The Heart Collector Read online

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, looking down at her.

  Her skin coloured again and she hurried away, putting the table between them. “Where did you come from?”

  “I woke up in Tallith.”

  “Tallith?” she said, looking out of the window as though she could see it. “And how did you get here?”

  “I walked.”

  “All the way from Tallith?” She frowned again.

  He nodded.

  “Where are you going? What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “You,” he said simply, surely, and her cheeks turned a delicate rose pink.

  “Me?” she laughed and he nodded solemnly.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her, his hand straying to his pocket of its own accord.

  “Samia,” she breathed.

  Then, without planning to, without meaning to, he pulled a small pipe from his pocket, which he hadn’t even known he’d been carrying. The pipe was white and solid, and warm in his hands. There was a flash of memory: an old man, dark, lined skin, sad, strange eyes. In the vision the man lifted the pipe to his lips and began to play. The Bringer, standing in Samia’s kitchen, did the same.

  She followed him from the cottage, her eyes glazed, and he burned with a triumph he didn’t understand. Suddenly he was been desperate to return to Tallith, to take her with him. She walked at his side, gazing up at him with open adoration. He alone noticed the whispers and stares as they left the village, the murmurs of, “Is that Samia Dunun?” and, “But who is he?”

  No one approached them, or tried to intervene, and they were soon in the woods, where he showed her how to find roots, and nuts, and clean water. At night they curled around each other like kittens, and while she slept deeply, he stared up at the stars, smiling, content.

  They travelled back through the land, taking a winding, meandering route through small forests and wild meadows. In the seaside village he’d visited before, he stole fresh fish and cooked it over an open fire, feeding her morsels of the flaking flesh with his fingers as she looked at him with perfect trust. They never spoke, had never exchanged a single word after they left her kitchen. He led and she followed, and it felt right to both of them. They were both as they were supposed to be, most of the time. Sometimes he would catch her staring into the distance, a frown marring her smooth skin, and then he’d take out his pipe and it would fade. Her gaze would return to him and he’d feel peaceful once more.

  They took a boat across the great river between Tregellan and Tallith, and he helped her from it, marvelling at how rough her little hands were compared to his larger, smooth ones. He led her through the ruins of Tallith, to the crumbling remains of Tallith castle. He cradled her against his body as he climbed the walls to the top, where his father lay. He wanted to show her to his father; it was very important that he take her there.

  It was sunset as they arrived and the Sleeping Prince was pale on his stone bed. For the first time since she had left her home, Samia hesitated before the bier, resisted the Bringer’s hand at her back, urging her forward.

  “It’s all right,” the Bringer murmured.

  Then the Sleeping Prince moved.

  His head turned, rolling to the side, and Samia shrunk back against the Bringer. At first he thought she was trying to embrace him, so he wrapped his arms around her and held her. Then he realized that she was struggling and felt angry, tightening his hold.

  The Sleeping Prince sat up.

  “Bring her to me,” he rasped, and the Bringer obeyed, dragging the girl, now shrieking and sobbing, towards his father. There was part of him that felt afraid, that wanted to take the girl, run far from this tower and never look back. But, as Samia had been unable to help but follow him there, so he could not help but force her across the floor to stand before the Sleeping Prince.

  “Good boy,” the Sleeping Prince said softly, reaching for her.

  The Bringer bowed and then some instinct told him to turn away, not to watch what would happen next.

  Samia cried out, but the cry was stifled almost immediately by a cracking, then a sucking, wet sound.

  Then a muffled thump, and the sound of tearing, of dripping. Of chewing.

  And the Bringer knew, without needing to look, that the pretty, lively blonde girl, who had looked at him as though he were the answer to every question she’d ever had, was dead.

  She was dead because of him. Because he had led her on a slow, steady dance across two kingdoms to this moment.

  “Son,” his father called, and the last thing in the world the Bringer wanted to do was turn around. “Son,” the Sleeping Prince said again and then the Bringer turned.

