And to my astonishment, those who were tired of fearing the northern giants reached out starving, trembling fingers to me, and soon they followed the demon child back into the forest to where the other monsters lived.
They were the ones who, with courage and loyalty, earned the right to know my second name. My true name.
Sparrow.
Together we waited for the day when our Emperor would demand that Sanra be returned to Kayan rule, the day they would send their soldiers in to banish the Pirenti from our land and rescue us from our lives of servitude, casting off the ugly northern name with which we’d been so deeply insulted.
The day never came. Even with peace between our two countries, it never came.
So I started to plan my own day.
On this day, I would free my people. I would force the rest of our country to acknowledge the forgotten, all those in the world who were different or ignored or feared. Then I would free even the Kayans who never helped us, because we were, all of us, puppets to cruel and cold masters. The power of the warders was not something any normal person could rise up against. But I knew how to kill them, and so I would end the warder dominion once and for all. Even if it took an army and a war and an ocean of blood, I would do this. Because the final thing I would do on this day, my day, forged out of the turning of the world by a demon child, was destroy the man who had the power to change things, but instead allowed our nation to be the way it was. Falco of Sancia, Emperor of Kaya.
The final stage of my plan took effect on the day I turned twenty-five. Seventeen years after my escape from the cage. Seventeen long years of building armies and building fear. Falco had come to power at ten years old when the rest of his family was slaughtered. Which was why I had waited years for him to grow into his role, grow old enough to understand what he had to do for the people of Sanra. But he never did, never tried to help us. I made my first attack on his people the day he turned fifteen, and for the last ten years had been winning more and more ground by making sure my warriors were fiercer and more savage than any Falco could throw at me. When finally I left Sanra to reach Limontae, rumours ran like wildfire about an end to the bond and the arrival of the Prince of Beasts. It would be through him and through the discovery of the end of the bond that I would find my way into the holy city of warders, and then into the palace where Falco hid with his eyes covered.
When he was dead, I would send in my armies.
I did not plan on the twins. Their quick smiles and sharp eyes. Their laughter. Finn’s headstrong disregard and sheer strength of character. Jonah’s kiss, cool and awkward, and the generosity of his feelings for me. I did not plan on the gentility and strength of the boy-prince. I did not plan on Penn, who was my favourite of all.
But nothing worth having ever came easily or without sacrifice.
That trip through Pirenti in the back of a cage changed everything. For I knew the caged life intimately, but I had never known it to be shared with others. Their presence shifted it all. In a cage with Jonah and Penn I imagined a different life. With these children, so bold and soulful. They offered warmth – warmth – and this was something I had never known.
During the darkest night of my soul I questioned it all. The plan. My life’s work. Revenge soaked in the blood of Kayan men and women.
What came at the end of that long night was the answer to it all: escaped prisoners and a warder attack on Sancia. It was the perfect way in, the perfect moment to make my move on Falco. And it was a sign. I would shoulder the fate I had decided on seventeen years ago, and I would finish it. I had people relying on me.
Jonah brought the three of us to the palace in Sancia; an incredible feat of power. There, in the chaos of shouting guards and falling roofs, I crept away from those who named me friend but did not know me, not at all. In my heart I bid them silent farewells, knowing I would never see them again, and then I made my way to my first target.
Falco would be easy. He was a drunken coward. But I had spies in this palace and so I knew a secret. A secret I would use to punish him. Quillane would be guarded too heavily to get to. But she had a secret bondmate who would not be. A secret mate who was locked away as though she was a shameful burden, purely because a warder’s magic had doomed her to such a cruel fate. When I killed this mate, the Empress of Kaya would die, and Falco would know I was coming for him. I wanted him to know that fear. That loneliness.
I crept my way down the secret tunnel.
The woman – her name was Radha – was small and pretty. She gave a good fight, but she was no match for the creature I had become. She died quickly, my knife in her heart and through her throat. I felt grief, a stab of it in my guts – for her innocence, for the waste of this life, for the cruelty that possessed my hands. I stood over her, whispering an apology and a prayer, and I wondered for the first time in my life if I really was demon spawn.
But time was passing quickly, and I had another life to take.
A life undeserving of all that it had been given. A weak and pathetic life, a life wasted on women and wine, a life careless with the people he ruled, and stupid enough to allow his enemies to grow. A life that was unskilled and untrained and would be easy to take.
My footsteps were silent over the marble. My hood was pulled up to hide my hair and face. Blood pulsed too fast through my veins. Rounding a dark corner, I found my way to his bedroom. Something was wrong – there were no guards in place at the door, nor was it locked. It might be too late. He might have been evacuated already, or killed in the attack.
But some part of me said that no. He would not be dead or gone. He would be waiting for me. Because this was a meeting decided lifetimes ago. A meeting every footstep in my life had led me to.
Slowly now I made my way into the room. Shadows flickered within candlelight. A voice spoke from the floor on the other side of the bed.
‘Quill,’ it said, soft like a whisper, like a prayer, and something inside me froze. ‘I’m so sorry, my love.’
