Текст книги "The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

The corners of my mouth had tightened. Of course, even as a little girl, Oraya would have taken her studies seriously. Endearing. So fucking endearing.

And then, just as quickly, the smile faded. Because apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought so, if Vincent had held onto these tattered papers for all these years.

No, I didn’t stay in the king’s wing.

My suite was right next to Oraya’s. Both had multiple rooms, but our bedchambers shared a wall. It was a bad habit, but every time I returned to the room, I hesitated at that wall. Tonight was no exception.

When Oraya cried, it was this horrific, violent sound. Silent at first, and then the silence would shatter into the jagged inhale of a sob, like she was suffocating herself and her body rebelled for air. It sounded like a wound tearing open.

The first time I’d heard it, I made an excuse to go over there—pounded on the door and pulled some bullshit request out of my ass when she opened it. I couldn’t even remember what had come out of my mouth.

Come on, fight with me. Let me distract you.

But Oraya had just looked so empty. Like it was physically painful to be in my presence in that moment. Like she was begging for mercy.

Now, I placed my hand against our shared wall and listened, against my better judgment.

Silence.

And there it was.

I swallowed thickly. My fingers curled into a fist against the brocade wallpaper.

One wall. Thin enough that I could hear through it. Might as well be iron.

Don’t you dare stop fighting, princess, I’d told her, the night before the final trial. It would break my damned heart.

And I had been so fucking smug when I’d wrung that fight out of her in that last battle.

Well, she wasn’t fighting now.

I didn’t go to her room anymore. I’d make sure that headache tea was sent to her the next evening. I’d make sure she had what she needed. But what she needed, right now, certainly wasn’t me.

I got into bed, but didn’t sleep. Nessanyn’s words floated through my mind, this time with a cynical tinge that was distinctly mine.

Who wins?

Well, Nessanyn sure as fuck didn’t.

And Oraya didn’t, either.

5

ORAYA

I waited until the sun was high over Sivrinaj to make my move. I’d spent the night praying that no one would come bother me, replacing those precious locks behind them. I was fortunate.

Raihn had left overnight and hadn’t returned yet. I was acutely aware of that, both because my escape relied upon his absence and because I knew he could show up at any moment.

I had twisted a silver hoop earring I found in the dresser into a clumsy hook. The top lock, a sliding bolt, slipped easily. But the second… the second gave me trouble. I had very little space to work with between the various locks, and the metal was stiff. Several times, I stopped just short of snapping my makeshift pick in half.

“Fuck,” I hissed.

You have more power than this silly little hook, Vincent whispered in my ear.

My gaze fell from the broken silver to my fingertips holding it.

All the doors and windows and locks in this place were, of course, fortified against magic. But even if that hadn’t been the case, my magic had felt very far away these last few weeks. Calling upon it required me to dig too deep, right into all these tender wounds I couldn’t even think about opening—I worried that I’d bleed to death before I could close them again.

But… Nightfire, maybe, could melt that one little bar of metal that held this door closed.

I dreaded so much as trying. But if I had a chance at freedom, I wasn’t about to relinquish it because I was too scared of myself to try.

The first call to my magic was met with nothing.

I gritted my teeth. Dug deeper. It hit on things I’d been trying to bury these last few weeks.

I taught you better than this, Vincent whispered.

I thought of his voice. His face, framed against the sands of the colosseum, bloody and raw and—

The burst of Nightfire was too hot, too bright. It engulfed my hand. I clamped down hard on the wave of grief, anger, sadness.

Control, little serpent, Vincent snapped. Control!

I can’t focus with you lecturing me, I thought, then swallowed shame at the sudden silence of his voice.

I took a deep breath, two, until my heartbeat slowed. The flame dimmed a little.

Control.

I whittled the Nightfire down until it was a small orb, then dipped my broken twisted silver into it. The Nightfire hovered at its end like a flame to a match.

There was no way this was going to work, I thought, then jammed the twisted metal through the gap between the door and the frame—pressing metal to metal. I poured my magic into my connection to that little Nightflame—

–And pushed.

