Swift (34 page)

And finally, thanks to all the enthusiastic fans, faithful readers and thoughtful reviewers who’ve e-mailed, tweeted and contacted me on Facebook to let me know they’ve enjoyed my other books and were looking forward to
Swift
. Here it is at last, and may you find it worth the wait!

Read on for a thrilling
extra short story by R J Anderson…

He’d lost track of how long he’d been flying. One day blurring feverishly into another, hour after hour of hurtling through the air without direction or destination, a flash of black and white feathers by daylight and a whisper of barn owl wings in the dark. Collapsing at last into ermine-form when he was too exhausted to fly any more, then sleeping a few fitful minutes in some abandoned burrow before dread or hunger woke him and the cycle began again.

Were the Blackwings still hunting him, or had they given up? He didn’t know, but he had no intention of staying still long enough to find out.

A few weeks ago he couldn’t have dreamed of living like this. He’d been idle, cynical, indifferent to anything but his own amusement – goodness knew there’d been little enough of that in the life he’d been born to. A nameless orphan with no past, restless as a young bird, sure of nothing except that he wasn’t human. He’d found his magic early and used it without mercy, like his fists and his teeth and his cunning, because it was the only way he could survive.

But then
she’d
found him, the faery Empress. His voice had hardly broken when she’d plucked him from his hardscrabble life on the streets and given him his first role, the jaded courtier with the quick knife and whiplash tongue, willing to scheme and betray and kill at her command. She’d told him, laughing, that he had no heart, and he hadn’t denied it. Because there was no other way he knew how to live, and he had nowhere else to go.

He’d made mistakes at first, some merely humiliating and others near-fatal, but the Empress had been patient. Within two years she’d remade every part of him, turning him from a wild thing into a sleek and pampered pet, a dirty imp with a gutter mouth to a haughty young buck who talked like the Prince of Denmark…not that he’d known anything about Shakespeare at the time, ignorant fool that he was. He’d been nothing but a performing animal, a slave to the Empress’s treats and threats, and he’d quickly learned that nothing displeased her more than to hear her subjects sounding too modern, too
human…

A black shadow passed over him and his heart fluttered, fear’s cold talons gripping him once more. He’d been a fool to think he could outfly the Empress’s hunters, or throw them off his trail for long. They’d cut him off any second now, trapping him in the circle of their raven wings, binding him with spells too strong for even his unruly magic to break, and then they’d drag him back to
her.

He’d never cared much for fighting, but that didn’t mean he’d forgotten how to do it. With a shriek of defiance he wheeled in mid-air, ready to hurl himself into battle—

But it was only a crow, alone and indifferent to his challenge. With a mocking caw and a few lazy wingstrokes, it flapped away.

The relief was so great he couldn’t even feel embarrassed. He flitted onto an updraught, soaring high above the treetops and the flight paths of his fellow birds, so he wouldn’t be caught off-guard again. But his wing muscles trembled and his head felt light with hunger, and he knew that he’d nearly reached his limit. Soon his strength would give out altogether…and the higher he flew, the further he’d have to fall.

What madness had made him believe he could escape the Empress, that she would give in and let him go? He’d followed her direction so long, played so diligently the parts she’d written for him, that he’d made himself indispensable to her schemes. She had neither time nor inclination to replace him as her court spy and sometime assassin, and her pride was too great to accept that she’d been wrong to give him that role in the first place. He must come back to her, or die.

Perhaps it would have been better if he’d never walked into that little theatre in Cardiff, never seen that first motley performance of
Hamlet
. Never known that the words of some long-dead human playwright could speak to his heart more eloquently than the Empress ever had; never taken the Bard’s lines into his own mouth and felt their weight, their grandeur, their fluid shape; never guessed that he could find greater pleasure sharing in the humans’ gift of theatre than he ever had in merely exploiting it.

He’d thought the humans could teach him to lie rather than merely rearranging the truth; he’d thought they could show him how to become a different person. Instead, they’d taught him the only truths he’d ever found worth having, and on their stage he’d learned, for the first time, what it meant to be himself.

But there was a cost for that self-knowledge, a higher price than he’d ever expected to pay. Because when he returned to the Empress, he’d found that nothing she said to him, nothing she offered him, seemed to matter any more. She could force his obedience, but his heart and soul were no longer hers to command.

‘
I want you to infiltrate the rebels
,’ the Empress had told him with cold decisiveness, a few days or a lifetime ago. ‘
I want you to find my wayward heir, win his trust…and kill him.
’

He’d almost done it. He’d come so close, out of habit if nothing else. But the moment he was out of her presence his mind had begun working in other directions. So many of the Empress’s servants had turned against her already, including her own adopted son – would it really trouble her to lose one slave more?

The answer, as he’d learned all too quickly, was yes.

He was so tired now, he could barely flap his wings. His stomach gnawed itself with hunger, but the insects that sustained his bird-body were too scarce at this altitude for him to make a proper meal of them, even if he’d had the energy to chase them down. He had to descend, even at the risk of being spotted. He needed to slow down, take a few hours to rest and recover in his own rightful shape.

