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

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

75

ORAYA

Acaeja’s beauty was not the beauty of Nyaxia. Nyaxia was beautiful the way many women hoped to be, albeit a million times over, a force greater than a mortal mind could even comprehend.

Acaeja’s beauty, though, was terrifying.

When she landed before me, I started shaking.

She was tall, even taller than Nyaxia was, with a regal, strong face. But more imposing than her stature were the wings—six of them layered over each other, three to each side. Each one acted as a window to a different world, a different fate—a field of blossoms beneath a cloudless summer sky, a bustling human city beneath a lightning storm, a forest raging with fire. She wore long white robes that pooled around her bare feet. Strings of light—the threads of fate—dangled from her ten-fingered hands.

Her face tilted toward me, cloudy white eyes meeting mine.

I gasped and tore my gaze away.

A second of that stare, and I saw my past, my present, my future, blurring by too fast to comprehend. Fitting, that was what one would see, looking into the eyes of the Weaver of Fates.

“Do not be afraid, my daughter.”

Her voice was the amalgamation of so many different tones—child, maiden, elder.

Fear is just a collection of physical responses, I told myself, and I forced myself to meet Acaeja’s gaze again.

She knelt before me—observing Raihn, and then me, with detached interest.

“You called,” she said simply.

You answered, I almost replied, because I was still in shock that she actually had.

I groped for words and came up empty-handed. But she grabbed my chin, gently but firmly, and looked into my eyes like she was reading the pages of a book. Her gaze flicked back to Raihn.

“Ah,” she said. “I see.”

“A Coriatis bond,” I managed. “I ask you, Great Goddess, for a Coriatis bond. My mother devoted her life to you, and I—I’ll offer you anything if—”

Acaeja raised a single hand.

“Hush, child. I understand what you seek. Your mother was indeed a devoted follower of mine. I am quite protective of those who walk the unknown beside me.” She scanned the carnage that surrounded us, lips thinning with a brief wave of disapproval. “Even if they walk it, at times, to questionable ends, tampering with forces that should not be disturbed.”

I bit back a wave of shame on my mother’s behalf.

“Please,” I whispered. “If you grant us a Coriatis bond, if you help me save him, I swear to you—”

Again, Acaeja raised her palm.

“Do you understand the gravity of what you ask of me?”

This, I knew, was not a rhetorical question.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Do you understand that you are asking me for something I have never once granted before?”

My eyes prickled. Another tear rolled down my cheek. “Yes.”

Only Nyaxia had ever granted a Coriatis bond. Never a single god of the White Pantheon.

But I was willing to try anything. Anything.

“Countless times, my followers have begged me to save their loved ones from death. Death is not the enemy. Death is a natural continuation of life. An intrinsic part of fate.” The visions in her wings shifted, as if to demonstrate—revealing glimpses of dark skies and bones and flowers growing from rotting flesh. “What makes you different?”

Nothing, I thought, at first. I was just another grieving lover, standing on the precipice of one more loss she couldn’t bear.

But I rasped out, “Because he could do such great things for this kingdom. We could, together. We could make things so much better for the people who live here. People—” My voice grew stronger. “People like my mother, who devoted her life to you, even when trying to survive so many hardships here.”

Acaeja tilted her head, as if she found this answer interesting. Compared to Nyaxia’s blatant emotionality, she was distant, calculated. I couldn’t read her.

I knew Nyaxia, despite her cruel dismissal, felt my pain. Acaeja, I feared, was only analyzing it.

“My cousin spoke the truth to you,” she said. “Granting a Coriatis bond between two Heirs would alter the course of the House of Night forever.”

“It would end millennia of warfare.”

“Yes. But it would come with many challenges, as well.”

My hand closed around Raihn’s limp, bloody fingers. “I know. We would face them.”

It almost surprised me, how easily this answer came to me. It wasn’t a platitude, wasn’t a performance. It was the truth.

Acaeja stared at me for a long moment. A shiver ran up my spine—the uncomfortable feeling that my past and future were being rifled through like pages in a record log.

