The Crystal Heart (11 page)

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.

Then hatred came, and with it, wild fury. I hated Izolda with all my heart and soul, with as much intensity as I had loved her. I wished desperately that I'd never met her. Then despair came and I no longer hated her but myself. I hated the knowledge that I had ever loved her. I hated that I was so weak. I hated the fact that I had heard the voice that had lured me to the Tower that day.

And I hated the fact she hadn't known that was what she was doing, for I could not even think of her then as wicked. I hated her father. I hated the guards, the Supreme Council, the Commander. Hate boiled within me, dark and scalding. But all those hard, wild feelings faded away in time. The hatred, the despair, the pain – it all went just as the hope, the love and the courage had. All that was left
was this numbness. Dull routine. Black heavy nights. Grey long days. The nightmares stopped. I had not gone mad. I only waited for my life to be over, for time to eventually run down.

At least, that's what I thought.

There was little to mark this day from other days at first. Morning had slipped into afternoon with only the soup of midday to mark any change. I was reading in my cell when there came a rattle of keys in the lock. I expected it to be one of the guards come to fetch my tray, but it was the Commander.

‘Get up, Bator,' he said without preamble.

He hadn't visited for a long time. I did as I was told and sat up.

‘Come with me.' I held out my hands for the cuffs, but he shook his head. ‘No need. Follow me.'

I obeyed, walking past the Commander's guard at the door. He was tall as a tree, with a frame like a mountain. For such a big man, he moved silently. He padded behind us as we walked down the passage, towering over us both. We did not stop at the locked door that had been the boundary of my world for two years. The Commander unlocked it and ushered me through to
a series of passages until we came to the Governor's office.

There was no one in the small neat room with a plain desk, two wooden chairs and rows of black-bound books in metal shelves along the walls. On the desk was a large typewriter and two wire trays filled with tidily stacked papers. There was a picture on the wall behind the desk, a rather incongruous one in what were otherwise businesslike surroundings. It was a reproduction of a famous painting whose original hung in the White City Art Gallery and whose copies were to be found over the mantelpieces in hundreds of homes, on shop and tavern walls all over the land.
The Quest of the Lion Knights
, it was called, and it had been painted by the most famous artist Krainos had ever produced, a man named Alfrid Lugos. Though Lugos had died only twenty or thirty years before, the painting was set in that long-ago time when the Lion Knights had truly been the greatest knights in all of the world.

The Commander noticed the direction of my gaze. ‘I like it very much, too. It reminds me of a better time.'

I looked at him, but said nothing.

He smiled thinly. ‘Sit down.'

I did as I was bid, the giant bodyguard hovering at my shoulder. The Commander sat at the desk, acting as though this place was quite familiar to him. Yet the Governor was not there – why, I didn't know, and I didn't much care.

‘They tell me you have been behaving well, Bator. Is that so? Answer me,' he added sharply, when I still said nothing.

‘If they say so, sir,' I said quietly.

‘Do you still hope to be released, is that it? Do you think behaving well will win you mercy?'

I shook my head.

‘That is just as well, for it will not.'

I had thought myself armoured in fog. But that shaft pierced it for an instant, just one squirm of pain, then it was gone. ‘I do not ask for mercy.'

‘No, you do not, and that pleases me. Tell me, do you hate the ones who have done this to you?'

I looked at him. ‘Who, sir?'

Again, that thin smile. ‘You know, Bator, they say a great warrior is armed by his courage. But sometimes courage is only despair in a mask. I have known men like that; men who care not a whit for their own lives, who have no mercy and ask for none. They may have started out as the lowest of the low – even as criminals – but they can do great deeds, just as much as those in whom the blood runs hot, just as much as those there …' He waved a hand at the picture behind him. ‘I think you can be just such a man.'

This time I really did start, before thinking that he was only tormenting me for his own twisted reasons. But I said nothing, and that made him angry.

‘Look at me when I'm speaking to you, Bator!'

I looked at him. His eyes were blazing.

