Monstrous Heart Read online

  Copyright

  HarperVoyager

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Copyright © Claire McKenna 2020

  Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

  Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com 2020

  Claire McKenna asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008337124

  Ebook Edition © APRIL 2020 ISBN: 9780008337148

  Version: 2020-03-06

  Dedication

  For Mum

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One: Vigil

  1: It was only when the Coastmaster

  2: A whore clothed herself

  3: Oh dear

  4: As was the custom

  5: Her uncle had left her a boat

  6: The tides had a certain

  7: The Vernon Justinian who went to Garfish Point

  8: Mr Quill was dreadfully curious

  9: When she’d first met

  10: Mr Harrow

  11: Mr Quill’s car

  12: She swam with the surge

  13: Something in the quality of her life

  14: Wake up!

  15: A delicate pattern of daylight fell

  Book Two: The Lion

  16: The invitation came

  17: The night took on a different feeling

  18: Half an hour I waited in this freezing cold

  19: Vigil in the morning

  20: Arden had expected that she would break

  21: I just wish you didn’t have to kill them

  22: I saw him passing

  Book Three: Blood

  23: Sing to me

  24: Do they know

  25: No

  26: I have come

  27: A hull, upside down

  28: … and stopped.

  29: Was the dumping that woke her

  30: So it’s true

  31: The Harbourmistress’ boy yelped at her

  32: Mr Riven made a sound

  33: When he didn’t immediately reply

  34: A whump of hot flame

  35: Where are they taking us

  36: Are you awake

  37: Mr Justinian had the last word

  38: She could not bear to stay

  39: So, to the testmoot

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Book One: Vigil

  1

  It was only when the Coastmaster

  It was only when the Coastmaster turned to remonstrate the old man struggling to load the Siegfried’s voluminous trunk that Arden Beacon seized the moment and made her escape.

  She sidled behind the wheels of the automobile — a thing callously ostentatious in this wild country — and walked off with such a laboured pretence of a casual stroll that it could not be seen as anything but. With each step she feared Coastmaster Justinian’s realization that she was not waiting patiently for him, but had instead slipped his leash.

  A sharp turn at a bluestone wall, and then Arden was free.

  Out of his sight she felt overcome with relief, and had to lean against the salt-scored stones and gulp chilly air before she felt remotely whole again.

  Had it been so long since she wasn’t confined like a criminal under house arrest that she didn’t know quite what to do with herself? This was the first time since she’d arrived in Vigil that Mr Justinian had allowed her out of the Manse, his huge family estate that overlooked the small, coarse coastal town. The instinct to make a sudden getaway had come with such an awful slug of panic she’d almost been inclined not to move at all.

  Hadn’t he told her it was dangerous, hadn’t he told her …?

  But he’d spent a month telling her these things about Vigil, and her thudding heart and acid stomach were evidence enough of the contempt she held for Mr Justinian, the man who was both the Master of the Coast and her employer. He had made it clear he wanted to be more to her, still. Arden shuddered.

  Still, forced to endure his hospitality, Arden had observed Mr Justinian with a calculating eye and taken his measure. She discovered that foremost her host had a predilection towards causing humiliation. It delighted him to be petty, and mean; and so she had grasped the opportunity to be well away from him while his voice still remained fixated on castigating the poor elderly porter.

  ‘You fool, you’ll break every dish in that trunk! Put some backbone into it, guy, or I’ll have the Magistrate charge you with the damage …!’

  Mr Justinian would occupied for quite a while longer. Arden straightened her jacket and skirts and looked down a street undergoing some kind of market day. Market day was trading day in this town where even the dread sea-serpent, maris anguis, could find itself pickled in salt and up for sale with the lumpfish. The siren song of trade brought the coastal dwellers out of their hamlets and huts, hauling with them their spoils of the sea. A row of trestle tables fronted anonymous doorways. Each table was topped with the ocean’s produce laid out like a museum of grotesque curiosities. For every recognisable ichthyosaur in a zinc tub filled with ice there bobbed something ghastly and incomprehensible; fish with ten eyes, a barnacle the size of a woman’s torso.

  Arden set off, searching for the experience that would make her brief sojourn into freedom worthwhile, and instead found to her sinking disappointment that her host had not lied to her. Vigil was both grim and drab in appearance and utility. An oily yellow mist shrouded the slate roofs and slunk about the chimney pots, giving everything a murky air. The cold air had a burned and salty miasma, despite it having drizzled earlier. Arden startled at the tootling of foghorns as the fishing boats came into the harbour. People wore the odd uniform of the shore: salt-country linens dipped in flaxseed oil and fish-tallow, shirt-collars embellished in bleached thread, plain hogwool jumpers knitted thick and warm.

  All this strangeness, but no real sense of blood. No impression of the power that eddied and washed through her own hot northern country like a tide of whispers, that great sympathetic connectedness with the manifestations of life. No Sanguis.

