Read Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) Online
Authors: Evie Manieri
Isa tensed, waiting for Frea to silence the boy with a slap, or worse.
Instead, Frea turned to Rho.
Rho half-walked, half-stumbled towards the door, but just before he disappeared into the corridor Isa felt him in her mind: a little push, a little urge.
She stepped forward.
Her sister barely glanced at her.
Isa drew her sword. The scraping sound echoed off the stone walls. Ice crystallised in her veins; her eyes were as cold as hailstones.
No one moved.
Frea’s silver-green eyes looked over Isa, down and then up again.
Make it a matter of family honour. That’s what Rho had said.
Frea whirled.
This time Isa wasn’t pretending. This time she could really feel the ice hardening to the strength of diamonds under her skin.
challenge. That should be good enough for the emperor and the rest of the clans at court.>
Kharl leapt up from the table where he’d been sitting. He circled the boy as warily as if he were a poisonous snake before shooing him through the doorway.
Frea stepped down off the dais and stalked towards Isa, who felt a sudden flush of panic. Rho’s strategy had worked. The moment of her redemption was finally here. Now all she had to do was see it through. Now she had to
win
.
Frea reached back over her shoulder and drew Blood’s Pride with an impatient jerk. The other guards jumped up from the tables and formed up in a ring around the room, snatching up benches and pushing the heavy tables out of the way.
Isa slid into her guard stance, but Frea walked right past her and past the soldiers who hurriedly cleared the way. With her free hand she drew the black-bladed imperial knife and flicked it towards the windows. The blade, unerringly guided by her thoughts, came down precisely on the latch of one of the shutters and split it apart. For a stunned moment nothing happened; the knife itself, wedged into the wood, kept the shutter closed. But then the knife gave a wriggle and yanked free, and a wall of deadly sunlight bisected the room, sending the Norlanders stampeding into the shadows.
The light was so bright that Isa saw only flares of hectic colour, searing rainbows that moved with her wherever she looked. Then she felt her sister grab her arm and haul her over to the open window.
She blinked her eyes frantically, trying to focus. Frea shoved her up against the wall. The angle of the sun kept her safe from burning, but she could feel the heat crawling over her flesh like a swarm of insects. Far down below, the Shadar’s white rooftops blazed like beacons. A weight dropped in her stomach and she felt insubstantial, as if her feet were no longer anchored to the ground and nothing was preventing her from spinning off into space.
Frea’s other hand was still on her arm and she could feel the cold. She focused her eyes on the Shadar, feeling every inch of the distance between her and the ground. With imaginary fingers as cold and merciless as the ones that gripped her arm, she grabbed hold of the fear dancing in her chest and squeezed it as hard as she could.
remember
?>
Isa looked down. She felt the screams in her sore and swollen heart and she squeezed that too, burying the treacherous organ under layer after layer of ice so strong that it choked off every pulse; she kept piling it on, letting all of her senses slide away into numbness, and still the ice spread outward, encasing her, so that nothing – not the soldiers’ embarrassment, not Frea’s disdain, not the sunlight’s piercing rays, not the memory of her mother’s screams, not the deadly pull of the city below – could get near her.
This is what I’ve always wanted
, she realised placidly.
This is what it feels like to be Frea.
Frea released Isa’s arm and pushed the broken shutter back into place, though it didn’t close completely.
Arnaf had no need to respond in words. A tangle of emotions snaked up from the guards as they took in the news.
Her father was dead.
She turned to a nearby table and picked up a jug of wine and a cup. Isa watched her sister pour herself a cupful and drink it down, then pour another.
Her father was dead, and she didn’t know what she felt. When her mother died she had ached with missing her – the feel of her arms, her scent, her presence like a soft mantle, the way she’d lift her into her lap to brush her hair. What would she miss about her father? Judgment had been the only thing he had to give, and Isa had been found wanting. There would be no appeal now, except maybe in Onfar’s Hall – though if her father was right, that was a place she would never see.
She walked past the gaping soldiers and their uncertain mess of feelings, past the plates of half-eaten food and splashes of spilled wine, past Frea, past Arnaf, towards the door. She didn’t know where she was going; she just wanted to move. She wanted to surround herself with a blankness that was as still and empty as her heart and she wanted to merge with it, to disappear into nothingness.
Isa turned back and saw Frea pointing to the sword that she still held, unsheathed, in her right hand.
The air in the room became perfectly still. Isa’s measured steps rang out on the stone floor as she walked up to her sister and looked into her silver-green eyes. She slapped the cup out of Frea’s hand.
For as long as he could remember, Daryan had suffered a recurring dream – it always started well enough, with him waking up in his own bed, in his own dark room. Nothing would be out of place – the outlines of his few simple possessions were familiar and unthreatening – yet a deep sense of dread would begin to creep over him, as if something evil were massing in the shadows, just out of sight. He would reach for the lamp, but when he tried to strike the flints, the stones would crumble into dust in his hands, and at that moment, his vague fears would crystallise into terror.
