As Finn, Osric and Ava slept soundly, I felt Falco watching me from the other side of the stall. There was a deep, thrilling panic in my breast. I tried not to look at him but it was like being dragged against the strongest current in the ocean. The urge to touch him was like nothing I had experienced.
Obviously he hadn’t told them about us, or about me. For some reason they had no idea I was the Sparrow (was he embarrassed of being bonded to me?). What did he expect would come of this? That we’d now be allies against the Mad Ones? Or simply pretend to be, until we could kill each other?
‘Are you alright?’ His voice cut through my thoughts.
I didn’t answer.
‘You don’t look well. Let me take your watch.’
That didn’t even deserve an acknowledgement.
‘Who are you? Where do you come from?’
I stared resolutely at the door.
‘It’s whispered that you were born in Sanra.’
This time I looked at him. ‘Don’t you mean Yurtt?’
‘Then it’s true. It makes sense. That you’d be angry.’
Did he even understand what anger was?
‘I do,’ he said.
I glanced at him, then realised he’d responded to my unspoken thought and recoiled. My fingers went to my knives, then felt their absence with cold vulnerability.
He raised his hands quickly. ‘Easy.’
‘Stay out of my head.’
‘I didn’t mean to. I can’t control it.’
‘Do you hear everything?’
‘No.’
My heart thundered in my chest. Not even warders could read what was in my mind, and yet this man could. And if he could hear some of my thoughts, why could I hear none of his?
‘I felt it all,’ Falco said softly. ‘When I was in the tunnel and you were in that room. I felt what you felt and I know, Isadora.’
I tried to breathe. Found myself unable to look away from his eyes. ‘What do you know?’
‘What it does to you.’
Suddenly it all surged up through my chest and my heart and into my mouth. ‘So then what?’ I demanded, a lump in my throat. Gods, the words that fell free were as shocking to me as anything had ever been. I had no power to stop them. ‘You think I want any of this? You think I like the violence I’m capable of? I didn’t ask for it – there’s no other way. I didn’t want to be born like this, into this. But what am I meant to do? Let them win? Let them ruin the helpless? I’m capable of stopping them when there are so many who aren’t, who are hurt over and over again, and I can make it stop, so doesn’t that mean that I have to?’
Falco crossed the stall to my side swifter than a breath. ‘Yes. But you don’t have to do it alone anymore. I’m here now.’
I let out a laugh that sounded more like a sob. Turned away from him. ‘You? You’re a joke. Just as this thing between us is a joke.’
‘Isa–’
‘You left us here, to this nightmare.’
My words let the air out of the world. He closed his eyes, resting his head on the wall behind us. Long minutes ticked by as I stared at the stall door and Falco kept his eyes closed.
But then he murmured, ‘How are you killing them?’
I looked at his face. With his eyes closed I could better focus on the shape of his features, the narrow delicacy of his sharp cheekbones, the heavy brow and square jaw. He looked just as everyone thought an Emperor should look – an expertly sculpted example of perfection. The golden ones. That damned royal blood of his. Beauty bred beauty, after all. How they would love him in the palace now. What sick pleasure Dren and Galia would derive from his loveliness. A lock of his long golden hair had come loose and I fought the urge to reach over and brush it behind his ear.
That was the moth being drawn to the flickering flame, only to be destroyed by the heat. That was the nasty tug of this unnatural warder’s bond. The seductive, deadly trap.
Softly I said, ‘You don’t get to have all of my secrets, Emperor Feckless.’
Chapter Seven
Falco
I woke the others in the cool quiet of predawn. I hadn’t slept, and neither had Isadora. We’d kept watch together in stubborn silence, allowing the others to rest. As the sun began slowly to rise we made our way through grey streets, moving quickly. If we were stopped we were to say that Osric was escorting us home after shifts at the palace.
It felt remarkable to be moving through my home city without a blindfold or a dozen guards, but I didn’t think it looked as it once had. I was disturbed at its decline. Buildings were abandoned and crumbling, waste lay in gutters and I could smell the heavy scent of death. It felt too much to solve, a task far too big for the kind of person I was. Quill would have known exactly what to do, but I felt dwarfed.
