Isadora

  Quillane, Empress of Kaya, and her mate, Radha. Both dead.

  I searched my mind, wondering if I had accidentally slipped into the dream realm where things were not as they should be.

  ‘You’re very much awake,’ Quillane told me. Her silky black hair swayed gently, cut along the line of her sharp jaw. She truly was beautiful.

  ‘Do you know why we’re here?’ Radha asked. She was the opposite of her mate, a wheat-coloured creature of hard lines and thin lips. She had fought well the night I killed her. She’d been clever, I remembered now, blowing out the flame of light and facing me in the dark. Blind in one eye and knowing well how to fight without sight. It hadn’t mattered.

  I didn’t speak to either of them. I couldn’t afford to give them that power over me. I let their presence settle. I accepted my ghosts as penance. I had never expected to pass through this life without having to pay a heavy price.

  Their presence changed nothing. They knew it and I knew it.

  They watched me and I watched them and none of us blinked, and at some point I must have fallen asleep. Because I was abruptly not here in this alcove, but in Radha’s room, slicing my blade into her heart and telling her I was sorry as her sweet, sweet eyes lost their glitter with a final shift to gold.

  Pain. Quick.

  I dug my fingernails into my palms hard enough to draw blood. It yanked me back in, harnessed me, and I rose, feeling the shift and blur in everything. The dead bondmates were gone. Asleep, I walked from the alcove and back into the chamber, only to find that too much time had passed and the Mad Ones were also gone.

  Though the walls of the hallways bled thick drops of blue-red blood, I walked through them until I found a staircase and then on until I reached the kitchen. There were knives here. The cooks and servants darted me glances but they knew my face by now and shooed me away without concern. I ignored them and their warped dream appearances, and I slipped two knives covertly into the folds of my skirts and then lifted a tray of drinks to carry with me.

  Now the walls of the corridors were made of twisting vines. Tiny rosebuds bloomed in them, fragrant and heady, alongside razor-sharp thorns, sliced free.

  Servants passed me, not sparing me a glance. Why should they? I was the slow-witted pet. I aimed for the dining hall where the Mad Ones enjoyed their banquet with Lutius and Gwendolyn. I would take them all tonight. But before I reached them I had to pass through a room filled with dragonflies.

  The gossamer wings flickered and parted before my eyes, allowing me to see what waited in this chamber. Twelve warders. Torturing a girl with magic.

  A dozen men, and only two knives.

  Impossible.

  But the girl screamed, her agony bursting into the air as a thousand flapping crows. The birds shrieked and cawed, their wings filling the air above the group like a dreadful cloud. They set my heart to thundering, set it to certainty. There was no way on this earth that I could turn back now, impossible as venturing forward may be. No way that I could let the girl continue to be harmed.

  Falco

  In the tunnel I stopped. Something wasn’t right. My heart was beating too fast and my skin was tingling. Were there dragonflies darting around my head? What – no, there were no dragonflies in the tunnel. I was going mad.

  ‘Falco?’ Finn asked from up ahead. They stopped to look back at me.

  We had been walking so long. Too long in this dark, dank tunnel.

  ‘It can’t be much further,’ Ava consoled me, thinking I was anxious about the confines. But I couldn’t care less about the tunnel. It had disappeared.

  I could feel her. And a deep, approaching dark. ‘I think …’ I whispered. ‘Oh, fuck.’ And blitzed past them, running faster than I ever had.

  Isadora

  A dozen men with two knives. Very well. I would find a way.

  But even dreaming, I felt the task settle upon me with concern. The dragonflies had shifting wings of gossamer and so beautiful were they, as they flew between the heavy dark of crows’ wings, that it was painful to drag my eyes from them. The roof was a veritable chaos of flying creatures. But on the ground was something else entirely.

  On the ground were twelve men and a girl. One small girl, weeping.

  Warders were different to men. I had an advantage, and it was simply that they wouldn’t know how to proceed when their magic didn’t work. Twelve normal men with only two knives would be too many, because they would react with physical urgency and that innate human need to survive, to use fists and elbows and feet and guts and balls and the fight fight fight of life.

