Isadora

  ‘What did you plan on doing with the world when you had killed me?’ I asked her abruptly.

  She took her time replying. ‘Disempower the warders.’

  ‘All of them?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How?’

  ‘By teaching people to lucid dream.’

  ‘What about the warders who aren’t corrupt?’

  I was afforded a sceptical glance.

  ‘So you’d punish them all for the actions of a few. Eradicate magic entirely.’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with the people. I take issue with the magic. With anything that can be manipulated by some humans and not others.’

  ‘Then why do you carry weapons?’

  She shot me an impatient look.

  ‘What you’re saying is no one should have a skill that others don’t,’ I pressed. ‘No one should have superior strength or speed, or carry a sharper weapon. No one should excel at anything. If I’m stronger than you it must mean I’ll hurt you.’

  ‘Human strength doesn’t corrupt souls. Soul magic destroys those it inhabits. It’s not a matter of if, but when.’

  ‘What of Jonah? Finn? Osric? You would condemn them before they’ve committed a crime? Wipe them all out to avoid danger? That’s negligent. A ruler who thinks of all as one can too easily commit democide.’

  ‘And allowing a problem to fester and grow will be the ruin of all. I would have thought you’d learned that by now.’

  I closed my mouth, surprised she’d engaged in a political conversation at all.

  Time passed. I was trapped in it, wanting it to speed up or slow down, anything but to move at its normal pace. Something was missing, some piece I couldn’t remember, couldn’t fit into place. It niggled at the edge of my mind, just out of reach. It was the answer to this mess, I knew it.

  I questioned Isadora constantly, starting to lose my handle on things. She stopped answering, stopped communicating except with looks. She’d obviously fulfilled her quota of words and I was left to my own company.

  ‘So what do we do?’ I demanded days later. ‘I don’t accept this end.’

  Isadora didn’t say anything.

  ‘Speak, Izzy. You have to speak. I tried to do this on my own but I can’t. The silence is sending me spare.’

  She met my eyes as she rarely had. I let my desperation rise to the surface – I was literally begging at this point. Swallowing, she clearly made an effort. ‘I don’t know what to do. I was never able to get free on my own.’

  ‘The sleepwalking?’

  ‘Can’t move me through metal bars.’

  ‘Does anyone pass by here? Your people?’

  ‘We’re in the wilderness,’ she replied. ‘It’s dangerous rocky terrain, and there are no roads nearby. My people live south-east in the forest.’

  ‘Fuck.’ I peered into the dark below. ‘What’s really down there?’

  She shook her head, incensed. ‘I told you.’

  ‘They haven’t attacked us.’

  ‘Yet.’

  But the niggling thing, the missing piece. I had the edge of it now, and turned it over in my hands. ‘It’s not as far as it looks … Gwendolyn said that. Right before.’

  We frowned, peering down. I could hear Izzy’s scepticism in her silence.

  ‘She intentionally let Penn go,’ I said. I got to my knees and studied the loop connecting the chain to the cage. ‘I think I can get this free.’

  She shook her head quickly.

  ‘It’s the only way to break the cage,’ I insisted. ‘It might crack if it falls from a great enough height.’

  ‘As will we!’

  ‘Maybe not.’ I started calculating, mapping it out in my head, working out angles and timing. ‘How far is it really?’

  Izzy bit her lip, considering. ‘Fifty meters, maybe. More?’

  ‘That’s how far it looked. Which means it’s less.’

  ‘Says the Viper.’

  ‘What do we have to lose?’ I studied the cage while I worked it through aloud. ‘It will hurt. The damage will be proportional to the force at which we hit the ground. Which is great for breaking the cage, but not so great for us. Force depends on momentum, momentum is mass times velocity. If we can change our velocity even a little it will lesson the force. So we jump within our cage. But we have to do it right before we land, otherwise we could increase how far we fall.’ I looked over to see that she was staring at me. ‘What?’

  ‘How do you know all that?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ll go first and call up if I survive.’

