Page 92 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

Someone struck me from behind. I went toppling to the ground. The little girl, the same one who had been staring at me, leaned over me, red dotting her face.

She lifted her knife in both hands over her head, ready to bring it down.

I tried to counter, tried to—

A blast rocked the room. My vision blurred, dimmed.

A moment or minutes or hours passed.

I forced my eyes open.

Raihn leaned over me, brow furrowed with concern.

I was hallucinating, clearly, or dreaming again. Someone pried my hands free and I let out a choked cry.

“It’s alright,” Raihn murmured, leaning close to me.

I hated these dreams, the ones where I dreamed of the way Raihn had once looked at me, when we fought together in the Kejari. Like his heart was outside his body.

Made it hard to reconcile all he had done to me, when he looked at me that way.

“You’re safe,” he whispered, as he gathered me in his arms, and I faded away.

27

ORAYA

Iopened my eyes from a mercifully dreamless sleep. My head was throbbing, and my body hurt even worse.

Coarse linen rubbed against my cheek. I was in a plain little bedchamber. A desk, a chair, a crooked table. Behind me, someone was moving around. I could hear the snap of a fire, and the hiss of something boiling, and the smell of something delicious.

I tried to roll over and was met with a stab of pain so sharp I let out a little strangled sound that was intended to be a “fuck” but instead sounded more like “ffermmkk.”

Footsteps circled the room, approaching me.

“Well look at you,” Raihn said. “So bright and cheerful when you wake up.”

I tried to say, “Fuck you,” and coughed instead.

“Oh, I still heard that.”

He sat at the edge of my bed. It was so rickety that his considerable weight made the entire thing shift to one side.

I choked out, “Where are we?”

“One of the Crown homes in the east. It’s, uh… seen better days. But it’s safe. Quiet. And closer than Sivrinaj.”

“How long have we been here?”

“Little less than a week.”

I started, and Raihn raised his hands. “We kept you sedated for a while. Trust me, that was for the best.”

I didn’t love the idea of Raihn’s men carting around my unconscious body for a week.

As if he could read my face, he said, “Don’t worry. It was just me.”

That did feel like a relief, though I didn’t want to examine too closely why.

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