by K. N. Lee
I took a deep breath, very aware that his hands were still on my shoulders, and how he smelled of cinnamon and spice. “I guess I’m not the only one who has had to make sacrifices.”
“Hardly,” he said. “But it’s kind of you to notice.” He embraced me then, and though short, I didn’t realize just how much I needed it. I wanted to melt into it and breathed him in like I’d been drowning and was exposed to fresh air.
When he pulled away, I was defeated, and my shoulders slumped.
Back to reality.
But, when I looked up at him, my heart pounded at the way he stared at me.
There was something more in his eyes—something I’d never seen reflected onto me by another.
The sound of boots in the distance ended that tender moment, and he pulled me hard again. “Now, come on.”
“Come on where?” I asked, going where he led me.
“To try to fix this,” he said. “Your little disappearing act got back to the emperor, and he’s not happy about it.”
Chapter 15
My second walk to the emperor’s throne room turned out to be much more pleasant than the first.
No guards hoisted me off my feet. No threats were made or glowering looks were given. I just strode, holding Raelyn’s hand as he gave me some pointers.
“You don’t remember the emperor, but he’s a hard man,” he said in a voice so low that I could barely even hear it, and I was inches away from his lips. “He’ll make an example of you. He’ll be rough with you.”
“And, if he recognizes me?” I asked, realizing that I was actually starting to believe the nonsense Raelyn and Ian told me about being from a different life.
“He won’t recognize you,” Raelyn said.
“But, if he does,” I countered.
“Then, he’ll want you dead,” he admitted, his voice somehow even lower than it had been before. “Right there, right then, he’ll order your execution.” He squeezed my hand. “And, we’ll fight him.”
“You’ll fight the emperor inside of his throne room?” I asked, arching my eyebrows at the foreign prince at my side. “You do understand how impossible winning something like that sounds, especially given the fact that, not only does he have an army at his back, but he also has home field advantage.”
“This is your home. Not his,” he said. “Remember that always. You are the heir to this throne. You are the one who should be sitting on it. Not him.” He grimaced. “Never him.”
This was still all so strange to me.
For all I had seen, for all I had been through, there was still a piece of me who thought I was just a poor kid from the wrong side of the kingdom. The idea that I might have had a bigger destiny, that something I did set all of this in motion, it felt wrong somehow—like I wasn’t hearing the whole story.
Still, I had no time to consider such things. I steeled myself as Raelyn pushed open the doors, revealing the throne room to me. The breath caught in my throat and my chest tightened as the place opened up around me, and not just because I was nervous.
This—this was unlike anything I had ever seen or could have dreamed of. Opulent, and encased in shiny golden trim, it was vastly different from what I imagined.
Back home, in the slums, we all shared a single room. Even when Eden was alive, we all crammed into that tiny space. There was no privacy, no area for anyone to have even a second to themselves. You could have fit ten of those rundown shacks in this space and still had room to spare.
The expanse stretching out in front of me required all of my senses. I tried to remain collected, but the walls were so tall that it seemed the ceiling was as high as the heavens. As we walked along the marble floor, I found myself beginning to shake with both fear and awe.
“Your grandfather sat in that chair,” Raelyn muttered, perhaps sensing my dismay and offering a bit of support as he walked me through the lines of guards and up a running golden carpet toward the weathered man sitting in a stainless steel chair that hovered so far off the ground I was sure he would have to shout downward if he intended on speaking to me. “Your father sat in that chair. If left to live out his life, your brother would have sat in that chair as well. Don’t let this get inside your head, Moira. All of this is absolutely nothing compared to you.”
I swallowed hard, trying to keep my eyes focused and my feet moving. Raelyn might have said this was nothing compared to me, but that wasn’t what it felt like. This was everything. It was enough to send me scurrying for an exit, as if I hadn’t already tried that and failed.
The man on the floating throne, a tall gangly sort of whose eyes looked shockingly like my own, glared down at me. The crown on his head, a silver band with glowing dots moving all across it, seemed to weigh him down and his hands clutched so hard against the arms of the throne that his fingers went white.
He shifted in his seat as he peered downward at me. “This is the criminal?”
I thought he would have to shout at me, but as it turned out, I was wrong. He barely whispered as he spoke, yet I heard every word as clear as my own thoughts. In fact, like my thoughts, his words echoed throughout my head.
I shuddered, trying to stop. I would have stopped if not for Raelyn’s hands continuing to pull me forward.
“This is the girl who has been charged with the crime,” Raelyn said. “She is but a peasant, Your Majesty. Nothing more.”
“She is no peasant,” Emperor Taros said, once again directly into my mind. “She is a murderer and worse.” His eyes trained on me. “In the Empire of Embers, your actions speak louder than the circumstances of your birth.”
“That’s easy for a man sitting on a throne to say,” I muttered, mostly to myself. Raelyn’s fingers dug into my forearm, a clear warning for me to keep my opinions to myself.
It was too late though.
“What was that, murderer?” the emperor asked, his whitening eyebrows arching upward.
