The Crystal Heart (23 page)

I no longer cared about the Commander's plots or his motives or his mad warmonger's notion that the tunnel system could truly be of use to him and his army. I knew they could not, that the army would perish like rats in a trap before they had gone more than two miles. But none of that mattered, not even the strange irony that this man, chasing his obsession, had been, in a way, our benefactor. All I cared about was letting Kasper see that I loved him and wanted to be with him, always. How could I blame him for what he felt about my father? I knew how much it must have cost him to tell the truth, how easy it would have been to keep quiet.

I took his hand and said, ‘I will go where you go, wherever that leads us.'

Joy leaped into his eyes. ‘And, whatever befalls, I will never leave your side.'

The Commander coughed. ‘Very touching, but I must remind you that we should waste no more time. Are you ready?'

We nodded.

‘Good,' he said, smiling. ‘Then we will go at once.'

He waved us into the carriage and closed the door. I had never been in one of these and would have imagined it would be dark and cold. It was neither of those things, with light coming in through translucent panels. The walls were a little too close for my liking, and I was glad of Kasper's hand on mine. The Commander pulled down a lever, and the carriage began to move, soon picking up speed. It was then that a nagging uneasiness surfaced in my mind.

‘The Marshals will have noticed by now this vehicle is missing,' I said. ‘And if we come back into the city with it –'

‘Oh, we're not heading that way,' the Commander said cheerfully. ‘We're headed to the end of the Forest, and above ground.'

‘But – but you don't understand,' I stammered, exchanging a glance with Kasper. ‘There's no way into the upper world. There is the watchtower and then … nothing. Everything just ends at the abyss.'

The Commander laughed. ‘Abyss? What abyss? Have you ever seen it?'

‘No, of course not, but –'

‘It doesn't exist. It's just a story used to frighten the people of Night,' said the Commander. ‘There
is
a way out. Why do you think there's a watchtower, if it's only to keep an eye on a big fat nothing?'

‘Because the abyss could encroach and swallow us –'

He laughed. ‘Nonsense! It doesn't exist, though the watchtower most certainly does. And it is there to make
sure no one leaves for the land above. Because, you see, there
is
a way out. Only, it is not easy and no one has taken such a route in a long time.' He shot me a sideways glance. ‘Not since
I
last took it ten years ago.'

My heart clenched like a fist. Ten years ago.
His
was the unseen presence that had carried me away;
his
were the hands that had trussed me like a bundle;
his
were the arms that held me unseeing, swaddled in a blanket.

The Commander smiled. I could see he understood what was going through my mind, just as he knew how his plan to use Kasper would turn out. And he didn't care if I realised it. He was so supremely confident, so sure of himself, so unnaturally certain … It came to me in a flash, the thing that made sense of everything.

‘You are a
feyin
,' I gasped.

‘Well, there you have it, my dear,' the Commander drawled, quickly recovering from the shock.

It was clearly not the reaction Izolda expected. As to me, I don't know what I expected, for this was beyond anything I could have imagined. The Commander, hero of Krainos, defeater of the army of Night – a
feyin
! How could this be? How could we have all been taken in, all these years? Or maybe not all of us had been tricked. Just as the Council had known the truth about the prisoner in the Tower, they probably knew the truth about their star member.

I was shaken to the core by this revelation, for it cast such a different light – not only on what happened to us – but on the history of my country. I could not stop thinking of the legend woven around our great hero's life: the poor woodcutter's son, orphaned at a young age when his parents died in a forest fire, who went on to become a captain and leader of men. It was a beautiful story that had
inspired me, that had inspired so many of us in Krainos, for it made us feel that poverty and lack of connections were not barriers to achieving greatness.

‘Was any of it true?' I burst out. ‘Or did you and your friends on the Council invent it all to cover up your real history, just as you covered up the truth about Izolda, so you could justify every foul thing you did?'

My words clearly rankled him. ‘There was no invention, you fool! It is my real history.'

Before I could say anything, Izolda broke in. ‘You didn't know, did you?' she said, looking him right in the eyes. ‘Not back then. You were brought up as a human, and didn't know what you truly were. And your friends in Krainos still don't know.'

He held her gaze for a moment. ‘The Chief Magus was right about you, Princess,' he said in such a gentle tone that I was immediately on my guard. It was the Chief Magus's prophecy that Izolda's magic powers would awaken and lead to the destruction of Krainos, which had decided the Council to murder her on her eighteenth birthday.