I watched Isadora as we travelled. I couldn’t help watching her. There was an ugly tint in her hair and on her skin, but despite that …
She moved with a slow, dreamlike grace, unlike anyone else I knew. The tilt of her neck was almost gentle, the slenderness of her tiny fingers elegant. Everything was calm and deliberate; she was extraordinarily lissome and I found her almost unbearably lovely to watch. Which was what made the blood staining her hands and feet such a dichotomy, the twelve dead bodies in the palace such a brutal contradiction.
I noticed a flow of people and asked Isadora where they’d be going at such an early hour. Her enormous red eyes watched the bodies turn up a side street. ‘Temple.’
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘It’s illegal.’
My head whipped back to her. ‘Why?’
It was Osric who answered me. ‘All that should be worshipped is the soul magic, and the wielders of the soul magic. The old gods are heretic now, I would imagine.’
I led them to follow the families who crept through the grey predawn. It was dangerous, but my curiosity was an undeniable force.
‘Os will be trouble,’ Finn pointed out, handing him a sash to wrap around his head. At least it would hide his hair. She then removed her cloak and draped it over Isadora’s bloodied and torn dress. Isadora buried her smeared hands inside the pockets – she’d been unable to clean them properly.
The temple was disguised as a closed fabrics shop. Two men guarded its entrance, sitting on upturned crates and casually smoking pipes. As we drew near their eyes fixed on us with wariness. ‘What business?’ one of them asked. He had two yellow braids hanging on either side of his face, and a thick blond beard.
‘Prayer,’ I replied.
‘Haven’t seen you before.’
‘I only just learned you were here.’
He studied me carefully. ‘Where would you die?’
For a moment I was confused, and then I recalled summer nights thirty years ago spent on rocky seashores with my ma, and the stories she would tell me about the old ways. She had believed deeply, so I would don her cloak as I entered this place; in temple I would be as pious as she’d ever been.
‘At sea,’ I murmured, ‘that the goddess Rian might claim me.’
The man reached for my hand, clasping it tight. His was a large, firm grip, and it moved me, somehow, as did the look in his eyes. His eyes. To have any eyes at all look upon me, without blindfold, without fear – it was an intimacy I was unaccustomed to, and it thrilled me. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
‘Coll of Orion.’
At the name, Ava cleared her throat. ‘Do you know of your home’s fate?’
Coll met her violet eyes through the gap in her scarf. ‘Aye, and it is a sad one, I’m afraid. One of the first towns to be destroyed.’
I reached for Ava just as her legs wobbled. Caught her as she steadied herself, saw the grief in her eyes. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, so desperately sorry, but I couldn’t find my voice. It was the second man who spoke, Coll’s companion, who remained sitting on his crate. ‘The feathered cloak will wrap them in her embrace and protect them now. She’ll carry them to the bottom of the ocean. You have
only to believe it and it will be so.’
We stared at him, though he didn’t look up at us, intent on his pipe.
‘Follow the stairs to the bottom,’ Coll said, and we made our way into the small, dusty shop. Behind the counter there was a trapdoor in the floor, which we lifted to find stairs. They led down into the ground, where it grew cold. Our footsteps echoed as we descended steadily.
The feathered cloak. It lodged itself in my mind.
Beneath the ground was a basement, in which dozens of people were sitting on the floor in prayer. At the farthest end of the room was a plinth, and on it an ancient-looking piece of driftwood, intricately carved and twisted. So beautiful, it stole my breath. I moved slowly through the sitting bodies until I reached it. In the early days of the world, from the sea had come dark, curled pieces of salt-drenched driftwood. These had been imbued with life by a trio of old gods, and as such had been the first humans to walk from the ocean and onto land. Or so some believed. Others used to believe it was the warders who came first, and gave life to the rest of us. Pirenti believed in an entirely different origin story: one of ancient ice and fires, of men forged in iron just as the Holy Sword had been, of women uncurling from deep within the earth. But here, we believed in sea and salt.
