Isadora Read online

  Thorne smiled a little, just a little. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve scented that on you since the day you met her.’

  ‘How is that consolation?’

  ‘What’s new,’ he murmured, ‘as of the last six months, is the despair.’

  Howl chose that moment to give a slight whimper in my lap.

  ‘Despair is the worst scent there is,’ Thorne added softly. ‘It’s thick and rancid, my friend. It smells like death.’

  I watched a swallow dip through the sky above us, its melancholy path beautiful. I was an absence. Where there had once stood a man there was now a hole. The cutout shape where a person had been.

  ‘I understand. The subjugation of your people. The usurping of your reign.’ He took another breath, another smell of me, and this time it unnerved me. I fought the urge to move away. ‘But it’s more than that,’ Thorne concluded. ‘It smells … intimate. More intimate. I don’t know how else to describe it.’

  I stood up to force some space between us.

  ‘Falco, must we play this guessing game? Won’t you just tell me?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘The rest still think you feckless, but I have never believed the ruse.’

  ‘Leave it.’ I strode for the stairs, then forcibly drew myself to a halt. Don’t, I warned myself. You have never had friends before. Not true ones. Don’t push him away now. It was a battle every day not to hide from the people in my life. A battle to show them pieces of the truth, as many as I could stand to give away. Because whenever I tried a voice whispered my deepest fear – that it would be impossible to show any pieces of truth when there were none. That Emperor Feckless was a mask, and beneath him was nothing. Perhaps the bones of a child that had long since been picked clean by life’s vultures.

  I faced Thorne once more. I was fifteen years older than him, but he stood more than a head taller, was at least double my width. He had a harsh, blunt face, with hair shaved short enough for his scalp to be visible. He wore a huge cloak, but unlike his kin, he did not wear fur. He never wore animal fur, and I was one of the few people who understood that it was because he felt so animal himself. Something dark and strange had happened to him in the north, and he had returned King of the berserkers. A brutal, bloody fate for a man to carry, especially when he was barely more than a child. Now Thorne spent most nights roaming the forest, pulled by the weight of an anvil to be wild and free and alone. And yet still he managed to stand here, present, painfully refined and caring more for his friends and family than anything.

  ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ he replied simply. ‘I worry for you.’

  ‘And I love you for it, brother,’ I smiled. ‘But all I need is a night on the drink and a couple of women to share my bed. You have divine ones, you know.’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘Aye. Or at least new ones. I was growing bored of bedding Kayans who all look and taste the same.’

  He gave me an impatient look, but I grinned. Because that was all that was left. Grinning and lying, or turning to dust.

  I spent the evening in the armoury with my two favourite people. While I used seed oil to treat the wooden slats, my team members painted flowers and other embarrassing things onto the undersides of the huge wings.

  ‘Sigh,’ I said, instead of sighing.

  ‘What now?’ Ella asked me.

  ‘He doesn’t like the pictures,’ Sadie explained with a roll of her eyes.

  ‘How could he not like moths?’

  ‘Or spiderwebs?’ She flicked paint at me.

  ‘Watch it! This shirt was expensive.’ I flicked paint back and before long it was an all-out paint war, the three of us diving behind counters and lurching out to splash vermilion at each other. I got splattered way more than either of them, which they were happy to point out.

  ‘Just you wait,’ I warned. ‘When you least expect it, I’ll destroy you and all you hold dear.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  We all whipped around to see Ava standing in the doorway, looking unimpressed. ‘Hate to interrupt the ruthless attack on my offspring, but you need to come with me, Falco. Now.’

  ‘We’re otherwise occupied, darling.’ I waved her away.

  ‘Now,’ she repeated, in that very ‘Ava’ way of hers.

  I shared a bewildered look with the eight-year-old twins, who shrugged. ‘You’d better do it,’ Sadie commented.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I warned.

  ‘No, it’s bedtime,’ Ava told them. ‘Upstairs for washing, please.’

  ‘Oh, Ma,’ they whinged together.

