Defiance: The Umbra Chronicles Book 2 Read online

  I got a cloth and wiped myself to check. The chamber pot had been full of blood. Sure, it was mixed with urine so it couldn’t be as much as it looked, but there were big, dark clots and drops of blood spattered on the sides of the pot. It couldn’t be as much as it looked. If I’d bled that much, I’d be dead, surely.

  I hadn’t had a period since I’d bled at the loss of my virginity. It was as though my body had decided that having been forced into giving that show of blood unnaturally early, then it wasn’t going to produce the regular show of blood that other women took for granted. I took my own… what can you call it? Periodless? That doesn’t sound like a word, but it’s the best I’ve got. I took my own periodless state for granted, much as any woman took her reproductive system for granted.

  To tell the truth, the sight of the blood in the bowl frightened me. Sparrow had had periods, but I hadn’t paid any attention. I thought the whole thing was too gross for words and so I ignored it. Now what was I supposed to do? I stuck a handkerchief in my underclothes and hurried to Rhiannon’s tomb. I knocked on the door softly. I didn’t want the whole spire to hear me. What would I say if Ronan asked what I was doing, knocking on Rhiannon’s door at this late hour?

  I knocked again, still soft. ‘I’m coming!’ Rhiannon shouted back.

  ‘Ssh!’ I urged when she opened the door. Her hair was messy about her face and I was glad that she didn’t wake up with the immaculate locks she presented us with when she came down to breakfast in the morning.

  ‘What’s this about?’ she demanded, making no effort to lower her voice. Beyond the brands and the tattoos, it was easy to see the anger on her face. For a minute there, I seriously contemplated not telling her at all, but I was too worried that I was going to bleed to death. What if it wasn’t a period? What if I was haemorrhaging?

  God help me, she was going to laugh at me. That might be even worse than haemorrhaging. Maybe I should just go back to bed and see if I was alive in the morning.

  That kind of thinking will make you seek help from your worst enemy. It’ll even make you seek help from your family.

  ‘Rhiannon, please, I’ve got a problem…’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘I can’t. Look, it’s private, can I come in?’

  ‘No.’ She faced me blandly, ‘You can’t. I want to go to sleep, it’s the middle of the night. It’s my tomb.’

  ‘Please. It’s really private.’ She still stood in the doorway. It made me want to give her a shove in her middle. ‘Look,’ and I looked as I said it, looking down one side of the hall and up the other, ‘it’s my period. I don’t know what to do.’

  Rhiannon sighed. ‘Fine, come in. Trust you not to be prepared.’ She went to the chest of drawers and drew out several pads made of fabric and sewn so that they would fit into underclothes. ‘Take these.’

  I turned the pads over in my hands. Folded and sewn bits of fabric that I had no idea what to do with. I looked up. Rhiannon was glaring at me, folding her arms. That was probably a bad sign, but what could I do?

  ‘I’ve never used them before,’ I admitted.

  That stalled her. ‘That’s something I didn’t need to know about you, Emer. I don’t have tampons. I know that you weren’t raised as a princess and your hymen isn’t a political tool, but mine is, despite my irregular situation in this household, and if I don’t have one on my wedding night then someone’s going to have to go to war. So, you’ll have to make do with what I’ve got until you can get something else.’

  Gee, that made me mad. ‘First of all, even I know that thing about tampons breaking your hymen is a myth. Secondly, my virginity’s long gone, so I don’t need to worry about that anymore. I just needed to talk to you without you being a snarky cow about it. I need to know… I don’t know, whatever it is that girls are supposed to know about their periods. I’ve never had one before. So, the faster you tell me, the faster we’ll both be able to get back to sleep.’

  Her brow furrowed. ‘You’ve never had a period before? Never?’ She looked me up and down. ‘Emer, you’re not that much younger than me and I’ve been menstruating for the last…’ I could see she was mentally counting, ‘six or seven years already. Why haven’t you?’

  I shrugged, although I knew well enough. If she’d asked, I could have told her all about the effect of stress on the body. But she didn’t ask.

  ‘Don’t just shrug.’ She wasn’t as mean now, though. She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Surely you wondered why you hadn’t had a period? You’re old enough to have a child by now.’

