Once we’re all gathered on the ground floor of the house – Oriana, Luthan and me in the soft area by the fireplace, Fabithe leaning against the wall, and Isidor in a chair a little distance away – I launch straight into it.
“I need your help. To find Toralé. I don’t even know where he is – I haven’t seen him for days – but now he’s going to be executed, and – ”
“Wait,” Fabithe says. “If you’ve not seen him, how do you know?”
Shit. I didn’t mean to tell them that part. But I can’t think of a good reason to lie, so I admit, “I saw it through Ifor’s eyes.”
Dead silence greets that announcement. I glance at Oriana, but her head is bowed. When I look back at Fabithe, he narrows his eyes at me.
“This is a new development.”
“I don’t like it any more than you do. But the point is, I found out he has Toralé.” I blow out a long breath. “I should have guessed, after everything. Toralé is in prison. I just … I never realised it was Ifor’s prison. So I was hoping, between all of us, we could work out where it is.”
“What do you know about Toralé’s surroundings?” Isidor asks, and I turn to him gratefully.
“Not a whole lot.”
“Any details would help.”
I close my eyes, trying to dredge up my faded memories of everything I’ve experienced through Toralé. “The room feels … big. Stone walls. Kind of like the Citadel, only the daylight isn’t blue …”
“How do you know?”
“There are windows.” I frown. “Not like a normal prison. No bars. But he doesn’t move around much. I mean, I don’t think he can. They don’t let him.” Frustrated, I bite the inside of my cheek. “It’s no use, is it? He could be anywhere. I’ve tried imagining myself into his head, like I did with Luthan, but I just don’t remember!”
“Maybe you need to approach it differently,” Isidor says. “You said your visions are controlled by emotion. How does Toralé feel?”
I can only stare at him, because he’s right. It’s emotion that pulls me in. When I found Luthan, that time, it wasn’t what she could see or hear that mattered most. It was the feelings.
“I … he’s confused. Disoriented. It’s as though he’s asleep, most of the time, and they only wake him up when they … want something. And what they want is usually bad. They … hurt him.” I shiver, cold prickling along my forearms despite the warmth of the fire. “He’s frightened. Because they don’t think like other people. You can’t predict what they’ll do next. He wants to beat them, but he can’t see how. He can’t see anything ahead except loneliness and darkness.” My voice drops. “He just wants to go home …”
As usual, Toralé registers his own consciousness with a mixture of fear and determination. Fear, because waking usually means interrogation, or else another uncomfortable and incomprehensible experiment. Determination, because these brief snatches of awareness in between prolonged periods of enforced sleep are the only chance he has of escape. A slender chance, admittedly, but one day he will find a way to do it. He cannot believe he will be trapped here for the rest of his life. Cannot. Otherwise he will lose his sanity along with everything else.
“Get up, Toralé.” The voice is completely colourless. Tarrith. Of course it is. He is Tarrith’s tool. None of the other mordathi would wake him.
Pulling himself into a sitting position, Toralé turns his head. Tarrith is standing beside the stone slab, knife in hand. Toralé barely flinches at the knife; he’s used to blades by now. It took him far longer to get used to the lack of colour in the man’s voice. Tarrith looks like an ordinary man, albeit one who is thin and pale and almost expressionless, but his voice … it still makes Toralé shudder. He is used to seeing people’s emotions painted on the world: the bright red slash of anger, the deep blue wash of sorrow, the springtime green of hope. Yet Tarrith is empty. He might as well be faceless, for all the sense Toralé can make of him.
“What do you want, Tarrith?” He says it forcefully, trying to hide his fear. Yet when Tarrith looks at him – that flat, blank stare – the fear comes bubbling to the surface anyway. “Forgive me. That was rude. I shouldn’t have – ”
Without any change of expression, Tarrith raises his knife and stabs it straight through his own palm.
Gods. Toralé grits his teeth to hold back his cry of pain, but he can’t stop the tears springing to his eyes. As always, the transfer is almost immediate. Tarrith’s hand remakes itself, the blood flow reversing, the skin sealing itself back up. And Toralé … I get to bear the impact of the blow. You’d think, after all this time, it wouldn’t hurt so much.
He looks down at his left palm, bright with blood. A hole has been torn through the middle of it, sinew and bone peeking through like macabre treasure, yet the line of his scar still shows above and below. His scar: a strange way to think of it. He is more scar than skin, now. Yet that jagged, thicker line has a special significance, because it was the very first. The only one Tarrith didn’t give him. After that …
Tarrith leaned over him, holding a knife. Incongruously, his expression reminded Toralé of his mother gutting a fish for dinner: absorbed yet detached, intent on a chore that was messy and complicated but still, in the end, only a chore. The blade scored precisely along his hands and feet, his face, marking up his composite parts as if he were no more than a vessel for the blood he held. And then it moved to his throat –
With a supreme effort, Toralé keeps his good right hand on his left wrist, instead of lifting it to touch the place where his birthstone should be. The moment when Tarrith cut around it stands out white-hot, even in the sea of colourless fog punctuated by bright moments of agony that forms his recent past. Not out, Tarrith told him. We would not want to make you a mage, would we? Just … away.
