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

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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17

ORAYA

“Lahor.”

Raihn tapped the map again. “Lahor.”

I stared at the city at the tip of his finger—a little ink drawing of broken stone. A single, tiny sigil was inked above it—a taloned claw holding a rose.

The last two weeks had passed in an uneventful blur. Sleeping. Training. Waiting for the next move.

The next move, apparently, turned out to be Lahor. One night, after training, Raihn pulled me into his chambers and dragged an extra chair to his desk, which was covered with maps and papers. He’d pulled out a heavy atlas of the House of Night, and pointed at a city on the far eastern shores.

Now, I stared at it.

“Alright,” I said, in a tone that said, Why the hell are you showing me this?

“You’re familiar with it?”

“Of course.”

I’d memorized this map when I was a small child and these ink lines were all I’d had of the outside world. Lahor had always interested me, because its crest matched the one that Vincent bore on some of his clothing.

The thought of Vincent came with the obligatory stab of grief, and then, shortly after, a wave of realization.

“You’re asking, I assume,” I said, “because it’s Vincent’s homeland. But he didn’t talk about it much.”

I’d rarely asked about Vincent’s past. I learned quickly that he didn’t like to talk about it, and I wasn’t in the business of saying things that Vincent did not like.

“It was a very long time ago that I lived there,” he had told me. “It’s not my banner anymore. All of the House of Night is mine.”

I’d accepted that. After all, it had taken me years to see Vincent as a person who had existed beyond the walls of his castle—as a fallible being with a history. Hell, maybe right up until the end, I hadn’t seen him that way.

“If Vincent had needed to hide something,” Raihn said, “and he needed to put it somewhere where only he could find it, do you think that’s where he’d go?”

I didn’t answer for a long moment, my chest tight.

At first, I wanted to say no. Vincent hadn’t wanted to even acknowledge his past before his reign. But then again, just because Vincent didn’t want to acknowledge something didn’t make it any less true. The lie of my own blood was more than enough proof of that.

“I don’t know,” I said at last.

I knew so damned little of my father.

“Septimus wants us to go there,” Raihn said. “He thinks that Vincent hid something there. Something to do with the god blood.”

“And why does Septimus think this?”

A dark laugh. “I wish I knew how that man knows half the things he does.”

I felt that, too. Especially since I had my own secrets to protect.

“I have to admit,” Raihn said, “it does seem like the perfect hiding spot. Right there on the eastern tip of the House of Night. No one needs to go there for anything. Inaccessible as fuck. Overrun with hellhounds and demons. And Vincent had kept some odd trinkets from there in his chambers, which seems unlike him. The place, from what I hear, is little more than ruins now. Fallen into some disarray since Vincent left it two hundred years ago.”

My brow furrowed in thought. “I think his niece lives there. Or… niece once removed. Twice removed.”

Evelaena? Something like that.

“Right. Another reason why this will be complicated. I don’t think she’ll be very happy to see us.”

To see us?

“We’re going?”

“What did you think we were going to do? Send a couple of servants to go search for us?”

At my flat stare, Raihn laughed. “My, how you’ve adjusted to royal life, Your Highness.”

“Fuck you,” I muttered.

But then the truth of his words sunk in. Complicated. That was right. No Hiaj would welcome the Rishan king at their gates. Not even accompanied by me. Perhaps especially not accompanied by me, because this was Vincent’s only living relative—who probably thought she would be Heir when Vincent died.

“That was the face I made when I thought about it, too,” Raihn said.

“Tell me we’re taking an army with us.”

“Right, with all those loyal warriors that I have to spare.” He raised his brows at me. “What about you? You plan on calling in some loyal and cooperative Hiaj soldiers to escort us? Or are they all too busy trying to kill my people?”

My face answered his question.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it be smarter if you stayed here? A king shouldn’t leave his castle unguarded.”

“A king shouldn’t leave his queen unguarded, either, especially not one as prone to getting into trouble as you.” He gave me a sly grin. “Besides, if you think I’m going to miss the chance to get out of this damned place and go get my hands dirty, you don’t know me at all.”

I thought he would say that.

INTERLUDE

Turning is a fate worse than death. It is death, in a way—death of a version of yourself that you will never see again. Born vampires cannot possibly understand, nor are they usually especially inclined to. To them, the turmoil of the Turned is a sign of weakness. A snake, after all, does not mourn its skin.

What they will never understand is how much that skin takes with it.

The man clings to his humanity through every second of his transformation. It must be ripped away from him, stitch by stitch. Turning is a terrible process. It nearly kills him. He loses weeks, months, to illness, taken in an onslaught of delirium. Dreaming of his home. Dreaming of his mistakes. Dreaming of the family he does not yet know he would never see again.

