, because it made it easier for me to close my eyes and force everything to disappear, even my brother, who I loved best.

On the morning of the announcement, we all flooded in together to the enormous city centre. A sandstone square lay beneath the palace and its balconies, and it felt full to bursting with eager citizens. My head pounded and my eyes ached, so I stayed quiet for a change and held Penn’s hand. Along with my hangover, there was fear in my heart, a great bloom of it.

If there was no end to the bond, I might as well lie down and die on these stones.

Jonah smoothed a hand over my forehead and eased some of my anxiety, helping me to breathe. Thorne watched us, and I wished he wouldn’t.

Above, two figures moved out onto the balcony of their palace amidst a cacophony of cheers. Both wore a blindfold. The woman had ebony hair, the man golden. She was small and petite; he was tall and lean. They looked an odd couple, but even from where I stood in the middle of the crowd I could see how they gravitated around each other.

I hadn’t laid eyes on our Emperor and Empress for years, and was startled to find them younger than I remembered. But then I supposed as a child every adult had seemed older and larger and wiser than I.

‘Greetings!’ Emperor Falco called out, and the cheering died slowly to a dull roar. ‘You are here to witness one of the most auspicious days in Kayan history.’

This was it. Jonah took my hand and squeezed it tight. I couldn’t move my eyes from the man above.

‘It has been whispered of for some time. But your Empress and I wish to make an end to rumour. Hear us now, and know it as truth. In this world there exists an end to the bond.’

An intake of breath, and then a mighty explosion of sound. Many cheered, many screamed their horror and dissent, some wept for joy or grief, others moaned aloud. There was division in Sancia, but in my heart there was a single, clear note of joy.

Thorne had turned to look at me. I wanted to know what he thought of this, but didn’t think I had much space inside me to even ask.

Because I had a father who was a half-walker, and if I didn’t find this end to the bond then he would perish just as my mother had, and I refused to allow that to happen.

‘We have not decided whether or not this discovery will be put to use in Kaya,’ Falco boomed. ‘And it will remain undecided until we have this end in our possession.’

This caused another eruption of chatter and arguing.

Empress Quillane spoke out over the masses. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t as simple as it sounds. The end, as we shall henceforth name it, has been hidden for thousands of years. We have the very start of what we believe is a map to this end, but I am promising you now – it will not be an easy thing to find, because its very nature was to remain secret.’

‘We want your help,’ Falco announced. ‘You are all entitled to be a part of this search, because you have all been affected by the bond. But we cannot very well let everyone under the sun loose on the world and its dangers unless we know those people are equipped and capable. Your safety is paramount to us, as always. So what we are proposing is this.’

‘A tournament,’ Quillane declared. ‘Any of you may enter, but only the fittest and strongest, the most skilled and courageous among you will come out victorious in this tournament, and then those few shall be given the map and sent on a quest in the name of Kaya. Those who discover the end will be rewarded with land and wealth for them and their families.’

And then Falco, Emperor of Kaya added, ‘You had best gather yourselves and decide how far you are willing to go, because once on the quest you will not be permitted to back out, and the tournament begins this afternoon.’

I looked then at my brother. My favourite person in all the world. And as our eyes met we smiled an identical smile.

Chapter 7

Thorne

It was clever, I’d give them that. They were involving their people in the search and thus removing themselves from the war raging amongst their country. Forestalling the inevitable decision that would have to be made and letting their citizens take ownership over their own opinions.

The tournament would weed out the incapable, and the winners would be perfect to send on the search because they were not soldiers and couldn’t be mistaken as an attack on Pirenti, if the clues did indeed lead them that far north.

The entrants had to put themselves forward in a group of any size. Finn and Jonah gathered us in to discuss it.

It was time for us to work out where we stood. The fact that I had been travelling with Finn, Jonah and Penn was a matter of both circumstance and a measure of manipulation on Finn’s part. But this went beyond simply travelling together to another city. To group together now meant the five of us, including Isadora whom we knew nothing about, would be tied to each other until the day we failed or succeeded at the quest. It meant placing our lives in each other’s hands and really, truly trusting one another.

Which would be no easy feat for Finn and I, given the start we were off to. And given, more importantly, the fact that we wanted two very different outcomes from this mission. She wanted an end to the bond; I was charged with preserving it at any cost. She knew nothing of this; I was finding it difficult to think of anything else.

Finn looked at me, and I looked at her, and everything that had passed between us was there in our eyes. I doubted she wanted to spend the next weeks or months with me – I annoyed her no end, and I brought animosity with me wherever I went. I would make us targets on the road, and the novelty I presented to her would no doubt wear off pretty quickly.

But despite all of this, despite all the reasons to the contrary, Finn kept her eyes trained on me as she murmured, ‘Obviously, we’re a group of five.’

A slow smile found my lips, and I watched her eyes shift azure. An inexplicable warmth flooded me at being included. Because even though there were a million reasons not to bind ourselves to each other, the thought of parting from these kids filled me with an undeniable sadness.

I shared a glance with Isadora. She didn’t look as pleased as I felt. Her red eyes took in the twins and Penn with calculation. ‘I’m not certain I will benefit from grouping with the three of you. No offence meant.’

‘Why would we take offence to that?’ Finn muttered.

‘I will compete with you,’ I told her softly.

‘Thank you, Prince Thorne,’ she replied pointedly to Isadora. ‘You are a man of impeccable taste and judgement, clearly.’

‘Then I too am with you,’ Isadora conceded, eyeing me. She obviously wanted to stick close to me, and I needed to work out why. If she truly did want to help me, then that was great. I just had to be sure she didn’t mean any of us harm. She didn’t smell of it, which was a good thing.

‘Well maybe I don’t want to be grouped with someone who doesn’t want to be grouped with me!’ Finn announced.

‘Finn,’ Jonah sighed. ‘We have a better chance if we’re all together. Isadora is good with knives – that could be useful.’

‘She’s sizeist, is what she is,’ Finn sniffed.

I heard him murmur, ‘That’s not even a word.’

‘Indeed – I’m particularly good at counting!’ Penn announced with an air of scorn and the rest of us couldn’t help smiling – even Isadora.

We’d been given simple aptitude tests to ensure we weren’t sickly, elderly or handicapped in any way. I think what they really wanted to check was that none of us were bonded. Next we were allowed our pick of weapons and tools, but not knowing what awaited us, it was a hard choice. I chose a wooden sword. Finn picked a rope and a sword to tie over her back. Isadora looked pained to part with the daggers she kept over her body, but made do with a few short wooden rapiers. Jonah and Penn didn’t bother with anything, and I wondered if they knew how to fight. Finally we were shepherded to the waiting area of the mighty arena.

Finn was bouncing in her shoes, filled with excited energy. Jonah looked more subdued, while Isadora stood still as stone and Penn drew pictures in the sand as if he had no clue what was going on.

A set of wooden doors swung open and we walked forward, into the arena.

Before us was a vast chasm in the earth, over which hung suspended cages and ropes. The chasm dropped away on one side into sea cliffs, while surrounding the other three sides were the high stadium stands for thousands of screaming viewers. The sound hit me like a tidal wave, and the five of us walked out to stand beside the other groups of contestants at the edge of the canyon.

My eyes quickly took in the height of these cages and platforms – a fall from one would mean death, unequivocally. The ropes joining them all looked thin and frayed, and no less dangerous. It was a nightmare and I felt my heart sink at the sight of it.

Finn’s eyes, however, held a look of absolute triumph, and I couldn’t help thinking she was dangerously over-confident.

Isadora looked spooked. ‘Are you well?’ I asked her softly.

She blinked, letting the haunted shadow pass her. With a quick nod, she turned away from me.

Falco

Quillane and I sat at the top of the stadium behind a thin gauze drape to shield us from view. We’d be able to see the action perfectly, and I sat forward, for once not having to guard what I was feeling – Emperor Feckless and I were both as excited as each other. Quillane was more subdued, worried about the entrants, but I’d told her not to mother them.

‘Half of them are children,’ she pointed out.

‘And if they’re incapable they’ll be sent home to be swaddled by their folks.’

Petir arrived at a run, erupting into our private box. ‘Majesties.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘There is a contestant who has just been tested …’ We both stared at the breathless man, his cheeks red from the exertion of having sprinted up hundreds of steps. ‘It’s Prince Thorne.’

‘What?’ Quillane was out of her chain in an instant, and it kind of looked like she wanted to throttle poor Petir. My mind started whirling, working out the best course of action. This was not good.

‘We can’t allow him to compete like a commoner! It’s insulting to him!’ she hissed.

‘To deny him at this point would be even more offensive,’ I pointed out. We stared at each other.

‘His aunt and uncle are going to crucify us for this,’ she said.

I turned to Petir. ‘What is his character? Is he reckless? Prone to disobeying?’

‘I don’t know, sire.’

‘Find out.’ I glanced at Quill. ‘If they are used to him acting on his own desires then they might not blame us for this.’

‘We didn’t receive him formally,’ she said. ‘It’s catastrophically embarrassing and entirely your fault.’

I shrugged, taking a big gulp of ale. ‘Well, at least now we’ll get to see what the kid is made of.’

We turned together to see the contestants emerge into the arena.

Despite being quite a way below us, the ‘kid’ was immediately recognisable. And he did not look like a kid. He was tall, straight-backed and very strong. He held himself with an incredible stillness and even from here I could see perfectly the way he embodied that certain sense of regality that only true leaders possessed.

‘Get me the names of the contestants he has grouped himself with,’ Quillane told a page, and the boy rushed off, leaving us alone once more.

We both peered at the prince’s group, four people who were in fact children, by the looks of them. A small red-haired boy. A girl and boy who were tall and willowy, and moved in such a way that I thought they must be related. And finally a small white creature, hair and skin so sapped of colour that she was almost impossible to look upon, for the glare of the sun reflected off every surface of her like she was made of cut diamonds.

‘They don’t look like much,’ I muttered.

‘Imagine the embarrassment if they don’t win.’

‘It will not be our embarrassment, but Pirenti’s.’

‘Do you think we can afford to embarrass Pirenti?’

‘I’m tired of pandering to them. We are at peace. We shouldn’t have to feel as though we constantly walk on eggshells. Ava will not bring war to us.’

‘Who knows what she’ll do.’

‘Come now, this talk is dull,’ I announced. ‘Let us drink and be merry!’ I sculled the rest of my flagon and called for another.

Thorne

It was to be a time challenge, and our team drew the last place. I looked up at the covered box and knew the Emperor and Empress would be watching from there. As we waited for our turn from a cordoned-off area that allowed us to hear the other contestants but not see them, Jonah moved to my side.

‘Is it appropriate for you to be doing this?’

I shrugged. ‘They could have stopped me. They haven’t.’

‘The people won’t like it,’ he warned me. ‘They’ll think it’s unfair.’

‘Trust me, I am no better at rope climbing than any Kayan.’

‘Not just this,’ he said, gesturing to the tournament. ‘All of it. The fact that you could be included in the search for something so important to Kaya. They’ll think you have no right to it.’

‘And what do you think, Jonah?’

The boy’s eyes shifted to a deep crimson as he said, ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is a promise I’ll make to you now. If your presence in our lives causes harm to anyone I love, I don’t care that you’re the Prince of Pirenti – I will destroy you.’

I met Jonah’s gaze. ‘I understand. My promise to you is that I will destroy myself before I let harm come to any of you.’

He seemed slightly taken aback by that, but after a hesitation he shook my hand.

‘If you two are finished measuring masculinity, maybe we should talk strategy,’ Finn suggested.

‘What knowledge have you of strategy?’ Isadora asked her. It was obvious she was regretting having been grouped with three teenagers. Four, including me.

Finn shrugged, crouching to the ground and using her finger to draw the stadium in the sand. I was impressed at her ability to remember such detail – she had each of the pylons, ropes and hanging cages memorised, and marked them all out.

Jonah recounted the instructions we’d been given. ‘Each cage holds a key guarded by a soldier. We have to collect all six keys before we can unlock the box on the last platform. These nine platforms here also have soldiers guarding them, so we have to either be able to fight them or get around them somehow. Makes sense for us to split up and aim for a key each, and whoever gets theirs first can go for the sixth. Then we meet up at the last platform.’

‘Sounds like a hoot,’ Finn declared.

‘Any number of things could go wrong with that,’ Isadora pointed out.

‘Well, we can at least have a vague plan, and if it doesn’t work we improvise,’ Jonah replied. ‘Penn and Finn, you two go for these first cages. I’ll take this side one, while Thorne and Isadora, you two head past us for the keys behind the final platform.’

‘If we’re the stronger climbers, shouldn’t we be climbing the furthest?’ Finn queried.

‘What makes you think you’re stronger climbers?’ Isadora asked.

Jonah explained, ‘If we take the first cages, we’ll have to carry the keys further. It’s safer if Thorne and Isadora, who have less experience on ropes, have the least time with the keys in their possession, because if they fall after having claimed them we’re immediately disqualified. If they fall before that, the three of us can get their keys and continue on.’

I nodded, satisfied that he was right despite the obvious judgements of our abilities. I wasn’t insulted, but I could tell Isadora was.

‘The three of you,’ she said. ‘What do you plan to do when you reach your cages and the guard won’t let you take the key?’

‘We’re not quite as helpless as you seem to think we are,’ Finn said.

‘Then answer me. How?’

They didn’t have an answer.

‘The best course of action is to allow Thorne and I to get the six keys.’

‘Excuse me?’ Finn’s eyes shifted to steel grey and her air of fun-loving mischief was gone in an instant. ‘And what shall we do during that time? Twiddle our thumbs?’

Isadora shot her a pointed look.

‘You’ll waste too much time,’ Jonah protested. ‘It’s a race, remember? You can’t possibly gather all six keys between the two of you and hope to beat the other teams.’

‘And when you fall with your keys because a guard is attacking you?’

Finn sat forward slightly, and now I saw a sharp-edged smile at her lips. ‘We will not fall.’ I stayed quiet because the truth was simple. I was far more worried about myself falling than any of the others. Grace and balance were not talents of mine. And the worst part of all? I had not been kidding when I told Finn I had a crippling fear of heights.

Our time came and we returned to the arena. The crowd in the stands screamed its excitement, heady with whatever it had just witnessed from the other teams. A warder moved to meet us at the starting pylon.

‘Are there training warders amongst you?’ he asked us.

Jonah raised his hand.

‘What stage in your training have you achieved?’

‘I’m in my fourth year.’

‘You are permitted to use the magic you have been taught, but nothing further.’

Jonah and Finn both grinned at each other.

‘Please climb onto the first platform.’

We did so, scaling the ladder to stand atop the wooden plinth. The view from up here was dizzying. I edged to the middle, willing myself not to look down, but one quick glance nearly made me vomit in horror. The bottom of the chasm was at least two hundred metres away. Clenching my eyes shut, I took a deep breath through my nose and tried to calm myself.

Bow out. Tell them you can’t do this.

I opened my mouth to do so, but my gaze fell on Finn and I stopped. She had obviously forgotten that I’d told her of my fear, or perhaps she hadn’t believed me at the time. I spotted the guards on the platforms and saw that they were real soldiers, trained in combat. Finn, who was thin and scrawny, would never make it past the first one. I wasn’t sure what Jonah was capable of with his magic, but I didn’t think Penn would get past a guard either. Which meant I had to do this – they were going to need help.

As we lined up Finn looked straight at me and I realised she hadn’t forgotten at all, because she said, ‘You can do this.’

The bell tolled and we were away.

I knew immediately that I couldn’t follow the plan. It made sense theoretically, but not when you took into account our different skills.

I looked at Isadora and nodded towards Penn. ‘Go with him.’ She nodded, knowing what I meant. The slender girl leapt after Penn, who had shot off over the ropes, swinging easily towards the first cage, quick as a monkey.

Jonah and Finn had also leapt into their climbs, taking different paths to their cages. I followed Finn slowly, forcing myself not to look down. Nausea crept up and I swallowed the hot flood of saliva in my mouth. Everything seemed to be shaking as I swung out onto the rope. My entire body was dangling over a huge crevice and I didn’t like it one bit. I liked solid earth – bodies like mine with a heavy centre of gravity needed their feet in the soil or everything turned upside down.

Something hurled into my body and I looked around to see that there were catapults flinging rocks at us. As if I needed any more obstacles. I jerked out of the way and my sword promptly fell all the way to the ground. Watching it, I cursed profusely under my breath, dizzy with the sight.

Finn was approaching the first cage. But she paused, looking back for me. Before I knew it she was swinging back.

‘What are you doing?’ she panted. ‘Keep going.’

My jaw clenched and I tried to remove my left hand in order to swing forward. But the damn hand had a mind of its own and wouldn’t budge.

So Finn budged it for me. She took the wooden sword over her back and whacked it onto my knuckles. My hand let go and I nearly fell, jerking against my right grip.

‘Get a move on!’ she snapped.

I reached forward and clutched wildly at the rope. My eyes darted down to the bottomless pit beneath me and caused my head to spin.

‘Eyes forward, big guy,’ Finn ordered. ‘Keep them on me. Aren’t I beautiful? Why would you want to look at anything else? Now let go with your right hand or I stab it.’

‘I’m slowing you down.’

‘You are indeed.’

I let out a long breath and unclenched my fingers, lurching forward an arm-span.

‘Great. You’ve moved half a metre. Only about a thousand more of those to go. You know, I sort of thought you were joking when you mentioned a fear of heights. Who’s really afraid of something as banal as heights? I assume you’re not afraid of a whole lot of other dangers, being a giant and all, so why this? It’s only a drop to your death. Would probably be quite a pleasant way to go, really …’

As Finn rambled on I used her voice to anchor me as the ground would normally. She edged her way backwards and I followed at a snail’s pace, every so often trying to glimpse where the others were but unable to get a good enough look from my perilous position. Long minutes passed.

‘Thorne,’ she said suddenly. ‘Open your eyes.’

At the tone of her voice, I did as she said. She was hanging from the rope in front of me and something about her expression was the wildest I’d seen it.

‘There are metal hanging bars to your left. If you can reach them, you can pull yourself up and crawl along the top of them. It’ll be a lot easier than trying to swing like this. But to do that you’re going to need a considerable leap through the air.’

I stared at her, frozen.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’

Swallowing, my throat felt like it was closing up.

Finn edge closer, so close we were almost touching. Her lip curled and she whispered, ‘Where’s my fierce berserker prince? Let him free. Let him show me what he can do.’

I felt the words strike inside me and take hold of my beast, who had been curled in sleep, but now rose to his full size and gave a roar of pride. Every one of my thoughts turned to keeping him caged, and the fear of falling was forgotten; there were much darker things to be afraid of.

Finn smiled. ‘Show me.’

I started swinging to the left, back and forward, gaining momentum. Timing it right, I let go with both hands and reached for the distant metal bars. My hands were slick with sweat as I caught hold and nearly fell, but I gripped tight and pulled myself up onto the top. As soon as I felt my hands and knees land on something solid my head cleared, grew sharp.

Looking around, I reacclimatised myself to what was going on. Penn was perched on the top of his swinging cage, poking the guard through its holes. Isadora was hanging from the bottom of it, stabbing the man’s feet and ankles. As I watched Isadora resorted to a different method. She opened the cage door, swung herself into it, cracked the soldier over the head and caught his box before it dropped. She swung herself out and leapt back to the rope. But Penn was still on the top of the cage, and the soldier was still conscious. He climbed out to attack Penn, but that was when the small boy did an incredible thing. He untied the knots connecting the cage to its tether, and just as the cage pitched and fell away he launched himself through the air to grab hold of Isadora’s outstretched hand.

She managed to hold onto him, groaning aloud with the strain. But he quickly scampered up and took hold of the rope, swinging forward as though nothing had happened. I would have been heaving my guts up if I’d been on a falling cage.

It had dropped to the ground, but hadn’t been destroyed upon impact; I suspected warder magic was being used to ensure nobody died.

Jonah had already claimed his box – the cage he left behind was open and burning with a blue fire, the soldier nowhere to be seen.

I turned quickly back to Finn who was swinging arm over arm to her cage. Crawling after her, I concentrating not on the gaping chasm below me, but on what was ahead. Our cage hung suspended mid air. It was made of tightly bound wicker and was big enough to hold a man. In this soldier’s hands were a small box and a wooden sword.

Finn paused, considering the best way to tackle it. If I were in any way nimble or light enough to manage it, I would climb on top like Penn did, reach through the holes and put the man to sleep by placing pressure on his neck. But since I was neither light nor nimble, I couldn’t help much. So I kept moving forward towards the first platform, to where I could see a soldier waiting. This soldier had a proper sword, not a wooden one.

As I passed Finn I heard that she was whispering quickly to her soldier through the cage, and I caught a whiff of fear – not hers, but his. Curiosity spiked inside me, but I forced myself forward to clear the path for her. Reaching the plinth I ducked beneath the swing of the sword and hammered my elbow into the guard’s ribs, sending him flying into the air and down towards the ground. My breath froze in my chest as I watched him fall, only to be caught in what seemed like an invisible net. Thank Gods.

Finn got the box from her guard without resorting to any kind of violence – the man just handed it to her – and now she held it between her feet so she could swing arm over arm towards where I waited for her on the platform. She arrived just as I heard an odd hissing sound and looked down to see an enormous scorpion climb onto our platform.

Finn yelped in surprise. The creature was at least four metres long, and barely fit on the block of wood with us.

‘Hand me your sword,’ I told Finn and she did so quickly.

I watched the scorpion’s long razor sting rise ominously behind it; it watched me as I inched closer. With a quick feint of the sword to the right, I ducked around behind and snatched the scorpion’s stinger while it lunged in the wrong direction. I was just about to haul the huge thing into the chasm when Finn made a strangled sound and hurled herself towards me. I didn’t know what she was trying to do, but the scorpion was too fast – it had a second stinger that curled out and jabbed me in the arm.

White fire erupted in my wrist as I dragged the scorpion over the edge.

‘Gods damn it,’ Finn snapped. Without waiting she placed her mouth over the puncture wound and started sucking. My blood trickled down her chin and neck, long pale rivulets of red. I didn’t know how much time passed as I watched the macabre sight of her head bent over me and got lost in the sensation of her lips against my skin. There was an itching pain but eventually she spat onto the ground and looked up.

‘Can you feel that?’ she asked, tapping on the soft flesh of my underarm.

I nodded.

Finn breathed out, dropping my arm. ‘I got it out then. Come on.’

I stumbled after her, dazed.

This time I kept a good hold of the sword and dispatched the next three soldiers in our path, sticking to the tops of the metal bars.

Penn and Isadora were making an excellent team. Together they’d circled around for the furthest key, Penn as quick as Isadora was deadly. They now had two and were going for a third. Jonah was approaching a second key, having been delayed by something I’d missed during the scorpion debacle. But he looked rattled, and his left arm was hanging limply at his side.

A rock sailed through the air and clipped my ear, reminding me to stay alert. The scorpion poison had addled me, but I was still conscious, so that was something.

‘I’m going to help Jonah with the last –’ Finn started to say but was abruptly cut off as something swooped out of the sky at her. She screamed in surprise as the huge sea eagle raked its talons through her shoulder.

There were dozens of them, careening through the sky.

I lunged for Finn as I saw her feet slip off the edge of the bars. My right hand was holding the sword, so I didn’t think as I threw my left arm out. But it was slick with blood from the scorpion sting. Our fingers slipped and she fell, as quickly as that.

Finn

Time slowed and the world froze around me. Everything ceased to exist except the knowledge that I could stop this fall if I wanted to. Dark power curled in my belly, coiling itself in readiness, and if I but breathed in this moment I would will my body to reappear back on that plinth. It was a terrifying awareness. A notion of being capable of so much more than I’d ever allowed myself to be.

But if I did that they would know I had used my forbidden warder power, and I would not only be disqualified from the quest, I would be sent to the cold prison of the warders, most terrible place in all the world.

I made my choice, and the world erupted into movement around me. Air whooshed past me, my stomach lurched out of my body and a scream was ripped from my throat.

‘Jonah!’

Swift as lightning my brother turned towards me, flinging his hands out even though one of his arms had been broken by a rock. I felt rather than saw his eyes turn completely white with the power coursing through him and my body stopped mid air. He wouldn’t be able to lift me now, not without my help. So I began to channel my own coil of power through the bond between us and into his body, praying that there were no warders close enough to feel the transference of energy.

Slowly I rose through the air as Jonah whispered a stream of fierce words and sent everything the two of us had into manipulating the air around me. Thorne reached out and grabbed me, pulling me back onto the platform.

There was a long moment of silence, and then I felt the noise around us slam into me – the crowd was screaming in excitement and awe to have seen such magic. It was a mighty wall of moving, throbbing energy, spectators having jumped to their feet to cheer with abandon.

I laughed breathlessly: this was fun.

‘Get Jonah,’ I panted to Thorne.

‘But you –’

‘Please, Thorne. He won’t be able to move.’

Thorne nodded, going for the hanging rope that connected our platform to Jonah’s, atop which my brother had collapsed in a heap. The Pirenti Prince clenched his teeth in discomfort and his hands trembled badly, but he didn’t hesitate. He swung out onto the rope and started making his way inch by slow inch towards Jonah.

I closed my eyes for a second, just in time to feel a rock slam into my shoulder. A gasp of pain rose from my throat and I dragged myself forward. I couldn’t look as though I’d been sapped of energy, or they might suspect I’d had something to do with the magic.

‘Finn!’ I heard suddenly, and whipped around to see that Penn was upside down on the rope, hanging with his knees hooked over. And dangling from his thin arms was Isadora. ‘I can’t hold her!’ the boy screamed.

Woozy with exhaustion, I launched myself forward, scampering across the metal bars towards them.

I saw a guard take hold of the rope Penn hung from and start to jerk it up and down, hoping to fling them off. Penn was wailing wildly, but he didn’t let go of the rope and he didn’t let go of Isadora, even when she was hit by a flying rock and jerked in pain.

Another bloody sea eagle swooped me but I ducked as I ran, managing to avoid this one. The creatures were undoubtedly being controlled by warders; I could hardly believe that all these animals had just decided to randomly attack us.

I reached one end of Penn’s rope. At the other end the soldier looked like he was having a seizure he was shaking so hard. The man took his job a little too seriously. I couldn’t think what to do. My mind was slow and slushy. A glance to the left told me that Thorne had reached Jonah and was carrying the smaller boy in his arms.

‘Hold on, you two,’ I shouted, getting an idea. A crazy one. I was probably about to disqualify all three of us and lose our four keys.

Squatting, I started to undo the knot tying their rope. It was knotted with an anchor hitch, which meant the more pressure applied to the knot, the tighter it would be. And with Penn and Isadora’s weight pulling against it, it was one damn tight knot.

‘Don’t!’ Isadora snarled.

‘Relax,’ I muttered. This girl was really starting to irritate me.

My mouth was numb from the poison in Thorne’s wrist, and I realised saliva was dribbling out as I concentrated. Gross.

I nearly had it. I was working the joins, using the weight to allow me some manoeuvrability. Once I had the first round turn undone, the tension would go slack and then this was going to be a race. It all depended on how smart that soldier was. And if he was any good with knots. Which I assumed he was, given you ought to be ashamed of yourself if you lived in Kaya and weren’t good with knots.

My fingernails all broke painfully in the effort, but I forced the round turn free and then we were away. I kept hold of the rope and it yanked me off the platform. I swung down in a huge arc, while Isadora and Penn scrabbled to hang onto the falling rope. At the bottom it caught us and swung us towards the opposite platform, where waited the soldier. I hit the wooden poles with a crunch, and it felt as though my shoulder had dislocated, the one I’d already had gouged by a nutty bird. Tears stung my eyes, and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to climb up the rope as I had planned.

Peering up, I looked past Penn and Isadora to see that the soldier was, unfortunately, smart. He was already trying to undo the knots on his end so we would plummet to the ground. My plan was to climb up and stop him in time, but now I was in too much pain to move.

‘Penn,’ I gasped. ‘Can you get up and stop him?’

‘I’m still holding Isadora! I’m still holding Isadora! I’m still holding –’

‘Okay, okay! Isadora, can you get up there?’

She was already trying, but Penn was flailing her around and she couldn’t get past him. I felt the rope jerk and knew the soldier was making headway with the knot. Shit. This was it then. I had disqualified us.

But that was when I looked up to see Thorne arriving on the platform. He set Jonah down just as the knot unravelled. With an almost casual shove, Thorne knocked the soldier off the platform and reached to catch the rope as it dropped. A grunt of strain escaped him as he held the weight of all three of us.

Oh Gods. I didn’t know how to help him. We were all small people, but still – we were three people. And the more we moved now the harder it would be for him.

Thorne started to pull us up, hand over hand, and my eyes widened. His shoulders strained and I saw the veins in his arms pucker beneath his skin. He was breathing hard, eyes closed. As he dragged us onto the platform we scrambled to safety and his shoulders slumped in relief.

‘So how often do you Pirenti have to haul multiple people out of chasms using only the strength of your arms? Because you’re suspiciously good at it,’ I pointed out and he cracked a weary smile.

Isadora knelt over Jonah, and I was surprised to see her look of concern. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘I’m fairly sure he’s just sleeping,’ Thorne breathed.

‘Sleeping?’

‘It was some display of power.’

While they were talking I moved to the edge of the platform. The last place we had to reach was about ten metres away, but there was no rope bridge or hanging bars between here and there.

‘Everyone get out the keys,’ I said quickly.

I removed the box from my belt and opened it. Inside was not a key, but a tiny scroll of parchment. I unrolled it and read the words If you break me, I do not stop working. If you touch me, I may be snared. If you lose me, nothing will matter. What am I?

I groaned aloud. ‘Riddles. I hate riddles.’

I read out Isadora’s. ‘I give you a group of three. One is sitting down, and will never get up. The second eats as much as is given to him, yet is always hungry. The third goes away and never returns.’

‘Goes away and never returns,’ Penn sang sweetly, drawing shapes in the sand.

‘Well don’t look at me – sleeping beauty there is the brains in our family,’ I pointed out. My shoulder was really aching, and sent pain up through my neck and head.

‘It’s stove, fire and smoke,’ Thorne said. Just, like, out of the blue.

I blinked. ‘You’re supposed to be the dumb brute. You’re really ruining the dynamic of our group.’

Amusingly, he blushed.

‘So what do we do with the answer?’ Isadora asked.

I shrugged. ‘Let’s solve them all first.’ I read her second out. ‘The one who makes it sells it. The ones who buys it never uses it. The one that uses it never knows he’s using it. What is it?’

I glanced up at the sky, no clue about the riddle but wanting to check for mangy birds. I did not appreciate the one who’d gouged three holes in my shoulder. We were clear for the moment, but a rock whizzed past my head and landed on poor old Jonah. Isadora saw it just as I did and moved to guard him from further hits. As the rocks and birds both started to increase in number, she drew her wooden sabres and shielded us from attack, gracefully swatting things out of the sky.

Which was pretty damned impressive. But now meant we had one less head for the riddles.

‘It’s a tomb,’ Thorne replied. Apparently it wasn’t a problem after all.

‘Now you’re just showing off,’ I told him. I read the clue Jonah had collected. ‘I never was, am always to be. No one ever saw me, nor ever will. And yet I am the confidence of all, to live and breathe in this land. What am I?’

‘Who has confidence to live and breathe in this land?’ Isadora muttered, slashing at a bird and making it pull out of its dive with a screech.

‘It’s probably more general than Kaya,’ Thorne said, looking into the distance. I watched his face, wondering how he kept working them out. It must be a certain type of mind. Problem solving would serve him well when he was King, I had no doubt.

Perhaps it was blood loss or pain, but for the first time since I met him I was struck by the thought that one day he would rule a nation. And if they were all as smart as he was up in the north, then I certainly hoped we could keep this treaty intact.

‘Death?’ Isadora suggested, twirling to land on Jonah’s other side in time to knock away a flying rock.

‘No. It’s tomorrow,’ Thorne said.

Isadora paused to smile at him – the first smile I’d ever seen her give – and their eyes met, and Thorne smiled back, and I did not like it one little bit.

‘Moving on,’ I snapped. ‘Who’s got the fourth?’

‘Alexander is stranded on an island covered in forest,’ Thorne read. ‘One day, when the wind is blowing from the west, lightning strikes the west end of the island and sets fire to the forest. The fire is violent, burning everything in its path, and without intervention the fire will burn the whole island, killing the man in the process. There are cliffs around the island, so he cannot jump off. How can Alexander survive the fire? There are no buckets or any other means to put out the fire.’

‘Alexander’s an idiot for getting stranded there in the first place,’ I pointed out. ‘What happened to his boat? Did he sink it? If he did, I think he deserves to burn, frankly.’

‘Can you be quiet for one second?’ Isadora snapped at me.

‘I’m just trying to fill the void of despair you carry with you,’ I replied sweetly.

Thorne squatted and drew the island with his finger on the sandy wooden boards. He drew a compass, and which way the wind was blowing, and then he marked where Alexander was.

‘If he lights a piece of wood and carries it to the east, lighting that side of the forest on fire, the wind will cause that to burn out this whole eastern side of the island, and then he can shelter in the burnt area.’

Thorne looked up at us as if to ask if he was right. As if we would have any clue.

I turned towards the judges’ stand and shouted, ‘He’s just trying to make us look bad now.’

‘Fifth one,’ Thorne said, unrolling the scroll. ‘It’s … numbers.’ He showed me the parchment.

1

1 1

2 1 1

2 1 1 1

1 1 2 2 1

? ? ? ? ? ?

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

‘What in Gods’ names is that?’ I sighed.

We stared at it, and stared at it, and I took another rock in the leg. Plus I’d just seen more of those scorpions climbing up the poles.

Penn wandered over and idly started drawing numbers in the sand.

3 1 2 2 1 1

1 3 1 1 2 2 2 1

Now we stared at Penn, who had gone back to drawing crabs. I couldn’t help it – I burst into laughter.

‘Remind us never to underestimate you, my friend,’ Thorne told him with a grin.

‘All right,’ Penn agreed, as if he was doing Thorne a favour.

‘Okay, one more,’ Thorne said.

‘Could we hurry it along please?’ Isadora grunted, battling a scorpion and sweeping it over the edge with both her swords at once.

‘The last answer is heart,’ I said shortly, moving to the edge.

‘How do you know? What’s the riddle?’

Before I could reply, a bridge unwound from beneath us, reaching to the final platform.

‘Huh. That was easy.’

Isadora looked at me as though I’d completely lost my mind.

‘Well, you know. We didn’t die,’ I pointed out.

Thorne gathered Jonah into his arms and the four of us walked across together.

Falco

Quill and I spent the day watching the contestants. Some teams were made up of ex-soldiers, and they fared the best, as did the teams containing warders. But none had a particularly impressive run, and I was starting to think I’d made the tournament too hard. I sincerely hoped not, because I feared for our competency in the looming war. We’d gotten soft in the last twenty years. Frighteningly soft.

Out of forty-two different teams, only the fastest five would be sent on the mission. We couldn’t afford to risk any more lives than that. Most contestants were young, which made sense – they had yet to bond, so had witnessed the death it caused but hadn’t felt the love it brought.

As I watched, pretending to be bored and disinterested while carefully taking note of each contestant, something struck inside me and made me distinctly uncomfortable. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, couldn’t name the unease.

Halfway through the day our page returned with the identities of those in Prince Thorne’s team.

Quill took the parchment and read it aloud. ‘Finn and Jonah of Limontae. Twins from the Cliffside, son and daughter of Alexi of The Lakes. Penn, son of Dren and Galia of Sancia. And Isadora of Limontae, no known family.’ She pondered a moment, then murmured, ‘Why do I know the names Dren and Galia?’

Because eight years ago they’d been locked in the warder prison for slaughtering an entire temple full of novice warders. That was why.

I watched as a young woman was knocked through the air and went sailing down into the warder’s net. They had a power that frightened me, the warders. I’d seen it time and again, and its ability to destroy us all had never failed to chill me. It was stories like the one about Penn’s parents, those twisted by power to commit terrible acts, which scared me the most. We all had it in us – the ability to be monstrous.

I remembered bodies on beds with throats cut and slipping in pools of blood on sandstone. I remembered children with hearts stolen from their chests and placed around a trickling fountain I had played upon each day. I remembered a lot of things.

At last the end came. One team so far had finished the course in a time I considered respectable. This team consisted of three warders and three young royal guards, and had been impressive in their ruthless ability to sacrifice each other to get one person to the end. Very few teams managed to acquire the six boxes, and fewer still solved all the riddles. Not a single team had gotten to the end of the course without having lost one or more of their team members to the fall.

We came, finally, to the Prince of Pirenti and his team of children. I sat forward, no longer bothering with the pretence that I was uninterested. He emerged into the afternoon sunlight and I saw the crowd fall into a strange hush. They knew who he was – how could they not? Some booed. Others shouted at the advantage, the unfairness, the treachery of having him compete. But when the bell sounded and the five of them took off, no one was booing anymore.

They were quick. By gods, they were quick. The littlest one, the one with red hair – Penn – he swung with the grace of an acrobat, and when the pale child, Isadora, followed him, I watched them carve their way through three cages by themselves. It surprised me that they had not split up for speed as every other team had, but had known that to help each other would keep them safer.

The twins were lightning, snaking out with the precision of cobras.

‘Twins from the Cliffside?’ I said suddenly, turning to Quill. ‘They’re the brats who started the Siren Nights.’

She smiled slowly, and then we both erupted into laughter. We’d talked about how much fun it would have been to compete in the Siren Nights when we were teenagers.

But the big prince was not moving. He was hanging precariously, and it was obvious, from the moment I laid eyes on him, that he was battling fear.

‘Oh no,’ Quill breathed. ‘I will gut you in your sleep tonight if this tournament humiliates him, Falco.’

The girl twin – Finn – turned around. I frowned, wondering what she was doing. Had she grown frightened too? But she started speaking to Thorne.

‘Sound!’ I snapped, and a servant raced out to tell Lutius, who was nearby controlling the warders.

A moment later one of his wards allowed us to hear what she was saying, sound from the arena projected up into our private booth.

‘… let him free. Let him show me what he can do,’ she said softly, and I heard it, the smile in her lips. ‘Show me.’ It was a taunt. A dare. But it was full to the brim with a kind of yearning I had never heard in my entire life, and I felt something inside me stir awake.

Thorne swung himself up onto the bars, forging ahead despite his fear.

I looked once at Quill, and her expression was just as intrigued as mine must have been. We turned back together.

‘Have the sound stay with her,’ I ordered.

Finn swung to the cage and climbed onto it, facing the soldier inside. ‘You’re bored,’ she murmured to him. ‘You’ve been here all day. Your shoulders are aching. But you believe in it, don’t you? In the mission.’

The soldier said nothing.

‘Who have you lost?’ the girl asked him. ‘Someone very dear to you. Two very dear to you.’ She watched his face and then said, ‘A daughter.’

‘How did she know that?’ Quill demanded, but I didn’t have a clue. ‘Find out if she’s using magic.’

‘Would you like me to avenge her for you?’ Finn asked, so softly her voice was almost a whisper. ‘I can do that for you. I’ll find the end and I’ll put a stop to this, and I’ll do it for your daughter, who shouldn’t have died for love.’

‘You’re no different from the others,’ the man said, and his voice was raw with grief.

‘I am very different. Give me the box and I’ll show you.’

And he did. The man actually gave her the box.

My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t look away from her. She had a silver tongue.

When she fell I actually stood up. But a scream rent the air, her brother’s name from her lips, and the boy didn’t hesitate a second before he caught her with a fierce power. As she rose through the air to be placed back on the plinth, the crowd erupted into screams so loud and so powerful I started to laugh. It was a frenzy of excitement, the touch of joy and family and pride. And I knew what I’d been so uncomfortable with before – the fact that none of the other teams had helped each other.

My laugh ended in a moment though, because I watched the big lumbering brute make his way to Jonah, over the ropes he had not been brave enough to face in the beginning, but did so now in order to lift the unconscious boy in his arms and tenderly carry him to the end.

My laugh ended, and I felt, absurdly, like I might cry for the first time in my adult life. It was nothing. Less than nothing. But they were the only team who refused to leave each other behind.

And I realised how alone I truly was in my blindfolded palace.

In the end it was brought to our attention that no, Finn had not used magic to manipulate the soldier, but yes, Jonah had used magic to save his sister, and it was magic that far outranked his training level.

‘Who cares?’ I demanded, pacing the throne room.

Quillane was seated on her throne, arms folded. ‘He shouldn’t even be capable of that yet.’

‘But he is. Why not use it to our advantage?’

‘Because it’s against the law. If all warders used whatever magic they wanted without the proper training it would be chaos and people would die.’

I couldn’t argue with that. But it made my chest ache to think we might have to disqualify their whole team for such an act of valour.

‘He knew the consequences,’ she pointed out.

‘Yes,’ I agreed softly. ‘And he did it anyway.’

She threw up her hands. ‘What would you have me do?’

‘Nothing. I will do it.’

‘The other contestants will be furious. Everyone will be furious.’

‘What care have I for that? Besides, no one who watched today could be sore we let them through. They were the fastest team, and lost no members.’

‘They’ll think it’s because of Thorne.’

‘Let them think it.’

‘And paint an even bigger target on his back?’

‘He’s a big boy. He can handle it.’ I turned and ordered the prince’s team to be sent for. We would receive them for a meal.

And I would have Finn of Limontae before the night was over.

Chapter 8

Thorne

There was a party on the beach that night. Our feet were bare, our hands full of wine cups. My eyes found stars and sea spray and Finn, always Finn. She danced with quick grace and she laughed all night, for every moment since the moment we won. Not a minute passed without someone trying to speak with her, dance with her, offer her a drink. She took no alcohol and ignored no one. She wanted them all, and they weren’t enough for her, not even an entire beach full of revellers. She was lightning in a bottle, joy squeezed inside a body, and I feared what would happen when she wasn’t anymore.

Our wounds and injuries had all been healed by the royal warders, and I felt full of restless energy. Jonah and Penn stayed by my side. The three of us wandered to the edge of the water, wanting quiet and each other. Something had happened today, during those long minutes of shared struggle. Some gap had been broached, some divide pulled down. Tonight Jonah looked at me without the open hostility, and with only a tender, hesitant approach to friendship.

Finn did not look at me the same way. She looked at me, instead, with something dark and barely contained in her fire-lit gaze. I couldn’t read it, couldn’t understand it, but I could feel it. My eyes followed her without meaning to, watching the way she moved when she danced. It was with blind sensuality and a freedom I heard in her laugh sometimes. A man kissed her on the neck and she smiled, dancing with him and laughing as she teased him. Witnessing the intimacy of the moment startled me, made me unbearably uncomfortable but also painfully thrilled.

‘She’s always like this,’ Jonah consoled me lightly.

‘Where did Isadora disappear to?’

‘I asked her to dance so she ran,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘She’s probably halfway back to Limontae by now.’

I grinned.

Penn practised handstands while I timed how long he could stay upside down.

‘Thorne …’ Jonah hedged and I looked at him. ‘I … Thank you, for not leaving me. For carrying me. I know it wasn’t easy for you.’ I blushed and looked at the sand, then found myself smiling. ‘You weigh the equivalent of a small child. It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.’

He laughed and our eyes met for a split second.

‘They didn’t make us fight,’ Jonah pointed out. ‘Not really. A few grapples here and there.’

I nodded. ‘Perhaps it was designed to see how well we could avoid fighting.’

‘Why would they want to know that?’

‘What are your chances of winning a fight to the death?’

‘I don’t know. It would depend on the opponent. Fifty-fifty I suppose.’

‘What are your chances of survival if you don’t have to fight at all?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘A lot higher. Smartass.’ Jonah shoved me and I let him tackle me to the sand, then I pinned him hard, making him laugh. There was nothing like a good wrestle to bond you with another man.

Penn dived on top of us, accidentally cracking me in the head with his elbow – painfully. ‘Smartass!’ he yelled like a battle cry.

‘That’s not how they’d prepare you in Pirenti, though, is it?’ Jonah asked once we’d recovered.

I shook my head, digging my toes into sand still warm from the day’s hot sun. ‘There’s no use trying to avoid fights in Pirenti.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s impossible.’

Waves crashed behind us.

‘How long will we be on this quest?’ Penn asked abruptly.

‘Don’t know,’ Jonah replied. ‘As long as it takes.’

‘Will we be home in time to feed Griggor?’

‘No, mate. Your grandma will look after him for you.’

Penn’s eyes dropped to the sand. I felt a sudden fear in my chest for him. It wasn’t that I thought him incapable – if anything, today had shown us how brave and capable Penn really was. But his childlike view of the world seemed too innocent to corrupt, and if anything happened to him I didn’t think any of us – myself included – would recover from it.

‘Who’s Griggor?’ I asked.

‘My horse.’

A horse named Griggor. Excellent.

Finn arrived, ephemeral in the flickering bonfire light. She swept Penn to his feet and danced him around the sand in an acrobatic routine they had obviously worked out together. Jonah and I watched quietly.

I cleared my throat. ‘When this ends …’ I tried, gesturing up to her, to her energy and laughter. I had seen her shadow side, and knew it to be far more powerful, a tugging riptide.

‘I will be there,’ Jonah said, firm like a vow or a truth, a fact ingrained inside the very core of who he was.

We were summoned to the palace, and we weren’t given time even to change or don shoes. I was not by nature an angry man, but I was starting to feel that way by the time we were shepherded into the throne room. Doors and windows were open to balconies that overlooked the cliffs and crashing sea. Candles were lit and hung from sandstone pillars. And before us on their thrones sat the Emperor and Empress of Kaya.

Finn, Jonah and Penn were blindfolded; I had not permitted myself to be. Finn wore a flimsy dress made of gold shimmering material. Her hair was tangled, her cheeks flushed, but she looked gorgeous and alive, and I knew Falco thought the same as soon as I saw him lay eyes on her. His gaze raked over her body, unhindered by any sense of shame or propriety.

We sank to the ground in a bow.

‘Prince Thorne, please,’ the Empress exclaimed, coming to meet me. She kissed me on each cheek and then on the backs of my hands as was their custom.

‘Do we keep bowing?’ Finn muttered, unsure.

‘You may rise,’ Falco smiled from his reclined position on the throne. ‘Courage has earned it.’

‘Welcome to Kaya,’ Quillane said to me, her black hair swaying silkily. She was slim and lithe, and with the luminous green eyes she seemed almost cat-like. ‘We are grateful and excited to have you here, Your Majesty.’

‘I am pleased to be here,’ I told her. ‘Thank you for having me. Ava and Ambrose send their regards.’

‘We’re so sorry about the mix up concerning your arrival. It’s mortifying. We meant to receive you, of course, but –’

‘I got drunk and forgot to send the invitation,’ Falco said with a titter of amusement.

Quillane shot him a hard look but he ignored her, eyes sliding back to rest on Finn’s body.

‘Your companions.’