The door flew open. I went rolling across the tile floor, stopping myself just short of sliding into the opposite wall.

I looked down. A twist of partially melted, scorched metal lay on the tile. I slipped it into my pocket, then turned around to see my bedchamber door.

Wide open. The hallway was empty.

I was out. For now.

Goddess fucking help me.

I quickly—silently—closed my door, rubbing away scorch marks best I could. The second lock was broken, but hopefully no casual passerby would notice that.

It was wartime. I’d seen firsthand what that looked like in this castle. Daylight or no, most hallways would be occupied or heavily guarded. Certainly the weapon stores. And definitely exits.

But I could get around that.

My lips twisted with a smirk of satisfaction. The movement felt uncomfortable, like the muscles were out of practice.

Good thing I knew this castle better than anyone.

Vincent had been a very cautious man. He’d renovated this castle to add passageways and tunnels and confusing hallways that led nowhere—infinitely aware of the possibility that, one day, his fortress could be turned against him.

He’d showed me some of these hallways when I was young, making me memorize the paths to his wing. Even when I was only a child, he never sugarcoated why it was so important that I knew this. “This is a dangerous world, little serpent,” he’d said. “I’ll teach you how to fight, but I’ll also teach you how to flee.”

He never showed me all the passageways, of course—he didn’t want to give me too much freedom. But I’d explored the other ones, too, in secret.

Today, though, I followed the path my father had left for me. It was downright stupid to run straight for the outdoors. Yes, it was daylight, and that might help me—but guards would be watching everywhere. I needed to know what I was getting into. I needed a weapon—

My step faltered as I remembered what I had done the last time I’d held a blade. The last heart I’d pierced.

I shook away the memory of Raihn’s dead face, narrowly escaped the image of Vincent’s, and continued down the hall.

I could hear distant voices near the stairwell. One of the entrances to Vincent’s web of hallways was nearby. No one had discovered it yet, it seemed. It was well hidden, the seams of the door covered by strategically placed tapestries. Sometimes these passageways were locked, but today, I was lucky. The door opened easily to my touch.

The tunnels were narrow, lit by forever-fueled Nightfire torches. They had been constructed around the existing layout of the castle, so they were convoluted and awkward to navigate. Many of the doors inside were locked, leaving me little option but to push forward and down several sets of stairs. Most of the other exits here would lead into hidden passages within various bedchambers—the last thing I wanted was to end up in some Rishan general’s room. Instead, I traveled down several sets of tight, winding stairs. Farther still, until I reached the ground floor—until I passed it.

I had rarely been allowed to come here as a child, but I still remembered exactly where it was. Vincent treasured his privacy, and he got very little of it. So, near the beginning of his reign, he’d had a new basement dug out beneath the easternmost tower of the castle—an underground wing that was specifically for him.

It had two access points. One led right up to the ground floor—I could escape through there. But more importantly, Vincent had often kept weapons and supplies in his rooms. I could arm myself before I left.

The wing’s entrance was closed—a set of oak double doors, stained black, that seemed to melt right into the shadows save for their silver handles. I held my breath as I eased them open, very slowly, very silently. I didn’t know for sure that the Rishan hadn’t discovered this place. Vincent’s wing was private, but not a secret.

But my luck, it seemed, held out a little longer. Not a soul.

An empty hallway stood before me. This one, unlike the dark, poorly maintained paths I’d come from, looked like it belonged in this castle. Indigo blue tile floors. Black doors. Silver knobs. Hiaj art framed in gilded presentations on the walls. Eight doors lay ahead of me, four on each side, and then a stairwell that led up, cradled by swooping silver rails.

I hadn’t been here in so long. I didn’t know or remember what all these rooms contained. I tried the first two doors to find them locked. The third. The fourth. Fuck. Maybe they were all locked, and I wasted my precious freedom to come down here for—

The fifth door opened.

I froze. Stopped breathing. Stopped moving.

I stood in the open doorway, my hand still on the knob.

Oh, Goddess.

Vincent’s study.