Then she let out a soft chuckle. “Humans,” she said softly. “Such hope.”

I waited, not breathing.

At last, she said, “If I grant this request, do you swear that to me? That you both will use the power I am granting you to fight for what is Right in this world and the next, even against great opposition?”

My heart leapt.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I do.”

“You will be under my protection as an offspring of my acolyte, and that protection will extend to him, as your heart-bonded. But understand that my cousin will not be happy about this development. She will not act against you. Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday soon, Oraya of the Nightborn, there will come a day when Nyaxia brings a great reckoning. And when that day comes, you must be prepared to face her displeasure.”

Goddess fucking help us.

And maybe I was a fool for it, but I still didn’t hesitate.

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

“I see your truth. I see the possibility in both your futures. I see that there is still much to come. And for that reason, I will grant you a Coriatis bond.”

The words were so unbelievable. At first, I couldn’t even grasp them.

“Thank you,” I tried to say, but it drowned in a sob.

“Quickly,” Acaeja said. “He fades.”

My eyes fell to Raihn’s face—motionless, battered, covered in blood, features broken beyond recognition. And yet, for some reason, the image of that same face on our wedding night came to my mind. The night he had promised himself to me, and I couldn’t offer him the same.

“This will be painful,” Acaeja warned.

She touched my chest, right over my heart.

“Painful” was not the right word for it. I gasped at the bolt of agony—like someone was spearing me straight through, hooking my heart and dragging it through my ribcage.

Still, I didn’t flinch, didn’t close my eyes. I looked only at Raihn’s face. Through the haze of pain, I heard our wedding vows:

I give you my body.

I give you my blood.

I give you my soul.

Acaeja drew her hand from my chest, slowly, as if pulling a great weight, and then pressed it to Raihn’s. A blinding white light engulfed us.

The pain intensified.

From this night until the end of nights.

I doubled over, my forehead leaning against Raihn’s.

From daybreak until our days are broken.

Acaeja drew her hands back, a thread of light between them.

“I bind these hearts together.” Her voice rippled through the air like water. “Their souls are one. Their power is one. From this moment, until their threads cross this mortal plane.”

Her hands splayed, twenty long fingers weaving together our fates—and then, in one abrupt movement, drawing the threads taut.

I doubled over, unable to move, to breathe. My eyes squeezed shut. My head emptied of everything except for five words:

I give you my heart.

The words I wouldn’t—couldn’t—say to Raihn that night. The vow I could not make.

Now I whispered those words over and over again, clinging to them, as my soul itself shattered and reformed.

“I give you my heart,” I murmured against his skin. “I give you my heart. I give you my heart.”

The light faded. The pain ebbed.

Acaeja sounded very far away, her voice like a wave rolling from the shore, as she said, “It is done.”

The words faded off into oblivion.

And so did I.

76

ORAYA

I did not dream of Vincent.

I dreamt of nothing at all.

I opened my eyes to a blue cerulean ceiling. It was the same ceiling that I had awoken to every day for nearly twenty years. But this time, from that first moment, everything felt different. As if my innermost self had been rearranged.

I felt... stronger. Like my blood thrummed through my veins with greater force.

And...

I laid my hand over my chest. Over my heart.

And... weaker.

Like a piece of my soul, the most vulnerable part of me, was now outside my body.

My mind pieced together the events of the battle, not quite in order, and then I shot bolt upright.

Every thought disintegrated except for his name.

Raihn.

My room was empty. An unoccupied chair sat beside my bed, and a few empty cups and plates on my nightstand, like someone had been here but had just left.

Raihn.

I threw back the covers and stood, only to immediately topple back to the bed with a dizzy spell that had my stomach lurching. An odd tug on my awareness disoriented me, like I was seeing something out of the corner of my eye that wasn’t there, or witnessing this room from another angle.

Mother. I must’ve really hit my head.

I got to my feet again and went out into my living room, then threw open my apartment door.

Raihn.

I wasn’t sure how I knew exactly where he was. Only that, without thinking, I was walking over to his chambers and—

The door swung open just as my fingertips brushed the knob.