‘This is Jonah, Finn and Penn, from the Cliffs of Limontae.’

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you all,’ Quillane said, helping them rise and kissing each of them. ‘Apologies for the blindfolds, but even we aren’t powerful enough to sidestep that rule.’

‘It’s exciting,’ Finn announced. ‘I can hear a million things at once.’

‘Where is the other – Isadora?’

‘She does as she pleases,’ Finn explained. ‘She’d disappeared into the night before you even came for us.’

We were escorted onto the balcony and seated around a table. A servant was placed at the elbows of Finn, Jonah and Penn, there to help them with anything they wished. Finn asked for food, so her serving lady started feeding her. Finn erupted into laughter and the poor girl accidentally smeared sauce on her chin, which made Finn laugh even more, and by the time she’d been wiped clean we were all laughing, even the servant.

‘Welcome to our lives,’ Falco grinned.

‘I bet you’re very good with your other senses.’

‘Touch is my favourite,’ he agreed, and I couldn’t see Finn’s eyes, but I’d bet they were rolling.

‘So, Prince,’ he turned to me. ‘Why is it that you wish to go on this mission?’

‘For my friends,’ I replied simply.

‘For your friends. I see. And these would be friends you have known for …?’

‘Not long, I admit. But trial by fire has a bonding effect,’ I answered with a crooked smile.

‘It has nothing to do with your aunt and uncle?’ Quillane asked.

‘Of course it does.’

There was a short silence.

‘Do go on,’ Falco implored.

‘Ava is Kayan,’ I pointed out. ‘She is your cousin. She cares deeply about her homeland and her people. She cares even more about the peace treaty. So I am here, in her name and in Ambrose’s, to help you as best I can in finding the end to the bond, for the good of both nations. Take it as an offering of good faith, of peace and of family – for that is what we are: family. I am bound to this mission as you are bound to your country.’

‘You honour us,’ Quillane said softly, ‘as we have not done you, Prince Thorne. I apologise, truly, for the way you have been welcomed to our country, and I thank you for the generosity of your offer. We are the luckier for having you here, to strive in our names.’

I inclined my head.

‘I fear it will be difficult for you,’ she warned. ‘There are those who will stand in your way, not just because you are from Pirenti, but because of what you search for.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what’s more we don’t even know if the rest of the prophecy will lead to anything.’

I nodded politely.

‘Leave him, Quill. He’s not to be deterred,’ Falco said. ‘The boy wants an adventure!’ Which was patently dismissive of everything I’d just said. I wondered if he’d done it on purpose or was really just that boorish. Falco took a long gulp of his wine, sloshing some of it down his shirt. ‘Tell me, Thorne. Is it true that your father used to devour his enemies and keep their bones on a necklace?’

There was horrified silence on the balcony, an abrupt lack of air.

‘We’ve all heard the stories. It sounds excitingly macabre.’

And just like that, I knew that the Emperor of Kaya was not what he seemed. I could smell it. He played a beautifully crafted part; I had spent a life being asked questions like those from people who understood nothing about what they spoke of, and they all shared that same excited awe in the face of what a monster my da had been. But under Falco’s façade there was a deep understanding of the world and its darkness, and I could smell it on him as though he’d bathed in vinegar.

He reeked of cunning.

‘I did not know my da,’ I replied softly. ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Highness.’

Falco sat back, the very corners of his lips twitching in an almost imperceptible way. ‘How dull.’

‘Wine please,’ Finn asked loudly, and I almost laughed again as she was fed the cup.

‘Are we permitted to ask about the tournament?’ Jonah asked.

‘Of course. You’re permitted to ask anything you wish,’ Quillane told him.

‘Doesn’t mean we’ll answer,’ Falco added.

‘It was interestingly designed,’ he pointed out slowly. ‘Thorne and I were speaking earlier about how we found it curious …’

‘That there wasn’t a lot of combat?’ Quillane predicted. ‘You’re right. We had it designed by an architect and then we took out the one-on-one bouts that would have come at the end.’

‘Why, Your Majesty?’

‘Because we are not sending you out into the world to commit acts of violence or shed blood.’ There was something in her tone, and for the first time tonight, I saw the Empress in Quillane.

‘The riddles were designed to torture me, weren’t they?’ Finn asked, and Quillane smiled.

‘I was tortured too. Trust me. I didn’t get a single one during the practice run.’

‘Who wrote them?’

‘They were found in our library.’

‘By old-fashioned people who enjoy reading,’ Falco added with a grimace of distaste.

‘They’re designed to test lateral thinking,’ Quillane explained. ‘Problem solving.’

‘So you’re saying that as long as we have Thorne in our lives then our problems will be always be solved?’ Finn turned towards me, despite being blindfolded, and smiled widely. ‘Did you hear that, Thorne? You’re an essential item.’

The others laughed, but I gazed at her, at her lips, and I smiled slowly.

‘What a conundrum you’ll be in when he returns to the ice,’ Falco pointed out, and I watched as Finn’s smile turned brittle and she asked for more wine.

‘Speaking of which, have you walked the ice caps, Prince Thorne?’

‘I haven’t, Majesty.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because the ice caps are where the berserkers dwell. Anyone else would perish in such conditions.’

He leant forward, lacing his hands together. I met his eyes, which were pale like glittering diamonds, and had not shifted colours all evening. ‘I heard a story once,’ he said softly. ‘It was just a whisper. But it spoke of your father going north into the ice caps and returning a changed man.’

I knew instantly that he must have spies in Pirenti, and that he wanted me to know. ‘My ma would know the answer. She knows many stories of her late husband. If you wish it, I can ask her to write you about him.’

I would do no such thing, and he knew it.

‘I wouldn’t want to unsettle her with memories of the past,’ he conceded.

‘Best not unsettle us with them either, then,’ I murmured, and it was very clear: I had just admonished the Emperor of Kaya, and everyone here knew I had the power to do it.

It was the first moment in my life in which I had used my status for anything, used it against anyone. But if ever I were to apply my position to this world, it would be because I wanted no one alive to think they could use the identity of my parents against me. And as uncomfortable as the awareness made me, a prince of Pirenti still commanded more fear than the highest-ranking Kayan. We had won more wars, after all, despite their magic, despite their warders.

That was when Lutius and another man I hadn’t met arrived. Lutius was the head warder of Kaya and I knew him a little – we had met upon my arrival in Limontae, only we had spoken but one greeting to each other and then I’d been handed off to the army general. I’d been uncomfortable around him then, and I was uncomfortable around him now. It was that damned warder magic I had no problem with intellectually, but seemed instinctively averse to within my body.

‘Greetings, Highnesses. Greetings, Prince Thorne, I am pleased to see you again.’

‘And what of me, you old dog!’ Falco exclaimed. ‘Are you not pleased to see me?’

Lutius rolled his eyes and turned to me. It was patently clear he did not respect the Emperor, and I wondered what game Falco was playing. ‘Well met today,’ Lutius commented. ‘Your performance was impressive.’ As if we were caged bears on display.

The second man was introduced to me as Osric, the only first tier warder still alive. It was explained to me that although Lutius was the head warder of Kaya, he was not the most powerful wielder of the soul magic. I didn’t understand the distinction, nor why someone less powerful would be higher in rank than a first tier warder, but I kept my mouth shut, sensing that any questions I had would only highlight my ignorance.

I caught the scent of deep dislike coming from somewhere around the table and was surprised to track it to Finn. Though she couldn’t see the warders, I was sure she could sense them. And clearly, she did not like them one bit.

‘Go on, Lutius,’ Falco sighed. ‘Explain to the children how your world works and bore them to death as you have done me a thousand times.’

Osric stared at me as Lutius went on to explain the various methods of training novice warders. I tried to listen, but found myself appraising the two warders before me. Unlike Lutius, who was old and leathery from too many years in the sun, Osric was young; I imagined him to be around thirty years of age. He had long white hair like most of the warders I’d seen, but it was not bound in braids or dreadlocks; it hung loose to the small of his back. His eyes were not entirely white; I got the impression they’d once been green, but now the colour had bled away, leaving only streaks that reminded me of falling stars flashing across his gaze. He was watching me without any of the lofty detachment that Lutius wore; instead, his expression was wry and somewhat amused. I got a sense of why he might not be in charge. He had a restless quality, a kind of … defiance in the playfulness of his mouth.

You read me well, a voice said inside my mind and I startled violently. Easy, it warned quickly, and I realised it was Osric, speaking to me inside my head. I’m not supposed to do this, so pretend you’re listening to Lutius.

I immediately moved my eyes back to the older warder and tried to focus on what he was saying.

‘… a rigid discipline, without which we would have no grasp of our own capabilities …’

He’s dull, but we are not all that way. His voice in my mind was rich and gentle, and I realised I’d never imagined the kind of power he could wield.

Only those trained to do so can understand how to wield the soul power, but there are many different kinds of power, Prince Thorne, and you wield a great deal of your own.

He could read my thoughts?

When you think them as clearly as that I can.

I glanced across the table to see that he was grinning. With a start I realised that everyone was staring at me expectantly.

Tell them you agree.

Clearing my throat, I nodded. ‘I agree.’

Lutius and Quillane both smiled, and I looked at Osric gratefully. In my head I tried to form a question. With what did I just agree?

No idea, he replied mildly. But that’s usually the safest answer since it’s the only thing they wish to hear. Then he laughed, and it was such an odd sensation in my head that I clenched my jaw with unease. It felt wrong all over my skin, having his magic inside me.

Forgive me, he said quickly. You are unaccustomed to this. I will stop now. And just like that he was gone from my head.

Lutius wrapped up his explanation of warder magic and I felt bad for having missed the entire thing.

‘My powers of deduction are telling me that someone new has arrived!’ Finn cried, rubbing her temples as though from telepathy. Jonah snorted his drink onto the hand of his poor servant and then apologised profusely.

‘Forgive us,’ Quillane said with a soft laugh. She made the introductions.

‘I know this one,’ Lutius said when she came to Jonah. ‘He’s one of mine, though he behaved very poorly today.’

‘He did not!’ Penn exclaimed.

‘He should never have wielded magic he is untrained in,’ Lutius informed him. ‘It was foolish and unbecoming.’

‘Penn, it’s –’ Jonah tried, but Penn stood so quickly his chair fell back to clash against the ground.

‘He didn’t!’ the boy roared, and I could see him growing enraged. His fists clenched and he hit them onto the wooden table loudly. ‘That’s Jonah! You don’t talk about him like that!’

Finn tried to get up, but she couldn’t see where she was and bumped her hip sharply.

‘Penn, it’s all right, I –’ Jonah said again but Penn let out a moan that was, abruptly, full of despair. It struck out and into all of us, like the ache of all his pain put into one sound.

I went to him, turning him to face me. Without permission, I removed his blindfold and looked into his eyes. They were full of frustrated tears. ‘Penn,’ I said softly. ‘I need your help. Can you tell me how many flagstones are on this balcony floor?’

His moan cut off and he looked at me, taking me in. He wiped his eyes impatiently, looking concerned. ‘Of course,’ he uttered. ‘Of course I’ll help you. Don’t worry, Thorne.’ And then he dropped to his knees and started counting the stones, and I felt sick in my guts for having manipulated him so, but in this moment I knew also that I loved him as kin, and would do so for the rest of my life.

There was silence around the table as I sat slowly. We didn’t offer an explanation. Jonah and Finn remained silent, and I knew they would never apologise for Penn, so I wouldn’t either.

Quillane looked pained by the exchange and was watching Penn worriedly. Falco was expressionless and watched me.

‘His mind is addled,’ Lutius said blankly.

‘No,’ Finn snapped, and I could scent her rage. ‘It is clear as day and full of beauty.’ And then, ‘I would never expect a warder to understand complexity.’

I felt a momentary fear slice through me. Somehow Falco correctly interpreted it. ‘Don’t worry, Prince,’ he told me. ‘We don’t punish words or thoughts in this country. Finn can say whatever she wants, and we just might love her for it.’

As Finn blushed – Finn, the girl who was never rattled by anyone – I wondered how no one else had picked that Falco was all an act. He was too smart, too calculated. Perhaps people only saw what they expected to.

‘I don’t understand why Jonah’s magic wasn’t permitted,’ I admitted. ‘He was told upon entry that he could use the power he knew.’

Lutius considered me. ‘Would you like to see something, Highness? It might help you to understand.’

I nodded.

Lutius called for two novices to be brought in. They were both blindfolded and he explained that they were in their fifth year of training, personal mentees, students who shadowed him. I didn’t know how they both knew what to do – probably mind speak – but the eyes of both turned white and their skin glowed a very faint blue as if their whole body was covered in a bruise.

And then I wasn’t looking at them anymore, any of them. Because the chair I sat upon started rising in the air. I gripped its edges with a shock of fear. A sound left my mouth and I gazed around in astonishment. Up I flew, high up into the air, the ground below me growing smaller and smaller. I could feel the air against my face, colder and harsher as I rose, and my sense of balance started to fail until I knew I would fall. A deep terror awoke inside me and I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself to remain calm. Sweat beaded and trickled down my face, and my guts heaved.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, I was back on the ground and I blinked, stunned, to find that Finn was standing and yelling at Lutius. ‘Let him go!’ she raged. ‘Stop this!’

I blinked, realising there were tears on my cheeks. Well. Great. This was the most mortifyingly humiliating moment of my life. I must have been making some Gods-awful sounds if they alerted Finn to my fear. The students’ eyes returned to normal and they looked terrified.

‘Finn, it’s all right,’ I told her quickly. ‘I’m fine.’

She was physically trembling as she sat down and gripped the edge of the table with white knuckles.

‘Forgive me,’ Lutius said emotionlessly. ‘I had no idea he was so affected by heights.’

Falco gave a titter of amusement, but I didn’t think it was real. I couldn’t smell any amusement on him.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘An illusion, Majesty,’ Osric told me.

‘We’re so sorry,’ one of the novices whispered to me. He reeked as though he thought I would rise up and devour him this very instant.

‘It’s all right,’ I assured him quickly. ‘I just … We weren’t in the air?’

‘No, Highness,’ Lutius said. ‘They simply made you think you were.’

‘The wind on my face and the loss of balance … You thought of everything.’

Lutius dismissed them and they retreated from the balcony. ‘They are currently learning illusory coercions.’

‘So would they really be able to lift us off the ground?’

‘After such a regrettable fiasco, we come to the point I wished to make.’ He looked at Jonah, who had remained quiet in his blindfold. ‘It is far easier to manipulate a human mind than to manipulate physical matter. So no,’ Lutius said. ‘They would not be able to move you through the air. Only Osric has the kind of strength for that.’

I looked at Osric, who flashed me a lazy smile. I was now more certain than ever of why he wasn’t in charge. He wasn’t just restless – he was arrogant, too.

The implication hit, and we all turned as one to look at Jonah.

‘A fourth year novice with as much power as the strongest warder in the world,’ Falco pointed out. ‘Is that really what we’re to assume here?’

‘It’s not like that,’ Jonah said hurriedly. ‘I thought Finn would die if she fell and I just … I didn’t think.’

‘A true point,’ Quillane said. ‘He acted to save his kin. He will not be punished for it, as he caused harm to no one.’ And that seemed to be the end of the discussion, despite it being hardly the point. I didn’t think it would be as simple for Jonah when he got back to training though. Lutius was gazing at him with a kind of rapt attention.

‘I’m weary,’ the Empress added. ‘Forgive me, but I think we had best all get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day – for the four of you, especially.’

As we went to leave, Penn shook his head. ‘I’ve not finished counting!’

I looked at Quillane and Falco. ‘I would stay with him while he counts, with your permission?’

‘I will remain also,’ Osric offered. ‘I wish to speak with the prince.’

Falco threw his empty cup to the ground. ‘I don’t care what you lot do! I’m off to find entertainment!’ He was laying it on a bit thick now. Maybe he really was drunk.

Quillane murmured, ‘Of course. I will have guards escort you home when you are ready. Unless the four of you would like to stay in the palace? It would be our honour.’

‘No thank you,’ Finn said crisply. She sank into a curtsey that very nearly cracked her head open on the table in her blindness. She and Jonah were escorted away and I moved to wait near where Penn was counting. Osric joined me quietly, looking out at the sea.

‘Your mind is very receptive to breaking the rules,’ he pointed out with a grin. ‘Do you like misbehaving, Majesty?’

I glanced at him, but didn’t bother responding as it was such a stupid question. Osric seemed to find my silence funny. I understood within the wash of his gaze that he liked the company of men and wanted the company of me.

‘How long do you think you’ll be able to keep your secret?’ Osric asked me abruptly.

I knew he was baiting me, so I said nothing.

‘I met your father once,’ he said suddenly.

I frowned, not understanding how he could have been old enough to.

‘I am much older than I look,’ he assured me, dipping into my head again.

I watched his strange eyes and his refined face. I supposed a part of me found him attractive. But I disliked his arrogance.

‘I use the term loosely, because we didn’t actually speak. But we stood about this close, and we looked into each other’s eyes. Just like this, in fact.’

I didn’t look away. I dreaded what was to come, the words that were circling, readying themselves to swoop.

His voice completely toneless, Osric said, ‘I had just watched him kill a friend of mine. Another warder I’d trained with all my life. I was full of … disbelief. That’s all I can define it as. No one was supposed to be able to kill warders, even if we were young and not yet finished our training. But the first prince of Pirenti was a law unto himself on that battlefield. I felt in him the fury of a thousand years of bloodshed, could taste his need for violence. It was so seductive that it almost overcame me. I wanted to fight him, kill him, but we were losing the battle and a comrade pulled me away before I could get myself slaughtered by the slaughterman. He already bore three Marks that day. My friend would have been his fourth.’

He stopped, and there was silence but for the crashing of the waves on the cliffs below and the soft counting of a young boy.

‘Tell me, son of Thorne – do you bear any Marks?’

I felt anger and shame, equally. ‘Do you think it would be permitted for me to be here if I did?’

He said nothing, simply gazed at me with those unsettling eyes.

‘No one in Pirenti has been given a Mark for twenty years,’ I told him, but he remained silent. I felt heavy with the weight of it, of my family, and I felt heaviest with the shame of it.

But somewhere deep inside me bloomed something else. Something sinister and frightening. A sick, misplaced kind of pride.

I was supposed to hate him, and I did. I was supposed to fear him, and I did. But I would be branding my soul with lies if I did not admit to myself that I was also a little bit thrilled by my da’s strength. No one in the world had been able to kill him, even when an entire country was out for his blood. No one could defeat him except my mother, and that had been simply because he’d loved her. I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t know what it meant that I liked it.

Forcing it all back into the dark corner of my soul, I swallowed and said, ‘You are right to be angry. Right to hate me. I can only apologise for the blood shed by my people – I cannot erase it.’

Osric’s response surprised me. ‘You have a pure heart, Thorne. A kind heart. You must fight that blood of yours with everything you have.’

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I felt exhausted by the simple idea of this.

‘I can read you,’ he reminded me. ‘I know all that you are. If I did not, I might make an embarrassing blunder and try to kiss you. But then again, if I did not know all that you are, I would not want you like I do.’

I didn’t know what to say in the face of such a bizarrely honest statement, so I said nothing. He clapped me on the shoulder and strode away.

Sliding to the ground, I waited for Penn, loving the sound of his counting. It was so comforting that I could have fallen asleep and been washed away into the night. It had been such a long day I could hardly believe it.

‘There are three hundred and eighty-three stones in this section of the balcony, Thorne,’ he told me some time later.

I looked into his deep brown eyes and said, ‘Thank you, my friend.’

As we were being escorted through the palace I spotted Emperor Falco leaning lazily against a statue in the entrance hall. Penn and I paused as he dismissed the servants.

‘You are curious to me, Thorne of Araan,’ Falco murmured, and I knew the pretence to be gone. For whatever reason, I stood now before the true Emperor of Kaya.

‘It’s because I see you, and you can feel that,’ I told him simply.

‘What do you see?’ he asked, and I was abruptly hit with the scent of grief and rage and yearning so strong my knees nearly buckled.

I swallowed, wanting to give him the truth, knowing that this moment deserved it. ‘I see a man cowed by fear, and I know there must be a reason for all of this because you are too smart for it to be otherwise, but I can’t help feeling deeply sad that you feel your life must be this way.’

There was silence in the stone corridor. We stared at each other, and for the first time I saw his eyes shift colour. They changed, unsettlingly, to a vibrant crimson shade. I had a momentary awareness that this was his true colour, his true self, the shade of blood. It reminded me of my beast.

‘I feel deeply sad about it too,’ Falco said with a broken laugh. And then he shocked me by stepping forward and pulling me into an embrace. ‘Goodnight, brother,’ he spoke into my ear, and then he was gone, swift like a shadow.

Penn and I walked home in silence. There were people all about, and some recognised me, but we kept a quick pace and our eyes remained down. I was grateful for his presence.

And then, strangely, we met Finn on the street. She was dressed in a cloak and stopped before us, tilting her head in such a way that I knew she knew. She knew I felt ancient and weary of the world. Penn threw his arms around her, and while she hugged him she looked over his shoulder at me.

‘It’s nearly over,’ she consoled gently. ‘And when you wake you get to start a whole new one.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve been summoned by the palace.’

I froze.

‘Again?’ Penn asked quizzically. ‘Are we all going back?’

‘No, just me.’

I didn’t know what to do, what to say. Nothing could make its way out of the burning mess inside me.

‘Penn,’ I murmured. ‘Can you make it back to the inn without me? It’s on this street, down another block.’

He nodded and without meeting our eyes he sprinted off to find Jonah.

Finn started walking and I fell into step beside her. ‘I’ll escort you,’ I felt the need to explain in a rough voice.

She nodded.

Our footsteps sounded around us. I could hear people shouting with distant fun. We remained silent, and it was the first time I’d known Finn not to want to break the quiet.

‘What is it that you want?’ I asked.

‘I told you. Adventure. Fun. Entertainment.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I’m bored.’

‘But why?’

We approached the palace.

‘You sound like Penn. I just want to see if I can get him to look me in the eyes,’ she declared with a wicked grin. But for the first time since I’d met her I could see behind the smile to the unhappiness, and it startled me so much that I felt as though my chest was opening up.

‘It’s dangerous, this game,’ I warned her.

‘The best games are.’

‘And if you lose?’

‘Then we bond.’ She shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t that be an adventure.’

The steps started before us and we climbed them slowly. I wanted to stop time, and had the strangest sense that she wanted the same thing.

‘I’m kidding,’ she said. ‘I won’t bond with him. Or with anyone.’

‘Why?’

‘And even if I did, we’re about to find the end to the bond, so I’ll be able to reverse it anyway.’

‘He’s a buffoon.’

‘Yes. But I’ll bet he’s fun.’

We reached the top of the steps where the guards waited. ‘You don’t need to do this, Finn.’

‘I do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I can’t breathe.’ As she looked at me in the dark I felt a moment of purest understanding.

‘All right. I’ll wait for you.’

‘Please don’t,’ she said as she went up into the palace.

I walked to the bottom of the steps and sat down to wait, for as long as it took.

Falco

As Quill and I walked to our chambers, she paused and in the flickering light looked dangerous.

‘You are taken with her. But be careful, Falco. Whatever you do, don’t look into her eyes.’

And I nodded, because she was right. If you were so taken with someone from such a distance, after never having spoken a word to her, chances were that woman was your bondmate.

Finn

I was blindfolded and then guided into the palace to the royal chamber. I could smell the difference, as it was filled with the scent of patchouli, and the light dimmed.

‘I apologise for the blindfold,’ I heard his honeyed voice say.

‘Your Empress has already apologised for it once this night. There’s no need for a second.’

I wanted to touch his skin and feel the weight of his heart. I was alive with the excitement of what I was doing, with the strangeness of it all. ‘My senses aren’t as good as yours. Only my eyes. They see a lot.’

‘Then I’m crippling you right now, aren’t I?’

I nodded, reaching out. He took the bait, walked right into the trap, and took my hand. It was a lie: my eyes paled in comparison to my touch; I felt everything. His warm, smooth skin met mine and I was instantly assailed with a cold agony. It lasted only the briefest of instances, but it was there, like shock and whimsy, like a kernel of rotten fruit inside him, surrounded by the wings of brilliant creatures sweeping him away to places I had never imagined could exist. It was these wings that made me decide.

‘I’m taking off my blindfold,’ I told him, and knew he wouldn’t stop me. I could feel his eagerness.

‘It’s forbidden,’ he told me. ‘But I wouldn’t deny you for all the world, my Silver Tongue.’

So I took off my blindfold, and I looked into the forbidden eyes of the Emperor, and knew them to be incredibly beautiful and incredibly sad, and we did not bond.

We did not bond.

I think he was more shocked than I. He crossed to the sideboard and poured us wine, but I put mine down. ‘When I drink alcohol, things turn bad.’

He drank two whole glasses in quick succession, and I sat tiredly on the edge of the bed, my excitement surprisingly fleeting.

‘You knew I would call you here.’

‘I did.’

‘When did you meet the Prince of Pirenti?’

‘Several days ago.’

He paused, surprised. ‘Days? But you fought for each other. Would fall for each other.’

I didn’t reply, for I had no explanation.

Falco knelt before me, running his hands over my legs, and there was his cold, cold heart again, and it made me want to weep.

This was not the fun I had come in search of, not even remotely.

‘You are excited to lie with the Emperor of Kaya?’ he asked woodenly.

‘No.’ I had been, but not anymore. ‘I don’t like men who are drunk. I like men who are strong and smart and brave.’

Falco nodded wearily, as though this made perfect sense to him.

The quiet had begun to creep in. It set me to panic, an uncanny sensation of flailing through the air without a single thing to ground me. ‘But you know fun and pleasure, don’t you?’ I asked him. ‘You love women and wine and you love to have adventures.’ And you have wings inside.

‘The same adventure over and over again.’

‘But an adventure. You don’t stand still. You laugh.’

Falco stood up and drew me to my feet. ‘You’re beautiful and clever and desperate,’ he told me. ‘I am forbidden to bond, but I wish that we had, Finn of Limontae. Because I laugh, but my life is empty.’

I kissed him, hard and quick. And then I left, because I was tired of people asking me for things I didn’t possess and to feel his lips was like peering through a veil to find a million truths I’d never expected.

He was waiting for me on the bottom step. Big and soft, a gentle beast.

‘Thorne,’ I murmured, and he turned to watch me descend, his eyes illuminated by the lights from within the palace.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. I nodded and we started walking.

‘If you could be any animal, what would it be?’

He blinked. Didn’t answer for a long time. ‘I’m animal enough.’

‘I’d be a fish,’ I told him. ‘Did you know they don’t have memories? I’d live in salt, and I wouldn’t remember a thing.’

‘So how would you remember to love Jonah and Penn?’

‘I wouldn’t need to remember. I just would.’

‘And what if Jonah died?’ Thorne asked bluntly. ‘He wouldn’t exist anymore, without you to remember him.’

This was hurting inside my chest. I regretted bringing it up. I regretted everything. ‘You love a man you don’t remember,’ I pointed out.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s not love.’

I didn’t know how to reply. Memories were ruin.

‘I made love to him,’ I lied, wanting to hurt him.

Thorne didn’t respond. Perhaps it was foolish to think he’d care about me being with another man.

Shaking my head, I muttered, ‘You look at me with this thing in your eyes, as though you think me the worst kind of person. But there’s something else in there too. Some wish for me to be better. And it’s worse, because I can’t live up to it.’

Still he said nothing.

‘I feel sorry for you. You’re alone. There’s this big, sad ache behind your eyes.’

‘Stop,’ he murmured.

‘It’s true!’ I seized on his reaction. ‘You bore me and I annoy you, so whatever this misguided sense of duty is – it isn’t necessary.’

‘I’m simply escorting you home,’ he said quietly.

‘I don’t want you to!’ I snarled. ‘You’re crippled with fear and unaware of who you are! You’re a lost little boy, Thorne. I pity you.’

The Prince of Pirenti stopped walking and looked at me. ‘You know how to spot a person’s weakness and use it. You strike to the bone, to the heart. It’s your gift, Finn. And you’ve picked mine. I am crippled with fear and I don’t know who I am. But I see you for everything that you are, and I won’t be frightened of you or your cruel tongue.’

I strode forward, furious and terrified.

He took my hand. ‘Don’t.’ Looked into my eyes. ‘Don’t leave.’

And I knew that he wasn’t talking about now, about me walking away down the street. He was talking about my joy, my light, all the life that was in me.

‘It always leaves,’ I told him truthfully.

When we got back to the inn Jonah drained me of the rot so that I could sleep. But there was still screaming behind my eyes, and I didn’t know how it would ever stop.

Chapter 9

Thorne

It must have been close to dawn when I felt myself start awake at the shake of cold hands. I’d barely been in bed for a few hours and felt horribly groggy.

Blinking, I peered through the grey pre-dawn light to see yellow eyes staring down at me.

‘Get up. We’re leaving,’ Finn said.

‘Now?’ I mumbled. ‘Why?’

‘To get a start on the other teams.’

Jonah and Penn were both grumbling as they dragged themselves out of bed. Was I the only one who found this extremely odd?

I sat up and watched Finn. She was darting around the room, shoving items into her brother’s pack for him, and there was something completely manic about her movements.

‘Have you slept?’ I asked.

A quick shake of her head, the flash of a disarming smile. ‘Who wants to waste time with sleep?’

Rather than arguing, I hauled myself out of bed and pulled on my shirt. Falco and Quillane were going to see all the teams off together at a reasonable hour, but apparently Finn had decided we weren’t going to participate in that. I wondered if it was because of what had happened between her and the Emperor. She’d told me they’d made love, but I’d smelt the lie as easily as I’d scented the lack of sex on her skin. I had no idea why she’d lied about it, but for some reason the thought of her lying to me at all raked in a thoroughly unpleasant way. Although, I supposed, the thought of her actually making love to him felt a lot worse. I was not about to try and unpack why that was; instead, I blamed it entirely on my beast and his embarrassing appetites.

The early morning was cool, but the sandstone of the city retained so much heat from the sun that it was like walking on a pleasant bed of coals.

‘Where’s Isadora?’ Jonah asked.

‘How should I know?’ Finn replied waspishly.

‘We can’t leave without her.’ He stopped on the quiet street, folding his arms.

Finn spread her hands. ‘She didn’t bother telling us where she disappeared to, so why should we wait? She’s not even part of the group. Not really.’

‘Finn. Come on.’ The tone of Jonah’s voice was so thoroughly exasperated that Finn sighed. Even she knew she was being ungenerous.

‘Fine. We’ll all stand around and waste the advantage because my desperate brother thinks he’s got a shot at sharing his sleeping roll with the knife-happy, albino psychopath.’

‘Wow, that’s lovely.’

I was taking a breath as they argued and so I caught the whiff of cold calm approaching in the dark. ‘No need,’ I told them, just as Isadora appeared silently before us, her white hair and skin glinting. She didn’t say anything, but I imagined she must have heard Finn’s cruel words.

‘How did you know where we were?’ Jonah asked her, surprised.

Isadora only shrugged, and then she led the way towards the south gate. The rest of us glanced at each other, then followed. The mysteries of Isadora were many. I watched the wraith-like creature before me and considered how I had never once smelt an emotion on her. Only a kind of calm … lack. Which was weird. Perhaps I just hadn’t been paying enough attention to her.

After the tournament the five fastest teams had been given the piece of prophecy and a map, plus a coin purse for the journey. The first piece of the prophecy only read:

First to south, and then beyond.

‘How can you go beyond south?’ Jonah wondered aloud.

‘More bloody riddles,’ Finn groaned. ‘How is that supposed to help?’

‘The southernmost tip of the country – and indeed the world – lies in Querida, which, if I have my information correct, belongs now to the Sparrow’s warriors, and has done for the last eight years. Since they’re a rebel force intent on bringing down Falco and Quillane’s rule, then they’re going to make it very difficult for us if they know from where we’ve been sent.’

They all stared at me.

‘How come you know so much about it?’ Finn asked suspiciously.

I sighed. ‘It’s my job.’

‘Well he’s right,’ Jonah agreed. ‘So what do we do?’

‘How is it even a question?’ Finn asked. ‘The instructions say to go south, so we go south.’

‘Into a hornets’ nest?’ I pointed out.

She smiled sweetly at me. ‘You needn’t worry, Majesty – I’ll protect you if we come to any danger.’

I frowned. ‘You think it wise to charge into a situation without at least discussing it first?’

‘Who said anything about wise?’ She made a face of distaste.

‘You talk in circles,’ Isadora told us bluntly. ‘We vote.’

‘Fair enough,’ Jonah agreed. ‘Those who think we should go south into Querida?’

Finn’s hand shot into the air, followed by her second hand, and then she stood on tip toes to make her reach even higher, bouncing up and down with excitement. Penn copied her, and the pair of them looked ridiculous. I couldn’t help but laugh. Isadora flicked a lazy hand into the air, which was followed by Jonah’s ‘aye’.

With a shrug, I nodded. ‘I never said we shouldn’t. I just wanted to discuss it.’

To which Finn promptly replied, ‘And that, our big gentle giant, is why you are such a bore.’

We exited through Sancia’s outer wall to find ourselves on a long, flat plane, glowing as the sun rose over it. In the distance was Mount Barraka, and beyond it the rock region of Ora, which we would have to travel through to get to Querida.

As we walked, I noticed that Penn grew less and less exuberant, and with each passing stride he began to turn and look over his shoulder.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jonah asked him when he finally stopped and wouldn’t walk any further.

‘Griggor,’ Penn replied.

‘He’s fine, mate. Your grandma loves him.’

Penn continued on, but it was plainly obvious that he was unsettled.

‘I’m bored,’ Finn announced, after glancing at him for the tenth time in a few seconds. ‘I think it’s time for a story.’

Penn’s ears immediately pricked up and he looked at Finn with reluctant interest.

‘Have you heard the tale of Fenrir the Wolf?’ she asked him, and I felt my own interest pique. This was an ancient Pirenti fable.

Penn shook his head.

‘Well then, you’re in for a treat, my tiny friend. A million, trillion years ago, deep in the darkest forest there ever was, sat the oldest, wisest woman in the world –’

‘Finn,’ Jonah laughed.

‘What?’

‘Try exaggerating a bit more – we’re too stupid to get the point otherwise.’

‘Hyperbole is a legitimate storytelling tool,’ she snapped. ‘Anyway. The wise woman had the ability to see the way the world would come to be. She spoke of the birth of a creature, and she named him Fenrir the moon-snatcher. She said that at the very end of the world he would slay the god of war by devouring him, and so named him, also, the beast of slaughter.’

Finn found her stride and I felt something almost otherworldly come over me then. As she weaved the tale she began to act it out, her long limbs making a slow kind of hypnotic dance that conjured precisely what she described with words. I had never seen anything like it, and didn’t dare to blink as I watched her.

‘As had been foretold, Fenrir was born into the world. He was not a monster – but he was terrible, and he was beautiful, for he was the mightiest of wolves. All those in the land knew him for what he was – a beast, destined to kill the beloved war god who had kept them safe for all eternity. So the gods and goddesses came together as one to plan the moon-snatcher’s capture.’

Finn danced the birth of the wolf, and the fear of those watching, and she danced the divine beings as they drew forth and created two fetters, each of varying strength. She danced Fenrir growing larger and stronger with every day, and the moment when the only god brave enough to approach him – Tyr – took the first fetter to him and asked him to wear it.

‘Fenrir knew the fetter to be weaker than he, so he allowed it, and with one mighty kick he broke free of it. This frightened the gods, and they had Tyr bring him the second, twice as strong. Tyr told him that if he tried his strength with this second fetter, he would earn the love of the people, and not be so hated by all. So the lonely Fenrir did so, and he broke free with a measure of great and unrivalled strength.’

With a swift turn on the balls of her feet, Finn jumped and twisted and mimed casting off heavy shackles, so beautifully that I imagined I could see the chains scattering as far as the eye could track.

Jonah and Penn were watching her closely, but not with the kind of awe that would infer she had never done this before. No, it seemed they knew well her skills at storytelling. Isadora was witnessing it expressionlessly, but there was a certain interest in her red eyes that I had not glimpsed before.

‘The gods feared they were destined to perish at Fenrir’s hands so they sent for the iron god to create them an unbreakable third fetter. Tyr once again asked Fenrir to wear it, but the wolf was growing wary now. He saw the fetter for its strength, and knew he could not beat it, so he asked for a guarantee. He would put it on, but if he could not break free it would mean that he could not be such a threat as the gods believed. Therefore he should be let free. They agreed, but Fenrir wanted someone to put their hand between the sharp teeth of his jaws as the deal was carried out – insurance against treachery. Tyr was the only one brave enough to do so. Fenrir fought against the bindings but they only grew stronger, and he could not break them. ‘I have failed, and thus you are to set me free,’ he announced. But the gods did no such thing. They laughed at him, and so Fenrir bit Tyr’s hand from his wrist and was given the ultimate punishment. The gods placed a sword into the wolf’s wide jaws, propping them perpetually open, despite Fenrir’s heart-wrenching howls of despair and agony. They left that sword in for the rest of eternity, a punishment for his very existence.’

There was an abrupt, cold silence as Finn acted out that final, depressing end, then grew still, returning to her body as though she was only suddenly becoming a girl once more.

In my mind and my heart I saw the world’s end as my people believed it would happen one day: as one son to devour the sun, the second son to devour the moon, as the disappearance of all the stars from the sky and the mighty ice mountain falling. I saw the end of Finn’s tale, when everything would crumble and Fenrir’s sword would finally snap, freeing him from torment, freeing him to run forth and devour the war god in the final battle.

‘Why didn’t they just kill him?’ It was Isadora, surprisingly, who startled us with her soft voice.

Finn turned her yellow eyes to the other woman. ‘The gods respected the earth too much to defile it with the wolf’s blood, even if it meant their deaths.’

‘What happened in the end?’ Penn asked.

‘The end has not yet found us,’ Finn replied, and then she smiled, and it was slow and gentle, and it was a smile I had never seen her wear. ‘But I know he will get free.’

As a boy, I was taught to fear the moon-snatcher’s liberation, but to hear the words on Finn’s lips this morning seemed as though she longed for it more than anything. Something caught inside me, like the sudden existence of something new. An idea, the ghost of one. Goosebumps rose on my skin.

‘He was a monster,’ I said softly. ‘Would that his binding last forever.’

Finn looked at me, and there was no surprise in her eyes, none whatsoever. She understood completely, and in that moment I thought she understood me completely. ‘What did he do wrong?’ she asked. ‘They broke a vow; he broke none. He was only born.’

We walked in silence until afternoon found us. I thought of nothing but the wolf and his perpetual agony. I thought of Finn. I had believed her ignorant and childish, but she was not. She understood truths hidden from the rest of the world, and saw deeper than the bone. She heard stories and looked further than anyone wanted her to look. But therein lay the problem. These were stories to her. Finn had never seen a beast, not a real one. She had never feared the wolf because she had never encountered him.

But I caged the beast because I knew what most didn’t: that he had the strength – and the will – to devour not only the war god, but the whole world.

‘How do you know that story?’ I asked, too long after the moment had passed for it not to be strange.

‘Oh – didn’t I mention? Spying on the foreign kingdom.’

My eyebrows arched.

‘We plebs do have a library, you know. You aren’t the only one interested in foreign culture,’ Finn muttered with a careless shrug. She was already onto the next thrill, cartwheeling alongside Penn and having Jonah judge who had the better form.

I wondered if she knew what she’d just done to me. What she’d just made me question. The kernel at the heart of my existence. I wondered if she knew how close I had come to letting it all shift, before snatching my certainties back to my chest and holding them tight.

She looked at me only once during the rest of the day. And in that look I saw that she knew very well what she’d done.

We spent our first night on the rocky coast, trying to find boulders big enough to shelter against the screeching wind. Jonah made a blue fire that was so warm we couldn’t sit too close. Then he played his gita and sang. Finn harmonised with him every now and then and the moment was sweet, for I had been raised by an uncle who never stopped singing, and this made me feel very at home.

When the song was over, Jonah kept plucking idly away, while Finn turned to Isadora. ‘I think enough’s enough, don’t you? I want to know where you came from.’

Isadora said nothing, but stared into the fire.

‘Shall we guess, then?’ Finn flung her arms dramatically. ‘I think you’re a sea siren, come upon land to guide men to their watery deaths.’

And, miraculously, it made Isadora smile.

‘A lake sorceress,’ Jonah agreed more softly.

‘An Ice Queen,’ I suggested.

‘A snowflake,’ Penn hedged.

‘How glamorous,’ she replied, ‘to be any such things. I am merely an orphan from the streets.’

‘How did you lose your parents?’ Finn asked.

‘How would you imagine I lost them, if I am driven to such a quest?’

‘Then you are as bound to break the bond as the rest of us.’

Say it, I told myself. Tell them now. But I didn’t. I kept silent, guilt making a shell of me.

I thought, for the first time, about what this meant. I’d been sent on a royal cause with an order given me by my King. But what was it for? He had given me no reason, no explanation. When sitting before me was a girl whose only reason in life was to save her da from a pitiful, slow death. It seemed nobler and better than anything I had ever set my mind to.

As the fire crackled I stared into its blue depths and I thought about, not for the first time in my life, what it truly meant to be a prince. My answer, as always, was that I didn’t know, but that I was surely not going to be worthy of it.

The others went to sleep huddled around the flames, but I couldn’t switch my mind off. At one point very late I sat up, needing to move away from the heat. My eyes, without my permission, went to where she was lying in between Jonah and Penn. Her hand was resting on Penn’s back, making very small circles to comfort him as he murmured in his sleep. It was not something I wanted to see, because it opened something inside; it made me ache.

Rising quickly, I picked my way over the rocks until I’d climbed a very large one and stood atop it, gazing out at the ocean. There was no wind at all now, strangely – the air was dead still. Between the rocks were deep holes and fissures, easy to slip into and deep enough to kill.

My mind went to Ma, as it did most nights, wondering how she was, hoping Howl was taking good enough care of her but knowing, as always, how no one could take good enough care of her when she had the memory of my da to compare them to. I had never known a moment of life without her catastrophic grief permeating our lives. Twenty years on, and it was still as though the wound had been inflicted yesterday. A part of me hated her for it, for the weakness of this, but that part was buried deep beneath a mound of shame, for Roselyn of Baath was the gentlest, sweetest creature who had ever lived, and anyone broken enough to hate her was a beast so far gone he had no hope of returning.

I tried to imagine them together, but failed. Da was so unknown to me that I couldn’t even conjure the briefest fantasy of him.

I smelt Finn before I heard her footfall. My whole body tensed, and I kept my eyes straight ahead.

‘Are you really so surprised that I would know one of your myths?’ she asked softly. ‘You must think us very uneducated in Kaya.’

I shook my head.

‘You’re so surprised you can’t sleep.’

I shot her a look.

‘Surely I can’t have been the first person to ever think of it that way,’ she pressed.

‘I wasn’t raised in the palace. The opinions I have heard aren’t about the moon-snatcher.’

‘And yet somehow you seem to know that everyone in your country fears him,’ she murmured idly. ‘You know it so well it is ingrained in your bones, berserker prince.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why? It’s what you are.’

‘And shall I call you failed warder?’ I snapped. The sound of my voice echoed between us and off the rock faces around us. I felt mortified at the rudeness.

‘If you want,’ she said, unbothered, and I bit off the apology I’d been about to make.

Unbothered. As always. What could I possibly say that could upset her? Was there anything? I supposed that if someone didn’t care about anything, then nothing would affect her. The notion aggravated me, for some reason.

‘How did you know?’ I asked abruptly. ‘That I was a berserker.’

‘Your eyes shifted red and you wanted to murder a whole tavern. It’s not the hardest conclusion to come to.’

‘No one else realised it. It isn’t a thing Kayans would ever know to recognise. Not anymore. But you did.’

I turned to look at her for the first time. It was dark, but her yellow eyes were glowing like a wildcat’s.

‘How, Finn?’ I pressed.

Her teeth clenched together, and I saw her eyes dart away as she tried to think of a lie. I would let her, if she truly needed to. I was beginning to understand the inexplicable truth that I would let her have or do anything she wanted.

But she looked up at me and said, ‘When our skin touches I can feel your heart.’

I stared at her.

‘I can feel every heart.’ She shook her head, struggling with the explanation. ‘The truths they hold inside them. The weight of them, or … the burden.’

All the words in my mouth evaporated. The beast inside me lifted his face to the moon and in a moment of purest understanding he let out a long howl. Because he knew, just as I did, how wrong I’d been. The burden of another person’s pain was not a burden anyone should ever bear. Feeling the pain of every person you ever touched was too much. And burden, as I had come to understand at a young age, had a power unlike any to disfigure a soul.

‘Don’t ask me,’ Finn said.

With difficulty, I swallowed. ‘Ask you what?’

‘What your heart feels like.’ Her eyes looked huge in the moonlight. ‘I don’t know how to answer.’

‘I would never ask that. I only …’

‘What?’ There was something wary in her voice.

‘I only wanted to say that I misjudged you, and that I am sorry for the unkindness I’ve shown you since we met, because you are brave and I did that no honour.’

She peered at me, her eyes narrowing. Her mouth fell open in disbelief. ‘Unkindness? Thorne, for Gods’ sakes! I am the only one who has been unkind, and yet –’ She walked away from me, shaking her head angrily.

‘Finn –’

‘How dare you?’ she snarled, rounding on me. ‘There’s nothing brave about me! And to presume you owe me some sort of pity is the most degrading, offensive thing I have ever endured.’

‘That’s not –’

‘Don’t! I don’t need you to have any sort of opinion about me whatsoever. I don’t want you even turning your mind to me. Do you understand?’

I stared at her in the dark, wondering how in the world this had spiralled so badly out of control. I had no patience for miscommunication – not when I had lived a lifetime with someone who understood next to naught and needed explanations for everything.

I took two steps and reached for her face, taking it between my hands. ‘I have no pity for you,’ I said firmly, looking into her eyes. Her irises shifted lime, lilac, navy, cream, peach, scarlet. She was breathing quickly.

‘I wondered tonight what kind of insult it would take to upset you,’ I murmured, keeping hold of her. ‘Little did I imagine it would be a compliment that would do it.’

‘Stop,’ she breathed, so softly I nearly didn’t hear it.

‘Stop what?’

‘Touching me.’

I held her gaze for one second longer – it stretched indefinitely and within it I saw all kinds of impossible things, like a life in which she did not think me boring and I was not disappointed by her carelessness – and then I dropped my hands.

‘Forgive me.’

‘I hate it when you say that.’

My mouth spread in a hopeless smile. ‘You can’t make me speak as you wish me to – I’m not a pet.’

‘Just as you can’t make me behave with the decorum you’d like.’

We looked at each other, and I felt the look all over my skin, more intimate than any kiss on the neck I had witnessed her receive from a stranger. More intimate than anything I had ever known. I wanted this look to last forever, even as it became a kind of agony.