  I surprised her by my sudden flinch. I saw her shock, but no force on this earth would have told her why I’d reacted that way. ‘I just didn’t, OK? Now, look, how much is too much bleeding? I’ve got a chamber pot full of blood and I’m… curious as to whether that’s normal.’

  She frowned and so help me, I nearly passed out at the sight. She frowned. That had to be bad. I was going to die.

  ‘First things first,’ Rhiannon said. She gave me tips on how to keep myself clean and how to put on the pad. She told me what to expect in regard to pain. She was thorough and still bland, but she was kind and I was surprised to find myself feeling almost comfortable with this hideous conversation. And God help me, I even showed her the chamber pot.

  She frowned again when she saw it, and again I felt that chill of fear. ‘This is a lot more than I have,’ she said. She looked up at me. ‘Maybe it’s because it’s your first and you’re so late.’ She looked me up and down. ‘But you’ve developed in the rest of your body so you’re not a late bloomer, are you, Emer?’

  I shrugged again. ‘Dunno. If that’s a lot, how can I make it less?’

  ‘You can’t. There’s nothing you can do to control how heavy your flow is. All you can do is deal with it. I hear the heavier it is, the worse the pain gets. But you’re not bleeding to death, Emer. It is just a period.’

  Just a period. Rhiannon went back to her room and I emptied the chamber pot over the edge of the spire. I made sure I cleaned it out properly, pumping water in the common area and went back to my room.

  I got into bed, but I was so excited and nervous I couldn’t sleep. And I was frightened. To clean myself, I’d had to touch parts of myself I’d studiously avoided in the past. The only times those parts of me were touched was when I was hurt. I was frightened that even to touch those areas would cause pain. Call me stupid, since it’s my own body, but when you think something is going to hurt you don’t do it. That’s stupid. I was old enough now to be thinking about love. But Caradoc was dead. Even Andras, who had once looked at me like I was special, was lost to me. I’d kissed Ronan, but it had been an experiment, and he knew it.

  What was my body doing, having a period now? I lay very still at the thought that it might be something to do with getting ready for pregnancy. If I was menstruating, then I was fertile. I realised for the first time, admitted for the first time, that I didn’t want to have sex with anyone right now. I was frightened. I liked Ronan, but I wasn’t ready for sex. I wasn’t sure I would ever be. And how fair was that on him? To keep him on hold until I was ready?

  The period might be because I felt more safe now. We were held captive by the White Queen, slaves, sleeping in tombs. Still, I felt safer than I ever had since I was fourteen.

  And having a period made me feel more normal. I was sick of not feeling normal, whatever “normal” was. I would have given anything to have no power, to have no great destiny, to just be a girl, even if the phrase set my teeth on edge. I wanted to be a girl falling in love maybe, learning a trade or doing my hair or whatever it is that “normal” girls do. The only person who ever understood that was Sparrow and I’d learned long ago not to try and tell anyone that I just wanted to be like everyone else because I was just so special. That kind of talk doesn’t make you friends.

  #

  Several weeks later, in the early afternoon, Rhiannon came to find me. I was talking with Cuchulainn about how we might possibly free
all the slaves, acting like he had my full attention when I was barely making the right noises when he stopped talking. Rhiannon wasn’t obvious. She didn’t interrupt us, or say anything like ‘Just reminding you, Emer, we planned to kill the Queen, it’s time now, if you want to get ready.’ No, she just appeared in the doorway and raised her eyebrows at me, once again cutting that poor little bee in two. Then she went away.

  I pleaded tiredness and Cuchulainn was apologetic. He not only let me go, he begged me to rest and look after myself.

  ‘I will.’

  I left the alcove where we’d been talking and found Rhiannon in the hallway. She looked composed enough, but she was holding her hands together in front of her so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  ‘Do you want to see what she does to me?’ she asked.

  The way she worded it made me sick to my stomach. I swallowed hard. ‘If you want to show me,’ I replied.

  Rhiannon nodded. ‘You might… I suppose… maybe find a way out of it…?’

