Avery (Random Romance)

  I was anxious to stay, anxious to go. Wild pegasi pulled me in two different directions, stretching my skin over my bones like a dried out old skeleton. And under those bones – under the skin and the flesh and the muscle and even under the blood – was something else entirely. A monster, caressing my edges and trying to whisper its way out of my heart. Mostly I kept him caged. But he was cunning and he was strong, and sometimes …

  ‘You’ll leave immediately,’ my mother told me.

  ‘You could come with me.’

  She tilted her head, thinking about it. Perhaps making wishes.

  ‘I’m not sure how I’ll control myself.’

  Roselyn shook her head firmly. ‘You will be fine, my love. Perfectly fine. You know the rules. You know exactly what to do when you feel it begin.’

  There was a question on my lips – a painful, impossible question. One I had never spoken aloud, for fear of the answer. Finally, I couldn’t keep it in any longer. The question had consumed my life, and if I really was supposed to be growing up, leaving home, then I ought to know the answer.

  ‘Did he fight it? Or did he give in?’

  She knew who I meant straight away – there could be no confusion in this. I watched the way her eyes gathered more depths, as they always did. Infinite depths, where my da was concerned. She saw so many things in him that nobody else ever did, understood so many things about him that were impossible.

  ‘In the beginning,’ Roselyn said softly, ‘he was more beast than man. That was when the blood spilt, oceans of it. But at the very end, he fought like no ordinary man could – he fought with strength only his blood could have allowed him.’

  I wasn’t sure if the blood she was talking about was the half that came from the wild snow beast or the half that came from the evil half-walker. Either blood seemed particularly unappealing, and I housed both in my veins.

  ‘He died fighting it, then,’ I said flatly.

  She shook her head, my mother. ‘On the day he died he’d already beaten it. He was a long way beyond it.’

  I was a creature made of uncertainties, except for the one single thing I knew: I would never beat the beast.

  I wasn’t strong like my da had been.

  ‘Do you know what the king wants you for?’ Ma asked me.

  I met her eyes. ‘He’s sending me to live in Kaya.’ And for the first time in a long while, my mother looked truly frightened.

  Finn

  All I wanted was a hat. Was that too much to ask? Jonah was at my side, elbowing me in the ribs at regular intervals, and Penn was on my other side, tugging on my hair to get my attention. I felt likely to kill them both. The sun was beating down on my uncovered head, glancing off all the windows of the buildings around me, blinding me with its brightness, and we’d been standing here for over an hour. All of this might have been fine under normal circumstances – I usually quite liked public announcements – but there was a gallon of last night’s ale still making its way through my body, and I was very close to vomiting.

  All I wanted was a damn hat.

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ my idiot brother told me smugly.

  ‘One more word and I’ll kick you in the groin.’

  ‘Do you know what this is about?’ Penn asked me for the thousandth time. He was on repeat this morning. Sometimes when he got something stuck in his head – a question or a thought, a word or a colour or an image – it came out of his mouth over and over again until someone screamed at him for mercy.

  ‘No,’ both Jonah and I replied forcefully.

  ‘But look,’ Jonah pointed out, ‘soldiers are here, and several warders, so I reckon it must be important.’

  ‘Do you think they’re finally going to tell us if the rumour is true or not?’ I wondered aloud.

  Eighteen years ago, the first peace treaty in known history between Kaya and Pirenti was drawn up. Ten years after that, a rumour started. I had no idea where it originally came from, but it had seemed like an incredibly nasty rumour. A cruel whisper that no one could believe: that there might, somewhere, be a way to break the bond.

  As the rumour grew in strength, Kaya began to crumble. The very idea divided the regions, rekindling the oldest argument – was the bond a gift or a curse? Should we treasure it, or fight to survive it?

  I wanted to know the answer more than anyone, because if it was true, and there was a way to end the bond for all Kayans to come, then I was going to be the one to break the curse once and for all, and no warder’s magic, no army of berserkers – nothing at all in the entire world – would stop me.