It smelled like him. For a moment, it felt agonizingly like my father hadn’t died. Like he was in this room somewhere, a book cradled in his hands, a serious line between his brows.

The past barreled over me like splintered steel, just as sharp and just as painful.

It was a small room, smaller than Vincent’s other offices. A large wooden desk sat at its center, and two velvet armchairs in the corner near the fireplace. Bookcases lined the walls, boasting hundreds of black and burgundy and silver and blue spines of old but well-kept books. The desk was covered with clutter—open tomes, papers, notes, and what looked like a pile of broken glass at its center.

When I could make myself move again, I went to the desk.

It was far more cluttered than Vincent usually left things. Then again… at the end, he’d been…

Well. I avoided thinking about the way he’d been in those last few months.

My eyes fell to a wine glass sitting among the notes, dried red caked at its bottom. If I looked closely, I could see little smudges near its stem—fingerprints. I reached out to touch it, then pulled away just short, not wanting to mar those remnants of him.

Even losing Ilana hadn’t prepared me for this. The sheer degree of fucking obsession that grief forces upon you. It took everything I had to force my mind to think about something other than him—it had exhausted me so completely.

But now that I was here, surrounded by him, I never wanted to leave. I wanted to curl up in this chair. I wanted to cocoon myself in the coat left casually slung over one of the armchairs. I wanted to wrap this wine glass in silk and preserve his fingerprints forever.

I picked through the papers on the table. He’d been working hard. Inventories. Maps. Reports about the attack on the Moon Palace. I rifled through the stack of letters, and paused, my hand shaking, at a piece of parchment.

Debrief, the top read. Salinae.

It was written in very matter of fact, straightforward language. A simple accounting of resources and outcome.

The city of Salinae and its surrounding districts have been eliminated.

One sentence, and I was once again standing in the dead remnants of Salinae. The dust. The toxic mist. The fucking smell.

The way Raihn’s voice had wavered when he held that street sign. This is Salinae.

And now here on my father’s desk was this brief, one-page report, outlining so drily how he had destroyed my homeland. Murdered any family I’d had left.

Lied to me about it.

You weren’t going to tell me, I’d spat at him.

You are not like them, he’d snarled at me.

The parchment quivered in my hands. I put it down quickly, pushing it to the back of the pile.

As I did, I glimpsed a faint silver glint. I pushed aside an open tome. Buried beneath it was a tiny, crudely made dagger.

A lump rose in my throat.

I had made this not long after I’d come into Vincent’s care. It was the first time I’d felt comfortable enough to ask for a project to work on and safe enough to actually do it. I’d liked chipping away at stone—I didn’t even remember why, now. But I did remember making this little dagger, and the pit of nervousness in my stomach when I’d presented it to him. I had held my breath when he surveyed it, face stoic.

“Good,” he had said, after a long moment, and he’d tucked it into his pocket, and that had been that. The first of countless times I’d found myself reaching for Vincent’s approval and wondering desperately whether I’d gotten it.

And now here it was, lying with the death warrants of thousands.

Two versions of him that I couldn’t reconcile in life, and now was even further from understanding in his death.

Vincent the king, who would kill my whole family in the name of power, who would slaughter an entire race, who would lie to me for nearly twenty years about my blood to protect his crown.

And Vincent the father, who kept this little makeshift trinket I’d made him, right there with all his most precious possessions. Who had told me he loved me with his final breaths.

How convenient it would be, if I found a letter tucked away in one of his drawers. My little serpent, it would read. If you’re reading this, then I am gone. It would be unfair for me to leave you with no answers…

But Vincent was not the kind of man who wrote down his secrets. Maybe I’d told myself I was coming here for supplies, but really, I was coming here for answers.

A fucking dream.

Because instead, this was a room that made as little sense as he did. I found nothing here but discarded pieces of him, just as disparate in death as they were in life.

My eyes burned. My chest ached. A sob bubbled up inside of me with such violence that I had to press my hand over my mouth to stifle it.

I never used to cry. Now, it seemed like the more I tried to stop myself, the more viciously it clawed its way out of me.

I choked it down with an ugly sound that I was grateful no one could hear.

