‘It’s always been like that between the two of you, hasn’t it? You’re obsessed with him – you always talk about him. I’ve been so blind.’ He advanced on me and I cringed in fright. ‘Have you been with him?’
‘No!’ I whispered, horrified. ‘Of course not!’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Things were starting to unravel – I could feel the carefully defined lines of my life changing shape. I started quickly making wishes. I wish the painting didn’t exist. I wish Thorne had gone hunting this afternoon. I wish for someone to come in and interrupt us. I wish for him to believe me. I wish I were somewhere different. I wish I were someone different.
The wishes weren’t working, because none of them were coming true – instead of calming me, they only unsettled me further. Breathing heavily, I began counting the floor tiles.
‘Look at me!’ Thorne snarled.
But I couldn’t – if I did I would stop counting, and if I stopped counting … Well, I didn’t know what would happen, but it would be something terrible. He grabbed my chin and forced my face up towards his. I was stunned to realise that there were tears in his eyes. ‘You can’t escape this,’ he told me. ‘You can’t just disappear and hope this will too. Be present and tell me the truth – how do you feel about my brother?’
I wish Thorne wasn’t crying. I wish I was invisible. I wish he loved me.
‘Roselyn – focus! Tell me the answer!’
‘I … I’m not sure what the answer is,’ I told him desperately.
‘Try to think,’ he coaxed me urgently. ‘Focus on the question and express it in words.’
I did as he said and imagined Ambrose – his beautiful, pale eyes as they looked at me without … and then I had the answer. ‘He’s the only one in the world who doesn’t pity me,’ I told my husband. ‘He doesn’t treat me like a child, or a fool. He doesn’t get angry with me.’
Thorne was frozen still, staring inside me. I’d never seen him like this – I thought that maybe I’d broken him somehow, by telling him the truth.
‘How do you feel about him, Rose?’
He was painfully close to my most secret wish. The wish I’d vowed never to tell anyone: I wish I was married to Ambrose. I shut my mouth and closed my eyes.
‘Answer me!’ he screamed, and then he grabbed me by the throat and lifted me off the ground like a rag doll. I didn’t see it coming, and it shocked me as only severe pain could. Agony sheathed into my neck and head, making me faint. My breathing was cut off and I started to choke – tears streamed from my eyes. Even now, so overcome with anger, Thorne was careful not to draw blood.
He let go of me abruptly, dropping me to the ground, and started throwing things around the room – smashing plates, glasses and chairs – screaming all the while about my treachery.
I hadn’t told him my wish, and yet he seemed to know. What he didn’t realise – what I was unable to explain to him – was that even though my most secret wish involved Ambrose, my biggest, most important wish was completely different – I wish my husband loved me.
Thorne
I could taste the bitterness in my mouth. The filthy stench of betrayal permeated my nostrils, and those together made me feel like retching. Roselyn was huddled on the ground, covered in bruises – weak from how badly I’d choked her. I could see that she was shaking, but my eyes were veiled with a sheen of fury. I couldn’t comprehend that her shaking meant she was truly hurt, or that she needed a physician – I could only understand that she had taken my generosity and my kindness and sullied them both with her whorish desires. For a moment, I wanted to kill her, and what’s more, I wanted to kill my brother – my beloved Ambrose. I could see them together, his hands all over her, making her cry with pleasure … a wave of fury unleashed itself upon me and I screamed pure torture. She had humiliated me again, but this was a thousand times worse than ever before.
I stormed from our wing of the fortress and pounded up the stairs. ‘I want her dead!’ I snarled.
My mother looked up from stroking the fully grown male wolf at her feet and stared at me. The wolf growled in the back of its throat and its hackles rose. ‘Shhhh.’ She calmed it until it sank back onto its haunches. Vincent was there, standing in the shadows as he always was. He eyed me even more closely than the wolf.
‘Truly?’ she asked me.
‘Yes.’
‘Why now?’