  Blood was the great divide that separated the country of Lyonne from the wilder climes of Fiction. The talents that had once been so powerful in this land were now all but forgotten. Once upon a long time ago Arden would have found kin here, talented users of blood like herself.

  Arden rubbed her hands, and felt the cut-coins beneath her soft leather fingerless gloves catch and tug from where they’d been newly sewn into her palms. Before the Seamaster’s guildsman had come into her Portmaster’s salty office with bad-news and orders wrapped up in a vellum scroll, she’d kept respectable e
mployment as a lead signaller upon one of the busiest trading harbours in the world. She had been Sanguis Ignis, flame-keeper. Respectable.

  But with a single request she had been sent south to this place where no ignis had been born for a hundred years. Nobody would share what she was. She would be at best a novelty come from far away. At worst … well. There was no bottom to that particular pit.

  When Arden walked past one market table, a scarred, bearded man touted her in a foreign language. Old Fictish, the dying tongue of the shorefolk of these cold, grey southern oceans. Then he stopped, and stared.

  Arden pulled her fine leather coat about her, feeling as much an outsider as she had at any time in her life. If she thought the Fictish people backwards, then they would see her as inexplicably strange, with her sun-embraced complexion, the bright colours of her clothing, and the waxed cotton of her skirt still creamy and un-stained by the oily coal that heated every rude little home here.

  ‘Roe for sale, madam, sturgeon eggs? Would you like a taste?’ he repeated in a passable Lyonnian.

  ‘I’m not buying anything today, I’m sorry,’ Arden replied, even though she didn’t even know what he was trying to sell her, for the mess in front of him was as unlikely to be caviar as it was anything edible. He shrugged, unconcerned with her disinterest, as she was not quite his usual customer anyway.

  There wasn’t much of a town centre to be had, and soon she found herself back on the waterfront again, where six feather-footed dray horses provided the counterweight to a pulley and a load bound for an overladen cargo boat. Arden stayed to watch at the marvel of such a thing, for in Lyonne’s capital city of Clay Portside a sanguis pondus could make a counterweight weigh whatever it had to, ten tonnes if needed, and no effort was required except a simple pulley. Just as she suspected, no blood here in the country of Fiction, no control over elemental forces, just pure labour.

  From the waterfront she had her best view yet of Vigil clawing itself from the sea as a hillocky mess of factories and trade offices fronting a sheltering port. The region played host to fish-processing warehouses, one merchant hotel, and a clumping of lonely, ugly little houses with tiny windows. It had not always been so miserable and backwards, perhaps. At one stage in the recent past there had been an effort to modernize the town, for wires still occasionally strung between lamp posts, evidence of elektrifikation, that startling new technology. Yet on closer inspection the wires hung lax and broken, the lamps in their curlicued galleries browned out, their internal globes grey with a fine ash from where the filaments had charred away.

  A shout and Andrew whirled about, expecting to have been discovered by her jailer.

  Instead of Mr Justinian however, it was a rotund man with a publican’s medallion about his neck, fleeing his own establishment. Vigil’s lone merchant inn, the Black Rosette, was at three storeys high the largest building in town, ramshackle in stone base and tin cladding. The entirety of the ground floor seemed to have become a cross between a pub and charnel house, for whatever drama was going on inside the Black Rosette tavern, it caused not a few strangled shrieks and cries for mercy.

  A man in an oily duffel coat staggered out of the warped saltwood doors, barking for reinforcements. In answer, to which three men ran in. An intense curiosity made Arden linger a moment. Not more than a breath later, the fight that had begun in the Black Rosette’s stifling interior burst its banks and spilled out across the fish-gut cobbles of the Vigil waterfront.

  Two men, caught in a savage embrace. It was a hopelessly unequal combat, for one was bearish and older, armed with twelve dangerous inches of boning knife, the other a slighter man blinded by a bloody gash across his forehead.

  The boning knife darted towards the younger man’s pale chest and snarled itself in the grey linen of its victim’s shirt. Tied up in threads the two men fell against a table burdened with a decapitated ichthyosaur head, narrowly missing the row of serrated teeth as the scuffle took them past the carcass, and in doing so they collected Arden, inconveniently in the fight’s way.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried, and struck the ground with her shoulder, felt her coat tear and a hot pain flower from her elbow.

  The fall gave them all only a brief pause. The men were back at each other immediately, locked hand-over-hand around the boning blade while Arden rolled onto her back, stunned and breathless. Beside her the two brutes reached a violent stalemate over control of the knife.

  Someone grunted a curse-word in Old Fictish. The older man took higher ground, rolled upon his opponent and pinned him to the cobblestones. The blade-steel blurred in the fringes of her vision before stabbing into a cobble-join inches from Arden’s nose.