The feeling I had then – standing before the wood and surrounded by Kayans who worshipped such ancient stories – was of an immense connection to something flesh and blood. There was no magic down here, only earth, only life.
I swallowed and looked up to see Isadora watching me. I couldn’t read the expression in her eyes, but they did not move from me even when I met them. I wanted to know how she felt about the feathered cloak and the driftwood. About the old gods and the soul magic. About anything, everything. I knew nothing about her except the way her heart felt when it beat, and try as I might I couldn’t control when I heard her thoughts. In this moment she was silent. Everything was silent. Then I realised that was what I was hearing from her: a deep, undeniable quiet.
The tolling of a bell broke into my thoughts, startling everyone in the room.
‘Raid!’ a voice screamed, and every person in the basement went scrabbling up the stairs. My companions and I waited and then followed the terrified crowd back up to the shop. Coll and his friend were ushering people out quickly.
‘Get on,’ he urged.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Warders on their way.’
I heard it then, a second distant bell, tolling to alert the temple to an approach. ‘You’ll flee too?’
‘Run!’ he snapped.
We sprinted up the street and rounded a corner, but something about the look in his eyes stalled me. I peered back, spotting the fabric shop in the distance. The two men were still smoking in front of it when four warders arrived.
‘Fal, come on,’ Finn pleaded.
But they weren’t moving. Coll and his friend. I could see it coming and hurled myself back towards them, drawing my two swords. I barely got two paces before Ava, Osric and Finn tackled me to the ground and literally dragged me back around the corner.
‘Get off!’ I hissed. ‘They’ll be killed!’
‘You run out there, they’ll read you in a second and then the Mad Ones will know you’re here!’ Osric snapped.
‘It’s not worth their lives!’
‘It is, Falco! Of course it is!’
But I could not abide that. I would not allow any more deaths for me and my fucking secrets. Not men who believe in the same things my ma did.
It went through my mind in the flash of a moment, less than a moment – how I would lay my friends flat on their backs, turn that corner, cross that street and use my two swords to destroy those corrupt warders. I saw it all; it would be easy.
But in that moment, less than a moment, I heard the grunts of pain and knew I was too late. I saw the two dead bodies. The warders disappearing down the steps of the shop to destroy the temple and its precious symbol of defiance.
I turned back to my company. They were staring at me, pale and concerned. Except Isadora, who watched me with something completely different, turned from me with something brutally like scorn.
The fury in my chest made it hard to breathe, but breathe I did, long and slow. Don’t blame them, they were protecting you. But a dark thing in me wanted them punished, wanted them to understand who I was and the kind of power I could wield.
That wasn’t true though, was it? Power only lay in the opinions of others, and if no one obeyed my orders then I had no power. Perhaps they might have obeyed me if I’d been honest with them, but instead I had lied and lied and lied those men into their graves. I walked down the street, needing air and space and none of their gods-damned faces staring at me like that, with pity. The endless cursed pity of being Emperor fucking Feckless.
‘Fal–’ Finn started.
‘Do not follow me,’ I ordered her coldly and she fell back. Rounding another corner, I stood in the empty street and rested my forehead against the wall of a house. Breathe.
Coll’s handshake tingled in my palm. His eyes. His friend’s words. The driftwood and the prayers and all those bodies pressed in together. It crystallised me, activated something within. For the space between heartbeats Quill was here with me and I wanted only to make her proud, to be the kind of person she could have faith in. As I’d never been for her when she lived.
While my pulse settled once more I put it all in boxes, just as I had seen Isadora do. Locked away the things that, if left free, would weigh too heavily. And perhaps shutting things in boxes would allow them to rot and fester deep within, but it was better that than letting one single piece of them stop us from walking on. There was no time to slow or stop, not now, not when people were dying.