No fucking time for this, Oraya, I told myself. This isn’t what you’re here for.

My gaze fell to the center of the desk—the pile of broken glass. That was peculiar. It was mirrored, the shards neatly stacked on top of each other, as if someone had assembled them into a perfectly aligned pile. The metal reminded me of the full moon, silver bright and gleaming with hammered indents that shivered beneath the cold light. Elegant swirls adorned its smooth edge, driving to the center before being interrupted by the jagged edge. I squinted and could make out a faint cast in those carved lines—red-black. Blood…?

Why would he keep this broken trinket here? Right in the middle of his work?

I touched the edge of the top shard—

A gasp ripped through me.

The edge was razor sharp. It sliced open my fingertip, leaving a streak of red rolling to the edge—but I barely noticed either the cut or the pain.

Because the shards began to move.

In the span of a blink, the shards of glass spread out, locking into place with each other—forming a shallow, mirrored bowl, the drops of my blood rolling down to be cradled in its center.

And yet, as shocking as this was, what left me staggering was the sudden, overwhelming, disorienting sense of Vincent—Vincent as he’d been in this room, standing where I stood, blood spilling into the same bowl. A sudden, intense anxiety rose in my throat, all in broken pieces—fragmented thoughts of cities, generals, Sivrinaj, Salinae, hundreds of feathered wings staked throughout the city walls. Anger and possession and determination, but beneath it all, a powerful fear.

I yanked my hand away, gasping. I felt nauseous, dizzy.

“Vincent?”

I thought I’d imagined the voice at first.

“Vincent? Highness? I—how can—”

The voice was faint and distorted, as if coming from somewhere very, very far away, and through heavy winds.

But even so, I recognized it.

“Jesmine?” I whispered.

I peered into the bowl again. My blood pooled there, spreading out more than such a small quantity of liquid should have, coating the silver.

I squinted and leaned closer. The flickering reflection of the Nightflame made it hard to see, but was something moving—?

“Oraya?”

The voice—confused—was definitely Jesmine’s. I could barely hear her.

I was now bent over the desk, my forearms braced, my awareness pulled in so many directions—to the faint presence of Jesmine, somewhere many miles away, to the presence of Vincent in the past.

This was a communication tool of some kind. A spell, a—

Voices.

Not Jesmine’s. No, these were here, in the hallway outside.

One was Raihn’s.

Fuck.

I yanked my hand away from the device, and the silver collapsed back into countless shards, falling again into a neat pile. I winced at the metallic sound they made crashing against the wood.

I swept them up and shoved them into my pocket, my eyes glued to the door.

The two voices grew closer. The other, I realized a few seconds later, was Cairis’s.

“—long to find it,” Cairis was saying.

Footsteps. Down the other staircase. My escape route.

“Has the guard gone through all this yet?” Raihn asked.

“Not yet.”

“He made a lot of changes to the place.”

There was a strange note to his voice at that—one that seemed obvious to me, but that Cairis breezed right by.

“They’ll start in on these rooms as soon as they’re done with the upstairs studies,” Cairis said.

“Anything useful?”

“Nothing new. We already know who we need to kill. The hard part is getting to them. But getting rid of Misrada will help with that. Septimus seems confident.”

“Well, as long as Septimus is confident.” Raihn’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “At least that will get some of them out of our way.”

The footsteps grew louder. I shrank back as I watched the sliver of light beneath the door—watched shadows flicker across it.

I stopped breathing. I shrank back against the wall, trying to put as much space between me and them as I could.

But they just kept walking. “This place was kept out of the way,” Cairis said. “Maybe he kept the good shit down—what?”

My short-lived breath of relief stilled.

One set of footsteps—Raihn’s—had stopped.

“What is it?” Cairis said, again.

“Nothing. Just curiosity.”

Raihn was a good actor. He always sold his lies well.

“You go ahead,” he said to Cairis. “I’d like to look around in here instead first.”

Fuck. Fuck.

“You want me to call someone to help you?”

“Honestly, I’m dying for a little privacy. Want to hear myself think for once.”