  At the end of the public square was a raised wooden plinth. This was where they held award ceremonies and punishments. I’d seen a Pirenti man get hanged there, but that had been a long time ago. No one had been hanged since the peace treaty had started to properly take effect about ten years ago. Now the square was mostly saved for fairs and markets and performances, the countless swinging corpses of war just an unhappy, ghoulish memory that haunted the cobblestones.

  I fixed my eyes on the stage and begged the gods to let whatever was happening start soon. The sun, which I normally welcomed like a lover, was starting to become the worst kind of nightmare, seeping into my head and making it throb with blinding light.

  ‘Can we go?’ I asked. ‘This is stupid.’

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ Jonah repeated.

  ‘What’s my fault?’ I snapped. ‘The sun? All these people? This stupid announcement?’

  ‘No, drinking too much and acting like a sourpuss.’

  ‘Sourpuss,’ Penn agreed with a secret giggle that nearly made me crack a smile.

  Just then the horn blew, and I groaned aloud in gratitude.

  Several men walked onto the stage. The first man was the army general, Brathe. He was taller than most Kayans, and so bald that it hurt my eyes to look upon the glaring surface of his skull. Next came Sharn and Valerie, the two royal informants of the Emperor. They were always dressed the same – in the gold of their eyes when they looked at each other. For eight years people had protested the fact that a bonded couple were the two royal informants. It was unsafe. But the Emperor had never done anything about it, which had fuelled the rebels’ excitement about a world designed on the survival of the bond.

  Next came the head warder, Lutius. He was terrifying as always, though at this moment his eyes and skin were a normal colour.

  And lastly was a man who didn’t fail to grab everyone – everyone – in that square’s attention. I could feel the rustle move through the large crowd, the whispers and the fidgeting and the general disbelief.

  Because here – striding out onto the raised plinth for everyone to see – was a giant of a man, and he was unquestionably from Pirenti. There’d been no one born in Kaya who had ever looked like that, not since the dawning of the world.

  There was fear, then. Indelible fear. We weren’t ready. They should have warned us. Too many had died at the hands of the Pirenti pigs. For too many years we had fought in the wars against them. Even for those of us like Penn, Jonah and myself – who were too young to have seen any violence there was still a bone deep awareness of danger that came with seeing the northern giants. Parents and grandparents had been killed. Cousins and aunts and uncles. No family had been spared the savagery of the Pirenti.

  And not even peace, which was a constant relief, could erase the fear and the grief.

  He was a monster of a man. The second tallest man on that stage only came to his shoulder, and just barely. He must have been seven foot tall, at least. His chest was an enormous barrel, his arms muscled like tree-trunks. He wore his hair shaved very short, like all Pirenti soldiers did, and his skin was pale and ghostly as a Kayan’s would never be.

  ‘Doesn’t the sun shine there?’ Jonah had asked a very long time ago when we’d been four or five years old.

  ‘It’s hidden behind all the blood,’ my ma had replied.

  Beyond that I couldn’t see him very well, but there was somethin
g about him that made me forget my headache.

  ‘Greetings!’ Sharn called to the assembled crowd. The public square was full – whatever news was announced this morning would be spread throughout Limontae by the time the sun went down. Of that there was no doubt – we loved to gossip, we Kayans.

  A shout of response came from the crowd – a gathered ‘Ho!’ that made Sharn grin. She glanced at her bondmate and whatever she saw there made her curb her smile. Valerie was as stern as Sharn was flippant.

  ‘Peace prevails!’ she shouted next, and the resounding cheer was even louder.

  The Pirenti man didn’t move a muscle. He surveyed the crowd with an expression that was completely unreadable – I was trying to read it, by gods I was trying.

  Brathe, the general, looked exceedingly unimpressed, but I only glanced at him before my eyes were pulled back to the outlandish stranger.

