Chapter 3

I had known many types of darkness. The cave felt nurturing and ancient, like it was somehow the start and end and the very heart of life itself, and I was not afraid. 

We had been brought here with a purpose. There was a name I had to find in my soul and say it out loud. The name belonged to a boy, and I could feel him moving in the darkness, looking for me. It felt like half of myself had taken a walk outside my body, and I needed to call it back, but only if I could find his name.  

“D…”

And then the dream shifted into another type of darkness, but this one held only pain and terror. A blonde-haired woman was suspended in the air, her arms splayed out wide, each finger taut as she strained and reached. Her head was thrown back, eyes only white, her mouth open in a silent scream. Black mist was winding up her legs and over her torso. At her feet lay unmoving shapes in cloaks.

My door opened, and I jerked awake, dagger in hand. Ester stood in the doorway with a breakfast tray and an irritated expression on her pretty face. She made a sound in the back of her throat of annoyance and walked into the room. I groaned and flopped back down onto the bed, pulling the covers over my face, only to have them ripped back.

“Up,” she signed and turned to start picking up my discarded clothes from the floor. And I pretended not to notice her signing the word for ‘pig’ as she moved about.

“I'm tired!” I whined as a pillow hit me in the face with a startling smack.

“Ester!” I wailed as she crossed to the curtains and threw them open, letting in a stream of weak light, and I hissed.

She was beautiful in the way most people from Drukhar were. Tall and striking, with features that weren't fine or delicate but chiselled. They were people of substance and grit; you had to be to thrive in Drukhar. But Ester was especially beautiful with her soft strawberry-blonde curls pinned up around her face, framing her wide caramel eyes, highlighting the light dusting of freckles over her nose. She had a face built for smiling, and when she did, it was infectious. 

My hand found the collar at my neck as I watched her fiddle about in my room, signing random thoughts to herself, the familiar guilt thick in my throat. I was the reason she couldn't speak.

She spun towards me and dropped my hand, hiding my guilty expression. I had no energy to have this fight again. 

“Why the fuck do you keep covering the mirrors?” She signed in exasperation, crossing to a rickety vanity table and yanking off the white undershirt I had draped over the dull and tarnished mirror. “It's so fucking weird.”

I laughed.

“What?” she signed, and if she could talk, it would have come out like a snap.

“The sign for fucking is funny,” I commented, mimicking the gesture of a man masturbating but giving it some extra-long enthusiasm.

She rolled her eyes and laughed. “Gods below, you are such a child.” But her face fell when she saw the white bandage tied around the crook of my arm. 

“Again?”

I didn't even need to nod. She crossed to the bed, took my arm in her hands, and touched the neat white bandage. 

“Adrian’s handiwork?” she signed, and I nodded. 

He had come to my room late last night with a bottle of whisky and some lemon cake, knowing that I would most likely need them. I told him everything that happened on the farm while he bandaged my latest brand, a particularly bad one because it was on the soft skin on the inside of my elbow. I, however, had not told him about Malric’s newest threat to go look for my forgotten island. That was a problem I would be keeping to my chest for the time being; we had others that were a lot more pressing than this new obsession that I had no way of solving.

“He is good with his hands." She said with a wink and stood. 

“Good with his hands?” I shouted incredulously at her turned back. “How would you know that!”

“Ester! If he has touched you, I will remove his fingers! You're like family!" 

“No. We are friends. You are his family." She rolled her eyes and poured the tea. “And don't baby me; I'm not a child. You are too overprotective. No one wants to come within a mile of me because they think you will pluck out their eyes." She signed in a flurry, her beautiful face set in a frown. “Pan, I like to flirt. I like…”

"Don't say ‘fucking’…!”

"You could use some fucking, honestly, Pan. If you just gave Arlo half a sign that you saw him in that way, he would be here, on his knees, begging…" 

“Ester! I am his commander,” I shouted. "That is a line you cannot cross!”

"You could. Other commanders have whole lives; they fuck, get married...” she countered. 

"And they don't have Malric!” I hissed. "What would he do to him? To punish me?” I snapped, Ester flinched, and I instantly regretted my words as guilt crawled up the inside of my skin.

“Come and eat.” She looked away from me and waved her hand dismissively, although something sparkly had gone out of her eyes. “A raven came, and the Valmere emissary is arriving soon.” 

I watched her for a long moment as she began digging through my dresser. Reluctantly, I climbed out of bed, threw on a warm dressing gown, and crossed to the small breakfast table. I sat, picked up the chipped blue and white teacup, and took a hearty sip.