  Samia was crumpled at the foot of the bier, a heap of wrong angles and stained hair. The Sleeping Prince’s mouth was bloody, and when he grinned at his son there was gore between his teeth.

  “Thank you,” the Sleeping Prince said. He looked up at the sky and then moved to the edge of his resting place, dangling his feet over the edge. He tilted his head, thoughtfully, before a sudden anger warped his face. “No…” he said, looking over at his son, his expression wounded. “She wasn’t the right one. You brought me the wrong girl. You betrayed me.”

  He kept his eyes on the Bringer as he swung his legs back up on to the plinth, lying down once more. It seemed to the Bringer that his father’s body was moving against his will. As his arms crossed over his chest, the Sleeping Prince’s eyes were wide and terrified.

  “Father?” he asked, guilt seeping through his veins like treacle, sticky and cloying.

  The Sleeping Prince’s mouth opened, but at the same time his eyes closed. Then he was gone – the Bringer could feel it. He was gone again, leaving him alone with Samia’s body.

  Next time, he’d promised his father’s body. Next time he’d bring the right girl.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep again. He didn’t remember anything about Samia until he woke up on that same cold stone, his joints as stiff as if he’d lain there for one hundred years. Which he had. When he sat up, he saw the skeleton next to the bier, the bones small and fragile looking. He crawled over to them and lifted one, holding it up to the twilight. Samia, who’d smelled of butter and flour and sweetness. Samia, with her limpid blue eyes and her willingness to follow him here, to her death.

  His father slept on, and the Bringer took the opportunity to touch him, to run a finger down his cheek. When nothing happened he grew bolder, poking the Sleeping Prince, pulling his eyelids back to peer at the strange gold eyes, prising open his mouth and puzzling over his healthy pink gums and tongue. When he was finished, he touched his own face, mapping the contours of it. He pulled his hair forward, blond, shining, falling to his shoulders. Like Samia’s.

  Then he’d felt it, an unavoidable hook around his innards, the tugging, beckoning that pulled him from the bier and out of the castle. And he knew he was going to go, and that he would find another girl and that he would bring her back there. For his father to pull out her heart and eat it. This time he’d get it right.

  She was beautiful, with dark skin and large brown eyes. Her hair was black as night and tightly coiled in winding plaits across her head. She was dressed like a queen, in a gown the colour of buttercups. She had been sitting in her garden, fanning herself idly with a small, leather-bound book. He’d walked around her house – a large manor with mullioned windows and dark beams – three times, knowing that what he sought was inside but not how to get to it. Finally, he’d scaled the wall at the back of the house, to see her sitting unattended in her garden.

  The air smelled of roses, heavy and sleepy, and the Bringer watched as she raised a delicate, robin’s-egg-blue teacup to her lips and sipped the pale golden liquid inside. It was the same colour as his father’s eyes and the Bringer took it as yet another sign that this girl was the right one. She finished her tea and placed the cup silently on a matching saucer. As she did so she looked up and saw him. He began to smile, warm, charming, his lips parting and curv
ing in happiness.

  Then she screamed.

  Instantly big, angry-looking men materialized with weapons: swords, daggers, even a bow. They rushed at the wall and at first the Bringer stayed still, frozen in place by the malice on their faces. The sight of an arrow being nocked and pointed helped him to understand they meant him harm, and he flung himself down from the wall, a loosed arrow shooting through the space where his head had been only moments before. He broke into a run while the men poured from the garden like lava from a fire-mountain. There was a rushing sound that whipped past him, dangerously close, and ahead of him he saw a second arrow bury itself in a gatepost.

  He ran faster, weaving and dodging, heading instinctively towards a crowded market square, sending patrons and store-holders scattering, leaping over carts and rolling under trestle tables like an acrobat.

  He finally allowed himself to stop in a dingy alleyway that stank of piss and rot, breathing heavily, his heart refusing to slow until long after he’d realized he was safe. Weakened by the adrenaline coursing through him with no outlet, he sunk to the ground, not caring about the damp and mess.

