BY THE SKYLIGHTS, this truck made a lot of noise. And it bumped and jerked, and it stank. Loriane sat on the velvet-covered seat, her back straight, her hands clasped between her knees. She was hot in the stuffy cabin. The dress that the young man Farius had brought was very thick, unusually tight in the waist, and her belly was still flabby from the pregnancy she thought would never end.
Outside, the streets of Tiverius slid past at disconcerting speed, huge houses with walled yards, like Sady’s house.
The two men in the front seat seemed relaxed, the driver and the huge dark-haired and dark-eyed guard in his stiff uniform.
He had come to the house especially for her. She’d seen him before, briefly, in the corridor and shadowing Sady when he went out. And this morning, she’d been sitting in the kitchen with her Chevakian book, and this man had come in and had demanded that she come with him. He mentioned Sady, but not much else of what he said made sense.
She worried about being taken back to the camp, where surely the child could easily find her and kill her. She should have let Myra cut it from the womb, this instrument of Tandor’s. It was out there somewhere, and if not killed, it would kill again. The thing was a predator, living off raw flesh.
At a time that now seemed long ago, Loriane had seen the misshapen foetuses in jars in the palace birthing rooms. Demon-like creatures with wings. She’d thought such children were born dead, but the awful truth was that sometimes, they lived.
Dara and Ontane didn’t believe her.
The Chevakians had no idea, and how she could possibly warn them of this thing was a mystery to her. These people with their machines, with their refined tastes and beautiful houses. The people were so rich and so far removed from her. They knew nothing about icefire, and worse, seemed unwilling to believe that such a thing existed.
The truck stopped in front of a building with tall columns at least two storeys high. In the dark space between the columns, Loriane spotted two guards standing on either side of a door. Another guard, in similar blue uniform, came around the side of the truck, opened the door and helped her out. She caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the glass. The Chevakian dress didn’t look bad on her. It just felt hot and tight. Her hair was still loose from combing it this morning. It hung in a curly mass halfway down her shoulders.
Sady’s guard took her arm and led her up the steps between tall columns into the building. This looked like some sort of official building to her. She wished Sady were here, and would feel a lot better if he was.
They entered a high-ceilinged hall, circular, with columns around the sides and a domed ceiling above. The floor underfoot was smooth, with a mosaic of different-coloured tiles. Patterns of leaves and vines slid by underfoot.
They went through the hall into a corridor on the other side, and from there down a staircase. It grew dark here, with oil lamps casting little pools of orange light over rough stone walls. She didn’t like being under the ground. By the skylights, this place reminded her of the dungeons in the City of Glass.
The smell was the same, too, of human misery and suffering. A hand of panic clamped around her chest. Were the Chevakians blaming her for the deaths of their citizens? Was she to be locked up?
She turned to the guard. “Can you tell me what is happening?”
But the guard didn’t understand and her Chevakian vocabulary didn’t yet include the words “prison” or “I did not kill them.” She thought her innocence was clear. She thought Sady understood. After all, he wouldn’t have allowed her to sleep in the room next to his if he believed that she had killed four people.
Or would he?
They arrived in a corridor where the stink was worse than on the stairs. Metal-barred doors lined both sides of the corridor.
Dark presences rustled in cells off the side. She thought she heard ragged breathing and the rough whisper of a male voice. Leering.
At the end of the corridor, a light burned in a cell where there were silhouettes of a number of people. The guard led her inside. To her immense relief, one of the people was Sady.
He smiled at her.
She returned his smile, her heart still thudding. By the skylights.
Then she spotted the cell’s prisoner. Shackled to a wooden crate, his ankles bound. With pale, scabbed skin and his shoulders wasted to bony protuberances, he resembled a skeleton more than a living being, and a disgustingly filthy one at that. But she recognised his scarred face.
“Tandor!”
He squinted in her direction, but she was unsure if the watering eyes saw anything. Brown eyes. She thought he could only use disguises when there was icefire?
He smiled, and coughed. “Loriane, my love.”
“I am not your love.” She shuddered with revulsion. Was there ever a time that his mysterious craggy face and lilting voice had seemed exotic to her? She’d been stupid for believing that he would carry her off to a more exciting life. Riches, living like a princess, travelling to foreign places—what a load of rubbish.
She turned to Sady. “Where . . .” And then found that all Chevakian words had fled her mind.
“You talk to him,” he said, and mimicked talking. “We go outside.” He pointed at the door.
“No.”