  But these were barely men anymore. They knew the lofty unreality of magic. They knew a detachment from base urges and primal, animal instinct. They knew nothing of fists or fight.

  That girl on the floor knew animal instinct. She knew fists and fight. She screamed again, but this time in fury, and she lashed out at the warder even though she knew it would provoke him into sending a terrible bolt of pain into her arching spine.

  It was in her courage that I found mine. I took a breath and began.

  Speed. That was what I’d need. Before they understood I had already taken out two, raising the blades and slashing them through two throats. For the next I slid low, slashing through the artery in his thigh, and twisted back up to stab a fourth in the guts. I leapt onto a table and used the momentum to plunge my knife down into the skull of another. The blade was much blunter than I was used to, and it got wedged in bone.

  There was shouting now. They were flinging impotent hands at me but I was still moving, wrenching the knife free and plunging it into the heart of a sixth. One of the warders ran at me, trying to pull me off his comrade, but he was clumsy and weak. I allowed him to haul me free, and as he tumbled back I jammed the blades down into his guts.

  Kicking out at another warder who came at me, I flipped myself back over the body beneath, using the momentum to cut my knives up through the throat of my attacker.

  I turned to the rest of the room. Someone screamed for help. ‘Destroy her!’ another snarled. I ran at him first, spinning to cut his throat, then another, and another. And for the last warder, who even now stood over the girl as if she was his possession, I threw my dagger through the air and embedded it in his heart.

  As the room fell still I stopped to catch my breath.

  It was a mistake, stopping. Looking. Letting adrenalin settle. Because a great, woozy sense of horror struck me, even though it never struck while I still dreamt. No, the horror usually waited for me in the waking realm. But now, here, still in the dream, the crows dived at me, screeching their attack. I could feel them raking through my skin, tearing off pieces of me. I curled into a ball and squeezed my eyes shut, willing it away, all of it, including everything I was.

  ‘Wake up!’

  No. The nightmare of waking.

  A voice split my ears and I lurched into consciousness. Above me was an unfamiliar face. The girl who’d been tortured, shaking me. ‘Please, wake up! We have to go! They’re coming!’

  I struggled to rise, saw the desolation around me and stopped, paralysed.

  ‘Please,’ the girl wept frantically. ‘Please get up. We have to go. People are coming, I can hear them.’

  ‘Go,’ I told her.

  ‘Not without you. I won’t go without you.’

  But the bodies and the blood. Something had changed. I couldn’t look away. I could always look away only I couldn’t, not now. I shook my head: I couldn’t go yet, I had to stay here with the dead, my dead.

  She sobbed, climbing to her feet. ‘What’s your name?’

  My eyes darted up to the ceiling. There had been wings. Now there were none.

  ‘Your name!’

  ‘Isadora.’

  ‘I’ll find you,’ the girl vowed, and fled.

  Alone, I leant over and vomited onto the marble. I didn’t understand – I had seen worse, I had imagined and done worse, but my body was revolting. It had had enough. I couldn’t leave this room, I’
d never deserve to. I’d stay here in this nightmare forever, trapped with them, with all the lives I’d stolen –

  No. Don’t. Don’t go there.

  Slowly, very slowly, I stood.

  Around me was a sea of blood; it seeped towards my feet and for some mindless reason I didn’t move. I just let it reach me and lap languidly over my skin. It licked my feet as it did my hands until I wore red socks and red gloves.

  That was when I heard footsteps approaching along the marble corridor. The girl had been right. They were coming. The butcher or the meat, I screamed inwardly. You can’t be the meat. You can’t.

  Please, I begged myself. Don’t give up now.

  Ten seconds, if that, to place my actions and the violence inside a very small box and move it to the bottom of the lake. Ten seconds to do that, and to draw the two kitchen knives. No time to escape – no possible way out of this. Which meant whoever entered through that door would have to die. Because I had to get to the Mad Ones, I had to. Ten seconds to do all of that, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Nothing was fitting in any boxes, and no locks were strong enough.

