ISANDOR STRUGGLED, but the Knights bound his arms behind his back and dragged him away from Milleus’ truck. He yelled out, “Jevaithi!” But his voice did not rise above the screams of the people, and the hiss of engines.
People chanted, “Jevaithi, Jevaithi!”
A lot of people were screaming, and over the noise, there was a thunderous roar that shook the ground and made the air vibrate. The Knights stopped behind a large tent, with Isandor suspended between them, hanging from their grip on his upper arms.
“There,” one of the men, a Knight Leader, said, his gaze directed downhill. At least twenty huge dark objects were floating down into the camp, massive round silhouettes occasionally punctuated by a flame and another roar.
Balloons. The Chevakian army.
A volley of arrows flew from the camp but most fell well short of the baskets, which were bristling with soldiers.
There was a moment of eerie silence before the first bangs echoed over the hillside: Chevakian guns.
Voices on the ground screamed orders.
The balloons landed.
The Knight Leader shouted, “Everyone, come with me. You two, take him away. We don’t need him.”
Isandor felt a surge of fear. Don’t need him was a Knights’ way of pronouncing a death sentence. He struggled, but with his hands bound, he could do nothing. The two men dragged him across muddy ground. More balloons were still coming down and the sounds of battle changed as the Chevakians joined. There were people cheering. Groups of Knights ran downhill towards the scene of the fights. A flash of lightning turned the whole camp white and a moment later, a clap of thunder shook the ground.
The air tingled. For a heartbeat, he thought he could see icefire strands in the clouds. Blue and pulsing
They arrived at a couple of trucks guarded by one single Junior Knight standing on the steps into the cabin peering over the camp. “What’s going on down there?”
“Trouble. Chevakian army has turned up. Go join the unit.”
The Junior Knight saluted his superiors and left Isandor with his executioners.
They looped a rope under his arms and tied it so he stood with his back against the truck. Then another rope around his legs. Isandor kicked, but they were too strong. The ropes were really tight and cut circulation in his hands, but he suspected that he would not have use for blood circulation much longer.
Please, let it be quick.
“Now, let’s see how brave our boy king is.”
“I don’t want to be a king.” The people had called him that and it embarrassed him. The people of the City of Glass feared kings, and he was no king.
He glanced at the sky. Where were those balloons? Where was Milleus? If he whistled, was there a chance that his eagle would turn up?
The Knights laughed. “You’re a worm, nothing but a worm, from the Outer City. You really thought you could defeat us with your pathetic rebellion?”
“We will defeat you.” Although he wished no part in the rebellion. By the skylights, he had to keep them talking, until someone, someone would see him.
One of the Knights lashed out with a rope.
A sharp pain exploded across his legs, as if someone burned a glowing rod into his skin. Isandor bit his lip to keep in the scream. He braced himself for the next hit, which came soon enough, and the next one, on his stomach. Each felt like it dug deeper into his skin. With the fourth hit, he screamed.
“Change the tone of your cockiness now?”
“We will win!” He turned his face to the sky, and with all the breath he had left, whistled for his eagle.
He had to keep believing, or all was lost. Believing that Jevaithi was alive, believing that Milleus would find him, that the Chevakians would defeat the Knights.
He lost count of how many times the Knight hit him. With each hit, his anger grew. Once he had respected the Knighthood, but these men were rotten, evil.
His shirt felt wet, with blood, he guessed. The icy rain was probably the only thing to keep him from feeling the pain. Because there was no pain, only anger.
With each hit, he screamed. “Fuck you!”
The rope lashed him. “Shut up, you worm.”
“Never!”
Again.
“Never! You’ll have to kill me first.”
Again. His throat was raw from screaming.
“Never.”
There was no next hit. The Knight stood before him, his face shining with sweat, his chest heaving.
“Getting tired, huh?” Isandor said. His skin was itching like crazy.
“You are a tough bugger.” The Knight grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him up, dragging at the bonds that held Isandor to the truck. “You like playing games, huh?”
Isandor spat blood into the man’s face. Behind the Knight’s head, roiling clouds parted, and something moved between them, blazing blue icefire. “By the skylights, what is that?”
“Trying to distract me?”
“No, look!”
But the clouds had covered the crack again. The first Knight stared. He had seen it; Isandor had seen it, but the second Knight had not.
