Skyfire (19 page)

Silence.

‘Tomorrow evening, our battle begins. And you will be there, my little friends, as offerings to the king.' His eyes fix on Lukas. ‘Well, offerings of a sort. I'm going to make a deal, you see, with the ruler of Taladia.

‘Here I have a Morrigan in my grasp. A prisoner of the prisoner.' His lips twist into a cruel smirk. ‘And I've always longed to see the Morrigans slay one of their own.'

My veins are hot and cold all at once, shocked by his words. Lukas stands beside me in the dark, his fingers wrapped tightly among my own. I want to jump to my feet, to leap upon Lord Farran and –

Calm down, Danika.

I take a deep breath. My body twitches, releasing a little of the tension, but I still feel coiled tight enough to explode. This isn't the time for rash attacks. If Farran drags me out and shoots me, it won't save Lukas. It won't save anyone.

‘Warm down here, isn't it?' Lord Farran holds out a hand to test the air. ‘You're lucky, you know. To have such a cosy place of imprisonment. It may not seem this way to you, but I'm a fair man. I treat my prisoners well. I'm not a
Morrigan
.'

He spits the last word like a curse, his eyes still fixed on Lukas. ‘The first time they tried to kill me, your ancestors left me to freeze.'

I frown, confused. The flooding catacombs are a terrible way to die, but I wouldn't describe them as ‘freezing'.

Then Silver's words come back to me. The prisoner was one of the survivors of Midnight Crest. A prison of ice, and cold, and snow. Now it's a ruined fortress in the Central Mountains: a blackened hulk, destroyed by its fleeing prisoners. Farran was among those who escaped and burned that prison to the ground.
The first time they tried to kill me.

When the hunters recaptured Farran, they locked him in the Pit to be drowned by the draining of the Valley. It was supposed to be a symbolic death. The king's greatest enemy, killed by the king's greatest triumph.

But he escaped, and made his way to Víndurn.
From the prisoner's pit to the sky
…

‘When I was there,' Lord Farran says quietly, ‘I learned a lesson that would put paid to a thousand kings and commoners.' He leans in close, his eyes like ice. ‘I learned what it takes to defeat the Morrigans. Just a little patience. Just a little time.'

As he turns to leave, his cloak trails silver behind him.

‘And it's time, at last, to take what's mine.'

We wait for dawn, curled together in the centre of the cave. My head rests on Lukas's shoulder, our hands tightly clasped. Clementine keeps scratching her neck, as though her proclivity is a mosquito bite. It hits me that she may die before it finishes developing, and I slump even lower in the shadows.

‘Well,' Teddy says. ‘I reckon we're screwed.'

‘Maybe we can escape tomorrow,' Clementine says. ‘When Lord Farran comes to fetch us from our cell.'

‘Yeah,' I say. ‘Maybe.'

I try to picture it. When Lord Farran arrives tomorrow, pistol in hand, we'll have to jump him. We can wrestle the gun from his fingers, and then …

But surely, even if we overpower him, he'll manage
at least one shot. At least one bullet. My insides clench at the thought. Teddy, Clementine, Maisy or Lukas. A body bleeding, a bullet in its skull.

If we don't risk it, though, we'll die anyway.

My gaze wanders across to the bars. The magnetic field overlaps between the bars themselves, preventing any use of magic to slip between them, but at least its range is short. Barely a metre from the door, it fades to almost nothing.

‘I'll wait in the shadows,' I say. ‘About a metre back from the magnets. When we hear Farran coming, I'll cast an illusion to hide myself. And as soon as he opens the door …'

Lukas shakes his head. ‘He'll shoot you.'

‘If he doesn't see me coming,' I say, ‘we might have a chance. He looks pretty weak, doesn't he? And my illusions are getting stronger. I could hide myself for a few minutes, if I had to. Maybe longer.'

The others exchange glances, their expressions bleak. But no one offers a better idea. We can't blast through solid stone, and we can't slip through magnetic bars. And so, exhausted, we must wait for dawn.

‘Shame there's no watchmen around,' Teddy says, after a while. ‘That's always a decent bet – scamming the guards, bluffing your way out and that. Bit trickier when your guard's a lump of magnet, hey?'

‘Better than the guards in Rourton,' I say. ‘At
least the magnets aren't likely to bash us up for being scruffers.'

Teddy flinches, then looks down at his feet.

I frown at his reaction. I haven't said anything shocking; it's just a fact of life in Rourton. Teddy grew up a scruffer too, and he knows how rough the guards can get on a cold winter's night.

But then I stop myself. I'm making assumptions again. Ignoring the holes in Teddy's past – the fragments I haven't quite pieced together. His grandfather. The fact that someone used to read him storybooks. His parents? His siblings? I don't know. For all I know, his family could have died at the hands of the guards, beaten to a pulp.

Teddy pulls his knees up to his chest. I've never seen him look so dejected. He usually sprawls all over the place, his long limbs dangling with a confident grace.