‘I'm offering you a chance – not mercy, but a chance to redeem yourself. It is almost certain to cost you your life. But the reward would be great, for you could be remembered for this one great deed and everything else would be wiped clean.'

I stared at him. My hands started to shake. ‘I don't understand.'

‘I want you to kill the Prince of Night,' he said simply.

‘Kill the Prince of Night?' I echoed, through the sour catch in my throat.

‘You hate him. I know you do,' the Commander added impatiently. ‘And you have a good way in – his daughter, of course. She has a soft spot for you, despite everything.'

‘No,' I managed to say. ‘She doesn't care. And I – I don't care either.'

‘Nonsense. All that is buried in you, that is all.' I made a gesture of protest, which he dismissed with a wave of the hand. ‘Love her or hate her, you cannot be indifferent. I don't care what you do with the girl, in the unlikely event you survive your mission. You see, we were wrong about her power. It has not grown. In two years the magic that had started to blossom has withered. It never had a chance to grow. For her human blood tainted her
feyin
heritage. There is no danger in her anymore, though her father watches her like a hawk, as he guards all the precious things he owns.' His voice grew grim. ‘
He
is a different matter.'

I raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought he was now the friend of Krainos and the Council.'

The Commander slammed his fist on the table, making me jump. ‘The Council! They are fools. They go on sponsored visits to Night and see only what he wants them to see. They have made so much money from the mines they fail to see that he has lulled them into sleep. Meanwhile, deep underground, I am certain he has been biding his time, rearming, gathering his armies again. If we allow him to continue, he will destroy Krainos and lay the whole land to waste, taking his full revenge at last.'

My heart was like a stone in my chest. But along my veins, the blood was rushing, stinging, sending shocks of energy through my whole body. ‘And you think I care about any of it?'

‘I know you do. I can see it in your eyes. You will do this, Bator. Not just because I want it – but because
you
do.' His voice softened. ‘You forget, I spoke to you for long days and weeks. I took the measure of you.'

‘I have since changed,' I said dully. But I knew, inside me, the darkness was howling for release.

‘No, you have not. You only think you have,' the Commander said firmly. ‘You are young.' He paused. ‘In my own youth I was in prison for three long years.'

I looked at him in surprise. I had heard nothing of that in the many stories told of him. It was certainly not in the biography we had been set to read at military school.

The Commander leaned across the desk. ‘Very few people know about it, but it's true. I lost hope, too; I reached the level you are at. And then I went deeper and discovered that my strength was not lost, it had just been hidden.'

I shrugged. ‘And so you broke out of prison.'

He gazed at me steadily. ‘Yes. I went on a mission. And I never looked back.'

‘It didn't cost you your life,' I remarked.

‘It did not. And yours may not, either, if you are lucky. Either way, you will be fortunate. You will no longer be seen as a traitor, but as a hero of Krainos.' An ironic smile twisted his lips. ‘History can easily change.'

‘Don't I know it,' I said, trying to keep my voice steady through the wild sensations that tore through me.

‘I suppose you do.' The Commander paused. ‘So, Kasper Bastor, what will it be?'

‘It will never work,' I said. He smiled, knowing that by these words I'd already agreed. ‘They will kill me as soon as I set foot in their country. They will know what I have come to do.'

‘No. You will have escaped with information gleaned from important papers, which you managed to memorise when I was fool enough to leave them behind during a visit to you.' The Commander grinned. ‘Your memory is excellent as a camera, and your heart is burning with revenge against Krainos. At least the Prince made us spare your life. And you are still in love with the Princess …'

‘No – and even if that were true, the Prince made it quite clear that I … I was not worthy of her. He spared my life for her sake, that is all.' My body ached with the force of memories returning, memories I had hoped to banish for ever.

‘Your escape will look perfectly legitimate,' the Commander said, watching me. ‘You will escape while we are transferring you to another prison. You will find your way to a salt-mine gang. You will get work in the mine. And one day, you will wander away from the others and you will find your way into the heart of Night. You will have that information to trade for your life, and a word with your lost Princess –'

‘I need more than information carried in my head,' I said harshly. ‘I need written proof. And it will have to be good if the Marshals are not to kill me.'