  He decided he would try again later, when night fell. He felt sure that this girl was the right one. The way she was guarded, the challenge of getting near her, made him certain. Samia had been too easy. This girl, she was practically a princess already.

  He used the rest of the day well, skulking from shadowed place to shadowed place, stealing a snow-white shirt with billowing sleeves from a washing line, a peacock-blue velvet jacket from a hook beside an open door. He took a comb made of lacquered bone and spent a painful half an hour taming his long blond hair, teasing out the knots and smoothing it until it was a sheet of shining gold. He reached inside an untended bedroom window and snatched a sweet-smelling cologne, anointing himself behind his ears, his throat, and his wrists.

  Then he returned to the mansion. As he’d expected, there were guards patrolling the perimeter, perched on the wall as he had been, and standing against the gate, all of them watchful, their fingers poised on the triggers of crossbows. But the Bringer had no intention of allowing them to attack him again.

  Instead, he pulled his pipe from inside his fine new coat and put it to his lips, playing a new tune, his fingers dancing across the smooth white fuselage, his every breath willing the guards to fall asleep.

  Which of course they did, lulled by magic into slumping at their posts and snoring softly. He picked his way past them, once again scaling the wall. This time he walked along the top, heading towards a small white-iron balcony, intricately filigreed with swirls and flowers. He knew that she was in the room beyond it; it felt as though there was a rope between them, slowly shortening, drawing him to her. He knew, as surely as he knew the right notes to play on his pipe, that she was just metres from him. And that she was sleeping.

  Deliberate as a cat, he leapt from the wall on to the ledge of the balcony. In the summer heat she’d left the shutters open; long, gauzy curtains danced in the light breeze, fluttering out from the glass doors like ghosts. He pushed them aside, impatient to see her.

  And there she was, the white of her silk pillowcases and nightgown stark against her black skin. He watched her sleep for a moment: the languid rise and fall of her chest, her small hand resting by the curve of her cheek, her face turned towards the window as if she’d fallen asleep staring out at the stars. He stalked over to her, silently, and bent to kiss her forehead.

  Her eyes opened immediately, meeting his and widening, her lips opening to release her gathering scream.

  He placed his hand over them. “Don’t,” he said. “I’m not here to harm you. I just want to share my music with you.”

  Above his hand her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  “Please,” he said. Slowly, he pulled his hand away, ready to clap it back if she rebelled.

  “You were here earlier.” Her voice was rich and deep, educated, confident in a different way from Samia’s. Samia’s confidence had been borne on the sway of her hips, the swell of her breasts beneath her apron. This girl’s confidence was articulate and clever. This girl had a thousand weapons: grace, intellect, privilege, as well as her beauty. Surely this girl was the right match for his father. Surely no other in the land was as regal, as fit for a prince, as she was. “Where are my guards? How did you get in?”

  “They’re sleeping.”

  “Do you mean that they’re dead?” Despite the question she betrayed no fear.

  “They all live. They merely slumber.”

  “They shall die when my father finds out they failed to stop you from intruding upon me. And all to play me a song?” Amusement coloured her voice, jostling into place beside suspicion and disdain.

  The Bringer nodded.

  The girl sat up, watched him with her dark eyes, one eyebrow raised in question. “Well, you’d better play it then.” It was an order, not a request. He felt the steel of command beneath her pleasant tone and it gave him a thrill of pleasure to shake his head.

  “I cannot. For though I know your guards outside won’t bother us, I don’t know who is inside.”

  The girl looked at him thoughtfully. “No one else sleeps in this wing,” she said slowly. “I am a very light sleeper usually. Until tonight, no one has ever come within twenty feet without instantly waking me. I wake when moths flutter against the lamps. I wake when bats swoop too close to the window. Even a strong wind is enough to wrench me from my rest. And yet I didn’t know you were there until you kissed me. I did not hear your music. I did not hear your approach.”

