Page 210 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

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

Iopened 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.

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