Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) (16 page)

My jaw dropped.
 
“Wait, wait, wait.
 
Back up.
 
Brother of the Blood King?” I stammered, breaking Arisella’s
concentration.

Arisella blinked, came back to
reality, and nodded slowly.
 
“Why are you
so surprised?
 
I thought Adrian already
told you about the Blood King last night.”

“He didn’t tell me you were related
to him!” I choked.
 
“What, did you spend
holidays at his place too, and exchange Christmas cards?”

“Of course not,” she snapped.
 
Arisella opened her mouth, but her voice
caught in her throat, like she wanted to say something but couldn’t.
 
She shook her head, as if to dismiss the idea
before moving onto another.
 
“Maybe he
didn’t tell you because he didn’t want you to know.”

I uttered a small “oh.”
 
It sort of made sense.
 
It would have been hard for me to trust the
niece and nephew of the evil king who wanted me dead.
 
“Well, the cat’s out of the bag now.”

Arisella looked at me strangely.

“Jesus, it’s an idiom.
 
Never mind.”
 
I shifted my weight in frustration.
 
“As the niece of this almighty Blood King, what type of special
privileges were you granted?”

“Although Bloodbourn society
undervalues women, girls are still trained to be warriors, just not as
rigorously as boys are.
 
Thanks to
outdated tradition, all Bloodbourn are expected to develop certain skills in
combat, even though for many, those skills never prove useful.
 
As you already know, I was no common
girl.
 
For much of my life, I was trained
exactly like my brother.
 
My father
employed the most talented instructors to teach us how to hunt and ride, and at
daybreak we would sometimes hunt the countless grimalkin that plagued our
forests.

“My mother soon forgot about her
affair, and, the rare times my father permitted her to visit us, she would
shower us with adorations.
 
Our father
always warned us not to become too attached to her.
 
He told us that Mother’s mind had been
polluted with abhorrent filth that only the weak believed, and that as much as
he wished to help her, she was beyond saving.
 
He tried to convince us that the Irisbourn were the ultimate enemy and
that we were destined to slay them.
 
But
our mother tempered his hatred with wisdom.
 
She made us search for love in the world, not blood.

“As Adrian and I matured, we
realized our father’s madness.
 
We
despised the way he devoted himself to his brother’s obsession with Irisbourn
genocide.
 
We couldn’t stand how he
treated our mother.
 
But we could never
speak against him, so we took it in silence, the same way our mother had.

“And then, at the age of ten,
Adrian had his Awakening.”

“Awakening?” I echoed, confused.

Arisella groaned.
 
“Adrian really hasn’t gone over this
already?
 
An Awakening is something all
Divinbloods naturally go through when they reach the age at which they can
invoke their abilities.
 
Adrian’s was
early.
 
It’s different for everyone, but
it usually happens around twelve.
 
If we
had Bloodbourn babies shooting knives out of their wrists, the Bloodbourn race
would have died out a long time ago.”

“That makes sense.”
 
I bit my lip and reflected on what she
said.
 
“So, two nights ago when I was in
the woods, did that happen to me?
 
Did I
have my Awakening?”

“No.”
 
Arisella waggled her finger in my face.
 
“First off, you’re seventeen.
 
That’s way too late for an Awakening.
 
Secondly, you were human.
 
When humans change into Divinbloods, that’s
definitely not an Awakening.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to hide my
disappointment.
 
“What happened after
Adrian’s Awakening?”

Arisella straightened.
 
“Our father and mother were incredibly proud
of him, and he moved onto higher training.
 
Naturally, I longed for my Awakening as well, but that would not come
for three more years.

“I was fighting with Adrian when it
happened.
 
He loved flaunting his new
abilities, just to irritate me.
 
I
remember becoming absolutely livid when he launched a blade into the only
ornament that Mother had ever given me, shattering it.
 
Then came the burning, bone-crushing pain –
oh, but of course, I need not describe that to you.
 
I changed into a grimalkin right in front of
my brother in our bedroom.
 
I had no idea
what had happened until after it was over.”

“Sounds a lot like what happened to
me,” I pointed out.

Arisella’s expression
softened.
 
“At least I had some idea what
I was going through.
 
You... you knew
nothing.
 
My Awakening was one of the most
frightening experiences of my life.
 
I
honestly don’t know how you did it, how you survived your first change.”
 
Arisella’s voice was infused with a touch of
compassion she had never shown before.
 
Did she actually feel sorry for me?

“In full disclosure, I
did
truly believe I was going insane.”

Arisella laughed.
 
“I don’t blame you.
 
After my Awakening, I thought that something
was horribly, horribly wrong with me.
 
How could the daughter of two Bloodbourn have the abilities of a
Beastbourn?
 
I was terrified by how my
father might react when he realized that I was a failure to the pure Blackwing
line.

“That night, Adrian snuck me into
my mother’s chambers.
 
She was the only
person we trusted enough to ask for help.
 
That’s when she told us all of this, and I realized that I was not my
father’s daughter, but the doula’s.

“We swore to keep her affair and my
Beastbourn ability a secret, not just for her safety, but for mine as
well.
 
But my father grew impatient as
months passed and I still had not had my Awakening.
 
He tried to force it out of me, just as I had
done to you.
 
When he trained with me, it
took everything in my power not to change into a grimalkin at his feet.

“My mother tried to teach me how to
control my ability.
 
She told me to study
the wild grimalkin in the Black Forest, and I spent many days amongst the
beasts.
 