She stopped behind me and started trying to pull a brush through my wild hair as I spread a thick layer of butter onto a piece of dark bread and then topped it off with some cloudberry jam, one of Cook's specialities. Bread and jam was an absolute luxury these days, and I wondered what I had done to deserve this.

“What is this?” I asked, picking up a round white pebble with a fleck of red that ran through the centre like a crack. I ran my thumb over it a few times, the texture like hard silk.

Ester stopped brushing my hair and moved where I could see her hands. “A gift from Jack. He almost fell in the stream trying to fish it out for you.” I looked down at the stone in the centre of my palm and smiled, my heart doing something wobbly.

“I think your white patch is growing,” she signed flatly, looking at my hair, and I knew she was not wrong. 

It was partly the reason why I had covered up the mirrors. That, and the fact that I could not stand to look at my face anymore because now all I saw was Amaral's face, not my own. 

Mirrors used to give me comfort. I would look at myself and pretend that I was looking at her. I would be able to see how our faces aged as we grew. It was my one remaining connection to her, the living reminder that she was somewhere out there in the world, thinking of me when she looked at herself. 

But six months ago, my world shattered. I woke in the middle of the night to a pain so deep and searing it felt like my very soul stretched taut and then snapped. A small, warm space at the back of my mind, one I was not even sure I had fully noticed before, was gone. It left me truly alone for the first time, and I knew in my heart she was dead.

When I had eventually gotten the courage to look at my face again, I noticed the few white hairs behind my right ear, like the very life of me was draining away by the secret grief I carried. And every day, the white patch got larger. I often wondered if, when all my pitch-black hair had finally turned white, I would just lie down and die.

That's if I don't kill myself first, which was the secret reason why I slept with a dagger under my pillow. I had taken it in hand the night she died, so ready to be done with this misery of life. The fantasy of escaping Malric and finding her had been the secret flame that gave me the strength to endure. Without her and the hope of our freedom one day, what was the point of all these scars, all this endless torment? I had held the knife to my wrist every night since, the runes tattooed across my right hand now only seemed ironic. But something had always stayed my hand, and that was when I started dreaming about the boy in the cave.

Ester tugged sharply on the end of the braid. “Hey!” I cried.

“What were you thinking about?” she signed suspiciously.

The door opened abruptly, saving me from having to lie, and Adrian waltzed in. His face was a study in rugged charm. His still-damp, shaggy blond hair fell to his shoulders, only adding a carefreeness to the manner in which he wore his skin. It fitted him, confident and strong. Which always surprised me, knowing what I did about the scars he bore across his back from his father's blade. I had often wondered how someone like him could bloom in darkness like he had; it reminded me of the night violets that only revealed themselves on a full moon. Where I felt like I only festered in the damp and dark, like the slimy mushrooms that clung to tree rot at the beginning of spring.

“You are not dressed yet,” he commented on my dressing gown and stole a piece of bread from my plate before he threw himself into one of my small lounge chairs arranged in front of an empty fireplace and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

“And you're a pig,” I replied tartly. “Don't even think of pulling out that dress!” I snapped as Ester freed a hideous blue monstrosity from between my riding pants.

They both pounced, talking and signing over each other. “You're a goddamn lady…. Inappropriate… riding pants… you can't wear your armour!” They both ended in unison.

“Do you both get together and practise this when I'm not around?” I asked dryly. "I'm the commander of the Right Hands for fuck's sake, not a show pony." 

Adrian glanced at my hands. “No one would accuse you of being a show pony with those knuckles.”

I dropped my gaze to them. Thin, delicate lines of indigo traced across each knuckle, almost ancient in their shape, the kind of runes only the Vaelkin wore and never gave lightly to outsiders. One mark per finger.

I flexed my hands once and looked back up to Ester, who only flipped me off and shoved the dress back in the armoire with such force it rocked backward, then yanked out wide-legged black pants, a warm undershirt, and a fine white blouse with a high lace collar and tight cuffs.

“If you say one word about the lace…” and then ran her finger over her throat in a way that suggested she too was versed in all manner of violence.

I could survive in what she chose, so I raised my hands as a sign of truce, and she huffed in a self-satisfied way. “I will get your boots.” She added and left.

I waited until I was sure she was out of earshot before I stabbed my dagger into the table. 

“Fine, I won't eat it!” He cried and looked down at the dagger pegged in the wood between his thumb and index finger.

“That is not about the bread, you arsehole! Are you sleeping with Ester?”

“Pan, we are just friends.” He defended and moved his hand away from my blade. "We just flirt for fun.” 

