And this was how we spent the night. He watched the right and I watched the left, and as I informed him of what I spotted, he marked it down. We didn’t speak and we didn’t look at each other. I was agitated to pain by his nearness but we didn’t touch. Of course we didn’t.
An hour or so before dawn he put the parchment away. ‘How do you kill them?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Fine. They’ll be here to ring the bell soon.’
So we descended the stairs and climbed back out the window. As our footsteps sounded softly in the night, he took a surprising turn.
‘One more stop,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to come with me.’
I looked at him.
‘Truly – I don’t think you would enjoy it. It’s nothing to do with … anything important.’
When I made no move to turn home he shrugged and led the way once more. As we walked he seemed to want to distract himself, for he asked, ‘What news from within the palace? How are they managing things?’
I didn’t have to tell him, but it seemed pointless to keep quiet. Sharing my knowledge wouldn’t hinder my plans. So I explained in short words what it was like under Dren and Galia’s reign – the humiliation of the servants, the energy they stole from the living creatures around them, their concern for what the ‘rebels’ within the city were planning. Falco remained silent throughout, but I could feel the anger rolling off him in waves. I finished by telling him the secret I had discovered: ‘They cover their bodies with clothing and their faces with magic because they don’t want anyone to know the truth of their decay.’
‘The power eats at them,’ Falco said. ‘This is good news. They’ll not last indefinitely.’
‘I plan to kill them long before their power runs out.’
He glanced at me, but didn’t ask how I planned to do it. Instead he said, ‘How did you come to be in the palace?’
‘Working as a servant.’
‘And they didn’t read your true intentions?’
I shook my head. ‘Why?’
‘They can’t.’
He considered this. ‘What of Penn?’
‘I don’t think they’re aware of his presence here. If they are, they don’t care, or they’re planning something more subtle.’
‘How does he feel about them?’
I hesitated. ‘He doesn’t speak of them. But he understands. And I believe he’s ashamed.’
‘Is he frightened of them?’
I didn’t like where that question was leading, so I shrugged.
It took us only five blocks to reach Falco’s second destination. He squatted behind some dying bushes and peered at the building down the end of the street. It was the royal tomb. My heart picked up speed as I crouched beside him. There were four guards at its entrance, all human soldiers.
‘We’re too close to the warder temple for this,’ I whispered.
He ignored me. Fine then. I drew two of my daggers.
‘I don’t want them dead,’ Falco forestalled.
‘They work for Dren and Galia.’
‘I don’t want them dead.’
I sighed, sheathing the weapons. It would be dangerous to leave them alive. But I found myself relieved not to have to kill them. I stood from the bushes and walked towards the guards, Falco right behind me.
They straightened at our approach, dressed in leather body armour and brandishing spears. ‘It’s after curfew,’ one of them pointed out stupidly.
I took him out first. One kick to the groin forced him down and I caught his spear before it hit the stone. I cracked it over his head and then swung it back to take out the second guard. The third came at me and our spears snapped together – too loudly. I swept for his legs, jabbed the fourth soldier in the chest to wind him, turned back to the third and whacked him on the head, then finished off the fourth with a second jab to the temple. I set the spear down and glanced at Falco, who was watching with comically wide eyes.
The tomb was locked, but I had pins in my cloak pocket that made short work of the padlock. I didn’t know how he imagined getting inside on his own. We crept down the steps to the underground crypt, to where the world disappeared into pitch black.
‘Take hold of my cloak,’ Falco murmured. I remembered he was used to moving without sight and clasped the fabric of his cloak, careful not to brush any part of his body. I was uncomfortable with such vulnerability but thankfully he soon found a wall-torch. I heard him strike a piece of flint and then the crypt was illuminated. We both looked around. Stone graves lined the walls, what had to be dozens of them. Names had been carved into the slabs. The Emperors and Empresses of Kaya, dating back hundreds of years. Falco’s royal bloodline. It was hard not to be awed by it, by the passing of time and the power in these graves.
Falco made his way to the very end of the crypt and stopped before five slabs of rock. I felt it then, the wings of sparrows flapping against my skin and hair, flickering in the candlelight. They were in my heart, too, and I felt more frightened than I ever had. I couldn’t walk over there and see them, the names of his slaughtered family. I couldn’t allow them to be real because they would make him real. They had the power to turn him from a privileged, sculpted specimen into a damaged and lonely man.
I watched him place his hands on the stone, stroking it gently, tracing his fingers around the edges of each five graves. I watched him press his cheek against their names. I saw the tenderness in his touch, and the sadness in the bowing of his shoulders.
And then I turned and left the crypt.
Falco
I stayed with my family as long as I could afford, aching to stay always. My memories of them grew so faint that I felt a savage loss each time I tried to conjure their faces and failed. It had been six months since I’d been to visit them, a very long six months, when normally I went each morning. Every visit I ran through the stories of them, recounting them to myself so I couldn’t forget, so they wouldn’t slip away. But each day the stories felt more and more like they were being recited instead of remembered.
