The Crystal Heart Page 9

  Do not be afraid. I will move heaven and earth for you, my eyes promised her. Nothing will keep us apart. I promise, with every fibre of my being, that I shall escape, find my way back to you, and free you once more. Outwardly, it must have looked like I had given up, for I bowed my head meekly.

  The Prince of Night smiled and turned to the Commander. ‘We will be speaking further soon.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Commander, nodding. He proceeded to say more, but I was no longer listening, for I had noticed something nobody else had.

  Izolda’s hand that had been fixed around her pendant had come stiffly to her side. She unclenched it without looking at me, and I saw something small and shining tumble to the ground to fall under her skirt. The Prince called to his men to go, and while attention was diverted by their departure, I quickly bent down and picked up what she had dropped. It was one half of the crystal heart. As she passed me, our eyes met in a pledge of love for the last time, before I was dragged away and she vanished from my sight.

  Izolda

  To pass him without a word or a touch was a thing so painful that I could barely breathe as I walked away. All we could do was speak briefly with our eyes, and all I could hope was that he would understand. I had to make a terrible bargain so his life would be spared. They promised me he would not be harmed, but what are their promises worth? I did not trust that wicked old Commander. I did not trust my own father. It was only Kasper I trusted.

  Hold fast to the crystal as you hold fast to our love, I said to him through my eyes. Believe, believe without fail in us. Believe that one day we will be together again.

  That was the last sight of him I would carry away with me, and it would haunt me for as long as we were apart.

  Kasper

  Long ago, the nightmares stopped. The nights grew black and heavy, the days grey and long. My world shrank to four walls, my feelings to a foggy numbness. I saw nobody except for the guards. My parents hadn’t come in over a year, and who could blame them? The only way for my family to survive was to forget I ever existed.

  In the beginning, the Commander came every day. Then he, too, stopped. I was no longer of interest, even as a traitor. I was nothing. The world went on without me. More to torment me than to inform me, they revealed how it had all been explained away. The people of Krainos were told that the witch of Night had died in a shipwreck shortly after her escape, ending the enmity with the Prince of Night. As to me, I had been captured and would never be released.

  During the day I occupied myself with all kinds of tasks. I read, endlessly, books in which there were no people, no feelings. I became interested in geology and learned a good deal about the composition of soil and rocks. I made small objects out of quick-drying clay, which the guards took to sell. And though I knew they pocketed most of the profit, they did in turn bring me small luxuries of pencils, sweets, newspapers and smoked fish. In one of the newspapers I saw a photograph of the Prince of Night on a State visit, with his smiling daughter on his arm, and it stopped me sleeping for almost a week. I thought then that I might truly go mad. I begged the guards to never bring me papers or anything that might pull me apart again. The world made no sense but it didn’t matter anymore, as long as I could keep away from it.

  When I was first taken, it was very different. Despite the pain of what was happening to me, a shining belief burned in my heart and armoured my mind. Izolda loved me. She loved me like I loved her – body, heart and soul. Nothing could change the beauty of that knowledge. Even if we had been snapped apart, like the two halves of the crystal heart, we were still one. And though they had taken my piece of the crystal heart, it remained bright in my mind.

  The first few days and weeks, it was easy to keep to that dream. No matter what insults they flung at me, no matter how many cruelties they inflicted, I held fast to my shining truth. Even when they delighted in telling me every detail of how hard the news of my treachery had hit my poor parents and sisters – even then, when my stomach churned with bitter sorrow and black pain, I held fast to my truth. Our truth.

  After I was taken to the prison in the White City, I was questioned for days on end without respite. First, by a trio of political police. Then by the Lord High Judge, followed by the Chief Magus. There were always brutal guards there, too, and they were the ones who inflicted the beatings, who burned my skin with cigarettes, who threatened to break my fingers. It was they who brought a bear into the interrogation chamber and threatened to set it upon me if I did not tell the truth.