I returned to my friends and gestured for Isadora to lead us home. No one asked me anything. It only took another twenty minutes to reach our destination and we walked it in silence. Entering a back alley, we snuck behind several buildings and then scaled the wall of a courtyard. Finn was first over, tearing inside the house.
‘Jonah!’
I landed and followed her in time to see the young man fling himself from a sleeping roll on the ground. The twins collided with each other, and Finn was sobbing wildly and then Penn was there and she was kissing him over and over and the three of them collapsed to the floor, hugging each other so tight, utterly heedless of the fact that they were squashing people who’d been sleeping on the floor and who were now quickly disentangling themselves.
‘I knew you’d come,’ Jonah said, over and over.
I turned my eyes to the other people in the room. All half-asleep and blinking drowsily at us.
‘Iz?’ a man asked, eyeing us nervously. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Gods, girl!’ a woman exclaimed at the sight of Isadora. ‘What’s happened? You look a sight! Are you wounded?’
Jonah finally caught sight of Isadora and frantically took her bloodstained hands in his. ‘Did they hurt you? What did you do? Are you alright?’
I frowned, then saw Isadora remove her hands from his uncomfortably. ‘I failed.’
‘Who are you?’ a man asked me.
‘And why is there a warder in my house?’ the woman demanded. There was a rustle of unease, and I saw one of the big fellas reach for a sword sheathed in its scabbard.
‘Easy,’ I told him.
‘I grow weary of this,’ Osric sighed. ‘I’ll die before I lift one finger in an effort to help the vile false rulers of this graveyard.’
Silence followed that, until the child started to cry and I saw the woman take her baby from the room.
‘You sent word, asking for aid,’ Ava said into the silence. ‘We have come to help.’
‘I’ve told you of Finn, my sister,’ Jonah explained. ‘And …’ Looking my way, he hastily lowered his eyes and then sank to the floor. His friends watched in confusion.
I sighed, wishing the anonymity could last. ‘My name is Falco. I was once Emperor of Kaya.’
There were gasps and a general ruckus of bodies flattening themselves to the floor, eyes squeezing shut.
‘You remain Emperor of Kaya,’ Osric said.
Finn peered down at the prostrate people, then looked at me. ‘Should I bow?’
‘Please stand,’ I told them. ‘You need not bow or avert your eyes.’
‘But … why, Majesty?’ the woman of the house asked from the doorway, eyes still closed.
I couldn’t help glancing at Isadora, which was a mistake. ‘I can hardly be dethroned for bonding if I have no throne to lose.’ Once my eyes had strayed to her I had a very hard time dragging them away.
‘But, Majesty …’
‘Please,’ I murmured, forcibly trying to wrest control of myself. Something prickled in the air between our bodies, something painful. ‘I am a guest in your home,’ I managed to tell the others. ‘You will honour me enough if you offer us shelter while we take stock of the situation.’
They rose, still looking unsure. Their knowledge of the law was so deeply ingrained that looking upon me was terrifying – long before my reign people were killed for meeting the unguarded eyes of an Emperor.
I introduced Ava and when she removed her scarf we had to go through the whole thing again as they dived once more to the floor. I worked hard to make sure I didn’t forget anyone’s name. By the end of the introductions, during which not one of them had looked me in the eye, it was clear how desperate they were for help – or even a scrap of hope.
Soon it was time for the workers to earn their food chits. They were all, including Penn, working as street cleaners, which was apparently a nice name for a job that entailed entering homes to remove dead bodies or waste and taking it all to a pit. I felt sick to my stomach upon hearing this, and a weary headache started at the base of my skull.
Sara stayed home to look after the baby, along with Isadora, Jonah and my party. While the twins stood in the kitchen, talking a mile a minute at each other, I noticed Isadora sneak away to the washroom. I’d been very careful to stay as far from her as possible, but I’d known every second that she was near, she was here, she was in the corner of my eye, something I couldn’t look directly at for fear of being blinded. Now that she was leaving that space, my space, I couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t so much a decision to follow her, but an inevitability. I ignored the question in Ava’s eyes.