He was alive.

He was alive.

I didn’t take in anything else about him, only that he was here and alive and standing right before me and alive and smiling and alive.

And then his arms were around me, and mine around him, and the two of us held each other for a minute and an eternity, like two halves reunited. I buried my face against the bare skin of his chest and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears.

For a long time, we stayed like that.

And then eventually, he murmured against my hair, “So you missed me.”

Arrogant prick, I thought.

But aloud I said, “I love you.”

I felt his shock at those words—actually felt it, like it was my own. And then, the wave of contentment that followed, like the sun falling over my face.

His arms tightened. “Good. Because now you’re really stuck with me.”

I scoffed, but the sound was muffled against his skin, and it sounded much weaker than I’d intended.

His lips pressed to the top of my head.

And he whispered, “I love you too, Oraya. Goddess fucking help me, I do.”

He pulled me into his apartment, though it was more of a stumble, the two of us not wanting to let go of each other long enough to properly close the door, let alone walk. The need to be physically close to him was disorienting—like our very essences had been united, leaving us with an innate need to get our flesh as close as possible. It wasn’t sexual—or at least, it wasn’t sexual right now. It went deeper than that. More intimate.

I realized, after a few moments, that our heartbeats had aligned—his quickening slightly, mine slowing. And I knew this because I could feel his, the same way I could feel my own.

He noticed it the same time as I did.

“Strange,” he murmured. “Isn’t it?”

Strange was an understatement. And yet it also seemed like... too negative of a word. It didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t feel unnatural. It didn’t even feel frightening, which shocked me, because I would have thought that having my soul linked to another person’s would be utterly terrifying.

Linked. Bonded.

Goddess, we had actually done that. We had a Coriatis bond.

The realization hit me so hard that I pulled away from Raihn abruptly, nearly sending myself toppling over until he caught me.

“Easy.”

I stopped short. My brow furrowed.

I grabbed his shoulders, not to steady myself, but to hold him straight.

I’d been so relieved to see him that I hadn’t even stopped to really look at him. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of low-slung cotton trousers, his torso covered with the fading remnants of his injuries and the bandages that had treated them.

But my eyes fell to his chest—his throat.

And the Heir Mark that now covered it.

“Ix’s tits,” I whispered.

He frowned, looking down at himself, but I dragged him to the mirror instead.

When he saw himself, his eyes bulged.

“Ix’s tits,” he agreed.

The Mark was nearly identical to mine, albeit slightly modified to match the shape of his body. I was wearing a loose camisole that exposed my neck and shoulders, leaving our two Marks visible side-by-side. The resemblance was uncanny. He had the same layered phases of the moon over his throat, and the smoky rendering of wings over his clavicle and shoulders—except his were the feathered wings of the Rishan.

We stared at each other in the mirror, and then had the same idea at the same time. Raihn turned me around, sliding the straps of my camisole off my shoulders, letting the garment pool around my waist and leaving my torso exposed.

He positioned me, my back was to the mirror, and I peered over my shoulder into it.

Sun fucking take me.

Beside me, Raihn turned around and matched my pose.

The Heir Mark on his back was nearly identical to the one I now bore on mine. The phases of the moon spread across the top of my back, spears of smoke running down my spine.

We looked at each other. The reality of what we’d done—of what had changed—settled over us both.

Nyaxia and Acaeja had both warned us that a Coriatis bond would mean the end of the Rishan and Hiaj Heir lines, combining them into one.

We’d altered the course of the House of Night forever.

I felt a little dizzy, and not from my injuries.

A wrinkle formed between Raihn’s brows. The corner of his mouth twitched in an uncertain almost-smirk. “Regrets, princess?”

Regrets?

The answer was easy and immediate. “Fuck, no.”

The smirk became a full-on smile, and if I’d had any regrets, that smile would have erased them, anyway.

“Good,” he said. “It looks better on you than it does on me, anyway.”

I glanced at Raihn’s muscled back and wasn’t sure that I agreed.