Toralé doesn’t understand what that means. He only knows he is missing a vital part of himself. Perhaps the binding process can be reversed and it is possible for him to get it back. Perhaps he is forever broken. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter either way, because Tarrith will always be able to find him …
I will not be here forever. He clings to the thought. Yet already, determination is being subsumed by despair.
“Over and over, you forget yourself,” Tarrith says. “And now you have forced me to waste your blood. I don’t like waste, Toralé.”
“I’m sorry.” The pleading dark yellow of his own voice would sicken him, were it not for the fact that he gave up the appearance of dignity a long time ago. His damaged hand has begun an excruciating throb in time to his heartbeat. Both hands, now, are soaked crimson. He clutches them to his chest and prays desperately for the bleeding to stop.
“I came to tell you that you are going to be executed,” Tarrith says. “Lord Ifor sent through the order. He intends to oversee your death in person.”
Executed. It should be a shock. It should send Toralé’s thoughts scrabbling for ways to avoid it. Yet somehow, all he can find is a vague sense of relief. I was right: I will not be here forever. He has the irrational urge to laugh, and perhaps Tarrith reads it; his lips tighten.
“I could save your life, you know that. If you would only consent to become my link.”
Toralé shakes his head. “Thank you, but I’d rather die.”
“Are you sure? After all, in life lies hope.” Tarrith’s thin crack of a smile suggests he is fully aware of Toralé’s lingering desire for escape, and finds it mildly amusing.
In such a life, there would be very little hope. I will not bind my will to yours or to anyone else’s. The words are there, but they won’t come out. Instead, once more, Toralé shakes his head.
“I could make you do it,” Tarrith says. “Consent is easy enough to coerce.”
“Do you have your master’s permission for that?” Toralé croaks – knowing he is inviting retribution. Knowing that Tarrith does not like to be reminded of his own status as a bound link, even one granted full autonomy. And, sure enough, although the mordathe’s expression remains almost empty, the corners of his mouth tighten in a particular way that Toralé has come to recognise, and a rare swirl of dark brownish red – the colour of old blood – disturbs the dullness of his voice.
“I have a week and a day, Toralé. In a week and a day, Lord Ifor will arrive to see you die. But in that time, anything could happen.”
He picks up his knife and stabs his own hand a second time. Toralé screams.
I clutch my hand, trying to hold together the severed tendons and stem the flow of blood – but my skin is unbroken. What I felt was only a shadow, an echo of pain. All the same, I have to bite my cheek again to stop myself crying out.
“I still don’t know where he is,” I whisper. I can’t stop shivering. “But we have a week.”
Around me, the room is silent. I look up to find everyone watching me with varying degrees of concern. Oriana appears almost as shaken as I feel, but she takes my left hand and grips it tightly. The warmth of her touch helps to ease the lingering pain.
“A week,” I say more loudly. “Just one week before Ifor shows up to execute him. Fabithe, you said something to me once about Ifor’s secret prisons. What did you mean?”
“It’s only a rumour. There’s an old abandoned castle in the Duskmire. The Castle Retreat. Used to be some kind of hideout for rich people.”
“All right.” It’s a start. And something about the name seems familiar. “But now it’s a prison?”
“Or something like one.”
“Something like one?” Luthan echoes. She’s stayed in the background, taking it all in – I could almost hear her brain whirring as she thought through the implications – but now she leans forward with quiet intensity. “What does that mean?”
“It means that in the towns and villages of eastern Castellany, if you accuse someone of being a mage, men will come across the border from the Duskmire and take them away. They call themselves Pendhaki.”
“Mage-takers,” Isidor translates for me. “The martial arm of the priesthood, dedicated to ensuring the world stays free of magic.” Briefly, his eyes meet mine, and it’s as if I can hear his thoughts the way I do the others’ – yes, this is one of many reasons why we hide – before he looks away. “And yet, Fabithe, you reject any possibility that magic exists.”
“If these people really were mages, I doubt they’d allow themselves to be disappeared so easily. And it’s only a rumour. I went there myself once, to see, but there wasn’t any sign of life. At least, not from the outside.”
“You did not try to enter?”