It was the voice, his voice. It didn’t sound anything like I’d imagined it to sound. It wasn’t pompous or drunken. There was no arrogance lining its edges. Instead it was soft and broken and beautiful.
No. No, no, no.
This didn’t feel right. Something was moving, reaching out, taking hold. Pieces were crumbling, truths shifting.
I took another step – it was all my feet seemed to be able to manage. Her hand came into view, lifeless on the expensive rug. The top of his head, with its golden hair.
Move now, I told myself. While he’s unprepared and grieving.
I couldn’t. Couldn’t move in any direction, and I didn’t know why, but I felt the voice as it wound its way firmly around each one of my bones and held tight, too tight, crushingly tight. My body forgot how to breathe, how to function, how to live.
A sound left my mouth, the softest of all sounds, but he heard it. In one fluid movement he was up; my eyes dropped unaccountably to his feet. A way to deny. To prevent.
Stupid, really. My soul already knew the truth: there would be no preventing this inevitability.
My gaze started travelling up. Up the long legs in leather working boots that no palace born man would wear. Up over the narrow hips, the white tunic, over the broad shoulders and along the taut, wiry arms, far too strong to belong to court nobility. Over hands that were not soft or weak, but were in fact moving to rest on the hilt of a sword that was not in any way an ornament; large, worn hands, the hands of a warrior, the sword of a warrior.
I didn’t understand, but my eyes continued to move.
Up the long, graceful neck, past the locks of hair the colour of spun gold. Over the jaw, clenched now in a fury I was unprepared for. Men who didn’t care were not supposed to feel fury like that, like the hammer of the Gods. I paused at the mouth, wide and tense, and inside my heart screamed and screamed and screamed because I was starting to understand, and I needed to close my eyes.
I needed to squeeze them shut and flee from this place before
the world came crashing down.
Instead, I let my gaze move up over his sharp, angular face, to rest, at long last, on his crystalline eyes.
And that was when both sets, his and mine, turned simply to gold.
Here was truth.
I knew it deep inside me, threaded through my soul.
He was not feckless.
He was astonishingly cunning.
And he was mine.
We stood staring at each other in silence for a long time. I felt his grief in my own heart, clear now because of the bond that would tie us together for the rest of our lives. I felt that grief, but I felt, too, the unmistakable fluttering of a joyous, weightless love. It was wrong, this love.
It was a jeering lesson in the laughably cruel ways of the world. A cold sneer at my own supposed beliefs and understandings.
This love said to me, You don’t know anything about life, or death. You have no way to understand the twists and turns of fate – no way to bear them. Your entire life has been a practical joke.
‘Your name is Isadora,’ he said finally, in that deep, honeyed voice of his. It was not the voice I had heard him use for the public announcements – that voice was high and unsteady.
It was unbearably sweet, to hear my name on his lips, in his true voice. But a different name rose to mine, one that would haunt us both forever. ‘No. It’s Sparrow.’
He knew, of course. But the acknowledgment of it sheathed through his heart and I saw tears in his eyes.
‘I dream of you.’
‘What do you dream?’ I whispered.
‘Of the day we meet. Over and over. One of us always dies. I never thought it would be both of us.’
I closed my eyes, letting the sound of him wash over me.
I heard him move closer, but I didn’t open my eyes. He stopped just before me, so close that I could feel his breath.
‘Falco.’ Just to say his name once, to have it on my lips.
‘Before,’ he said. ‘Before we die. Just once.’
I felt his lips on mine and it hurt, it hurt. I tasted his tears in my mouth, against his lips and his skin. I remained trapped in a lifetime’s worth of torture, unable to move.
I told him, ‘I want the whole world to burn for this.’
Falco stepped away, and it was like a death, that simple stepping away. He looked so weary. All this pretence, all these years of lying, and no one would ever know the truth but he and I, and we were not long for this world. It seemed like a tragedy all of its own.
‘It will be Lutius or you,’ he murmured. ‘You’ve both come for me. I would prefer it to be you.’
I nodded once.
And that was when we heard it. The footsteps in the corridor.
We froze, unsure what to do. This was the moment – we had to do it now. But we were each as cowardly as the other, because instead of sheathing my knife into his heart, I leapt instead for the open window. He helped me through it, and right before I disappeared down the outside of the building, our golden eyes met, and he simply said, ‘Until next time, my Sparrow.’
Falco
I watched her go and I almost laughed at the exquisite absurdity of it all.
The small, strange friend. The one I had paid no attention to – had barely glanced at. She’d changed it all. All the heartbeats of my entire life.
The footsteps at the door belonged to Osric. ‘Praise the Gods,’ he breathed. ‘You’re alive.’
‘One of us is,’ I murmured, gesturing to Quillane’s body. Even to glance at her hurt like knives.
Osric’s face flashed with a pain that surprised me; I hadn’t known the man to be so patriotic.
‘How did you get here?’ I asked him, feeling idle, wasted, ruined. (And secretly, secretly reborn.)
‘I jumped. You must come with me now, Majesty.’
‘Where? The palace is overrun.’
‘I will take you to Pirenti.’
‘I won’t leave my city. My country.’