  ‘Stop. Think a moment.’

  ‘I just did.’

  She shook her head helplessly. ‘Falco.’

  I turned to her.

  Her mouth opened but nothing came out.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I smiled. ‘If I die, you’ll still be alive to think of another way out.’

  Isadora

  Stop him. Don’t let him do this. But too old were my wounds, and too deeply scarred upon me. I nodded and said, ‘Then it’s lucky we broke the bond.’

  Falco’s smile turned gentle and knowing. ‘Aye.’

  Something passed between us, a little piece of truth. He reached up through the bars and took hold of the chain, removing his weight from the cage. Then he unhooked it and he was falling.

  My chest lurched as he disappeared into the darkness. I heard the crash of his landing, quicker than I expected. ‘Falco!’

  A groan reached up to my ears, and then pained words. ‘Still alive! But gods that hurt.’ I listened to him shuffle, wishing he’d waited for the sun to be higher. ‘It worked!’ he shouted. ‘The cage broke! When you go, keep hold of the bars above so the bottom of your cage will break most of your fall!’

  He’d actually worked it out.

  I took the sparrow bones I’d meticulously sharpened and slid them into the waistband of my breeches. Then I reached up and hung onto the bars of the cage.

  Something made me pause.

  An inexplicable, irrational fear threaded my pulse. Not of falling or dying, but of leaving the cage. Of returning to the overwhelming, crowded, intimate, violent beyond. In the cage I was nothing. I was safe. In the beyond I was a monster drenched in blood, and worse – there were people out there who wanted something of me, wanted to be always talking or touching or questioning, giving me things and asking for things and expecting and wishing and requiring and taking. In the cage, I needed no words. In the beyond, I never had enough.

  In the cage, I didn’t have anyone. In the beyond, I didn’t have Falco.

  I closed my eyes and tried to reach for the lake of calm, but it was gone.

  ‘Isadora,’ Falco shouted up to me, ‘you can do it!’

  But he didn’t understand. I was panicking.

  ‘Don’t let Dren and Galia choose your fate for you,’ he called. And it was enough, it was where my hate lived.

  It took me a few goes to unhook the cage and then I felt the world drop out from under me. A hollow whoosh swept through my stomach and crushed me against the top of the cage. I held onto the bars as tightly as I could and –

  I hit with a huge crash. My hands were ripped free and I slammed into the ground, dislocating both my shoulder and hip. A gasp of pain stole my breath and for a too-long moment my entire world was eclipsed by the fire in my left side.

  Then Falco was there, dragging me out of the bent and broken metal and lying me on the earth. ‘Where?’

  ‘Hip and shoulder,’ I panted, squeezing my eyes shut.

  ‘Hip first.’ He took my leg and I tried to prepare myself, tried to count or breathe or something, but I didn’t have a chance before he wrenched it up and to the side. I screamed as the joint twisted back into its socket.

  Falco didn’t give me a single second to recover – he moved straight to take my wrist.

  ‘Wait, wait –’

  He pulled it up so the muscle could rotate back into place, and I blacked out.

  As I came back around the
pain was dizzying, but less. I breathed in, feeling queasy. I could see, even wreathed in shadows, that both my palms were bleeding profusely.

  ‘Good advice,’ I snapped, noting that he was in much better shape than I was.

  Falco turned and showed me the back of his skull, which had a badly bleeding gash. ‘You’re better off without the head injury.’

  I tore strips from the ankles of my trews and wrapped them tightly around my palms. Then I made him carefully remove his shirt so I could wrap it around his head with as much padding as possible. He could be badly concussed or have a brain injury, which meant he’d deteriorate quickly. We shared a look, both aware there was nothing to be done about it but hope.

  ‘You managed to do what I couldn’t in twelve years,’ I said.

  ‘I spent my adolescence studying physics and mathematics. You spent yours sitting in a cage. You could hardly be expected to know how to get out.’