Finn went to return to camp, and I watched her step down, and I saw her ankle pitch, and I moved, too late. My hand reached for her, and she reached for me, and it was bizarrely like the moment in the tournament, except that there were no warder charms to keep her from falling all the way to the bottom of the chasm. A breath left me as I heard her hit the ground with a whoomph of sound. A whole lot of rocks rumbled and fell, showering her. Some were big enough to kill her, if they landed on her head.

‘Finn!’

A grunt left her, followed by a soft whimper, and then nothing.

‘Finn!’ I demanded, strangled.

‘I’m all right,’ she called up, and with the words something inside me that I had never realised to be tight loosened. As in, a thing that had been tight from the moment I was born until now, loosened. It shifted, let go its grip, ceased its unbearable strangling. I took a breath, and it was the first breath I had ever taken.

I stared down into the dark, and I saw the twin dots of her reflective eyes, eyes so strange it didn’t seem possible they could belong to a human, and then I climbed into the chasm.

Finn

Pain splintered into my ankle. And my spine. I closed my eyes against it. My leg was trapped under some of the rocks that had fallen, and I tried to push them off, but most were too heavy for me to budge, and the rare few that were light enough simply crushed my ankle more upon shifting them.

‘Finn!’

‘I’m all right,’ I called. I just had to get my leg free and then I’d have no trouble climbing up. Honestly, it was deeply embarrassing that I’d fallen in the first place. Falling was not a thing that I did. Not when climbing rocks. Or climbing anything. Or just existing. I didn’t fall. But the big bastard up there had been blathering on yet again about how lovely everyone was except him, and I was tired of it because I didn’t understand how one person could be so unbearably blind to the fact that he was the loveliest person in the world and made everyone else living look like huge monsters in comparison – particularly me.

And then the big, lovely bastard started climbing into the chasm with me.

‘Don’t!’ I snarled, horrified.

Oh Gods. Oh no no no no.

‘Go back up, Thorne!’

But he didn’t. He swung down, letting himself fall half the way and stumbling onto his side in what I could only imagine was a very painful drop. But he was moving again, scrambling to crouch over me.

‘You’re all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

Ignoring my waspish tone, he started lifting the heavy rocks from my leg.

‘Don’t!’ I snapped.

‘Just – please, be quiet,’ he replied.

So I fell silent, hating him and hating the world and most of all hating myself. ‘I don’t need you,’ I said softly.

‘I know that,’ he said, and then he finished freeing me.

I struggled up, stiff with pain but not seriously injured. Stretching my muscles, I got the blood flow back into them and reached for the rocks. It didn’t take me long to climb to the top, but when I turned I saw that Thorne was having more trouble.

I waited, telling him where to put his feet and hands for easier manoeuvrability, and he did as I said without question. When we were both finally safe once more we went back to the fire without a word, and I knew that it would be as if tonight’s conversation had never happened.

But I couldn’t forget the look he’d given me, as if he’d realised I was suddenly a completely different person to the one he’d thought me. A part of me would derive a sick kind of pleasure in proving him wrong, in showing him that I wasn’t, in fact, good at all. But the other, quieter part of me would be sad when I inevitably let him down.

Thorne

‘Do you wish to learn to fight?’ Isadora asked Finn the next morning. ‘I could show you some things.’

‘No thank you.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘I have no desire to fight.’

This took me by surprise, as it seemed to take Isadora. We both stared at Finn, confused.

‘You may not have a choice.’

‘What if you’re attacked?’ I agreed.

‘Then I’ll probably die.’ Finn shrugged unapologetically.

I frowned, wishing I could believe she was only kidding.

‘You ignore danger but that will not make it disappear,’ Isadora told her impatiently.

‘Has my voice shifted to an octave they’re incapable of hearing?’ Finn wondered aloud.

‘Finn –’

‘Oh, just kill me now then! Anything but to listen to the pair of you! You’re both as tedious as each other.’ With that she strode ahead, dismissing us. Jonah caught up to her and they immediately got into some wildly animated conversation that required lots of hand movements and loud laughing. She honestly seemed like another breed of person sometimes.

I hung back with Isadora. ‘Stubborn,’ the girl commented simply.

I glanced at her and found myself sighing in exasperation. ‘Does she just wish to be contrary? If we forbade her from learning to fight I’m sure it would suddenly be the entire point of her existence.’

Isadora tilted her head, watching Finn. ‘She’s frightened.’

I frowned. ‘She’s not frightened of being harmed by any number of other dangers –’

‘Not of being harmed.’

I fell silent. Neither of us spoke for a good while. I didn’t really know what to say about that and found myself wanting to change the subject.

Something had been bothering me about the night Isadora and I had met.

‘You called me an Ice King,’ I pointed out eventually.

She nodded but didn’t explain any further, so I didn’t question any further. We walked in easy silence until midday, when I looked back for Penn, only to realise I couldn’t spot him anywhere.

‘Hold,’ I called to the twins. ‘Penn!’ I shouted in a boom. I shielded my eyes against the hot sun and scanned every direction around me, but there was nothing except dry grass and rocks.

‘Penn!’

Something in the grass rustled to my right. Drawing a deep breath, I searched for any scents that didn’t belong, my danger senses on high alert.

Just as I was about to call out again, something launched itself from the grass and straight onto me. I moved, reaching to take the intruder and slam him to the ground, but caught a whiff of familiarity and a flash of red. My hands gentled and I rolled him to the grass, pinning the wriggling boy.

‘What are you doing?’ I panted.

Penn giggled. ‘I’ve been stalking you all morning and you didn’t notice.’

I sank back on my haunches, staring at him. My heart was struggling to slow; I’d truly thought something terrible had happened to him for a moment there.

‘Poor Thorne,’ Finn sighed. I looked up to see that the twins both appeared amused, and I felt like shouting at them. ‘You frightened him, Penn.’

Penn whooped with delight, then ran ahead. Finn dashed after him, keeping pace. Jonah fell into step beside Isadora, so I hung back on my own this time, watching them all. I worried about what would become of us when they no longer had the strength to laugh at the darkness.

Mount Barraka loomed, casting shadows and releasing plumes of smoke. The volcano had not erupted in decades, and even then it had only been small. She looked ready to blow. As we approached, the rocks grew darker, the air warmer, smokier. We skirted around the base, staying close to the sea as the wind was blowing inland. A few hours later we made it to the other side and found what Jonah explained was the Bath House, a famous spot that people from all over Kaya travelled to enjoy. It was essentially a walled sandstone inn, large enough to house several hundred people at a time, and it was full of dozens of different sized baths cut into the rock and heated by the lava beneath the earth.

‘We don’t have time for bathing,’ Isadora pointed out.

‘I’ve wanted to come here my whole life,’ Finn exclaimed. ‘I don’t care how uptight the lady is, nor how poorly she wishes to smell – I’m having a bath and anyone who tries to stop me will get a knife in the eye. Understood?’

I hid a smile as we gave a mumbled ‘understood’.

‘We need more food supplies anyway,’ Jonah agreed, ‘since the giant eats four times as much as any normal person.’

Blushing, I led the way into the House, paying coin from our royal expense purse and renting two rooms, one for Isadora and Finn and the second for the males. I wondered if the girls would end up murdering each other during the night, but frankly would rather endure torture than try to intervene.

The others headed straight for the baths, but I hung back, checking the rooms – their entrances and windows, the locks and security. Hesitantly I made my way through the halls, passing people who stared at me in fear. At the first baths I could see Finn and Jonah languishing in the warm water, laughing as Penn did bomb dives into the pool and annoyed all the other patrons.

I couldn’t spot Isadora – she seemed driven by the need to be perpetually alone. I knew immediately that I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s fun, so I bypassed the pool and went strolling through the rock gardens. I kept to the empty pathways, scenting people and avoiding them.

As I was about to turn back I caught sight of a figure through the branches of an olive tree. It was a woman, and she was so pretty that I couldn’t help but sneak a proper look at her. She was on her knees before a pool, reaching in with a long tree branch to fish something out. A few soft curses left her mouth, and I could smell real worry on her skin.

I walked to her side to see that there was a gold bracelet sitting at the bottom of the pool. She would be able to reach it if she put her arm in the water, but for some reason she must have not wanted to get wet.

‘Let me help you,’ I offered, sinking to my knees to reach in and pluck the bracelet free. Her scent hit me full force, and I swung around to see that the woman was trembling with fear. She backed away from me, eyes white and emerald, white and emerald.

‘It’s all right,’ I tried quickly. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

She shook her head, stumbling over a loose rock.

‘Please, I would never hurt you –’

But she was already dashing away.

A sick kind of guilt filled me. I didn’t belong here. The gold bracelet in my hand was cool and smooth. It was precious to the woman. But she hadn’t given it a single thought since the moment I stepped too close and she was faced not with her treasure but with a creature from her nightmares.

I placed the bracelet on a stone bench where she would be able to find it and then I quickly walked back towards the room, praying to the sword that I wouldn’t meet anyone else along the way.

No such luck. There were people blocking the path before me, and I saw quickly that one of them was Isadora, her hair and skin unmistakable in the afternoon sun. Around her were five children and they were poking her with sticks. I was so dumbfounded that my feet fell still and I forgot to do anything but stare.

Isadora tried to move through them but they blocked her way and jabbed her from all sides, calling her words like ‘demon’ and ‘monster’ and ‘hideous’.

I came to my senses and hurried towards them, but I was beaten to it. Finn had appeared from the other end of the path and in her face was a look of such fury I thought it a miracle the earth didn’t incinerate beneath her feet. She grabbed the closest boy by the back of the neck and kicked him so hard in the backside that he yelped and sprinted away.

‘Get out of here, you snot-nosed little brats, or the demon and I will come to your rooms tonight and eat your souls out.’

They ran, squealing with shared excitement.

Isadora was expressionless as Finn and I converged on her.

‘What a bunch of shits,’ Finn commented. ‘Why didn’t you beat some sense into them?’

‘They’re children,’ Isadora pointed out.

‘And?’

‘Are you all right?’ I asked her. Isadora merely nodded and went inside.

Finn and I looked at each other.

‘I thought you didn’t want to fight, huh?’

‘Oh no, you misunderstood – I’m more than happy to fight those smaller and weaker than me,’ she replied, deadpan.

I started laughing, and a slow smile found her lips. Her eyes turned violet. And then sank to a deep, dark purple, so dark it was almost black. It caught me, the scent of this shift. Trapped me in a different kind of cage, one with bars that felt at once completely new and also like they’d been waiting for me all along. She was dripping wet from the pool and I was abruptly aware of how her shift clung to her body.

Without a word, she turned and walked along the path, descending a set of steps I hadn’t explored. And without a word, I followed her. At the bottom of the steps was a lemon tree, its scent heady and delicious. It was not as heady and delicious, however, as the scent of Finn, and this was why my beast made me follow.

Beyond the tree was a small bath that overlooked the sea, and it was completely empty. Finn climbed into the water and gave a long sigh of pleasure. ‘Don’t make me force you,’ she warned without opening her eyes.

I glanced around to make sure we were alone before removing my shirt and breeches, leaving my undershorts. Stepping into the bath, I sank to my chin and felt warmth spread my muscles with a kind of agonised bliss.

‘My parents met at these baths,’ Finn said with a smile.

I watched her face, the lines of it, the shape of her mouth, the dark lashes resting against her freckled cheekbones.

‘Do you want to hear the story?’

I nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see me. It didn’t matter – I didn’t think she cared if I wanted to or not.

‘Da was here to sell his catch to the kitchens, and he was carrying two huge nets of carp over his shoulders as he wound his way through a thousand screaming children in the halls. He was young then, brash and confident with what he called “the entitlement of youth”. He was handsome too, as Ma told it. Sun-drenched cheeks, muscles made for trawling fishing nets. Quick to laugh.’

I could see Finn in the description, and understood where she’d come from. This Alexi was a far cry from the man I had met in her house last week though, the one crippled and shrunken by loss.

‘As he drew nearer to the kitchens, he grew more and more frustrated by the chaos, and started snapping at the kids to move out of his damned way!’ Finn grinned as she spoke, obviously remembering the way her ma used to tell the story. I felt right there with Alexi, surprised yet again by how she conjured such images with her words.

‘And then Da stumbled, careening into something, and both the nets of fish unravelled from his clutches to spew all over the poor creature who’d been unfortunate enough to collide with the fishmonger. Da looked down, about to erupt into a burst of frustrated curses, when instead he stood speechless. For it was a girl. Small and plain, less good-looking by far than he, and covered head-to-toe in stinking raw seafood. But she was laughing. As Da stuttered a mortified apology, she simply said it was a lucky setting for it and that she would forgive him if he took the bath with her. And they bonded, just like that.’

I smiled as she finished and looked at me. ‘It’s a good story.’

‘It’s an excellent story.’

‘You tell it well. You tell all stories well.’

‘The secret is in the embellishments,’ she revealed.

‘So which bits were actually true?’

‘If I told you that, it would spoil all the fun.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘How did your parents meet?’

I shrugged. ‘She was sold to him for marriage.’

‘Oh. Lovely.’

Finn swam a little closer. Her cheeks were flushed from the warm water, and her eyes were pale, pale yellow, like a field of wheat or a distant sun. ‘What is it about you?’ she murmured to herself.

I held her eyes. Held them and held them.

Then I noticed that one of her hands was resting over the surface of the water and beneath it the liquid was inexplicably forming tiny orbs that floated up into the air.

My eyes widened and she followed my gaze, closing her hand with a snap. The water abruptly returned to normal.

Something in her breathing hitched and she stood up. ‘I want salt.’ Then she waded to the side of the bath, climbed over the stone wall, and started picking her way down the rocks to the seashore. Apparently we weren’t going to talk about whatever that was.

I followed. Felt as though I had no choice in the matter anymore: where she went, I went. What I didn’t understand was why.

The ocean was shockingly cold when it crashed into me. Finn was ahead, diving under already, looking like a fish. I pushed my way out and ducked under; it was like coming alive, like my body finally knew how to work, to breathe, to be here, be present. It felt so damn good I laughed. I wanted and needed and I was tired of denying that. So maybe I could just let myself have this, for a little while. Sun and sea and Finn’s laughter.

Finn

After our swim we sat on the warm sand, letting the sun dry our skin. There was a strange, almost unbearable restlessness thrumming beneath my surface.

‘I want to try something,’ I blurted, knowing it was a bad idea but unable to help myself. Wasn’t that always the way of things? My foolish heart running towards cliffs and leaping over their edges without care for the consequence. It was easy to blame this part of me on Sam and on Ma, but I knew that in truth I had been like this since the moment I was born, and nothing would ever change it.

Thorne and I were both resting our arms on our raised knees, and he glanced over his shoulder at me.

‘Touch me. Skin on skin. Just a little.’

‘Really?’

‘I just want to try it.’ I was nervous, actually. Which was unusual.

Thorne pressed the tip of his index finger against the skin of my ankle. And there he was, all of him. The beat, beat of his blood through his veins. The thump, thump at the very centre of him. And the suffocating roof of the world crashing down atop him, bowing his strong shoulders until they were weak, shrinking him into small small small –

‘Stop, stop,’ I panted. He snatched his finger away and the feeling receded immediately, gone as if it had never been there.

He searched my face closely, but he didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell him.

Swallowing, I bid him, ‘Try again.’

Thorne hesitated, probably not exactly liking the idea of what I was experiencing of him, but then he reached the back of his hand out and brushed his fingers over my wet foot, gliding them up over my ankle and around the underside of my calf.

This time I got crushing weight. But I also got a sudden rush of cold so intense it felt as if I’d been frozen from the inside. My eyes flew open and met his, but whatever he saw in my face did not make him remove his touch. He circled his fingers around my ankle and clasped it in his big hand, touching me more firmly.

The ice slipped away, as if thawed, and I got earth and sea and sharp glittering edges and, and something – what was that?

‘More,’ I murmured, distracted.

And that was when Thorne bent his head to press his lips to the inside of my ankle, and I actually – embarrassingly – gasped. Because the thing I couldn’t grasp became an overwhelmingly sweet lightness. It tasted of cherries and felt like whispers against my skin, and it was fast like fluid animal strength melting through trees and surrounded by pine and roughage and warm warm warm.

The air left me in a great big rush and I needed more. I needed more and more and more for infinity. He knew; he could smell it on me, and I in turn knew this because I was allowing myself to stay with his touch, to really feel it, to feel beyond the first layers of it. It occurred to me that I did not touch anyone enough to feel beyond the initial sensation to the complexities of what really lay in their hearts, and this, for the first time, was a revelation. Of Thorne, and of me.

Thorne moved his mouth up the inside of my leg, tickling the underside of my knee and then sliding around to the soft length of my thigh.

I reached to press my hands against his shoulders and back, wanting more touch, as much as I could have. I could feel his heart beating in time with mine and I started to confuse all the pieces of him with all the pieces of me, my mind scattering more with each kiss. His hunger was draping my skin like a veil; I could taste it in my mouth. He could taste salt, and he said it; he called me ‘Salt Girl’, with eyes that darted up to rest on mine, eyes I could see berserker and boy and man and beast within.

I went in and out of my body. One moment I was in our wet skin, slippery against each other, and the next I was in the forest of his heart, running scenting hunting, strong and alive and free. One moment I was the burn of his mouth against my skin and the flicker-pound of my heart, then I was trapped in ice and surrounded by the most mournful howl I had ever imagined, knowing knowing knowing the baying belonged to the moon-snatcher himself.

And then he moved his mouth up the inside of my leg, all the way, and I felt his tongue inside me and
and I was nothing but a set of nerve endings a sky drifting dark around me a rising heat a trembling ache and wings lifting me up up up.

Sensation exploded through my skin and fizzed down my spine, burning everything in its wake. I was the volcano above us, a burnt out husk but also a river of raging lava and a sea of inexplicable oyster shells.

It took me a long time to come back, to find that my body felt familiar to me again, and not some gloriously animal creature made for desire and nothing else. Slowly I became aware that I was still lying in the sand, and that Thorne still had his large hand on my ankle, his thumb circling my skin idly. It made it impossible for my mind to hold to any single thought.

‘Enough,’ I managed, and he removed his hand from my skin, and I became Finn again. Sitting up, it was as though I shook off layer after layer of impossible feelings and sensations and images, until I was alone again in my head and body.

I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to handle anything like that again, and I had a very acute awareness of why warder powers were so dangerous – not just to the world around, but to the warder. What if touch was always like that for me? What if I never escaped the intensity? I’d always been careful, not wanting to touch too many people, not wanting to feel what it made me feel, but now that I understood the full extent of what my touch could bring I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle it again. Which seemed an incredibly lonely life to live.

‘Finn,’ Thorne murmured, and I looked into his face and realised that he was concerned. And the look was enough to rip my vulnerable heart into a thousand tiny thumping pieces.

‘I’m fine,’ I said quickly. ‘I just wasn’t expecting …’

My eyes were shifting colours quickly, moving through too many shades to name. He watched each shift, then murmured worriedly, ‘You wanted fun. I gave you fun.’

‘You sure did,’ I agreed.

It was in that moment that we both realized the hilarity of this and burst into exhausted, hysterical laughter. Even though feeling all the secrets in Thorne’s soul was something very different to fun.

The Bath House was in a flurry of movement when we returned. It took us a few tense moments to work out that two separate bonded couples had gone missing from their rooms.

‘They probably just left,’ I said, thinking it obvious.

Jonah and Penn had found us in the corridor, already having spoken to the house owners. ‘All their belongings are still in their rooms,’ my brother explained.

‘Did the couples know each other?’ Thorne asked.

‘Had nothing to do with each other, as far as the owner knows.’

‘How long have they been missing?’

‘They each travelled with companions who’ve said the respective couples both disappeared two nights ago.’

‘And have only reported it now?’

‘Suppose so. The owner said that over the last month at least half a dozen bonded couples have gone missing from their rooms and have yet to return for their belongings.’

I frowned. That was very weird.

We returned to our rooms to change from our wet clothes. I was alone in the chamber I shared with Isadora. I never had any idea to where the girl disappeared. Perhaps she just didn’t like being around us. Made sense – I wasn’t exactly welcoming. As I dried myself with a towel I couldn’t help thinking about the bonded couples, and something about it stuck in my mind, nagging at me.

Because I was alone I didn’t bother dressing, but walked to the window, enjoying the sensation of the ocean wind against my raw skin.

Where had I been asked about bonded couples recently? The men in the forest, I remembered. Sin and his gang had been searching for bonded couples and warders, which I’d thought unusual. My fingers ran through the grooves in the sandstone walls, idly using the rough feeling to focus my mind. Eight couples missing from the one establishment. That was more than enough to assume there was foul play involved. And if it was somehow involved with Sin’s men, or warders, then that was even more strange, for they’d been on the other side of the country.

I was about to turn for my clothes, feeling hungry, when I realised belatedly that the room next to mine had a balcony, from which I was clearly visible standing in my open window. And on that balcony was Thorne, watching me.

Our eyes met and I felt his gaze ignite every inch of my skin. I gave a laugh of astonishment and saw him blush bright pink, dropping his eyes quickly. He looked mortified at having been discovered.

I could have gone inside. But that thought lasted less than the shadow of a moment. Instead, I decided to play. I moved to the railing so he could see me better, and as his eyes flicked up again I saw surprise turn to something dark. I could feel those eyes as they darted over my hips, my arms, shoulders, breasts. I could feel his lips on my salt skin even now, just as intensely as I had on the beach.

Would this be the only way I could touch without the tumult of someone’s secrets assailing me? With looks and memories?

A voice called to him from inside his room and he turned reluctantly to reply. Moving inside, he paused briefly to meet my eyes. A small, shy smile curled the corners of Thorne’s lips before he disappeared.

I pulled on a robe and collapsed onto my bed, feeling woozy and astonished. I had absolutely no idea where the tryst on the beach had come from, since Thorne and I had both made it very clear we neither liked nor respected each other, but whatever the cause, I was now utterly drunk on desire, addicted to touch. It was a frightening sensation, because when I felt like this it inevitably led to destruction of some kind. Passion took its place in my heart and burnt so hot and so fierce that it ravaged my entirety, burnt out and left nothing in its wake. I grew so fixated on things that I crushed them within my excited, giddy hands, and then there was nothing left of them.

I had to be very, very careful. Which was a problem because, regrettably, I was the least careful person in the whole entire world.

When Isadora crept into the room it was late and I was finding it impossible to sleep. I was too hot, no matter how little clothing I slept in or how wide I kept all the windows.

‘What mischief have you been getting up to?’ I asked jealously.

She undressed and climbed into bed. I heard her breathing slow amazingly quickly. I had always been envious of people who could fall asleep with ease. I had to fight it, every damn night of my life.

‘Why are you really on this mission?’ I asked her.

‘I told you.’

‘And I obviously didn’t believe you.’

‘You would do well to keep your questions to yourself, Finn.’

‘I could say that I’ll try, but I’m afraid it would be a lie.’ I watched her still form. ‘Is it because of Thorne? You said you wanted to fight alongside the prince. And you were awfully protective of him for no apparent reason.’

‘He represents peace.’

‘So it’s not because you have any loyalty to him.’

‘I have loyalty to no one,’ she admitted. Then finally muttered, ‘I grew up in the streets. I have no idea who my parents were, nor if they were bonded. I’m doing this for the money.’

And it was bluntly honest enough that I didn’t ask any more questions.

We left early, eating a quick meal of fruit and bread before setting off towards the rock region. It took us two days to reach Ora, sleeping under the stars and playing guessing games to pass the time, and then another day to walk to the capital city Koll where we planned to stay the night at an inn. As we settled in our two rooms, I removed my shoes and drew on a light dress, then set out, pausing only to poke my head into the boys’ room.

‘I’m going to find Hess,’ I told them. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’

‘Make sure it’s before midnight, Inney. I don’t want to have to traipse through the city to find you,’ Jonah sighed.

‘Then don’t.’

‘I’ll go with her,’ Thorne offered.

‘I don’t need a minder,’ I snapped.

‘No,’ Thorne agreed. ‘But would you grant me the pleasure of your company?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Fine. Take your shoes off.’

‘Why?’

‘Nobody wears shoes in Koll. The rocks are warm and do wonders for the skin on your feet.’

I could see he found this puzzling and was uncomfortable in the extreme, but took his shoes off nevertheless. If I told him to walk naked because it would help him fit in, he would.

We walked in silence for a few blocks. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, but I figured she would be somewhere in the guts of the city. Everything was flat and wide, the buildings all the same sand colour.

‘We haven’t spoken about … the other day,’ he began awkwardly.

I considered letting him fumble his way through it, because his discomfort was amusing and quite adorable, but instead I shook my head. ‘Don’t ruin it.’

He looked a bit crestfallen, but thankfully changed the subject. ‘Who is Hess?’

‘A warder.’

‘Why do you wish to speak to a warder?’

‘She’s famous for her foresight.’

‘She reads the future?’

I nodded. ‘With more accuracy than any warder has been able to before her.’

‘And you wish to know your future?’

‘Well surmised, Thorne.’ I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He was frowning. ‘You don’t agree?’

‘I think it a cruel thing to do to yourself.’

‘Will my life be so awful?’

‘It is cruel for anyone to know their future.’

‘If I know, one way or another I can stop worrying.’

‘What is it that you worry about, Finn?’

I didn’t mean to answer, but it escaped me before I could stop it. ‘Sam of Limontae.’

He was silent for a time, and then I felt his hand brush mine, seeking to take it. I pulled away, stopping to face him. ‘I need neither pity nor comfort,’ I warned fiercely. I deserved neither.

Thorne searched my face with that probing gaze of his, nodded once, and then we went back to walking.

After asking a few locals we found Hess’ home, adorned with a small sign that read her opening hours. We had arrived over an hour after she’d closed shop for the day. ‘Gods damn it,’ I muttered.

But the door swung open and a young woman motioned us inside, saying simply, ‘You’re late.’

Her fawn coloured hair was braided with pieces of leather and tawny feathers. Her eyes were white. And she looked no older than me. It was unsettling to see, knowing she was over a hundred years old.

‘I’m Finn, and this is Thorne,’ I told her.

‘I’m aware.’

‘You’re obviously Hess then?’

‘I’m obviously Hess.’

The ceiling was low, and Thorne had to duck his head to fit inside the house. Hess guided us to a living room, where we sank onto cushions in front of a raging fireplace despite the heat of the season. The room was sweltering, and the combination of this and the heady incense she had burning made me feel immediately nauseous. Perhaps it was this that caused my nerves to ratchet up, or perhaps it was simply the fact that I was here, finally, in a house I had wanted to visit for the last five years, and I might be facing an answer to the question I feared more than anything.

‘Should I wait outside?’ Thorne asked me.

I was about to say yes when Hess interrupted. ‘You do not wait outside.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve seen it. You are present.’

‘But what if I get up and walk out right now?’

‘But you don’t.’

He didn’t like that one bit, I could see. He tried to settle himself, but was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being powerless in the face of time or fate or destiny – or whatever it was. I didn’t particularly enjoy the sensation either, but I didn’t fight it like Thorne was trying to, for I had intimate experience with understanding the inevitable nature of a person’s place in the world. I felt something a little like a version of the future every time I touched someone’s skin. Not as definable as the future, more like an imprint of a soul and its fear, an imprint of a heart’s impact on those around it. I could not hope to ever explain this to anyone – I could barely define it in my own head.

‘You are here about the boy,’ Hess said, not at all like a question. ‘The boy you were infatuated with. You grew obsessed with him, dreamt of a life with him, imagined bonding with him.’

‘By all means, feel free to embarrass me,’ I muttered.

‘He would have fallen anyway,’ she said, and I froze.

‘What?’ My voice came out as barely a whisper.

‘Child, he would have fallen anyway.’ She leant forward, looking at me with those chillingly vacant eyes. ‘You saw that he was in danger, and you thought to help him. You entered his mind to give his hands strength, little knowing the impact that such a power would have on a young mind. He fell, and died. It weighs heavily on you. But it need not. He would have fallen anyway.’

A savage pain was clawing at my insides. I thought in that moment that I might die of it. Because she was right, but she hadn’t mentioned the whole story. That was only a piece of it, and it made the rest worse.

‘I know the rest,’ she agreed, having read my mind. ‘And that is not your burden to bear either. She made her choice, as we must all be allowed to do.’

‘I’m not here about that,’ I rasped, unable to look at her, wishing Thorne was anywhere but in this boiling hot room. Sweat was trickling down my spine and I felt like either vomiting or screaming.

‘Ask your question then.’

I took a breath, felt it catch. ‘Will I kill again?’

‘Yes.’

And that was it. It hit me as a wave of heat and I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could faint and lose consciousness, disappear from this world and this body that was too small for me and had made of me a monster.

When I looked at Hess again she was focusing on something I couldn’t see. Her expression sharpened and she shook her head, murmuring, ‘No – not that one.’ She started to look frightened. ‘Not that one.’

Thorne looked as bewildered as I felt.

‘Hess?’

The woman’s eyes jerked back to me, blinked several times and then seemed to clear. ‘Forgive me. I see many times at once. Is there anything you wish to ask me, Prince Thorne?’

He stared at her, then shrugged. ‘Don’t you already know if I’m going to?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I don’t have a choice?’

‘Of course you do. Every move you make is of your own choosing. It is simply that I have already seen you choose what you choose.’

He considered this. ‘Are you ever wrong?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t assume so.’

Thorne shrugged. ‘I have nothing to ask.’

‘Would you like to know about the ice?’

‘No.’

‘Very well.’

‘Are we going to find the end to the bond?’ I blurted out.

‘Don’t ask that,’ Thorne warned quickly.

‘Why?’

‘What if she says no? Will you give up now, before even trying?’

I shook my head, not knowing the answer. ‘Don’t tell us,’ I agreed finally. ‘Better not to know.’

‘I will tell you two things, because I saw myself doing so,’ Hess said.

Thorne shook his head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. What if your vision is what brings the future to pass?’

‘So what if it is?’

He opened his mouth then helplessly closed it again.

‘What are the two things?’ I asked.

‘The writings you seek will be found at the warder prison. And at the end of this journey through ice and ghosts, one of you will die.’

All the air was gone from the room and my heart disappeared from my chest. What I thought in that moment shocked me to my core: Don’t let it be Thorne.

‘I know not which, nor how. But I know it is certain, and that it will only be one of you.’

‘Black sorcery,’ Thorne snarled suddenly, and I was stunned by the fury in his voice. ‘What right have you to play so cruelly?’

I turned to him quickly, reaching for his hand, but he was gone from the room with alarming speed.

Slowly I looked at the warder. I didn’t apologise for him, because a part of me hated her for what she’d said to us. I knew not how I would bear that knowledge, or what it would do to me.

‘It seems cruel,’ she said softly, and there was an abrupt sorrow in her. The very edges of her white eyes leaked to a deep jungle green, almost as though they had not been that way in many years and had forgotten how to shift. ‘I know it seems cruel. But the fact that I have told you this will impact on both your paths.’ And then, in a voice surprisingly hopeless, she murmured, ‘I had to speak because I saw that I did.’

It occurred to me how very bound she was to this gift of hers, a gift I now saw for the curse it was.

She reached to the left and whispered, ‘The stone will skip its path a thousand times,’ and I realised she was no longer speaking to me. I rose and left her, wanting to bid her farewell but finding my voice stuck at the strangeness of her particular kind of madness. I didn’t think she was even aware of me anymore.

Outside I found him staring up at the full moon, and under its gaze he seemed wolf-like to me, as though he might let out a mournful howl at any moment.

‘Why didn’t you tell me what had happened with Sam?’

‘Why would I have?’

‘You let me believe you murdered him for sport,’ he accused flatly.

‘And you believed it so easily.’

‘You wanted to make me hate you.’

I swallowed. ‘Did it work?’

He moved close to me, unbearably close. I could feel his breath against my lips, and I could feel my eyes shift. ‘No,’ he murmured.

It cut me, and I felt panic bloom from the wounds. Summoning all my cruelty and coating my heart in it, I simply replied, ‘Better it had.’ And walked away.

Thorne

She had secrets behind her eyes, and I was starting to guess what they must be. The reason she had to run and run and never stop.

But I knew something she did not. I was the heir to the throne of Pirenti, son of the slaughterman from the north, and one day I would be King. Even if I had to make myself the most powerful man in the world, I would do it, because I would not allow Finn of Kaya to die for me.

When I returned later to the inn, I found Jonah waiting for me in the dark. He motioned for me to be quiet so as not to wake Penn, and we went out onto the balcony.

‘Is Finn all right?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She left me in the city.’

‘Why didn’t you follow her?’

‘As she pointed out, she does not need a minder.’

Jonah shook his head, frustrated. ‘She’s not well, Thorne. She needs to be protected.’

‘No she doesn’t. She is more than capable of looking after herself, and old enough to know how.’

‘You don’t understand –’

‘I do, Jonah,’ I murmured. I reached out and placed a hand on his slender shoulder. ‘She will be well. She just wanted wine and laughter and people who don’t know her.’

‘What happened?’

I explained about the next clue being at the warder prison in the south.

‘That is dark news indeed,’ he sighed. ‘We can’t take Penn there.’

‘Why not?’

‘His parents are there.’

I frowned. ‘Guards?’

Jonah’s eyes shifted white, and it startled me in the dark. ‘Prisoners,’ he replied.

Chapter 10

Falco

I very nearly went with them. That was what I knew on the morning I woke to their departure. The silver-tongued girl had ensnared me, and the prince had seen me. He was the only one who ever had. Knowing that, knowing what I could be if I gave all of this up, my throne, my title, my power over Kaya … I very nearly went with them.

Instead, I decided to let Emperor Feckless take over. What was the difference, anymore? Perhaps he was not a deceit, but the truth of me after all.

Quillane

Falco was different over the next week. He drank more. Drank himself into comas. He took no women to his bed. He spoke very little, but was heard yelling at servants and smashing things in his tantrums. I found him one evening in a pool of vomit and nearly wept from the sight.

‘What is this?’ I whispered to his sleeping face. ‘What is it that plagues you, my love? And why will you not fight it?’

It was a week after that when I retired to Radha’s room to find her gone.

Falco

I woke with a splitting headache from a dream of the Sparrow. He always found me in my dreams. I could feel him circling, readying himself to come for me. In my dreams I dared him. Taunted him. For I wanted nothing more than for him to come after me and end this farce once and for all.

And when he came, I wanted him to take me first. It was why I did all of this – to protect Quill from becoming a target.

Needing fresh air, I could think of only one spot in which I wouldn’t be interrupted by servants or courtiers. Making sure not to be seen, I climbed the stairs to the roof. On one side I could see my city sprawling below, full of the bustle of daily life. On the other I saw the world drop away into sea cliffs and an ocean that stretched out to a distant horizon.

The sun was hot, and I relished the feel of it on my skin. Without thinking, I drew my sword and began twirling it. My hands moved of their own accord, so used to the movements. Enjoying my body’s stretches, I pushed into a more complicated sparring pattern. Slash left, right, shift the foot positioning, spin and hack, block. I revelled in the power through my limbs, the push and strain of muscles, the instinctive way my body knew exactly what to do. My father had taught me every day since I’d been old enough to hold a blade. Nobody remembered that though. Parry, hard left jab, high riposte, sweep low and spin –

I wrenched myself to a stop.

There was a person watching me.

A young woman – without a blindfold. She had a pretty face, pointy nose, clever eyes. Belatedly she sank into a bow.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, horrified.

‘Forgive me, Majesty. My name is Radha.’

‘Why are you up here?’

‘I came for the view.’

This was not good. ‘You are a servant?’

‘Yes, Majesty.’ She actually moved closer to me and brazenly looked at my face! ‘I can’t count the number of times I have been told of the Emperor and his disastrous abilities with a sword. He cuts himself, they say. Can’t even manage the weight of the weapon.’

The air left my chest. Was she threatening me?

‘Why do you hide it?’ she asked.

I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t reply.

‘You have so much talent, Majesty. It would comfort the people no end to know their Emperor was not quite as useless as he seems.’

We stared at each other. I had to remember to close my mouth. ‘Are you addled in the head?’ I managed. ‘What possesses you to speak so freely – and so insultingly – to your Emperor?’

She shook her head quickly, aghast. ‘Forgive me. I meant no offence!’ Her eyes turned lime.

Perhaps it was not a threat at all, but simple stupidity. I needed to do some damage control here. The cloak settled upon my shoulders. ‘You call me useless and do not wish to offend?’ I asked pompously.

‘Forgive me,’ she breathed again. Her cheeks and ears were turning pink. ‘I am new to the palace. I forget myself, and the way of things.’

I realised what it was. Painful innocence.

‘I’ve been practising in secret,’ I admitted. ‘I was embarrassed at my inability.’

‘You have overcome it,’ she assured me.

‘Who are you?’

‘No one, Majesty. One of the Empress’ maids.’

‘Bonded, yes?’

She nodded. It was the only way she’d be allowed to work in the palace, but still, she should have worn a blindfold – it was the law.

My headache was starting to intensify. I sighed, rubbing my eyes. ‘I cannot have you telling anyone about what you’ve seen.’

Radha lifted her gaze to mine. Again, I was surprised by the audacity. Had she not been instructed upon her employment? ‘Tell them, Majesty,’ she implored. ‘Why hide it?’

‘Tell them what? That I can manage a few clumsy sword moves?’

She frowned. Searched my face. ‘I learnt as a youth. Trained at the Limontae academy. I have seen many a swordfighter. But believe me when I say I’ve never seen one who moved as you just did, Majesty.’

My heart sank as I realised what I was going to have to do. ‘A misfortune for you,’ I murmured, dropping my accent and the high-pitched timber I affected.

She was clever. She heard it. Her gaze sharpened, turned to azure. But she did not struggle or cry out when I took hold of her arm and escorted her to the dungeon.

Thorne

We had come through the rock region with a few sprained limbs and a thousand insect bites, but were otherwise in good shape given we’d made it to the first clue in just over a week. However, what I didn’t realise as we approached the heavy cloak of trees at the south of Querida was that this forest lay dark with magic. We each felt it the moment we entered. Like a touch spiriting over skin, lifting the hairs and chilling everything inside.

It did not feel pleasant. A low growl was ripped from my throat and I felt very other. The beast rattled at the cage with frightening intensity.

Finn took one look at me and stopped immediately. She and Jonah engaged in some kind of silent communication. ‘Jonah and I will go the rest of the way alone, and come back for you.’

‘Why?’ Isadora demanded.

‘This much soul magic will be harmful to you.’

‘Why not to you?’

‘We have more practice in bearing it.’

I looked at Penn, wondering how I could get Isadora to stay here with him while I escorted the twins. With the magic of the forest prickling against my skin, I looked at the young red-haired boy and wondered if he had any idea where we approached.

He surprised me yet again by saying simply, ‘I would like to come with you.’

Jonah and Finn looked at Penn carefully, and then Finn nodded. ‘Of course.’ She glanced at Isadora and me with a roll of her eyes. ‘I suppose you two will be demanding to come too?’

We nodded.

‘Then I’ll enjoy watching you puke your guts up.’ She flashed us a sweet smile and led the way deeper into the forest.

Finn and I had spent zero time alone since the night with Hess. She was making sure of it. But that didn’t stop us from watching each other. I felt it every time her eyes grazed me, and I knew she felt it when mine rested upon her. Over fires we stared at each other, unable to look away, as if pulled by some impossible, yearning ache we could deny in words but not in our bodies.

If I tried to speak with her she simply levelled me with a look dripping with such scorn that it made my insides shrivel up. Sometimes I thought I understood her perfectly, and then within the space of a glance or a word I would feel completely blind to her. She was sending me mad trying to put all the pieces together.

In moments of weariness I would tell myself to dislike her once more. It was easier than this confusion. It cost nothing to be kind, and yet somehow she couldn’t find the desire or the space inside her to be so. Even as I thought this, the story of the boy Finn had tried to save reared its head. He was there in the back of my mind, every second of the day. I couldn’t work out if I believed that trauma could be an excuse for unkindness. But I could see the obvious self-loathing she harboured. It made me think that perhaps if she disliked herself enough for the two of us, I needn’t bother. And then I would come, inevitably, to what lay beneath all my efforts. To the truth that she might be unkind, but she was also brave and clever and protective and funny, and no matter how hard I tried I didn’t actually dislike her at all.

The trees had started to die. It made something in my chest clench to see blackened trunks and barren boughs, and not a living thing in sight. It was a ghost forest, something deeply disturbing in its unnatural quiet. Grey and black fingers reached up into the darkening sky and made spectral silhouettes before the moon.

Something moved and I realised there was something alive after all. A single black raven, perched on a low branch, gazing at us with beady golden eyes.

I watched it as we passed quietly by, and was startled when it launched itself into the air. With a loud squawk it flapped once, twice, thrice, and then without any warning at all, the raven fell from its height and plummeted straight into the earth.

Penn sprinted ahead and was crouched over it when the rest of us arrived. ‘It’s dead!’ he explained quizzically. He prodded it a few times as if to make sure. Its beady eye stared eerily.

‘It’s the warders,’ Jonah explained softly. ‘They take soul energy from everything around them in order to keep the prison secure.’

‘And when they run out of things to kill?’ I exclaimed.

Jonah’s deep blue eyes shifted to a pale mauve. ‘I don’t know.’

I shifted on the balls of my feet. ‘It occurs to me that should the warders in charge ever be compromised, they could do a vast amount of damage.’

‘It would be almost impossible, since there are so many of them. They guard each other, maintain balance and order. Spread the power out so that it cannot be overcome by a single individual.’

‘Still …’

Jonah didn’t reply for a while, and I thought he meant not to, but eventually he said very quietly, ‘In our hearts, it is what we are most afraid of.’

Finn

We moved on, keeping quiet. As we walked I started to feel weary, but it was nothing to how the others seemed to be feeling. Isadora and Penn looked pale and ill. They took regular sips of water and ate more than they normally would, trying to keep their energy levels up.

But Thorne was becoming a different creature altogether. He paced like an animal on the prowl. The humanity in his face seemed to disappear, and from deep within his chest came an urgent, dread-filled growl.

The magic and his berserker blood – they did not get along.

‘No further,’ I told him seriously.

He opened his mouth to reply, but a tremor ran down his spine and he looked as though he might have had a minor seizure or something. When it passed he simply nodded, his eyes unable to focus on anything but darting, darting.

Isadora remained with him, and my last image of her was to see her vomiting onto the dead ground.

In the distance as Jonah, Penn and I drew closer we could make out a dark smudge amongst the trees. It grew into a flat building, out the front of which waited two warders in their robes. Their skin was glowing a strange shade of aquamarine, a mark of how much power they were using at this very moment.

‘Greetings,’ one of them said. They looked identical to each other and I couldn’t tell which one of them had spoken. ‘We must be quick. You’ll not withstand this place much longer.’

We entered the building and poor Penn hit the ground as though something had smashed into him. It was the force of the magic, its pressure enough to make it feel as though his skull was being crushed. A whimper left him, and Jonah bent to scoop him up.

‘We were informed of your arrival and have made you a copy of Agathon’s parchment,’ one of the warders said.

I shared a suspicious look with Jonah. This seemed awfully easy. None of us had spoken a word. Penn’s eyes rolled back in his head.

The building had no roof but opened to the sky above. Within it there were several warders rushing around as though attending to something dire.

‘You will be needing horses, too,’ our warder said.

‘That’s very generous of you,’ I replied, waiting for the catch. ‘But why?’

‘You are on a royal search,’ he explained. ‘The other groups, if they make it this far, will be given the same.’

‘I’d like to see my parents,’ Penn requested, slurring badly.

‘There are to be no visitations at this time.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘What’s going on in here?’

Ignoring my question, they handed us a pack in which I assumed the parchment waited, then led us to another door, beyond which waited several horses.

‘How do they stand the magic?’ I asked, gesturing to the mounts.

‘They are wreathed in protection wards and thus cannot be drained of their energy. They will get you to safety.’

I had no idea what was going on as we were shepherded swiftly onto the horses.

‘We’ll need more – there are two more in our party,’ I said.

‘We can spare you three, but that is all.’

So I held onto the reins of the third horse, while Jonah and Penn shared the second, and we were spurred away. I had never been more confused in my life.

The horses moved swiftly across the broken earth. Over the cantering of their hooves I could hear Penn muttering over and over again, ‘I’d like to see my parents. I’d like to see my parents. I’d like to see my parents.’

It caught and squeezed my heart, and I wished for his sake that the world were a fairer place.

Thorne and Isadora were where we’d left them, and it was no small feat trying to get them onto the horses. He was barely conscious, and Isadora kept vomiting. In the end the only way we could think to configure it was to have Thorne ride behind me, for he was unable to control his own reins and would fall off without someone to lean on. Isadora took the horse on her own, insisting, between retches, that she could manage. Leaving Jonah to continue carrying Penn, who had slipped heavily into sleep.

Past the dead raven we rode, under ghostly trees, through moonlight. We came to living forest at a gallop and slowed our horses with relief.

‘What was that about?’ I asked Jonah breathlessly.

He met my gaze and he did not look confused, he looked grim. His eyes turned navy. ‘They were guarding their minds very closely, for they knew I was a warder. But the chaos … it had them ruffled. They were split too far. And I heard something. A stray thought.’

I felt my hands tighten around the reins.

‘There’s been an escape.’

As we walked the horses through the night, too rattled to make camp anywhere near the macabre warder forest, shadowy figures moved through the trees beside us. Jonah and I had noticed them several hours ago, but as Thorne, Isadora and Penn were all either unconscious or halfway there, we had said nothing but kept moving.

They were undoubtedly the Sparrow’s people. And I had no illusions about the fact that I could not fight a single one of them. I had never learnt to fight, never wished to. Jonah had his magic, but it would be sorely depleted after the prison.

So we kept walking. Quietly. Calmly.

Honestly, the situation wasn’t bothering me all that much. I was intrigued, actually, by who these people were, and why they followed a rebel leader. What was bothering me was the thought of someone escaping the warder prison. It was impossible. Warders were sent there to have their powers stripped, and the sheer amount of magic radiating around that place in order to keep them contained and harmless was gargantuan. It was not the kind of power a single warder could deny – not even a first tier warder, of which there only existed one.

Poor Jonah. He was going to be in serious trouble for saving me in the tournament. Lutius would absolutely discover the fact that he had not been using much of his own power, but mine. And then I would be in serious trouble. Perhaps the warder prison would end up as my new home after all this.

Better I died.

Which I had a fifty-fifty chance of, according to Hess.

It was close to dawn when the figures on either side of us finally moved. They wore hoods so I could barely see them, but about half a dozen moved onto the path before us. Jonah and I drew our horses to a halt. I flashed him a swift look, telling him to let me deal with it.

‘Who is your leader?’ I was surprised to hear a woman speak. She had a lisp.

‘I am,’ I told her.

‘Your name?’