  I followed Ava into the corridor. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘A messenger has arrived.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘From Sancia.’

  My heart lurched, but I gave no sign of it. Ava and I hurried up the winding steps to the tenth floor and entered the war room. At its center was a beautiful wooden table, large enough to seat at least a score of people. Around the walls were maps of Kaya and Pirenti, as well as maps of the Kayan cities of Sancia and Limontae that we’d been using over the last few months.

  Ava and I were the last to arrive. Ambrose, Thorne, Finn, Osric and Roselyn were already there, waiting for me in their usual seats. There was also a very sweaty boy of about twelve standing nervously to the side.

  I went to him. ‘Are you well, lad?’

  He nodded, bowing low. ‘You’re ’is ’ighness?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Beg your pardon for the intrusion.’

  ‘Not at all. You’ve run the length of the world, by the smell of you.’ I made one of my routine expressions of distaste to the others, who weren’t impressed by it.

  The boy procured a scruffy looking piece of parchment from his pocket. ‘I’m sorry to the rest o’ you, but I ’ad orders to give this to the Emperor o’ Kaya, and none but ’im.’

  ‘Who did it come from?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sire. A girl.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  A look of fear passed his eyes. ‘She was … soulless. Damned.’

  The words caused a strange ache in my chest. ‘White hair? Red eyes?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Did she say anything?’

  ‘Only that I was to get this to you, or she’d haunt me the rest o’ my days.’

  I almost smiled.

  ‘Can you tell us anything more about what’s going on in the city?’ Ava asked him. ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘Secret tunnels, Majesty,’ he explained. ‘The city’s still overrun. It’s bad. Not much food or clean water, bodies pilin’ up and causin’ disease. But … someone’s been … killin’ the warders, Sire.’

  We stared at him. ‘Who?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Dunno, Majesty. But every mornin’ the city wakes to find one of ’em dead and laid out in the town square. There’s always somethin’ carved into their foreheads.’

  I swallowed. ‘What?’

  ‘A sparrow, Sire.’

  After sending the child to be seen by a physician, I sat down at the table with the parchment.

  ‘It’s from Isadora,’ Finn exclaimed. ‘She’s alive!’

  Heart pounding, I uncurled the note. ‘Emperor Feckless,’ I read aloud, curbing my embarrassment. Of course she’d addressed it so. ‘If it be your will, we kindly request that you deign to send aid.’

  ‘Wow,’ Ava commented. ‘Someone does not like you.’

  ‘As stated in the previous letters, Sancia is under warder reign. But there are those on the inside who have formed a resistance. We seek a sign, any sign, that we have allies on the outside. That we have not been forgotten. We would like to know if our Emperor has any regard for us at all.’ I stopped. ‘That’s it.’

  Finn snatched it from my hand. ‘It’s Jonah’s handwriting!’

  We sat in silence for a moment, considering the note.

  ‘Several things,’ Ambrose surmised. ‘Is
adora and Jonah are both alive, or were when the message was sent. There are secret tunnels in and out of the city. And someone is assassinating warders in the name of the Sparrow.’

  ‘Could it be the Sparrow?’ Ava asked.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Osric shrugged. ‘We have no idea who he is – he could have been in the city when it was overtaken.’

  ‘What about these tunnels?’ Thorne asked. ‘We can use them to get in.’

  ‘Did you know about them?’ Finn asked me.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I suppose it must have slipped my mind.’

  They stared at me.

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Finn said. ‘What’s wrong with you? People in that city are dying.’

  I shrugged. I hadn’t forgotten the tunnels. I simply hadn’t mentioned them because they were dangerous. Most had collapsed before I left and several had been found by the warders on the night they took Kaya, so I assumed the rest were also discovered and guarded. Not easy to keep things hidden in a city full of warders.

  ‘According to the boy, there’s at least one in use,’ Ambrose said.

  ‘Unless this is a trap set by Dren and Galia,’ Ava pointed out. ‘How many knew of the tunnels, Fal?’

  ‘Me. Quillane.’ My voice hitched over her name. ‘And probably every warder in that city.’