“All right. I watch from here. Talk to him.” He leaned against the metal bars of the door. One of the other Chevakians crouched in the corridor. He had a slate with paper and was making notes.
“He wants to check out what I told him,” Tandor said. “And the other guard understands what we’re saying. But I’ll tell you the same I told him already.” His Chevakian accent, always very slight, seemed to have become stronger. He chuckled, and then coughed and spat in the straw. A dribble of brown slime ran down his chin.
By the skylights, he was disgusting. This wasn’t Tandor. Not as she knew him. This was the evil that hid underneath the disguise of an alluring, mysterious travelling merchant.
“So what happened then?”
He coughed. “Well, they played with something that was too big for them. And it blew up in their faces, huh?”
“The Knights?”
“Who else? They played with icefire but they couldn’t see it. They had no idea what they were doing.”
“So, whatever you did, whatever your plan was, when we went into the palace with Myra—that had nothing to do with the explosion? Am I supposed to believe that?”
“Whatever you believe makes no difference.” His voice lowered. “It is what we do now that can doom us or save us. The Heart has come alive. When I reached their prison, the children who were captured by the Knights had been tampered with. They wouldn’t listen to me. The Knights’ tampering had turned them into living sinks and they were attracted by the Heart. They absorbed all the icefire from it and became living evil constructs of icefire. Ruko has gone to join them. He has become more dangerous, having returned to his servitor state. His temper was always a problem, but he was a proper servitor and I had him under control. He’s been free since the explosion. I managed to keep some control over him, but it took all my wits to do so. Often, I was controlled by him, not the other way around. By removing him from me, you and Myra set him free and allowed him to return to his peers. He is the most dangerous of all the children. He should never have been allowed to escape.”
“So now it’s all my fault?”
“Loriane, if you only listened—”
“If I’d listened? If I’d listened to my concerns I would have given you up to the Knights years ago, and if I had, I bet that none of this would have happened. Whenever I asked you about your plans, you never told me anything. It was always later, or, when it’s all over. But I see now. First everything that was wrong with the world was all the Knights’ fault, and the stupid people from the City of Glass who let the Knights rule. Then it was Isandor’s fault, and mine, for letting him sign up. And it was the Chevakians’ fault, and your mother’s. And the Knights’ fault again, and the Brotherhood of the Light. Now, finally, the Chevakians are going to make you pay for your own failures.”
“Loriane, please, I need your—”
“You don’t need anything that I could give you. Because of you, I’ve lost all I have. My house, my position, my son . . .” Her voice grew unsteady. She glanced at the man in the corridor, writing down everything they said. “I’ll tell the Chevakians that you’re evil and should never be released.”
His voice cut through hers. “Loriane, listen to me!” He coughed and spat on the floor.
His expression was intense. For a moment, the brown illusion of his eyes wavered, and the blue came through. Royal blue.
From the corner of her eye, she noticed Sady’s concerned look.
“I need to get out of here, you have to tell them that. Whether or not you believe in my guilt doesn’t matter. I need to find the hybrid child.” Tandor cleared his throat and spat again. That began to get on Loriane’s nerves. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know, and that is the truth.”
“It hasn’t come back to you?”
“No. Why should it? I’ll kill it if it comes back.”
“Kill it? The most valuable of all your children?” He laughed.
“This is not the time for stupid jokes!” A wave of anger came over her. She lashed out and her flat palm connected with his cheek with a satisfying slap.
Tandor cursed, and met her eyes, his nostrils flaring. His cheek was going red.
“This child is part of your machinations, isn’t it? You are the king’s grandson, and you wanted to put yourself back on the throne and return the City of Glass to what it was before the king left. I thought all that stuff about Thilleians and Pirosians was over, not important anymore. You said so. But that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Isandor is Thilleian and that was why he was an experiment, to see if I could live with him, and . . .” She saw something now. It was part of the experiment. The misshapen foetuses in the palace had not died because they couldn’t live, or because the Knights had killed them; they had died because their mothers had killed them. How often, at the start of the pregnancy, had she felt that she wanted to kill the child? How carefully had she planned for Myra to cut the child from her womb and strangle it? But she had hesitated, because the hybrid’s evil blood had already mingled with hers. Seeing the baby girl, having suffered for so long carrying her inside her body, she knew she could never kill it. That was Tandor’s experiment: to see if, in the face of evil, a Pirosian would kill her own child.
She continued in a lower voice, “Isandor and I were part of this evil experiment. I know how you did it. He is the hybrid’s father.”