  ‘Even without all the gibberish you went on with,’ I muttered, ‘it was still common sense to drop the cage.’

  ‘And when did you have a chance to learn common sense?’

  I flushed with embarrassment. Moving awkwardly to the wall of the chasm, I began the climb despite the pain in my body.

  ‘There are tunnels,’ he protested. ‘Look. We don’t have to climb.’

  ‘You don’t wish to face what lurks in those tunnels,’ I replied softly. ‘Not for anything in the world. Climb, Falco, and do it quickly. They will have smelled the blood.’

  They did come, and they followed us up the wall in that swift sinister way of theirs, never emerging entirely from the shadows, though their eyes glowed red just like mine. Their teeth were sharp but they were no match for the sparrow bones I darted into their mouths and eyes and soon, soon, Falco and I made it into the sunlight and up over the lip of the chasm.

  Together we sagged to the ground and stared up at the sky. My wounds hurt, but Falco was worse. His eyes kept losing focus and drifting shut.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep.’

  He smiled. ‘Strange. You’re usually telling me not to wake up.’

  Something in my chest tightened in fear at the fading quality of his voice. I forced him to his feet.

  We walked. On and on for days. We ate what we could and drank from streams. We didn’t speak. Falco went in and out of feeling well or drifting into a barely conscious haze. I silently pleaded with him to make it to civilisation where we could find a physician.

  My body hurt too. But it didn’t hurt like the very heart of me was beginning to, the greatest of all the wounds, where he had been cut from me. He was the other half of my soul, after all, and we’d never been born to be parted.

  ‘Which way?’ Falco asked.

  I shielded my eyes against the glare of the white salt lake. It stretched as far as I could see into the distance. To travel around would slow our path considerably and I wasn’t sure Falco could make the extra leagues – so we would have to hope for rain or we’d die of thirst trying to cross the enormous expanse.

  I led him onto the surface, feeling the crunch of salt beneath my boots. It had formed winding circular patterns a long time ago, made by the movement of the earth and the wind, I supposed.

  ‘I wonder what the world looked like before the ocean here dried out,’ he said.

  ‘There was no ocean here.’

  ‘The salt remains to tell us of another time, another world. We’re standing in a spot that must have once been hundreds of leagues underwater.’

  It was a strange notion, and I found myself comforted by it. It made me feel powerless in the face of time and the earth beneath my feet, and the feeling wasn’t unwelcome. ‘So much is lost,’ I commented.

  ‘But look at what beauty remains.’

  I frowned. It was just … white. And painful to look upon. The salt glistened in the sun like ice or snow and yet the land here was incredibly hot. I had difficulty sometimes determining what was beautiful and what was ordinary. I’d always thought I knew what was ugly, but maybe I didn’t really know that either. I swallowed, unsure how to voice my question. ‘Do you not … does it not make you feel insignificant?’

  Falco peered around, letting his eyes travel over the horizon. He was more lucid than he’d been in days. ‘Strange, I suppose, but I find myself not all that bothered by insignificance.’

  ‘Is a ruler meant to think that way?’

  He shrugged, smiling crookedly. ‘I have no idea what a ruler’s meant to do.’

  I dropped my eyes and as we walked I thought hard about what that meant.

  We’d covered about half of the salt lake by the time the sun went down. Exhausted, we stopped to rest a few hours on the hard ground, neither of us inclined to keep talking. I took watch, searching the dark for signs of movement.

  I woke later to a painful thirst. Rolling over, I was met with Falco’s staring eyes. I sat up quickly, embarrassed to have fallen asleep. The moon was huge above us, and lit the salt with an eerie, lovely glow.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘don’t move.’

  I paused, unsure if he was warning me of danger.

  ‘I dreamt of you like this once,’ he murmured, frowning. His gaze traced over my skin and hair. ‘Covered in salt.’

  I looked down to realise I was indeed covered. My fingers drifted up to feel that my hair was filled with coarse grains – it, too, was coated. There wasn’t a great deal of difference in the colour. I was surprised he’d noticed.