  And Isadora, apparently.

  ‘I knew,’ Osric admitted. ‘I assumed they’d have been long since discovered by the Mad Ones.’

  ‘So who told the boy?’ Finn asked. ‘It could be a trap. Except that doesn’t make sense, because how would he know to describe Isadora? There’s no way in the Gods’ world that she would be working for Dren and Galia.’

  ‘Unless she was being manipulated by them,’ Ava said. ‘They have the power to do that, if they wish.’

  ‘Isadora might have found the tunnel,’ Thorne suggested. ‘She’s always been capable of more than one might expect.’

  As they talked themselves painfully in circles I melted to a puddle of guilt for not sharing the truth I knew. Isadora, rebel Sparrow of the South, was my bondmate. She knew of the tunnels because she’d spied on me to discover them, and then used them to find her way to kill me. There was something far too intimate about divulging that, and I felt a peculiar repulsion at the thought of discussing anything about this without first speaking to her. That loyalty was surely misplaced – these were the people who deserved my loyalty, not my greatest enemy. Still, no words came from my mouth. The truth of my bonding wouldn’t fit with any of my masks. Perhaps it was another mask in itself, one I didn’t know how to wear.

  ‘So if she wasn’t being controlled and she found it herself,’ Thorne hedged, ‘why didn’t Isadora send the message to Finn and I? She doesn’t know Falco. Doesn’t know where he is, if he’s alive, where his loyalties lie …’

  ‘Do my loyalties not lie with Kaya?’ I asked.

  Thorne met my eyes. ‘What I mean to say, brother, is that you have a difficult reputation in Kaya. Isadora does not know you to be capable of helping her. But she knows Finn and I, and she knows we’ll try to get her out. So why send the message to you alone?’

  There was a slightly awkward silence at the mention of my reputation. I’d earned worse.

  ‘It’s a good question,’ Ambrose agreed. ‘You never met the girl, Falco?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What if she’s allied with the Sparrow?’ Ava wondered. ‘The message was derisive, at best. Perhaps she’s aiming to wound an Emperor she doesn’t believe in.’

  ‘It’s not enough of a reason to waste her only message out of the city,’ Finn said. ‘This is her one chance at seeking aid. Why waste it on an insult?’

  ‘So she thinks Falco can help her,’ Ambrose said.

  I could hear their doubt, and found myself taking shelter behind it.

  ‘There are very few who can kill a warder,’ a voice said softly, and we all turned to look at Roselyn, with her auburn hair and porcelain skin. ‘So how could this Sparrow have murdered several, unless he has magic of his own?’

  In the silence that followed my eyes met Roselyn’s and found her as eerily unreadable as ever. The woman somehow knew too much and too little at the same time. In her hands was a spool of wool and she went back to her knitting as if she had not made the most astute point so far this evening. Under her breath she counted her stitches, touching each one with her index finger.

  ‘Marry me, Roselyn,’ I implored for the eighth time, and for the eighth time she blushed and smiled and didn’t look at me. ‘Gods, have mercy on me. One of these days you’ll say yes.’

  ‘If you’re quite finished,’ Ava interrupted witheringly.

  ‘What kind of man is ever finished seducing a beautiful woman?’ I asked, earning a few impatient eye-rolls.

  ‘However the killer is achieving his kills, we should see this as an opportunity,’ Ava said. ‘If the Sparrow is killing warders, then he’s potentially on our side. We may be able to broach a temporary alliance.’

  ‘No,’ Osric said with a flash of his eyes. ‘Never. He is traitorous, murdering scum.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Say what you really think, Os,’ Finn muttered.

  ‘Either way,’ Thorne said, ‘we gather our forces and move south.’

  ‘War,’ Finn said, and for once she didn’t look flippant or reckless. She looked scared as she met her husband’s eyes. ‘You’re talking about waging war on Kaya.’

  ‘Not Kaya,’ he replied. ‘The warders who seek to take what does not belong to them.’