But where could he go? The hillsides and scattered woods below him were unfamiliar, and he could see no place where a fugitive might be safe. Especially not with the Empress’s most skilled and ruthless hunters on his trail…

‘
You are mine now
,’ her voice whispered in his memory. ‘
By blood and bond, by debt and until death. Do you understand?
’

‘No,’ he gasped, but it came out as a high-pitched twitter, an alarm cry that only his fellow house martins would understand. His wingbeats faltered, his body went slack, and before he could recover he slipped off the updraught, tumbling into the wild air currents below. He fought for control, but his head reeled and he could no longer tell up from down. He was twisting, spiralling, plummeting through the sky, the earth rushing up towards him—

With the last of his strength he pulled himself out of the dive a few feet above ground-level, but he no longer had the power to hold any shape but his own. He was a dead weight, a flopping scarecrow of limbs and sinews, pale hair blinding his eyes as he collapsed onto the turf, rolled over a few times, and lay still.

It was the end: he had no doubt of that now. He would lie here, too weak to even get up, until they found him…if his ravaged body even lasted that long. He had ignored all the rules and all the warnings in his desperation, pushed his magical strength far beyond its natural bounds, and now there was nothing left to do but pay the price…

He heard a low thudding and the ground beneath him vibrated, rocks and dirt shivering against his spine. A rippling footfall, four-legged – hounds? No, it was far too heavy for that. Too drained to lift his head, he squinted down the length of his body and made out the blurred shape of a horse cantering towards him, with a small person on its back.

‘Are you all right?’ asked a breathless girl’s voice, as she reined in her mount and leaped out of the saddle to land beside him. A round, sun-freckled face, a pert nose and wide brown eyes – she couldn’t have been more than twelve, or more ridiculously human. ‘Is anything broken?’

‘M’fine,’ he managed to mumble, though his lips were cracked with dehydration and his voice was barely more than a croak. ‘Just resting.’

‘I don’t think so.’ She gave a little laugh, half nerves and half delight. ‘I saw you fall out of the sky just now. You were a bird, and then…’ She caught her breath. ‘You’re a faery, aren’t you? Don’t deny it, I know you are.’

He couldn’t bear this. If she was still here when the Blackwings came, it would be a disaster. They’d never let her go with her memories intact – she’d be lucky to escape with her life. ‘Go ’way,’ he gasped. ‘Leave me ’lone.’

‘Not likely,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve been wanting to meet a faery my whole life. You need help, and I’m going to give it to you.’ She leaped up and seized the horse’s reins, pulling the animal closer. ‘Let’s get you onto Dodger, and I’ll take you somewhere you can rest.’

‘Little fool,’ he moaned. ‘Don’t…’ But she’d already slid her arm behind his back, heaving him upright with a strength that surprised him. He’d always been lean and not over-tall, but had he really lost
that
much weight?

‘Stop arguing,’ she told him sternly, half-carrying and half-dragging him over the grass to the horse. It snorted disapproval and danced sideways, but she spoke a sharp ‘Dodger!’ and it lowered its head, meek again.

He had a vague thought of trying to change shape one last time, if only to get away. But when the girl grabbed his left foot and shoved it into the stirrup, he couldn’t find the will to resist her. A mortifying few seconds followed as he tried and mostly failed to pull himself into the saddle, and she ended up behind him shoving mightily with both hands – but at last she’d draped him across the horse’s back to her satisfaction, and the three of them set off.

‘My mum’d have a fit if she found out about this,’ said the girl cheerfully. ‘Especially if she knew I thought you were a faery. So I’m going to put you in the barn with Dodger and Duchess – is that all right?’

He was too dazed to answer. Part of him was convinced that both the girl and the horse were nothing more than a dying hallucination, or some cruel trick of the Empress’s. That he should be found, so quickly, by a human he’d never met before but who knew at a glance what he was – and more, that she’d be both willing and able to help him – was a piece of good luck too extraordinary for even his powers to orchestrate.

Though that assumed that it really
was
good luck, which was by no means certain yet…

He spent the next few minutes drifting in and out of consciousness, his body limp and his chin bumping the horse’s side. Then the thud of hooves on grass became the clop of hooves on cobbles, and he heard the thin creak of a door opening. The barn? He lifted his head weakly to see what lay ahead, but all he glimpsed was a hazy shimmering.

For a horrible moment he thought he’d gone blind. But he could still see the girl clearly enough, even as she led him forward into the fog. Then he felt reality shift and ripple around him, and realised they’d just crossed the boundary of some kind of protective spell. Magic, in a human place? He made a feeble noise of shock, but the sound had scarcely left his lips when his vision cleared and the world solidified again. The air stilled, the sunlight faded, and a soothing coolness surrounded him as they entered the barn.

‘Here we are,’ said the girl, pulling the horse to a stop. She fastened the reins to a post, then came around to tug him out of the saddle. ‘Just a few steps, and then you can rest.’

Did she know about the spell they’d just crossed? She couldn’t have put it there herself, surely; he couldn’t sense any magic in her at all. ‘Ward on the door,’ he mumbled. ‘Protection. Who…?’

‘Shush now,’ the girl told him, slinging his arm around her shoulders. ‘I’ve got you.’ His legs buckled as his feet touched the floor and he felt her stagger under his weight, but she hung onto him gamely until they reached the end of the corridor. ‘There’s a bit of straw here,’ she said as she lowered him down. ‘I can get more, and some old blankets to make it more comfortable. Are you hungry? What can you eat?’

‘Anything,’ he gasped as he sagged against the wall. ‘Everything. Just – not insects. Or mice.’

That made her giggle, though she clapped a hand to her mouth to hide it. ‘OK then,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

‘Wait,’ he called after her. ‘Who are you? How did—?’

But she was already gone.