Page 89 of Healer to the Ash King
Suddenly the Ash King holds up his hand, and I halt. He’s frozen, listening.
I creep toward him. “What do you hear?”
“On the other side of this wall is a parlor where the Favored sometimes gather,” he whispers back. “I can hear some of them speaking now.”
“If you can spy on them like this, why ask me to observe them for you?”
He presses two fingertips to my mouth, tilting his head toward the wall. I can hear nothing, and it frustrates me.
“Who is it? What are they saying?”
“Axley, Leslynne, and Diaza. They are speaking of the time when there will be five of them left, and I will bed each one to see who is most agreeable to me.”
My lungs contract. Slowly I shift away from him. “What fun that will be for you.”
He cuts a glance at me. “Jealous?”
“Not at all.” I swallow, trying to moisten my dry mouth.
He keeps walking, and after a while I risk a question. “Which one do you most look forward to bedding?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Curiosity.” Because I’m trying to prove I’m not jealous, and because I have a sick desire to know. “My bet would be Axley. You were all over her the other night on the balcony. Or maybe Khloe, since you’ve apparently kissed her a lot.”
“Only a few times.”
“Have you kissed them all?”
“I did not kiss all the Favored candidates, but I’ve kissed the seven remaining women, at least once each.”
Something twitches inside me—a knot of corruption uncoiling, sending out viperous threads. When I look down at my hands, my fingertips are darkening, and thin black lines are slithering out of them.
Panicked, I tighten my grip on my magic, hauling it back in, crushing it down. This is the second time recently that the darker side of my healing powers has surfaced. Not a good sign.
“You seem very interested in my physical relationships with the Favored, Healer,” says the King. “Perhaps you’d care to observe a coupling or two. Would that bother you, watching me take pleasure from someone else?”
There’s a challenge in his tone. He’s testing me, making sure I don’t have unrealistic expectations about our relationship. Which I do, of course, though I barely let myself think them, and I certainly can’t let him know.
“Of course it wouldn’t bother me,” I say lightly. “Heartsfire, I’ll even hold the woman’s legs open for you.”
“Filthy words, kitten.”
A thrill runs through my heart at the endearment. But his cloaked back continues moving along the tunnel, and he says nothing else for a while.
When he speaks again, it’s to ask about my village, specifically its crops and production rates. At first I disclose the information grudgingly, but soon he transitions from economic inquiries to quiet questions about my parents and my fellow villagers. I find myself relaxing, telling him all sorts of details about my home life. It feels good to speak of familiar things, and it feels even better to know he is listening.
His attention softens the pain of knowing that his body is soon going to be sampled by others. I know he’s been with women before me, but somehow it’s worse anticipating what he’ll do with the Favored. So I try not to think of it, and instead I tell him the most humorous stories from my childhood, smiling secretly at his back whenever something I say makes him laugh.
Once though, when I’m telling him about my parents’ frequent forays in search of new materials and their long hours working together in their shop, he turns around, a frown etched between his brows. “Did they neglect you? Your parents?”
“No, of course not…” But I hesitate, pondering. “They’re very much in love, after all these years. In love with each other and with their work. But even when they were away, I never doubted that they loved me too. And when you live in a village as close-knit as ours, everyone is family. Everyone cares for each other—young, old, or in-between. I wasn’t neglected.”
But his words give me a new perspective on myself, and shed fresh light on my hunger for open affection and appreciation from people, lots of people. Maybe my parents were a little too absorbed with their work and each other. Maybe they handed me off to others a little too readily, allowed me a bit too much dangerous freedom running the slopes of our mountain.
Maybe there are caverns within myself that I have not yet explored. And maybe it alarms me a little that the Ash King saw straight into those deeper places, without my making the slightest effort to reveal them.
We walk for perhaps another hour, then duck through another door with a very low lintel. There’s a final squeeze along a tight passage, and then the Ash King applies heat to a strange-looking lock, and we exit through one final door.