He barely remembers the aftermath of the shipwreck when he emerges from this haze.

The king is beside him, perched at the edge of his bed, watching him with the kind of detached interest that one affords a new pet.

He offers a goblet, and the man gulps it down frantically, liquid spilling down his chin. He has never tasted anything so wonderful—so sweet, so rich, so—

The king pulls the goblet away.

“That’s enough for now,” he says, with a thick accent, patting the man’s shoulder and setting the cup aside.

The man wipes the mess from his face with the back of his hand and blinks down at the smears of red left behind, confused.

He does not understand yet, you see, what happened to him.

He puts aside his hand and his confusion. His family, he thinks. How long has he been here? Time blurs. The ship seems like a lifetime ago.

“Thank you,” he chokes out. “Thank you for your hospitality. But I need to go.”

The king smiles and says nothing.

Perhaps he didn’t understand him, the man thinks. He is far from home. What country had he ended up in? He knew once, but now—

It doesn’t matter. The man doesn’t speak any language but the commoner’s tongue he’d grown up with.

“I need to leave,” he says again, speaking slowly, each word enunciated, pointing to the window—the window that overlooks the sea.

The king still does not answer. His smile broadens slightly, revealing the tips of his pointed teeth.

Those teeth—the sight brings with them the memory of the night of his almost-death—

Do you want to live?

Dread rises. The man ignores it.

“Please,” he says.

But the king just strokes the back of his head. “You have no more home,” he says, somewhat pityingly, words serrated with the thick tang of his accent. “You exist only here.”

Years later, the man will remember little of this conversation. But those four words will remain, even when the specifics of the rest are long lost: You exist only here.

It will become the truth. The king has given the man a new life, but the catch is that this life belongs solely to him.

This is the moment that the man understands how much his life has just changed.

He shakes his head, trying to get up, but the king pushes him back to the bed easily. The man is too tired and dizzy to fight, though he claws through it with every bit of his remaining strength—

But when the king offers him his wrist, the scent dazes him.

“It will not be so bad,” the king says, as he guides the man’s head to his skin.

18

RAIHN

I practically skipped out of that castle.

Weeks out of that place. Weeks away from those stone walls, and those people, and that musty incense smell that reminded me far too much of two-hundred-odd years ago. It was every gift I’d ever gotten rolled into one. Better than any birthday.

Cairis would stay behind to manage the affairs of the Crown, and Vale, to continue directing the battles across the House of Night. He seemed a little relieved to have an excuse to remain.

Ketura and a few of her most trusted soldiers would come with us. I tried to talk Mische out of it, but this, of course, was futile. She made it about two sentences before she cut me off and said, “Do you want me to let you finish this before I tell you I’m not listening? I’m a bodyguard, remember?”

Then again, maybe it was for the better. Better to be out there with us than to be in this place, alone.

Septimus—of course—insisted on coming himself, too, bringing his second and a small force of Bloodborn guards with him.

Lahor was one of the most remote cities in the House of Night—all the way at the tip of the eastern shores, surrounded by water on three sides. Truly in the middle of nowhere. The journey alone took almost two weeks. We moved quietly, taking advantage of our limited forces to move swiftly, days spent in unassuming inns where no one would ask questions or in makeshift camps on the road. The winged among us flew, while the Bloodborn followed on horseback. I carried Oraya, which was about as awkward as it had been last time. It was impossible to focus on anything with her quick heartbeat throbbing in my eyes and her steel-sweet scent in my nostrils and her body stiff and uncomfortable next to mine—all these distracting reminders of what we’d been to each other before and just how far away that was now.

We traveled over rolling desert sands, smooth swells of pale moonlight-drenched gold. When I’d first come here, after I’d made it through the worst of my Turning sickness, I still remembered so clearly stumbling to the window in my room in Neculai’s castle. I’d staggered against the glass, eyes glued to those distant dunes.

I had thought, This place has no fucking right to be so beautiful.

I’d never seen the beauty in all the typical trappings of vampire allure. Their physical appearances, their gold and silver, their fashion.

But as much as I wanted to hate those dunes, I couldn’t.

For days, we flew over the deserts—sand and sand and sand, interrupted by occasional cities and townships and the rare lake or river surrounded by scattered greenery.

But when we grew closer to Lahor, those smooth waves of gold were shattered by sudden gashes of broken stone. First a couple, then more and more as the hours passed, until the ground below us looked like distant crumpled parchment—all hard angles and sharp edges, cut through only by a single road. No movement below from other travelers, only distant roving packs of hellhounds and demons.

Lahor was that kind of place. The kind of place that the world just moved on without.

No one had much of a reason to come here. Except for us.