‘My reasons are my own. I just want it done.’
‘Fine – I’ll need a reason to give the people, though.’
‘Tell them she will die for treason and adultery, then.’ I could feel the words flooding from my mouth, propelled forth by my hot, fevered blood, and I didn’t seem to be able to stop them. Some far, distant part of me knew I should, but right now the rage was all-consuming.
Ma nodded slowly. ‘We’ll wait for the summer solstice and do it then. An execution of this nature needs to be public.’
‘I’ll tell her myself when the time is right.’
The Queen peered at me, then shrugged. ‘It’s up to your discretion.’
‘When will Ambrose return?’
‘He’s been gone a week, so I wouldn’t expect him back for another three.’
Not even in time for the solstice, which was two weeks away. My mouth felt dry. I imagined what my brother would do when he found out I’d killed his lover without even waiting for him to return. A vicious streak of malice swept through me – it would serve him right. It would feel good to watch him suffer. He’d always thought he was too good for this place, and now he’d gone and stolen the one thing that belonged to me – the one thing that was my very own.
I pounded back down the stairs, all the way to the dungeons. There would be no one in the training yard at this time of night, but there were rows and rows of cells full of criminals down here in the bowels of the earth. I searched until I saw a man big enough to give me a proper fight. I definitely wanted a Pirenti – there would be no point in fighting a Kayan, it would just be like beating a woman and I had my very own wife waiting in my room if I wanted to do that. Storming into the cell, I began to lay into the man, punching him over and over again. My beast wanted free, and the bars of the cage that held him at bay were growing very weak.
‘Fight back!’ I yelled at the prisoner, so he swung at me, hitting me in the jaw. It was deeply satisfying – I revelled in the pain. We fought a while longer, scuffling and hitting and kicking. When I was done, I spat out a mouthful of blood, patted the woozy, semi-conscious man on the shoulder, and locked his cell once more. The other prisoners were watching on in stupefaction but I ignored them and dragged myself back to my room. Reaching around blindly in the darkness, I poured myself a jug of ale and downed it, then stumbled to light some lamps.
The room blinked into life, the dim lighting casting long shadows over everything. I rubbed my eyes wearily, and then I spotted her. In my delirium of violence I’d completely forgotten about the state in which I’d left Roselyn. She was curled up in our bed, brown eyes unblinking as she stared at me, an ugly purple bruise around her throat. It made me sick, that bruise. We stared at each other for an interminable amount of time. My brain was fuzzy – all the rage had been doused by the fight, and had been replaced with something I didn’t know how to name.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked softly, her voice cracking, dry and raspy as if she’d never used it before.
‘You,’ I muttered, glaring into her eyes. ‘You happened to me.’
‘I did all of that?’ she asked, confused.
Roselyn climbed stiffly out of bed to get the aid hamper. She looked at me questioningly, so I nodded and sat down at a table, offering her my bloody hand. She took it gently and began to wash it, her touch gentle and calming. I couldn’t bear to look at her.
‘Thorne,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t … he never touched me, and I never touched him, and neither of us ever wanted to.’
I closed my eyes.
‘Is that what you?
??re angry about?’ she asked.
It had been – I’d been obsessing over it. I’d thought it would drive me mad, until this very moment, when she dispelled my fears. I believed her, but what was strange was that I didn’t feel any better. If anything I felt worse.
‘Is it?’
‘No,’ I muttered, surprising myself. ‘I thought it was, but …’
With everything gone from me, all the anger and the images in my mind, I was left with only one thought to face. I’d poured every ounce of my patience into caring for this woman. Every ounce of kindness and tenderness I possessed had gone into her, and it still wasn’t enough – she still wanted someone else. I was amazed by how much that hurt. The truth, the honest truth was that since I’d met Roselyn, not once had I looked at another woman, but she’d been looking elsewhere all along. And the knowledge was like to destroy me.