‘Finn of Limontae.’

‘What is your true name?’

I stopped, mouth half open. I had no idea what to say, and then, oddly, I did. With a smile I couldn’t help, I said, ‘I have many. Would you like to hear them all?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been called Silver Tongue. Salt Girl. The Twin. Dreamer of the Siren Nights. Wild One. But the person who loves me best in the world calls me Inney, so I guess that’s the truest name of all.’

They didn’t move or confer. They remained still as statues.

‘To where do you travel, Inney?’ the woman asked me, and it was strange beyond the telling to hear her speak Jonah’s silly childhood nickname for me. He’d only called me Inney because as a child he hadn’t been able to pronounce the f. I almost laughed.

‘I haven’t figured that out yet. We came from the warder prison, and wish to get as far from it as possible before we stop and regroup.’

‘What was your business at the warder prison?’

‘You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m not really in the habit of telling cloaked strangers on the road my business.’

She moved forward, right up to my horse. Then she reached out and stroked its muzzle. ‘Do you carry these three against their will?’

I blinked, darting a glance at Isadora and Penn, both unconscious. It would certainly seem as though they’d been drugged.

‘If I was going to drug them it would be to escape them,’ I said. ‘Annoying. The lot of them.’

She didn’t respond. Not a good time for jokes, then.

‘As I said, we’ve come from the prison. It made them woozy.’

‘And why has it not affected the two of you? The twin faces?’

I considered her cloaked form, weighing up how best to approach this. ‘We have warder blood.’

‘Then we shall kill you,’ she said calmly, as I’d thought she might.

‘You’re loyal to the Sparrow, aren’t you?’ I asked her.

‘We are. And when we have killed you we will carve his mark upon your foreheads so that when your Emperor and Empress discover your corpses they will know that even royalty is not safe from us.’

Oh dear. Thorne’s birth was going to be my next plan of attack. Clearly, they had recognised him and didn’t care one way or another that he was the flimsy tether keeping Pirenti and Kaya at peace.

Another approach then. ‘How many of you are there?’ I asked. ‘A score? Two? You think it makes a difference to warders?’ She didn’t have to know that I couldn’t use my powers and that Jonah was weak.

My brother calmly lit a fire in his palm and flicked it to his left. Everyone watched as it sailed up into a tree and caught it alight. He did the same to the right, igniting a tall tree above me. I saw several of the Sparrow’s people shift uncomfortably within the sudden glow. The woman lifted a hand and they all ceased moving once more.

‘All we seek is to pass,’ I told her softly. ‘But if you stand in our way we shall burn this entire forest down, and you with it.’

With the flames crackling, I could now see the bottom half of her face. Beneath the hood, she had an ugly scar through her lip, giving it a perpetual curl. Her hand moved to the long, curved knife at her belt, but froze before she drew it. She was staring at something.

I tried to follow her gaze, but could see nothing.

The woman barked a word so sharp and cutting that I couldn’t even understand what it was. And like that, the Sparrow’s people were gone, vanishing into the night.

We sat alone, gazing around in surprise.

‘We must be scarier than we thought,’ Jonah commented.

‘I don’t think it was us who scared them.’

He followed my eyes to see that Isadora’s hood had slipped back to reveal her white hair and bleached skin. She was asleep in the saddle, and looked every bit as ghoulish as she always did.

‘Thank Gods for superstitious fools,’ I grinned.

‘Don’t tell her,’ he bid me worriedly. ‘It would hurt her feelings.’

‘That she scared off a bunch of thugs by sleeping? I think she’d love that.’

He kicked his horse forward and I leant over to take Isadora’s reins, leading her horse behind mine.

We stopped to get everyone on the ground and covered in blankets. Thorne was a struggle – Jonah and I didn’t have the strength to lift him off the horse, so we had to pull him down and try to catch him, which resulted in both of us crushed beneath him and sent into hushed hysterics.

‘My Gods,’ I gasped as we managed to extricate ourselves. ‘Are his bones made of lead?’

‘Shh,’ Jonah laughed, placing blankets over the three sleeping beauties. We didn’t make a fire, concerned about who else might be in this forest to see it. Instead Jonah and I kept watch until the sun had risen.

‘Want to sneak a peek at the clue?’ I asked him, smiling naughtily.

‘We should wait for the others to wake up.’

I sighed. ‘Bor-ing. You just don’t want to annoy the Ice Queen.’

‘What’s your issue with her?’

‘I have no issues with anyone.’

He snorted. ‘Right. Everyone annoys you.’

‘Well you should feel special because you annoy me more than anyone.’

‘You can’t even bring yourself to say her name,’ he pressed.

Couldn’t I? I hadn’t even noticed. ‘Please. You’re obsessed with her. You don’t look at anyone but her.’

‘Speak for yourself!’

‘I don’t moon after her!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t mind experimenting with girls, but, you know – I can’t help thinking she wouldn’t be wildly fun in the bedroom. Lack of soul and all.’

Jonah rolled his eyes. ‘She does not lack a soul.’

‘Well it’s a pretty weird one. Haven’t you noticed the way her eyes never shift? It’s like she doesn’t have any emotions, Jone.’

He didn’t say anything to that. Eventually he just muttered, ‘I wasn’t talking about Isadora, anyway. I was talking about you and Thorne.’

I shrugged. ‘There is no me and Thorne.’

To which my brother just laughed.

As morning rose Thorne, Isadora and Penn recovered somewhat and we sat around our camp to look at the parchment together.

Jonah read it aloud. ‘The people of Kaya die in pairs. With the forging of the soul magic, so is forged an unbreakable bond between those in love. When one dies, so shall the other, and forever will it remain so … Unless in the turning of the world the day comes when one is born with both the frozen blood of the north in his veins and the hot winds of the south blazing through his soul. Then shall he, and only he, have the power to break the unbreakable bond.

‘He will be of one soul and two faces. He will speak with two voices and feel with one heart. He will be servant and ruler. He will know moon and earth. To break the bond will be to break him.’

Jonah stopped and there was a silence.

‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘What in Gods’ names does that mean?’

‘No idea.’

‘We’re looking for a person,’ Isadora murmured. ‘That changes everything.’

‘And it’s a man, we know that much,’ I supplied.

‘Not necessarily,’ Jonah disagreed. ‘“He” is how they referred to everyone back then, because all were “man” meaning “human”. So it could be man or woman.’

‘You have one soul and two faces,’ Penn pointed out, looking between Jonah and me.

There was another silence.

‘Well shit,’ I muttered. ‘Thank Gods we aren’t the only twins in the world.’

Thorne stood abruptly and he towered over all of us, looking like an ancient god of fury.

‘Woah. Calm down there, big guy,’ I said.

‘Frozen blood of the north and hot winds of the south,’ he bit out. ‘It’s Pirenti and Kaya. And born to a man of Pirenti and a woman of Kaya are the two royal Princesses of Pirenti. Twins – one soul, two faces. My cousins.’

We stood, hurrying to pack our belongings and mount up.

‘Thorne, it’ll be all right,’ I said, unsure why he was so utterly panicked.

‘As soon as the other groups discover what we did, they will ride for the fortress in search of the princesses, and they will want to use the girls – everyone in Kaya will want to use them – and do you know what will happen then?’

I said nothing.

Thorne said, ‘It will mean an end to peace, because there is no way in this world or any world that the King and Queen of Pirenti will allow their children to be used in a dangerous prophecy. There will be war, and an ocean of blood.’

Chapter 11

Quillane

It took hours to find her. Nobody had seen her except one man, finally, who admitted he had seen a small woman being led by the Emperor himself. My heart beat out of time as my feet took me to his chamber.

‘Hello, darling,’ he slurred. He was throwing darts at the roof, lying directly beneath them. There were six blindfolded and half naked women scattered around, giggling at his antics.

‘I’m looking for a woman. A servant.’ My nerves were shattered – I had no idea how much he knew. Why would he even be aware of her existence? And what was she doing out of her room without me?

‘I was under the impression this palace was full of them,’ he pointed out. ‘I just clap my hands and they appear. Come to think of it, do you imagine it could be by some kind of magic?’

‘Falco,’ I snapped. ‘Someone saw you leading her by the arm. Do you often lay hands on servants and take them places?’

He rolled over to look at me properly. Then grinned. ‘She wouldn’t sleep with me.’

‘What did you do with her?’

‘None of your concern, darling. Would you like to play? I’m not doing very well. I’ve been stabbed by a falling dart twice now.’

‘Do you think the wine could be affecting your aim?’ I asked acerbically.

‘On the contrary!’ he laughed. ‘It’s bolstering my strength!’

The girls laughed. It boggled my mind that he could enjoy this kind of shallow debauchery.

I spun on my heel and left. What would he do with a girl who’d angered him? I could hardly imagine him to be cruel – Falco had never been that. But he had been different since the departure of the girl – Finn. She’d unsettled something in him. Perhaps he was so twisted by it that it had made him unforgiving.

Without daring to believe it, I let my footsteps carry me down the steps to the dungeons. She wouldn’t be here. There was no way he would take an innocent girl to prison. No way –

And yet there she sat, in the far cell.

I ran to her, unable to believe it. ‘Radha!’

‘I’m all right,’ she said quickly. ‘Perfectly all right.’

‘What’s going on? How could he?’ Outrage struck. I literally couldn’t believe he’d done this.

‘Easy, Quill. I haven’t been here long.’

‘Because you wouldn’t have sex with the disgusting Emperor of Kaya? That is not the way this country works. I’ll have him punished for this – he will be held accountable.’

‘How will you do that?’ a voice asked from behind me and I whirled to see Falco leaning lazily in the doorway.

My jaw clenched. ‘You can’t lock women away for not falling into your bed. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful man in the country. Nobody has the right to demand that.’

He dropped his eyes, looking abashed. ‘You’re right. I apologise. I’d been drinking too much. Wasn’t thinking straight. Forgive me, Radha.’

Calling for one of the guards, I had him open the cell. Radha emerged and I had to forcibly stop myself from embracing her.

‘Are you well?’ I asked her instead. She nodded. ‘Then be gone to your duties.’

She hurried up the steps, but not before she met my eyes. A curl of something in my chest, of heat and tenderness – and our eyes shifted gold.

Fear punched me in the gut and I spun around so that my back was to Falco. Breathing quickly, I tried to make my voice cold. ‘We’ll deal with this later, when you aren’t drunk.’

I heard him come closer and I willed my eyes to shift, but fear for her was keeping them gold, tightening the bond between us.

‘I really am sorry, love.’

‘Just go, Falco! You disgust me!’

So he did. Dizzy with relief, I ran up the steps and headed straight for the secret room.

Falco

Something was off. The urgency under Quillane’s skin. The shifting concern I saw in her eyes. So I followed her. Up stairs and through corridors. She arrived at her chambers and I managed to catch the door before she let it fall shut behind her. Slipping in, I watched her wind her way deep into her library and then I saw her open a door I had no knowledge existed. With a quick look behind her (I ducked around the corner not a second too soon) she disappeared into what looked like a tunnel, closing the door firmly behind her.

Heart pounding, I left her rooms. I made my way to my study and unrolled a large map of the palace. There was no tunnel marked there. No door. Nothing.

How the fuck had she managed to hide a room from me in a palace that had been mine long before it was hers? And what was she keeping in there?

Finn

A raging river rushed before us. One we needed to cross.

‘The bridge is another day’s ride north,’ Jonah informed us from the map.

‘Too far,’ Thorne said bluntly. ‘We cross here.’

I tried not to smile. My gang didn’t appreciate it when I showed too much excitement for danger.

‘Hang on,’ Jonah tried. ‘Let’s not make poor decisions through haste. The horses might not make it across here.’

‘I’ll swim,’ Thorne said. ‘The load will be lighter for the mounts.’

Jonah clearly thought this was idiotic, but Thorne had become very difficult to argue with over the last few days. He was single-minded: reach the fortress. He started wading into the rushing water and we followed slowly on the horses. Jonah and I had a mount each, while Isadora and Penn who were the lightest in weight were sharing the third.

My horse, who I had decided was called Benedict, paced forward, then pulled up, uncomfortable with the depth and speed of the river. ‘Easy,’ I murmured, stroking his neck.

Penn had called his horse Griggor, of course, since he apparently needed to call all his horses Griggor. Griggor was moving calmly under his influence.

Jonah wasn’t having the same luck – his horse was pawing the ground uneasily, refusing to cross.

Penn swung off Griggor and walked back to Jonah’s horse. He reached up and started to stroke the dun-coloured mare, murmuring things to her. She calmed instantly as though by magic.

I smiled. I loved Penn’s affinity with animals; secretly, it was my favourite thing about him.

‘What’s her name?’ Penn asked Jonah.

My brother shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘Cruel and selfish as usual,’ I sighed. ‘I named my horse the moment I mounted him, Penn.’

‘Good,’ Penn said approvingly and I grinned smugly at Jonah. He glared at me. ‘Name her,’ Penn said. ‘You have to name her or she’ll be uncomfortable.’

‘Uhh …’

‘Can we move it along, please?’ Thorne called from where he was up to his waist in the water.

‘Sky,’ Jonah blurted.

‘Sky?’ I repeated. ‘Did you just say that because you were looking at the sky?’

‘Whatever.’

‘It’s like you were born without an imagination.’

‘Oh, and Benedict is really inspired, is it? Shut up, Finn.’

‘You shut up.’

‘Both of you shut up,’ Isadora snapped.

‘Sky,’ Penn said, then whispered to the horse. Penn led her forward into the water until she was crossing comfortably, then he ran back to swing onto Griggor. Together we all crossed the river. As it grew deeper the horses had to start swimming, and they were doing beautifully under Penn’s soft words to each of them.

Until something moved, something hard and fast and whizzing past us with a thunk.

‘What –?’ I looked around to see that Thorne had been shot in the shoulder with an arrow.

He gave a grunt of pain, floundering in the water.

‘Thorne!’ I shouted.

But more arrows were flying, hitting the water around us. One flashed straight by my head and I yelped, ducking low to Benedict’s neck. He was trembling with nerves but I urged him forward and he kept swimming, the brave creature.

Sky gave a wild whinny as an arrow sank into her flank. Jonah tried to calm her but she bucked in the water and stopped swimming, allowing herself to be washed downstream.

‘Jonah!’ I screamed.

‘Keep going!’ Thorne ordered to me. He was swimming with one arm, struggling against the current.

Isadora and Penn had managed to keep their mount calm, even while being shot at, and were nearing the far bank. Penn was lying across the horse, shielding it from arrows with his body.

‘Come on, boy,’ I pleaded with my horse. ‘Keep going.’

The arrows were coming harder now, and I couldn’t work out how many assailants we had. My eyes scanned the trees of the forest and figured they must be firing from up in the branches.

Jonah was being swept downstream very quickly. I didn’t know what to do – was about to lunge from my horse when I saw him do exactly that. He scrambled off Sky and tried to swim against the current that was barrelling against him.

Benedict made it to the bank just behind Griggor and we climbed out. I kicked him into a hard run, fumbling with my pack as we thundered along the bank towards Jonah. Finding the long coil of rope, I knotted it through Benedict’s reins and prayed he was as strong as he looked.

There was a huge bit of driftwood sweeping down through the water. ‘Jonah!’ I screamed, trying to warn him, but it cracked him in the head and I saw my brother go under.

Spending so much time with Penn meant we were good with horses. I laid my hand flat against Benedict’s neck and said, ‘Hold strong, Ben. This isn’t going to be fun.’

As we cantered alongside where Jonah was being washed downstream – face underwater – I stood up in my stirrups and looped the other end of the rope around my waist, securing it with a quick bowline. Then without preamble, I launched myself from the saddle and dove straight into the river.

I plunged under. It was instantly cold and brutal, but I managed to reach for Jonah, clutching onto his ankle. The rope around my waist pulled taut and I heard Benedict whinny loudly but hold firm. He was anchoring the weight of both Jonah and I, as well as the force of the current. He was a good, good horse.

I hauled Jonah towards the bank and clutched onto it. With trembling limbs I managed to roll him onto the side so that he was no longer face-down. Then I dragged myself up onto the bank and drew some ragged breaths. My hands slipped as I clasped Jonah’s underarms and tried to drag him out of the water. He was a pretty small person, but Gods he seemed to weigh a thousand pounds right now. I finally managed to get him onto the bank and touching his skin reassured me that his heart was beating strong. He was breathing too, so I looped the rope from my waist, gave Benedict a quick, calming stroke, and then sprinted back up the riverbank.

Isadora and Thorne were both crouched behind trees, peering up into the branches. Penn was with his horse, still trying to guard it, but it seemed to have become a stalemate, for the arrows had paused.

I reached Penn and pulled him behind Griggor.

‘Don’t!’ he cried.

‘Shhh. I’d rather the horse get shot than you.’

Peering around, I met Thorne’s eyes and nodded to let him know Jonah was all right. He motioned for me to stay low. There was still an arrow protruding from his arm, and it made my heart revolt.

‘What do you want?’ Thorne called.

A few rustles above. ‘We want the Pirenti pig dead,’ called a male voice. An arrow shot straight past Thorne’s head and he pulled back behind the trunk again.

‘Anything else?’ Thorne replied.

‘The map.’

‘You can have the map. We surrender. Come down and we’ll hand it over.’

‘Throw your weapons into the river and move out from behind the trees – all of you.’

Thorne nodded, and I thought it was the stupidest thing ever, but didn’t have much choice but to trust him. He threw his axe into the river, then moved right into the open where he could be killed with ease. Heart thumping, I did the same, but had no weapons to remove. Penn came with me, more comfortable standing in front of Griggor, though he was hardly big enough to guard the tall horse.

Isadora moved slowly, removing the sabre at her belt. She held up empty hands.

‘The fifth!’

‘He’s unconscious!’ I snapped.

‘Show yourselves and you get the map,’ Thorne said.

‘Place it on the ground before you.’

‘No,’ Thorne said flatly. ‘Reveal yourselves or you get nothing.’

In response, they shot another arrow straight into his other arm.

I cried out without meaning to, but he lifted his hand quickly to stop me from moving. He had taken the impact with only the smallest of stumbles.

‘Fire as many arrows as you want,’ he said. ‘The map is knowledge. I die, and it dies with me.’

There was a long hesitation, and I wondered how they were communicating. Eventually the trees rustled and then four people dropped from the branches. They slid down ropes with ease and then hung suspended in the air, their arrows nocked and aimed straight at us.

‘The fifth, too,’ Thorne ordered, and I wondered how he knew there were five. Sure enough, a fifth assailant dropped into view.

‘Nobody move,’ their leader warned again. He was dressed in green to match the trees.

‘Nobody’s moving,’ Thorne assured him calmly.

But it was a lie.

Someone was moving.

What they didn’t know was that Isadora was covered neck to ankle in hidden knives. And she knew how to use them.

I watched, frozen, as she moved, grace in every muscle. A knife appeared in each hand and shot out to take two bowmen in the throats. They dropped their bows and hung dead, still attached to their ropes.

Thorne lunged to Penn and I, pressing us beneath him.

But Isadora wasn’t finished. With an easy spin she ducked beneath the three arrows fired her way, then materialised two more knives and with lazy deadliness flicked them out to kill two more. I had barely seen the knives land before she had a fifth and final dagger thrown into the last man’s heart.

All five bandits hung dead from their ropes within a matter of seconds.

Isadora straightened smoothly, utterly unruffled.

I’d known. But I hadn’t known. Her red eyes darted to us, and then I watched her walk to the five bodies and reach up to reclaim her knives. There must have been invisible slits in her clothing, because she cleaned the blades on the grass and then they disappeared again, settled back against her body.

I turned to Thorne, because frankly I didn’t know how to react or feel or what to think about what I had just witnessed. My mind wasn’t processing what my eyes were seeing – five swinging corpses. Five lives doused in mere moments, without the slightest of efforts. I couldn’t fathom who Isadora was, where she had come from, and why she was able to do that without batting an eyelid. It seemed too preposterous. As if the mere fact of her existence made a joke of the men who’d thought to attack her.

One did not want to anger Isadora. That was the lesson of the day.

Carefully I removed the arrows from Thorne’s arms, feeling queasy. He wasn’t too bothered by them, which was a whole other absurdity to deal with.

‘Small bows, small arrows, small wounds,’ he shrugged when I pointed out his remarkable lack of pain. I just shook my head and bound his arms with bandages from the aid kit. Then I went back to Jonah and bound his head wound, which was thankfully quite shallow.

The others wanted to leave the bodies where they were, but I felt even more ill at the idea, and so went to cut them down myself. Thorne helped me, and we didn’t say anything as we laid them out under the trees.

A few more days passed and we kept a cracking pace. Now that we only had two horses, we took turns riding and walking. But Thorne was a silent creature of determination – he would not be slowed, and the rest of us were not keeping up well. On our third night of only stopping for an hour or so of sleep (filled with nightmares of swinging corpses for me to enjoy!) Jonah blocked Thorne’s path as he went to re-pack the horses.

‘Stop.’

‘We must keep moving, Jonah,’ he said flatly.

‘Wait. We need to work this out. We can’t keep going as we have.’

‘I must get to them.’

‘The rest of us are spent,’ Jonah pointed out. I would never have admitted such a thing, but it was true. He reached a hand to clasp Thorne’s upper arm. ‘Brother, we will get there. But we need to rest.’

Thorne gazed at the smaller boy, hesitating.

‘Prince Thorne could go on ahead,’ Isadora suggested wearily. ‘With a horse to himself he will make better time.’

Thorne nodded, saddling up.

‘Not on his own,’ I said quickly.

‘Why?’ Thorne demanded.

I didn’t know why. I just … didn’t like the thought of him having to make this journey, in such a state, alone. It seemed too lonely.

‘Go with him, Inney,’ Jonah said. ‘Take the second horse. The three of us will walk and meet you at the fortress when we can.’

‘No, wait –’ I tried, suddenly horrified at the idea of being alone with Thorne for so long.

‘And if we come across the other groups along the way, we can persuade them not to follow the trail to Pirenti,’ Isadora added.

‘It won’t be safe for the three of you to enter Pirenti without Thorne,’ I pointed out.

Thorne picked out a piece of coal from the tiny fire we had made. He motioned for Jonah to turn around, and then he made a small mark on the back of his neck. He did the same to both Penn and Isadora. ‘The royal sigil. You will be safe wearing this – no sane person would don it without my permission unless he wanted to be in serious trouble. But for the Gods’ sakes, don’t wash it off.’

‘Not a problem!’ Penn declared, and Thorne couldn’t help but smile. He took the small boy in a tight hug.

‘Hang on,’ I said hurriedly. This really looked like it was being decided. He was bidding farewell to all three of them. ‘I can’t leave Jonah.’

Thorne glanced at me. ‘I’ll go ahead on my own, Finn. I don’t mind.’

‘I know you don’t mind, but you shouldn’t have to.’ I looked between him and my brother, feeling a terrible ache in my chest. I already knew what I was going to do, but it hurt.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Jonah told me softly. ‘I promise you will. It’ll only be a few weeks, at most. And this had to happen at some point in our lives. We always knew that.’

I went to him, embracing him fiercely. I was crying, and I hated it, but I couldn’t make it stop. ‘I love you,’ I whispered to him, not wanting anyone else to hear. ‘Do you know why?’ His hands were in my hair. ‘Not because you take away my sadness. But because you’ve given me every piece of happiness I’ve ever known.’

He clutched at me and I could feel him trembling, could feel his tears. ‘And you me, my girl. But don’t be frightened of finding happiness elsewhere. That’s all right too, you know.’

I shook my head, trying to hold onto him, but he pushed me away, and he was crying as he led me to the horse. I hugged Penn and kissed his cheeks and lips and he giggled and couldn’t look at me.

To Isadora, I said, ‘I charge you with looking after them both. If harm befalls either one of them I will hold you responsible.’

She nodded once and then helped me to mount my horse.

As Thorne and I rode away from them I was sobbing and it was ridiculous but the truth was that Jonah and I had not been parted since the day we were born. I knew of course that it would happen but I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t prepared myself, not yet not yet not yet.

In the night I could hear the high, sweet voice of a young red-haired boy singing. ‘Away we go, close to always, stolen by the bone queen of once upon a time …’ And then his voice was swallowed up by the thunder of our horses’ hooves.

Thorne

It was because she came with me. I could smell her terror; leaving her brother was what scared her most in the world. But she came with me anyway.

That was how I knew I loved her.

Finn

It took us half the time it should have to cross into Pirenti. A week instead of two. We did not touch each other once – I didn’t know if I would ever be ready to touch him again – but we talked. Talked and talked and talked. I felt the air between us shift and change shape, become something different. Something … deeper. Something that was starting to make me very nervous.

We crossed the border and the forest grew denser, the cover of trees blotting out the sun so that there was a canopy of speckled light above. The road was quiet, but Thorne said it always was this close to the Kayan border. Only traders came this far south, and even then they were few. I wondered who had built this road between the countries, and what they’d had in mind for it. Probably war.

‘There will be civil war in Kaya before long,’ Thorne said suddenly, on one of our few walking breaks. ‘The Sparrow grows greedy.’

‘He wants what we want,’ I replied. ‘He wanted an end to the bond before we knew there was one.’

‘He wants power and will shed blood to gain it.’

‘He wants Falco gone from the throne,’ I murmured softly. ‘It’s commonly known. And having met the man, it’s hard to disagree.’

‘The bond,’ he said bluntly. ‘You want it gone for your da. But if not for him how would you feel about it?’

This was a question I didn’t allow myself to ask. But with Thorne the way he was in this moment – a focused, detached man – I felt a desire to answer it. It felt safe to answer it.

‘It just brings so much death and destruction,’ I told him. ‘And there’s like this … yearning that defines a Kayan. An emptiness that we know instinctively to be our soul’s way of waiting for its mate. That absence – it’s not a way to live.’

‘There’s more than one way to fill the absence,’ he replied. ‘What you wish to achieve with this quest is an end to the yearning, the half-souls, the endless waiting. But you could also end it by bonding.’

‘I have no desire to live in a world where a man or woman cannot be themselves, wholly themselves, on their own. I defy the idea that I can’t be me without someone else to help.’

‘And maybe that’s not what’s happening at all. Maybe the absence is just loneliness. Maybe the bond is simply about two people sharing something when they are ready and willing to do so.’

‘Sharing what?’

‘Love!’ he exclaimed, exasperated. ‘You can be you without love, Finn. But maybe love would make things better.’

I didn’t respond, sick of the conversation. I was tired to my very core of love. It bored me in all its predictable anguish. Damned Agathon and his romantic heart. Didn’t he have any idea of the kind of destruction he was setting loose when he made this infuriating bond?

‘I don’t think the bond is all that different,’ Thorne added after a while.

‘From what?’

He hesitated. ‘Kayans seem to think that the love of the bond is so much bigger than any other kind. But in my own country I’ve seen love that’s vast and strong, and I know that all loss leaves us walking half a life, at least for a time. My mother loves like no one I’ve ever met. And her grief … it’s bigger than the ocean. Who can truly say that it means less than a Kayan’s grief?’

I felt unaccountably angry with him for saying something so painfully perfect, and I wanted to be gone from him, and I wanted the day we met to erase itself from my life, and I wanted him to never say another word to me for the rest of our days, because – really – I wanted none of those things at all.

I kicked my horse into a canter so that he wouldn’t see my eyes or hear my heart beat its way out of my chest.

As night drew closer the road grew busier. We had to slow to another walk as it was unsafe otherwise, passing horse-drawn carts and travelling parties who either walked or rode. They all recognised Thorne and bowed formally to him. Many stared at me with calculating eyes, but none spoke with any hostility, nor did any make trouble. A few even greeted me kindly.

The one quality each shared was their enormous size. Around these men I felt like a dwarf in a land of giants. They were unshaved and scarred and ugly, and they wore filthy animal pelts and carried massive, dull weapons. I felt rapt with excitement at the sheer strangeness of it all.

At one point Thorne explained, ‘This is a rough area. The farmers and merchants don’t have much money, so they survive on what they can. Closer to the fortress there is more wealth and you will notice the difference in the appearance of those we come across.’

‘More to my taste, surely, having come from such luxury myself.’

He cracked a smile at that. ‘The central provinces of the country are the safest. In the north, closer to the ice caps, it is more brutal. The northernmost city, Vjort, is a walled city that houses the largest army barracks. Hundreds of soldiers dwell and train there, which makes it a dangerous place for outsiders. In Vjort it never stops snowing, even in summer, and the beauty of it makes it hard to understand the violence.’

I’d never seen snow, but I wanted to, more than anything. ‘I thought the capital fortress was the biggest army barracks.’

‘It’s not half the size of Vjort. Ambrose spends a great deal of time up north, and the soldiers take shifts travelling down to the fortress, doing sweeps of the country and spending time training under the King. That way he has a strong presence with them, for if the soldiers couldn’t see the King’s continuing strength, Ambrose would be challenged by too many who forget his power.’

‘Can anyone challenge him?’

Thorne nodded.

‘And if someone beat him?’ I demanded. ‘Some idiot who was a good fighter? What state would Pirenti be in then?’

Thorne said simply, ‘That is why he must not be beaten.’

It occurred to me that I would meet this man soon. The unbeatable King of Pirenti, who had been so lovable that even a woman incapable of love could fall for him. ‘Is he challenged often?’

‘He was. In the beginning of his reign, when he married a Kayan.’ Something dark crossed Thorne’s face. ‘They came at him, one after the other. Thinking him weak. Thinking him soft.’

I swallowed. ‘And now?’

‘Now they know better.’

We travelled in silence for a while. An owl hooted in the trees above. No one passed us for a few hundred paces or so.

‘There are those who don’t like the treaty, aren’t there?’ I asked, no idea why I was pushing it when I knew the answer.

‘There will always be those who seek war. It’s why Vjort is such a dangerous city – it’s full of bloodthirsty warriors with no one to fight. One day someone will think himself strong enough to take on the King and the challenges will start again.’

‘Thorne …’ I licked my lips, keeping my eyes forward. ‘They won’t challenge you. Not until you’re King.’ It didn’t sound like a question, but it was. It was.

‘No,’ he said softly. ‘They won’t challenge me.’

We came to the outskirts of a town. ‘There’s a tavern where we can sleep a few hours.’

‘Really? You don’t want to keep going?’

‘It will be too cold to sleep outside.’ By which he meant that it would be too cold for me to sleep outside. I thought about arguing, but the weariness had set into my bones and the thought of an actual bed made me giddy.

Inside the small tavern it was dark and hot with a huge fire raging in the main dining area. Thorne asked for a room with two beds and we were shown immediately to the largest. It was not very large. After dumping our packs, we went down to have a meal in the dining area. There were quite a few people already seated at the bar or around the fire, so we chose a small, free table at the back of the room. A few men bowed to Thorne as we passed, but he simply gestured for them to stop, greeting them individually. It was nice to see Thorne being treated with respect instead of the hatred and fear he’d received in Kaya.

I gazed around at the other patrons, noting that they were all grizzly looking men. ‘Aren’t there any women in Pirenti?’

‘There’s one.’ He pointed at a very overweight, very dirty cooking lady who was delivering a huge pot of boiling stew to some men who slapped her on the ass, even though she was twice their age.

‘Charming company she keeps.’

Thorne tried to hide his smile. ‘You have no idea of the world you’ve just walked into, do you?’

I looked at him, thinking the question a curious one. ‘What should I expect, Majesty?’

‘Expect that your words will earn you different responses to the ones you’re used to,’ was all he said.

Food was brought over – delicious, meaty stew. Thorne ate four entire bowls, plus a whole loaf of bread, while I only got through one measly bowl.

I couldn’t help thinking of Da, of course. He was never far from my thoughts. It scared me to think of him at home alone, unable to look after himself when the fevers struck. Those on the cliff would tend to him, but still. My thoughts shifted to Jonah and I couldn’t help wondering where he was, worrying for him too.

‘Do you think Isadora beautiful?’ I asked Thorne.

He frowned. ‘Is this a trap?’

‘My brother does.’

Thorne smiled crookedly. ‘Is that why you look like you’d enjoy throttling her?’

‘No, I’d enjoy throttling her because she’s completely charmless. But I’ll win her over one of these days. I’ve not yet met a soul I could not win with a word of some kind.’

‘No I imagine you haven’t.’ He leant forward, holding my eyes. ‘Who called you Silver Tongue?’

My mouth curled into a smile. ‘You know who. Jealous?’

‘Painfully,’ he admitted, and Gods, I wanted him. Despite one of you will die. I let my fingers trace the outline of his hand where it rested on the table, but I made sure not to touch him. He moved quickly, trying to snatch my hand, but I was quicker, darting out of his reach and grinning. His big, calloused hand returned to its spot and I placed mine next to it, so close I could feel the warmth from it. Understanding the game, he moved his thumb to trace the air above my wrist, and as though he really was touching me I felt my pulse race. Yellowblack, flickered my eyes, yellowblack.

‘What about Wild One? Who called you that?’

The flickering stopped. I drew my hand back, folding my arms. ‘Ma.’

Thorne levelled me with a probing look. ‘You’re so frightened.’

‘Of what?’ I snapped, indignant.

‘Of me. Of yourself and your powers. Of your ma.’

‘I don’t want to talk to you about Ma,’ I said bluntly. ‘Ever.’

‘Because you’re frightened,’ he agreed calmly. ‘Do you know what it is to obey fear?’

‘I’m going to assume you’d prefer to answer your own question here.’

‘Cowardice.’

‘Congratulations. You’ve stated a fact that everyone alive knows.’

‘You’re mean, Finn of Limontae,’ he smiled.

‘Some days,’ I agreed. ‘Some days I’m sweet as sugar.’

And then he looked at me
and he looked at me
and he said

‘And I will love you on every one of those days.’

I was frozen. In my mind I saw Falco’s wings and wished for them. In my bones I felt fractured. In my muscles there was a need to run like I had never known and in my throat was a scream barely contained. In my soul was too much, needing to get out, to get away, to be more than I could carry.

But in my heart there was simple truth.

I would love him on every one of those days too.

A man appeared behind Thorne. We were holding each other’s eyes so intently that it took me some time to realise we were no longer alone. My expression must have changed because Thorne rose to face the man.

‘Prince Thorne.’

‘Aye,’ Thorne replied.

The man looked to be in his late thirties, with cold brown eyes and huge meaty hands. He had long hair plaited on either side of his face, and was definitely a soldier, for his weapons and clothing were more expensive than any the farmers had been wearing. ‘I am Hersir Blain of Slaav.’

‘Greetings. With whom do you serve?’

Blain eyed Thorne, completely ignoring the question. ‘I have business with you, Prince. I heard tell that there was a Kayan whore here, travelling with the heir, but I did not dare to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.’

My skin felt cold.

‘Speak again of the lady and I’ll kill you where you stand,’ Thorne replied softly, flatly, and I was stunned. I was stunned and I wasn’t. I knew, really. I knew what had been lurking inside him. I’d seen it, hadn’t I? In those agonising touches? There was deadliness in his voice and a thirst for blood in his words, but they were nothing to the creature I’d seen lurking in his heart.

I watched Blain’s face as closely as I could bear to. He looked full of entitlement and anger, and I realised that very rarely was I frightened of a thing that existed in this world. You grew detached from your body and you started to fear abstract things, like time racing forward without you, like a soul you could not read, like quiet and ghosts and memories. Real things began to amuse you. Like falling from a great height, like humiliation, physical pain, the very idea of having your heart broken, or death. Like men with axes. You did not fear men with axes. I did not. This all happened, I supposed, when you grew rotten inside.

But right now I feared a man with an axe, because I could sense what was about to happen.

My thought was: Thorne lied to me.

‘Isn’t it enough that we have the boy-bitch for our Queen without the heir to the throne also bringing filthy foreign blood into our midst?’ Blain demanded. ‘I’ll not stand by and let this happen again. In good conscience I cannot, though I have always respected you, Prince.’

‘You’ve insulted a beloved aunt, and Queen of our nation, and you’ve insulted a good friend of mine,’ Thorne pointed out calmly. ‘You speak of respect but I’ve witnessed none.’

Blain’s lip curled. ‘Outside then. I formally challenge you.’

He lied to me.

And I didn’t notice.

The world seemed to slow down around me so that all I could hear was the loud thump, thump, thump in my chest. I was dazed as I trailed outside. A whole crowd of people followed and made a wide circle on the stone. They knew too well what to do, what to expect.

The air held a sharp bite, and I wasn’t wearing enough clothing. I was barely aware of it. My skin was numb but I hardly felt tethered to my body, except for the thump, thump grinding through my bones.

Someone appeared at my side – I only noticed belatedly. The fat cooking woman. She placed a thick hand around my upper arm, holding onto it tightly. ‘It’s all right, love,’ she told me. I looked at her, struggling to interpret the words through my haze. What I did interpret was the look in her eyes, and there was no mistaking that it was pity. In her touch I felt a huge heart, an incredibly generous heart, one with more kindness than I had ever felt. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for thinking rude thoughts about her, for belittling her life here, for judging her. I wanted to thank her for being such a good human. I felt shame, and it was the most powerful emotion in my breast. Which was so odd, given everything. I didn’t seem to be able to interpret how I felt about Thorne and Blain and the rest of this waking nightmare.

Thorne crossed the circle to stand before me. He didn’t say anything, but he looked into my eyes, long and slow. I had no words. I had a thousand words, but I was unable to speak them.

‘I’ll protect her, Your Majesty,’ the woman told him. ‘If you fall. I’ll smuggle her out of here.’

Thorne’s eyes moved to the cook. Unexpectedly, he smiled. ‘My thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll not forget your kindness.’ And then he met my eyes again and said very clearly, ‘But I will not fall.’

I watched him walk to Blain, who was stretching his muscles as though he’d done it a thousand times. He really was big. And older than Thorne – a soldier during the war, probably, before the prince had even been born. I searched my mind for the lessons at the academy some years ago and remembered that in Pirenti a Hersir was a high-ranking officer – one who had proven himself a leader in battle.

I felt sick as it started to hit me. Truly, gut-wrenchingly sick. I might have to watch him die here.

And that was when I learnt something about the way I loved him.

‘Say it formally in front of the witnesses,’ Thorne ordered, still peculiarly calm.

Blain drew himself up to his considerable height. ‘I, Hersir Blain of Slaav, son of Jarl Brock of Slaav, am formally challenging His Majesty, Crown Prince Thorne of Araan, son of the late King Thorne and heir of King Ambrose, for his legitimate seat on the throne of Pirenti. Do I have a formal witness?’

‘Aye,’ a man spoke up, raising his hand and intoning his full name.

‘Do I have a second?’

A second man recited his name.

‘I, Crown Prince Thorne of Araan, acknowledge the validity of the challenge,’ Thorne said and then the proceedings were done.

Blain drew his mighty axe and approached. Thorne didn’t draw any weapons.

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked with a cracked voice.

‘The Prince isn’t allowed a weapon during the challenge,’ the cook told me.

He was going to die, I realised with a start. He was going to die. And I was going to have to stand here and watch.

I must have stumbled, because the woman grabbed hold of my arms and supported me steadily against her mighty bosom.

Blain gave a loud battle cry and attacked, swinging his huge axe at Thorne’s head. The prince ducked out of the way and spun behind the bigger man. And that was when I witnessed a dark, bloody miracle. Before Blain even had a chance to turn, Thorne slammed a fist into the back of the man’s skull, sending him stumbling forward. He didn’t have time to understand the impact before Thorne hit him again, harder. The axe dropped loudly to the cobblestones and Blain sank to his knees woozily.

Thorne moved in front of him calmly. Eyes cold, he kicked Blain hard in the stomach, sending the man heavily onto the stone ground. He tried to get up, marshalling well considering the blows he’d taken, but Thorne wouldn’t allow it. The prince knelt on top of Blain and started to hit him in the face. His big, strong fist pummelled into Blain’s mouth and nose over and over again. Blood was pouring and front teeth were gone. I could see even from where I stood that Blain’s nose and cheekbones were shattered. He wasn’t conscious anymore, but Thorne kept hitting him, over and over again.

He must have realised finally that the man was either dead or very close to it, for at length he stopped. Thorne sat still a moment, staring at the mess he’d made, then he gave a chilling growl that crept through the silent night, and within the space of that sound, he took the man’s head and ripped it from his body.

The sound was the most distressing thing I’d ever heard, a kind of sick, wet tearing of flesh and bone. Thorne stood, holding the bloodied, severed head for all to see. Even in the moonlight it was no longer recognisable.

I wanted to close my eyes but I couldn’t. I wanted to shut it out, block the sight of it from my mind, but it was too vivid, too clear.

Thorne spoke into the eerie silence, his voice rough and growling. ‘Spread the word. If anyone threatens the safety of my travelling companion, or speaks ill of her at all, I will hunt them down and slaughter them, and I will not be as mercifully quick as I was tonight. This man challenged the Prince of Pirenti, knowing the consequences, and has died for it. Be gone to your beds, all of you.’ And with that he threw the head to the ground where it hit with a sickening thump.

The stunned crowd hesitated, then began to disperse. Thorne calmly ordered someone to fetch our belongings from the tavern, and then he crossed back to the cook and me. She was still holding onto me, and I was thankful for it.

‘Your Majesty,’ she whispered shakily, overawed.

‘Thank you again,’ he said woodenly, then gestured to the dead body. ‘I apologise for the mess.’

She didn’t know what to say – it was too bewildering.

Thorne hadn’t met my eyes yet. His, I saw, were clear, pale blue, and I realised with a start that they hadn’t turned red, not once. He reached out and softly pried her hands from my arm, telling her gently that he would look after me now. I didn’t want to leave her. Absurdly, I wanted to go inside and live with this cooking lady; I wanted only her kindness for the rest of my life. But our packs were brought from inside and Thorne claimed the dead man’s axe as his own, and then he led me away from the bloodied cobblestones into the cold night.

We walked our horses in silence. It was cold. Colder than I had ever known the world to be. I had to stop so I could vomit into the bushes. I heaved up the entire contents of my stomach, then returned to my horse. Thorne didn’t say a word, and I didn’t say a word, and we just kept going. And in the moments when he reached out to stop me from stumbling, I could not feel his heart in his skin.

Chapter 12

Thorne

With blood on my hands we walked. I could smell the faint remainder of her soap, lingering in the blonde tresses of her hair. I could smell pine needles and a hint of the rot of the underbrush. I could smell the ocean, growing and growing.

And death. I could always smell death after I killed.

She knew now. The brutality in my hands. She could never un-know it.

It was still dark when we came to Araan. I could hear the lapping of the water, gentle on this stretch of coast, and I used it to guide me home in the pitch black. The moon had crept behind the heavy cover of clouds, and I begged the looming storm to wait for us.

In the distance I saw Ma’s cottage. It was small but sturdy, and it sat only a handful of metres back from the very edge of the water, alone amidst forest and sea. If we turned northeast we would come to Ambrose’s fortress, the place over which I would one day rule. If we kept walking north, a long way north, we would come to a world of ice, the land in which at least half of me belonged.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, the first words for hours. Since before.

‘There,’ I said softly, and she followed my gaze to the house. ‘Ma’s house. Closer than the fortress. We’ll rest there until sunrise.’

We plodded the last few hundred yards. I tethered the horses under the awning, giving them as much shelter as I could, then led Finn to the front door. Opening it as quietly as possible, I ushered her inside and she followed me soundlessly. The house had only two bedrooms, so I led her to mine, the room in which I’d recovered from a thousand nightmares. I placed both our packs in the corner and pulled back the covers of my bed, motioning for her to climb in.

Clearly exhausted, she did so without a word and promptly fell asleep.

I padded back into the living room, glancing around at the house. It looked exactly as I’d always known it to. But as I stood here, gazing at the small rooms and all their small belongings, I felt a deep pain. My mother was the loneliest woman in the world, and I’d left her.

I strode back out the front door and down the three wooden steps I’d built when I was ten. Then I walked to the edge of the water where it lapped gently against the rocks. A slice of moonlight peeked its head out of the thick clouds and illuminated the edges of the oyster shells, wreathing me in a feeling of familiarity so strong I didn’t know where to put it, where it would fit.

A crack of thunder rumbled and lightning sliced through the sky, lighting up the calm sea. It reminded me too much of my dream, and I half expected the next bolt of lightning to reveal a yellow eyed girl getting devoured by my beastly father. As I was haunted by the image, fat drops of rain splattered my face, and then it was pouring. Flash storms like this were common on the coast of Pirenti, where it would be calm and clear one moment, threatening lives the next.

A distant sound reached my ears over the racket of the rain. A high-pitched sound. It came again, and through all the despair I had a moment of pure delight. I spun around and saw him bounding out of the house and through the storm. Howl, barking his glee.

We collided, and he bowled me to the ground, licking my face and yelping joyfully. I laughed and wrestled with him in the mud, rolling him over and tickling his belly like he loved.

‘Hello, boy,’ I murmured, sitting up and stroking his beautiful head. He nuzzled my side, dark eyes meeting mine soulfully, and I realised how much I’d missed him. Strange, which connections snuck into your life and took root there. Growing up alone on the coast with only your ma and your dog meant you loved the two of them as fiercely as it was possible to love, and selfishly resented the loneliness they could not manage to fight off for you.

Howl ran back towards the house, barking at me to follow. That was when I saw her, my mother, standing in the silhouetted light of the house. She came down the steps and into the rain before I could stop her.

‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’

I bounded up to her and swept her into a mighty hug. She smelt of rosemary. She smelt of fear and relief. Setting her down, I looked into her rain-swept face and I found my smile.

‘What are you doing here, darling?’

‘Visiting, Ma.’

‘But …’ She seemed bewildered. ‘It’s only been a few weeks.’

‘I missed you,’ I told her. ‘I’m for the fortress at first light. There are dark tidings, but I need rest. There’s … a girl here, sleeping in my bed.’

Roselyn’s eyes widened. ‘A girl.’

I hesitated, then muttered, ‘She’s not well. I scared her.’

Roselyn turned back towards the house, but paused and looked at me again, soft and delicate. ‘How lovely you are, my boy,’ she said softly. ‘You grow more handsome each day.’

I shook my head. ‘Ma? She wasn’t well.’

Howl barked and licked my hand. Rose didn’t respond.

Inside it was quiet and dark, but through the door I had left open I could see that Finn was no longer in my bed. Hurrying into the room, I spotted the open window. ‘Ma!’ I called. My heart began to pound with brutal beats. Lightning struck and I saw her up on the hill, standing in the rain.

Unable to fit through the window, I sprinted around the side of the house and up the hill, stopping behind her, frightened.

‘Finn?’

She didn’t reply, or move. I circled around to look into her face, but it was vacant. Gods, why had I brought her away from her brother? Jonah would know how to take this horror away and give her happiness. All I’d given her was fear.

Ma came up the hill with a heavy blanket. She wrapped it carefully around Finn’s shoulders. ‘My dear,’ she said softly.