When we landed, Oraya made a face of such abject disgust, I wished I could capture it and keep it for the next time I didn’t have words to describe how much I hated something.

“Impressed with your ancestral homeland, princess?” I said.

The wrinkle over her nose deepened. “What is that smell?”

“Viprus weed. It grows on the cliffs near the water here,” I said. “It spreads quick and then rots as soon as it touches air, so whenever the tide goes out—”

“Ugh.” Mische made a sound like a cat hacking up a hairball. “Gross.”

“Would be even worse if you could see it. Looks like entrails. And then it shrivels up like—”

“Oh, I get it.”

“You’ve been here before?” Oraya said.

I shot her a little smirk. “I’ve been everywhere.”

“Aren’t we lucky to have a world traveler as our guide,” Septimus said. He was smoking, of course. His horse, a big white beast with pink-rimmed eyes, snorted and shook its head—as if just as offended by the stench as we were.

He looked up at the gates ahead of us. “Looks like a beautiful city.”

The words dripped with sarcasm. Earned sarcasm.

Maybe once, a very long time ago, Lahor had been a beautiful place. With a very active imagination, you could maybe see the ghost of what once stood here. Obitraes was an old, old continent—far older than Nyaxia’s patronage and far older than vampirism.

Lahor, though, actually looked it. Now it was little more than ruins.

The wall that stood before us was formidable, perhaps the only well-maintained part of this city. Black onyx, stretching high above us and out to either side. The skyline beyond the wall, though… it was what bones were to bodies. What had once been buildings were now jagged spires of shattered stone, the mere suggestion of architecture—towers cracked and leaning on uneven piles of stone. The only lights upon this skyline were distant, wild flames along the jagged peaks of a few of the tallest, broken spires.

The towering onyx doors before us remained firmly closed.

“How quaint,” Septimus said.

“Quaint,” Ketura echoed, eyeing the road behind us—and the packs of hellhounds yipping and howling not far from us. It was rare that so many of these beasts would come so close to a town. More evidence that Evelaena was not doing much to maintain her homeland.

“So now what?” Oraya said, turning to the door. “We knock?”

“It’s your cousin, princess. You tell us.”

Evelaena knew we were coming. Oraya and I had penned a letter to her before we left, announcing our visit—a tour of all notable vampire nobles in the House of Night. Cairis had heaped sickening amounts of flattery into it. We’d ensured that she had received it, but we’d gotten no response.

That didn’t surprise me. Even my own nobles weren’t especially inclined to return my letters.

I jerked my chin towards Septimus’s companions. “You think you can take down this wall?”

“I hope you’re joking,” Ketura muttered. “Stupidest idea.”

I was half joking.

Oraya had slowly approached the door, staring up at it. Something about the expression on her face made me pause. I approached her.

“What?” I asked, softly.

“It just feels… strange here.”

She lifted her palm, as if to lay it against the door—

And then a deafening grinding rang out as the stone swung open. The sound was hideous, squealing and cracking, as if the gate protested moving at all after decades or centuries.

The curtains of stone darkness parted, and Lahor spread out before us. It was even worse than it had seemed in silhouette—the road ahead nothing but slabs of broken stone, every building half-open and crumbling, every window nothing but broken shards of glass.

Standing before us was a boy, no older than sixteen at most. He wore a long purple jacket that didn’t fit him well, once fine but now several hundred years out of style. Waves of pale blond hair framed a delicate face and wide, empty ice-blue eyes. Those eyes seemed to stare through us, not at us. And then, just as the grinding finally stopped, they went suddenly sharp, taking us in with eviscerating keenness before sliding back to cow-like vacancy.

He bowed low before us.

“Highnesses. My lady Evelaena welcomes you to Lahor. Come. You must be eager to rest after your long journey.”

19

RAIHN

The castle was the only building in this place that seemed to be—almost—in one piece. It was the tallest building in the city, which was to say, it was the pile of rubble that towered over all the other piles of rubble. It was cold and damp inside, ocean breezes flowing in through broken windows, strong enough to rustle heavy, velvet curtains that reeked of mold.

We didn’t pass a single soul as we were led through the halls, into an expansive room with tall ceilings and towering windows that overlooked the churning sea beyond the cliffs. Some of the panes were tinted red. Maybe that once had been some kind of design decision, but now it looked eerie and disparate, because so much of the glass had been shattered.

Yet, even on such a sad canvas, the view was breathtaking. There were few places anywhere in the House of Night where you could see the water like this—ocean surrounding you on all sides. A gust of wind bellowed through the room, salt so heavy it made my eyes water, the stench of Viprus thick enough to gag on. A dais sat before the windows, bearing a rotting velvet throne with only one armrest and a cracked back.