  Eight, nine, ten, and the footsteps arrived. A person exploded into the room and stopped. Shadows obscured them and for a disorienting moment I couldn’t see properly, didn’t recognise who had come.

  Then he shifted, and I saw – he was here.

  A great, woozy disbelief and a pounding panic and a heart beat beat beating – how could I not have felt him sooner? Because of the violence, that was why. The bond did not live in the same space as this kind of violence.

  His long golden hair was tied back, his glittering eyes shadowed and his boots muddy. I started to cry. Because I had done too much, had become too monstrous for my own heart to bear. And yet here he was, as strange as any dream.

  Falco crossed the bloodied tableau in an instant. He put his hands on my face and he held it and looked into me and even though I was crying he still managed to keep me inside his eyes. I shook my head desperately, whispering, ‘You’re too late, I already did it, I didn’t stop.’

  But he said, ‘No more. Put it in its box and lock it.’

  ‘The box is too small for this.’

  ‘Make it bigger.’

  ‘The lock is too weak.’

  ‘Make it stronger.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then I will do it for you.’

  I stared at him. His face was so close, his breath on my lips.

  ‘It’s done,’ Falco said softly. ‘All of this is small and over. We have to leave now.’

  And so that was how the boxes became big enough and the locks strong enough. That was how all of this went to where it couldn’t touch me. That was how I straightened my shoulders and turned myself to stone. How I emptied my mind spirit heart and remembered all too clearly that I hated this man almost as much as I hated myself.

  I nodded once, and we moved for the door.

  Someone was darting down the hall and I could hardly believe my eyes as I recognised her. Finn of Limontae spotted me and closed the gap between us, taking me into her arms. I stiffened, unsure of what to do. Her skin on mine was unbearable. But some part of me wanted so badly to give way to it, to allow it – this affection of hers, this strength and generosity and caring. That was not, however, the monster that had been forged.

  Finn stood back, searching my face. She wore none of her usual scorn or sarcasm. ‘You look weird,’ she said. Whether she meant the look of my hair and skin, or the look of my soul, I didn’t know.

  I licked my lips, stepping away from her. There was too much blood on my hands.

  ‘Jonah and Penn?’ she asked urgently. ‘Are they alive?’

  I nodded, and she sagged against me once more.

  ‘Come on,’ Falco said.

  He was right – we had no time for talk. A guard ran towards us along the hall; I spun and slammed my fist into his jaw, knocking him unconscious. He fell and we continued on. I didn’t look at either of my companions. I didn’t care what they thought. There were boxes and I was a gods-damned soldier in this war.

  ‘Izzy, we have to –’

  I threw my knife, hilt first, into the temple of the next guard who ran at us, then crossed to reclaim it from beside her unconscious body. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Falco take Finn’s hand and draw her forwards. My eyes moved to where his skin touched hers. Such ease he had in touching another human being. I turned and continued on.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I heard Falco ask Finn. Their familiarity was clear; it was there in their voices and clasped hands.

  ‘Os is waiting for us on the roof,’ she answered. Going to the roof would be infantile. I shook my head, stalking forwards.

  ‘Izzy, there’s a plan, we have to go to the roof,’ Finn pressed. ‘We have a warder who’s meeting us …’

  A balloon of hatred in my chest, my throat, moving up into my mouth, curling my lip.

  ‘Not with them,’ Falco told me. ‘With us.’

  Us. An amused breath left me. Us. ‘I’m here to kill the Mad Ones.’

  ‘The palace is in chaos. You’ll never get to them now,’ Falco told me. ‘Either you come with us and our man gets us out, or we go with you and try to get out your way. We don’t separate.’

  My hackles rose. We would separate if I wanted us to separate. I could lose them in a breath. But I looked at Finn’s face and knew that even if I did disappear, she would follow. And my way had us plunging into the bowels of the palace and hoping for enough luck to be able to fight our way out. It had been a suicide mission after all, one I hadn’t expected to survive. Which meant Falco died. And Finn of Limontae. Finn, who I – surprisingly, abruptly – cared for.

  So I followed them to the roof.