  ‘After eighteen wonderful years of peace, we must move forward even further,’ Sharn announced. ‘We’ve taken the first step in a unified world, but until now our borders have never been shared. We have not offered our homes to an ally as we should have. Today we welcome a man from the north into our country, a man who signifies our ties with progress and with peace.’

  Something inside me started to move. I pushed through the people in front of me, shoving them out of the way unceremoniously. There were loud grunts of disapproval but I barely heard them. I was forcing my way to the stage and there was nothing else, for just a moment, but the need to see the Pirenti man’s face clearly. I didn’t know why, but I had to see that face. I reached the base of the plinth and stopped, staring up at him, oblivious to all else. The sharp, clear angles of his face, his small, thin mouth, his severe jaw, and his eyes. His eyes. They were a startling shade of the lightest blue. So pale they almost looked white. Clear and crisp and distant.

  In all my life, surrounded by people with eyes that changed to every imaginable hue, I had never once seen such a pale shade of blue. I wanted to know what it meant, I wanted to know what the colour meant.

  Then I remembered that in Pirenti colours meant nothing.

  I took a breath and was dismayed to feel it tremble. Up so close, I could see how far away he was. He barely stood there, on the ground. He was a million miles away, his angled face pensive and haunted. I had the strangest desire to reach out and catch all of his thoughts in my hands and hold them to my face so I could see them before they escaped. I wanted to see what colour they were; I wanted to see if they were as beautiful as his face was.

  ‘Finn …’ my twin brother hissed, coming up behind me with apologetic glances to everyone around us. ‘Damned impossible girl!’

  ‘Beside me,’ Sharn called, interrupting Jonah, ‘stands the Crown Prince Thorne of Pirenti.’

  Everyone in the crowd froze. No one had any way to be prepared for that, for the terror. We were stunned, every one of us.

  In the north there had been a man, a demon man, who’d spilt more blood than any other human in the world. He fed on Kayans, the legend went. Sucked their blood from their bones and kept their teeth as trophies. Slaughterman of the Barbarian Queen – the most dangerous man in the world.

  In some legends, it was told that he was part berserker – the monsters of the ice – but that was impossible, I told myself sharply, curbing my frightened mind before it got away with me.

  His name … That name followed us into our nightmares. We went to sleep fearing Thorne the slaughterman. And although we all knew by now that the war was over and that the slaughterman was dead, there was a kind of disease that came with even the mention of it. A sickness that crept inside our bones, eating away at them until we were so scared of Pirenti that we were willing to do anything – anything at all – to make it end.

  I took half a step back – it was all I had room for. The people behind me were close and panicked, just as I was.

  ‘Prince Thorne comes in peace,’ Sharn shouted quickly, sensing the unrest her words had created. ‘He is a peace envoy from the King and Queen of Pirenti, and he is here to learn more about our ways to further the understanding between our peoples. This is a joyous occasion – joyous!’

  Nobody was listening. There was too much hatred, too deep in our bones.

  Brathe stepped forward, his grizzly face evidence of all the battles he’d fought in the war. ‘Every person in Limontae – and Kaya, for that matter – is bound by law to treat this man with respect. He is protected by Kayan royalty, and by the precious treaty that has kept us all alive. We must protect that treaty. Any violence towards him will be punishable by death.’

  The dire warning reached out to all of us, and people started to hurry home.

  I stood a moment longer, not sure why, but aware that fear had curdled in my fingertips and started to spread. But the funny thing was, it left a strange kind of excitement in its wake. My heart was pounding heavily. Everything was transient except fear – it was the only thing that stayed. This I knew and hated with a shameful kind of intimacy. This I forbade myself to think upon.

  Jonah and Penn both grabbed my arms but I shrugged them off, staring up at the Pirenti man’s face. He was very young, barely a man at all, really.

  The warder moved past the prince, striding off the stage. Next went the bonded informants, followed by the general.