  Tell the truth I did, and little by little they were forced to accept that. The Commander sat in on all these interviews, but he said not a word. He just watched and listened with a face impassive as rock. Nothing moved him. When I explained that I’d helped Izolda escape out of love – not hatred – for my country, the questioners had gasped in horror. But not he. When I said that Izolda had not wanted to return to Night because she did not want war to break out again, the others sneered. But not he. When I told them we had planned to obtain the protection of Almain, they all laughed except for him. When the guards beat and tortured me, the squeamish questioners looked away. But not the Commander. Not even a flicker of an expression would pass across his face.

  After I repeatedly begged them for an answer, they told me they had discovered the cottage because Fela had been intercepted by a sharp-eyed soldier in a provincial town. But very soon I realised that was a lie. They knew about our carrier pigeon only because I’d talked about Fela and how soon Almain would be coming to our aid. They could hardly have found out where we were from the message Izolda and I had composed. When they saw I did not believe them, they claimed that they had found us because Izolda had betrayed me.

  I had laughed and said, ‘If Izolda had done that, then why had the men of Krainos been there too, working in tandem with a supposed enemy?’

  For that, I was struck across the face by the Lord High Judge himself. ‘You are a black-hearted villain,’ he had shouted. ‘You should hold your tongue if you don’t want to swing from the gallows, which is where you should end up if there were truly justice in this world!’

  ‘You don’t think my punishment is just, do you, Lord High Judge?’ I had asked. ‘I wonder what the Commander thinks of your opinion, given that he clearly has a nice little arrangement with our erstwhile enemy?’

  The Commander gave me a sharp look but said nothing. For my insolence I was given another ‘tickle of the ribs’, as the chief tormentor amongst the guards put it.

  Nothing they said about how they’d found us, or why they’d allied themselves with Night, made any sense to me. I knew I would not get the truth from them. It was something dishonourable, of that I was certain. Something secret and underhand that had forced the Prince of Night to ally himself with the people who had imprisoned his daughter for ten years. It was only later that I was to learn about the things both sides had gained by the arrangement. But I knew from the beginning that greed must have played its part.

  And inescapably for them, part of the deal included me not swinging from the gallows. I was the traitor who could be presented to general disgust as the worst of the worst, who’d used undefined evil magic to do his wicked deeds. The fact that a simple soldier had made a mockery of their so-called impregnable Tower and hidden from them successfully for weeks could thus be glossed over, as could the fact that now, somehow, Krainos and Night were no longer in a state of cold war. The men of the Supreme Council were masters of the well-spun lie that looks like the shining truth. I had been like all the rest. I had followed along like the other sheep, in the wake of disguised wolves.

  After a few weeks, they changed tack. They took off the chains, stopped the beatings, allowed me to wash and gave me clean clothes. I was still kept in solitary confinement but in a bigger, lighter cell. I had a bed, a chair and a table. I was given writing material and some books. Most amazingly, a guard returned my piece of the crystal heart. By way of the Commander’s orders, I was told. He’d seen I hadn�
��t broken under bad treatment. He was going to treat me well. Breaking was still the purpose, though. I could see that.

  I was still determined to keep to my own truth. Nothing would change that, I had thought. My half of the crystal heart sat on the table in my cell. It seemed to bring me closer to her, as if, wherever she was in her father’s underground kingdom, Izolda was looking at its twin half and thinking of me. In those moments, I was happy despite everything. The physical scars were starting to fade and the relentless questioning had halted, too, so that my mind was free to roam.

  I needed a plan – a way to escape. It might have seemed impossible to any other prisoner, for where I was held was a prison within a prison, with no entrance or exit to the outside world. But I had done the impossible before. The Tower had supposedly been secure, yet we had broken out of it. Here, too, I would do it somehow. Little by little, as the questioners and tormentors left me alone, and my spirits slowly began to rise again, I began to think my way around the difficulties that faced me.