Sometimes I felt like I belonged
with the grimalkin more than I did with the Bloodbourn.

“As a grimalkin, I always had to be
wary of Bloodbourn hunters.
 
Usually I
could escape them, as I was faster and smarter than any of the other
grimalkin.
 
But one afternoon, while I
was hunting, I crossed the path of two Bloodbourn riders.
 
They were extremely fast and aggressive, and
within seconds they had surrounded me.

“Prepared to meet the eyes of my
hunter, I lifted my head to the first rider.
 
To my shock, I discovered the face of my father.
 
His rigid arm pointed toward me, ready to
project a blade into my head.
 
Beside him
was Adrian.
 
I knew immediately from his
terror-filled eyes that he recognized me.

“I knew that my father would kill
me without hesitation, so in an instinctive attempt to save myself, I changed
back into my normal body before him.
 
He
said nothing, only stared at me while I watched him fit the pieces together in
his head.
 
I could see the disgust in his
eyes.
 
My very existence made him
sick.
 
It took him far less time to
figure everything out than it had taken me.

“My father rode away without saying
a word to me, and Adrian dismounted to ensure that I was unhurt.
 
Together we rode back to the house, so we
could warn our mother that our father would be looking for her.
 
We burst into her chambers frantically,
practically tripping over each other, morbidly similar to the way we eagerly ran
into her room when we were clumsy toddlers.
 
But for the first time in our lives, we were not greeted by her smiling
face.”

Arisella’s hands began to tremble,
and her words became hushed.
 
She
swallowed, struggling to fight back the emotions that threatened to spill into
her voice.
 
“In truth, at first we were
not even sure that it was Mother, the face was so unrecognizable.
 
Her cold body was twisted across the bed, her
limbs jutting out at unnatural angles.
 
The bed sheets had been stained crimson, and dripped into little red
pools on the marble floor.

“Adrian tried to push me out, but I
fought against him.
 
I had just as much a
right to be there as he did.
 
We were
only children, and we tried futilely to save our mother.
 
We thought that if we tried hard enough to
put her back together, she might come back.
 
We were trained to be warriors, not medics, and it was only later that
we realized that there was nothing we could have done for her.
 
Our father had reached her before we could
warn her.
 
It had not taken much for our
father to snap, to kill the wife he had never loved.”

A warm ribbon of wetness snaked
down my cheek, and I hurried to brush it away. The abrupt movement brought
Arisella back from the depths of her memory.

“I – I’m sorry.
 
I got carried away,” Arisella said, like she
had just realized who she was talking to.
 
“I shouldn’t have told you all that.”

I put my hand on hers
sympathetically.
 
“No, no, don’t
apologize,” I said, but my voice broke on the last word.
 
I mentally scolded myself for letting my
emotions get the best of me.
 
Arisella
didn’t look nearly as sad as I felt, and I never even knew her mother.
 
“I understand.
 
I lost my parents too – not like that though.”

“Yes, Adrian mentioned that,”
Arisella said, her voice becoming far away again.
 
“Adrian, it’s even harder with Adrian.
 
His eyes, his hair, the way he speaks… he’s
so much like Mother.”
 
Arisella’s voice
grew tight, and I noticed that her eyes were wet.
 
She shook her head and picked up where she
left off.

“My brother had to drag me out the
bedchamber to get me to leave.
 
My father
was out of control, and Adrian did not want to see what he would do to me, the
illegitimate child who had sullied the Blackwing name.
 
Hoping that we might get far enough to escape
the influence of our father, Adrian and I fled into the depths of the Black
Forest.

“My father was the head of the
Bloodbourn Battalion, though, and he sent his best Bloodbourn trackers after
us.
 
As soon as we saw them coming, we
knew we wouldn’t stand a chance.
 
We’d
both be severely punished for attempting to flee the Blood Kingdom, but after
my father found me, the legal punishment would be the least of my worries.

“As my father’s men closed in on
us, I came up with a plan in desperation.
 
Adrian was reluctant at first, but we had no other options.
 
Adrian left my side and waited by a nearby
river for the Bloodbourn men to find him.
 
When they did, he told them that he had drowned me in the river and let
the current take my body, so that I would never be seen again.
 
He said it like he was doing his father a favor,
ridding his family of the disgraceful evidence of his mother’s affair.
 
Meanwhile, I slipped past my father’s men as
a grimalkin and became just another of the wild creatures of the Black Forest.

“As the Blood King’s only nephew,
Adrian was spared the most extreme penalties for the disturbance he created for
the Bloodbourn Battalion.
 
Instead,
Adrian was sentenced to spend the rest of his life as a lowly prison guard, one
of the most deprecating positions for a Bloodbourn son of noble birth.
 
The Blood King ordered Adrian to the
lightless dungeons of his palace, where Adrian walked amongst the Bloodbourn’s
most dangerous captives and criminals.
 
We lived like this for years – me, a grimalkin in the Black Forest, and
Adrian, a prison guard in the Blood King’s palace.

“Sometimes, at night, he would
sneak into the forest and find me, just to make sure I was alive and
healthy.
 
During one of our meetings,
Adrian told me he may have discovered a way for us to escape.
 
For years we had both dreamed of leaving that
wretched place, but it had always been impossible.
 
The problem wasn’t breaking out of the palace
– it was what we would do after we broke out.
 
Even if we had managed to escape, we would have nowhere to go, and no
one in all of Fallyre would have been willing to harbor a fugitive Bloodbourn
and his disgraced sister.