Finn blinked, noticing Rose. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured faintly. ‘I don’t know how I got out here.’

‘Come inside. It’s too cold.’

Finn said nothing, but she reached out and hugged Ma with the kind of hug so full of yearning I could hardly bear to watch. Rose stroked her wet hair, and even though the rain was torrential, we stood there on the hill without moving.

When finally they drew apart, Finn stared into Ma’s face, blinked once, then let her eyes drift to me. She said, ‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘Ma, go inside now,’ I ordered calmly, but inside me was a sharp panic.

Ma saw my face and left us.

Finn said, ‘I can’t feel anything.’

Then, ‘Thorne? I can’t feel anything.’

I grabbed her face in my hands, smoothing my skin over hers, holding her against me, trying to make her feel it. She gazed up at me and whispered, ‘I can’t feel anything.’

I pressed my lips to hers; I kissed her with all of me. In the rain I kissed her again and again. I didn’t stop.

At last her face crumpled into distress, and even though she was sobbing I kept kissing her and kissing her and touching her as much as I could with only two hands. And then I carried her inside, to where Ma had gotten the fire raging and made a warming concoction for her to drink. We made Finn finish every last drop of it, though she could hardly stop crying, and then I placed her before the fire. As Ma changed her into a set of dry clothes I paced the kitchen, terrified that I had broken her.

‘She’s chilled. Lie with her, darling.’

‘She wouldn’t want it,’ I said.

‘Keep her warm,’ Ma instructed firmly.

I sank down and pulled Finn against me. She’d stopped crying and lay very still, except for the shivering of her body. Howl curled himself against her other side, and the three of us warmed each other.

Hours later the rain felt like a dream. It was warm inside, and with her pressed against me I could feel her heartbeat, the rise and fall of her breathing. Her hands curled around mine, and I noticed how long her fingers were with a jolt of uncanny otherness. For a moment she felt impossibly distant, deeply unknowable, and I was filled with a sense of loss so profound I wondered if it would shape me all the days of my life. Whatever was between us – I didn’t think it could survive what she had witnessed tonight. Her regard for me was already so fragile, her fear of what I represented so thick. For a split second I decided to let her go. To cease this mad yearning that had come upon me so suddenly and let her be free of me. Easier for us both.

But then she rolled in her sleep, and tenderly she placed her mouth in the crook of my neck and her hands against my heartbeat, and the decision was gone, erased, the shadow of a thought drifting up and away on the wind as if it had never existed. I wasn’t capable of it: of letting her go. Not yet.

Carefully I extricated myself from her limbs and walked once again into the lashing storm. The rain felt violent as I forced myself out into it, right up to the edge of the now unquiet sea. I closed my eyes against the onslaught, but I tilted my face up towards the sky, and I sent a prayer to the Gods for Blain of Slaav, as I did with each of the men who were courageous enough to fight for what they wanted.

I didn’t share their courage; I only took it from them as they died.

I was a beast, after all.

Finn

I woke, disoriented. I’d been dreaming of Sam and Ma and heads torn free of their bodies. It took me several long moments to understand why I was asleep on the floor with a furry white thing curled around me. I reached out to stroke the dog’s head and he looked at me with dark liquid eyes as if to tell me he loved me despite never having met me before. His tail thumped hopefully.

Sitting up, I felt stiff and sore in each joint. Unable to help it, I bent my head and buried it in the dog’s fur. He smelt faintly wet in a pleasant way.

Maybe it was a sound that alerted me, but I turned and belatedly saw that I was not alone. Sitting casually at the kitchen table were Thorne and his ma, both watching me quietly.

I remembered last night as though it too were one of the dreams I’d had. I remembered the rain and the storm, and I remembered Thorne’s touches and kisses and how I had felt nothing. There had been only numbness. A kind of impotency in my skin. Which was, I now knew, worse than anything I had experienced in my whole life. Worse than the black tar I waded through sometimes. Worse than being away from Jonah and Da and Ma and Penn. Worse, even, than the screaming.

That was how I came to understand something about my power, sitting on the warm floor of Thorne’s family home, next to a big white dog. The touching of another person’s soul might have been painful and frightening and burdensome at the best of times, but it was me. It was how I existed, how I had been born. It was more a part of me than anything else, and spending a night without it had been spending a night as a ghost.

So I closed my eyes and pushed the memory of it away, feeling a kind of calm wash over me.

‘Whose bed did I share last night?’ I asked, indicating my new best friend.

‘Howl,’ Roselyn said with a gentle smile.

With a last pat to Howl, I rose to my feet and moved to the living room window. It was still dark and stormy outside. ‘What time is it?’

‘Daybreak.’

Thorne hadn’t said a word. I crossed to sit in the third seat at the table. There was a long silence as I gathered my nerve.

Looking Roselyn in the face, I said, ‘Forgive me. I behaved poorly last night.’

‘Please don’t,’ she protested. ‘You weren’t yourself. And this house has seen many dark nights.’ She was without doubt the loveliest creature I had ever seen, fine and delicate, with a pink flush to her pale skin. Her deep red hair was warm in the candlelight and her eyes were enormous. She made me instantly wish to be softer, quieter, someone whose sweetness was as beguiling as hers was.

I cleared my throat. ‘That’s generous of you to say. Thank you for having me, and for your kindness.’

‘Thorne has never brought anyone here before,’ she said shyly. Roselyn then rose to cut slices of bread, but as her eyes found the kitchen window she grew distracted by something she’d seen and the knife in her hand was forgotten.

I watched her, taken by her shadowed profile. Under her breath, barely audible, there were numbers emerging without her awareness. And it made sense, how Thorne had understood what to do with Penn and how to be with him.

My gaze shifted to him; he was already watching me. I could see a thousand things in his pale eyes.

I told him, ‘I’m all right now.’

He frowned, searching my face worriedly.

‘I’m all right now,’ I promised again, and this time he heard the truth of it.

We waited quietly for Rose to remember the bread and bring it to the table, then the three of us ate together just as quietly. And what happened to me in those moments was a strange and impossible shift. I no longer felt my panicked heart flailing in my chest as the quiet cloaked me like a suffocating veil. I no longer wished to scream just so there would be sound.

I … I felt the first, tender whispers of happiness come to entice me. I thought perhaps that the complete mental snap I had felt last night was like a kind of dam wall breaking, letting free a flood of madness, of rotten, poisonous mess, but now that it had flowed through me I was clean and empty and … open. My brother would tell me it didn’t work like that, that there were peaks and troughs, always. But my brother wasn’t here.

Swallowing, I reached out and took Thorne’s hand. It was weight and earth and ice and wolf’s howls. It was Thorne again. It was me again. He startled, looking down at it, then up at me. He didn’t understand. But he didn’t let go. And as his grip tightened, encircling mine, I understood that terrible burden I had felt the first time our skin touched, because I had seen for myself the brutality life had cursed him with. And I had seen him be brutal with eyes that remained blue, instead of turning berserker red.

I’d watched on with disbelief, unable to fathom why. Why he had to make it so terrible. If he was conscious of what he was doing, how could he do it? What it had taken me the night to decipher was the need for fear, because only through fear could he stop more of his men from challenging him, and if there were no challenges there need be no deaths by his hand. His gruesome, vile beheading had been a way to beg the world not to keep trying to kill him, because he would fight every challenge and win every challenge, and he didn’t want to do either.

‘Why did you lie to me?’

‘I didn’t want you to know.’

‘Did you not think it would be worse for me to find out by witnessing it?’

He shook his head helplessly. ‘I hoped it wouldn’t happen. I should have known better.’

I licked my dry lips. ‘How many?’

Thorne didn’t want to tell me. I watched him struggle with it, pleading with his eyes for me to take the question away. But I didn’t, I waited. Eventually he turned and lifted his linen shirt so that I could see the tally on his spine. The one I had wondered about. I counted the marks. Eighteen. He would need another for Blain of Slaav.

‘So I never forget to atone for them,’ he said, voice rough.

I pulled his shirt down for him and moved my hand briefly to his cheek, delirious with the simple act of touching. The truth was simple: the things inside Thorne were beautiful, and I was lucky to experience the feel of them.

I turned back to Roselyn, who had been watching us.

‘I’ve heard you are a miracle woman and can cure any ailment,’ I said brightly.

Rose smiled, and the shadows fell back, leaving us be for a time.

She had an infirmary to the side of the house, and she showed me through it with pride, explaining techniques and remedies I had no hope of understanding. I enjoyed the passion she had for it, wishing there were something in the world I could be this good at, or care this much about. The Siren Nights seemed stupid now, after last night. Everything in my life seemed stupid, and there was a grief in that, but also a kind of liberation. I looked at the tools and the medicines and the herbs. I smelt plants at her encouragement and tried to identify the scents. Then she took me back to the house and I looked instead at all the little things sitting on windowsills or fireplaces or tables. Little statues and figurines, whittled out of driftwood. Black and white pearls, taken from the oysters beyond the windows. And shells, hundreds of them. Hanging on walls were empty oyster shells, the luminous insides of which had been painted with tiny, delicate strokes. The life-like landscape scenes were imbued with a striking sense of melancholy and loss, and I almost felt like weeping when I had gazed at each one in turn. The last was a lonely windswept hillside and standing atop it an even lonelier figure I knew to be Thorne. I just wasn’t sure which Thorne.

What a small, simple life they had led out here together, mother and son. Full to the brim with love and memories and an aching, undeniable sadness.

Thorne blew back inside with Howl at his heels, his cheeks pink from cold or wind. ‘Ready?’ he asked me and I nodded, despite the overwhelming urge not to leave Rose here alone.

But as I stood the door slammed open directly behind Thorne and we all spun to see a hooded figure silhouetted against the lightning streaked sky.

‘Ambrose is either a liar or he’s more stupid than he looks,’ this figure said.

‘That’s a nice way to speak about your husband,’ Thorne replied.

Slender hands drew the cloak back, and there she was. Ava of Orion, half-walker Queen of Pirenti. Her eyes were an obnoxious shade of violet and her hair was thicker and longer than any story had prepared me for. One side of her face was strong and plain, simple in feature. But I would know her anywhere – everyone in the world would. Because on her other cheek was a deep, ugly scar, shaped like a howling wolf. Evidence of her torture. It pulled at the edge of her mouth and eye.

‘He swore to me this very morning that his nephew was in Kaya, despite my having heard rumours of a big lug of a boy killing Hersirs in taverns within the border.’

I thought for a moment that she was condemning him for it, but then she grabbed him and hugged him so tight I could actually see the tremor through her arms.

‘I’m fine,’ Thorne told her quickly.

‘I’m not worried about you – I’m worried about myself. I missed you too damn much.’ Saying so, she swept his legs out from under him and tackled him heavily to the floor. ‘Embarrassingly slow, as usual,’ she commented.

Thorne laughed, pushing her off. ‘Cheating, as usual. Where are the girls?’

‘Oh, I left them alone to roam the forest.’

‘What?’

‘They’re with their da. Where did you think they’d be?’

Thorne forcibly tried to relax himself.

Ava stood gracefully and kissed Rose on both cheeks, murmuring something too soft for me to hear in her friend’s ear. Then she noticed me for the first time. Her eyes narrowed like a predator who had caught its first sight of prey and she stepped around Rose to face me.

‘Ava, this is Finn of Limontae. Finn, the Queen of Pirenti.’

I remembered to bow my head quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off her.

‘Finn of Limontae,’ Ava repeated slowly. ‘Daughter of Alexi. Twin sister of Jonah. Founder of the Siren Nights. Eighteen years old and careless enough to have been in trouble with Limontae’s guards no less than six times.’

I blinked, only just managing to stop my mouth from falling open.

‘Yes, I know who you are.’

I shrugged, laughing a little. ‘So you do. I suppose you also know then that I am daughter to a murmured mother and wielder of a forbidden soul magic? That I drink and dance every night because I don’t like to be alone with my thoughts? Do you also know what I dream of in the dark and wish for in the sunlight?’

There was a taut silence. And no, I did not know what had possessed me to be snarky to the Kayan Queen of Pirenti, a woman I had spent my entire life idolising. I had simply been incensed at the idea of anyone presuming to know who I was. Because, frankly, no one did. Including myself.

Thorne and Rose were watching us uncomfortably, the mother apparently as prone to embarrassment as her son was.

But then Ava smiled. She laughed. And I realised she was not plain. She was magnificent, and I would worship her forever, because I could see everything in that smile and I had never known anyone to be so much. I needed to touch her skin, immediately.

‘I do not,’ she admitted. ‘But you have made me desperate to, Finn of Limontae.’

I blushed, shaking my head. ‘Forgive me.’

But she was already turning back for the door. ‘Come on, all three of you. Ambrose will never forgive me for leaving him in the thick of things. Midwinter’s festival is tonight and if I am forced to go then so are you.’

I watched Ava where she walked ahead with Rose. Thorne and I were hanging back a ways, our feet circled by an excited Howl, hands holding the reins of Griggor and Benedict. The Queen walked with long, purposeful strides, while Roselyn gazed up at the sky, searching for something. It was no longer raining, but the storm had left everything heavy with mist, and walking through it felt like stepping through a world too ephemeral to last.

It was a very surreal moment – walking with these three people – one I had never expected to live. I became abruptly aware of what my life might be like if Thorne were in it. Permanently.

I’d have to watch a lot of beheadings, that was certain.

But the alternative to that was finishing this quest and saying goodbye to him. Permanently.

Actually, if we were being realistic (or gullible), neither was an option. Because one of you will die. Damned Hess. I hated the old cow.

Forcing my thoughts elsewhere, I watched Ava. ‘Are you going to tell her?’ I asked Thorne softly.

‘When she can see for herself that they’re safe. I’ll break it to them gently when we get there.’

‘A festival is going to make it very hard to stop people from entering the fortress,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes.’

‘Kayans are invited.’

‘Yes.’

The Pirenti Midwinter’s festival had actually become something of an event. People from all around the world – both countries – travelled to attend. It was one of the only times when Kayans and Pirenti socialised together, though I had heard they usually managed to remain mostly segregated. I wouldn’t know; I had never been allowed to go, much to my growing outrage. Last year I poisoned every meal Da made with pepper until he agreed to let me attend, but as it turned out half-walkers didn’t care about taste. Jonah did. I received itching powder in my sheets for a month and was no closer to attending the festival.

Despite the disturbing news about the princesses, I was actually starting to get excited.

‘I’ll have nothing to wear!’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘I didn’t pack for festivals!’ Roselyn had dressed me in one of her fur cloaks and I’d never worn anything as heavy in my life. I couldn’t believe they had to endure weather like this all the time. It was so cold I could see my breath in front of my face. And this was apparently the warmest part of the country.

Thorne’s eyebrow arched. ‘That’s what you’re worrying about?’

‘Obviously.’

He almost laughed, and I considered it a victory. I missed his smile. I’d missed it before I even knew it existed. ‘Ma will find you something,’ he promised, taking my silliness seriously, when in truth I would wear a potato sack if it meant I could be near him.

The storm clouds were starting to part by the time we reached the fortress. A stone wall loomed high, atop which stood patrolling soldiers who let us through the gate with some cheerful shouts. Inside was chaos. People rushed about to get things prepared, decorating street lanterns and dressing shop windows. Food stalls were being moved into the streets, ready for this evening. At the end of the main street was the fortress itself, a huge building boasting at least a dozen floors.

The people around us seemed very different at first glance, but when I looked more closely I saw that they were more like Kayans than I had thought. The men were enormous, of course, but the women were normal in stature, and only differed in hair and skin colour.

Everyone, without fail, bowed to Ava and Thorne. Some waved and shouted greetings too, but none failed to show respect, and I was impressed, wondering how Ava had earned their love despite her birth.

Inside the fortress it was not as I had expected it to be. The walls were adorned with rich draperies and fires raged in most rooms. As we wound our way up stone staircases I saw levels full of people carrying food and decorations and generally causing a flood of warm ruckus.

‘It wasn’t always like this,’ Thorne told me softly, seeing my gaze. ‘I’m told that when my grandmother ruled this was a cold and loveless place.’

We reached a mid-floor and parted ways with Ava, who said she would send for us and continued up. Thorne led the way down the stone corridor to a door at the end.

‘Ma’s rooms,’ he told me.

‘Do you have rooms here too?’ What a stupid question.

He nodded, and I thought I could see something behind his eyes, a phantom desire passing through. I knew we were thinking the same thing: how can we work this so that the two of us can share those rooms?

We couldn’t.

‘Would you like to share my chambers?’ Roselyn asked me.

‘I would love that, thank you.’

Thorne and I darted a glance at each other, and I had to hide a smile at his disgruntled expression.

‘I’ll arrange a meeting with Ambrose and Ava,’ he told me. ‘I’ll find you.’ Then he headed off, and I followed Roselyn into her chambers.

They were huge – this must have been where she lived when married to the first prince. Indeed, his presence was everywhere, in the masculine furnishings and the paintings of him, so like my Thorne it was unnerving. There was even weaponry still on display, and I knew Rose hadn’t changed a single thing since losing him twenty years ago.

It made me incredibly sad.

I wondered how she felt, coming to stay in these rooms where he lingered. Watching her, I couldn’t guess. She crossed to pour us both the warm spiced mead that had been prepared for our stay, and handed me the mug, explaining, ‘It’s festival day. We’re supposed to drink from sunrise to sunrise.’

I laughed. ‘Fine by me.’ It tasted delicious.

Dumping my pack, I wandered, looking at things and running my fingers over them. Carved jewelry boxes, silver chalices, iron-wrought swords on the wall. Roselyn was busy counting the flagstones with import, her lips moving silently.

Finally I moved to the fireplace and tried to warm my frozen fingers.

‘I might go and explore,’ I said. ‘Roselyn?’

She was miles away, so I tip-toed my way out. Following the stone corridor around a corner, I was met by a group of pretty young women who all stopped and stared at me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Are you … Kayan?’

‘Depends if it’ll get me in trouble or not.’

And just like that, by Gods – they attacked. With kindness. I was swept into one of their rooms and barraged with questions about Kaya and the towers and the men and warder magic and everything conceivably possible for a human to ask. But most of all they asked about the bond. Question after question after question. We drank more of the spiced mead and I watched as they prepared for the festival, dressing each other’s hair and painting outlandish and beautiful designs on their faces, and all the while I tried to answer as honestly as I could. No I was not bonded. Yes I knew those who were. Yes I had seen couples die as one. No I did not think it was lovely.

I noticed that each of them had painted a wolf onto their cheeks and I smiled.

After some time had passed I realised Thorne could be looking for me and would have no idea where I was, so I excused myself and emerged, a little stunned by the encounter. They’d all told me their names but I couldn’t remember a single one, as they’d all sounded the same.

I was now completely lost. My footsteps echoed around me, making me feel more alone and more secret than I should. I reached a door and pushed quietly through, finding myself on an outdoor balcony that wrapped around the building. The sky had a strange, warm hue to it, which made me feel warm and alive.

I followed the balcony around, running my fingers along the stone balustrade. Soft voices drifted to me. They sounded very high and very sweet, and they made me curious so I kept walking. Some part of me didn’t want to be spotted; not as the outsider.

As I reached a corner the voices grew so that I knew they were just on the other side.

‘… not without beauty,’ said a soft, deep voice I recognised as Ava’s. ‘Sailors often wish for the sea to be their graves.’

‘Wouldn’t it be lonely?’ asked the voice of a child – a little girl.

‘No, because all the other souls would be there to keep them company,’ Ava replied.

‘Is the sea full of souls then?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘King Thorne?’ the girl asked, making my heart lurch. ‘Is he in the sea?’

‘I don’t know, my darling. Maybe he is. Or maybe he is north in the ice. Perhaps he preferred the warm earth beneath this fortress. We cannot know where he wished to go.’

‘But is he happy, Mama?’

‘Do you know how he died?’

‘He was poisoned,’ came the answer.

‘Do you know why?’

There was a confused pause. ‘No, Mama.’

I couldn’t help it then – I had to turn the corner just an inch to see. There was a regal looking statue in this new section of the balcony, but I couldn’t see its face. Sprawled on the ground below it were three figures. Two of them were very small children who wore identical faces. Twin girls, I realised. The princesses. Their mother was lying next to them, and all three were immersed in charcoal drawings on large pieces of parchment.

Ava’s long blonde hair was splayed out over the stone beneath her, and her purple eyes were focused on the lines she was scribbling. Her daughters were equally as focused on their drawings, but kept looking up at their mother, waiting for her answer. They couldn’t have been much older than six or seven.

‘Someone wanted to hurt him,’ Ava said eventually, her voice sounding odd. ‘A man. He sent the poison to King Thorne’s room. That poison is called prylene. It is a strange concoction. When you smell it, you want to drink it more than anything.’

‘Why?’

‘Its properties are beguiling. On this day, when the prylene was sent to King Thorne, his wife Roselyn was in the same room.’

‘Aunty Rose!’ both the girls cried in excitement.

Ava smiled sadly, and I was startled to see the cracks in that smile. She wore a broken smile just like my da did.

‘Yes, Aunty Rose. This was a long time ago, when she was much younger and when she lived here in the fortress.’

‘I wish she lived here with us now,’ one of the girls sighed.

‘So do I, darling. In any case, when the prylene was uncovered, Rose and Thorne both smelt the deadly poison. Now, King Thorne was no normal young man. He had been taught at a very young age to survive the smell of prylene, just as Da had.’

‘Who taught them?’

‘Their mother – your grandmother.’

I was very curious about what they had been told in regard to their evil barbarian queen of a grandmother. The girls simply nodded as though they knew exactly whom Ava was talking about.

‘So Thorne knew the scent, but unlike everyone else he could withstand its pull. Rose, on the other hand, had no defence. She was overcome with the need to drink the poison. King Thorne, seeing this, stole the poison from her clutches and did the only thing he could think of to save his wife – he drank the poison himself, so she could not get to it.’

There was a long silence as the girls concentrated on their drawings.

I felt like I could not breathe. I had never heard this story before, and now I felt pulled back into another time, another room, another life. In my mind I watched King Thorne kill himself to save his wife. And every part of me ached.

I’d thought, rather naively, that I had understood love. But I hadn’t even come close. In Kaya we said that we loved more than anyone else. We thought that we loved bigger and lost bigger.

But that was no truth. The only truth in our lives was that we were blind and arrogant and foolish. Here in the north, where the sky was red and the ground was frozen, they loved just as hard as we did. The only difference was that they used that love to make them stronger, braver, instead of letting it ruin them.

‘So he was happy,’ one of the girls murmured, and the delicate awareness of it made my eyes fill with tears and when I blinked they spilled silently down my cheeks.

‘He saved Rose,’ the other girl agreed. I watched their mother reach out and stroke both of their faces in turn. As she looked at her daughters her eyes changed to blue, a lovely deep shade.

‘A brave, noble way to die,’ Ava told the girls, then went back to her drawing.

I tried to gather myself, feeling overwrought. I couldn’t possibly reveal myself while I blubbered like this.

While I steeled myself, footsteps sounded from the other direction and I saw a very tall man round the corner. He strode towards the woman and her girls, and as he drew closer I felt my eyes widen. He was gorgeous. Like, I’d-leave-my-bondmate-for-a-single-kiss gorgeous. Like, I-might-as-well-go-blind-now-that-I-have-seen-the-most-beautiful-thing-in-the-world gorgeous. He was taller than Thorne, leaner and more elegant. His face was cut and lined in a very severe way. A long scar cut through his forehead and eyebrow. His features were finer than Thorne’s were, but his eyes were the same shade of pale blue, maybe a little deeper, and all of that together made it pretty obvious who he must be.

King Ambrose strode to his family and sank to the ground beside them.

‘You’re late, Da,’ one of the girls told him mildly without looking up. The other little girl looked up long enough to draw a streak of charcoal along her father’s cheek, then grinned and got back to her work.

‘And you’re unforgiving as ever, my darlings,’ he told them wryly. ‘Your ma has had me running around dealing with everything while she skips off to Araan and then spends the afternoon drawing with you two!’

They didn’t reply, so he leant down and pulled them both into a hug, kissing them noisily on their cheeks and making them giggle. When he finally let them go, they scolded him to behave himself and sank back to their art.

The King turned to his wife. She looked at him with arched eyebrows and he raised his hands in defence. ‘I have a good reason, I swear.’

‘Quick then, before I lose patience.’

‘You haven’t had a speck of patience in your whole life,’ he pointed out.

‘I had plenty before I met you, actually.’

Ambrose grinned and flipped her onto her back, pinning her arms on either side of her head. ‘I don’t believe that for a second,’ he told her, dropping kisses all over her face.

‘Get off, you ugly oaf!’ she demanded, which only made him more gleeful to have her pinned down. She struggled in what was clearly a futile mission – the man outweighed her by at least three times as much – but then I saw her knee jerk up and catch him in the stomach. Ambrose groaned and rolled off her. Ava laughed, leaving him to struggle upright once more.

I watched, only feeling more aware of how ignorant we were in the south. This father was supposed to be the most dangerous man in the world. All I saw when I looked at the King of Pirenti’s face was adoration and humour.

‘Is Rose here?’ he asked his wife.

‘She is. So is a certain nephew of yours. The one you told me was in Kaya. Do you ever tire of being wrong, my love?’

I strained to hear, feeling guilty but unable to help myself, starved for insights into this famous but secret world that Thorne was from.

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘We’re meeting him in our rooms shortly for an explanation.’

‘Well I was late because I’ve had a letter from Falco and Quillane,’ the King told his wife. ‘They said Thorne has been sent on their mission, but in the meantime they wish to meet to discuss the Sparrow.’

I watched Ava’s face turn to stone.

‘What would you have me do, pretty boy?’ Ambrose asked her gently.

‘You must do what is best for the peace treaty,’ she said woodenly.

‘That means offering them aid and soldiers, which they will use to destroy the Sparrow and his men in a civil war. Do you think it best to incite more bloodshed?’

‘I want whatever is best for both countries.’

‘Ava,’ he said suddenly. He reached out and took his wife’s chin, drawing her to meet his eyes. ‘I need you. You know what is best for Kaya. I do not. Is stopping this rebel force in the country’s best interests?’

Ava’s eyes went gold. ‘Falco is a drunken fool, but I’d not have him dethroned, Am. No matter who rules Kaya, they will continue on this search for a way to break the bond. No one will stop until its existence has been proven once and for all. Even if the Sparrow were to win this and rule, I doubt it would be long before he, too, wanted the choice. What he will also want, however, is an end to the power of the warders.’

I froze, shocked by the sentence. It had never occurred to me that Kayans would want less power for the warders – though, honestly, it should have. There had always been those uncomfortable with what the soul magic wielded.

‘So if we let him win one war he will simply begin another,’ Ambrose surmised. He cupped his wife’s cheek gently. I saw with astonishment that his eyes turned gold as he looked at her. And I realised I had never seen love like this, so blazing and defiant in the face of impossibility. This woman … she had crawled her way back from oblivion, and she had found the courage to love a man she was supposed to loathe. And Ambrose – we all knew the story – had fallen in love with a boy from the country he was supposed to abhor, and he had helped that boy to find his freedom, even when it meant betraying his own queen. They humbled me, the two of them, and they made me realise what kind of fight was in my own heart.

I was loath to interrupt such an intimate moment, but I couldn’t stand still, not with these words on my tongue. I stepped around the corner and said, ‘No one can fight the warders.

All who tried would die.’ All four looked sharply at me and then proceeded to stare.

‘I was eavesdropping,’ I explained stupidly.

Ambrose rose, peering at me with deepest curiosity while Ava merely hid a smile. I looked into the King’s face, flustered by the handsome, handsome handsomeness. Most of the girls I knew would find him too frightening to be beautiful; they preferred the pretty slenderness of Kayan men. I, on the other hand, seemed to prefer the brutes from the north.

‘You look Kayan,’ he pointed out, crossing his arms over his chest and levelling me with an appraising stare.

‘What incredible powers of perception you have, Majesty,’ I replied, to which he grinned.

‘You and my wife will get along nicely,’ he said. ‘You share a penchant for making me look stupid.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I get obnoxious when I’m nervous. My name’s Finn.’

‘Finn of the cliffs of Limontae. She came with Thorne,’ Ava supplied.

Ambrose’s eyes sparked with interest.

Two things attached themselves to my legs and I looked down to see that the little girls were clutching at me. They had dark hair like their father, and purple eyes like their mother. They were extremely pretty, and I knew they would grow up to hold the kind of beauty that was very rare in the world. It was something about their eyes, which were too deep and too clever for girls of their age.

‘Hello,’ I said, taken aback.

‘Hello,’ they chimed in unison.

I grinned. ‘Who are you?’

‘She’s Sadie –’

‘– and she’s Ella.’

I blinked. ‘Pleasure to meet you. How old are you?’

‘Six and three quarters,’ they said in unison.

‘They do that all the time,’ Ambrose grinned.

‘I used to do it too,’ I confessed. ‘I have a twin brother.’

This was, clearly, the most incredible news the girls had ever heard. They squealed with delight and pulled on my arms wickedly. They felt like drifting pollen on a summer’s afternoon and the gossamer shine of spider’s webs, with both the innocence and the cunning of each for good measure. It was a lovely thing to feel, and I knew they would be incredible women when they grew up – if they were able to withstand the corruption of those hearts.

‘I’m Ambrose,’ the big man laughed, moving to offer his hand. I didn’t want to take it, feeling already too overwhelmed, but I couldn’t exactly refuse to shake the King of Pirenti’s hand. I took it and felt a whoosh of air leave my chest. Snow, falling, violet eyes, swords made of iron, pegasis fur, black hair, heavy and light and full and yearning and rage and grief and love and –

Quickly I snatched my hand back, not because what I’d felt was bad, but because it was simply too rich. Like taking a bite of the darkest chocolate cake in the world and savouring its deliciousness but knowing you couldn’t possibly have another bite or you’d vomit. What an incredibly curious man. My head spun for a moment and then settled itself in time to hear Ambrose ask, ‘You’re a believer in the warders?’

I glanced at his wife, who stared at me expressionlessly. I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. ‘I hate them, actually.’ Honestly, then. ‘Most of them. But I know what they’re capable of, and it’s not a matter of believing in them or not. I wouldn’t have normal humans go up against them unless it was the end of the world and we all wished to die.’

‘No need to be blunt,’ he murmured.

I shrugged. ‘You asked.’

‘And what do you think of the bond, Finn?’ the King of Pirenti asked me next. He certainly got right to the point. I wondered if he questioned every Kayan he met this way, or if it was my friendship with Thorne that made him so curious of me.

I met his eyes. ‘Here in Pirenti you endure your broken hearts. I would that we could do the same.’

‘Do you think it possible?’

I looked at Ava once more, at her wolf scar. ‘I know it’s possible, Majesty.’

He appraised me thoughtfully. After a moment his eyes turned sharp. ‘Tell me, child. Why did you follow my nephew into our fortress?’

I met his gaze. ‘Because he asked me to.’

Just not with words.

Ambrose stared at me, and then he smiled, looking very much like a wolf. He took my hand and dropped a kiss on the back of it. ‘In that case, you are very welcome here, Finn. I hope we can speak more tonight, if there is time between the obscene amount of fun we are required by law to have. Now I think we need to start making ourselves pretty, don’t we, girls?’

Ella and Sadie giggled and followed their da inside, leaving me alone with the Queen. She continued to watch me closely, but I had no idea what she was thinking. After a while she turned and stared out at the forest below the fortress. I did the same, watching her out of the corner of my eye. I hadn’t touched her skin yet, and I realised now that I wasn’t going to. Somehow it was an intimacy too far, and to broach that felt disrespectful. Some secrets weren’t for sharing, and I got a sense that whatever was in Ava’s heart was not a secret for me to know.

The statue, from this angle, was quite clear: King Thorne, his expression as detached as any human’s could be. I wondered if this was how he’d been, or if the artist had taken liberties. Either way, he was everywhere, this man. His presence hung heavy in every corner of the fortress. I knew now why Thorne didn’t live here – it would be suffocating.

‘You are either very brave or very foolish,’ Ava said abruptly.

‘Your Majesty?’

‘No titles,’ she muttered bluntly. ‘I’ve been trying to work out your motives, Finn. At first I thought that perhaps you sought fortune and fame, tying yourself to a prince. Then I thought that you might wish for danger, because I can see a startling amount of that in your eyes. I also entertained the thought that you might be here to spy.’ At this, the Queen looked sideways at me with enough of a glint in her eye that I knew she was only half serious. ‘I did not entertain that thought for long,’ she conceded less bluntly. ‘So I can only conclude that you care for him, and this leaves me with a certainty: you are either very brave or very foolish.’

I didn’t know what to say. ‘Whatever you do, don’t ask my family. They’d be only too happy to tell you which it is, and unfortunately for everybody bravery has nothing to do with it.’

Ava faced me. ‘Thorne is extremely dear to me. He is my kin – I love him like a son. He is kind and brave and clever. He is gentle in a way men from this land tend not to be. But hear this, Finn – loving a Pirenti man is no easy life for a Kayan woman. Easier, certainly, for I, who left my world and everyone I loved long ago, and was saved by a man braver and more foolish than any. But for a daughter of the cliff such as yourself, with family and friends and a life to live …’ She licked her lips, looking weary.

‘It’s cold up here,’ Ava finished simply.

Thorne found us shortly after that and the three of us went to see Ambrose. Ava let us into their chambers and I found myself staring around in wonder. The room was made of stone and timber, with furs on the floor and tapestries lining the walls. In brackets in the roof were dozens of tiny lamps, making the ceiling look like it was dotted with rosy coloured stars. There was a large fireplace to one side, with cushions scattered all over the floor before it, and lots of doorways leading into other areas of the chambers. The girls were already lounging around on the cushions, but when they saw Thorne they jumped up, shrieking their delight and tackling him to the ground.

‘It’s just one big wrestling match with you lot, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘You have no idea,’ Ava muttered.

Thorne, I saw with a thrill of pleasure, reverted into a child as he played with the girls. I got the feeling they were his best friends, which was somewhat adorable.

Ambrose emerged. Half dressed. Was the man trying to kill me? Without a shirt I could see that his chest and arms (oh, Gods, his chest and arms) were covered in tattoos – way more than Thorne – and scars. So many scars I was momentarily breathless. They were everywhere. They came at him, one after the other.

‘I can’t get them to pick dresses,’ Ambrose complained.

‘Well don’t look at me,’ Ava replied. ‘When was the last time you saw me wearing a dress?’

‘I’ll help,’ I offered. ‘I love dresses.’

‘Do your worst,’ Ambrose told me, indicating the bedchamber of the girls. He then launched himself on top of his nephew and the two men started really wrestling.

‘The violence,’ I commented.

‘Honestly, do not get me started,’ Ava said. Though really – she was watching them quite happily.

I wandered into the bedchamber and looked around at all of Sadie and Ella’s pretty things. There were moth wings everywhere. Real ones in glass cases, paintings of them on the walls, a string of paper moths hanging from the roof. I went to the cupboard and picked out matching dresses in a rich green colour I thought would look pretty with Sadie and Ella’s violet eyes.

They came crashing in and I held the gowns up questioningly. The girls glanced at each other and then nodded decisively, hurrying to get dressed. ‘Masks?’ they said at the exact same time.

I got an idea. Choosing two of the paper moths, I made little eye holes and tied them with string around the girls’ faces. This earned me another squeal of joy as they pretended to flap wings in front of the mirror.

‘Are you and Thorne married?’ Ella asked.

‘No. We definitely are not.’

She shrugged with an air of indifference I found very amusing. I could guess which parent she’d picked that move up from.

‘If we bond it’s going to have to be with twin boys who understand the twin thing,’ Sadie sighed. The twin thing definitely sounded like something she’d heard an adult say. ‘It’s a real problem.’

‘I get it,’ I told her. ‘If my brother bonded before me I’d be suicidal.’

‘What does that mean?’

Whoops. I wasn’t very good with kids, apparently. ‘Sad.’

‘You’re sad already though, aren’t you?’

I paused, looking at Ella. ‘What do you mean?’

She shrugged, eyes darting away as though she’d been caught in trouble.

‘I’m not sad,’ I promised.

‘Will you dance with us tonight then?’

‘I’m not going to stop dancing with you tonight.’

While they tried to work out how to add more moths to their outfit I went back into the living area. The adults had been waiting for me with a huge jug of wine, but despite this I found myself wanting to go back to the children and just play with them for the rest of the night. I missed my childhood. It had been so simple.

As Ambrose passed me a goblet I sank onto a cushion beside Thorne.

‘To Avery,’ the King said, raising his cup. ‘And Thorne.’

Ava and Thorne raised their glasses as though this was a normal occurrence. I belatedly followed suit.

‘Come on then,’ Ambrose implored. ‘What’s got you in such a sour mood?’

‘I think the girls are in danger,’ he said bluntly.

Nice effort to break it to them gently, Thorne.

‘Hang on,’ I said quickly. ‘It might not be as bad as that.’ Even though it was. ‘The last clue to our journey was kept at the warder prison.’ I went on to explain what it meant.

Ambrose launched himself to his feet and paced the room, fuming. ‘They’ll come in hoards.’

‘Let them come,’ Ava said softly, and I was thrilled to see her eyes turn red. This was the woman from the stories I’d been raised on.

‘To be honest,’ I said bluntly, ‘I’m not even convinced it is Sadie and Ella who are the key to all of this.’

‘Why?’ Ambrose demanded.

I licked my lips, considering my words. ‘I touched them, and I didn’t feel … that kind of burden.’

They stared at me. ‘Explain,’ Ava ordered sharply.

Wow. Manners had really gone out the window. ‘I can feel the weight of hearts,’ I admitted, no idea how to better put it.

Ambrose wouldn’t stop pacing. ‘Is that supposed to make sense to us?’

‘Finn’s a warder,’ Thorne explained. ‘Forbidden from using her powers.’

‘Why?’

Thorne generously waited for me to explain that one. I sighed. ‘I’m too emotionally unstable to control them.’

Ambrose and Ava stared at me again. I was getting a tad uncomfortable with it.

‘I’m not, like, dangerous or anything,’ I added.

‘If it’s not the girls, then who?’ Ava asked.

‘I don’t know. We need to figure that out.’

‘Thorne,’ Ambrose said, but he wasn’t looking at Thorne. ‘He was the one who figured it out in the first place.’ He’d turned to his wife. ‘Remember? What did he say?’

Ava looked down at her hands, and when she started speaking it was like an intonation of something ancient and dark. ‘My job was to torture warders. I have a whole bag of tricks for withstanding their black magic. While I worked I learnt things that can never be unlearnt. Things like the real truth behind the bond.’

I looked at Thorne, unable to imagine how he must feel hearing his da’s words. His eyes were glued to his aunt and he was completely expressionless.

Ava wasn’t finished. ‘That a way to break the power of it exists. There is a spell – a piece of magic. A way to stop the people of Kaya from dying in pairs.’ She stopped. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end.

‘You remember every word,’ Ambrose said softly.

‘I remember every word your brother ever said to me,’ she answered.

Thorne had his head in his hands and was massaging his scalp wearily. ‘So how do we find out what he knew? He’s dead, in case anyone had forgotten.’

The fire crackled and popped. It was amazingly hot, and for the first time since I’d been in Pirenti I actually wished for fresh, cool air.

‘Frankly, I don’t really give a damn about any of this,’ Ambrose snapped. ‘What I care about is protecting my daughters from overzealous Kayan idiots.’

‘Bit racist,’ I pointed out and was, understandably, ignored.

‘So we don’t take them to the festival tonight,’ Ava said. ‘It’s too late to cancel it altogether.’

‘They’re going to murder us in our sleep if we don’t take them,’ he said. ‘Or more likely they’ll just sneak out.’

‘We’ll set guards.’

‘Well, look,’ I reasoned. ‘Realistically, the other teams wouldn’t be here yet. The warders gave us the only horses. So if they even made it that far, they would have had to walk out of that forest and all the way up here. Which means we had a huge head start on them. So there won’t be any overzealous Kayan idiots looking for the girls – not tonight, anyway.’

‘It’s too much of a risk,’ Ambrose shook his head.

‘They won’t be coming here to kill them,’ Ava pointed out. ‘They need them. Or think they do.’

‘So it’s okay if they kidnap our daughters?’ he snapped.

‘The four of us, plus Ma, plus a host of guards,’ Thorne said. ‘We’ll all watch them, all night. Won’t take our eyes off them. Remain armed and alert.’

‘They truly couldn’t have made it here yet?’ Ava clarified.

‘Not unless they acquired mounts along the way, but there are no towns on that stretch of land – we slept in the open and saw no one. Plus Jonah – my brother – said he would watch for any other teams and make sure they didn’t come here.’

‘Most weren’t soldiers,’ Thorne pointed out. ‘We beat every one of them in the challenges. There was the odd warder among them, the odd fighter. But they wouldn’t come here so boldly and demand the King and Queen of Pirenti for their only children. They’re just normal people. They’d be much too frightened.’

‘We all stop drinking now,’ Ava ordered, and we put our cups down.

‘It’s not a good idea,’ Ambrose tried, but I could hear him wavering.

‘Do you really think they could get through the two of us?’ Ava asked him softly, meeting his eyes. ‘Do you think anyone could?’

He looked at her for a long, intimate moment, then shook his head. ‘Not in this life.’

So we dispersed to get ready.

I’d never felt such purpose in my blood. Not even when entering the tournament or looking for the clue. The four of us together would make sure not a hair was harmed on those children’s heads. I didn’t know what I could do, so inept at fighting, but I knew that some dark part of me was readying itself.

Will I kill again?

Yes.

Chapter 13

Falco

I’d been following Quillane for a few days now. It was quite possibly the behaviour of a man who was losing his mind – why in the world would I not just ask her? – but I couldn’t stop myself. She worked hard, my Empress. That was for damn sure. Watching her filled me with sadness, because I could see how much she needed my help, and how lonely she was in this palace.

Each night she disappeared into the secret tunnel and she did not come back out until morning. Which was very intriguing.

I decided to wait until she left one day and break into the tunnel. Curiosity was burning my insides. And the desperate hope that she was not betraying me in some way. Secrets usually led to something of the kind.

It all went from my mind on the day we had word from the warder prison in Querida.

Dren and Galia of Limontae, once teachers of the soul magic at the warder training school, once first tier warders with unrivalled power. Once committed to life imprisonment for the slaughter of twelve warder novices. The most dangerous prisoners we had ever held in custody.

Escaped.

I knew with perfect dread that they would be coming for us. Because on the day they were captured, it was reported by more than a score of witnesses that Dren and Galia had proclaimed themselves the true rulers of Kaya.

And I had made myself into the easiest target there had ever existed.

Thorne

Finn and Ava disappeared to get dressed, but as I was leaving Ambrose asked me to wait a moment. I lingered, resisting the pull of the big painting that hung over the fireplace, then realising it was futile and going to look at it properly. I’d looked at this painting a lot as a kid. It had been Ma’s but for whatever reason she hadn’t wanted to keep it in her rooms with all of his other possessions.

There stood Ambrose and Thorne over their battle victory, arms about each other, smiling very different smiles. I grew more and more like him – my father – with each passing day. My features were taking on the bluntness in his. I had bits and pieces from Ambrose too – the sharper cheekbones, the heavier brow.

Ambrose returned to stand beside me, but he didn’t say anything. I waited, feeling uncomfortable. There were dead bodies all around them and they didn’t even care.

‘He spoke very little when he was a child,’ my uncle eventually told me. ‘But he was gentle. It was not in his nature to be cruel. Our mother brutalised him and made him that way.’

Why were we talking about him? Why were we always talking about him? ‘Easy words and excuses,’ I said flatly. ‘She didn’t make you that way.’

‘I was the second son.’

‘You were stronger.’

Ambrose shook his head, gazing at his brother. ‘No. Not at all.’

I was tired of this. I had never asked about Da, and I didn’t ever intend to. I didn’t know why people kept thinking it their place to tell me, when I didn’t want to know. Maybe they thought it helped, but it didn’t.

‘He had records,’ Ambrose told me finally. ‘I’ve managed to keep them private since he died. I wanted to give them to you when … I don’t know when. When you were ready.’

‘But I’ve never been ready?’

‘I didn’t get the feeling you would want to read them.’

He was right about that.

‘But they may shed light on what he knew of the bond. It would be worth taking a look.’

‘Are you asking me to read them?’

‘I’m just telling you they exist. I’ve been reading pages of them for the last twenty years, but I don’t have the time to sit down and make any kind of thorough search. And if we are to establish the girls as unconnected to the bond then we need to figure out who is.’

I could feel a headache coming on. Poring through my father’s old records and reading his thoughts was the last thing I wanted to do. At least that’s what I told myself. But deep down, so far down I almost didn’t know it existed, there was a part of me coming alive at the thought of getting answers, once and for all, to who the slaughterman of the north really was.

I nodded, turning to leave.

‘Thorne.’

I paused.

‘Some of it is very disjointed. His time in the ice … I think it sent him a bit mad.’ Ambrose looked weary and sad.

I shook my head, unaccountably angry. ‘Torturing people will probably do that to you,’ I replied, voice hard. Quickly I walked to the door, but stopped almost against my will. I struggled to hold the question in – I didn’t need the answer. He didn’t have this power over me; I wouldn’t give it to him.

But in the end I was fooling myself. I asked it. ‘What was it, Ambrose? This thing he had over you all? How did you love a monster?’

My uncle gazed at me, and his eyes seemed far too knowing. They saw straight through me, to the lonely little boy I kept hidden, the one who yearned for his da.

‘He was loyal,’ Ambrose said simply. ‘And when you have cause to see what that truly means, you will understand it to be one of the most important things in this world.’

I was scattered and unsettled as I dressed. Clothes and a mask had been laid out for me on my bed, so I donned them without thinking and went to collect Ma and Finn. Roselyn opened the door, dressed in a red velvet cloak, the deep colour of vein’s blood. Her face was adorned with a rusty coloured fox mask, and she looked sly. I kissed her on both cheeks, her familiar scent serving to calm some of my rattled nerves.

‘You look so handsome,’ she told me. ‘I must go ahead.’

I nodded, knowing she would need time to check that there was the right number of people for her to enter.

Moving quietly into the chamber, I looked around for Finn. The shadows were long, for not many lamps had been lit. Only one or two here and there, sending flickering rosy light against the walls.

I should wait. Call out to her. It wasn’t appropriate for me to enter a bedchamber alone and without a word. But I did. Maybe it was the conversation with Ambrose. Maybe it was the prospect of reading Thorne’s records. Maybe it was the girls in danger, or the mission, or the whole lot of it put together.

But most probably it was her scent, reaching out to me as if to call my name, and most probably it was her, just her, that made me keep moving.

She was waiting for me in front of the window. The world beyond was grey and star-speckled. Finn was ebony. Her gown had been made of black lace, her cloak black fur. Over her eyes was a raven mask, its wings spread in flight. And her eyes. They were the blackest things of all.