  First, I needed some idea of where I was. I’d been brought to this place in darkness, and though I knew it was close to the White City, I had no idea exactly where. I didn’t even know the layout of the prison itself. Occasionally I heard distant shouts, but I saw no other prisoners. There seemed to be not another soul in my wing, the ordinary prisoners segregated by a thick wall. I constructed a map in my head of what my wing of the prison was like, for I was now allowed to roam the echoing passages and empty rooms.

  Looking back, I see I was in a fool’s paradise. No matter the hopelessness of my situation, I still believed that miracles could not only happen but that I, Kasper Bator, a Krainos man of no particular talent or position in life, was truly loved by a feyin princess. I thought our love was a shining truth that nothing could ever dull – a beauty that could never be broken, a promise that would be kept even in the shadow of death. Now I knew that, too, was a lie. Or a half-truth, which I had already learned, to my cost, could be worse than an outright lie.

  Kasper

  The day the Commander had first brought me the proof of Izolda’s betrayal was the worst day of my life. I fought against the knowledge with every last bit of me for, if it were true, it would have all been for nothing. I was to be locked up for the rest of my life, my name reviled throughout the land, and all for a vain dream. And so I fought hard and long.

  The proof was in a message – the note Izolda had sent with Fela, which the Commander had possessed all along. At first I was sure it was a fake for, though it seemed to be written by Izolda’s hand, I knew she had not written to her mother’s relatives in Krainos, asking them to rescue her ‘from this new imprisonment, but to spare Kasper’s life, for I am grateful’. No, those could not be her sentiments. It was a fake. Izolda had written to the Grand Duke of Almain. Why, I had even composed the message with her!

  The Commander listened to my protests, impassive. ‘But were you there when she sent it?’

  I could only answer no.

  ‘Then she could have sent anything – to anyone – and you wouldn’t have known,’ the Commander said quietly.

  ‘No,’ I protested. ‘She wouldn’t have done it! I know she wouldn’t.’ But as I uttered the words I felt the sting of doubt. I remembered how I had left early to check on the boat, how it was Izolda who had suggested I should do so while she readied Fela for her task …

  ‘Whose idea was it to send the bird?’ said the Commander, watching me closely.

  Again, I was forced to say it was hers. ‘But it was my idea to leave for Almain,’ I said helplessly. ‘It wasn’t Izolda who thought of it. It was me.’

  ‘You had planned to escape by water. Your plan would have worked. This one made sure you had to stay.’

  ‘Till the bird returned, that was all,’ I cried. ‘We were going, then …’

  The Commander raised an eyebrow. ‘But you did not. You walked right into a trap – a trap set by the Princess of Night.’

  Unlike the other questioners, he did not insult her. He did not say she had deceived me, played me for a fool. His way was more subtle.

  ‘Don’t mistake me. I am sure she cared for you, in her way,’ the Commander said. ‘You had saved her life, freed her. She was grateful. She may even have liked you. But a feyin’s heart is hollow, they cannot truly love in a human way.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘that is not true.’ There was a burning pain in my chest, a lump in my throat. ‘You are wrong. She is only half feyin. In any case, the feyin love as we do. She told me about her father – how he loved Izolda’s mother so much that when she died he decided to take revenge on the whole world –’

  ‘Is that what she told you?’ the Commander said, with a little smile. He paused. ‘A comforting story, I am sure, and perhaps she even believed it. But it is not true. The Prince’s wife had been dead five years when he attacked us. It was all for greed. He wanted to seize our ports, our trade, our goods, as if the great wealth of Night wasn’t enough! Listening to fairy tales, you were. To sweet, hollow stories spun by a feyin!’

  The bitterness was plain in his voice, and if I’d had any feelings to spare, it would have puzzled me. But it didn’t, for my own bitterness was too great. ‘How can you talk of hollow stories? You have fed them to us for years. You said Izolda was a witch. You said she had helped the Prince win his battles.’