Cairis chuckled, and I glanced frantically around the office. The only hiding place was under the desk. A comically terrible choice. Still, it was better than nothing.

As I ducked down beneath the desk, I caught one final glimpse of all my father’s work—papers and diagrams that showed exactly how much he loved his kingdom, and how much of his blood and sweat he poured into building and protecting his empire.

His empire. My empire.

And here I was cowering under a fucking desk.

A sudden, agonizing wave of shame swallowed me as I slid beneath the wood.

Just as one set of footsteps faded away, and the other drew closer.

Just as the door swung open and a familiar voice said, “Did you really think I wouldn’t smell you, princess?”

6

ORAYA

Fuck.

I looked around for something, anything, I could use as a weapon. That would be too easy, apparently.

“Are you going to come out from under that,” Raihn asked, “or are you going to make me get you?”

My jaw clenched so hard it shook.

Suddenly I felt just like I had in the Moon Palace, when he had taunted me in the greenhouse. I was cornered then, and I was cornered now.

I rose and turned to face him. My hands curled at my sides. I wished I didn’t see the flicker of disappointment in Raihn’s eyes at my concession.

He leaned against the doorframe, surveying me, that brief reveal disappearing beneath the smirk at his mouth, his performance reassumed.

I said nothing.

“I know you’re very good at sneaking around places you aren’t supposed to be,” he went on. “Should I feel lucky you don’t have your blades on you this time?”

He touched his thigh, calling back the first time we had met—when he’d grabbed me in an attempt to save my life, and I’d thanked him for it by driving my dagger into his leg.

What did he think he was doing here? Playing with me like nothing had changed between us. Like we were still just two contestants in the Kejari, reluctant allies.

My voice was hard and sharp. “Somewhere I’m not supposed to be? This is my home.”

I was never very good at seeming cold and collected when my emotions were thrashing under the surface of my skin. Vincent had reminded me of it often.

Raihn saw the truth.

His smirk disappeared.

“I know that,” he said. No hint of teasing this time.

“No, you don’t,” I shot back. “You don’t understand that because you’re keeping me a prisoner here.”

“You’re not a prisoner. You’re—”

You’re my queen, he always said.

Bullshit. I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Stop,” I snapped. “Just—just STOP. Stop with the lies. Stop with the willful ignorance. You lock me in my room every night. You sleep in the next apartment so you can guard me—”

Raihn moved abruptly—two steps forward so he was up against the other side of the desk, leaning close to me.

“I am trying to keep you alive, Oraya,” he said, voice low. “And it’s hard fucking work, alright? I know none of it is ideal. But I’m trying.”

I wanted to say, So what? Let it happen, if it’s so hard to stop it. Let them kill me.

You’re better than that, little serpent, Vincent whispered in my ear.

“How benevolent of you,” I shot back. “How selfless.”

Raihn’s palms now pressed to the table, and he looked directly into my eyes.

“Do you think I want any of this?” he spat. “Do you think I want to listen to you sob every night?”

The blood drained from my face.

At my expression, his mouth thinned. I could practically hear him silently scolding himself for saying it.

I knew there was a possibility that he heard me. I knew that Raihn had always seen everything I didn’t want him to. But fuck, to hear it acknowledged—it violated some unspoken contract. My cheeks warmed.

I took a step back, suddenly desperate to put more space between us, and Raihn matched it forward. His gaze was steady and unblinking—as inescapable as if he’d grabbed me and pinned me to the wall.

“I made you an offer,” he murmured. “The night we—”

A stutter to his voice. I heard what he didn’t say: The night we were married.

Neither of us ever acknowledged that. Our marriage.

“I made you an offer that night. And it still stands. It always will.”

Another step back. Another step closer.

“I hate this place.” He exhaled the words, ragged, like he’d torn them from deep in his chest. “I hate these people. I hate this castle. I hate this fucking crown. But I don’t hate you, Oraya. Not even a little.” His face softened, and I so wanted to tear my eyes away and didn’t. “I failed you. I know that. I’m probably still—” He shook his head a little, as if to shut himself up. “But you and I are the same. There is no one I would rather have help me build a new version of this kingdom. And honestly, I… I don’t know if I can do it without you.”