He said, “Looks like the Chevakians are beating the stuffing out of our boys. Come, we got to help them. Just get on with this job.”
“I hear ya.” The first Knight unsheathed his dagger, but he still looked nervous.
Isandor screamed, “Jevaithi! Milleus! Mother!” But a gust of icy wind tore past him and carried any sound his voice made. It was so cold that it hurt. All around him were flurries of . . . snow?
His mind drifted off into a place where he kept his secrets, a place where he and Carro sat on mounds of snow and read old books, a place where he led Jevaithi by the hand in the warehouse where they had exchanged hearts. And a small hunting shack in the Aranian mountains where he had first made love to her.
The dagger came down.
One moment, it glittered in the light, the next it plunged into his chest. He screamed without making a noise. The clouds burst open and released a lightning bolt of pure icefire. The world stopped moving around him. He felt no pain, and no sense of having a body.
The Knight stumbled back, wide-eyed.
Voices, thunder and battle sounds went quiet. Was he dead? He tried to move, but his arms were still tied to the truck. Not dead, then?
A screech above the camp made all the hairs on Isandor’s neck stand up. The Knights shouted at each other and looked up.
A waft of warm and humid air went over the camp. The air wove into blue strands that were sucked up into the sky.
Isandor had only felt something like this once before: in the City of Glass, when he tried to escape through the Outer City with Jevaithi, and when Carro and his patrol had attacked him with an icefire sink.
Isandor sensed a lot of people running up the hill. There were cries and screams.
A huge shape came plummeting out of the air. At first Isandor thought it was his eagle, but it was much bigger than that. The thing—whatever it was—landed on top of the truck, where he couldn’t see it. He tried to twist around, but his arms were still tied to the truck. His back hurt, his legs hurt, his chest hurt. His movements dislodged the dagger from his chest. It fell into the mud at his feet. A strand of icefire played over the hilt and the blade, which had withered to a useless stump.
The animal behind him snorted, and no, that didn’t sound like an eagle. It didn’t sound like a camel, or a bear, or like any animal he knew, but it was a large-animal snort. A very large animal. He felt the warmth of its breath. The icefire strand on the dagger curled itself into a little coil and sprang off, over Isandor’s head, to the creature on the roof of the truck.
A woman’s voice screamed, “Look! Look at it!”
The truck wobbled at his back. There was a thud of a heavy weight landing on the ground, and then the thing came around the side of the truck. It was . . . a girl.
She was about his age, and stood barefoot in the mud. She was stark naked, thin, her skin grey with engrained dirt. Her cheekbones were strong, but her cheeks rounded. Her hair was curly and deep black, like his mother’s hair before it started going grey. Her eyes . . . were deep royal blue, like his own. She was strange and alluring and the most beautiful and most wild girl he had ever seen.
“Who are you?” What are you?
She didn’t reply, but her eyes remained fixated on his. She came closer and ran her nose over his shoulder, like an animal sniffing its master. Her breath was so hot that it made him shiver.
She reached out a claw-like hand, with long and pointy nails, and ran it over his blood-soaked shirt. The blood dried, turned to powder and blew away on the wind. His skin burned and itched. She ran her hand down both his thighs and the skin there itched, too, knitting back together. Then she hooked the long nail under the rope that tied his arms to the truck and ripped it.
Oh, the freedom.
Oh, fuck, the pain.
She ripped the rope that tied his hands together, too.
While he cursed with pins and needles, the girl knelt at his feet and ripped the bonds to his legs as well. Her back was unusually broad for a girl and triangular in shape. Her backside was not full and rounded, like Jevaithi’s, but muscular and strangely asymmetrical, and her legs—wait, what was the snake-like thing that curled around her upper leg? She had a tail?
“What are you?” he asked again.
She rose and bent over him, and kissed him on the forehead. He leaned into her warmth. She smelled like home, as if he had known her for years. If there were any good spirits, this had to be one.
At the edge of his consciousness, a truck engine roared. People shouted.
“Give her to me!” a rough voice yelled.
Someone stumbled towards him. The man looked like a living skeleton, dressed in filthy clothing, with a skull-like head devoid of most of its hair. The face had suffered horrific injuries, burns probably, and the skin was stretched tight over his forehead and cheeks. The lidless eyes were permanently open. But the irises were royal blue.