  A man stood there, his hair a faded black, his eyes a faded green. Perhaps he looked a little like me. I didn’t know. All I knew was that he looked like a warder, and I hated him. There was a woman, too, half her face covered.

  The warder’s eyes took me in. ‘Hands,’ he ordered.

  People were mounting the stairs – I could hear them. The door crashed open, just as we grabbed each other’s hands and –

  Whoosh.

  I slammed into the earth, my ankles and knees buckling. My spine hit hard ground and I felt the air ripped from my lungs. Nausea followed, a great roiling mess of it through my guts. All my energy was gone and I realised the warder filth had stolen it.

  Swallowing quickly, I forced myself upright even as the world spun around me. The warder and Finn were already standing, unaffected. The other woman struggled to sit and Falco was curled into a ball, but straightened as I watched. I felt his heartbeat in my chest, then forced it into a box. Whatever had happened between us in that death room upstairs was irrelevant. I had to distance myself from it, from the dangerous intensity of it.

  I peered around dizzily. We were not in the palace anymore. We were in an alley near the markets. It was a rough, violent area.

  ‘Where are we?’ Finn asked.

  ‘I don’t know where I brought us,’ the warder said wearily. ‘Too many people …’

  ‘Where’s safe?’ Falco asked me.

  I didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Nowhere at night.’ He and I were keeping as far from each other as we could. The thought of his skin touching mine again caused a revolt in my chest, as it must have in his.

  Carefully I led them out into the streets. We crept along several, staying to the edges, the shadows, though there was not much light left in any case. I could get myself home easily enough but I couldn’t get four others through the city without being spotted, so we needed somewhere to hide until daybreak.

  ‘A tavern?’ Falco whispered at one point.

  And be detected within moments by the warder spies? I shook my head and led them to a stable. The warder calmed the horses within so they wouldn’t make a sound; not with magic, I didn’t think, but with touches. We crouched low in the last empty stall at the very back.

  ‘This is Osric
,’ Finn said of the warder.

  I glanced at him, then away.

  ‘And this is Isadora,’ she went on. ‘I’d say she’s usually friendlier, but it would be a big fat lie. Izzy, you seem to have already met Falco. You know – Emperor Falco. And this is Queen Ava of Pirenti.’

  My eyebrows arched and I looked at the woman as she removed her scarf to show me the terrible scar on her face. The brand of a howling wolf. The ugliness of it was beautiful. I inclined my head to her and she did the same to me.

  But I was still covered in blood – too ashamed to be comfortable under their gaze. I busied myself checking the stalls for any sign of surveillance. The windows were locked, as was the door, and we were far enough from the palace that –

  ‘I’ll know of any approaches,’ Osric told me.

  Turning my eyes to his, I met them coldly for a long moment. Then I continued my check on the stables.

  ‘She doesn’t mean to be rude,’ I heard Finn say.

  That was when Falco spoke. ‘She might mean to be. She might be entitled to be.’

  A chill moved over my skin. I didn’t like that he’d stood up for me. I thought of feckless, beautiful royals, untrustworthy warders and amorous laughing cliffside girls. I thought of home, my forest and its deformed inhabitants, silent and cast-off like me. I didn’t belong here, or anywhere near it.

  ‘Osric is with us,’ Finn snapped. ‘You’d have Isadora treat him like those morons in Glenvale did?’

  ‘She can treat him however she likes,’ Falco replied. ‘He’s a big boy – I’m sure he can handle it.’

  I walked back to the stall and sat facing the door. I had no interest in their argument. Clasping my hands over my knees, I settled in to keep watch.

  ‘Shifts,’ Ava said softly. ‘Isadora will go first, clearly. She will wake Falco in an hour. I’ll wake Finn, who will wake me. Then we leave.’

  ‘What about me?’ Osric asked.

  ‘You need more rest. Sleep the night through.’

  If I was so inclined I might have pointed out that a warder would be useless from here on in, because the use of his powers would be a beacon to the Mad Ones; I was not, so I stayed quiet and kept watch. Let the precious warder have his precious sleep. The moment he and I were alone, I would gut him.