  Now the prince stood alone. He was an easy target like that, utterly motionless. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance, like maybe he hadn’t realised the others had left. What could he be imagining in that head? Trying to picture a Pirenti Prince’s thoughts was so far from my capabilities that a ravenous curiosity ignited in my veins. I’d never come across anyone as exotic or strange, or as different to me as the sky was to the earth. I stared up at him, held taut by my fear and my fascination, and in that moment he looked down at me.

  Our eyes met.

  His blue gaze was icy at first, and then it warmed to a kind of fire as he stared at me. All the muscles in his face relaxed very slightly – very, very slightly – and then his eyes followed suit. At the corner of his mouth I saw a twitch. And then he smiled, a thing made of warmth. A thing made to keep people alive. A thing that was beautiful beyond what I’d understood could exist.

  A second later the general called for him and he was gone.

  I was left in the glaring sun with my brother and my friend and a heart made of shattered stone.

  Thorne

  She was wild. That was the first thing I understood about the girl in the town square.

  I was led up onto that stage behind the Kayans so that their people could behold me, and even though I knew it was important, I wasn’t sure exactly what I could offer them that they would be pleased with. I wanted to try, wanted to give them something other than the memory of the war. But I felt like a tamed animal on display and they were distraught. All of them. I could smell their fear, pungent and heady. It made my beast claw at my insides in excitement, but I swallowed him away with all the strength I could manage.

  I’d been sent here by my uncle, my King, because to breach the borders like this was to cement our power. He knew I was no good with people, but he’d sent me anyhow. I didn’t understand, but I obeyed. Because I believed in peace.

  Except that all these Kayans abhorred me. And worse – they feared me. It was always unsettling to see terror in eyes and know it was because of me. My beast enjoyed it; I did not.

  Brathe led the way off stage, which I thought was too soon. They should have kept us all there longer, forcing the people in the square to acclimatise to the idea of me. They needed to get used to the look of me. But instead they rushed me off as if I was a creature of nightmare to be feared.

  I thought of my ma and da. In my mind they had always represented a kind of good and evil. There was a monster, and there was the angel who’d tamed him. I knew only the mother who had raised me, soft and gentle and disastrously vague. And I knew the legend of the slaughterman.

  ‘Your Highness,’ someone called from t
he side of the stage. Probably Brathe, since he seemed to be responsible for me. But before my eyes could move to him, they swept over the crowd before me and stopped.

  There was a girl standing there. Not far below me. Still, in the middle of a broiling mass of uncertainty. Where everyone else fled, she remained.

  Her tanned skin bristled with an undeniable movement, her short yellow hair whipped about her face with a life of its own. Despite her stillness, I had a sense that she never stopped moving, not for a single second. I had a sense that she was excited and loud and difficult. I had a million senses all at once and they were like a fist to the face.

  Her short, slim body reminded me of the women in Pirenti who were made an example of. They were weak, those women. But in this girl’s eyes there was no weakness. All I saw, in the yellow gaze, was laughter. And laughter, I’d become aware, was not something I was good at.

  Brathe grabbed my arm and wrenched me off the stage, but I pulled away from him and ran back into the crowd. People scattered before me – I even heard a few screams, for gods’ sakes. True, I probably looked like a lunatic, lumbering down off the stage like that, but screaming?

  Blindly I forced my way to where she’d been standing.

  I was too late; she was gone. Instead, all I found were people running in terror of me.

  Falco

  A simple man was an unthreatening one. That was what I knew – one of the only things I knew for sure. It was not good for a man in my position to be good at too many things.

  So when the skirmish broke out, my hunting party attacked on the border of my land, I gave an audible gasp of fear and cowed behind my horse.

  ‘Protect His Majesty,’ Petir ordered smoothly, and the soldiers of my guard surrounded me, their training making quick work of the rough group of southern rebels. When the six men were dead at our feet, I straightened and peered at them.