By the skylights. “Tandor.”
Was this girl creature a slave of his?
Tandor stopped, panting. “You’re in great danger. Stand very still and don’t speak, and I’ll come to take that creature away. I know how to deal with it.” He inched closer, his hand outstretched.
The girl turned her head, and gave a low hiss that made the hair on Isandor’s neck stand up.
“Why should I give her to you? She seems to like me a lot better.”
“She’s a dacon.”
A magical shapeshifter, the symbol of the Thilleian house. Isandor wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen the girl. “Why should I give her to you? You lied to me about everything else.” Isandor was surprised how quickly his anger resurfaced. “You lied to me about who you are, and what you wanted, and about everything. About my sister. You used my mother—”
“Come now, there is no time for talk.”
Isandor laughed, an action that made his stomach hurt. “Everyone is watching. These two tried to kill me. And you’re just going to walk out of here?” He noticed an elderly woman having come out of the truck. That was the Lady Armaine, daughter-in-law of the old king?
“We’re not going to walk. We’re going to fly,” Tandor said. He had come even closer. His left eye didn’t close properly and was weeping. By the skylights, what had happened to him?
Isandor laughed again. “We’ll fly because I’m a magical being since someone just stabbed me and I should be dead?”
“You stupid boy. You’re a servitor, that’s why.”
A servitor that couldn’t be killed unless the master died. When the master died, the servitors died. Which meant that no one could kill him when Jevaithi was still alive, and that he died when Jevaithi died. And that no one could kill Jevaithi while he was alive. That thought filled him with hope.
Tandor continued, “We’re going to tell that beastie to turn into its dacon form and take us out of here.”
“You can’t tell her what to do. She doesn’t even understand you, or doesn’t speak.”
“Come, you stupid boy.” He grabbed Isandor’s arm.
He yanked himself loose. “Let me go, you don’t own me.”
The girl snorted and shook herself like a bear. She positioned herself between Isandor and Tandor, jamming Isandor up against the side of the truck. Her body was much hotter than a normal person’s would be. It . . . grew. The skin became rough, the body became thicker, the shoulders extended. Hands and feet became huge claws. The head elongated like a bear’s snout. Ears and hair vanished into the leathery skin. And the snake-like thing against her leg grew into a huge tail.
Lastly, protrusions on her shoulders unfolded into giant leathery wings.
The creature turned its head towards Isandor. It had retained the girl’s blue eyes.
“Watch it!” a male voice yelled. One of the rebels, with a gun, pointed at the creature’s head. He wore the black of the Brotherhood, and Isandor recognised Simo, wild-eyed. “I’ll kill the abomination!”
“No, don’t!” Isandor jumped forward, but his muscles were still sore from being hit. A mighty wing swooped over his head. There was a bang.
He vaguely heard Milleus shout. The next moment, a rain of burning embers came down. The creature hissed and spread its wings. Simo fired again, and this time, Isandor saw the bullet hitting some kind of invisible shield in mid-air. It exploded into millions of glowing fragments. The dacon hissed. Simo fumbled with the gun that had to be reloaded.
“It’s a construct of the old king!” someone yelled.
“It’s a servitor.”
“Kill it! Kill it!”
Isandor held his hand on the creature’s neck. He could feel muscles relax under the hot skin. The creature understood the insults? It had nothing to do with the old king, and was not a servitor. It was something of icefire itself, some poorly understood part of it, some part that, possibly, the Brotherhood denied for fear of frightening the people. The Brotherhood desperately wanted icefire to be a positive force. And it was not.
The creature bowed its head and breathed out a cloud of warmth. As the air stroked past his skin, he could feel a sense of longing, and a savage hunger.
She finds nourishment in icefire, Isandor realised. And he also realised what he could do to save Tiverius from the same fate as the City of Glass and the southern Chevakian towns.
“You fly, huh?”
She crouched and held out her wings.
By the skylights, they were massive.
He grabbed a handful of leathery skin, put his good foot onto a bony protuberance that might be an elbow, or a shoulder, and heaved himself onto the broad back.
The huge body under him felt warm, and right. This was what he did best: working with animals.
He bent over the long neck. “You ready?”
The giant wings flapped and he rose into the air.