He felt something like that now, standing in the hallway in the doorway of Shairav’s unlit room, staring at a sliver of light running mysteriously from the floor to the ceiling in the far corner of the chamber. The outlines of his uncle’s rather opulent collection of furniture – the tables and chairs, the little ornaments, the bed heaped with cushions, all purchased from the Nomas with the governor’s gold – were all familiar, but something about that light in the corner evoked the nightmarish feeling of nefarious forces gathering strength around him.
He crossed the room slowly, moving towards the light. On the way he had to pass by the heavy chair in which his Aunt Meena had spent her final days. He remembered her sitting there, day after day, her frail body pinned down under a blanket, staring past him with rheumy eyes. Most of the time she was oblivious to his presence, but every now and then he would catch her looking at him. The expression in her dull eyes would barely change, but he had the uneasy feeling that she hated him. She had already been ill when he had first arrived in the temple and she’d died soon after. No one had ever explained to him what was wrong with her. She had terrified him.
The light was shining through a fissure in the wall no wider than the edge of the coin – or actually, he quickly realised, it was
exactly
the width of a coin, for a single Shadari sudra was wedged in the opening near the floor. He put his eye to the crack. He had the sense of a room on the other side of the wall, but he couldn’t make out anything specific. He heard nothing but silence.
He put his shoulder to the wall and shoved.
With a soft scraping sound, the entire wall pivoted from the centre, widening the opening to the width of a hand-span. The sudra rolled free.
‘What the—?’ he began, backing away until he knocked into the back of a chair. Through the gap he could see the shapes of furniture, and the glimmer of a lamp burning on a small table. But he saw and heard no one who might have been responsible for lighting the lamp and leaving it there.
With a cautious look back at Shairav’s dark room, he turned sideways and slid through.
‘Huh!’ The air rushed out of his lungs as if something heavy had hit him in the chest. He found himself standing in a child’s bedroom. In addition to the bed there was a child-sized table and a couple of stools, baskets spilling over with painted balls and wooden swords and crude carvings of animals, and a cradle from which a heap of dolls regarded eternity with unblinking eyes. An inch of reddish dust gave everything the soft, mottled texture of rotten fruit. No one was there, but a track of smeary footprints led across the room and then disappeared behind a high pile of furniture covered with old rugs. He started forward, but on the third step his foot came down on something soft and he hopped backwards in alarm.
He bent down slowly and picked up the Shadari doll. Sand sifted through rips in its cloth body and leaked out between his fingers. Someone had gone through the trouble of altering it: the brown threads of the left eye had been picked out and replaced with a splotch of green; the doll’s right arm was a mess of fat red stitches, crisscrossing over each other in no particular pattern. He glanced over at the other dolls in the cradle. They were all the same.
‘I remember you,’ he whispered to the doll, squeezing its lumpy body tightly. ‘Now I remember you.’
He remembered twilight in the desert, and his mother holding his hand so tightly that she was hurting him, but he wasn’t trying to pull away. His mother was crying – she wouldn’t say why, but he blamed Uncle Shairav – Mama called him Shairav’Asha. He was afraid of his mysterious uncle, and he refused to be impressed by the fact that Shairav’Asha could pilot a dereshadi just like a Dead One. His mother had shooed
him away so that she and Uncle Shairav could talk about grownup things.
He was throwing stones at a dead snake when he saw her. Her red Shadari cloak dragged behind her through the sand and she had the hood pulled up over her head. Her hair was black, like a Shadari, but her skin was very pale. She was probably a year or two older than Daryan and quite a bit taller. As she came closer, he saw that there was something wrong with her left eye.
She stood a little way off and watched him throw the remaining stones in his hand. When he bent down to look for more, she asked, ‘Do you like living here?’
‘It’s all right.’ He looked up at her. ‘Why? Where do you live?’
When she pointed up to the temple her cloak swung open. He caught his breath in wonder: enflamed red and pink scars crawled over her right forearm, like a cluster of engorged worms.
‘Wow!’ he exclaimed appreciatively. ‘What happened to your arm?’
‘It burned – a long time ago, when I was a baby,’ she said. Her voice sounded funny, as if she had a sore throat.
‘Does it hurt? Can I touch it?’ he asked eagerly.
‘No,’ answered the girl, apparently to both questions, and tucked the arm away again under her cloak.
‘Lahlil!’ Uncle Shairav’s harsh voice cut through the air as he ran towards the two children. Daryan noticed with cheerful malice how funny he looked with his robes flapping out behind him. ‘I told you not to get down,’ he reminded the girl sternly. ‘We’re going now. Come on.’ Then he called to Daryan’s mother, ‘Until midnight, then, but that’s all. Have him ready this time.’
‘Who? Me?’ He watched his uncle and the girl climb back on the dereshadi and fly away. ‘What am I getting ready for, Mama?’ he asked, as she flung her arms around him and pulled him into a smothering embrace. She was crying too hard to answer his questions. A few hours later his uncle had returned, alone this time, and taken him to the temple. Less than a year later, Daryan received word that his mother was dead. He never saw her or the girl again after that day.