‘You know,' he says, ‘my parents were guards.'

I stare at him, my mouth slightly open.

‘Hey, we're probably gonna die tomorrow, right?' Teddy forces a weak grin, with none of his usual bluster behind it. ‘No point hiding it now, I reckon.'

‘But your parents …'

‘Worked for the monarchy,' Teddy says. ‘They beat the living hell out of anyone who broke the law. Used to take money off people. Poor people. People who were too scared to say anything.

‘My parents'd give 'em a trumped-up list of charges, and only drop the charges if they paid. I guess they were thieves too, in a way. But they didn't steal from richies. They stole from folk that couldn't afford to feed their own damned kids.'

No one speaks.

Teddy looks back down at his feet. ‘Worst part was the conscription, I reckon. When my parents found a kid who hadn't signed up for duty, they'd do the bloodline test and suss out his age, and if he was over eighteen …' He shakes his head. ‘Had to watch it once. Hid under my bed and wouldn't come out for two days. Figured my parents might do that to me, too, if I didn't join up for the army.'

Clementine stares at him, horrified. ‘But surely your whole family couldn't have been so … well …'

Teddy shrugs. ‘Grandpa was all right, I guess. And I had a big brother, Tom. Used to read me stories. Told me I could be an alchemist, one day, like I dreamed about. He reckoned I could be anything I wanted to be.'

I can picture it. A tiny boy curled up in a blanket in his bedroom. An older brother reading storybooks. The faint scent of cabbage and socks that always lingers in old apartments, and the shine of an alchemy lamp in the dark.

‘When I was eight,' Teddy says, ‘my parents figured it was time to train me. I was a bit of a rascal,
see – always climbing out the window, nicking my grandpa's pipe for a laugh. Just stupid stuff like that. Pa reckoned it was time to whip me into line. To start me down the path of being a guard, so he dragged me along on a job.'

Teddy's voice hitches. ‘They'd found some revolutionaries, you see. People holding secret meetings and that. They were gonna blast 'em to hell: the whole damned family. Even the kids.' He looks up at us. ‘Even Radnor.'

I stare at him, confused.

Then understanding hits me, with a stink far worse than sulphur. Radnor, our crew's dead leader. Radnor, whose family was murdered by city guards. Teddy once told us he smuggled Radnor out while he was burgling a neighbour's house – but now I understand. Teddy's parents were the guards who killed Radnor's family.

‘Never went back,' he says. ‘Joined a thieving gang, and their leader trained me. My folks didn't try too hard to find me, mind you. Reckon they were too ashamed of what I'd become. Didn't want anyone to know they had a traitor for a son.'

Teddy looks up at us, his eyes a little too bright. ‘And when Tom turned eighteen, they shunted him off to die in the army. Just another lump on the battlefield, bleeding out another inch of territory for Morrigan's bloody empire.' He snorts. ‘Only heard
he was dead when I nicked the official notice from their bins.'

There is a long silence, as thick as the stone of our prison cell. I think of Teddy's reaction to the news of Lord Farran's war. His horror at the thought of more combat, more conscription …

Clementine gently disentangles herself from Maisy, and inches across to where Teddy sits. She places a hand upon his shoulder. ‘Teddy, you can't possibly blame yourself for –'

He looks up at her, eyes hard. ‘I could've done something. I could've saved a bunch of other people, I reckon, before I finally got the guts to do something with Radnor.'

Clementine shakes her head, unsure how to respond.

Another voice whispers, low and quiet in the shadows. ‘You didn't choose your parents.'

Lukas.

My skin prickles as I remember another conversation. Another prison cell. Another confession. My desperate attempts to make Lukas believe this very fact: to believe that his Morrigan name did not make him evil.

‘I was terrified of becoming king,' Lukas says quietly. ‘I thought as soon as a crown went on my head, I'd become like my father. Lord Farran's right about one thing, at least – my family's always been
brutal. But my father … well, he's the worst of them all. The curfews. The alchemy bombs. The endless wars, the obsession with expanding our empire …'

Lukas leans forward. ‘You know, I used to dream about living another way. People choosing their own leaders, instead of cowering beneath them.' He exhales, his breath faltering. ‘If I became king … I think kingship's the first thing I'd get rid of.'

Silence.

My own breath is tight in my throat. I already knew that Lukas still blamed himself, on some level, for his family's crimes. Why else would he have left us, back in the borderlands, to sacrifice himself upon the dam's kindred runes?

Why else would he prove so willing to die?

That thought stops me short. No matter what he says to Teddy, Lukas still feels that guilt. He feels it badly enough that he's willing to throw his life away to correct it. That's why he traded himself to Sharr to save us. That's why he abandoned us in the borderlands, to sacrifice his life.

To atone for a crime he never committed.

Teddy stares at Lukas, an odd expression in his eyes. Teddy has always been the slowest to trust Lukas. The least likely to forgive the crimes of his family.
He's one of them. You can't trust a royal.
And finally, it all makes sense. Teddy couldn't forgive Lukas because he couldn't forgive himself.