  She had me turn into the smallest animal I could think of ‒ a flea ‒ and nestle in her hair. It took a little while before my eyes grew accustomed to the strange vision peculiar to insects. It took a while, too, before I got over the desire to bite her. If Rhiannon scratched her head, she might easily kill me, so I restrained myself.

  I don’t know how she didn’t scratch her head, to be honest. If I not only thought, but knew for certain, that I had a flea in my hair, I’d be scratching fit to draw blood.

  Rhiannon knew where she was going. I settled down into hair and tried not to do anything itch-inducing. She made her way along the corridors at an even pace, her steps neither fast nor slow. You’d never know it to look at her; the thirst for revenge boiled in her heart beneath the calm, patterned face. You’d think she was off to buy bread, from the way she walked.

  She presented herself to the guards at a grand set of doors, saying her own name coldly voice like they didn’t recognise her. One of them answered her in a voice far kinder than Rhiannon’s could ever be, ‘Go on in, Rhiannon. She’s expecting you. Wait –’ he put a hand on her arm, gently, to stay her before she went in. ‘I’ve heard – from her maid – she’s going to bring the others in tonight. She’s got a new one and she wants to see you dance.’

  Rhiannon shook her arm free and kept her face lowered. ‘What’s one more?’ she murmured.

  The guard let go of her arm and opened the door for her.

  She walked into the banquet hall. For a moment, with my insect eyes, I was confused by the colours and the sounds and the movement. Musicians played in one corner of the room and a Fool was larking about in the space between the long tables.

  Aoife sat at the head table, dressed in a white gown decorated with silver and diamonds. It was all I could do to restrain myself from leaping off Rhiannon and burrowing into the heavy loops of Aoife’s hair beneath her crown, sinking my teeth in to the bone, delivering insect justice. Instead, I hunkered down low in Rhiannon’s hair. I was going to give Aoife more than a flea bite. I was going to take her head off and carry it home in my hands.

  Aoife’s face lit up when she saw Rhiannon and I thought for a moment that perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe she did care for the girl. She reached out and rang a little bell sat beside her wine glass.

  Immediately, the room fell silent. The Fool had just taken a deep mouthful of alcohol, a torch in his hand, ready to spew flame across the room. He looked panicked for a moment. It was a special alcohol, not wine, in his mouth. Nonetheless, after one pregnant pause, he gulped deeply, closing his eyes as though that might help the fluid go down faster.

  ‘Rhiannon! My dear!’ Aoife exclaimed. Her face was alight with joy. Maybe she wasn’t the cold-hearted bitch I’d come to know and hate. ‘Rhiannon, my Bach Chwaer.’ Little sister, it meant, but it could be used for any close, younger female. It was also the title of the heir apparent. When she said it, I knew that Aoife didn’t care about Rhiannon, except in so far as she cared about hurting the girl. She took so much pleasure in the thought of the pain she was going to inflict on Rhiannon that I had briefly mistaken it for love.

  ‘Rhiannon, my Bach Chwaer, you’re late. All the others are here already. And you have a new friend, look.’ She waved a gracious hand towards the corner.

  I hadn’t noticed them at first. There was so much activity in the room the prisoners were almost invisible. There was a cage in the corner of the room, decorated with flowers and ribbons to match the gaiety of the banquet, but still a cage. Inside were three people. Two old men, one a stranger to me, the other Cuchulainn from the Slave’s Spire. The third person was huddled in the far corner of the cage and barely distinguishable as a person unless you knew what you were looking for. Cuchulainn had his arm around her and she huddled into him. She didn’t look human because she was covered in feathers.

  A featherskin, to be exact.

  I’d worn a featherskin once in my life. It was a magic cloak that formed itself to the skin of the person wearing it. The feathers stopped the person from doing magic and could only be removed by the hand of the person who applied it. I could only guess the person was female from its size and the fact that it had long hair. It could just as easily be young teenage boy or a very fine boned, emaciated man. The wrist pressed to the feathered lips was nothing but bones and feathers. That wrist was emaciated, even for a fine boned woman.

  ‘There are four of you now,’ Aoife went on. ‘Four of my special ones. You get to know one another. What better way than a dance?’