I finally allowed my gaze to fall from Raihn’s face. Allowed it to drift down, to the desk between us, scattered with Vincent’s notes and plans. Raihn now leaned over that desk, his palms pressed down on those papers. All evidence of my father’s kingdom and how much he had loved it.

My father’s kingdom. My kingdom.

The faint pulse of my Heir Mark over my throat and chest burned stronger now. Itched, like an acid bite.

At least that will get some of them out of our way, Raihn had said, so fucking casually, when talking about the people who now relied on me.

“You don’t want a Hiaj’s help,” I spat. “You’re too busy killing all of us.”

“Us?” Raihn’s scoff was immediate, vicious, like he couldn’t even stop himself. “When the hell did it become ‘us?’ They never treated you like you were one of them. They treated people like you like fucking livestock. They disrespected you, they—”

“You killed my father!”

The words burst out of me. The accusation, the ugly truth, had been pressing up beneath the underside of my skin for weeks. Every time I looked at Raihn, they screamed in my ears. All those accusations: You killed my father, you lied to me, you used me.

YOU.

KILLED.

MY.

FATHER.

They drowned out every word he said to me.

They silenced him immediately, and then hung there between us, palpable and cutting as razor blades.

“You. Killed. My. Father.”

I didn’t even realize I was speaking aloud this time, the words scraping from between my clenched teeth.

With each word, I relived it—Raihn’s magic flaring as he pinned Vincent to the wall. Vincent’s body falling, nothing more than a pile of broken flesh.

Silvery smoke unfurled around my clenched fists. My shoulders rose and fell heavily. My chest hurt—Goddess, my chest hurt so, so much. I’d let out too much and now I struggled to wrangle it all back under control.

For a long, horrible, silent moment I was so sure I was going to fall apart. Raihn at last moved around that desk, approaching me slowly, watching me so steadily I could feel it even when I squeezed my eyes shut.

Like he was waiting. Like he was ready.

“I am so sorry, Oraya,” he murmured. “I’m just—I’m so sorry that it all happened this way. I’m so sorry.”

The worst part was, I couldn’t even doubt that he meant it.

Sorry. I remembered the first time Raihn had apologized to me, plainly, like it had been a simple truth, and how it had meant so much to me that it rearranged my entire world a little to hear it spoken that way. I’d felt like I’d been given a gift I had been waiting so long for—for someone to validate my feelings that way, to concede to me even at the expense of their own pride.

I’d been so desperate to hear those words from my father.

I’d finally gotten them in his final breaths. I love you. I’m sorry.

And did they change anything? Did they mean anything, in the end? What fucking good did a few words do?

I opened my eyes and met Raihn’s. His face was so starkly honest, so raw, that it startled me. I could see that he was opening a door for me, coaxing me through. Ready to take my hand and guide me there.

“But you’d do it again,” I said.

I slammed that door shut.

He flinched.

“I am trying to save so many lives,” he said.

Helplessly. Like he didn’t know what else to tell me.

Well, what else was he going to tell me but the truth?

I fucking hated that I understood that, in some dark corner of myself. Raihn had made a bargain he had died trying to avoid fulfilling. Raihn had thousands of people relying on him. Raihn had his obligations tattooed onto his flesh.

But I’d been denying for too long that I had my own obligations seared into my skin, too. And I’d just listened to Raihn talk about killing the people who now relied on me. Talk of a new kingdom was one thing. But it was talk. Because I’d just watched him put on a performance to gain the favor of the very same people who abused him.

Fucking hypocrite.

We wanted to talk about hard decisions?

Raihn took another step closer. “Oraya, listen…”

But I jerked backwards. “I want to go back to my room.”

It was impossible to miss the disappointment in his eyes.

“Take me back or let me walk there myself,” I spat.

To his credit, he knew when there was no arguing with me. He didn’t say another word as he opened the door and walked silently a step behind me, all the way back to my room.