“What for? If it’s not true, I’d have gained nothing. And if it is, I’d have gained myself a place in the lockup alongside them. No one can get into the Castle Retreat without being seen.” Fabithe’s gaze moves to me, pinning me down. “So if your Toralé really is in there, he’s going to have to stay there.”
Castle Retreat. Just as it did the first time he said it, the name evokes some resonance of familiarity – but I can’t work out why. It was something recent. Something that lingered long enough in my head for me to remember it now.
Something I wrote?
I close my eyes, seeing my own handwriting swim before me. Castle Retreat, 15 Moon 1411. That’s what Toralé wrote, in the vision I recorded for Dr Whyte. It’s right. I know it.
“He’s there,” I say firmly. My heart is racing with the knowledge that I’m one step closer to my goal. “And he can’t stay there. You have to help me get him out.”
Fabithe shakes his head. “I’ve already given you my answer to that question.”
“And now I’m asking you again.” I turn in Luthan’s direction. “All of you.”
She looks back at me, indecision clear to read in her face even without the benefit of my own particular insight. I think she likes me well enough, but this must all seem quite remote from her, despite my ability to see through her eyes. She doesn’t know Ifor, doesn’t have that personal reason to work against him that Oriana and Fabithe do. She doesn’t have a mysteriously matching scar. And besides, she’s followed the same patterns of study and travel and chores all her life. What possible incentive could there be for her to leave her father and her home behind, and help me to rescue a stranger?
She may not know Ifor, but Ifor knew her, a little voice whispers to me. A long-lost friend. A long-lost enemy. She means something to Ifor. But what?
“There’s no way in,” Fabithe reiterates. “And Ifor’s men’ll not have given up looking for us. There’s every chance we’d be caught before we got anywhere near the Retreat.”
“We can’t stay here forever. Ifor knows we’re in Oakelm. If he finds the island – ” I glance at Isidor, pretty sure he’ll take my meaning. His magic may be able to protect him and Luthan from ordinary folk, but how long would it stand against Ifor’s?
“I am not afraid, on that account,” Isidor says gravely. “You can stay as long as you wish. But on foot, the Retreat is many days’ journey from here. You will have to leave tomorrow if you want to get there in a week.”
I turn back to Fabithe. “It could still work. Ifor isn’t due to arrive at the Retreat until after the week’s up. The last thing he’d expect would be us sneaking in before him.”
“Of course it would! Because that would be reckless to the point of folly!”
My nails dig into my palms. If I have to, I’ll do it without him – without any of them. I’ll find a way to rescue Toralé on my own. But that isn’t what I want. Bring the five of us together. It’s what Ifor fears. It’s what feels right. And if I leave anyone behind, I might never find them again.
“You still want revenge, don’t you?” I ask. “Well, here’s your chance. Prevent Toralé’s execution, and you’ll mess up Ifor’s plans even more than Oriana’s escape did. Trust me. He wants Toralé dead.”
“Why?”
“Because Toralé is the last of us.”
Isidor sits forward. “What do you mean by that, Alyssia?”
The truth is, I don’t know. I haven’t figured out why we matter to Ifor. Who we are to him. Still, I attempt an explanation. “He knows us. All five of us. Even those of us who’ve never met him. He seems to … hate us.”
Fabithe’s gaze settles briefly on Luthan, and I feel him wondering what possible connection there could be between her and Ifor. But then he shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll not risk my life again for anything less than the ultimate prize.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“To kill him. What else?”
“I’m not sure we can achieve that,” I say softly. “Not without Toralé.”
“Why? Why do I need him? Why do I need any of you?”
“Because Ifor is afraid of us. Because we are … connected.”
Fabithe’s laugh is scornful. “Afraid of us? I hardly think – ”
“Look at your left hand,” I interrupt him. “Look at mine. Look at Oriana’s. Toralé has the very same scar! You can’t tell me that’s coincidence.”
He doesn’t need to look, which doesn’t surprise me. If I’ve had the chance to notice our scars, so has he. Instead, he folds his arms and scowls at me. “More things in life are coincidence than you seem to think.”
“You don’t believe it’s the slightest bit significant? That four of us are marked the same way?”
“If it was significant, all five of us would be.”
In the silence that follows, Isidor gets up from his chair and examines each of our palms in turn. The little crease between his eyebrows is back, and he nods to himself as he studies each scar. I expect him to say something, once he’s finished, but he only returns to his seat and exchanges a long, wordless glance with Luthan. If it didn’t sound so implausible, I’d say he was suppressing some strong emotion. Maybe alarm, maybe excitement. Maybe even joy. I don’t think Luthan shares it, though. She looks down at her own unmarked palms, and her lips press into a line.