  ‘Devilment!’ she cried out. ‘Watch yourselves!’

  In that sliver of breath between his living and dying, the younger man’s head turned towards Arden. She met a pair of eyes from the distance of a hand span, and all she could see was dark iris in a bloodied face, inhuman almost, and yet …

  There was there a broken nobility that did not belong on a monster’s face … and a suffering too, of the kind one only saw in children, or the carvings of salvagewood saints in poor-man’s churches. They were close enough to kiss. A second ago either one of them could have died from a blade through the skull.

  The knife lay between them, the white bone handle splatted with blood.

  An old dockworker’s instinct made Arden snatch the knife out of the cobbles and toss the blade away before either man could retrieve it. Then the demonic face was gone and the brawl was back up again, this time a thankful distance away. Arden picked herself up, chest cavity twanging with pulled ligaments and crushed organs, the fine leather sleeve of her only coat torn to shreds, the skin on her elbow pebbled with rash. The men continued to heave bloody-fisted blows at each other.

  How could you have missed a bar fight? Arden scolded herself as she brushed away stringy intestines and grey pebbles. She should have known that dance in three acts all too well; the gust of hot, hop-heavy wind from the flung-open tavern doors, the roil of spilled bodies and flailed fists, and the denouement where someone came close to joining the lamentable list of tavern-deceased.

  The younger of the combatants had clearly grown weary of this entertainment, taking only two more hard punches to the torso before turning the fight to his advantage. An upward thrust of hip, and he upended the bearish man onto the cobblestones.

  Without a word to yield or surrender, the victor took to pummelling the snarling face of the conquered until a flap of skin sheared clean off the eye socket. Blood across the stones. Blood thundering through Arden’s arteries, for suddenly she could feel …

  Sanguis? No, it was impossible. The talent was gone from here. It must be her panic, making her sense power where there was none.

  Something small and wooden escaped the tangle. Not a weapon this time. A turned black mangrove-wood handle with a screw thread of brass, such as would prime the oil in a ship’s pilot-light.

  The handle rolled several feet before bumping against the toe of Arden’s now woefully scuffed patent leather shoe. She was loath to touch it, for the handle’s owner was upright now, a demon-faced man, taller and more brutish than she had thought him at first, his pale chest working like bellows as the blood runnelled from the broken skin of his knuckles. She could not even tell the colour of his hair, for blood from his forehead now coated his scalp with a wave of sheeny black.

  How quick the fight had been, how expedient, how unnaturally silent.

  In Lyonne, police or militia would have crowded around the scene in an instant. Strangers would have pulled the two apart. Shrieks and screams. Accusals might have been shouted and another fight start elsewhere, for in the big city such emotions were as infectious as a plague.

  And she would not have been left to stand there unassisted in a state of fish-and-cobble-tumbled mess.

  The street took on the hush of a sermon. The priest of this hard message spat blood from his mouth and indifferently wiped gore from his b
eard. He glared about at his witnesses, challenging the other equally bestial fellows ashine in their waxed canvas and fishmongers’ overalls to step forward and make their claim.

  Nobody spoke. They averted their eyes from him, and went back to what they were doing in the dreary marketplace before the necessary interruption that passed as a trade discussion in this place. A few adjusted the coin they were charging for their bloodied sacks of produce, scrawling higher prices on the slates before facing them outwards again.

  Arden sighed at her own hesitations, then with a groan of effort picked up the screw-thread handle, and held it out to its owner.

  ‘I presume yours?’

  His attention was upon Arden for less than a second, only long enough for them to acknowledge to each other that she was insignificant and he was grotesque. Despite the muck, she noticed his bearing at once. He was different enough from the locals that she understood why he might attract the ire of fellows naturally suspicious of differences. His body was raw-boned and spare, hewn by necessity. His bloodied beard was a lighter brown than was usual on these shores, and in danger of gingering. There was no sign of the pelt of full-torso hair which appeared to grow abundantly on the Fiction men as if in response to the bitter climate, or the barrel chest built to tackle a fully laden net of monkfish. Though his arms were unmarked, under the tatters of his clothes she spied tattoos blooming across his back and flanks, a pattern of blue fish-scale chevrons, as if he were a selkie interrupted mid-transformation, and had decided to stay on land rather than the sea.

  Stayed on land for love, she thought ridiculously, then immediately berated herself, for who could love such a terrifying creature enough that he should return it in kind?

  She had thought his eyes dark, but they were Fiction-blue. A common shade. Eyes that averted as he took the handle out of Arden’s hands, shoved it back into his belt and returned to the tavern to resume whatever conversations had perpetuated such a disagreement.

  Not even a thank-you. His victim lay bleeding on the street, forgotten.

  The fight might have been silent, but that did not mean it had gone unnoticed. Mere minutes later the person Arden had been trying to avoid before the fight made his unwelcome reappearance.