‘Kaya is no longer yours,’ he said bluntly. ‘But if you survive this day, we may yet find a way to make it yours once more. And in that newly forged world perhaps you will be brave enough to finally be the man you were meant to be.’
I blinked, startled.
‘You think I didn’t know? That I couldn’t see everything you are?’ He smiled gently, and I realised I had never seen him this way – looking at me as though he liked me. I had never been the kind of creature that anyone could like before.
Closing my eyes, I nodded.
Because she had changed everything.
Sparrow’s wings unfurled in my chest as Osric swept me out of my palace.
Chapter 21
Thorne
Your heart is in tatters. Your soul shredded.
I struggled against the manacles, struggled against her entry into my mind. The pain of it was scattering; I could hardly hold to a thought. I was in a sea of blood; I was trapped beneath the ice, cold freezing my organs; I stood before the corpses of dozens of men and women as Da butchered; I was the corpse as he took his blade and carved – and worst of all, I was the slaughterman doing the killing, one after the other until there were twenty-two bodies laid out before me. But always, through all the visions and the agony, there was Eanna’s voice, tethering me to this body of mine.
Did you know, Thorne, that each time you kill someone, you tear another piece of yourself away?
Of course I knew.
Then why don’t you stop?
Because.
Because I wanted to live.
I could feel her smile, the cold depths of it. Having it inside me was repulsion. My beast was so deeply asleep that I could not tell, anymore, if he was alive or not.
Do you know who else wanted to live at the cost of human lives?
Yes. I knew.
The slaughterman of the north.
And suddenly there he was. Standing in the cavern, gazing at me. He was bigger, even, than I’d imagined. More scarred. He wore the skin of a mighty wolf and his eyes cut inside me like knives.
‘Don’t,’ I whispered. ‘Eanna. Don’t make me –’
‘She has you begging,’ my da said, his low voice filled with disgust. ‘What a pitiful creature you have turned out to be.’
And even though I’d spent my life praying to be different, praying to be a better man, a gentler man, fearing his ghost with a bone-deep terror, his words hurt me as I’d never been hurt before. And I realised in that moment that all I’d ever really wanted, regardless of how monstrous he’d been, was a father who was proud of me.
Finn
‘Don’t listen,’ I shouted at him. ‘Don’t listen to whatever she’s telling you!’
But Thorne wasn’t even aware of me. He was lost in some nightmare he wasn’t strong enough to wake from.
So I was going to have to do it for him. This bitch was about to die.
A soul too big for my body.
Too big for any body.
Big enough to tear this whole mountain down, if I wanted her to.
I did.
I called to her and she rose up. She was darkness and guilt and regret, and she was the ghosts I held tight to my heart, the ones whose lives had distorted mine. She was all the parts of me I had feared and denied, all the ones I thought meant death and only death.
But maybe she also meant freedom.
I thought of the chains about my arms breaking and they broke. Steel clattered to the ground and I rose to my feet.
The wings of hundreds of moths brushed against my skin. I felt a thousand years old and connected to everything in the world, in the sky and the earth, in the hearts of every person in this mountain, every poor wretched half-walker. There they were, throbbing warm and strong. And open to me. As though they’d been waiting a long time for me.
Each one whispered to me its wishes and each wish was for the death of this demon woman.
It will hurt, I warned. I was a blunt hammer. But they remained willing, and so I took
pieces of them, stole energy from every single one, and then I attacked the warder.
She screamed in shock. Spun to face me. Could not believe what she had felt, what she was witnessing.
‘Release your hold,’ I ordered softly. I was running out of time now. Energy was flowing through me, wearing me away. Soon there would be nothing left of me.
‘You think you can stop this? He’s so easy,’ she told me, trying to rattle me. ‘His mind is wide open to me – he hasn’t a single guard in place. And the anguish in his heart – it’s as though it’s been laid out for me to manipulate. As though he’s begging me to take it away. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it.’
‘He is the prince of a nation,’ I told her. ‘He endures his people’s pain as if it were his own. If you think that a flaw then you are looking at humanity the wrong way.’
‘It makes him weak,’ she sneered.
Slowly I smiled. ‘That’s why he has me.’
I sent my hammer at her, smashing through the hold she had on Thorne’s mind. The warder staggered, pain slicing through her head. I hit her again, more directly.
And again, and again, and again. I didn’t give her a moment’s respite, daring her to fight back, to deny the blunt force of my soul.
And that’s when she acted. I’d given her no choice. She sent a wave of pressure at me – a wave made up of every ounce of her power. Which was exactly what I’d been waiting for.
As it hit me, knocking me off my feet, it broke through the hold I’d had on the other beating hearts, letting them free. I felt the poor half-walkers liberated from the warder’s bindings, liberated with a sigh of relief. Every one of them died in their cages and their souls drifted up and away as if on a breath of wind.
And so too did I feel the berserkers freed of their chains, a chilling howl ringing through all the tunnels of the mountain and echoing around the cavern.
They would be coming. For all three of us – the intruders. I understood now, with the stray thoughts drifting all about the place, that not even Thorne could be here uninvited. The hunt had begun. So I had to give him a chance to escape.