And upon that throne was Evelaena.

She was only a distant relative of Vincent’s, and much younger than him. During his bloody night of ascension to power, he’d killed most of his close family members, carving a carefully mapped path to his inheritance. Yet, she resembled him. She had the fair eyes—not the moon-silver that he’d passed on to Oraya, but the cold ocean blue favored by most of his line. Her cheekbones were high and features severe, as if made of glass. Her blond hair fell over each shoulder, so long that it pooled in her lap in dry waves.

She rose. Her white gown dragged along the floor as she stepped down the dais steps, the hem bloodstained and dirty. It, like the boy’s jacket, was an outdated style, like she’d gotten it about a hundred and fifty years ago. Maybe it had been beautiful back then.

Her gaze passed over me, then Septimus, and then landed on Oraya—and stayed there, as a slow grin spread over her face.

I could practically feel Oraya stiffen. Hell, I did, too. I resisted the urge to step in front of her as Evelaena approached.

“Cousin,” Evelaena purred. “What a joy to finally meet.”

Oraya—ever transparent—blinked in shock at the sound of Evelaena’s voice. So, so young. Like it could’ve belonged to a fourteen-year-old girl.

Evelaena lay her hands on Oraya’s shoulders, and I could see every muscle in Oraya’s body tightening to avoid pulling away.

“Evelaena,” she said—and nothing else.

She clearly didn’t know what else to say. My wife was not much of an actress. But I could be good enough for both of us.

My hand slid around Oraya’s shoulders, casually displacing Evelaena’s.

“Thank you for your hospitality, Lady Evelaena. I have to admit, we weren’t sure what we’d find. We never received your response to our letter.”

Evelaena smiled, but a familiar, intoxicating scent—just a whiff of it—dragged my attention away. At first, I thought I was imagining it—but then I swept my thumb over her shoulder, right where Evelaena’s hand had rested.

Warm. Wet.

Blood.

My fake smile withered. My gaze shot to Evelaena, who folded her claw-tipped hands at her lap, leaving little specs of bright-red blood on her dress.

A wave of the exact same emotion that had fallen over me before I ripped Martas’s head off his body stifled me.

Evelaena just kept up that dreamy smile.

“I wasn’t sure that you would be interested in coming so far east. Such a journey! You must be starving. Come. I’ve had a feast prepared.” Her eyes brightened. “More than a feast! A ball! One of the grandest Lahor has seen in decades. Come! Come!”

Well, that sounded morbid.

It was morbid.

When we were brought to the ballroom, I actually stifled a laugh—because honestly, I couldn’t help myself.

The room had been grand once, and still held the distant echo of its long-ago magnificence, albeit all covered with a faint layer of dust. Long tables sat over mosaic tile floors on one side of the room, the windows overlooking the sea beyond them. The other side was a dance floor, a roaring bonfire in the hearth and an orchestra before it, magically enhanced, ghostly music echoing against the ceilings. Yes, this had all the trappings of a ball—the entertainment, the tables of food and wine, the finery.

Except, of the dozens of “guests” that turned to regard us with silent curiosity as we arrived, not a single one appeared to be more than fifteen years old.

Most were far younger—ten or twelve, wearing clothes so ill-fitting that they dragged skirts and pant hems over the dusty floor. Almost all of them were blond, with fair eyes.

Surely these couldn’t all be her children. Or if they were all members of her family, where were the other parents?

Evelaena took no notice of the sudden, awkward silence. She stretched her arms out. “Come! Sit!”

The children wordlessly turned to the tables and took their seats.

I’d witnessed plenty of disturbing things in my time, but the silent, simultaneous obedience with which dozens of children did this would certainly be among the most unnerving.

The seats at the head of the table, closest to Evelaena, were, apparently, ours. She motioned to them and we, ever the respectful guests, took our chairs.

“You must be famished,” she said. Her eyes fell to me and her smile stilled.

Hatred. Easy to see it. I knew how to recognize it by now. That wasn’t a surprise. I’d killed Vincent, after all. There was a reason why Oraya’s name had come first in our letter.

I glanced at Oraya’s shoulder, and the little beads of scabbing red on her shoulders.

Not that that seemed to be going any better.

We couldn’t trust this woman. We had to get what we needed and get the fuck out of—

The smell made my head snap up.

Blood. Human blood. Lots of it. Still beating. The truth was, I was hungry after so much travel—the truth was, even after all this time, when I first smell it, it takes me a minute to collect myself. Ketura’s eyes brightened. The Bloodborn peered over their shoulder.

Evelaena perked up, too, her smile brightening.

“At last,” she crooned, shifting aside so that her child servants could hoist a naked woman onto the table.