‘Oh, it will be. We have prepared a package, troop numbers, weapons counts – all false, clearly, but it is the
kind of information the Prince would give his eye teeth for.' The Commander grinned. ‘The kind of thing he might even give up his daughter for, if you play your cards right.'

A red mist of fury surged through me at these words, and I struggled to control myself, clenching my fists tightly.

‘That is good,' the Commander said calmly. ‘The killing fervour is already in you. Focus it, and you will succeed.'

‘I
will
kill him. Then I will come back and kill
you
,' I burst out, and then fell silent, appalled at what I'd said.

But the Commander just laughed. ‘We will see about that when the time comes, if you get out of there with your life. If you do, I will gladly fight you, for you will have shown a courage that is rare indeed.'

‘Even for a traitor?'

The Commander smiled. ‘Even for that. But then, there will be no more talk of traitors, if you come back with the head of the Prince of Night.' He looked me right in the eyes. ‘And if you even think of avoiding this mission, your whole family will be arrested and executed.' He spoke with utter calm, without expression at all. ‘Is that clear?'

‘Perfectly,' I said, through stiff lips. I knew he would not hesitate to do exactly as he had said.

‘This is how it will happen. Tomorrow morning, first thing, you will be told by the prison guards that you are being transferred to a prison near Katena, in the mountains. They do not know what is happening, for only the prison warden has been informed. You will be taken in an armoured van, which will be held up by bandits. In the confusion, you will escape. You will then make your way to Katena and join a work crew at the salt mines. The rest is up to you.'

‘But what if –'

‘There are no “what ifs”. This will work. Everything has been arranged.'

‘But if the guards see me escaping –'

‘They won't.'

‘But the papers … how …?'

‘Everything will be given to you tomorrow. Papers, money and an identity document that will help you pass muster for the mines. And this.' The Commander drew from his pocket a tiny leather case. Opening it, he showed me what was inside – a miniature sewing kit consisting of two identical needles, a spool of thread and two buttons.

I stared at it, then at him. ‘I don't understand.'

‘See the needle on the left? It is your weapon. The needle is hollow and contains a poison harmless to humans but deadly to the people of Night. The needle on the right is just a harmless sewing aid.' He gave a grim smile. ‘Take care you select the correct one when the time comes.'

‘What is in it exac–'

‘All you need to know is that you must stab the Prince of Night with it. It will kill him, nothing surer.' He closed the case and replaced it in his pocket. ‘As I say, you will be given all necessaries tomorrow.'

‘But the guards will search me.'

‘You will be given everything you need tomorrow,' the Commander said with a note of finality.

‘And if I get caught
before
I get into Night – if men of Krainos find the papers on me – they will think –'

He gave me a hard glance. ‘You must not let that happen, or you will die a traitor. We will deny all knowledge of you if you claim it. Do you understand?'

I nodded.

‘Any more questions?'

‘How do I get word to you?'

‘You don't. I have my sources. I will know what you are doing, at least until you are in the belly of the beast. Then you will be on your own. We will only know of the success or failure of your mission once it is over.' The Commander bared his teeth in an unamused smile. ‘Now, one final thing you must remember: the only way for uninvited humans to get into Night proper, beyond the mines, is through the Lake, which is –'

‘I know, apparently bottomless,' I said, as an image of the map Izolda had painted came unbidden to my mind. ‘But it's not really. There is a way, at the side, through which you can swim if you can hold your breath long enough. Only if you have something from Night with you for protection and …' I broke off, for it had been Izolda who told me those things, and I did not want to share any more of it with him.

‘Ah yes,' the Commander said softly. ‘The crystal heart that she gave you for safekeeping. Excellent. I see you already know what to do.' He motioned me to stand, and waved a hand at his bodyguard. ‘Leon will take you back to your cell now. Rest. Sleep if you can. It may be the last peaceful sleep you have in quite a while.'