  Rhiannon’s head turned back to Aoife. Even from above her head I could guess at the sardonic expression on her face. ‘A dance?’ she asked, as though the guard hadn’t warned her. She clearly knew that Aoife would not relish the captives having any kind of inside information, however innocuous.

  ‘A dance!’ Aoife repeated. She clapped her hands together gaily and the musicians struck up a waltz. ‘Ladies’ choice, Rhiannon. Choose a partner.’

  Rhiannon approached the cage, the steps slower than they had been when she had walked to the banquet hall. She was reaching out to the gate of the cage when a streak of lightning arced over her head to strike the lock. Thankfully for the prisoners, beneath the flowers and ribbon the cage was made of wood, not metal, or they would have been electrocuted. Rhiannon jerked her hand back quickly to avoid the lightning, but she didn’t turn around again, not even when Aoife laughed.

  Cuchulainn muttered something to the other man who took his place next to the featherskin as Cuchulainn moved. The featherskin gazed up at him like she was trying to read something in his face.

  Cuchulainn got to his feet and stepped forward, suddenly tall and straight, his head thrown back, as proud as… as proud as the morning star. How many times had I thought that about Caradoc? He had been like that, refusing to be beaten. I looked closer at Cuchulainn. He was thinner than Caradoc had ever been, but the skin hung loosely from big bones and wide shoulders. His hair was completely white, but his eyes were just as blue as Caradoc’s had been.

  Caradoc had been taken from his family at the age of four, to be raised by the Meistri to serve in their army. He hadn’t known for sure if his family was still alive. What if Cuchulainn was his father?

  A flea can’t cry, which is probably just as well.

  Cuchulainn was the very image of Caradoc as he stepped towards Rhiannon and bowed gracefully.

  ‘Your Highness, may I have the honour of distance?’ he asked. Now that I was listening for it, even his voice was like Caradoc’s. He held out a hand to Rhiannon.

  She put her hand into his and he stepped out of the cage like he was stepping down from a throne. Aoife had stopped laughing. Back in the cage I caught sight of the other man helping the featherskin to her feet and encouraging her to leave the cage.

  Cuchulainn bowed to Rhiannon again when they reached the open space in the middle of the tables. A titter ran through the crowd. Rhiannon curtsied, bobbing up and down beneath me. She put her right hand
into his and put her other hand on his shoulder and let him lead her into the dance.

  Rhiannon wasn’t any taller than I was, so it was almost like I’d gone back in time – again – and was dancing with Caradoc as I had at Aine’s wedding feast. I imagined the face looking down at me was fifty years younger, fuller, more ruddy, but still the skin was as pale as a pearl where it disappeared into his clothes. I imagined his hair wild and red and dotted with beads to mark the memory of his fallen comrades. I imagined that he was looking at me, not kindly, politely, as Cuchulainn was looking at Rhiannon, but like Caradoc used to look at me, an intense mixture of tenderness and desire.

  I caught sight of Aoife, who appeared to be having fun again. Suddenly she cried, ‘Change partners! Change partners!’ in a singsong voice.

  Like they’d done it a dozen times before, Rhiannon and Cuchulainn dropped their arms from one another and turned. Cuchulainn was now dancing with the featherskin and Rhiannon was dancing with the other man.

  It was a shock. I’d seen him before. Spoken with him, laughed with him, and after one humiliating, painful night, wept into his shoulder, believing he was dead and would never know I’d surrendered to the tears.

  This was Aine’s brother, Aoife’s brother, Gwydion. This was my uncle. He had lost so much since I’d seen him last. We’d gone on a picnic and I’d put myself out to be friendly, which never came naturally to me, because I knew I was going to betray him and escape that night.

  It was such a lovely day, the sun shining hot on my wings when I changed into a bird and flew from Aine’s shoulder to Gwydion’s as they rode, then to perch on Andras’s hair as he rode beside Gwydion. Andras always seemed to have a lock of dark hair falling over his forehead and into his dark eyes. He’d muttered dire imprecations about getting it cut, but he knew it made him look sexy. I wondered where Andras was now ‒ if he was alive, if he knew that Gwydion was here or even if he knew that Gwydion was alive.