His eyes widened to show that she had guessed correctly. And some part of her had still hoped that she was wrong. Tears pricked in her eyes, and she couldn’t have told if they were from anger or grief. Where was Isandor?
“I’m sorry about all of it, Loriane. Help me out of here, please. You’re my only hope. I love you.”
“You don’t love me. You only wanted to use me. Even now, you’re lying and grovelling. Anyway, even if I knew where the child was, you are not getting your hands on her. I’m through with your only hopes. You’ve said this so many times that I don’t believe it anymore. I could have died from giving birth to that thing. All you ever think about is yourself.” Tears rolled over her cheeks. She wiped them away, angrily.
“Just let me explain.”
“No. No more explaining. I’m through with you.” She turned away.
“Come join me, Loriane. Tell him to release me. Help me find the child. Come and be my queen. We will rule the City of Glass.”
“There is no more City of Glass, because of you. You didn’t love me back then. You don’t love me now. You never loved me. I do not want to be with a man who made the entire country suffer. I hate you. I hate you.” Her voice would no longer cooperate. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Sady said a few soft words and put an arm around her shoulders. She leant into him.
Tandor snorted. “Look at that. You have yourself some powerful friends.” He said something in Chevakian and Sady replied in a sharp tone. Tandor spat in the dirt.
The guard sprang forward and thrust the point of his dagger under his chin.
Tandor spat again, on the man’s uniform. “Tell your powerful friend, if he listens to you. Tell him that he’ll come and beg me for my help sooner, rather than later. Tell him that he’ll need the hybrid to stop the icefire storm coming for me.”
Loriane clamped her hands over her ears. “Stop this nonsense. Stop it. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I’ll tell them to hang you and shoot the child.”
A gust of wind tore through the cell. Loriane’s chest grew tight as if she could barely breathe. She clutched her throat, her breath wheezing. “Tandor. What are you doing?”
Chevakians were shouting around her, evidently some saw something she did not. Her chest grew tighter. She could barely move. Black spots danced before her eyes.
Sady grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away from Tandor, shouting angry orders at the Chevakian guards. Before he dragged her to the door, she noticed, between the bodies of the guards, two men pouncing on Tandor.
Loriane could only properly breathe when she had left the cell. Sady was looking at her with a concerned expression. “I’m fine,” she said in her best Chevakian, but she was still trembling. Sady shook his head, speaking soft words, and holding her.
She stood like that for a while, with his arms around her, feeling his comforting warmth and breathing the clean smell of his clothes. It struck her in a way she had not realised before, how much she hated everything to do with the royal family and the City of Glass. The secrecy, the fear of who was watching whom. All her life, she’d pretended to be unaffected, because she couldn’t see icefire, but icefire affected the lives of everyone. None of it had ever done anyone any good.
Sady let go of her and started moving again, leading her down the corridor and back up the stairs.
“I help you,” she said. Help him deal with Tandor, help him catch and kill the monster child. Help him guide the refugees from the south to a safe and better life.
He smiled. “Thank you.” His eyes were kind and honest. He would not betray her.
While she walked back to the truck with him and his guards, the warmth of his touch lingered on her shoulder. She accepted his hand in climbing in and sat opposite him in the cabin. He was finely built, with close-cropped hair threaded with grey at the temples. His intelligent eyes were light brown, his skin several shades darker than hers with a smattering of freckles over his nose and forehead and a small black mole under his right eye.
Cute, both freckles and mole.
Then he looked up, noticed that she was looking at him, and she feigned interest in Tiverian architecture.
As the city buildings slid past the window, she berated herself. Men were no good, and only wanted to further their own aims. At the very best, they only wanted sex. At the worst, they wanted to destroy her and everything she loved. It had started with the Senior Knight when she was sixteen. She was innocent and naive. He had only been kind enough so that she, starry-eyed with his attentions, came willingly to his bed. She had hoped he would care for her as a lover and companion, but he didn’t. She had hoped he would love the child she suffered so much for, but she understood Knights never looked after their own children. She had hoped Tandor would care for her, but he didn’t, either.
Men didn’t care.
And she hated getting that warm feeling inside whenever she met Sady’s light brown eyes. She hated feeling giddy when he smiled.
Damn it, Loriane, you’re too old and grumpy to fall in love. She’d seen it all before. Love was for suckers. Not to mention that it was the wrong time and the wrong person and, by the skylights, she couldn’t even talk to him.
But he liked her. And he seemed open and honest, everything Tandor was not.
Yeah, all right, she liked him. But that didn’t mean anything.