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.