“I can’t,” she says. “I can’t go with you. I need to stay here.”
His heart sinks.
He spends those final minutes of their old life begging her—begging her—to leave with him.
And right up until the end, right up until she is prying her hands out of his, she refuses.
They have no more time. The final trial is about to begin. And at last, she grabs his face and kisses him fiercely.
“You go,” she whispers. “But I cannot leave him. Not now.”
For centuries, the slave would think about this moment. Why? Why would she choose to die in her cage rather than find freedom?
Everything within him rebels against the thought of leaving her. But he has worked for this for too long. As he sits behind his master in the colosseum stands for that final trial, he stares at the back of the queen’s head and imagines carrying her out over his shoulder when he goes.
He is not watching the battle. But he knows when it is over by the scream of the spectators, deafening, bloodthirsty. The sky shifts, fragments of unnatural light circling above. The air holds its breath, anticipating the impending arrival of a goddess.
The king rises, his eyes locked to the sky.
But while everyone else is staring to the heavens, the queen simply looks over her shoulder at the slave. Her lips form a single, silent word: Go.
And he does.
He travels on foot first, favoring stealth over speed. He has no possessions, and very little money. He has nowhere to go, other than “anywhere but here.”
He hears it echo through the air when the Hiaj victor takes his prize. The screams and cheers pierce the night, as if the House of Night is a single dying beast letting out a final roar.
Don’t look back, he tells himself. It doesn’t matter.
Yet for some reason, he still does.
He’s at the outskirts of the city by then, wings outstretched, ready to take to the sky to make his final escape. The urge is sudden and overpowering—like a set of ghostly hands pulling him back.
He turns.
The colosseum is alight, bright and throbbing like an infected wound, ready to burst.
His gaze lingers there, but then rises—rises to the stars, where the strange shimmering light of the gods still hovers—and he suddenly cannot move.
Nyaxia is far away, floating up in the heavens as if observing the amusing consequences of her latest gift.
But one can always feel a god’s eyes. And Nyaxia looks directly at him that night. He can feel her stare like a blessing, a curse, an iron stake nailing him to a destiny he does not want.
And she smiles—a cruel, beautiful, devastating sight.
He tries to tell himself that he does not sense what changes in this moment. He tries to tell himself that he imagines the dizzying, disorienting burst of power through his veins. He tries to tell himself that the sudden shock of pain up his spine is a figment of his anxiety.
But the truth is the truth.
This is the moment when the slave becomes a king.
He turns away from the Goddess, flying off into the night. Later, safely holed up in a little village where no one would ever think to look for him, he will stare in shock at the red ink on his back. He will pay some starving beggar without a tongue all the money he has to help burn his back, burn it so brutally he nearly kills himself, until the scars are so bad, they swallow the Mark.
He is no king, he tells himself. He is no Heir. He is just a free man, for the first time in nearly a century.
But just because one tells themselves something, understand, that does not make it true.
This is only the first night of thousands the Turned king will spend lying to himself.
It will be two hundred years before he would accept the truth.
61
ORAYA
I opened my eyes.
Some innate part of me expected to see the cerulean of my chamber’s ceiling at the castle. Smell the familiar scent of rose and incense.
But no. The ceiling was old, haphazard wooden boards. The room smelled like lavender and the burnt wood of a fireplace.
So unfamiliar, and yet... so recognizable, in a way I couldn’t place. Like the scent called to a version of myself I’d long ago forgotten.
I turned my head and was greeted with a wave of truly agonizing pain.
But—I was alive.
I was actually alive.
As pieces of the battle came back to me—Simon’s monstrous face leaning over me—that seemed like a fucking miracle.
My eyes focused. I was in a tiny bedroom, lying in an old, beaten-down bed, covered with a quilt that was obviously homemade. Before me was a closed, slightly crooked wooden door, with a little wooden chair sitting beside it.
And in that chair—that tiny, rickety chair, comically overflowing it—was Raihn.
He snored slightly, his head tipped back against the wall, skewed at a painful-looking angle. His arms were crossed over his chest. He wore plain cotton clothes that looked within one sneeze of bursting open at the seams. Dark, dried bloodstains marred the cream fabric, and his forearms were wound in tight bandages.
My eyes prickled. I stared at him, the image growing slowly blurry. My chest was so tight. I didn’t think it had anything to do with my injuries.
I sniffed, and Raihn had been sleeping so lightly that that sound was enough to send him jerking awake with comical verve, nearly throwing himself off the chair as he reached for the sword that wasn’t there.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. The sound was horrible—a gasping rasp.
Raihn barely managed to right himself. Then his gaze fell to me.
He went utterly still.
And then, with a single swift movement, he was on his knees beside my bed, hands cradling my face like he wanted to make sure I was real.
You’re alive, I wanted to say, but all I could choke out was, “Did I scare you?”
I was smiling, laughing a little, though the sound was almost a sob. And soon Raihn was laughing too, and he kissed my face—my forehead, my brows, my nose, and finally, my mouth, leaving the taste of tears on my lips.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again,” he said. “Never fucking again.”
The door opened.
A woman stood in the frame, holding a mortar and pestle in one hand, like she’d rushed over so fast she hadn’t even had the time to put down what she was doing.
“I heard—”
But then her eyes found mine, and the words died.
I couldn’t speak either. Nor could I look away. Because Goddess, she looked so familiar—so familiar that everything else fell away. Those green eyes reminded me so much of someone I used to know.
She let out a long breath.
“You’re awake,” she said, at the same time that I said, “I know you.”
Those eyes crinkled with a sad smile.
“I didn’t think you would remember me.”
I didn’t know if I did remember her, exactly. It was more like… recognizing an innate familiarity.
“I… you’re…”
My words trailed off. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say, or how to name what I was feeling.
She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.
“I’m Alya,” she said. “I’m your aunt.”