I jumped a little as the door burst open.

“Gods!”

I looked up to see Mische whirling around, nearly dropping the tray in her hands in her hasty effort to cover her eyes.

“I leave you two alone, unconscious, for five minutes and you’re already in here tearing each other’s clothes off? At least lock the damned door!”

77

RAIHN

I thought it would be more of an adjustment than it was. The Coriatis bond, it turned out, was the easy part. Yes, it was a little odd to get used to. It wasn’t as if I could read Oraya’s mind, or communicate without speaking, or feel everything she felt—and hell, what fun would that be, anyway, to take all the mystery out of things? It was more that I was now constantly, innately aware of her. A biological attunement to her presence, her state, her emotions.

Right now, though, I didn’t need any kind of magical goddess-gifted heart bond to know that Oraya was pissed.

She was wearing that a-cat-is-pissing-on-my-leg-and-you’re-the-cat face. My favorite of the diverse library of Oraya faces. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her foot tapping impatiently. We were in the meeting room, me leaning back in my chair, Oraya bolt upright in hers. Ketura, Vale, Lilith, Jesmine, and Mische sat scattered around the table. Mische was half-slumped across the desk, Lilith was eternally thoughtful, Ketura and Vale were both visibly annoyed, and Jesmine was, of course, ever the ice queen.

“He has to be somewhere,” Oraya said.

“I’m sure he is somewhere,” Jesmine said, pursing her lips. “Snake that he is. But that somewhere is not in the House of Night.”

“Did you check—”

“We checked everywhere,” Ketura said, throwing her notes down. “Everywhere.”

Ketura’s frustration, I knew, wasn’t with Oraya. It was with herself. She hated losing.

“He must have retreated with the rest of the Bloodborn,” Jesmine said. “Was quick about it, apparently.”

None of this surprised me.

I wanted Septimus in captivity as much as anyone else. But I was under no illusions that he was about to let himself be caught easily. He was far too smart for that, as much as I hated to give him the credit.

These last few weeks had been a blur, establishing the fragile legs of our new kingdom and eliminating the final parasites of the old one. The Bloodborn, at least, had been easy to get rid of—the minute the goddesses showed up, they apparently knew nothing good was happening and began their retreat. By the time the fighting had stopped and Jesmine and Vale had retrieved Oraya and I, most of the Bloodborn troops were already on their way out of the kingdom.

No one objected to letting them go. Good riddance.

The only one we wanted was Septimus.

But he, it seemed, had been the first to leave. Though Jesmine and Vale both gave orders to have him detained immediately, before Oraya and I had even awoken, he had simply disappeared. And these last few weeks had been no more fruitful, not even as our guards tore through all potential strongholds and searched fleets of departing Bloodborn soldiers.

Septimus was long, long gone.

Vale let out a sigh and rubbed his temples. “Let him slink away with his tail between his legs. If that’s how he needs to deal with his defeat, so be it. We have plenty of other traitors to prosecute, and at least those won’t start a war.”

He tapped the parchment in front of him, black with dozens—hundreds—of names.

“Another war,” Jesmine corrected, and Vale sighed again.

“Yes. Let’s avoid another war. Especially one with another House.”

Mische shifted uncomfortably in her seat. I knew she was thinking about the House of Shadow.

We’d been lucky so far. Not a word from them about their prince. If that changed, our strategy was to pin it on Simon, let them believe that justice had already been served.

Risky. But it was the best we had.

Mische, I knew, thought about this possibility more than she let on.

“We did find someone else,” Ketura said, jerking my attention back to the meeting. “In the latest set of raids.”

I blinked, turning to her. “Someone important?”

Her face hardened, like she’d just smelled something very unpleasant.

“Someone I think you might want to talk to.”

Cairis looked horrible. Then again, it would be a little disappointing if he didn’t, after hours of questioning by Ketura and Vale’s men.

He looked up through the bars, a ray of moonlight falling over his face as he squinted up at me through a swollen eye.