I stopped, taking her in. Feeling her presence like a kick to the guts. My hands were literally trembling with desire; I could hardly focus my eyes. Her hair had been pulled onto the top of her head, making her look more severe than usual.

‘It’s not fair for you to look like that,’ she told me.

Me?

Finn turned to gaze out the window. Below, the festival had begun. Faint sounds drifted up to us; laughter and voices. I moved to stand behind her, close but not touching. Her perfume was in my nose, but more than that, I could smell her skin, her hair, her desire.

Reaching out to place my hands on either side of hers where they rested on the windowsill, I leant in close, dropping my face to her neck. She could feel my breath against her skin; I still hadn’t touched her, but I could sense the shiver run through her. Her lips parted.

‘This will be your home one day,’ she said.

‘But not for a long time.’ I breathed her in, nose brushing her hair, the skin beneath her ear, along her jaw. ‘Until then, I will follow you anywhere.’

Finn tilted her face towards mine.

My hands traced up her arms, to her shoulders, where I drew back her cloak and let it fall to the floor. My lips ducked to her shoulder, my tongue tasted her neck.

She shifted, pressing herself against me. I could feel a tremble move through her at my touch and I wondered what she was feeling.

My fingers went to her hips, then up along her waist to trace her breasts.

This was not like the first time, which now felt decades ago. In the tavern in Kaya that first night of our journey, when she had demanded a kiss and then run. Nor the second, when we had touched and I had kissed everywhere but her lips. Nor last night when I had pressed my mouth desperately to hers, only to have her feel nothing.

This was something entirely different. I felt a thousand years older. We knew all the pieces of each other. We knew exactly what we were doing, what it meant to be touching each other, what it was forging in the space between our bodies. She knew how I felt about her.

My hand went to her throat. Tilted her chin towards me. She was breathing hard as our eyes met for one long, long moment.

My mouth found hers. Lips touched, parted. Our breath was one. Her tongue traced mine.

I spun her to face me and lifted her onto the windowsill. Her legs parted and I moved my hand under her skirt, the backs of my fingers gliding up the soft skin of her thigh. She shivered at the touch, opened her legs wider.

Our faces were inches apart; I watched her as my fingers moved inside her. Her eyes were bottomless pits I fell into, her breathing as it quickened enough to set fire to my insides.

‘Tell me you love me,’ I uttered.

She drew a breath.

‘I know you do.’

Her hips moved against my hand. With my other I slid my fingers beneath her dress so I could trace her breast.

‘I can smell it on you,’ I breathed. ‘I can taste it.’ My tongue was against her throat, tasting the salty sweat there.

‘Tell me,’ I implored, pressing myself against the length of her body and feeling the heat between her legs.

She opened her eyes, looked at me, into me. And I knew she was about to say it. I could feel it.

And then –

‘Thorne? Where the Gods are you, kid?’

I wrenched myself away from her, startled badly by the King’s voice. Finn jerked her skirt down and stood on unsteady legs. Her cheeks were flushed, lips swollen, pupils dilated as if she’d taken a drug of some kind. We stared at each other, a little dazed.

‘Thorne!’

‘I’m coming, Ambrose!’ I roared angrily. Gods. I couldn’t get a thought to sit straight. Wanted to beat the life out of my unbelievably annoying uncle.

‘I’ll wait for you at the door,’ I murmured to Finn, then quickly retreated from her room.

‘Yes?’ I snapped.

Ambrose’s eyebrows arched. ‘What’s got you in a huff?’

‘Nothing. Sorry.’

‘I have someone for you to meet. Come on.’

‘I have to wait for Finn.’

He considered this, watching me a little too closely for my liking. ‘What’s going on between the two of you?’

I shrugged, not sure of the answer.

‘She told Ava you were friends and nothing more.’

‘Why are you interested?’

‘Because, my tetchy boy, you’re of an age to marry and I’ve started getting inundated with offers.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I wish I was! I never got proposed to this much. Every father in the country wants his daughter to be yours. If only they knew how boring you are.’

I shoved him in the shoulder and he laughed.

Finn emerged and Ambrose offered her a brilliant smile. ‘You are beautiful, my lady.’

She looked him up and down and then flashed a sly smile of her own. Those yellow eyes grazed me and I felt it like a touch. Without a word, she led the way.

Ambrose and I followed. He grimaced, muttering under his breath, ‘Oh dear.’

‘What?’

‘She’s not going to like this. And I see now that you haven’t a hope of keeping her in line.’

‘Why would I want to?’ I murmured, watching her. All I wanted was to set her loose on the world and watch the way it fell at her feet.

‘Why indeed.’

Coloured lanterns were strung up along the streets, people carried candles, fireflies danced under a starlit sky and the whole world seemed alight. In the town square there were three thrones on a dais. The thrones had been made from vine-leaves and thorns, and when Ava and Ambrose took their places they looked regal and beautiful together. At their sides were Ella and Sadie in their moth costumes. The girls were intent on asking Roselyn a multitude of questions while Ma fixed their crooked wings and answered what she could. Around the group stood a host of guards at the ready.

I didn’t sit in my throne – I never did. Instead I stood to the side with Finn and watched the revellers dance through the square, masked and cloaked and anonymous for a night. She was itching to dance, I could tell.

‘Go,’ I told her.

‘In a minute. I want to see her first.’

‘Who?’

‘The woman your uncle wants you to marry.’

I blinked, looking down at her.

‘I’m not quite as stupid as I look,’ she pointed out.

‘You, my Wild Girl, look anything but stupid,’ I replied.

We looked together to see that a group of people was passing, and instead of just having painted the wolf onto their cheeks, they had cut howling wolf sigils into the flesh of their faces, scarring themselves permanently.

‘Who are they?’ Finn breathed.

‘Fanatics,’ I murmured. ‘They worship Ava and all half-walkers.’

‘Thorne!’ Ambrose called. ‘Lady Sienna is here. Come and meet her.’

I could kill him. Casting an apologetic look at Finn, I headed over to meet the woman waiting before the dais. She sank into a low curtsey before me and rose gracefully.

‘Your Majesty, it is an honour,’ she said sweetly. Sienna was tall and willowy, with pale creamy skin and long red hair. She was pretty and demure, keeping her eyes cast down, and I could see exactly why people would think she was the perfect woman for me. Except that she wasn’t.

‘The honour is mine,’ I said, bowing my head in greeting.

‘Dance with her, Thorne, you cad!’ the King cried. I shot him a look of daggers and he grinned. Ava was looking entirely bored with the whole thing.

‘Would you dance, lady?’ I asked and Sienna blushed, nodding.

I led her into the fray of dancers and with a lurch of my heart I noticed that Finn had disappeared.

‘Our kin would have us wed,’ I pointed out as we stepped stiffly to the music. Why I pointed that out I had no idea. I wasn’t a very good dancer, despite Ma’s continued efforts, and felt more uncomfortable than I had in a long while.

‘I … Majesty, I would be so lucky …’ she stuttered.

Believe me, you wouldn’t.

My eyes raked the crowd for yellow hair but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Something felt off about it. Ella and Sadie were still fine, dancing on the dais in full view of their parents. So what was it? It wasn’t as though it was unusual for Finn to disappear to have fun on her own, but …

Without warning, I was hit full force with the scent of danger. My beast rose to his feet and gave a low growl of warning.

I stopped dancing but was unable to see anything wrong. Pushing back through the crowd to my aunt and uncle, they both stiffened at my expression.

‘Something’s wrong. Where’s Finn?’

Finn

It happened as I was looking at the painfully gorgeous shy sweet perfect little lady who was to be Thorne’s precious little wife and wishing I could strangle her lovely long neck. They looked beautiful together; he was painfully handsome in his black cloak and mask, while she looked alarmingly like his mother.

I didn’t even notice them beside me. Two men in cloaks and masks. I wouldn’t have noticed them, because everyone was in cloaks and masks. But I certainly noticed when they threw a ward to my lips, rendering me silent, and I certainly noticed when they took hold of me and moved me so subtly back into the crowd that we vanished from view without so much as a rustle.

My body was paralysed, so they lifted me at the elbows, making it look as though I was walking, and they spirited me through the streets of the fortress and straight out the front gate. People were still coming and going through the entrance. Guards watched closely, but I could not struggle or shout, so we passed easily.

My heart was thumping, my mind trying to make the connections. At least one of them was a warder. So what would a warder want with me? None of my skin was touching theirs – they were careful about that, which meant they knew of my abilities and didn’t want to be read. Not that I could do anything with this stupid power of mine. Knowing the feel of someone’s heart didn’t make them any less dangerous to me.

I resolved to just stay calm until I had some answers.

They carried me further into the forest until we were alone, with no chance of stray festival-goers stumbling across us in a drunken haze. They had a carriage, on the back of which was a cage.

My heart lurched. This was looking worse and worse.

The men let me go, and I felt my body return to my control. ‘If you wanted to get me alone you could have just bought me a drink,’ I pointed out.

They drew back their hoods. Both were warders: I was in trouble.

Especially because two more men emerged from the trees, and they were unmistakably Pirenti soldiers – huge bear-like men in animal pelts and wielding axes. Men with axes again. The world was really trying to teach me a lesson here. Don’t fear something frightening? Well then, let me throw it at you again and again until you see how stupid you are, Finn.

Having delivered me, the warders were apparently intent on returning to the festival. They turned and walked back through the forest. One of them paused long enough to say, ‘Be quick. They’ll be after her. And make sure she’s incapacitated or you may find yourselves in grave trouble.’

Huh? Grave trouble from me? ‘I think you kidnapped the wrong girl,’ I told them, but they’d already disappeared from view.

I faced the soldiers. ‘Whatever you’re doing,’ I said carefully, ‘I think you are seriously going to regret it. And I say that with the utmost respect for your profession of … crime.’

‘Lippy bitch,’ one of the men grunted. The other backhanded me across the face. It made a loud crack and I felt the shock of it through my entire body. Pain blitzed my head and I fell to my knees. The world spun. I’d never been hit before. Never been physically harmed at all, actually. It was not fun.

The same soldier stared down at me expressionlessly. He had pretty green eyes. And that was when real fear found me, and real understanding. I came from Kaya, which, ninety-nine per cent of the time, was safe. Women were treated the same as men. There wasn’t much violence, not a great deal of crime. You could say what you wanted and nobody was going to hit you in the face for it.

But Thorne had said it, hadn’t he? You have no idea of the world you just stepped into.

Blind fury exploded in my heart. I hated that there was a place in the world where if you were a woman it meant you were in danger. I hated it. I loathed the fact that the only way to stay safe was to learn to fight and hurt others. Loathed the fact that one hit could make me feel like I was dying and pretty much deny me any chance of escape.

I didn’t want to be weak, but I also didn’t want to learn to fight. So where did that leave me?

In a cage. That’s where.

‘If you want me to stop talking,’ I said coldly, ‘you’ll have to cut out my tongue.’

‘With pleasure.’

Green Eyes stopped his companion. Then he drew his own knife and he didn’t cut out my tongue – he stabbed me in the guts.

I woke some time later, staring up at the wooden slats of the cage. Grey and black trees moved above me. The carriage was travelling but I had no idea how far it had moved. I felt every rock in the road, every tiny bump or pebble we crossed as it jolted my body into a spasm of agony. The knife was still inside me. I didn’t know why he hadn’t removed it. Maybe he didn’t want me to bleed to death until we got to our destination.

It came to me in a rush, too late, the reason I had woken up. There was someone in the cage with me. Green Eyes. Undoing his breeches with tattooed hands and gazing down at my body.

Terror struck, and rage.

It coiled inside me, a living, breathing throbbing thing. It wanted out. It wanted free. It wanted no more seconds to pass in this life with this man doing these things.

A scream erupted from my mouth, and with it came my soul and my power and every ounce of magic I had been denying for so many years. Without thought, without decision, it sprung forth and slammed into Green Eyes, knocking him back against the cage where he slumped and did not get back up.

I felt woozy. My head was made of rubber. It hurt and hurt, but I had a sense that there was still more inside me, wanting to get out. Trying to move, I tore at the knife inside me and let out a cry.

The carriage stopped.

Oh no no no.

As quickly as I could manage, I tried the latch to the cage but it was padlocked. If I had a weapon I could probably get through the wood, but they would hardly equip a prisoner with a weapon. Footsteps sounded as the second soldier jumped out of the carriage and approached. Okay. This was okay. I needed him to open the door for me anyway. But what in Gods’ names would I do then?

Green Eyes had nothing on his body that I could use, except maybe his heavy belt buckle. But I was in bad shape, and trying to manoeuvre it off him proved too painful for me in such a cramped space.

Too late. Soldier number two was here anyway. I readied myself, letting the power unfurl like a whisper inside me. He stopped, taking in the scene. ‘You stupid bitch,’ he sighed. Then he undid the cage.

I let go, let myself explode, and he flew off his feet at the sheer force of the pressure I had sent into him.

It snapped back into me with a terrible snap and I nearly lost consciousness once more. Groaning, I struggled to sit up and looked at the two bodies in fear. What had I done? Had I killed them? The thought sent waves of nausea through me.

Fearfully I reached out and touched Green Eyes’ ankle and felt the faint beat of a rotten, rotten heart. ‘Oh thank Gods.’ Then muttered, ‘Not that you deserve it, you monster.’

I started dragging myself out of the cage, needing desperately to be free of it. The drop to the ground was anguish. I landed on the knife and jerked it sideways, right through me. A strange sound ripped into the air and I realised belatedly that it was my scream.

Reaching as far as I could, I managed to touch the second soldier’s hand and found him barely alive. And so with relief swelling inside my chest I allowed myself to lose consciousness.

Thorne

There was a howl inside me, right in the heart of me. He was howling with rage and despair, and with a savage need to find her. And that was how I knew: my beast loved her too.

They weren’t listening to me. They were reasoning. Telling me they were sure she had just gone to find wine or fun or dance. And yes. These did sound like things that Finn would do, normally. Before the last few days, I would have agreed. But not now. Not after the words I’d said to her, not after witnessing what she had with Blain of Slaav, after meeting Ma and after this evening in her room.

Not now.

‘Listen to me. Something’s wrong,’ I repeated, harsh. ‘I can smell it.’

This made them fall quiet.

‘Send a score of guards to search the fortress,’ Ava ordered and men ran to do her bidding.

‘She’s not within the fortress,’ said a soft voice I had not expected. I spun on my heel to see Osric, the only first tier warder in the world. Oddly, my dog Howl was with him; the man’s hand was threaded through the dog’s fur in a way he normally didn’t let strangers touch him. The warder was looking at me with his streaked eyes and I could see that he knew. Whatever it was, he knew.

‘I’m here for the festival,’ he explained unnecessarily, as if I cared.

‘Finn,’ I managed.

‘She has been taken,’ was what he said.

My eyes fell shut for a brief moment.

I couldn’t speak, so Ambrose asked, ‘By who?’

‘Two warders. Illegals. I saw it. Came as fast as I could, but I was too slow. I feel their residue still. And hers. She has a very distinct imprint.’

‘Where?’ I managed.

‘Out. Somewhere in the forest. I know not where.’

‘What do they want with her?’ Ava asked, but I was already moving. Running.

At the gate I shouted up to the guards, ‘Two men and a woman in a raven mask?’

‘That way, sire,’ came the answer, so I followed his pointed finger. Howl was with me, moving with swift certainty. Following the road, I stopped to breathe deeply, picking up the very faint lingering of her scent. It took me some time to find their tracks and follow them into the forest, away from the road.

It took us all night. I found where their tracks met the wheel grooves of a carriage and Howl and I followed those through darkness until the world turned to the grey of predawn. I ran every minute, scenting blood, her blood, and barely keeping it together. He wanted to be free, and I wanted the same.

Not yet, I told him. Soon.

But when at last I came upon them there was no one to kill, for they already lay dead on the ground. Howl yelped.

And there lay Finn, my Wild Girl, and she had a knife in her stomach, and there was a pool of blood spreading beneath her. My beast gave one mournful bay inside me and then he curled up in a ball, and I sank to the ground beside her, my knees soaked in her blood. Howl made a horrible high-pitched whining sound and sniffed the blood, padding frenziedly around us.

Reaching for her with trembling hands, I tried to shake her awake, not knowing what to do. I didn’t know what to do. ‘Finn,’ I said, my voice scraping in horror.

Her eyes miraculously fluttered open. My heart slammed out of beat. ‘Thorne?’

‘I’m here.’ I moved her gently into my lap so that I could stroke her hair and hold her. I was covered in blood – she was still gushing it.

‘When that desperate bastard wakes up tell him girls with knives in their stomachs generally aren’t up for a good time.’

I choked on a laugh, then realised what she was saying and literally saw red. I was losing control. I would tear him limb from limb.

‘Thorne,’ she said again. ‘Don’t kill him. You’ll need answers.’

‘How come you’re being more rational than I am right now?’

‘Must be blood loss.’

‘It’s all right. I’ll get you home.’

‘There were warders with them,’ she said in a rush. ‘Warders. Two.’

‘I know, it’s okay, just relax.’

‘Tell Jonah –’

‘Don’t, Finn. You’re fine.’

‘Just in case, tell him he’ll get to keep all his joy now.’

‘Don’t. Please don’t.’

She looked at me then, and her eyes were her tawny shade of yellow, except brighter, somehow. Richer. ‘Thorne,’ Finn murmured. ‘I’m so in love with you. And I’m sorry I was too cowardly to say it sooner.’

I started to cry, my tears falling on her face as I leant to kiss her lips, even though there was blood spilling from them.

Chapter 14

Thorne

When she lost consciousness I placed her in the carriage and rode it back to the fortress as fast as I could make the horses run. Osric had made it halfway. I had no idea why he’d followed me, but he had, and he climbed into the back with Finn and Howl and started to do something with eyes of white and skin of blue.

I got us back to the fortress and carried her inside to the infirmary, and Osric stayed close, working his wards the whole time. Two days passed, and he did not sleep, and nor did I. I washed my blood-soaked dog and I paced the hallways. When finally he stopped, he was ragged with exhaustion.

‘She will live,’ he said on a sigh.

And I hugged him close for a very long time.

Days I sat by her bed. Ma sat with me, helping with medicines. Ava, Ambrose and the twins were in and out, spending time with us as much as they could afford. Ella and Sadie pinned the wings Finn had made them above her bed for luck. Osric came sometimes, and oddly enough he comforted me more than any of the others.

We’d had the two soldiers brought in for questioning, because they’d turned out to be alive after all, but when Osric finally managed to get into their heads he said they were unreadable – that Finn had utterly scrambled their minds and there was nothing coherent left. I made him vow never to tell her what she’d done, but quietly I felt satisfied that they’d been ruined so utterly.

One night under a red full moon I found myself alone with her. I felt a thousand years old from waiting. From longing. And so I slid into the bed beside her, curling her gently into the crook of my body. It felt illicit, somehow. Secret moments stolen without her knowledge. I wondered if she would remember her delirious words to me. Her words of love, so generously given in her last moments.

I did not know how I would forge a life with her, only that I would.

She shifted in my arms and at long last opened her eyes. We looked at each other, faces close. ‘I only said it because I was dying,’ she warned me, and I laughed and kissed her.

‘It’s not fair,’ Finn murmured. ‘I’m sharing a bed with the prince of the barbarians and I don’t even know how I got here.’

I smiled. ‘It’s a very boring story, I’m afraid.’

‘Then make up a good one.’

So that’s what we did. Day and night. I sat with her and I told her stories. Sometimes they were true stories of my life, Ma’s life; other times they were tales I had been told as a boy, myths or legends or even just nonsensical things I made up.

Time passed and she recovered from a wound that should have killed her. I felt her come further back to life with each word I spoke – I, who had been such a quiet child, a silent young man. This was the most I had ever spoken in my entire life and probably the longest Finn had ever remained silent. Or mostly silent, in any case.

She watched me and listened, and sometimes she asked questions if I wasn’t making sense, and she often pointed out that I should have told that part before that part, or I should have drawn out some section or another. She taught me the art of good storytelling, and always she touched me. A hand on the back of my neck. Fingers entwined with mine. A foot grazing my leg. Sometimes she made me take off my shirt so she could touch my tattoos and my scars. But there was never anything more than that between us, only a sweet kind of tenderness neither of us had experienced before.

Each day she asked, ‘Have they come yet?’

And I was forced to shake my head.

I didn’t know where Jonah, Isadora and Penn were. I had men on the roads looking for them, because they should have arrived by now, or soon at least. But there was no sign.

On Finn’s seventh day in bed I brought a box of my da’s records in and dumped them on the floor.

‘The dreaded journals,’ she said.

‘Records.’

‘What’s the difference?’

I opened the first one, embarrassingly unsettled and trying to hide it. ‘Fourteen slain tonight. All Kayan. Seized with weapons of iron forged in the Vjort style. Possible spies? Look into forgeries in Querida region.

She took a breath. ‘Oh.’

‘Here’s a lovely one. Sanra taken. Renamed. A woman sobbed from her window as I made announcement. Later found her home. Husband killed in war. Children required double rations.’

I shook my head. ‘What a monster.’

‘That sounded to me like a man who followed the sound of a woman crying and gave her children extra food because she couldn’t feed them herself,’ Finn said.

I looked sharply at her. Then back at the page. ‘Don’t.’

‘Okay. Sorry. It’s from later in his life anyway,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘We need earlier records from when he was a teenager in the ice caps.’

‘Torturing people.’

‘Warders.’

I looked up at her, surprised. ‘Are they not people?’

‘Maybe they used to be.’ She shut down then, curling onto her side and facing away from me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but because I didn’t know what I was apologising for it meant nothing. The anger inside her had not been born upon her kidnapping, only deepened. She had harboured a fury at the warders since the day they banned her from being who she was. I’d scented it clearly that night at the royal dinner with Lutius and Osric.

I kept reading, not because I thought the words held any merit, but because I knew she couldn’t bear quiet. Nothing was in any order. I took pieces from all over the place. ‘A lord of Baath offered the highest dowry so it has been decided. I go tomorrow to inspect the girl. If she suffices we will wed quickly. Heirs are required.’

‘Ambrose beat back four at once. He has earned his place as my second. They will know better than to come at us. Her Majesty has proposed his journey to the north. I argued it was unnecessary.’

‘Three slain. One of them a woman. Cruelly, they send women soldiers. Her eyes turned white in the end.’

‘My wife counts. I buy her herbs to stall the panic. Her Majesty has demanded I send her back.’

‘Day twohundred. No conception.’

‘Day threehundred and twelve. No conception.’

‘Day sevenhundred and three. Remedies tried. Still no conception. Her Majesty suggests execution.’

I stopped, unable to go on.

‘How he wanted you,’ came Finn’s soft voice.

I frowned, returning the book to the box. ‘These are accounts of soullessness.’

She rolled over to face where I sat on the floor. ‘Far from it.’

We were quiet. I didn’t know what she meant.

Finn asked, ‘Do you want to hear a story?’

I nodded, though in truth I felt too raw to listen to any more stories.

‘When I was thirteen I loved a boy. He was sly and swift and he had orange hair and a thousand freckles. I liked how his eyes shifted azure each and every time he looked at me. I had a million different ideas of what this meant. I knew we would bond one day, when we were older. I had been practising my soul magic in secret. The warders had forbidden me from it, but I thought them cruel and foolish. The boy was one of the first to swing the ropes on the Siren Nights. He slipped, couldn’t regain his hold, too taken by the call of the sea. I knew what to do. I knew perfectly what I could do. If I entered his mind I could block out the haze of the siren seduction and give him clarity. He would be able to keep his hold. But I was blunt. My mind was a hammer instead of a needle. It went inside him and for a moment I knew all that he was. I could see every thought, every wish, every memory. I knew he loved me in a fashion but was more frightened of me than anything else. His brothers teased him about me and it made him deeply uncomfortable because the thought of me reminded him of his sister’s doll, the one he had admired in secret. He was equally ashamed about admiring me, which was curious to me at the time. And then the moment passed, and my blunt hammer smashed through his mind by mistake, killing him instantly.’

Finn fell silent, and I felt that silence deep down inside me. I sat on the side of the bed and reached for her hand, but she removed it.

‘The act I had taken killed me too,’ she said woodenly.

I straightened, watching her face, not understanding.

‘It used me up. All of me.’ Her gaze was flickering with a peculiar translucency. It kept fading white and black and grey, one colour overlapping another as if she had a thousand layers within her eyes. ‘I was dead, but my brother carried my body home to Ma. She was a warder – a low tier warder, not very powerful, but trained in the arts of necromancy. She knew about life and death, the flicker between it, and knew how to whisper a soul back into its body. She sent her soul’s energy into mine and drew me back from the dark, even though it had been too long and she could not hope to survive. She restored me by tying my soul to my brother’s permanently, but perished in the act.’

I tried to speak but couldn’t.

‘That’s it. That’s the story everyone wishes they knew. I walked a night with the dead and heard them screaming, and now they scream behind my eyes every night and every day, unless my poor brother is there to help me bear the burden of them. A fate he was never supposed to endure.’

Closing my eyes, I was awash with a sadness so profound I knew it to be a part of me, as it was a part of her. It was all so clear now. All the pieces of her I hadn’t been able to understand.

‘Your da. He’s survived a long time.’

‘Broken and humiliated,’ she replied. ‘He is a true half-walker. Not like Ava, who laughs and loves. Da is a shell. And soon he will die, murdered by me just as Ma was.’

‘Finn. Hess said it was not your burden to bear. Any of it.’

‘She also said Sam would have fallen anyway. Don’t you see how much worse that makes it all?’

She could have let him fall. Then she would have remained a normal girl, her brother would not have had his life stolen, her ma would not have died, and her da would not be fading as we spoke.

I nodded. There was no use in trying to take away this knowledge, or argue with it. No use trying to lessen her pain – that would never happen. Instead I reached for her hand once more, and even though she tried to move it from my touch, I took it and held it too firmly for her to be able to escape it. Reaching for her cheek, I cupped it with my other hand, tilting her face towards mine.

‘You find joy in so much,’ I told her softly, holding her eyes. ‘You laugh, and you love so many things at once. I would that everyone could endure their pain with so much courage. The world would be a far better place.’

The moment stopped, and I didn’t know how she would react, my Wild Girl whose behaviour would forever be a mystery to me. She was as likely to scream at me as anything else.

But she didn’t. Finn reached out and ran her fingers through my short hair, stroking it gently. Her eyes shifted one more time and then stopped, resting on the pale blue colour I saw when I looked in the mirror. I knew with perfect clarity that when eyes shifted to another person’s shade it was because something had been shared or felt or exchanged, some intimacy so sweet it stole everything else and left only love.

‘Let’s get this mess sorted out,’ she suggested, breaking the spell. She slid onto the floor and opened one of the records, and after a moment I did the same.

Some time later Finn said she was being driven mad by the walls and ceiling of her room, and needed a change of scenery. So we moved to the library to continue our reading. We were trying to find any records of the time Da had spent in the berserker mountains, but so far had come across nothing. The earlier records contained no ice, but they were certainly dark and twisted by bloody deeds and a very confused mind.

The black haired ghost taunts me, I read. He sees everything and I can’t escape him.

Ava and the twins found us surrounded by dusty scrolls and books; she looked at it all with distaste while Ella and Sadie found their favourite book and sprawled on the floor to read it. ‘How can you stomach it?’ the Queen asked.

‘Reading? Or reading about Thorne?’ Finn asked.

‘Either.’

‘You’re definitely Falco’s cousin,’ she muttered. Then added with a smile, ‘It’s actually really interesting. Like being privy to a different species of human. He was meticulous with his information and his training. I mean, sure, he slaughtered a whole bunch of people, but if you want to be ruled by a scary tyrant, then at least this one was good with his paperwork.’

The joke didn’t land very well. I couldn’t stomach much more of my father’s emotionless sentences and lists. Ava, the only one of us who’d known him, did not smile.

I looked at my aunt, sensing something warring beneath her surface. ‘What is it?’

She shook her head.

‘We know why Roselyn and Ambrose loved him,’ Finn said. ‘But what about you?’

Ava stared at her, something in her shifting eyes. They faded to a very pale lilac, so pale it was almost white, but not. Not quite. Looking at me, her expression was flat. ‘Let me be clear,’ Ava of Orion said with a glance to make sure her children weren’t listening. ‘I did not love this man. I spent the most important years of my life hating him. Your mother and uncle have every right to forgive and forget – everyone survives loss in their own ways – but I do not, and I never will.’

I’d never heard her say anything like it before. She went along with the toasts in his name and she spoke warmly of him to her daughters. I realised what a generosity it was towards the people she loved.

‘What did he do to you?’ Finn asked.

‘I don’t care what he did to me. It was his wife he hurt, repeatedly. And to me that’s unforgivable, no matter how long he’s been dead.’

A wave of queasiness hit me and I closed the book before me with a snap. All these puzzle pieces were not making a whole. I could no better understand the man now than I had a month ago. And maybe that was the truth of it: that there were no answers, no wholes left to be found. He would always be a mystery to me, existing only in words spoken with bias and memory.

Ava put her hand on my shoulder and admitted, ‘I was never capable of much complexity though, kid. In that way I was like your da.’ She swallowed and gave an uncomfortable smile. ‘He and I were similar in a lot of ways.’

After that she left us to babysit. Finn saw that I’d lost interest in the records so she sang a loud, crude sea-shanty that made me laugh reluctantly. Ella and Sadie watched her raptly, seeming torn between thinking her either the best or the weirdest person ever.

Osric came by late in the afternoon. ‘I’m glad to see you well, Finn.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, a tad stiffly.

Osric sat next to me, peering over my shoulder at the record I was pretending to read.

‘Any idea why warders would be working with Pirenti men to kidnap Kayan girls?’ Finn asked him bluntly.

He shook his head. ‘Those warders were not trained by us. They are illegals. I imagine that’s why they wanted you.’

‘I’m not an illegal!’

‘Technically, you are.’

We both stared at him.

‘You used your power,’ he shrugged.

‘To get free!’

Osric spread his hands. ‘Yes. Still illegal.’

‘Osric,’ I started.

‘I won’t say anything. I have no love for the warder rules and regulations. I am more powerful than any of them, and yet I have no place in their hierarchy because I am apparently too selfish by nature.’

Which was patently not true, evident in the help he had freely given.

Finn’s gaze softened. ‘Idiots,’ she muttered.

‘So how can we find out who they were?’ I asked.

Osric turned to Finn. ‘You touched their skin?’

‘Sure, but I was two seconds away from eating dirt. I have no idea who they were. And the warders left me with nothing either – they made sure I couldn’t touch them.’ She pondered for a while, then frowned. ‘The soldiers had tattoos on their hands. Both of them. I thought it odd at the time.’

‘Arrow heads?’ I asked quickly and she nodded. A sigh slipped from me. ‘Then they were soldiers from the barracks in Vjort.’

Finn gave a bright smile. ‘Well then. Looks like we’re going to the most dangerous city in the world!’

‘Please try not to look so happy about it.’

Osric nodded suddenly. His eyes had gone distant. ‘You must leave tonight.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve seen it. Something to do with the timing. Something will happen when you get there, but I don’t …’ He shook his head, shrugging blithely. ‘That’s it. That’s all I got.’

‘Prophecies and visions,’ I said. ‘Ruling our lives. What if you hadn’t said anything just then?’

‘But I did.’

I opened my mouth but nothing came out except a sound of pure frustration.

Finn grinned. ‘Thorne has trouble with the concept of fatalism.’

‘Fate is a tricky mistress,’ Osric agreed mildly.

I looked down at the journal in my hand. My father’s large, neat handwriting described his battle tactics for an upcoming skirmish on the borders of Kaya.

‘I want answers, Thorne,’ she told me.

Meeting her eyes, I nodded. ‘To Vjort we go. It’s on the way anyway.’

‘To where?’

‘The berserker mountain.’

She said nothing, but her eyes changed again to pale, pale blue and she got up to join the twins on the floor. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look unimpressed at a potential adventure.

The reality was this. If my da knew something about the bond, and he learnt it while under the mountain, then maybe, just maybe, it was the only place left in the world that still bore that knowledge. I didn’t know how, but frankly I didn’t have much else to go on.

Aside from that – aside from it all – the ice had been calling to me my whole life. Perhaps it was time I stopped denying it.

Falco

General Brathe called for soldiers to fortify the city. We prepared for attack, for the possibility of a siege. But Quill and I knew without needing to say it that walls and soldiers would not stop first tier warders.

Lutius was our greatest weapon. His warders were called in from the furthest reaches of the country. I only hoped they would make it in time. I didn’t know how many it would take to stop Dren and Galia, but if the couple had managed to break through the magic of the prison, then I feared what they were capable of.

Brathe, Lutius, Quillane and I were seated around a large table in my study. Brathe had been demanding that we be moved for the last hour, but Lutius had informed him that Dren and Galia would be able to feel our energy no matter where we were, so we’d best be kept in the most secure place available – which was the palace.

‘It would actually be the warder training facility,’ Lutius pointed out.

‘Protecting them on the road would be nigh on impossible,’ Brathe snapped.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ Quillane said. ‘I am more concerned about our people than Falco and I.’

‘I’m not!’ I exclaimed. ‘I want all day and all night protection – as much as we have.’ Gods, what a joke I’d become.

I paused then, considering this. Who was I really helping, being a fool in times like these? In war, people needed an Emperor who could inspire them to have courage. Not some cowardly imbecile who pissed himself at the first sign of trouble.

But the truth remained the same – the Sparrow was a greater threat. He had an army behind him, and he was coming. One day soon he would try to attack me, and I needed him to have no idea of what I was capable. I needed him to sadly underestimate me, or I had no chance at defeating him. I had set up this plan many years ago. It was a long game. I just had to keep reminding myself to see it to the end.

‘I want the boy,’ Lutius said abruptly.

‘What boy?’

‘Jonah of Limontae.’

I frowned, glancing at Quill. She leant forward with a probing gaze. ‘Why would you want him?’

‘Because he has more power than he admits to. That’s either dangerous, or very useful.’

‘He’s on the road. Last we heard, they were reported to be in Pirenti already.’

‘Call him back.’

‘How?’

‘Osric was my emissary for the Midwinter’s festival. I will contact him and have him find the boy.’

She spread her hands. ‘Very well. For all the good it may do us.’

I agreed with her there. For I happened to have a theory about the twins of the cliff. I didn’t know much about magic. But I knew one thing – bonded couples could share their powers, if they both happened to be warders. When Finn fell from the plinth she cried out for her brother’s help, and after she’d been saved Jonah was not the only one drained of energy.

Twins were not bonded, but there was a deep and resonant connection between the brother and sister – no one who met them could deny that.

So whether it was insane or not, I was convinced that in truth it was not Jonah with power that rivalled Osric’s. It was Finn.

Quillane

Radha was pacing the room when I stole a few minutes to check in on her. ‘How goes it?’ she asked quickly.

I’d barely forgiven her for leaving the room and accosting Falco, for Gods’ sakes. Luckily he was a distracted wastrel most of the time, and hadn’t given the exchange another thought.

‘We’re sending for all the warders in the country.’

‘They won’t make it.’

‘Probably not.’

‘I want to fight.’

‘What?’

She paced towards me. ‘I want to fight, Quillane.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘I’m going to, with or without your permission.’

‘And when you are killed? I die too. There goes the Empress of Kaya when the country is under attack from two different enemies. Do you think Falco would manage on his own?’

‘He might –’

‘He would crumble. This city would crumble, and then the country. All because you wanted to prove to yourself that you could be brave.’

She stared at me, and I began to regret the cruel words.

Radha swallowed. I was reminded in that moment both of her delicacy and her incredible resilience. ‘I was a soldier, before you,’ she said softly. ‘I was a fighter. And a dreamer. I was so many things.’

My eyes prickled. But I was our leader for a reason – I knew which risks to take and which ones to leave.

‘You will remain here, safe, until all threats have passed,’ I said softly, firmly. ‘I’m sorry for it, but that, it seems, is the price you pay for having had the misfortune of bonding with an Empress.’

Finn

The walled city of Vjort was cold and grey. I felt the difference in the air, the static deadliness. As we entered eyes fell to me, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was a woman or Kayan – probably both. Thorne stayed very close to me, hand on his axe at all times. The men walking along the streets and spilling out of ale houses were grizzly and scarred, warriors all. None seemed to recognise him up here, because he’d lived his whole life in the south.

I gazed up into the sky, struck by the beauty of it and wondering if it would snow. It certainly felt more than cold enough.

‘Keep moving,’ Thorne told me.

He brought us to a small, quiet inn too expensive for anyone but nobility to afford. There was a large room upstairs usually reserved for the King and Queen, which we rented, warming ourselves before the fire.

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ I told him. ‘Leaving without them.’

‘I begged you to stay, Finn. It’s not safe for you here.’

‘How?’ I whirled to him, annoyed. ‘How was I meant to stay and be parted from you?’

His expression softened. ‘When they reach the fortress, Ambrose will tell them where we’ve gone. They’ll be fine.’

‘It shouldn’t have taken them so long,’ I shook my head. ‘Something’s happened.’

‘We don’t know that.’

There was darkness building inside me. I wanted to curl into a ball and sleep and sleep and sleep. Or maybe I wanted to climb out that window and stand in the freezing cold until my skin turned blue and died. I could hear people screaming, screaming, screaming –

‘Finn, look at me.’

I didn’t want to see his eyes, didn’t want them to see me.

‘Fight it,’ he urged me.

‘I can’t.’

‘Don’t let it have this much control over you.’

‘I need Jonah. Only he can make it stop.’

‘He’s not here, and he’s not coming, so you have to do it yourself.’

‘I can’t,’ I exclaimed, stalking away from him. ‘You don’t get it. You have no idea.’

‘Of course I do. I’ve spent my whole life fighting my own darkness. I’ve never let him gain control of me. I’ve never let him free.’

I looked at him and wondered what would happen if he ever did let the beast free. I wondered if it would be as catastrophic as he thought it would be.

‘When your eyes shift red, is that not the darkness taking over?’ I asked him.

‘Those are the moments when I lose control of him and he becomes stronger than I,’ Thorne murmured. ‘But I have never intentionally let him loose – I cannot. I will fight him every day of my life, fight to keep him caged. You must do the same with whatever threatens to pull you under.’

‘I’m not as strong as you.’

‘It is only you who decides how strong you are. So decide, and then be it.’

Just then there was a loud shout from beyond the window and several angry voices in the night.

‘Wait here,’ Thorne ordered me.

Right.

I followed him down the stairs curiously, then stepped outside into the icy night air and wished I’d been quick enough to grab my fur. At the end of the street was a small town square. In its midst was a large group of men clustered around something, and lots of shouting burst into the sky. Thorne shoved through some of the men at the back of the crowd, clearing a path for us to squeeze through.

It was like all the air around us had been injected straight into my heart, so cold did I feel then.

Isadora was standing in the middle of the circle, positioned protectively over my brother, who was unconscious on the ground, and Penn, who was frustrated out of his wits. Circling her dangerously were four large Pirenti soldiers, expressions of rapt lust on their faces.

‘Touch either of them,’ Isadora’s voice snapped into the night, ‘and I’ll kill you. Do you understand?’

The men laughed, as did most of the crowd. Clearly this had to be stopped, but before we got the chance to do anything the man in front of Isadora stepped forward to attack her. His movements were lazy. He reached for her with his big, meaty hands, not having bothered to draw a weapon.

He didn’t even see what killed him. One of Isadora’s secret, hidden knives sliced straight through the enormous man’s throat. He made an awful, gurgling sound, blood spurting, and then he toppled like a tree trunk to the ground, dead.

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then the other three men gave thunderous screams of fury and lunged at her.

Thorne’s voice was quicker than all of them. ‘Halt!’ he boomed over the commotion, something so commanding in him that everyone did actually halt. Clearly no one made an order in Pirenti unless they were entitled to do so.

In my mind was one thing: Jonah Jonah Jonah Jonah. My heart reached for him, terrified of the stillness in his body.

‘Nobody move,’ Thorne commanded.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ one of the men snarled furiously.

Thorne walked into the circle to stand beside Isadora. ‘My name is Thorne,’ he spoke, and slowly the faces of the men changed. They gaped incredulously at him, letting their weapons fall instantly to the ground.

‘Majesty,’ one of them whispered. ‘Forgive us, we had no idea …’

‘You’ve attacked three Kayan youths in one of my cities during peacetime,’ Thorne said very coldly. I could see, as I watched him, that he was struggling to keep his beast caged. I could see how much he wanted to unleash it. And I could see, too, how well he fit his title, here in the cold north. He was younger than the men, but as he eyed them we knew, collectively, that he was infinitely more dangerous. This was a boy who had berserker blood in his veins – they didn’t know it, but their warrior instincts could feel it.

I stared at him, wondering what happened to the men now. Prison? Punishment?

‘You are extremely unlucky,’ he went on, more softly, ‘that these people happen to be very dear to me.’

I looked at the people around me and realised that they were excited. They didn’t often see their prince. Maybe they never had. And that’s when I understood what was going to happen. With poison in my gut, I knew. This was the heir to the throne on his first appearance in Vjort since manhood. And in Pirenti, in the army city of Vjort where the wildest soldiers in this world dwelled and prayed for war, they valued strength and ruthlessness above all else.

These were men who’d broken the law, and they’d done so in front of their prince, to people he loved.

He was going to have to execute them.

Thorne drew his axe. I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t watch this. I couldn’t bear to – I’d truly had enough. I willed myself to turn and leave this violence, but just as I was about to do so, Thorne’s eyes lifted to find me, and I knew I could not leave. This was the price of loving a man whose safety relied upon people witnessing his strength, and if I’d had enough, then he’d had enough a very long time ago.

What a curse it was, to be born a gentle soul in the body of a Prince of Pirenti.

There were tears spilling down my face but I didn’t look away from him. I straightened my shoulders.

Without a word, Thorne swung his axe three times and killed the three soldiers. Not men battling him for his own life. Not men who wanted to kill him. But men who had begged for forgiveness and now kneeled unarmed before him. They fell soundlessly, and I swallowed the bile my mouth.

In that moment it began to snow. Tiny white flakes floated through the black night, beautiful and pure, to land in the blood of the dead men.

Jonah was well. He’d been knocked unconscious only.

Thorne was not. He looked like a ghost.

He carried my brother to our room and placed him in bed. Isadora sat with Jonah in such a way that I knew something had deepened between them. Penn climbed into bed next to him. I kissed my brother on the forehead, sending him every ounce of strength I had through whatever bond was forged between us.

‘Will you watch him for me? I’ll be back,’ I told Isadora with a cracked voice. She nodded, taking Jonah’s hand.

And then I was drawn after Thorne. Down the creaky wooden steps. Through the noisy dining area. Out into the back courtyard, abruptly quiet.

Everything was made of stone, except the single tree curling up into the sky, a skeleton in winter. A moon shone large and crimson. The night was frigid.

I felt my body turn cold in the space between moments. Snow fell slowly, dreamily.

I felt in a dream myself.

Because I’d seen his face afterwards. And I’d understood that the weight of a heart so frayed had grown too much for him to carry. The violence in his hands was drowning him. He was alone in the courtyard, his back to me.

He looked tall and strong and kingly, but I knew better. As my footsteps took me closer, he fell to the frozen ground.

I sank to try and catch him, frightened.

He looked ravaged as he started to cry. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to be this.’

I pressed my forehead to his, holding his face.

‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ he whispered, locked. ‘I can’t be this thing that they want me to be. I don’t want this pain and death and I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.’

His tears were all over my face and I held him more tightly.

‘I can’t do it,’ he wept. ‘Please don’t make me do it.’

‘I will never,’ I vowed. ‘No one will. No one will make of you something that you are not. I won’t let them.’

He looked into my face, my eyes. He searched me, panicked, whispering, ‘I can’t live this life a second longer. Not one single second longer.’

I couldn’t help my own tears from slipping free as he cried against my chest, his shoulders heaving.

It was frightening, seeing him like this. Deeply frightening. Only weeks ago, before him, I would have turned and run back inside, and then I would have run into the night and not stopped running until I was so far away that nothing would ever catch me.

But now. Now I demanded more of myself. Because loving someone made you brave, if you were very lucky.

‘Do you know which life I wish to live?’ I asked, meeting his blue eyes.

He looked at me, and he waited.

Chapter 15

Thorne

Tonight I was shown the worst part of myself. And I was shown, too, a happiness so profound it didn’t fit within my chest and I knew I could never deserve it, could never be worthy of it.

When she asked me, what I thought was this.

How can anyone, ever, survive being loved so much?

Finn

I was clothed in a linen dress given me by the innkeeper’s wife. She did my hair with hands so old they trembled, but I loved them, these hands, for in them I could feel a life lived in sweetness and there was not a single regret in any of her wrinkles or her veins. She found heather in the garden to thread through my hair, and though the dress was old and tattered, I felt beautiful.

Through the snow I was guided to the small cobblestoned temple. It was crumbling, stone by stone. I ran my hands along the rough edges of it, needing to feel it, to remember every tiny detail.

We moved inside and I saw him.

At the end of the altar. Waiting for me.

I saw him and I saw nothing else. I had a sense that I would never see another thing in my life. I walked to him slowly, and I could see that in his eyes there were tears. Different tears; he looked happier and stronger than he had ever looked.

He took my hands in his. I was swallowed by his gaze.

When it was time, he said softly, ‘I am yours. The life I want is with you. The world I want to live in is the one in your heart. Always.’

And when it was time I replied, ‘You gave yourself so generously to me, Thorne, and so I’ll try always to be worthy of that generosity. I give you everything that I am. But most of all I give you my strength. Love is dangerous, but I will make us brave – that is my promise to you.’

And we were married.

Thorne

The answer.

You aren’t supposed to.

Chapter 16

Thorne

We hurried from the temple and through the snow, hands linked. We were both jumping out of our skin with excitement and a giddy, overflow of love; we were drenched in it. But there wasn’t time, yet, to enjoy each other.

‘He’s going to kill me when I tell him he missed it,’ Finn muttered.

‘Ma too,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll do it again, when all of this is over.’

‘Deal.’

Isadora and Penn were still sitting with Jonah, who’d not yet regained consciousness.

‘Sorry,’ Finn breathed as we entered. ‘We had to deal with something that couldn’t wait. What happened?’

Penn hugged her for a long time. ‘What are you wearing?’ he asked her. Finn shot me a guilty look.

‘We were captured on the road,’ Isadora explained darkly. ‘Warders. They gave us to half a dozen Pirenti soldiers, who brought us north in a cage.’

‘How did you escape?’

Isadora’s eyes were a deeper red than usual as she said, ‘I killed them.’

There was silence in the room.

‘All of them,’ Penn murmured. ‘All of them.’

‘What did they want with you?’ Finn asked.

‘All of them.’

‘Jonah read them,’ Isadora replied. ‘He saw ignorance, of a kind. He explained that they were too muddled in the head to be truly aware of why they were doing it. He thought it must have been due to warder manipulation.’

