TROUBLE , kaz brekker

iii. the swash-buckling elephant in the room.

CHAPTER THREE

ECHO WAS TWELVE WHEN her sister first mastered the art of breaking her bones.

Irina always was a prodigy. Her parents tossed around the term savant like pennies since she inflicted her first nosebleed but since the Darkling whispered 'genius' into her childish ears, it became the only word the oldest Orlova child cared to hear. Anything else was beneath her. She excelled, she suceeded, she surpassed every known Heartrender milestone with ease and added a few new ones of her own when she got bored of just being the best. Genius echoed behind closed doors and with every passing utterance, an insatiable hunger for more grew only larger.

The Orlova's were stellar by nature, superior by blood, a heritage second only to the Darkling's himself. But the untameable rise of their newest generation was their family's worst kept secret. Because the Orlova's had two children. And success always demanded sacrifice.

"Stay still!" Irina had hissed. "I'm trying to..."

Her sentence was punctuated by a sickening crack, the kind that mutilated the quiet tranquility of the forest in which the twins found themselves. The palace grounds, in their seemingly infinite expanse, were ideal for the type of underhand experimentation that was required of a Heartrender in training and with so much space between them and anyone who cared about one little otkazat'sya, Irina Orlova was ( as she often found herself ) above something as mundane as consequences.

The Heartrender needed bodies to practice on. How fortunate she had a spare.

The crack? Well, that was Echo's nose. The more meagre of her sister's punishments, the break was simply a warm up, a taste of the bitter ache to follow.

Echo didn't fight back. Why would she? It took two years for her to realise that energy was better spent setting her bones back in place than on feeble cries to the apathy of the Little Palace.

"I can feel your bones, you know." Irina was calm - almost meditative - with her closed eyes and deep breaths as she wound her power tightly around her sister's limbs. Echo couldn't move, not that she would have tried, as fresh scarlet oozed down her cheek, her lips, her chin, to stain the mossy floor beneath her the bright flush of amaryllis. Paralysis was new, though, not entirely unexpected. Echo had learnt not to underestimate her sister's capacity for cruelty. The Small Sciences flushed her cheeks and smoothed her skin and made her much too beautiful for someone who revelled so enthusiastically in trapping another inside her own skin. "The way they move against each other. Nina said this wouldn't be effective. Now I can tell her I was right."

Another crack. This time followed by a scream. Echo cursed her broken weakness, knowing every show of weakness fuelled her sister's morbid desire for the perverse. But she was a child. And pain, after all, was pain.

But it was this tantamount weakness ( one that would ultimately perish in Ketterdam ) that ensured Echo Orlova met Nikolai Lantsov. One scream, carried across the open expanse of the royal grounds, was the raindrop that began the lifesaving tidal wave of the young girl's life.

"Ladies!" A chipper voice sung over the gentle brush of the nearby willow. "Do we think we can save the macabre for another time? I'm really enjoying my book."

Irina turned, her hands dropped to her side. Her quiet tranquility had shattered, the silent stamp of her delicate slippers and furrowing of her unruly brows were little more than an infantile temper tantrum at the unwelcome interruption. The schedules of the Little Palace only ever gave her a few secluded hours of practice, uninterrupted hours, hours where those who could find her knew better than to holler and ask for reprieve. So, the question was unavoidable, who would dare?