But I only felt my scowl deepen.

"Trust me," he shouted, "she has a long line of suitors." 

“None of those other suitors has a father like yours! What do you think he will do if he even suspects his son is fucking the handmaid that he uses as leverage over me?” I hissed and leaned forward. 

"The next part of her he removes will be on your head, and I will cut your cock off before I let that happen!" I whisper-shouted at him.

Those ice-blue eyes hardened. "Don't you think she knows that every time you look at her, you see that night?" he snapped. 

That night. 

We didn't speak about it; it was our golden rule. Ester and I agreed to lock it away and move on, and it seemed like she had. She smiled, laughed, flirted and had become a whole person despite what happened.

But how could I when I could still feel the mud under my feet, branches snatching at my arms during those failed escapes from Castle Craggen. The hands of guards dragging me back and the vow I made to never stop trying to escape. 

But mostly, I remembered the strawberry-blonde girl in the corner of my cell with the wide caramel eyes.

We sussed each other out for days, but she reminded me of Amaral, and if my sister was in a cell with a stranger, I hope someone would show her kindness.

“I'm Pan." I held out half the scrap of stale bread I was given. “Do you want to be my friend?" 

And she had taken it. 

I hadn't realised Malric had been watching, measuring my heart like a butcher marks a cut of meat, and that question would be her damnation.

When the brazier was brought in, the air turned thick with the scent of coal and impending ruin; it should have been me; I had run.

“This is your punishment." He held the heated shears, now cherry red, close enough to my face to scold. "And if you run again, it will cost you her life and the tongue of one child a day every day until you return.”

They left me to nurse her. As she screamed in my arms, her mouth a blood-filled pit, her soul became like taffy: melting onto mine, sticky and irremovable. He had seen something in me I never knew to hide: empathy. It became my first lesson in the true price of my choices and consequences, a price someone else paid and I knew I would never run again

I put a hand over the collar at my neck as the memories chased me, guilt and terror thick in my throat. 

“It's my fault, Adrian,” I whispered.

"No, Pan. It isn't." He reached over and took my hand in his, his mind brushing up against mine in soft folds of blues and gold. 

“You didn't choose any of this. But you can choose what you do with it and whether your protection becomes a shield… or your fear a cage.” His eyes searched mine. He could never understand, so I nodded reluctantly, desperate to change the subject.

He patted my hand twice, then sat back in his chair. We sat in silence for a long moment as I rubbed my thumb over the stone in my palm. It was always comfortable between us, and even though I had lost a sister, I still had him. A lump formed in my throat at the word my mind called him: Brother. 

I silently offered him my breakfast plate of jammy bread as a peace offering, and he helped himself to it.

“Did you sleep all right? You know, after the farm?”

"No", I answered simply, not willing to voice my disturbing dreams of late.

“I have been thinking about it,” Adrian stated and looked down at the piece of bread between his fingers, licking jam off his thumb. 

“It definitely can't be the Rues, unless a raiding party got left behind when the Spine melted. But then they would take over a farmstead to ride out the summer here, inconspicuously. Not …”

“Murder everyone and take nothing but the bodies." I finished his train of thought and topped up my tea. 

"So, it is definitely another incident then.” He reasoned, and I nodded, trying not to think about that blood-soaked well. "What are you going to do about it?”

I sat back and let my cup warm my hands. “After the emissary arrives, the Hands will go back to the farm, see what is salvageable, and then board up the well." I took a long sip of tea and looked out the window; it was still early enough for them to get there and back before nightfall. 

“So, your father won't meet with the emissary until I have touched him.” I added, taking a big bite of bread, the jam sticking around my mouth like a sticky moustache that I tried to lick away.

“Do you have a plan for that?”

I nodded as I chewed and pulled my one foot up onto the seat of the chair and started to spin the butter knife around the palm of my other hand the way Arlo liked to. 

“If he is not wearing gloves, we will shake his hand when he arrives; it should be easy. Do we know what they are planning on discussing with us as trade?”

He only shrugged, “They know we only have our iron and blacksmiths.” He crossed a black boot over his knee. "Who knows, maybe after two summers without the aid of our steel, they can't keep the Rues at bay anymore.” He sighed heavily with a small shrug. “But whatever they ask for, we aren't in the position to refuse.” 

We really weren’t. We had barely survived this winter, and without their food, many people were not going to survive the next.

“Well, let’s just hope this next emissary is less chatty than the last.” 

“Why?” Adrian laughed. “I loved the stories about his whores.”

“Whores or horse?” I asked dryly, and Adrian only laughed louder. 

“Both!”