“The man asks for the emperor’s mercy,” Realyn said. “She pleads.”
That was, of course, a lie. Still, he was trying to save my life, and that was a good thing.
“Mercy has no place in my court,” Taros said. “Especially for someone who has been conspiring against me.”
A hologram appeared in front of me. I was there, standing and trading with Exeter back in his secret room, handing off pieces of my hair in exchange for food.
“Black market trading,” the emperor said, scoffing. “I would kill you right now if you weren’t more valuable to me alive.”
The throne lowered, and I heard gasps from the guards. Obviously, this wasn’t something that happened often.
“You have an oddity about you, girl,” he continued. “Some say the magic held within your hair speaks to royal blood. I say it’s an abomination. Still, abominations can be useful.”
I peered into the emperor’s now closer eyes, trying to see if he recognized me at all. He didn’t seem to as he continued.
“You will be carted back to a holding cell. From there-”
“I’ll be sheared and kept for my hair,” I muttered, this time loud enough for him to hear clearly. “I’ve heard the threat before.”
“Then you have been threatened by lesser men,” the king answered. “I have no interest in holding you, keeping you like an animal to be fed and maintained. I wish to understand you, how you work so that I may replicate it.” He nodded, firmly. “As I said, you will be carted back to the holding cell. From there, our finest medics will see you. They will slice you open, take you apart piece by piece, and peer into you until they figure out just how you can do what you can do. And, when they’re finished, we’ll bury what’s left of you.”
My blood ran cold as a slow smile spread across his face.
“Assuming there’s anything at all.”
Chapter 16
The day before the darkness fell, I awakened in a prison.
Sleep had barely come the night before, and when it did, it brought terrible nightmares and restless tu
rning with it. I pulled myself up from my cot, sure that the opening door would bring in medics and mad scientists, ready to slice me open and dig into whatever they found on the inside.
Strangely enough, something like peace washed over me as the thought filled my head.
No. I don’t want to die.
In fact, I wanted more than anything to live.
The person I knew as me was nothing more than a cover, a made up character in a book I wrote for myself and then for myself to live out. So, who cared if that character stopped existing?
Warm tears streamed down my face.
She wasn’t real. I wasn’t real.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” a familiar voice said as his feet clapped against the stone, walking toward me.
Looking up, I saw Ian there, his jaw tight as he handed me a tray of disgusting looking food.
I quickly wiped the tears from my cheeks and put on a brave face.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I said, grabbing the tray through the bars and setting it, untouched, on the counter beside the cot I was assured would be my new home by the thugs who tossed me into it.
“Oh, the Under it isn’t,” Ian scoffed, shaking his head at me. “I know you. I know both versions of you, in fact. And, if there’s one thing that migrated from old you to this new you is a sense of self-pity.”
“I thought you said the thing that migrated was my stubbornness,” I responded.
“It was,” Ian replied. “You’re both stubborn and very dramatic. Congratulations.”
“I’m also about to become a project for whatever lunatics Emperor Taros has employed since taking the throne from my brother,” I muttered.
I took a deep breath, a breath which caught in my throat as I realized what I’d done. I just spoke of the world Raelyn told me about, of the life he ensured I lived, as though it was fact. I wasn’t sure why I did that.
Maybe it was easier to go this route since I was surrounded by people who believed it themselves. Perhaps, I was starting to believe it was true myself. Somewhere inside of me, I was waking up to the fact that what Raelyn and Ian said had some credence.
“Of course, that’s not going to happen,” Ian said.
Though I was scared to death, his voice held none of the urgency of mine. In fact, he might as well have been talking about what scenery to hold a picnic in.
It infuriated me.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who is about to be cut up into tiny little pieces.” I shook my head, and stepped back from the bars.
“Like I said, so dramatic,” Ian muttered, folding his arms over his chest. “I might not be, but I am the one sworn to protect the person who is about to be cut up into tiny little pieces, and that makes it my problem too.”
“Sworn to protect?” I asked. “Really? Is that really a thing?”
“Of course, it is,” Ian said, sighing loudly. “For generations, my family has been born and bred in service of yours. I was, very literally, born to serve you, Moira.” He shrugged. “Well, I suppose, in all honesty, I was born to serve your brother, but he died and when he passed the crown down to you, I came along with it. Think of me as a gift with purchase.”
A slow, reluctant smile draped my face. It might have been a lie, but all my memories told me Ian had always been able to make me feel better. As lies went, I could think of worse ones. Still, with the smile came a dark realization. If this was true, it meant something else was true as well.
“I don’t have the crown anymore,” I said, swallowing hard. “I mean, if I ever did, if it was ever mine, it’s not now. Doesn’t that mean that you’re not mine now too?”
The words stuck in my throat. The idea of literally owning another person was about as distasteful a thing as I could ever imagine, and I couldn’t believe I would ever be the type to do something like that, regardless of who I had been or how I had been raised. Still, the idea had validity. If Ian and his people were sworn to the crown, then he wasn’t sworn to me, not really, not anymore.