“Oh.” His mouth twisted into a wry smirk, a pathetic recreation of his typical smile. “Hello. Sorry I won’t be very useful. I already told them everything.”

“I figured as much.”

I sat down in the chair before the bars, elbows on my knees. Behind me, Oraya slipped into the room too, lingering in the shadows against the wall.

I found it satisfying the way his face dropped with actual fear when he saw her. She found it satisfying, too—I sensed it alongside my own.

“So what, then?” he said. “You’ve come here to execute me yourself?”

He stood up, as if to prepare himself to meet death standing.

“No,” I said. “My time’s too valuable for that.”

Confusion flitted over Cairis’s face. “Then what?”

“Ketura and Vale wanted to execute you.” I nodded back toward Oraya. “Your queen wanted to execute you.”

Bloodthirsty little thing that she was.

“But,” I said, “I managed to convince them otherwise.”

His brow furrowed. “You—”

“I wanted to make sure I saw your face when the man you betrayed saved your life,” I said. “And I also wanted to make sure you knew it was no mercy. Actually, the queen that wanted to kill you was probably the merciful one.”

I stood, my silhouette casting a shadow over Cairis’s form. I towered over him. He wasn’t a small man, either—but he seemed it, now.

I supposed he always had been.

But how could he be anything but?

He’d spent his entire life in fear. He’d learned to survive by bending his spine to fit into his cages. For a while, he’d been able to make himself into something more.

For a while.

But as soon as he found himself staring down the possibility of being a slave again, he just couldn’t go back. No values were strong enough to supplant that fear.

I wasn’t sure if it made it better or worse that I understood it.

He lowered his eyes. There was shame—real shame—in them.

“I deserve to be executed,” he said.

“You do. That’s why you won’t be. That, and...” I cocked my head and smiled at him, wide enough to reveal my fangs. “I think you might be useful, one day. So you’ll be locked up in Tazrak. Spend a decade or four there, until I decide if I need you for something. People who have something to prove are the most useful kind.”

His eyes rose to meet mine again, round. His mouth opened, but nothing came out.

“If you’re considering whether or not to thank me,” I said. “I think the answer is probably no.”

He shut his mouth. But he still said, a moment later, “Thank you.”

I chuckled. I started to turn away, but he said, “Do you really think you’re going to be able to make this work?”

I stopped. Oraya and I exchanged a glance.

I turned around. “This?” I questioned.

I saw it on Cairis’s face, the moment he saw Oraya’s back—the Heir Mark, visible above the low back of her blouse, before she, too, turned back to him.

His eyes widened.

I laughed softly and pulled open the top two buttons of my jacket—revealing my Mark, too.

“They’re new,” I said. “Like them?”

“You did it,” he breathed.

The shock on his face was so satisfyingly genuine. Either he’d been living in true isolation wherever he’d been hiding out, or he’d heard the rumors and thought we were lying. Either option amused me.

“We did,” Oraya said.

He paled.

“What?” I said. “Realizing now you picked the wrong side?”

I was only half joking, because Cairis really did look like he was questioning everything he’d held as truth. He had played by the rules of Neculai’s game, right up to the end, thinking it was the only strategy that could ever win.

And here we were, crowns on our heads, having blown the entire board to bits.

He said softly, “Yes. I am.”

“You’re lucky for it,” I said. “Simon would’ve had you skinned by now.”

I started to turn away, but he again called out, “Wait.”

Now I was getting impatient.

I turned back, brows raised expectantly.

“Septimus isn’t done,” he said, then raised his hands, as if in preemptive defense. “I’ve told Ketura everything I know. I don’t have any more facts. I just... It’s a feeling. I know it. He’s doing something big, Raihn. I don’t know what it is. But don’t let your guard down.”

My smirk faded. Oraya and I exchanged another glance. She raised her brows in a way that said, See? Didn’t I tell you?

I gave her a flat stare that said, Yes. You told me.

“Well,” I said to Cairis. “We’ll be ready for him. Whenever he decides to show up.”

The truth. What else could we offer?

I closed the door behind us as we left, leaving Cairis alone in the dark.