This morning I whispered to them, telling them all I could. I told Ma, with my cheek pressed to her name, of the driftwood and the temple, finding that it unlocked new memories from all those years ago, several I thought I’d lost. Then I told them Finn’s story about the sea god and snow goddess, thinking of my own snow goddess as I did. I was unable to give voice to her, to the reality of Isadora, but I was sure that even thinking of her in this place, here with my family, was a kind of sharing. They would sense that it was too complicated to explain but just being here eased something in my chest. Helped me, in a way, to come to terms with the bond.
I rose some time later, kissing them all in turn. I slowly made my way out of the tomb, though it hurt to leave them.
Isadora was waiting outside, a guard to replace the ones she’d knocked unconscious. We looked at each other for a moment. The light was changing, shifting towards dawn. She looked unearthly in it, her ashen skin glowing.
‘You never found them, did you?’ she asked me. ‘The people who did that?’
I shook my head.
‘I would have hunted them until my last breath.’
‘I chose another way.’
There was a question in her eyes. As we made our way back through the streets I ordered my thoughts. And I decided, for the first time, to be honest with someone. ‘Do you know of the blade fish?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s small and slow, and unable to hunt its food. So it lies on the sea floor and lets its scales shimmer iridescent. This beauty is like a flame to a moth. It attracts dangerous creatures, who circle it slowly. The blade fish lies very still, an easy, harmless target. As the predator attacks, the blade fish turns its fins to reveal the serrated edges hiding beneath. These make quick work of the predators and the blade fish eats their remains.’ I ran my hand ruefully through my hair. ‘I owe that damn fish twenty-five pointless years of lying in wait and flashing my iridescent scales.
’
I saw a line form between her eyebrows as she considered my words. ‘You wanted them to come back for you.’
‘Aye, but they never came. Only you did.’
Her gaze flicked to mine. But a noise to our left drifted through the quiet morning, and Isadora froze. Running footsteps approached quickly. A shouted voice – Take south, enter every building!
Fuck. The warders had discovered the unconscious bodies at the crypt. The full implication of this hit me in a rush: the warders could have plucked the look of Isadora from the guards’ minds. They would identify us the moment they spotted us. I should have let her kill the guards. Or not gone into the temple at all. My heartache may have killed us.
Isadora grabbed my arm and wrenched me into an empty tavern. All the chairs and tables were broken or upturned and the kitchen had been ransacked, but she sprinted up the stairs and into one of the loft guest rooms. I helped her drag a chest of drawers in front of the door, though what good that would do was beyond me. We should have been getting away from here, not holing up to be caught.
‘How easy is it for you to fall asleep?’ she asked me.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Lie down and go to sleep.’
I nearly laughed. But she was actually reclining on the bed and closing her eyes. ‘What in gods names are you doing?’
‘Do you want to know how I kill warders?’
This was lunacy. But she was the only one in Kaya who’d figured out how to kill the monsters. With a groan of disbelief, I lay down on the bed opposite hers. My mind was racing and there was no way I was about to nod off.
‘Concentrate on your breathing,’ she murmured. ‘Slow it right down, as far as you can. Move your mind through every inch of your body and focus on the feel of it, on every muscle, every organ, every inch of skin. Imagine all of it slowing right down. Then imagine your mind is a still lake, and nothing can disturb its surface.’
I did as she was telling me, concentrating hard. Slow, I bid myself. Let everything be slow and still. I could feel myself relaxing, growing weary. It helped that I had been awake for over two days straight and was honestly exhausted. My body was heavy and sluggish, my mind was the lake.
The lake was … it was here. I stood before it, transfixed by its beauty. It stretched as far as I could see and its surface was sunlit glass. A ripple moved at its center, and then a small, pale hand emerged, fingertips first. The arm slid out, moving as if from between strips of silk. A creamy shoulder slipped free, shrugging from the water’s cloak.
A face emerged, turned up to the sky, blinking drops of water from her white eyelashes, drops that fell up into the air above. Her neck tilted, rising long and slim. Her breasts, small and white like the rest of her body as it slid up, falling up, up out of the lake, up like gravity was pulling her towards the sky.
When her hips and legs had come loose, when all of her had fallen from the water, her feet rested upon its surface, which was glasslike once more. Isadora turned her head and those red eyes locked onto me. I wanted to step in and meet her. Wanted to wade out to her, but my feet wouldn’t move.
So she came to me, drawing a knife from beneath her skin.
I dared not move.
She came so slowly, it seemed to take an age. Snow began to fall. Flakes rested in her hair, on her nose, her lips, her eyelashes. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. At last Isadora reached me. She said, ‘Don’t wake up,’ and then she cut me open with her dagger.
Pain broke through and I took a gasping breath, wrenching my eyes open. She was still there, but now she was clothed and we were in the attic room of the tavern once more.
Except … except that it was still snowing. Inside.
‘Don’t wake up,’ she said, but urgently now. Her eyes were so gold. Disoriented, I looked down to see that she had cut open my collarbone.
I climbed unsteadily to my feet, peering around in wonder.
‘It’s working,’ she breathed. ‘What is this?’
‘The dream realm.’
‘You brought me?’
She nodded. ‘Warder powers can’t touch us here.’