  ‘That was the Council’s idea,’ the Commander said steadily. ‘They claimed that if we did not say so, the people might take pity on her, even if she were the child of our enemy. Better that they did not know. I thought we should trust our people, but I was overruled. I had to abide by the ruling of the Council.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘You are a hero. If you’d wanted to, you could have gone above their heads. You knew Izolda was no witch but a motherless child. No matter her father’s sins, you people made her an orphan. You locked her up, kept her like a rat in a cage, and then you planned to murder her in cold blood …’

  ‘It was the only way Krainos might be safe from that monstrous prince.’

  ‘Yet what you did made Krainos as guilty as Night!’ I cried.

  ‘You do not know what you are saying,’ the Commander said without heat. ‘You do not understand. The Chief Magus saw in a vision that the Princess’s dormant power would awake from the time of her eighteenth birthday and that her power would one day destroy us all.’

  ‘And so I hope it will,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh no, not now. The Supreme Council came to an understanding with the Prince of Night – his daughter for our peace. The salt mines have been reopened to us, the migrant workers have flooded home to take up the thousands of jobs it has created, and the merchants have exclusive trade with Night again. It has made the Council very happy. War is wearisome to the merchant.’ The Commander’s upper lip curled.

  ‘You profit from it, too,’ I said, relishing the anger that sprang to his eyes. For the first time, I’d stung him.

  ‘Do you want to know what that girl said to her father and me, when we arrived at that little love nest of yours?’ he hissed.

  I could see something bad was coming, and I wanted to say, ‘No, I don’t want to hear’, but I could not speak. I could only gaze helplessly at him as he went on.

  ‘Izolda said she wanted to put an end to the war between Krainos and Night. Oh, you could say she had good intentions.’ The Commander paused. ‘Pity it was you who had to pay the price.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said weakly.

  ‘You said yourself she wanted to stop the war, that she longed for home and didn’t want her father to seek revenge against Krainos. This was her way of doing that. She knew we’d want to punish you. She knew the Prince of Night certainly wouldn’t want you near his daughter. Like I said, she had some feelings for you. She made us promise you wouldn’t be harmed.’

  I snorted. ‘And you kept to that just like you told the truth, which is to say, not at all.’

  ‘Yet you kept your life
,’ the Commander said tightly. ‘And I regret those early weeks, but I had to do as my masters on the Council bid me.’

  ‘Masters?’ I laughed bitterly. ‘Spare me. You are more powerful than they are. It was with you the Prince dealt, not the Council. So why are you spending your time with the lowest of the low? What is the point? Why are you trying to persuade me that black is white? Why does it matter to you?’

  ‘The truth matters. You need to know the truth.’

  ‘What do you know about the truth? You stopped recognising it long ago – you, the Lord High Judge, the Chief Magus and all you high and mighty people. All that matters to you is power. By the Angels, you are exactly like the Prince of Night!’

  I thought the Commander would strike me for that, but he just shrugged. There was pity in his eyes, and I hated that far more than his anger. ‘Try to remember she had good intentions,’ he said, getting up and heading for the door. ‘Try to remember she only wanted to make sure there would be no more war.’

  Stopping it by giving me up. Stopping it by returning to her father, leaving me to rot in prison. Making them spare my life only to condemn me to a living hell. No, it couldn’t be. The radiant, lovely girl I’d loved could not do such a thing. The sad prisoner she’d been could not condemn another living soul to such a fate. And we loved each other – we’d pledged the most solemn of promises to each other. It was impossible. Untrue …

  And yet, I could not shake it out of my mind. It became harder to dismiss as time passed. The Commander visited me again and again, talking gently as though he truly felt sorry for me. He had an answer for everything, and what he said made sense in a hideous sort of way. I began to remember little things from my time in the forest with Izolda – things she had said, a certain look in her eye, a hint of reserve, that longing for her home. That and her alien nature – her feyin blood … Little by little, these things gnawed at the belief that had been my source of strength. Until, at last, one day I realised I no longer believed.