No, it wasn't military secrets the Commander was after, and it certainly wasn't information about an abandoned tunnel system. Naively, we thought we'd been tricking him when, all along, he must have been laughing at our gullibility. No wonder he wasn't shaken by Izolda's revelation of his true nature. It didn't matter if we knew. We weren't getting out of here alive to tell anyone. We were the walking dead. He had lied to us about the way out, just as he had lied about so many things. Whatever was at the far edge of the Forest, it was certainly not a route to Krainos.

I had to warn Izolda, yet I could not say anything that might make him suspect that I had divined his true intentions. I had to do just as he had done over so many years, and mask my real thoughts as I tried to work out a way to escape. So I said, in a slow, puzzled tone, ‘I don't understand, sir. How can a
feyin
not know he's a
feyin
?'

He turned his head towards me. ‘If a child is taken so young that he has no memory of his former life, if the secret is kept so well that he never even gets an inkling – then, whether he is born
feyin
or human, it little matters. He becomes what he believes himself to be.'

Taken. He had been taken, just like me. But at least I had a memory of my former life. I knew who I was. My skin prickled with cold as Kasper asked, ‘Who did this to you, Commander Los?'

Something flickered in the Commander's eyes – the shadow of remembered pain, quickly suppressed. He shrugged. ‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Yes, it does.' Kasper glanced at me, and I understood he was trying to buy us time. ‘How did you find out?'

‘A chance meeting, when I was in my twenties, in an Almainian prison. Many years before that I'd fled the Forest after one too many beatings from my father in one of his drunken rages, and wandered the world making a living with my sword. Eventually I found steady employment in Almain as head of the household guard of one of the Grand Duke's rivals. It was a job that landed me in prison for a stretch of three years when said rival tried to mount a coup against the Grand Duke.'

I saw the startled expression that flashed briefly across Kasper's face. This was the truth, I thought. ‘Was it a prisoner who told you, then?' he said. ‘But how –'

‘There are all kinds of prisoners,' the Commander replied. ‘This one was a witch, an old
feyin
witch, the first I had ever met. She'd been arrested after a complaint by someone she'd made a spell for that hadn't worked out as they had hoped. Anyway, she took a liking to me, because, unlike the others, I was not afraid of her. What was there to be afraid of, I thought, in that frail old body whose powers were only small – just a little healing magic and a minor gift of second sight? And then, one day, she told my fortune – and turned my world upside down.'

I found my voice. ‘She told you that you were a
feyin
?'

He liked our questions, I could see that. He had probably never shared this story with anyone. Like Kasper, I knew what it meant, this willingness of his. I knew that he thought he had nothing to lose by telling us, that we would not live to tell the tale. So why not at last unburden himself?

‘Yes,' said the Commander. ‘It was a shock to her, I could see that. But if it was a shock to her, imagine what it was like for me. How could I be a
feyin
? I knew my own history. My parents – my late mother, my old father – were human, I was sure of that. They had never shown me much in the way of love; indeed, my father had frequently taken out his bad moods on me, but then I was hardly alone in that. And I had certain talents – an eye for strategy, an ability in battle, a talent for sizing people up very quickly. But I had no shred of an idea that they could be anything other than human qualities. No
feyin
I'd ever
heard of had these kinds of gifts. I thought the witch was surely mistaken. But I could not get it out of my mind – it explained so much. So, one day, I broke out of prison and went straight back to my father to make him tell me the truth.'

I looked at Kasper. His face was still, his glance steady. Like me, he was listening closely, trying to glean something – anything – that might help us.

‘The old man told me that he and his wife had found me abandoned at the base of a tree in the heart of the Forest,' the Commander snarled, ‘and that it was his wife who had wanted me. He would have left me there to starve, because he could see I was a
feyin
. I knew he was lying, I knew he and his wife must have stolen me. But he kept saying that I had been left to die in the Forest, because that was what a
feyin
did when they did not want a child. He told me that he'd tried to beat the alien nature out of me, but that I was irredeemable, and now that his wife was dead he wanted nothing to do with me. I granted him his wish, and struck him down and burned his house of lies down to the ground.

‘I walked for days till I reached the White City and enlisted in the army. On my long journey I had decided that, though I had learned this thing about myself, it belonged in the past, along with the heap of ashes in the Forest. Whatever I had been born, I was that thing no longer. I had chosen my own path, and I vowed to myself that I would never look back. I rose through the ranks despite my lack of noble birth until, finally, the chance came for me to truly prove myself. When war broke out with Night and we –'

‘No. No. I cannot believe this, sir.' The words burst out from Kasper.

The Commander stopped. ‘What do you mean, boy?'

‘Sir, I cannot believe that you of all people can truly be
feyin
.'

‘Then you are a dimwit indeed,' the Commander snapped. ‘I am telling you the truth.' He gave a grim smile. ‘Why should I lie to you now?'