“I’ll go to the Castle Retreat alone, if I have to,” I say, when it becomes apparent that no one else is going to speak. “But I am not leaving Toralé there to die.”
“You will not be alone,” Oriana says. Her eyes are haunted, but she faces me without flinching. “I will be with you.”
My heart leaps. I didn’t appeal to her directly before, because I didn’t think it would be fair. Not after what she’s been through already. But if she’s willing …
“No,” Fabithe says. “Absolutely not. You’re not going anywhere near this thing.”
Her fingers are interlocked tightly enough that the knuckles show pale beneath the skin, but she maintains her composure. “It is my choice. Not yours.”
“But you’re safe here. You’re still mending. Why would you want to – ”
“Because I know what it was like to be there. Hurt. Sentenced to death. I will always be grateful that Alyssia cared enough to rescue me from it. So if someone else is facing the same …”
Her voice wobbles. This time, I’m the one to take her hand.
“Thank you,” I breathe, and she gives me a shaky smile.
“Besides,” she adds, “if Ifor wants him dead, that is a good reason to save his life.” She meets Fabithe’s gaze, and the tilt of her chin is proud. “It is why you saved mine.”
He says nothing. Into the silence, Isidor says calmly, “Luthan will also help you.”
Surprise flits across Luthan’s face. She turns, and once again the two of them exchange a glance loaded with meaning I can’t decipher. Then she nods cautiously.
“Of course I will.”
I look at Fabithe, bracing myself for further argument, but his attention isn’t on me. Arms folded, expression stern, he’s watching Oriana.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks her.
“I am sure.”
He’s silent, still scanning her face. The fingers of one hand drum out an agitated rhythm against his other arm. And then, as if submitting to the inevitable, the tension drains from his body.
“If you’re set on it, I’ll come with you,” he says. “And protect you as best I can.”
He touches a clenched fist to his chest, then opens the hand towards her as though releasing something. It’s an oddly formal gesture, and one I haven’t seen him use before. Without another word, he leaves the room.
I glance back at the others: Luthan and Oriana look bemused, but Isidor is thoughtful.
“If I am not mistaken, that was a salute of the Westlands King’s Guard,” he tells Oriana. “He was acknowledging your courage.”
Her uncertain gaze moves from Isidor to the door. “Really?”
“Is that so surprising?” Isidor asks gently.
“Yes.” She looks down at my hand and hers, still locked together. “I am … unused to thinking of myself that way.”
“Well, then,” he says. “Perhaps it is time to start.”
Once Oriana and I are upstairs on our own, preparing to sleep, I sit down at the foot of her bed. “Are you all right?”
“I meant what I said. I want to help.”
“If you’re sure. I just … I don’t want you to feel like you owe me anything.” I hesitate, then admit, “I know what happened earlier. Between you and Fabithe. I know what it must be costing you to even think about putting yourself back in danger …”
To my relief, she doesn’t ask me whose eyes I saw it through.
“I cannot deny that I am still afraid,” she says softly. “Terrified. If I think too hard about it, I will shut down completely. But Fabithe made me realise that I am also angry, and that I am allowed to be angry. I had forgotten that.”
“He must like you,” I say, only half joking. “There aren’t many people he’d be willing to let punch him without fighting back.”
She looks down, a small crease forming between her brows. “That salute … do you really think it meant what Isidor said it did?”
“That Fabithe recognises your courage? Yes.”
She bites her lip, confusion surging down the bond between us. But I told him myself that I am always frightened. What courage can there be in that? I’d answer, but I don’t think she intended me to hear the question in the first place.
“To start with, I thought he was a man like Ifor,” she says instead. “Ready to take what he wanted, no matter the cost to anyone else. But maybe I was wrong.”
“He’s a good person. All four of you are good people. And I’ve seen inside your heads, remember? So I ought to know.”
Of course, I’ve also seen inside Ifor’s. I don’t want to remind her of that, not when I’ve unloaded so much on her already. But it does make me wonder: if I’d only ever looked through his eyes, not Oriana’s, would I understand him now? Would I take his side against her? Would I consider him my friend?
My heart wants to say no, but I suspect it isn’t that simple.
“Funny, though,” I add. “I thought Luthan would have a scar like ours. But she doesn’t.”
“How did Toralé get his?”
Good question. “I don’t know. I don’t really know much about him. But whatever it is they’re doing to him … there’s magic involved. And it isn’t very nice.”
Oriana doesn’t reply for a little while. Her head is bowed, her unseeing gaze fixed on the mound of her knees beneath the bedcovers. Then she asks, “How long has he been there?”
“All the time I’ve known him. At least two years.”
I see her shiver. But when she looks up, something new has come to life in her eyes – something very like rage. “Then I am with you, Alyssia. Whatever it takes.”