‘How? How did you bring me here?’
‘It’s pain. Pain to tether the body between realms. And our bond that let me tug you through the fold. We should hurry.’
‘Are we … where are we?’
‘Your body is in the real world. You can control it from the dream realm but things will be strange. Not as they appear when you wake. I can guide you through, but be certain not to let go of my hand.’ She met my eyes. ‘If you let go, Falco, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep you here, and they’ll kill you.’
‘I won’t let go.’
She pulled me to the door but I was suddenly drunk on her, on the snowflakes and her perfect skin, on the silken locks of long, white hair, on her scent and the impossible way she moved –
‘Falco!’
I shook my head, stunned. ‘You’re so beautiful.’
‘Concentrate,’ she urged. ‘Stay present.’
I helped her shove the chest out of the way; it weighed a thousand tonnes. We hurried down steps slippery with ice to find a warder charging through the door of the tavern, blasting it into a splinter heap.
I reached for my sword.
‘No,’ Isadora said, throwing a dagger made of light into the warder’s unprotected heart. ‘Leave the weapon. Just hold onto me.’
As we walked past the body she snatched her dagger free, releasing a burning slice of sunlight from the wound in the man’s chest. I tried to breathe. Tried to stay present. But it was so tempting to follow that light up –
She spoke my name, tethering me again. Into the early morning street we plunged. It was heavy with fog, so heavy I could hardly see my hand before my face.
‘Stop!’ came a voice, and there before us emerged four warders. In the dream realm their skin looked bruised and sallow, their eyes hollow pits of black.
Out flew her dagger. It turned the men to dust.
I felt an ache in my chest and lead weights in my feet. I couldn’t move forward, no matter how hard I tried. I was anchored to the earth beneath this road, and beneath that to the sea, way down below. I sank to my knees, listening for that sunken water. It was whispering in my ears, its waves crashing endlessly and growing so loud I could hear nothing else. I was sinking into it, swallowed by it –
Pain sliced through my face and I looked up, tethered once more. Isadora was gazing at me, and my blood dripped from her blade. ‘Concentrate,’ she told me. ‘We’re almost free.’
The warders were all dead. As she collected her knives from their bodies I was overcome by the violence. I had never taken a life. Not the life of an animal, not the life of a human, not the life of a warder. Isadora’s kills were likely too many to number. She was so distant from me then that the string tying our hearts together was pulled taut, stretched to the point of breaking. We ran with it stretching further and further, the distance opening up until we were on opposite sides of an infinite abyss.
The sun rose golden, on fire, crackling and spitting flames upon us. My hand went limp in hers.
‘Don’t,’ she said, feeling my intent to let her go. ‘Not yet. We’re not there yet.’
But it was burning.
‘Please,’ she begged, ‘there are more coming. I can’t protect you if you let go.’
‘You’re the only one I’ve ever needed protection from.’
She looked into my golden eyes. ‘Falco. Don’t let go.’
So I didn’t. I held tight and we escaped past another dozen. We sprinted through streets, took sharp turns, doubled back to make sure we weren’t being followed and finally made it home. My feet sank into the stones; it was difficult to move. But together we climbed the wall, still holding hands, and we walked past a staring Glynn, still holding hands, and we went inside to the bathroom, still holding hands.
Even now we didn’t let go, and I no longer knew why, and my heart was thun
dering.
‘You’re safe,’ Isadora said, as though worried I might be scared, and it was gone suddenly, the abyss, the distance, even the rope. The rope was gone: our hearts no longer needed it; our hearts were one. I understood it all. The death and the blood and the violence she endured was not born of desire or cruelty, but shouldered as a loathsome burden by someone strong enough to bear it. I understood she would kill again, to protect those who could not protect themselves. She would keep killing until there was no war, until we were free. And I understood, finally, how the necessity had turned to a sickness in her heart, a kind of madness.
I lifted my free hand to her cheek, her jaw, her neck, threading it through her hair. She turned her face into it, squeezing her eyes shut as her lips brushed my palm. ‘Don’t.’
‘It’s only a dream,’ I whispered, lowering my face.
‘Then don’t wake up.’
Our lips met and the world was filled with falling feathers, falling like snow, brushing our skin and our hair and our mouths. They wrapped us in their embrace and pressed our bodies closer until I felt the length of her along the length of me, tasted her lips and her tongue, kissed her eyelids and cheeks and neck. My mouth discovered that her skin had been sprinkled in a fine sheen of salt. As though she had just stepped from the sea. As though she was of the sea. A slippery creature of the dark depths. Or, no, perhaps it wasn’t salt, but snow. She was of the mountains, the ice, the winter. She was wild as wolves and just as fierce. I couldn’t get enough, couldn’t get close enough. I wanted more of her; I wanted all of her.
‘Falco.’
I blinked and she was gone. Where she’d been there was only absence. The bathroom was normal. The strange, beautiful colours had gone. There was no salt or snow on her skin, no feathers falling through the ceiling. She simply looked at me from the other side of the room – our hands were no longer entwined.
‘I lost you for a moment,’ Isadora told me softly.
‘Am I awake?’
She nodded.