“Technically,” he admitted, and I could tell from the hitch in his voice that the fact pained him. “But you freed me of that. When you crafted the spell that changed everything, the spell that changed our entire lives, you gave me my freedom. In fact, you told me as much. You said I wasn’t your servant anymore.”
To my utter disbelief, his eyes watered.
“In fact,” he said, sucking in a breath. “You said I never really was. You said I was your friend now, and as your friend, I could have whatever life I wanted.”
“And, you chose to scrounge for food and live in a shack?” I asked, remembering what Ian’s life looked like from my perspective.
“I chose to be with you,” he said. “You know what I did when you gave me my freedom, Moira?”
“Got drunk and had a party?” I asked.
“I gave it right back,” he answered without a hint of iron or hesitation. “You’re the best person I’ve ever known, and in that moment, I saw that you could also be the greatest ruler this empire has ever seen. I want to help you be that. It’s my life’s work. It’s what I was born to do.”
In that moment, warmth ran over my heart. Other things might have been a lie, but this was the truth. I knew it as well as I knew the suns in the sky.
“The Darkness is coming,” Ian said. “You told me as much. You told ‘em the time would come when we’d have to fight it together. You said I’d have to help you find the light.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” I admitted.
“I know,” he said. “Luckily, you also told me how to fix that. It’s why Raelyn and I let them take you here in the first place.” He leaned closer. “You said it was somewhere inside the walls down here.”
“What?” I asked. “What’s in the walls?”
“Under if I know,” Ian said. “But, I’ve learned to trust you over the years. Both versions of you.” He pulled a blaster from his pocket. “Now, stand back,” he said, pointing it at the cell door. “We’re about to break a lot more laws than we already have.”
Chapter 17
Stepping out of the cell, I followed Ian into a passageway on the far side of the room.
It was a wall at first, stone and strange carvings I had never seen before. Or, at least, this version of me had never seen them before. I was sure that, if I asked Ian about them, he would tell me something stupid like my grandfather carved them with his bare hands and I was actually named after the one that sort of looked like a bird.
Life was complicated enough right now. I didn’t need anymore of that. So, I kept my mouth shut as Ian tapped a few times on a couple of different markings and the door creaked open.
Walking through it, I expected to find a long and winding staircase, the kind of thing littered with lanterns and covered in ancient cobwebs. Instead, what I walked into was something like a command center.
Metal walls ensnared me as the cave door slammed shut behind me. Several chairs dotted the room and the walls were peppered with screens, which I soon saw showcased live feeds of what was happening inside the castle.
“Took you long enough,” a familiar voice said from the far end of the room. I watched as a chair spun around, revealing Raelyn, who gave me a little smile as he stood and walked toward us.
“Forgive me for not being more punctual, Your Highness,” Ian said, with something like sarcasm in his voice. “I had to make sure Taron was on duty before I could actually make my move.” He looked over at me, nudging me with his shoulder. “You probably don’t remember this, but with a handful of rum treats, and could walk past Taron with the throne itself on your back without him noticing.”
“I do not remember that,” I confirmed, swallowing hard and looking over at Raelyn. “Your Highness.”
“What are you doing?” Raelyn asked, narrowing his eyes at me, but still smiling. “You don’t have to call me that here. I mean, you don’t have to call me that anywhere. This is your palace, your empire. Which i
s to say that you outrank me.” He shook his head. “Not that we ever cared about things like that, you and me. Honestly, Ian only called me that to make fun of me.”
“It’s true,” Ian said, shrugging and heading toward the monitors.
“He’s kind of a pain like that,” Raelyn answered.
“That part, I do remember,” I replied.
“Good,” he said. “Hopefully, we can get the rest of it back soon. We need to move quickly. Otherwise, we might run out of time.”
“Run out of time for what?” I asked, shuffling a little uncomfortably.
Raelyn stared at me. In his bright eyes, I saw a plethora of things; hesitation, guilt, kindness, and maybe even a little affection. The thing I saw most clearly though, the thing that overpowered everything else when I looked at him, was the fear.
“One impossible goal at a time, okay, Moira?” he asked, smiling at me again and motioning to the monitors. “Follow me.”
I did as he asked, and strangely enough, it felt right. It felt natural. Though I held no memory of him before the day I met him in those sacred grounds, it seemed to me like I had been following him for years. He towered over me, but somehow, that only made me feel safer in his presence.
A wave of calm washed over me at that moment, and I realized I wouldn’t mind following him for years to come as well.
“You’re standing in a very special part of the castle,” Raelyn said. “In fact-”
“Please don’t tell me I built it,” I cut him off, twirling the end of my hair around my finger. “If you tell me I built it, I’m literally going to lose my mind.”
I had heard enough of this. There was enough about my apparent past, about my apparent self, that I didn’t remembered. I had no desire to be told there were extra pieces to the puzzle.
“Funny thing about the spell Moira cast on herself,” Ian said, looking back at me from the monitors. “As soon as she cast it, she started using the word ‘literally’ a lot, and using incorrectly as well.”