‘So there are illegal warders using Pirenti soldiers to move their victims north,’ I mused. ‘It is clever – if anyone is discovered, it will be the soldiers. But what purpose does it all serve? And why you?’

‘They wanted Jonah,’ Penn said. ‘His magic.’

‘So they’re looking for warders they can recruit,’ Finn surmised. ‘Which is why they took me too.’ Then she added, ‘And I think they want bonded couples.’

‘Why?’ Isadora asked.

‘That first leg of the journey. Sin’s men were looking for warders and bonded couples.’

‘You think it connected?’ I asked her.

Finn nodded. Didn’t explain why.

We mulled it over for a while. Two things we now had to deal with. The end to the bond, which we were no closer to finding than we had been on day one. And rogue warders kidnapping people.

‘My da’s information could be in the berserker mountain,’ I said finally. ‘And the warders are taking people north. So I will go into the ice and hope to find answers to either issue.’

‘Not alone,’ Isadora said.

‘You would not survive in the ice. I say this not to insult, but because it is too dangerous to trifle with such truth.’

‘You expect me to come this far and then give up?’ she demanded.

‘In the morning,’ Finn interrupted. ‘Tonight we sleep. In the morning we decide.’

Isadora’s jaw clenched, but she nodded.

To me, Finn said, ‘I’ll sit with my brother a while.’

I nodded, sharing a long look with her, then took Penn and steered him out to another room.

‘You ready to sleep, mate?’ I asked him. He shook his head, then promptly walked to the window and climbed out. ‘Penn!’

Poking my head out, I saw him scamper down dead creepers on the side of the building. Quickly I descended the stairs inside and circled around to the courtyard. It was empty, but I could smell the boy, and found him in the stables.

He was sitting inside one of the stalls, nuzzling a sleeping horse. ‘Shhh,’ he ordered me.

I nodded, watching him. Carefully I entered the stall and sat down in the straw. Penn was stroking the horse’s brown hair in time with its breathing; it was amazing that it had not spooked at our entry, but remained calmly on the ground.

‘They give you peace?’ I asked.

He didn’t reply.

‘Do you miss Griggor?’

Again he didn’t respond. And then, abruptly, he said, ‘I had a pegasis.’

‘Truly?’

‘He was the first Griggor. I belonged to him.’

I had seen the way Ava was with her pegasis Migliori, and knew it to be a very deep bond.

‘They killed him,’ Penn said, emotionlessly.

I blinked, felt something in my chest tighten. ‘Who did?’

‘They took his energy and he died.’ He stroked the horse again and again. ‘Now they’ve escaped.’ My mouth was dry. ‘Who, Penn?’

‘Ma and Da.’

I gazed at him in the dark. ‘It could have been anyone who escaped.’

‘It was them.’ He looked at me then. Met my eyes, which was unusual for him. ‘They have rot inside. They’re going to hurt people.’

Finn

Isadora crossed to sit in the window, and I was curious about the fact that she wouldn’t leave Jonah, even now that I was here.

‘What’s happened between you?’ I asked bluntly.

‘Nothing.’

‘You care for each other.’

She didn’t look at me, but I could feel her discomfort rolling off her in waves.

‘I don’t want him hurt,’ I said, not because she didn’t already know that, but simply because something in me felt the need to say it out loud. For myself more than for her, probably. ‘I don’t know anything about you,’ I added.

‘There isn’t much to know.’

‘I don’t believe this is just about the money.’

‘Am I meant to care what you believe?’

‘Isadora,’ I said. ‘I’m trying. You don’t like me. But you’ve saved my brother’s life, and I want for there to be something more between us. I want … This whole thing has to mean something, doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Can’t we make it mean something then?’ When she didn’t respond I shook my head. ‘I’m your friend, whether you like it or not, whether you are mine or not. I will care for you and fight for you always, because that’s what happens when you go through this kind of stuff together. I know that’s sentimental, but I also happen to believe it.’

The pale, wraith-like girl finally turned to look at me. She was silent a long time, and I had no idea what to expect. Then she murmured simply, ‘Very well.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Please. No more emotion.’

I kissed Jonah again, then headed for the door, wanting my husband. Before I reached it, Isadora said, ‘He has softened you.’

I smiled, surprised by her insight. ‘No. It only looks that way.’

Thorne had arranged another room to be rented. This was where I found him, blessedly alone.

‘Where’s Penn?’ I asked breathlessly.

‘Sleeping with the horses.’

‘Thank Gods. That was too long.’

‘It was twenty minutes,’ he laughed.

‘Twenty minutes too long.’

‘Come here.’

I went to him; he had my dress off in an instant. I felt things inside me quicken and tighten and heat up all at once. I was swept away by the mightiest of ocean tides and I had not a hope of fighting it – would never want to fight it. He drowned me, stole my breath, immersed me in sensation and feeling and something bigger, sweeter – more infinite. I saw a million things all at once, things that were him and things that were me. And I knew after the one nightmarishly numb night that I was lucky to have the power I did, to feel all of Thorne when we touched.

We didn’t waste any time, trembling with the same need, one that had been growing for a long time, every single second since the day we first saw each other in that square. His mouth was against my collarbone, breasts, shoulder, neck. His hands placed me on the bed, took my hips, pulled them up against him.

I was gripping him so hard that my fingernails broke his skin; there was a wild creature inside me and she was longing to burst free. Her heart was made of raven’s wings and her teeth were sharp like steel.

Our eyes locked as he finally moved inside me; I felt like I’d been waiting my whole life. My heart was against his heartbeat. I could feel the vibrations of it through his skin, but so too could I feel it in my own soul. My gift, my curse. Right now his heart was light as a feather and full and whole. It was beating through my body and my bones felt tight, aching.

Moving on top of him, I ducked my mouth to his chest. Thump thump thump through my lips, against my tongue, into my pulse.

He sat up, kissing me hungrily, large rough hands in my hair, along my spine, under the curve of my breasts and gripping my hips. As we began to move faster against each other he looked at me once more, and his eyes slipped scarlet.

I gasped. Thorne hadn’t disappeared – he was still here in every look, every touch. They were both here.

‘At last,’ I murmured.

Thorne flipped me over again and moved deeper inside me.

We reached that aching, shivering, exploding place together, holding tight, and when it was over we looked at each other and –
and as one our eyes shifted to gold.

Thorne

I was revelling in the disastrous perfection of our bodies together when I felt the cage crumble around him, my beast, and with no resistance from me he filled my limbs with his strength and his passion and his hunger. I felt, for the first time in my life, one with him.

And that was entirely because of Finn. I looked at her, could hardly believe she was real, could feel everything building inside me and taste the salt of her skin on my lips and the way she trembled around me and under me and then –

Our eyes turned gold.

And I knew we’d bonded because I’d allowed the beast a single moment of freedom.

It rushed through me – a heady, dizzy wave of love and death and lives stretching out around us. I felt the threads of our souls wrap around each other and link interminably, knitting together until there was no longer two but one, stronger and more whole than we had ever been separately. It was like fire, burning through my skin, setting every inch of me alight with a kind of agonised pleasure.

But with it, with the joy, came a sudden realisation, like the tolling of the bell, a warning of final doom. We were the dead walking.

Wrenching myself away from her and leaving us both cold, I felt swollen with horror.

‘Thorne?’

I turned away from her gold eyes, those gold, gold eyes. I couldn’t breathe, felt my chest cavity cracking open so that understanding could devour my heart with greedy glee.

‘Thorne.’

‘No,’ I managed to utter.

‘What?’ she demanded. I heard her get up and move towards me.

‘Don’t,’ I said quickly, trying to rein in a million thoughts, a million feelings.

‘You don’t!’ she snapped. ‘Don’t you dare turn away from me. Not now.’

‘I’ve just condemned you to death!’ I snarled. The beast was howling. I smashed my fist into the wood of the dressing table, wanting it to hurt, but all it did was splinter the wood. ‘Don’t you see? I’ve numbered your days! They come at me, again and again. I am challenged by men infinitely more savage than I am, and one day I will not be able to defeat them any longer, and you will die with me!’

I wanted to break things. Destroy the whole world. Tear it down piece by piece until my hands bled a river of blood.

I turned to see Finn standing in a shaft of moonlight, still and expressionless. I was struck abruptly by the sight of her, the curves of her in shadow and light, the tousled golden hair and –

And a look in her eyes that froze me still.

‘You might not be savage, my love,’ she murmured, ‘but I am.’

My heart clenched; a dark thrill ran through me. What she’d really said was: I will learn to be, for you.

She smiled and it was a cold smile. ‘You think I would let them kill you?’ A shake of her head. A few steps towards me. ‘I already told you. I will make you strong, Thorne. As strong as it takes to beat them back, one after the other, until no one in this Godsforsaken country would ever be foolish enough to try to take what is yours.’

I kissed her, my Wild Girl. Because she was loyal. And that, I thought, might have been the best thing about her.

Chapter 17

Finn

Over the next hours the world changed. The impossible happened, the inexplicable: I lost him.

What the bond meant was that Hess could no longer be right. She had said that one of us, and only one, would die at the end of this journey. Now it was either both or neither.

The other thing it meant, although this was true even before we’d bonded, was that there was no way I was letting him go into the ice on his own. It was vast and unforgiving up there – how could he possibly hope to find where the warders were taking people?

So I had a plan. Thorne would undoubtedly find a way to stop me, which meant I had to do this without telling him. I’d sneak out while he was sleeping. But now I wasn’t sure how that was going to work because he hadn’t slept a wink and was instead standing at the window, where he’d been since the moment we bonded.

And it was starting to scare me.

It scared me even more when he got dressed and donned his boots.

Clearly, he didn’t believe I had the strength to help him fight and win. He was convinced the odds were against us – that some day soon he would be killed in a challenge, and would take me with him. Dread was heavy upon him – I could feel it from across the room.

‘Thorne?’

He wouldn’t look at me. I could see his silhouette against the glass, and the night beyond seemed infinite.

I crossed to him and placed my hands along the length of his spine.

‘I love you,’ I whispered, my lips pressed into his warm body.

Still nothing. So I placed my hand on the back of his neck. It caused a rupture inside me. A shock of disbelief. He was pulling away from me with everything he had. With my hands on his skin I could feel it. I could feel his heartbeat through his body, and it was giving me nothing. Panic burnt.

‘Come back,’ I tried. ‘Thorne. Come back.’

But he wouldn’t. I couldn’t make him.

Sliding around to his front, I reached for his face and tried to look into his eyes. ‘All those words of love you spoke to me. All the stories. Hundreds and thousands of them. I lived off them. Breathed with them.’

It hurt, a nameless hurt. An inexplicable one. A hurt that filled all of me, and all of my years to come. I ached for the waste, the time I’d wasted keeping my love from him, as if it cost me anything to give.

‘What are you trying to do?’ I pressed. ‘How can you think that this is the answer? This is never the answer. You can’t will the bond undone.’

He moved infinitesimally so that his face was in a shaft of moonlight, and I felt myself crack into pieces. Thorne took my hands and pulled them from his face, but he didn’t let them go. He held onto them with a kind of urgency, as though he was being forced, as though something bound him to me beyond his will.

‘You told me,’ I uttered, starting to cry. ‘You swore to me that you loved me and that you wouldn’t ever leave me. We got married.’

Tears slipped out of my eyes and I could feel them tracing their way slowly down my cheeks.

‘Thorne,’ I whispered. ‘I want to follow you but I don’t know where you’ve gone.’

He closed his eyes, and I saw tears slip free of his lashes. I could feel his heart beneath my hands; each beat was seared into my flesh.

‘I’ll find you. Wherever you are, I’ll find you.’

But he turned from me, and he walked towards the door.

‘Don’t,’ I sobbed, striding after him. I hit him hard, and he turned, catching my fist in his huge hands. ‘Don’t leave me.’

But looking into my eyes, he said simply, ‘I must.’

And then he was gone.

And my eyes had no colour.

And my mind had no thoughts.

And my body had no sensations. And my soul gave up, too weary to bear the weight of its own size after so many years.

It had always been too weary. It had been born weak, my soul. He’d made it strong, but now he was gone.

Thorne

I would break this bond, and free her from me.

It was all that existed in my heart now, all that I knew. I cared not about the task I’d been sent for – it meant nothing to me. Nothing to what Finn had become.

My beast went into a deep, deep sleep, and I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to wake him, heartbroken as he was.

Chapter 18

Finn

At the door I stole a heavy fur cloak and hastened out into the cold night. Peering up either end of the street, I decided to try a new direction as I did not wish to see the residue of the executions. They seemed like an age ago, a thousand years in the past, when in fact they had been earlier this very night. Dawn would be arriving soon and with it a new day.

A crummy day, undoubtedly. I was fairly certain that the whole point of bondmates was so you were assured never to be left, but hey, I’d broken that rule with gusto. My husband was the first human being to find a way to choose not to be with his mate. That felt good.

You stupid, bloody idiot, Thorne.

It took me several hours to find my way to the wall and with relief exited through a north gate, leaving my name with the guard. I wanted to be found, after all.

Spread out before me were rolling hills covered in long yellow grass the colour of my eyes. Icy wind bit into me and my teeth immediately started to chatter.

I stood looking at the grey and black shadows of the pre-dawn world. I thought of my mother, of the gentility in her smile, the kindness in her soul. Perhaps that was why I loved Thorne so much. Because he had that same kindness, the one I had never been endowed with. Or maybe I had had it, once upon a time. But it had long since faded with the memories I refused to relive. On the day I woke to find Ma dead, I had vowed never to use my terrible soul magic again. It was a sickness, I had been warned. A deformity of my birth. Once only had I consciously broken my vow – which had been panic and nothing else, only the gut-deep survival instinct that arose when a man was about to attack you.

But now I stood, readying myself to break the vow willingly, for better or worse. I closed my eyes and hoped she would understand, wherever she was. ‘I won’t run away anymore,’ I whispered to her.

And then I set free a huge burst of power, enough to light up the sky above me with a brilliant glow. It rose high into the air and cascaded over the city of Vjort, blazing for all to see.

They would come. They’d see it or they’d feel the swell of its power, and they’d come for me. It had been my plan all along. Except I’d thought that Thorne would be the one to follow my scent into the ice, not the other way around.

My head pounded with a sharp pain. It was a blunt hammer, always. Never elegant like a needle or subtle like a whisper. My power was big, and it was savage; it killed without me wanting it to. But if Thorne and I were to survive in this world, if we were to save those being kidnapped, then I had to find a way to stop this fact from frightening me, and I had to take control of that deadly power instead of letting it control me.

Wearily, I sank to my knees and as the sun began to rise I saw for the first time the endless ice that stretched out into infinity before me. Thinking it beautiful, I waited for the warders to come and capture me.

Thorne

I stopped by the next room before I left. Isadora, Penn and Jonah – who was now awake – were sitting around the fireplace.

‘I’m leaving now. For the ice. I go alone.’

Jonah looked at me. ‘Hold, brother.’

The name struck my heart and I felt both Finn’s love for him and my own erupt in my breast.

‘I dreamt long.’

I moved closer, searching his face. It was with great fear that I saw his eyes had shifted to white. But it wasn’t the white Kayans seemed to harbour when they felt hatred. This was the strange sapping of colour that the warders had. It was in his voice, too. Something older, something more knowing.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

Jonah smiled a little sadly, still heartbreakingly young and human. ‘I guess I graduated. A little early, as it turns out.’

‘Are you …?’ My voice broke. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I dreamt of Penn’s parents and a mass grave. I dreamt of sparrows circling the holy city. I dreamt of bloodshed on the sandstone, a great deal of it. And treachery. The worst kind. I must go back to Sancia and warn Falco and Quillane. Finn will refuse to come with us, so I cannot protect my sister. I must ask you to do this for me.’

I took his shoulders and gripped them tightly. ‘Until my last breath.’ Even if it meant I had to destroy every last scrap of love between she and I, break every vow I’d made to her – even then, I would protect her from her greatest threat: myself.

Jonah embraced me. I felt, peculiarly, as though I didn’t want it to end.

‘We go with Jonah,’ Isadora told me, and it was the gentlest I had ever heard her speak. ‘We will do our best to get him there in time.’

‘And protect him,’ Penn said.

I hugged the small boy fiercely. ‘You be careful,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t ever let them compromise who you are.’ He nodded, knowing I meant his parents, knowing it with a courage that astounded me.

‘My life is the richer for knowing the three of you,’ I told them.

The innkeeper – who I vowed to endow with riches beyond his wildest dreams for having facilitated a secret bi-racial royal wedding many would kill him for – equipped me with ice shoes, ropes, a pick and a hammer, plus a fur thicker than my own and rations enough for a month. I promised him even more wealth to watch over Finn while I was away, knowing he’d need an army of helpers to stop her from getting herself into trouble.

My breath made thick clouds as I walked north into the ice.

Day broke and the sun lit it like an eruption of flames or a sparkling, dazzling expanse of glitter. Through it ran long chasms so deep they were blue like spider-veins. It seemed too vast, entering the very edge of it. It seemed impossible.

But it was not. My da had done it.

As would I.

Days passed as I ran at a steady jog; I didn’t have time to walk. I barely stopped for breaks, slept in snatched hours here and there. I focused on the beat of my pulse, concentrated on keeping it steady and slow as I ran. My feet dug into the ice with each step, the snow boots lined with small metal spikes. Several times I ran too close to a fissure and nearly fell to my death. There would be no climbing out of a chasm like that. It would sweep you down into the bowels of the earth and wait for you to perish.

Slowly – too slowly – I reached the shadow of the mountain.

And Gods, it was mighty. I’d never laid eyes on anything its like. Splintering into the sky with a divinity I hadn’t expected, it cast its baleful eye upon me as I ran closer and closer.

The cold, I realised, was what killed. I had to exercise my toes and fingers to make sure the blood kept flowing or I’d lose them to frostbite. My cheeks and nose were red and chapped, my lips cracked like a drought-ridden riverbed. I made the mistake of sucking on the ice for hydration – it dropped the temperature of my body to dangerously low levels. After that I let the ice melt in my pack before I drank it.

And always I ran, while wolves howled around me.

I’d lost track of how many days had passed when I first saw them – half a dozen shapes moving towards me from the base of the mountain. I stopped and crouched to gain my breath while I waited.

Their identity became clear quickly. It was in the way they ran, in the size of their figures, the disciplined and easy movements atop the ice.

Berserkers.

And here, at their head, was their leader. The King of the Ice. Berserker lord of the mountain. His name was Goran and he had been King since my father killed the King before him. Over thirty years.

He was huge and scarred, but beyond that – at a deep, instinctive level – I could feel his strength. Scent it, resonating through the air around him.

And as he drew nearer, it felt to me as though I was coming home, at very long last.

They said nothing as they surrounded me. All a head taller. Giant-like, in their animal skins. There was a restless, rabid quality to them. Rage threaded beneath their surfaces.

I knew that if he were awake, my beast would be shivering in delight, prowling his cage. He would send a deep, guttural desire into me – the desire to fight. But so too would he recognise kin, like ambrosia in my blood.

He did none of these things; he was like a corpse, so still was he inside me.

I drew myself up and gazed at Goran, who towered over me.

Then I bowed my head to him. ‘King of the Ice.’

His eyes were red. Perpetually. For the beast lived him and he lived it. They were one and the same.

‘Son of Thorne,’ he said, voice deep and resonant.

‘I’m not here to challenge you. I come only for information, and to find illegal warders.’

He cocked his head, smelling me.

My hairs pricked up, skin tingling.

‘Once,’ he said softly, ‘I would have destroyed you, Prince of Wolves, for daring to trespass. A man goes north and there is only one reason for it: to challenge. But now beasts are caged and the north has become hated by its sons. The world is falling.’

I didn’t understand, but I didn’t have to: they knocked me unconscious.

Finn

I was caged and carried, and to be honest, it was a blessing. I would never have made it on foot, and that was the whole point of getting myself captured. It was too far, too cold, too deadly. I had no idea where I was going, and one misstep would mean I was lost forever.

They were berserkers, I knew immediately. I’d been expecting warders, but I got four berserkers, emerging from the ice. They ran and ran, carrying me with them in a wicker cage. They didn’t speak or stop, and I felt dizzied by their strength. I moved in and out of consciousness, cold beyond comprehension. The only times they paused were to feed me and massage my limbs, and I slowly grew to hate these moments, for the burn of muscles being brought back to life was unbearable, and my body started to wish for oblivion.

I couldn’t count the time passing. I had no concept of it, trapped in my delirious hallucinations. Sam was always there in my head, swinging from that last rope. Moths fluttered endlessly around my face and body, and it was beautiful to me that each time their gossamer wings touched my skin they lit it up so that it glowed effervescent.

I thought often of the prophecy. Its words whispered through my mind, taunting me. He will be of one soul and two faces. He will speak with two voices and feel with one heart. He will be servant and ruler. He will know moon and earth. To break the bond will be to break him.

It made no sense that we should need to find information elsewhere. The clue itself should have provided the answer.

One soul, two faces. Two voices, one heart. Servant and ruler. Moon and earth.

If not twin girls born to a father of the north and a mother of the south, then … who?

Who?

The next time I came to consciousness I was in a cave. The earth beneath me was cold and hard, but it was not ice. I blinked, rousing myself slowly and trying to see through the darkness. I was still in a cage – that much was clear. This one had steel bars dug down deep into the ground. There were other cages around me, opposite and on either side. They seemed empty, at first. And then I was met by the slow, eerie sound of many people breathing.

Slowly they took shape and my skin crawled with a nameless horror.

Bodies lay in corners and shadows, barely alive.

Something scraped behind me and my heart slammed in fear. I whirled, peering into the darkness.

I saw her eyes first. Glowing. She shuffled forward; she was inside my cage with me. Her hair was shaved off. Her body was so thin it looked like a skeleton with papery skin stretched over it. She was a wraith with white eyes.

Trembling, I pushed myself back against the bars.

But she simply looked at me, this walking corpse.

‘Are you … are you all right?’ I managed to ask in no more than a whisper. She made no reply. ‘Who are you?’

‘I had a name once,’ she rasped, voice painfully young. ‘But I do not remember it.’

‘What is this place? Why are you here?’

‘It is the dreamless nightmare. And I am here because I fell in love.’

She spoke more. Slowly and at great length. Whatever agony was inside her wished to come up, to get free. But even her words did not present her with any kind of salvation.

They were, all of them, half-walkers. The most wretched creatures to walk the earth, as the nameless girl described them. The warders had taken them and brought them here. Then they had killed one mate in each bonded couple, and used their twisted magic to keep the second mate alive against their will. These poor souls were half-walkers not because they had chosen to be, not because they were strong enough to be, but by force. The idea of it was heinous.

Every single one of them wanted, with a longing I had no words to define, death. I was more frightened of accidentally touching their skin than I had been frightened of anything in my life.

To break the bond will be to break him.

At the end of this journey through ice and ghosts, one of you will die.

Two faces, one soul.

It wasn’t fitting, I couldn’t make it fit, but Gods it felt close. Warders making half-walkers. Why? Their power lay in the soul magic, in the power of the bond. This was Agathon’s legacy. Break the bond, and the soul magic unravelled. I didn’t know this, not for certain, but I had always guessed it might be the case. I imagined it would be very difficult for us to convince the warders to let us break the bond, once we’d found the answer, but I had always known it would be decided not by warders but by the Emperor and Empress of Kaya. It was why warders could not be rulers – there was too much potential for corruption.

So warders making half-walkers made no sense.

But it did explain Hess’ prediction. If either Thorne or I was killed, the other could be kept alive by magic. One of you will die … It will only be one of you.

Two faces, one soul.

And like that, it fit.

I knew.

It was Thorne of Araan. It had been him all along. I didn’t know how he fit as a son of the north and the south, but perhaps that was me. My soul, as half of his. We were the two faces, the two voices, now that we’d been bonded.

To kill one of us and keep the other alive, souls severed from each other, would mean breaking the bond and breaking it for all Kayans.

Thorne

Under the mountain I was brought to a large cavern and chained to a steel pole.

‘Why?’ I asked the Ice King.

‘Because it pleases her,’ was all he replied.

The berserkers left me and I waited. Long hours. The manacles about my hands kept them above my head and caused a fire in my shoulders.

At last she came. A warder. She had long white hair, blue skin and white eyes, and she was the strangest creature I had ever seen. She did not seem real, not in any way I knew how to recognise. There was something distant in her face, something completely unapproachable.

‘My name is Eanna,’ she spoke and her voice was so full of magic that it made me physically ill. ‘I am a first tier warder banished from using my power by the warders of Kaya.’

I wondered why she was telling me.

‘I have nothing to hide,’ she responded to my thought. ‘I want you to understand what has brought us both here. It will make it all the sweeter when I destroy your mind.’

‘Was it you who broke free of the prison?’

‘No. I facilitated it. To release the true Emperor and Empress of Kaya. Those who have the power to unite the world as one.’

Penn’s parents.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘The boy would have been a very powerful weapon, had he not been born mind-addled. Even without him, they will be taking the holy city as we speak. And when Kaya belongs to them, they will turn their eyes north to take Pirenti.’

My hackles rose. ‘They’ll never succeed.’

‘They already possess the berserkers under the mountain, greatest weapon of a blood-soaked nation.’

So that was what was going on up here. I hadn’t been able to fathom why the berserkers would be working with their mortal enemies, but now I got it – the warders had control of them.

‘What is it that you’re doing up here?’ I demanded. ‘You took the bonded couples, didn’t you? Why? To break the bond?’

‘No. We don’t wish it broken. Only changed.’ Her eyes flashed with something excited, and it was the first emotion I’d seen in her. ‘The bond will be remade. Deeper, stronger. A bond between the rightful rulers of the world and their servants. A bond between warder and man.’

I couldn’t grasp it, until she sent the vision into my head and I understood, finally. I saw all of Kaya and Pirenti held captive by the warders, bonded to them unto death, unable to fight or escape. Where could one escape to, if his very soul was bound to his rulers?

‘You’d die when they did,’ I breathed.

‘No. Not if we have you, Prince Thorne.’

I shook my head desperately.

‘You have in your blood the power to break the unbreakable bond. We wish to use that power to reshape a new bond, one that allows ordinary men and women to die without killing their masters.’

A world of servitude. It sent a shiver of repulsion into my heart.

‘I won’t let you do this,’ I said. ‘I’ll die first.’

‘That is precisely what we desire,’ Eanna answered.

And then she began to torture me.

Here he stood, torturing men and women with the cold edge of his axe. Here he stood, slaughtering Kayans in a room made of marble. Here he stood, watching my mother in the dungeon cell he reserved just for her. Here he stood, watching her scream for mercy as her head slipped beneath the surface of a mighty ocean.

I roared in anguish. ‘Get out of my head, warder filth!’

But she didn’t. She sent more painful visions into my mind. They were sharp and precise, but what was worse was the sense that they were all real, far too real. It was too much. I didn’t want to see him this way, even though I’d always known him to be a monster. My weary heart couldn’t take it. Because what was worse was when she showed me the truth of my own dream.

A girl with yellow hair and yellow eyes being devoured by a monster, the man who’d created me in his image. But when he looked up this time, into my eyes, I finally saw that the monster was not my da.

It was me. It had been me all along.

Finn

I could hear his screams. They came from somewhere close, the agony in them raking at my insides like the talons of a mighty bird of prey. I shook the bars of my cage, screaming with him, demanding to be let out. I could not get to my power; they had cowed it with their own magic – the magic that lay heavy upon the air with a stench of rot. His poor heart, oh Gods his heart. I could feel it in my chest and it floundered wildly, out of control and beating as though on its last legs.

‘Thorne!’ I screamed, again and again until my throat was hoarse and no sound came from my mouth.

A huge man appeared in the darkness of the cave. His eyes glowed red and I could smell his musky scent like one smelt a wild animal in the forest. The other prisoners shrank away from him, but I yanked on the bars with ferocity.

‘Step back,’ he ordered bluntly.

‘Make me, coward.’

He unlocked the metal and I lunged at him, no idea what I meant to do but out of my mind with worry. The man caught me and threw me over his shoulder as if I were no more than a small sack of meat.

I grabbed the back of his neck with my bare hand, wanting to know. It was ice and sky and blood blood blood. He was burdened, this man. But that burden sat high, near to his surface. Below it, in his heart of hearts, he was uncomplicated and happy. He knew his place; he was animal. That was how I knew he was the berserker King.

‘Let me go,’ I begged. ‘This can’t be what you want. It’s an abomination.’

‘All warders are abominations,’ he murmured. And I couldn’t help agreeing. It was the power, the horrible corruption of it. They were humans, after all. Liked to pretend they weren’t, that they were above it. But they were born and they died, and they wanted all the same things the rest of us did.

Which was what became so unforgivably dangerous.

The brute of a man carried me down a twisting tunnel, at the end of which we emerged into a large cavern. And shackled at the centre of it was Thorne, unconscious but hung upright by his hands as though he was about to be gutted. It looked like he’d been there for hours and hours. Streams of blood ran rivulets down from the manacles at his wrists.

I struggled like a mad thing to get free, but it was no use. I was chained to a pole opposite Thorne’s.

When the berserker was gone a warder entered. She gazed at me, her eyes shrewd and all-seeing. The air of this cavern stank of her, felt heavy with the residue of her power, and it was this power that had let off the horrible stench of rot. I could feel her delight, though she showed me none of it. And as she turned to Thorne I knew she meant to make me watch his torture.

If I’d had any training at all, if my power were not so blunt and so uncontrollable – if my soul were not too big for my body – I could have gone into his mind and blocked him from seeing whatever atrocities made him scream so. But I had been forbidden to train – to improve – so I could not.

I had never been able to save the people I loved. That was my tragedy.

It occurred to me that ignoring my soul magic all these years was where the true danger lay. And what a blunder that now seemed.

I didn’t know how long Thorne could stand that much blood loss before he died. And I didn’t know how long he could stand seeing such visions before he went mad.

My mind was working, stretching forward, trying to think of a way out of this. I could feel threads entangled on either side of us, but I couldn’t work out how to manipulate them. Just as I had struggled with all the puzzle pieces, I’d known there was a way to put them together, and there had been. I just had to find the answer to this in the same way.

The woman was a first tier warder. She had control of the whole mountain. She wielded the berserkers as weapons, which meant she was very strong. Pieces of her always had to be tending to them, keeping them locked tight. If I could somehow get her to turn all her power to the one thing, then the berserkers would be free to save Thorne. Would they save Thorne? I had no idea how it worked up here, but I had to assume they would.

And the only way I could think of to get her to concentrate every scrap of her power on the one thing was to attack her. Completely. With all of my power. Making myself a target.

Which would mean, unequivocally, my death.

One of you will die.

Good, then. Better that it be me. Perfect, to die instead of him.

Chapter 19

Falco

There was chaos in the palace. I’d been told it was the same in the city. Because with the setting of the sun every single guard on the wall of Sancia dropped dead.

People were ordered to lock themselves in their homes and to not emerge until told otherwise. Soldiers were sent, but every man or woman who took up arms anywhere near the wall died. The other warders had failed to reach us in time, so we had fifty at most. Which we had thought to be more than enough, but was not, apparently. Not even close.

It was catastrophic, a real tragedy, and I had failed to stop it. For all my plans, my strategies, I had never imagined that our trust in the warders would become such a miserable blunder. And it was far from over.

‘Why the fuck aren’t you doing anything to stop this?’ I roared at Lutius.

He ignored me, in constant contact with every warder he had dispersed throughout the city. He was pale and drawn, stretched thin. ‘Another,’ he whispered. ‘We’ve lost another. They’re dropping.’

‘Explain this,’ Quill demanded. We were holed up in the war room, which was fortified on every side.

I was aching to draw my sword and fight. It felt wrong on a deep, instinctive level to be hiding while my city was under attack.

‘There are more than two,’ Lutius said. ‘More than Dren and Galia. They have followers. The warders I stationed around the edges of the city are being overcome and killed one by one. Once they are all dead, there will be nothing to stop the enemy from entering.’

Quill and I had been moved to the floor, where the warders could stand watch over us and protect against the entrances.

‘This feels wrong,’ she said.

‘Just let them do their jobs,’ I cautioned her, even though I agreed utterly.

‘What use is there in us hiding? If they get through the guards, they will find us eventually.’

I didn’t reply, but I took her hand.

The question bubbled up from somewhere completely unexpected. I didn’t have a chance to stop it. ‘Would you have loved me if I’d been different? Better?’

She looked at me with those emerald eyes of hers. ‘I do love you.’

‘Quill.’

A minute shake of her head. A squeeze of my hand. And it was enough, somehow. It was enough for me to finally let go of the idea, the possibility of she and I. She was my Empress, my partner, my best friend, and that was all. No matter what deception I had made of my life, she would not want me as anything more, and the fact, suddenly, was like being set free. However long before death came to find us, I was free of this constant what if.

I leant in and kissed her lips gently. She smiled.

Shouting came from beyond the door. But it was not fighting, not yet. They still had yet to breach the wall.

I began to think that there must be a weak link somewhere. Some reason they had an advantage over us, something we had yet to identify. We had more warders, and many of them were very powerful. So why were they falling with such ease? Unless there was something we’d missed.

‘Lutius,’ I called. ‘Any luck with the boy? Jonah?’ With Jonah would come Finn. And she was the key, I was sure of it.

He shook his head, concentrating his power so that his skin had an unearthly glow.

I stood, considering how to put this. When there were no other warders within earshot, I said, ‘I think they have inside help.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘How could they have broken out of the prison unless they had someone working on the inside?’

He frowned, looking murderous at the very idea. But after a few moments he shook his head. ‘I would have seen it. Someone would have seen it.’

‘Nobody saw anything!’ I snapped. ‘You are not all-powerful! There are obviously ways of manipulating other warders. So I would advise you, as your Emperor, to take this seriously, and work under the possibility that you have been compromised from within.’

‘Yes, Majesty,’ he agreed. But I was no fool – I saw the disregard he had for me, the complete lack of faith. And it was fair enough.

I watched him return to his people and give a few sharp orders. I watched him close his eyes and concentrate once more on the souls of those who were trying to infiltrate my city.

When I turned back to Quill, she was gone.

I was quick enough to catch sight of her rounding a corner of the corridor. The guards were focused on the front entrance, so I snuck after her through the back. She was running at full sprint, and I knew she must be heading back to her secret tunnel. What was in there?

‘Quill,’ I said, just as she was unlocking it.

She whirled to me as if she’d had a shock to the heart. ‘Falco. Gods. You scared me.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘What are you talking about? I’m just –’

‘I’m coming with you.’

She stopped, unsure what to say. Eventually she gave a deep sigh and led the way.

The tunnel was small and dark and quite long. It wound deeper into the ground, twisted a few times and then stopped. Through another door, into a small, beautifully furnished room.

Within which stood a young woman. The very same woman who had discovered my secret. The woman I’d come close to having killed.

‘Radha,’ I said.

She stared at me, astonished. Looked to Quill, unsure.

‘You’d better tell me what’s going on, Quillane,’ I said softly.

She opened her mouth but before she had a chance to speak something shook the foundations of the palace and I felt my consciousness pulled into black.

I woke in pain, a heavy pressure on my body. Something had fallen on me, and I struggled to push it off. A piece of sandstone from the roof. Quillane and Radha were clearing a path to me.

‘Falco!’

‘I’m all right.’

As I looked around at the wreckage I realised we were very lucky to be alive. My shoulder had been dislocated, but it was prone to that, and the amount of times I’d had to push it back in prepared me for the pain.

‘You two stay here,’ I told them once I’d crunched the bone back into its socket. ‘Lock the door behind me and don’t open it for anyone else.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Quillane tried.

‘Darling,’ I said firmly. ‘You stay. One of us must always be safe. That’s how it works.’ I gave her a quick kiss and grinned. ‘Nobody cares if we lose Emperor Feckless, but you, my love, are the last remaining hope of Kaya.’

‘Falco,’ she said, and I could hear the tears in her throat, but I was already sprinting to the tunnel.

Back in the palace it was nightmarish. Difficult to see anything. People running around the place, shouting. Bits of the roof had fallen in, but thankfully it didn’t seem as though the whole palace was about to come down. Guards spotted me, moved to surround me. Petir looked relieved to see me alive.

‘Where’s Lutius?’ I shouted.

‘Don’t know, Majesty. The walls have been breached. But the evacuation has been put into action – many have already made it out of the city. We need to get you and the Empress out immediately.’

Protected by my host of guards I ran back to the war room to find it empty but for two figures. Petir had his sword at their throats in an instant.

‘Hold! Lower your weapons!’

I shook my head in astonishment to see that it was the prince’s friends – Jonah and the little one, Penn. Jonah was leaning heavily on the smaller boy, and he looked like he’d been vomiting. ‘Majesty,’ he breathed.

‘How did you get here?’

‘I … jumped us.’

I blinked. ‘What?’

‘He used power,’ Penn explained impatiently. ‘Listen.’

‘Dren and Galia come –’

‘I know, mate. You’re a bit late on that one.’

‘Not just them – the Sparrow comes too.’

I felt cold through my limbs, but shook my head. ‘That’s not my priority right now.’

‘He comes for you,’ Jonah rasped. He seemed to be moving in and out of delirium. Jumping two people across countries would suck a lot of energy, I could imagine. It was astonishing that he was still alive, from what I gathered. Maybe Lutius was right about his power after all.

‘Your sister?’ I asked.

‘In the ice,’ Penn said, and my hope died. Why had I been so sure that she was the key to this? I had not a shred of proof to that effect.

Penn took Jonah’s face in his hands and looked into his friend’s eyes. ‘The treachery,’ he prompted. ‘Remember the treachery.’

I lurched forward, studying Jonah’s sickly darting eyes. ‘He spoke of treachery?’ I urged.

Jonah gave a loud moan. ‘He’s circling. There’s so much blood.’

‘Jonah. Breathe,’ Penn told him gently. ‘One breath, two breaths, three, four, five, six, seven …’

The young warder seemed to hear him counting and did so, drawing a deep lungful of air. Then his eyes opened and snapped straight to me. In them I could see a dark horror.

‘Lutius,’ he whispered. ‘Lutius is with them.’

I straightened, heart hammering. Fury sliced through me. Our head warder, working against us from the inside. Our only chance at survival turned against us. We were ruined.

Penn took my wrist, and I looked down at him as if in a daze. ‘Run,’ the boy whispered. ‘Run and hide. Or they will kill us all.’

His parents, I remembered with a sick taste in my mouth.

I looked at the two boys. Two young boys, courageous enough to come so far on the hope that they could help an impossible fight in the moments before certain death.

‘Thank you,’ I told them softly. ‘But there will be no more running and hiding. Not for me.’ And saying so, I drew my sword.

Quillane

‘Stay here,’ I ordered Radha when I could sit still no longer. I didn’t care about the rules. I could not let poor, useless Falco dash out there on his own to get killed. I needed to know what was going on.

‘Not without you,’ she said bluntly.

‘I can’t do this right now. I need to know you’re safe or I’ll be unfocused. I will have a guard – you will not.’ I took her face in my hands and felt our eyes turn gold. ‘Radha. I love you. Completely.’

She was strong. She’d always had hidden depths of courage. It was why I loved her so. She did not cry; instead, she nodded, lending me her strength.

‘Bring the idiot back,’ she told me. ‘And be careful. We’ve got a long way to go with this country yet.’

‘See you soon.’ With a kiss, I started running.

It was, in the end, the worst mistake of my life.

Falco

‘Lutius!’ I screamed as I prowled through the corridors of my palace. My palace. I was born here. Watched my family slaughtered here. Was sworn to the throne here when I was but ten years old. No filthy treacherous scum was going to take it from me.

Petir was watching me as though I’d lost my mind, when in truth I had found it at long last. I felt all the hidden pieces of me take their rightful places in my body and soul.

I wanted to kill Lutius, and I was going to.

‘Where are you hiding?’ I shouted.

I could hear his soft laughter in the back of my head, there to taunt me.

‘Come out and fight,’ I ordered him.

‘Majesty, we must leave,’ Petir told me. ‘You cannot fight a warder. No one can.’

‘The slaughterman did,’ I breathed, more to myself. ‘In the north they learnt how to kill warders. Perhaps they had it right the whole time.’

Something was leading me to my chambers. It felt like fate. It felt like all the pathways of my life had led to here, to this room, though I knew not why. Would he be waiting for me? Ready to kill me?

In my mind I didn’t even know if I was thinking of Lutius or the Sparrow. I would not have been surprised by either. But my rooms were empty.

I stood still, assailed by a sense that this wasn’t right. That something was supposed to –

‘Falco!’

I spun around to see Quillane burst into the room. ‘What are you doing here?’ I snapped.

My guards were gone. It occurred to me like a finger tracing eerily down my spine. We were utterly alone.

And as I looked at Quill I saw her eyes turn gold.

I froze, thinking for a second that –

But no. It was not me. It was –

She sank to the floor.

‘Quill?’ I exclaimed, dropping to her side. ‘Help!’ I screamed, but still – everyone was gone. What the fuck was going on?

My Empress stared up at me, all the strength gone from her body. Silent tears were pouring down her face, so many tears I felt terror strike. She seemed completely and utterly broken.

‘Radha,’ she sobbed. ‘She’s dead.’

‘What? Why –’ And it hit me. They were bonded. And I was the greatest imbecile in the world to have missed it.

Quillane wept, her whole body trembling. ‘It hurts it hurts it hurts –’ It was a wail, a scream, the baying of a dying thing.

‘Fight it,’ I urged. ‘Darling, you can fight it. Half-walkers can survive. You’re strong enough. Fight.’

She blinked her golden eyes. An incredible colour. Why hadn’t I ever been aware of how beautiful that colour was? ‘Why would I want to?’ Quillane whispered.

And then died.

I didn’t know how long I sat there, draped over her. I bore grief like a hard stone in my chest. It was making it impossible to breathe, to move.

Why didn’t she fight? I couldn’t stop thinking it. Over and over. Why didn’t she fight?

‘Quill,’ I whispered. ‘I’m so sorry, my love.’ For it all. For spending a lifetime making her bear everything alone in the hopes of saving her, and failing. Failing at the sole purpose of my life. For being Emperor Feckless after all.

Something sounded behind me. Footsteps, coming down the corridor. That’s when I noticed how quiet it had gone in the palace. I couldn’t hear screaming anymore. Which meant that either the people in the palace had escaped or they were all dead.

The footsteps kept coming. Light and soft. The tread of a woman, or even a child.

I couldn’t move.

Because some deep, ancient part of me – the part of the soul that always understood no matter how impossible, how absurd – knew who had come for me. I’d dreamt of him every night.

He was always going to come.

Chapter 20

Isadora

For the first eight years of my life I was kept in a cage that hung over a bottomless chasm. Here, it was said, the soulless lay in wait. And by placing a demon baby just out of their reach, they would be kept at bay, and the town of Velencia would be safe a little longer.

My eyes did not shift. They remained blood red, for the thoughts I’d been born with were ones made of fury. At six, I taught myself how to fashion weapons out of the bones of the sparrow carcasses I was given to eat. I practised using them on the creatures in the pit below, which was not, after all, bottomless, but full of monsters.

When I turned eight, they brought me in from the precipice because I’d fallen ill with fever, and they did not want their bait to die.

I slaughtered the three physicians and escaped.

My parents had been killed for having born such an abomination. So I survived in the forest, and the strange deformed folk I met there took me in, taught me how to pretend and gave me two names. The first was Isadora, because it meant gift of the gods. No, they said, I was not demon spawn. I was just the opposite.

When I was fourteen, old enough and strong enough, I returned to Velencia to seek my revenge. Here the Pirenti beasts had conquered the Kayans, and they ruled us with fear and hatred. A river of blood ran, red for my eyes, for the life that had been stolen from me and the life that had been spilt from the veins of my parents. I did not reserve my hatred only for Pirenti, but gave it to Kayans, too. The ones who had cooperated with the unforgivable subjugation, who had allowed and encouraged a child to be hung over a pit of death. I gave it, especially, to the one warder in Velencia, who had used his power to make it so that my cage was inescapable.

I ended his life the most slowly of all, for I knew the secret of how to kill a warder.

And to my astonishment, those who were tired of fearing the northern giants reached out starving, trembling fingers to me, and soon they followed the demon child back into the forest to where the other monsters lived.

They were the ones who, with courage and loyalty, earned the right to know my second name. My true name.

Sparrow.

Together we waited for the day when our Emperor would demand that Sanra be returned to Kayan rule, the day they would send their soldiers in to banish the Pirenti from our land and rescue us from our lives of servitude, casting off the ugly northern name with which we’d been so deeply insulted.

The day never came. Even with peace between our two countries, it never came.

So I started to plan my own day.

On this day, I would free my people. I would force the rest of our country to acknowledge the forgotten, all those in the world who were different or ignored or feared. Then I would free even the Kayans who never helped us, because we were, all of us, puppets to cruel and cold masters. The power of the warders was not something any normal person could rise up against. But I knew how to kill them, and so I would end the warder dominion once and for all. Even if it took an army and a war and an ocean of blood, I would do this. Because the final thing I would do on this day, my day, forged out of the turning of the world by a demon child, was destroy the man who had the power to change things, but instead allowed our nation to be the way it was. Falco of Sancia, Emperor of Kaya.

The final stage of my plan took effect on the day I turned twenty-five. Seventeen years after my escape from the cage. Seventeen long years of building armies and building fear. Falco had come to power at ten years old when the rest of his family was slaughtered. Which was why I had waited years for him to grow into his role, grow old enough to understand what he had to do for the people of Sanra. But he never did, never tried to help us. I made my first attack on his people the day he turned fifteen, and for the last ten years had been winning more and more ground by making sure my warriors were fiercer and more savage than any Falco could throw at me. When finally I left Sanra to reach Limontae, rumours ran like wildfire about an end to the bond and the arrival of the Prince of Beasts. It would be through him and through the discovery of the end of the bond that I would find my way into the holy city of warders, and then into the palace where Falco hid with his eyes covered.

When he was dead, I would send in my armies.

I did not plan on the twins. Their quick smiles and sharp eyes. Their laughter. Finn’s headstrong disregard and sheer strength of character. Jonah’s kiss, cool and awkward, and the generosity of his feelings for me. I did not plan on the gentility and strength of the boy-prince. I did not plan on Penn, who was my favourite of all.

But nothing worth having ever came easily or without sacrifice.

That trip through Pirenti in the back of a cage changed everything. For I knew the caged life intimately, but I had never known it to be shared with others. Their presence shifted it all. In a cage with Jonah and Penn I imagined a different life. With these children, so bold and soulful. They offered warmth – warmth – and this was something I had never known.

During the darkest night of my soul I questioned it all. The plan. My life’s work. Revenge soaked in the blood of Kayan men and women.