Suddenly, Teddy sits up. ‘Hear that?'

‘What –?'

Teddy raises a finger. I hear it, ever so faintly: a scrabble of claws behind the back wall.

‘Rodent, I reckon.' Teddy closes his eyes, straining to engage his Beast proclivity without a clear line of sight. ‘A rat, or a mole …'

He twitches, visibly startled. ‘There's something hollow behind the wall! Some kind of old tunnel, or a fissure in the rock.' Teddy screws up his face in concentration. ‘Darkness. Shadows. Blimey, the air stinks …'

As one, we rush to examine the cave's back wall. The stone is raw and crumbly, as dry as the volcanic rocks of the plains. But if Teddy's right, there must be a hollow space behind it. A natural crack in the rocks, eroded by centuries of flame and eruptions and alchemical juices.

‘Bet this whole mountain's riddled with cracks,' Teddy says. ‘I mean, it's not the most stable landscape, is it?'

‘If we could just break through,' Clementine says, ‘there might be a way out!'

Teddy prods the stone. ‘Don't suppose anyone's got an alchemy bomb stashed up their sleeve?'

‘We don't need a bomb,' Maisy says. ‘The stone's soaked in Curiefer – it's incredibly volatile. If we build up a fire, we might be able to blow it up.'

I cast my eyes around the storage cell, searching for anything that might help. ‘Those sacks … Maisy, can you get them burning?'

She shakes her head. ‘Not without a spark. I can't conjure flames out of the air.'

Teddy seizes an old wooden crate. ‘All right, how about this?' He smashes the crate upon the wall. It shatters, cracking into shards of broken wood, and Teddy turns to offer us the splintered pieces. ‘It's what they do in stories, isn't it? You know – rub bits of wood together to make a fire …'

But the wood is rotten, damp with mildew, and about as flammable as a bucket of water. We rub the shards until our fingers burn with pain and splinters. Finally, Clementine throws her pieces aside in despair and we're forced to admit defeat.

I run a hand through my hair in frustration. When I move my wrist, the light swings upwards. I glimpse the star charm imbued with the proclivity of Lukas's dying grandmother.

Imbued with the light and heat of star-shine.

I hold my wrist up, my heart racing, and our patch of light sways drunkenly across the cave. ‘It makes heat.'

‘So?'

‘So maybe it can start a fire!'

I stare at the others, unable to hide my excitement. At the moment, the charm is providing only
light, since I've learned to mentally suppress the burn of its star-shine. But I know it can flare into scorching heat. Down in the catacombs, this charm even melted through a metal padlock. If it's hot enough to melt metal …

Maisy empties a hessian sack, spilling dried beans across the floor. Then she places a chunk of heavy stone into the sack. ‘If you light this, then throw it at the wall, I think the impact should be enough.'

I take the sack, fingers shaking. I think back to the airbase in the wastelands of Taladia. The workers had been so careful with their vats of Curiefer; any sudden impact could blow it into oblivion. They shipped it off the train and into a cooling silo, as mechanical as clockwork, terrified that it might explode in their faces.

And we're about to blow it up in an enclosed space.

‘This explosion,' I say slowly, ‘how big will it be?'

Maisy shakes her head. ‘I don't know.'

I look up at the others, asking silently for permission. Unexpectedly, it's Clementine who nods first. ‘Do it.'

The others hesitate before nodding their consent.

I press the charm to the sack, casting silver light upon hessian. For a moment, nothing happens. I close my eyes and focus on the charm, coaxing it into a stronger flare of magic.

Heat, heat, heat
…

Sharp pain flares at my wrist. My eyes fly open, as I realise too late that part of the charm is touching my skin. But the rest of the charm is pressed against the sack and, with a sizzle, a thin tendril of smoke rises from the hessian.

Maisy throws out her hands, engaging her Flame proclivity, and coaxes the spark up into a roar. I hurl the sack against the back of the cave. It hits the wall with a
whumph!
and flames explode from its centre. Heat and sparks ripple out across our cell, rumbling and roaring like a rush of violent water.

Teddy curses as a spark hits his shirt, sizzling through to sting his bicep before he manages to slap it out. Maisy throws up her hands to fend off the flames, shielding us from the worst of the blast. Even so, I'm left coughing and choking as the back wall rumbles. There's a roar through the smoke – a clatter and clang, a rumpus of collapsing stone.

The fire fades.

I stare through the smoke, struggling to clear my vision. I hear people coughing lungs full of smoke, then realise that some of the coughs are my own. Still spluttering, I risk a few steps forward to clear the air with my hands. Then I hold out the star charm, keen for a closer look at the damage.

Half of the back wall has crumpled – and some of the ceiling, too, by the looks of things. Chunks
of stone lie piled on the floor, broken and smoking with residual heat. But behind the rubble, I see darkness. A hollow cavity in the stone.

I whirl upon Teddy, a wild grin breaking across my face. ‘You were right!'