Chapter 5
Ambrose
When the rain started to fall more heavily, I knew I had to get Avery under shelter of some description. He was lying on the ground at my feet, delirious and only semi-conscious, and it was plain that he was dying. Peering around, I tried to figure out which way to start searching. The waterfall gushed with the rain, and it occurred to me that there might be caves behind it.
I grabbed the pack with our meagre belongings and slung it over my back, then lifted Avery back into the water. His teeth were chattering loudly, and his lips were blue. I wasn’t sure if it was the poison from the sea wasp that was affecting him, or the infection in his arm. Probably both – they couldn’t have been a particularly good combination, that was for sure.
Swimming with him propped over my shoulder, I brought us under the waterfall and found what I’d been hoping for – a small cave. It was damp and mouldy, but as I climbed out of the water and followed the rock walls, I saw that it actually opened up into a much larger space, which was perfectly dry.
I gently placed Avery on the ground, where he thrashed feverishly. Taking a knife from the pack, I headed back out into the water and swam across to the edge of the pool. The storm was getting bad. I needed to find a particular tree and scrape some bark from it. I’d seen the tree when we’d first arrived on the island, so I knew I had to backtrack towards the beach. Finding my way in the dark was no easy feat – fallen branches and vines tripped me constantly, and I was shivering from the cold in my bones. Eventually I found the tree I’d been searching for, and cut as much bark from it as I could carry. It took me a couple of hours of sprinting to make it back to the waterfall, and I had to swim across with the bark held aloft so it wouldn’t get even wetter than it already was. The whole mission felt foolish, frankly, but I wasn’t stopping to think.
Avery’s condition had deteriorated while I was away – he had stopped thrashing and was lying very still, his breathing shallow. I set about making a fire and building it as hot as I could. Once the flames were as high as possible, I placed the precious bark close enough for the heat to make its way slowly into the wood. While the bark dried, I tended to Avery’s arm wound, washing it thoroughly and wrapping it in a tight bandage. I padded up his burnt hand as gently as I could, knowing this was likely to be the hardest wound to heal.
‘Why did you do this to yourself, you witless kid?’ I sighed. I kept another bandage over his forehead, but had to soak it through every few minutes as the heat from his body stole the coolness from it.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I started to burn the pieces of bark. I had to do it slowly, because it was only with the ash that I was able to make a paste to smother over the sting on Avery’s arm. I packed the wound heavily, lathering his skin, smoothing the paste all around his slender forearm. Then I fed him water and sat back. There was nothing else I could do. If the paste worked, it could take days or hours and I had no way to know which. Of course, it might also not do a thing, which would mean I’d have to sit here and watch him die.
While I waited I couldn’t help thinking about the story Avery had told – it mystified me. It was perfectly clear in my mind, because as he’d spoken I’d felt, just for a moment, like I was no longer myself – like I’d become another man, capable of emotions I’d never believed in. It was probably the most surreal moment of my life – I’d never imagined, not for one second, that Avery was the way he was because of a girl – broken because of love.
I’d never been close to a woman before, never wanted to bother with them. They didn’t understand the things that concerned me, so why waste time on them? Avery obviously had, and look what it had done to him. I sat back against the rock and watched the flickering flames of the fire. The only women I knew were Roselyn and my ma, and neither of them inspired much faith in the female sex.
Although, I had to admit, there had been times when I had seen Roselyn, seen her delicate beauty, and I’d wanted it – wanted her. More than once I had cursed Thorne for being so blind.
‘Not all of Pirenti is as ugly as you believe,’ I told Avery softly. He stirred a little, but didn’t open his eyes. ‘There’s beauty there, too, if you look for it. My brother took me into the ice caps once, when we were children. They’re glorious – such a pure white they can blind you. A dazzling landscape of ice as far as you can see, run through with blue veins, tunnels and caverns that drop away into the heart of the world, so deep you’d never find your way out of one. In the distance, right up in the north, is the mountain, looming higher than any man could ever climb, and everything that lies in its shadow is testament to its power. My brother, who hardly spoke when he was a child, told me once that there was nothing more beautiful in the whole world than that place of death, where only the hardest of men survive, and come out even harder. He said it was his destiny to live there, under the mountain with the beasts, and that if he could, he’d take me with him, and keep me there forever. But I was too small, so he had walked off into the ice alone, and I had watched him get smaller and smaller. The day he returned, years later, he was bigger than any man I’d ever seen, and harder than all of them put together.’