  ‘It shimmers a little,’ he offered, like he’d read my thoughts. But he could no longer do that. The notion was a trick, a seduction of my heart. This moment felt a dream.

  I rose to my feet and carried on, prompting him to follow.

  The rain started that night and was at first a relief, soon a burden. The cold crept into our bones and made it hard to walk. But we continued on through morning and reached the edge of the salt lake. With a last look back at the roiling grey sky and luminous earth, I turned my sights and thoughts away from whatever beauty it held and towards what I had to do.

  I would reach my army and march them east to Sancia. I would destroy everyone in the palace. And for that I would need to be the Sparrow once more, not a salt-covered girl sparkling in the moonlight.

  We were two days’ walk from the village when he collapsed. We were so close, had made it so far already. The rain continued to pour, turning everything soggy. It was how he slipped, and why he couldn’t get back up again.

  ‘Falco!’

  He stirred groggily and muttered, ‘Quill?’

  We’d reached a muddy road, but I could see nothing through the curtain of rain. We were a long way west, and none wandered these parts for fear of getting lost too near the border of Pirenti.

  ‘Stand up,’ I ordered him, water persistently running into my eyes. ‘You must stand and walk.’

  He moaned, but his eyes remained closed. The shirt around his skull was soaked through not only with rain but with blood. I slapped him on the face and shook his shoulders but it didn’t rouse him.

  ‘Please get up,’ I urged. ‘Falco, I need you to get up. I’m not strong enough to carry you.’

  I wasn’t. I wasn’t strong enough. I was so small, and he so much bigger.

  And why should I care? Truly, why? Was this not what I’d wanted? This man’s death was meant to be the purpose of my life. I wasn’t blind to what I’d felt for him when bonded. I’d honestly believed I was in love with him. But the remnant of a thing I had never chosen and had fought to end should not be enough to nullify the very purpose of my life. How had I become so weak?

  Leave him. Leave him here for the crows to pick at, and take what you are strong enough to take from a broken world. Eradicate what monstrosity you are strong enough to eradicate.

  Here was what I believed.

  That you were either the hunter or the hunted. The butcher or the meat. The caged or the free. I believed that I would use my daggers to cut out the hearts of the Mad Ones.

  But no
longer was that all I believed.

  The terrible truth made itself clear as I watched a man die. He may not believe in himself, but I did. I believed in Falco of Sancia, and knew he would be the one to free us from the warders.

  So even though I wasn’t strong enough, I rolled him onto my shoulders and I rose trembling to my feet. My hip and shoulder hurt so badly that tears were in my eyes, lost in the rain as they streamed endlessly down my cheeks, but I took step after slippery step towards the village ahead, for hours and hours. Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t take another step, but step I did, because I was forged in a cage by cruelty and madness, and I would not let the distance between my feet and that village be the thing that defeated me. I would carry him forever if I had to.

  I couldn’t make it to the nearest village in Sanra. So I did something I’d vowed never to: I veered north-west and crossed into Pirenti. We were just as likely to be killed as helped so close to the border. Those on the edge of the two countries had never been able to put old enmities to bed – fights and skirmishes still broke out to this day. But it was Falco’s only hope.

  When I saw the village in the distance I sank to my knees and felt his body tumble from my shoulders. With the only strength I had left I stretched out to catch his poor head, protecting it from the hard, wet ground. Then I lifted my other hand and held it high in the air. Sentries would be posted at all times, and lightning struck often; I prayed for them to see me.

  It was two boys who at last came running. Small figures at first, slipping and sliding through the storm to reach us. When they arrived I saw they were very young. I licked my lips and rasped, ‘Run for help.’

  One of the boys sprinted away, but the other stayed and sank to his knees beside me. I looked up to see that he was dark-haired and dark-eyed, his hair shaved short in the fashion of adult Pirenti warriors. Water ran in rivulets from his long eyelashes to his lips.