What came at the end of that long night was the answer to it all: escaped prisoners and a warder attack on Sancia. It was the perfect way in, the perfect moment to make my move on Falco. And it was a sign. I would shoulder the fate I had decided on seventeen years ago, and I would finish it. I had people relying on me.

Jonah brought the three of us to the palace in Sancia; an incredible feat of power. There, in the chaos of shouting guards and falling roofs, I crept away from those who named me friend but did not know me, not at all. In my heart I bid them silent farewells, knowing I would never see them again, and then I made my way to my first target.

Falco would be easy. He was a drunken coward. But I had spies in this palace and so I knew a secret. A secret I would use to punish him. Quillane would be guarded too heavily to get to. But she had a secret bondmate who would not be. A secret mate who was locked away as though she was a shameful burden, purely because a warder’s magic had doomed her to such a cruel fate. When I killed this mate, the Empress of Kaya would die, and Falco would know I was coming for him. I wanted him to know that fear. That loneliness.

I crept my way down the secret tunnel.

The woman – her name was Radha – was small and pretty. She gave a good fight, but she was no match for the creature I had become. She died quickly, my knife in her heart and through her throat. I felt grief, a stab of it in my guts – for her innocence, for the waste of this life, for the cruelty that possessed my hands. I stood over her, whispering an apology and a prayer, and I wondered for the first time in my life if I really was demon spawn.

But time was passing quickly, and I had another life to take.

A life undeserving of all that it had been given. A weak and pathetic life, a life wasted on women and wine, a life careless with the people he ruled, and stupid enough to allow his enemies to grow. A life that was unskilled and untrained and would be easy to take.

My footsteps were silent over the marble. My hood was pulled up to hide my hair and face. Blood pulsed too fast through my veins. Rounding a dark corner, I found my way to his bedroom. Something was wrong – there were no guards in place at the door, nor was it locked. It might be too late. He might have been evacuated already, or killed in the attack.

But some part of me said that no. He would not be dead or gone. He would be waiting for me. Because this was a meeting decided lifetimes ago. A meeting every footstep in my life had led me to.

Slowly now I made my way into the room. Shadows flickered within candlelight. A voice spoke from the floor on the other side of the bed.

‘Quill,’ it said, soft like a whisper, like a prayer, and something inside me froze. ‘I’m so sorry, my love.’

It was the voice, his voice. It didn’t sound anything like I’d imagined it to sound. It wasn’t pompous or drunken. There was no arrogance lining its edges. Instead it was soft and broken and beautiful.

No. No, no, no.

This didn’t feel right. Something was moving, reaching out, taking hold. Pieces were crumbling, truths shifting.

I took another step – it was all my feet seemed to be able to manage. Her hand came into view, lifeless on the expensive rug. The top of his head, with its golden hair.

Move now, I told myself. While he’s unprepared and grieving.

I couldn’t. Couldn’t move in any direction, and I didn’t know why, but I felt the voice as it wound its way firmly around each one of my bones and held tight, too tight, crushingly tight. My body forgot how to breathe, how to function, how to live.

A sound left my mouth, the softest of all sounds, but he heard it. In one fluid movement he was up; my eyes dropped unaccountably to his feet. A way to deny. To prevent.

Stupid, really. My soul already knew the truth: there would be no preventing this inevitability.

My gaze started travelling up. Up the long legs in leather working boots that no palace born man would wear. Up over the narrow hips, the white tunic, over the broad shoulders and along the taut, wiry arms, far too strong to belong to court nobility. Over hands that were not soft or weak, but were in fact moving to rest on the hilt of a sword that was not in any way an ornament; large, worn hands, the hands of a warrior, the sword of a warrior.

I didn’t understand, but my eyes continued to move.

Up the long, graceful neck, past the locks of hair the colour of spun gold. Over the jaw, clenched now in a fury I was unprepared for. Men who didn’t care were not supposed to feel fury like that, like the hammer of the Gods. I paused at the mouth, wide and tense, and inside my heart screamed and screamed and screamed because I was starting to understand, and I needed to close my eyes.

I needed to squeeze them shut and flee from this place before the world came crashing down.

Instead, I let my gaze move up over his sharp, angular face, to rest, at long last, on his crystalline eyes.

And that was when both sets, his and mine, turned simply to gold.

Here was truth.

I knew it deep inside me, threaded through my soul.

He was not feckless.

He was astonishingly cunning.

And he was mine.

We stood staring at each other in silence for a long time. I felt his grief in my own heart, clear now because of the bond that would tie us together for the rest of our lives. I felt that grief, but I felt, too, the unmistakable fluttering of a joyous, weightless love. It was wrong, this love.

It was a jeering lesson in the laughably cruel ways of the world. A cold sneer at my own supposed beliefs and understandings.

This love said to me, You don’t know anything about life, or death. You have no way to understand the twists and turns of fate – no way to bear them. Your entire life has been a practical joke.

‘Your name is Isadora,’ he said finally, in that deep, honeyed voice of his. It was not the voice I had heard him use for the public announcements – that voice was high and unsteady.

It was unbearably sweet, to hear my name on his lips, in his true voice. But a different name rose to mine, one that would haunt us both forever. ‘No. It’s Sparrow.’

He knew, of course. But the acknowledgment of it sheathed through his heart and I saw tears in his eyes.

‘I dream of you.’

‘What do you dream?’ I whispered.

‘Of the day we meet. Over and over. One of us always dies. I never thought it would be both of us.’

I closed my eyes, letting the sound of him wash over me.

I heard him move closer, but I didn’t open my eyes. He stopped just before me, so close that I could feel his breath.

‘Falco.’ Just to say his name once, to have it on my lips.

‘Before,’ he said. ‘Before we die. Just once.’

I felt his lips on mine and it hurt, it hurt. I tasted his tears in my mouth, against his lips and his skin. I remained trapped in a lifetime’s worth of torture, unable to move.

I told him, ‘I want the whole world to burn for this.’

Falco stepped away, and it was like a death, that simple stepping away. He looked so weary. All this pretence, all these years of lying, and no one would ever know the truth but he and I, and we were not long for this world. It seemed like a tragedy all of its own.

‘It will be Lutius or you,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve both come for me. I would prefer it to be you.’

I nodded once.

And that was when we heard it. The footsteps in the corridor.

We froze, unsure what to do. This was the moment – we had to do it now. But we were each as cowardly as the other, because instead of sheathing my knife into his heart, I leapt instead for the open window. He helped me through it, and right before I disappeared down the outside of the building, our golden eyes met, and he simply said, ‘Until next time, my Sparrow.’

Falco

I watched her go and I almost laughed at the exquisite absurdity of it all.

The small, strange friend. The one I had paid no attention to – had barely glanced at. She’d changed it all. All the heartbeats of my entire life.

The footsteps at the door belonged to Osric. ‘Praise the Gods,’ he breathed. ‘You’re alive.’

‘One of us is,’ I murmured, gesturing to Quillane’s body. Even to glance at her hurt like knives.

Osric’s face flashed with a pain that surprised me; I hadn’t known the man to be so patriotic.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked him, feeling idle, wasted, ruined. (And secretly, secretly reborn.)

‘I jumped. You must come with me now, Majesty.’

‘Where? The palace is overrun.’

‘I will take you to Pirenti.’

‘I won’t leave my city. My country.’

‘Kaya is no longer yours,’ he said bluntly. ‘But if you survive this day, we may yet find a way to make it yours once more. And in that newly forged world perhaps you will be brave enough to finally be the man you were meant to be.’

I blinked, startled.

‘You think I didn’t know? That I couldn’t see everything you are?’ He smiled gently, and I realised I had never seen him this way – looking at me as though he liked me. I had never been the kind of creature that anyone could like before.

Closing my eyes, I nodded.

Because she had changed everything.

Sparrow’s wings unfurled in my chest as Osric swept me out of my palace.

Chapter 21

Thorne

Your heart is in tatters. Your soul shredded.

I struggled against the manacles, struggled against her entry into my mind. The pain of it was scattering; I could hardly hold to a thought. I was in a sea of blood; I was trapped beneath the ice, cold freezing my organs; I stood before the corpses of dozens of men and women as Da butchered; I was the corpse as he took his blade and carved – and worst of all, I was the slaughterman doing the killing, one after the other until there were twenty-two bodies laid out before me. But always, through all the visions and the agony, there was Eanna’s voice, tethering me to this body of mine.

Did you know, Thorne, that each time you kill someone, you tear another piece of yourself away?

Of course I knew.

Then why don’t you stop?

Because.

Because I wanted to live.

I could feel her smile, the cold depths of it. Having it inside me was repulsion. My beast was so deeply asleep that I could not tell, anymore, if he was alive or not.

Do you know who else wanted to live at the cost of human lives?

Yes. I knew.

The slaughterman of the north.

And suddenly there he was. Standing in the cavern, gazing at me. He was bigger, even, than I’d imagined. More scarred. He wore the skin of a mighty wolf and his eyes cut inside me like knives.

‘Don’t,’ I whispered. ‘Eanna. Don’t make me –’

‘She has you begging,’ my da said, his low voice filled with disgust. ‘What a pitiful creature you have turned out to be.’

And even though I’d spent my life praying to be different, praying to be a better man, a gentler man, fearing his ghost with a bone-deep terror, his words hurt me as I’d never been hurt before. And I realised in that moment that all I’d ever really wanted, regardless of how monstrous he’d been, was a father who was proud of me.

Finn

‘Don’t listen,’ I shouted at him. ‘Don’t listen to whatever she’s telling you!’

But Thorne wasn’t even aware of me. He was lost in some nightmare he wasn’t strong enough to wake from.

So I was going to have to do it for him. This bitch was about to die.

A soul too big for my body.

Too big for any body.

Big enough to tear this whole mountain down, if I wanted her to.

I did.

I called to her and she rose up. She was darkness and guilt and regret, and she was the ghosts I held tight to my heart, the ones whose lives had distorted mine. She was all the parts of me I had feared and denied, all the ones I thought meant death and only death.

But maybe she also meant freedom.

I thought of the chains about my arms breaking and they broke. Steel clattered to the ground and I rose to my feet.

The wings of hundreds of moths brushed against my skin. I felt a thousand years old and connected to everything in the world, in the sky and the earth, in the hearts of every person in this mountain, every poor wretched half-walker. There they were, throbbing warm and strong. And open to me. As though they’d been waiting a long time for me.

Each one whispered to me its wishes and each wish was for the death of this demon woman.

It will hurt, I warned. I was a blunt hammer. But they remained willing, and so I took pieces of them, stole energy from every single one, and then I attacked the warder.

She screamed in shock. Spun to face me. Could not believe what she had felt, what she was witnessing.

‘Release your hold,’ I ordered softly. I was running out of time now. Energy was flowing through me, wearing me away. Soon there would be nothing left of me.

‘You think you can stop this? He’s so easy,’ she told me, trying to rattle me. ‘His mind is wide open to me – he hasn’t a single guard in place. And the anguish in his heart – it’s as though it’s been laid out for me to manipulate. As though he’s begging me to take it away. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it.’

‘He is the prince of a nation,’ I told her. ‘He endures his people’s pain as if it were his own. If you think that a flaw then you are looking at humanity the wrong way.’

‘It makes him weak,’ she sneered.

Slowly I smiled. ‘That’s why he has me.’

I sent my hammer at her, smashing through the hold she had on Thorne’s mind. The warder staggered, pain slicing through her head. I hit her again, more directly.

And again, and again, and again. I didn’t give her a moment’s respite, daring her to fight back, to deny the blunt force of my soul.

And that’s when she acted. I’d given her no choice. She sent a wave of pressure at me – a wave made up of every ounce of her power. Which was exactly what I’d been waiting for.

As it hit me, knocking me off my feet, it broke through the hold I’d had on the other beating hearts, letting them free. I felt the poor half-walkers liberated from the warder’s bindings, liberated with a sigh of relief. Every one of them died in their cages and their souls drifted up and away as if on a breath of wind.

And so too did I feel the berserkers freed of their chains, a chilling howl ringing through all the tunnels of the mountain and echoing around the cavern.

They would be coming. For all three of us – the intruders. I understood now, with the stray thoughts drifting all about the place, that not even Thorne could be here uninvited. The hunt had begun. So I had to give him a chance to escape.

Closing my eyes, I summoned the worst part of me, the part that enjoyed my power and its control over people. I feared this part of me, but I let her reign. She made me strong – impossibly strong.

I took hold of the warder’s soul with an iron grip, and then I ripped it from her body.

She sagged, stripped bare. Her eyes blinked quickly. All the white left them and they returned to a deep brown shade, the same brown her hair turned.

‘Only human,’ I murmured. Corruption slithered through me and I felt the desire for cruelty, heady like a rush of adrenalin. I wanted to hurt her. Wanted to hear her screams.

‘Finn,’ a rough voice said, reaching beyond the terrifying malevolence I was drowning in. ‘Come back,’ Thorne said.

I met his weary, pain-filled eyes. There was blood pooling around him. I wanted to go to him, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t.

I had made my choice. I’d given the darkness dominion. And now there was no turning back.

Will I kill again?

Yes.

So let the blood on my hands be my own.

‘You once asked me how I do it. Win the Siren Nights and deny their call,’ I whispered. ‘The answer is simple: you don’t deny it. You give in to it.’

‘Finn –’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him, to my mate. ‘But I do not give you permission to die, Prince Thorne. The world has need of you yet.’

And then I let the darkness consume me, ravage its way through my body, my soul too big, too big. It stole everything.

I sank to the ground and felt myself die.

A last thought drifted to me through the shadows. A miracle – that love found a place within the darkness to survive.

Chapter 22

Thorne

She slumped to the ground just as Goran and his berserkers arrived. They were out for blood.

Goran went to Eanna, who now seemed unaware of the world after whatever Finn had done to her. Without any warning the berserker King smashed his fist through her chest and wrenched out her heart. Then he devoured it, blood swimming from his mouth and all over his hands.

The berserkers gave a chilling roar of approval, beastly and chaotic and never to be powerless again.

I was barely aware of it.

Because on the ground was Finn, and she was dead, and I could feel it.

It was my heart being ripped out and eaten. My soul that had been stripped and ravaged. I wanted to go with her, wanted it so much that I was consumed by the sudden yearning for death.

Please, Gods, let me die with her.

But.

I do not give you permission to die, Prince Thorne.

And so.

I had lost a great deal of blood, and I had had my soul flogged by a thousand lashes. A part of me was trying to die with her. I’d never been this weak in my whole life. But I gathered everything that was left in me and I ordered, ‘Let me down.’

Goran crossed to stand before me. He was euphoric in his newfound freedom. He exuded animal strength. ‘Why would I do that, boy?’ Blood dripped from his lips.

I had never – never – expected to be the one to speak this word. But times were changing. The world was falling. I had to set it right.

‘Challenge,’ I barked. And the cavern fell silent.

‘I accept,’ Goran said.

They let me down, and I had barely the strength to stand. Goran loomed over me, power in every one of his muscles.

Gods. I was going to die here, fighting an impossible foe.

My eyes rested on Finn’s body. The curve of her shoulder. The long, slender limbs. Her blonde, tangled hair. That mouth, the shape of it. The dark eyelashes resting on her freckled cheeks. All those places I had touched and kissed and loved.

A high keening was released from my broken heart. It stole up and up, right into the top of this mountain and beyond it, up into the sky, the infinite roof of the world. My soul bayed like a crippled animal.

But then I felt him. Deep inside, in his cage. He stirred from his slumber, scenting the air and stretching his muscles. Slowly he came alive, and slowly, as if by an interminable, inevitable will, I felt him fill with fury.

Rise, I whispered to him. Rise, brother.

He did. Oh, he did.

My eyes turned red and the bloodlust exploded in my veins. I was ravenous.

Goran and I ran at each other and collided with brutal impact. I was expecting his strength but even so it shocked me. We grappled and he slammed me to the ground. All the air left my lungs but I rolled him, landing a blow to his face, another, two more before –

He threw me off and hammered his shoulder into my ribs, cracking them. His left fist swung into my shoulder, crunching the bone there and sending my head blank for a second. But no time for blank. My limbs were trembling with pent-up adrenalin as I blocked his next blows and threw a right into his gut. When he punched me in the side of the head I knew it was going to be too much. He was too strong, I too weak.

He was King of the Ice, a man who fought every day of his life to keep his throne in the harshest conditions known to man, and I was a boy who’d spent too long in the safe embrace of his mother’s hut and been terrified of any conflict at all.

I stopped being able to block his blows. Each one landed. My body was alight with pain, but I was too dazed to be aware of it. A fist in my ribs, cracking them, a fist in my cheekbone, cracking it. One in my chest, stealing my breath.

Impossible. How had I imagined this to go?

As I took blow after blow after blow, scrabbling to stay on my feet and lessen their impact, a strange thing drifted to me on a current of memory.

A story. Told to me by my uncle for the first few years of my life, told so often it became a truth, a mantra, until the day I couldn’t take it anymore and asked him never to speak it again.

We watched the boy in the snow as he fought an impossible fight. He was smaller, weaker, less skilled. He was just a boy.

A left hook clipped my jaw and I tripped backwards, ducking beneath another blow aimed at my nose.

But we all watched together as he wore down the older, bigger man. Wore him down with nothing but heartbreaking determination. He fought on for hours without a weapon, hours and hours, and then at long last he killed the King of the berserkers, a mighty beast of a man, cutting out his heart for all to see.

I took a jab to my chest, managed to block the second.

An impossible victory. And Thelle, the berserker King, happened to be Thorne’s father.

An impossible victory. But that wasn’t me. I didn’t have that kind of strength.

Goran hit me in the temple and I went down. Dropped to my knees, swayed there. He stood over me, enjoying the rabid cheers of his men.

So this was it. This was how I died. A relief, not to have to endure too long without her.

I thought of Ava and Ambrose, of Sadie and Ella. I heard their laughter, wished for them love and joy. I thought of Howl, who had been my best and only friend for so many years. Of Jonah and Penn and Isadora, thankful to have met them, thankful to have been touched by their friendship.

I thought of Ma. My beautiful, gentle, sweet mother. In my heart I bid her farewell. A last regret – that I didn’t know if she would survive losing us both.

But I could scent the violence coming off Goran in hot waves, and knew it was mere moments before he finished me.

And then it happened.

Time slowed. Paused around me. A hallucination, probably. Because there he was again. My da. Only a few paces away, watching me on my knees as I waited to be killed.

But there was no disgust in him this time. No cruelty. Instead I saw with my own eyes all the things people had feared and loved him for. I saw strength and courage and loyalty, and even – here at the end – a measure of sweetness.

‘Have courage, my boy,’ he said softly. His voice was rough like it had been shredded once. It was warmth. ‘You are far stronger than you think.’

I’m not. It’s over.

‘Do you wish to know the answer to it all?’ he asked me.

I nodded. Possibly I nodded. Wasn’t very aware of my body anymore.

Thorne, my father, moved closer and looked into my eyes. He smiled the smile of a wolf and I realised how I loved him. ‘Stop fighting him,’ Da said. ‘He’s you.’

And then he was gone, and I was awake, at long, long last.

A howl rent the air. My beast’s howl burst from my mouth. The long, dangerous sound of the hunt. You don’t deny it. You give in to it.

Goran and his men grew still. I saw a new awareness in his eyes. I saw excitement. These were men who loved to fight. And I was going to give him one worthy of remembering.

I rose to my feet.

My beast was loose. There was no cage. He filled every inch of me; he was me. And we were strong.

I flew at Goran, smashing him in the face once, twice. My iron fists went into his guts, his abdomen, his ribs and chest. I felt bones crack beneath my hands. Blood splattered from his nose and mouth as I hit him there again, then slammed him to the ground. My blows were too heavy – they’d debilitated him and he couldn’t get back up.

Power flowed through my muscles. It had taken no time at all.

I had him down, and I had my hands at his neck, and if I wanted to I could tear his head free. I did want to. But it wasn’t like the blood fever had been every other day of my life. This was strength without the mindlessness. This was me, every part of me, the violent and the gentle. I was in complete control.

I looked into Goran’s eyes and saw a deep well of respect and contentment. He had been beaten by the stronger man, and there was a balance to that. A rightness.

My hands dropped and I stood.

‘To the death,’ he managed.

I shook my head. ‘I do not kill kin of mine. I would have you live to fight beside me, brother.’

There was a long silence. This wasn’t how berserker law went.

But I was their King now, and they knew it.

Goran rose slowly, trembling with the pain of his injuries. ‘It would be my honour,’ he said, and with a last look into my eyes he sank to his knees and bowed low before me.

Every single berserker under the mountain did the same.

I looked around at my men, and then I lifted my fist high into the air and gave a roar of triumph. They roared with me, fists pounding on their chests, battle cries let loose to fill the entire cavern with an almighty burst of sound.

My beast and I grew larger than this whole mountain. And we wanted vengeance.

Later, when the battle-haze had faded somewhat, I was able to see that it was a victory, and a turning point. It was an ending to one life, the beginning of another.

But it was hollow, because without Finn life meant an absence of laughter. It meant grey and bleak and cold. It meant loneliness in its purest, most unbearable form.

Fitting, I supposed, for the King of the Ice.

Chapter 23

Thorne

There were six Jarls and they stood to take my orders. Goran was to remain my second, the mountain’s Hersir – in charge while I was away.

‘Wait for me,’ I told them. ‘I will return for you. And then I will lead you south to war.’

Eyes filled with hunger. Beasts at their surface, aching for battle.

I lifted Finn into my arms. Her hair had faded and was now closer to white.

‘We will bury her for you,’ one of my men said.

‘No. I will take her to the sea.’ My Salt Girl.

I bid them farewell, and then I carried her out into the ice.

I walked with her in my arms for a day. I didn’t stop for food or water. And as night fell the wolves came. I heard them howling to the moon, their mournful cries the very sound of my own lonely heart. Soon their bays drew closer and I knew they were circling us.

A note of despair struck me. I needed to at least survive long enough to let her body rest at sea, but I didn’t have anything left in me to fight them – I didn’t want to fight.

Sadly I prepared myself, but as the wolves crept close enough for me to see their glowing eyes in the darkness, they did not attack.

They moved to my side and sank to the ice, and then they pressed their bodies around Finn and me, wanting to keep us warm during the night.

The moment built inside me, swelling to an unbearable ache. For the beauty in the world. For the loss.

I buried my face in the white fur of a wolf, and I wept.

Finn

Somewhere between life and death there were screams.

I was trapped within them. They’d been coming for me for years, since the night I was twice-born. Fear became a new reality. Timeless, weightless fear within this endless existence of screams.

I couldn’t get out.

I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself over the others.

I sobbed and begged and moaned but none of it made a difference. There was nothing solid or quantifiable. Just fear.

And then, through it all, came my brother.

Jonah stood within the cacophony and he smiled. My soul swelled with the sudden existence of love, here in this gloom.

‘Time to go home, Inney,’ he told me gently.

A sob of relief. Followed too quickly by reality. ‘How?’

His eyes shifted to my yellow. He was so full of love. Had always been so full of love. Where did he find the capacity for it?

‘Take mine,’ Jonah said. My life.

Tears spilled down my face. ‘Oh, Jone.’ I didn’t expect us to be able to touch, but we could. He gathered me into his arms.

‘He will need you. I’m not needed by anyone.’

‘Untrue.’ Vastly, immeasurably untrue. I looked into his face. ‘Hear this. I would rather an eternity of torture than to take your place and condemn you to this. Nothing in life or death could make me do that to you.’

His eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s my job, Inney. I’m your brother. It’s what I was made for.’

My heart clenched in agony. ‘No. No. You were made for a big, brilliant life, full of joy and love and laughter. You were not made to share your life with me. Keep it to yourself now, and enjoy every minute of it. It is yours.’

‘I’ll miss you every second of every day,’ he whispered.

‘I know. I love you.’

We held each other for a time, and then I allowed the bond between us to sever and dissolve, setting him free of me at long last.

Jonah vanished and I was alone again.

No, not alone. Surrounded.

It occurred to me that these were people. People who had once lived in my world, had lived lives of their own, just as difficult and lovely as mine. Instead of giving in to my fear, I tried to shift it for a moment. I tried to listen to the screams and hear them for what they were. And that was when I knew that there was no reason to be frightened of the dead.

Because they were trying to tell me something.

You decide how strong you will be. And you decide what fate you will have.

Thorne

I woke from nightmares so thick and heavy I thought I would drown in them. I had been carrying Finn for over a week now. The sun was brilliant and so bright as it bounced off the ice around me. The end to it drew nearer. I shielded my eyes, allowing the dream to linger in my mind, despite the despair it left.

Screaming. Within which was something … I strained my memory, trying to grasp it –

You decide how strong you will be. And you decide what fate you will have.

I blinked, sitting up. The words thundered around inside me, again and again. I thought of all that had led us here. Prophecies and dreams. Words of people we didn’t know, leading us here, to Finn’s death.

One of you will die.

And suddenly it was not enough. I was not content to allow that to be the way of the world. Or at least of my life. No one told us to die and then expected us to just roll over and do it.

I looked at Finn’s face, lifeless and blue with cold. She’d been gone a long time. But the truth was still there inside me. The reason I was still alive. Our bond endured, somehow. I had not let it go, not allowed it to sever.

‘I refuse for our lives to be decided by prophecy,’ I told her. ‘I will decide my own fate.’

And saying so, I felt the bond and I pulled on it. Pulled on all the threads that bound the two of us together. In my blood was the power to break this bond, and every bond in the world. But Eanna had told me that I also bore the power to change the bond, to strengthen it.

So that was what I did.

I put all of my newfound strength into it, thanking my father as I did so, because it was he, in the end, who had allowed me to find this strength. I made the bond between Finn and I the strongest thing in the world, a thing bound by iron and shadows, by gold and black and red. I made it from all of my light and all of her darkness. I made it from both of our ghosts and all the paths that had been laid out before us. And I was able to do this because I was more than just a man or a beast now; I was man and beast, both together, finally at peace with my own soul.

Once before Finn had been brought back from death. And I did not think it was only because her mother was a warder. I thought it was because no one in the world had loved Finn as much as her ma had, and it was that immeasurable love that had drawn her daughter back into the world.

‘Finn,’ I whispered. ‘I will carry some of your burdens and you will carry some of mine. I need you to help me be strong. I need you to help me stop the falling of the world.’

That was why Agathon made the bond in the beginning. Because he understood that sometimes life was too heavy a burden to carry alone, and he wanted us to be able to share it. I saw how beautiful such a bond was, in its essence. I saw not the destruction of it. Not the death of it. But the love it allowed, the life it gave birth to.

I knew I would never wish it gone from the world, even if it meant the end of us both one day. And I would spend my life helping people to survive it, to understand that they could, that they had enough strength to do so – they just didn’t know it yet. Just as my father had done for me, I would fight to help people see the truth of their own strength.

A great bloom of joy-sorrow-pain-pleasure-ecstasy-grief-regret-laughter overflowed my heart and I knew a pure moment of understanding for how she lived her life with a soul too big for her – for how she carried so much emotion, all the time – and when I opened my eyes it was to see Finn looking up at me, her gaze golden.

I cried as I held her. She stroked my hair and laughed at me, at my tears. ‘My big soft beast,’ she murmured. ‘You took your time.’

‘Forgive me.’

‘Only if you promise me now that we will never again speak of the end of this bond. We leave things as they are. I would not be parted from you for all the world.’

I smiled. ‘I was thinking the very same thing.’

I kissed her, tasting salt on her lips.

Epilogue

Finn

Sometimes, if I was tired or sad, I still heard the screams. But they were softer now, and they did not frighten me. They were a whispered reminder of how truly lucky I was to have been gifted with three births, instead of only one. Three births, and each forged from deepest love.

If in moments of weakness the old darkness shrouded me, I had only to look at my husband and feel our shared strength cast it off.

He was different, my Thorne. The ice had changed him, as it had done his da. I grieved secretly for the gentle child he’d been. He was colder sometimes, without meaning to be. But he was also capable of more love, more generosity. And that was the way of the world and all that it did to us. It marched on with or without us, forcing us to grow and change and adapt. It asked us to become more, or perish.

Thorne had become more. He stood taller. Understood his place with a simple awareness of necessity. He understood himself too – was not frightened of all that he was capable of. He was not frightened to be strong. He’d made peace with the beast, and with the ghost. Which meant he was less conflicted, a little older, a little wiser, a great deal sadder.

But that was why he had me. For laughter.

I knew the truth now. A soul only bonded with its other half if it needed help to carry the weight of its life. I saw no shame in it anymore; I was learning to take pleasure in giving and receiving help, in the sweet tenderness of gentility instead of the cold distance I had worn as armour for so many years. If Thorne had moments of detachment, then I now had moments of purest warmth. We’d found a way to stay balanced.

It was this balance – this love – that had saved my life when we returned from the ice to find that my country had been conquered by the true monsters in this world: warders with corrupted hearts and violent ambitions. It was what saved me when I learnt that the Empress had been slain and the Emperor had fled to hide in the Pirenti fortress where lived his cousin, Queen Ava.

And it was what saved me, finally, when I learnt that Jonah and Penn had been trapped and left within the walls of Sancia, a city now belonging to our enemies. We knew not if they were alive or dead, and I had no bond with him anymore to be able to tell.

I barely knew how to contain the tragedy of this in my heart. I struggled with it every day, and the only thing that helped me to wake up in the morning was Thorne’s promise that we would save them, that we would take back the city and find my family. I believed him – everyone did, because when he spoke now there was a rousing and ferocious passion in him, and you believed when he made a promise: that was the kind of man he’d become. I was proud, I was so proud.

My awareness of myself was more complicated. I still had a long way to come, a great deal to learn. But I had finally begun to understand that a soul could not be too big for a body. Not if you made room for it. Not if you had the courage to become bigger, to become more, to make within yourself enough space to carry all the love and the grief the world could possibly fit within you. I tried to do so every day – and I would keep trying with dogged determination – because I needed to be strong enough and brave enough to save my brother.

One of the hardest days of my life, to date, was the day my da arrived. He was one of the few to be rescued in time from Limontae and brought to the safety of the cold northern fortress. He was so weak they’d put him on a stretcher to travel, and I had to hold myself very still as I watched him being carried inside the stone building.

I sat by his bed, bathing his forehead with cold washcloths, and I both longed for and feared the moment he would wake and I would have to tell him.

Late one night I sat with Thorne beside Da’s bed, telling them a story. ‘… and with one fell swoop –’

‘We could end it,’ Thorne said suddenly.

‘What?’ I asked, irritated to be interrupted. But when I followed his eyes I realised he was looking at Da, and there was a lurch in my chest because I knew what he meant.

I closed my eyes, my whole body aching. We could end the bond and save Da. Thorne was willing to do this, despite the fact that we had vowed to each other to protect it for everyone in Kaya.

‘Sometimes, Thorne of Araan,’ I said softly, ‘you are just too much.’

He smiled sadly and I kissed him.

That was when Da stirred and we both lurched to his side. ‘Da?’

Alexi’s eyes opened and he smiled wearily. ‘My clever, clever girl,’ he murmured, reaching for my face. ‘Where have you been?’

My chest tightened. ‘I went to break the bond so that you would live. But …’ I felt Thorne’s hand on my spine, making circles that reminded me how to breathe. ‘I couldn’t. We can’t. I mean, we can. But we won’t.’

Da frowned, looking at me more clearly. ‘My darling,’ he said. ‘That’s as it should be. Let me go.’

‘What? No –’

‘Finn,’ he said. ‘I want to go. Let me go.’

A sob welled out of my body and I fell over his chest, holding him as tightly as I could. ‘No.’

‘Finn, stand up,’ a firm voice said from the doorway.

I looked over my shoulder to see Ava. She wore a hard expression, and her eyes were an incredible shade of yellow that I realised, with a deep shock, was my colour.

Thorne helped me rise and pulled me back. I didn’t know what was going on, but I watched, too heartsick to be able to speak anyway.

Ava moved to the bed and she looked down at Alexi. Her spine was iron; every time I saw her I was impressed anew by who she was.

‘When did your mate die?’ she asked Da.

He grimaced as though the very thought hurt, as I was sure it did. ‘Six years ago.’

‘Then you are very, very strong,’ Ava, Queen of Pirenti told him. ‘Why did you live, Alexi?’

I watched a tear slide from his eye. ‘For my children.’

Thorne caught me, held me against his body.

‘Good,’ Ava said bluntly. ‘Have your children died?’

He looked confused. ‘No.’

‘Then you still have two children.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would you die now?’

There was silence. What in Gods’ names was she doing? It wasn’t as though he was choosing this nightmare that sapped him of his strength more every day.

‘Ava, he’s not –’

‘Quiet,’ she ordered me flatly, without a single glance my way. To Alexi she said, ‘Your son is trapped in a city ruled by enemy warders who have been killing their hostages.’

An eruption of horror in my hands and teeth. Thorne moved his mouth to my ear and whispered, ‘Strong, girl. Be strong.’

So I made myself strong. And I listened. As the half-walker Queen saved my da’s life with nothing more than words.

‘How dare you die when your children need you more than they have ever needed you?’ she asked him.

Alexi gazed up at her, and there were still tears slipping from his eyes, but he was listening.

‘Sit up,’ Ava ordered. ‘Now.’

Alexi struggled, and I tried to go to him but Thorne the traitor held me back. Da managed to get himself to a sitting position.

‘On your feet,’ Ava ordered next.

‘He can’t!’ I cried.

‘He can, actually,’ Ava replied. ‘Alexi. Stand up. It’s easy.’

I watched my da trembling, weak and weary and sick of life. But he got to his feet and stood straight before the Queen.

She moved closer, and I watched as she looked into Da’s eyes. ‘What was her name?’

His eyes fell shut and I saw his shoulders sag. ‘Lillian,’ Da said.

‘Did she make you strong?’

He gave a soft laugh, like a breath of air. ‘Of course she did. But she was far stronger than I.’

Ava smiled, and it was sunlight in the night. ‘Her strength is yours now. Did you know that? It is. As is her courage. I bet she was very brave. I know she died to save your daughter, and sacrifice is the bravest thing, and the most everlasting. That’s yours too now, because your bond never broke.’

‘It’s gone,’ he whispered.

‘It’s not,’ Ava said, and suddenly she was fierce. ‘It’s part of you, and it’s making you the strongest person in this world. It’s making you strong enough to live for your children, and strong enough to help us get your son back.’

I could feel Thorne’s heart beating against my back. I turned my head towards him and he pressed his lips to my cheek.

‘Do you want to know a secret?’ Ava asked Alexi softly. ‘It’s simple. The people in your life make it so that when you think of the bond and your mate you will feel only the strength and the courage Lillian gave to you, and you will know that all this pain and death is just an illusion. Live, choose to live, and you will. That’s the secret. It’s easy.’

I watched Da’s eyes fall shut, and then I watched his shoulders straighten and I watched as he looked at the Queen, and I recognised a look in his eyes that I had not seen there for many years. A look I had not seen since before Ma. It was the look I imagined him wearing as he carried those fish through the baths, a look of complete certainty in who and what he was.

‘I’m getting my son back,’ was what he said.

And Ava smiled.

I followed her outside, overwrought. ‘Majesty,’ I called, and she stopped on the stone staircase. She returned to the step above mine, and I looked up at her violet eyes and wolf scar. I thought I understood now why people branded themselves with that mark, ugly as it was. It was her strength they were honouring.

‘Is it really all an illusion?’ I asked.

Ava smiled, that damned smile that I would probably die for if she asked me to. ‘I’ve heard it said that you’re the cleverest girl in Limontae,’ she told me. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think it’s an illusion at all. But I think you are a goddess in disguise.’

She laughed. And then the Queen of Pirenti reached down to kiss me on the cheek, and I felt the truth, I knew all the secrets of her heart, and I loved her even more.

Thorne found me standing there in that same spot on the steps. ‘The miracle of Ava of Orion.’

I smiled, reaching to touch his fingers where they rested on the railing.

‘I want us to make a vow,’ he said. ‘Every single thing that I believe about life and death and love goes into this vow.’

‘No pressure then.’

He levelled me with a stern look. ‘Are you paying attention?’

‘Yes, my darling, you have every scrap of attention I have ever possessed.’

He said simply, ‘If one of us dies, the other lives.’

‘Thorne.’ My eyes shifted gold and I shook my head. ‘No.’ Because in all probability he would be the first to die. We both knew that, him being the walking target he was. So it was very easy for him to say. But I could not live with him dead. I couldn’t.

‘Finn.’ Then the bastard said, ‘I have no desire to live in a world where a man or woman cannot be themselves, wholly themselves, on their own. I defy the idea that I can’t be me without someone else to help.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ I snapped. I shook my head, turning away from him. ‘If it were me?’ I demanded. ‘If you thought it would be me. How would you agree?’

‘For you. So our bond could live on like Alexi and Lillian’s.’

I looked at him. My shoulders sagged for the truth of it. We couldn’t possibly know what would happen. I could die first, for a million different reasons. And if I died first, then I wanted him to live, more than I wanted anything.

So I said, ‘Okay. Yes. But only because when I die I want you to carry me around everywhere with you. In an urn. Or, actually, no – you have to have my body stuffed and mounted in your bedroom, so if you ever wish to move on you’ll feel too guilty and won’t be able to go through with it.’

He erupted into laughter. ‘You are a very, very strange person.’ Thorne climbed up onto my step and pulled me into his arms. ‘Do you know what I foretell will happen?’

‘I thought you hated knowing the future.’

‘I foretell that we will grow old together, and die as one in our sleep when we’re ninety-nine years old.’

I groaned. ‘That sounds boring.’

Thorne smiled. ‘I can smell when you’re lying.’

Thorne

The people of Kaya died in pairs. So did a rare few from Pirenti. We were learning, day by passing day, how very much the same we all were.

But maybe, now, we didn’t need to die in pairs.

We all came to live in the fortress together. Finn’s da Alexi had been rescued before the warder rule could properly take hold. Ma moved in and looked after him every day, her physician’s skills making all the difference to his returning strength, particularly after Ava’s rousing speech. Rose was teaching Finn those skills, I knew, and was pleased with my wife’s progress.

Sometimes I caught them together reciting names of herbs and remedies, and they would glare at me until I left, as if it were secret women’s business.

Falco came to live with us, and I spent as much time with him as I could, seeing all too clearly how impotent he felt as a dethroned ruler, a displaced man without his people. The Kayan Emperor was so broken that I imagined us all to be waiting for him to crack. Surprisingly enough, it was Ella and Sadie who comforted him the most – he was often found seeking out their company, and entering into all sorts of strange projects with them. I once caught the three of them building enormous wooden wings, and shuddered to think what Ambrose would do when he found out.

Osric joined us, and was integral to our plans. He walked the forest with me, teasing me for what he called my ‘beastliness’.

It was true though – I had changed. I felt wilder, more animal. My beast and I were one, because I understood him now. He did not make me kill; he made me strong enough to survive when I had to.

Some days I found it hard to find my way back to my human life, because the hunt called to me day and night. But I did it, every time, and would do so for the rest of my life, because waiting there for me was Finn. My Wild Girl. The perfect answer to all that I was. Love in the dark. A woman who somehow accepted every piece of me, whether it was broken or whole.

She told me the other night that she loved my beast as much as she loved me. I tried not to be jealous, as the smug bastard howled his glee inside me.

Finn had taken the news of Jonah and Penn hard though. She was instrumental in our strategy meetings. Her abundance of energy was poured into her training. She and I would sit with Ava, Ambrose, Falco and Osric through the nights, planning and discussing the workings of our next moves.

What became clear to us on these nights was that we had one important move to make: we had to figure out who the Sparrow was and make contact with him. He was the only chance we had of wresting Kaya back from the warders.

For now Finn and I held each other in the dark and we whispered stories to each other, so that no matter how lost either one of us became in the shadowy depths of our chipped souls, we would hear those words and be tethered to each other.

Nothing would ever change the vow I made her on a winter’s night. The life I wanted was inside her heart. Always.

‘Thorne! Get your gorgeous behind over here!’

I looked up at Finn and blushed crimson with horror. Did she have to talk about my behind in front of every damn person in the fortress? There was a ripple of laughter throughout the crowd and I sighed.

‘You do have an awfully gorgeous behind,’ Ambrose pointed out, and I smacked him over the head.

We were standing in the trees to watch the first of Finn’s games. These days the fortress of Pirenti was filling up with Kayan refugees fleeing their catastrophically dangerous home country. What I’d been amazed at was the fact that most Pirenti hadn’t made a fuss or argued about it – they’d let it happen with an admirable aplomb.

The refugees were all miserable and scared, of course, so Finn had decided that she knew exactly how to cheer them up. And she’d set out quietly and without fuss to rig up an enormous obstacle course, reminiscent of both the Siren Nights and the tournament in Sancia. The forest beyond the fortress was now full of ropes and ditches and ladders and puzzles. Every person between the ages of five and eighty was permitted to enter, both Kayan and Pirenti, and it was patently clear from the shrieks of laughter that it was a success.

I watched with Ma, Falco, Ava and Ambrose at the front of the crowd of amused onlookers. Under the course stood Finn and Osric, both using their warder magic to ensure no one was hurt.

A few young lads from both countries had just finished, much to their own pride and their friends’ rapturous applause. What was inspired about the course was that it wasn’t about physical strength, which would have made it unfair to the Kayans when having to face their much larger Pirenti opponents. It was about courage, cleverness, agility and athleticism. Anyone – man, woman, Kayan, Pirenti, elderly or child – could win. Well, probably not elderly or child. But they were still enjoying themselves.

I watched as Sadie and Ella stepped up to take their places at the starting line.

‘They’re too young!’ Ambrose protested, lurching forward, but Ava grabbed him and dragged him back.

‘Leave. Them. Alone,’ she growled, making Ambrose sulk.

That was when my darling wife decided to publicly embarrass me. ‘Thorne! Get your gorgeous behind over here!’

I slumped over to her side amidst the laughter – apparently both peoples found it hysterical to see the berserker prince having his behind brought to attention by a small mischievous woman.

‘I dare you to race your cousins.’

Ella and Sadie screamed their excitement and I shot Finn a glare. ‘I’m far too mature to be baited by a dare.’

Finn stared at me, waiting.

I sighed. ‘You’ll pay for this.’

She smiled sweetly. ‘Hurry up, big guy.’

‘Just a second,’ I forestalled, leaning in to give her a long, slow kiss. The crowd cheered, and when I pulled away Finn was the one blushing. She shoved me towards the course.

Sidling over to the girls, I climbed up beside them on the platform. Glancing down at the ground, my head swum with unease. Despite everything, I still really, really hated heights.

Ella and Sadie both took one of my hands. ‘You can do it,’ they encouraged, and I couldn’t help but smile.

‘Whose kindness did you inherit?’ I muttered rhetorically.

‘Da’s,’ they replied promptly and I burst into laughter.

We set off. As I swung hand over hand along the ropes, being indisputably annihilated by my much quicker cousins, I glanced to the side and saw him standing there in the trees.

My da. He smiled, looking amused.

‘You’d better pick up the pace, my boy,’ he grinned. ‘No son of mine gets left behind.’

And then, more softly, my father said, ‘You were born to lead the way, my son, even when the world is at its darkest.’

They settled upon me, those words, and for the first time in my life I believed them to be true.

Here ends Book 2 of The Chronicles of Kaya

Coming soon …

Isadora

Book 3 of The Chronicles of Kaya

About the Author

Charlotte grew up with her nose in a book. At fourteen she decided to write a novel, and thus began her foray into epic fantasy, with sweeping romances, heroic adventures, and as much juicy drama as she could possibly squeeze in.

Her first novel, Arrival, was published at age seventeen, followed by Descent when she was twenty, launching The Strangers of Paragor series, which is adventure fantasy for teenagers.

Soon she started her first adult fantasy novel, Avery, the prologue of which came to her in a very vivid dream. This was followed by Thorne, the second book in The Chronicles of Kaya series, and Fury, the first in a dystopian science-fiction trilogy called The Cure.

Charlotte has a Masters in Screenwriting, which allows her to explore different aspects of her writing and indulge in her passion for film and television. She lives in Sydney and will, however, always be a novelist at heart, still unable to get her nose out of the books.

See the whole collection! Visit http://www.randomhouse.com.au/randomromance/

Avery
by Charlotte McConaghy

The people of Kaya die in pairs. When one lover dies, the other does too. So it has been for thousands of years – until Ava.

For although her bondmate, Avery, has been murdered and Ava’s soul has been torn in two, she is the only one who has ever been strong enough to cling to life. Vowing revenge upon the barbarian queen of Pirenti, Ava’s plan is interrupted when she is captured by the deadly prince of her enemies.

Prince Ambrose has been brought up to kill and hate. But when he takes charge of a strangely captivating Kayan prisoner and is forced to survive with her on a dangerous island, he must reconsider all he holds true …

In a violent country like Pirenti, where emotion is scorned as a weakness, can he find the strength to fight for the person he loves … even when she’s his vengeful enemy?

Avery is a sweeping, romantic fantasy novel about loss and identity, and finding the courage to love against all odds.

Available now!

Losing Patients
by Virginia Taylor

It’s Bree Branson’s first day at Pemberton Private Hospital and the last thing she needs is a patient dying in suspicious circumstances on her watch. The only person who can help her clear her name is the one person she was hoping to avoid, the devastatingly handsome Sam Vincent … the doctor she stood up three years ago.

Forced to work together to find a killer, will Bree and Sam be able to leave their past behind to find a future together?

A scintillating romantic suspense novel with a twist of intrigue and a lot of flirtation. Can true love be found in the hunt for a killer?

Available now!

Down Outback Roads
by Alissa Callen

Kree Garrett’s younger brother Seth is all the family she has left, so when he goes missing in the Australian outback, she doesn’t think twice about leaving her American home to find him. When Seth is rescued Kree vows to find a way to thank the small town of Glenalla. It isn’t long before she falls in love with the tight-knit rural community. But is it really the town she’s falling for?

Ewan Mackenzie has given up everything for his brother’s family, but he can never give enough to assuage his guilt at what happened one dark night, years ago … Ewan knows he doesn’t deserve a second chance at happiness, but when beautiful, open-hearted Kree stays to fight to save his home town, he finds it hard to keep his distance.

Can Kree and Ewan leave their pasts behind for long enough to find a future together?

An enthralling rural love story. Sometimes you need to give yourself permission to fall in love.

Available now!

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0
Thorne

Published by Random Romance in 2014

Copyright © Charlotte McConaghy, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Random Romance book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW, 2060 www.randomhouse.com.au

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at http://www.randomhouse.com.au/about/contacts.aspx

First published by Random Romance in 2012

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

McConaghy, Charlotte, author.
Avery/Charlotte McConaghy.

ISBN 9780857985996 (ebook)

Fantasy fiction

A823.4

Cover Image © Aleshyn_Andrei/Shutterstock
Cover design by Isabel Keeley-Reid
Map by Jon MacDonald, Xou Creative
Ebook by First Source

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