I didn’t know why I was saying these things, why I was talking about my brother to a sleeping Kayan boy. Thorne hated Kayans with a rage darker than the blackest night sky – a ferocity I had never been able to comprehend. I didn’t know what had happened to him under that mountain, but it had crystallised him – and brought him back from the tempestuous, silent childhood he’d fallen into. I’d watched Thorne through all the stages of his life, and I’d known, on that day of his return, that he would make a mighty king one day. But I had feared the cruelty in his eyes, and I worried it would consume him, which was strange, because cruelty was never a quality he’d had as a child.
‘What about a hard woman?’ Avery asked softly. ‘Could a hard woman survive up there?’
I blinked, slightly embarrassed that he’d been conscious for my rant. ‘She’d have to be very strong.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured, then seemed to fall back to sleep.
I took this as a good sign, and lay down to sleep too. I was exhausted, but I hadn’t wanted to sleep until I was sure Avery would wake. As long as I could hear him breathe, I knew he wasn’t dead. And it was funny, but the thought of Avery dying in this cave made me feel very lonely.
Ava
The long grass is scratchy under my bare feet, the sun warm on my skin. The brightness of the sparkling towers in the distance hurts my eyes, so I look instead to the cliff below me – the dizzying drop to the crashing sea – and I think about what it would be like to live in the side of the cliff, as so many in Limontae do.
‘You don’t have to move here,’ he says, lips warm against my ear. I run my fingers along the sinews of his slim arm, tracing the outline of the muscles. ‘I’ll come back to Orion with you.’
His smell is always the same – spices, cinnamon and boy-sweat. I tilt my face towards his, smiling as I feel his lips against the corner of my mouth. ‘Your studies are here. You won’t be finished for years.’
‘Who cares?’
&nb
sp; ‘I do. I want you strong and fast and clever.’
‘As opposed to how I am now?’ he grins. I close my eyes, resting my cheek against his and feeling our hearts beat the same rhythm.
‘I think I could come to love this cliff,’ I murmur sleepily. ‘As you do.’
His hands move to my hair, threading through it, and then move down over my body to slip inside my clothes.
‘Naughty,’ I chide lazily.
He laughs in my ear and then his hands make me gasp aloud, right here on the hill, where anyone could walk past. My pulse picks up speed, excited by the danger of what we are doing. I roll him over and straddle him, and he glances warily around before allowing himself to relax into me—
Pain throbbed in my arm – pain that hadn’t been there on the cliff. There was suddenly no longer any sun on my skin, or grass under my feet. What in Gods’ names was going on? I felt around for Avery, wondering where he’d disappeared to, wondering why I felt so abruptly cold and sore.
‘Avery?’ I asked softly, my mouth dry and furry.
‘Still delirious, kid,’ a voice said, a voice much deeper than Avery’s. I opened my tired eyes and saw Ambrose. A wave of shock went through me as it all came flooding back – all the truths. I squeezed my eyes shut again, unable to bear the pain. My heart beat slowly in my chest, as if it didn’t care enough to beat properly.
‘No,’ I said finally. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Drink this.’ He held a canteen of water to my lips and I felt better as it made its way through my body.
‘Where are we?’
‘A cave.’
I looked down at my arm. There was a thick grey paste all over it, but surprisingly the pain was much less. ‘How long have we been here?’
‘About a day. You’ve been completely out of it – mumbling weird stuff.’
Uh oh.
‘Do you remember any of the last twenty-four hours?’