  She regarded him again, waiting for his response, but he was so filled with rising joy – rising certainty – that he could find no words. This was the girl to waken his father for good – why, sleep eluded her, ran from her at the slightest provocation. She would drive the need to slumber from the Sleeping Prince. He would not eat her heart; he would hold her close. They would be a family.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Elyssa.”

  “Elyssa, will you hear me play now?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  So he played.

  Elyssa was less amenable than Samia as they travelled towards Tallith, and the Bringer had found himself playing his pipe two, sometimes three, times a day to keep her happy. She cried when her fine nightgown tore on brambles as they passed through the forests, and he snapped at her, telling her she’d soon have finery beyond even her wildest dreams.

  They were hunted and followed from almost the moment they left the girl’s mansion, and twice she broke free and ran towards the hunting horns that bellowed through the forests and across the meadows. He hauled her back each time, playing the pipe with an aggression he had not known he was capable of. Every time she pulled away he felt it and it hurt him, made him want to hurt her in return. The notes that poured from the pipe were recrimination and accusation and punishment, and she cowered under the song before submitting meekly to follow him once more.

  They skulked across Tregellan by night, hiding in abandoned barns and bothies during the day. The Bringer was relieved when finally the river appeared, the natural border between Tregellan and Tallith, and he hustled the wide-eyed and scandalized Elyssa into a small stolen boat. The river rushed beneath them, angry as Elyssa, tossing the boat, and them inside it, until they both hunkered down in the hull, and waited for the shore to greet them.

  She began to weep as they approached the castle, her steps slow and lumbering as she fought the magic that compelled her onwards. Although she’d stopped screaming, stopped berating him, she hadn’t stopped crying or clawing herself, and the girl he brought before his father looked nothing like the elegant, self-assured young woman he’d seen sipping tea in a summer garden.

  But her appearance had mattered little to the Sleeping Prince, who sat up as she entered. “My son,” he said with affection. Then his hand whipped out and gripped Elyssa by the throat, and the Bringer turned away, bitter disappointment flooding him when
instead of kissing, he heard the rattle of death in Elyssa’s throat.

  “Son,” the Sleeping Prince said again, and the Bringer couldn’t bring himself to turn. “Look at me,” he commanded and finally the Bringer did so, his hands held out in supplication.

  “Forgive me, Father,” he begged. “I truly thought it was she. I swear it.”

  But the Sleeping Prince was already rearranging himself on his stone mattress, his white-blond hair forming a pillow beneath his frowning face. Then he was gone, all traces of dissatisfaction wiped from his face as the curse pulled him back into its embrace.

  The Bringer looked down at Elyssa. In the end, she had not been regal at all. Samia had been pleasant, but lowly, inside and out. She’d had a sauciness to her that no queen would ever have. Elyssa had looked like a queen, and behaved like a queen, but cracked under pressure like an egg. A queen would stand strong and face her demons head on. The right girl wouldn’t need to be pushed towards the Sleeping Prince; she’d go to him calmly, serenely.

  Next time, the Bringer told himself as he lowered his body to the ground, suddenly tired. Next time she’d be right.

  But she wasn’t. She’d been blue eyed and brown haired and in the end she’d been as worthless and as stupid as Samia and Elyssa. Upon waking, the Bringer had felt the tug to leave, but the hope was lessened somehow, the desire to please dimmed. He felt bad-tempered and anxious as he left Tallith, strangely reluctant to leave the ruins, and he’d felt relieved when he found the girl in a bustling town just a day’s ride from the river.

  He didn’t try to woo her or befriend her. He waited until she herded her geese into a field and then simply began to play. She followed, and he led her, barefoot, across fields and along tracks. He didn’t pause to let her sleep, or eat, or tend her blistered and bleeding feet. He asked her no questions, walking two steps ahead of her at all times, playing his pipe until his lips were chapped and his fingers raw. He played melody after melody, trying to lose himself inside the music.