  They turned as one to look at me. Expecting something. Perhaps an impassioned speech about how I would take back what was mine, and welcome Pirenti aid in doing so. Instead, I asked, ‘You think I know anything about war?’ I shook my head and stood, scraping my chair back loudly. ‘This is too tense for me. I’m going for a drink.’

  ‘This isn’t the time, Falco –’

  ‘It’s always the time for royalty,’ I laughed. As I left their disappointment was palpable, but so familiar it felt safe.

  I remembered vividly the fury I had felt that night, when Lutius had betrayed me and let the warders invade Sancia. I remembered the hatred I’d been filled with and the accompanying need to cast off all pretense, to fight for revenge and justice and power and respect. I had drawn my swords and screamed his name, and I would have fought him then and there – until something very, very different found me.

  All of that was gone now, that fury and hatred. Everything was gone, and the more they expected of me the worse it would be for them when I failed to deliver.

  After an ocean of ale I wound up in bed, staring at the ceiling. I could feel wingbeats inside my ribcages. I could feel her. Assassin, murderess, children’s nightmare.

  My Sparrow.

  I remembered hearing her. That day. Or hearing something – footsteps. I remembered thinking to myself: He’s here. The Sparrow. I remembered thinking it was fitting, now that Quillane was dead, for me to either die or kill. There was a pit of grief in my chest as I kissed my Empress on her cold lips. This slain person had been my someday, the beginning and end to every plan, every ruse, the reason to keep going. I had forged the mask, but Quillane had been the reason I wore it each day.

  And that was when I saw it.

  A wraith. Some kind of monster, something not human at all, too pale by far, too colourless. And who dared to be colourless in this world, this world ruled by the shades in eyes and souls? Who had ever dared but me? Me, whose eyes did not change, had shifted but twice since the day I was born?

  My same shiftless eyes travelled over the creature and a sucking riptide took hold of my soul, dragging me into the unknown, the infinite, the absolute beauty of the void to which I had been blind.

  She was not colourless after all. She had eyes of bloodiest crimson and she looked at me with them and –

  – and I was aware for the first tim
e of the complete savagery of life, the tearing hands and teeth against my skin, the perfection of fate and the strength of the world. Here, in her, the strength. I understood it immediately: the iron force of her will, the impossibility of it. The detachment she had from anything mortal – she was too cold by half for mortality.

  Inwardly I sank to my knees before her, dwarfed. A slave to her for the rest of my days as I had never been to anyone. She made sense of my existence. As we bonded she let loose the fury that lay dormant in my heart, she gave power to my impotence. My eyes had shifted three times in my life. Once to gold on that night, with her. And twice before, twice when they had turned the bloodiest crimson. Isadora’s shade of red.

  Without her near I shrivelled and returned to dust.

  Tonight I tried to form a thought, unsure how it worked, this bond. I formed it as hard and as clear as I could.

  I’m coming for you, little Sparrow.

  To have her or kill her, I didn’t know. But either way the message remained the same. And that was when I was jerked from consciousness with a wrench on my guts and balls and lungs and dragged into a different plane of existence.

  Isadora

  I took my place on the floor of the living room, surrounded by sleeping bodies. Jonah was outside on watch, but Penn lay to one side of me, Wesley to the other. I stared at the ceiling and let my mind calm into that place it inhabited during sleep. I would need focus.

  The dream arrived with a tingling, sinister brush of my skin. Things blurred and warped. They became a cage made of forged iron, swinging very gently over the precipice. I could hear the slight creak of the chain suspending me. And I could hear the faint shuffle of things below. I didn’t know what that sound meant, not yet. I knew I had space to stand because I was small, but no space to walk or run. Space to curl in sleep and food that was raw and dead and never enough.

  I was crying, sobbing. Wordlessly begging the men at the edge of the chasm. They were watching me, and there were two of them. They were so pale, as fair as me, and I thought they were surely here to help me. I knew only the cage, and that I must escape it.

  But when one of them spoke he called me demon. ‘Stay where you belong, demon,’ he said. ‘Guard your precipice.’