by Ava Jae
“Forget what your father says. He’s been acting like a spoiled child, and his ancestors would be ashamed.”
I gasp and Mamae raises a shoulder unapologetically. “Just don’t tell him I said so.” She stands and takes my shoulders. “You are going to be a blessed Avra, Kora. Do you know how I know?”
I shake my head.
“Because Kala handpicked you himself the moment he placed you in my womb. You were born for the throne, not your brother. He is far too much like your father.”
I frown. “Father is a strong Avra. The people respect him.”
But Mamae shakes her head. “Naï, Kora. The people fear your father. It’s time for a new age in Elja, one in which people are ruled by an Avra who respects them as much as they do her. One in which the people do not need to be afraid. Do you understand?”
I take a breath and nod. “Sha, Mamae. I understand.”
She smiles and brushes a tendril of hair behind my ear. “I have a gift for you.”
Despite my nerves, a lightness flutters through my gut and pulls the corners of my cheeks northward. “You do?”
She laughs. “Of course, my beauty. Did you believe I’d allow the set my daughter became a woman to pass without a proper gift?”
I shrug. “Father said Elja was my gift and I better appreciate it.”
Mamae sighs. “Well you have another gift from me. Close your eyes.”
I smile and obey.
Her soft fingers brush my right ear and she pauses. “This is going to sting for a moment.” She slides an earring through the piercing at the bottom of my ear, then her fingers travel to just under the notch in the point of my ear. She’s so close that the sweet and tangy fragrance of her skin fills my nose. Something cold cradles the tip of my ear as a low humming noise buzzes through the air. A sound like a koti sting, the bite of metal through flesh, then the humming stops and Mamae steps away. My ear throbs, but it’s not unbearable.
“Open your eyes.”
I do as she tells me and then face the nearby mirror, tilting my head to see my new gift. The earring is a deep purple gem connected to a ring at the top of my ear with a light chain made of a blue-tinted metal called ushara found only in the Daïvi mountains. A smile tugs at my lips as my fingers run over the chain.
“It was mine,” Mamae says. “And my mother’s before me, and her mother’s before her.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say. “I love it. I’ll never take it off.”
She smiles. “Just remove the chain while you’re sleeping. I’d hate for it to get caught on something.”
I start to answer, but a knock at the door interrupts my thoughts.
“Avra-saï,” a voice calls. “It’s time.”
The words are a kick to the stomach. I catch my breath and my eyes widen. “I’m not ready. I can’t—”
Mamae takes my hands and pulls me to my feet. “You are ready, my heart. You’re not a child anymore, and it is time for you to come into your inheritance. You’ll be the best Avra Elja has ever seen.”
“But—”
“Would I lie to you?” Her eyes glint with pride as she watches me.
I take a breath and shake my head. “Naï.”
“Naï, of course I wouldn’t.” She steps behind me and pulls my shoulders back. “Walk with your head held high. If you believe the throne is yours, so will the people.”
I do as she says, steeling my face and fixing my posture.
“There,” she says with a nod. “Now you are ready.”
But she was wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for the screams and ashes of my people.
I wake clutching the knife under my pillow, my heart ramming against my chest. The heat of the unseasonably warm night sticks to my forehead and bakes my skin, but the sweat on my back and temples is cool. I sigh and relax my grip on the knife, chasing away the panic of the always nightmarish ending to that memory.
Breathe.
After calming my heart, I slide out of bed and throw on a loose silk robe. While my feet pad silently against the marble floor, Eros stirs and sits up, rubbing his eyes and squinting into the darkness. “Taking a walk?” he croaks.
“I’m fine,” I say softly. “I just need some water. Go back to sleep.”
He sways in place for a moment, then falls back onto the bed, dead to the world.
Light from the moons and the glittering stars streams through the open window into my bathroom. I step over to the sink and splash cold water onto my face, drink deeply, then pat my face dry with a towel. Straightening, I catch my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My robe and wrap has slipped over my left shoulder and the ugly pink scar swallowing my shoulder and arm is visible—the ever-present reminder of the violence and death that welcomed me to the throne. A symbol of my inadequacy—a sign, some say, from Kala himself that I am unworthy of the throne. That Dima, not his weak-minded sister, should rule.
I am the child who never should have been. My father wanted a son, and he got him, but Father and Mamae never expected me with him. Some call twins Ul’Inote, His Act, as my mother did. In Inara, brother and sister twins are revered, considered the highest blessing from Kala because they’re a reflection of the original prophets of our faith, the twins Alara and Oro d’Inara. But to Father, I was a curse. A punishment. And though I tried, there was nothing I could have done to change his mind.
Now Mamae and Father’s spirits have traveled through the veil of this world, and while they aren’t here, Father’s judgment still sits heavily on my shoulders.
I cover my arm and pull the robe closed. It’s late and I should get some rest. I start to turn away from the mirror, but a shadow flickers in my reflection behind me. A streak of black moving—
I throw my arms over my head and duck—the mirror shatters. Broken glass rains over me. I stumble forward and a figure steps out of the darkness, swiping at me. I gasp and jump back—hot pain spears through my foot, streaking up my leg and into my hip. My knee gives out—I hit the tile; my foot throbs. The figure steps toward me, but my vision is blurred with tears and I can barely make out his form. The soles of his shoes crunch on the glass. I pull a shard into my fist, clenching it tightly.
Light floods the room and a guttural scream rips through the air as two men hit the floor: Eros and a shorter, unusually pale man with muscular arms and a scraggly orange beard. Eros holds a knife in the bearded man’s shoulder and crimson streaks the floor, the man’s torso, and Eros’s face. The man grabs a handful of glass and smashes it into Eros’s chest, then slams his head into Eros’s forehead. Eros loses his grip on the knife and hits the ground hard; the bearded man rushes out of the room.
I try to stand but the pain in my foot is tremendous. Eros jumps to his feet and bolts out the door after the bearded man.
Moments later, my bathroom is flooded with guards and people asking me questions. I demand to see Neja and send the guards after the would-be assassin. Anja helps me to my bed, but blood is everywhere. Purple, red, and somewhere in between—smeared across the tile like a gruesome work of art. Neja arrives minutes later and begins picking glass out of my foot. All the noise and commotion—as well as my shouting—upsets Iro, and he hides under my bed, maybe a little too docile for his own good. Did he even notice there was an intruder in my room? If he did, he probably hid, which I suppose is to be expected considering he’s been rendered harmless. Still, I wish he’d made a noise or done something to warn me.
Between unpleasant outbursts, I ask about Eros, about the bearded man. Did they catch the assassin? Is Eros alive? How did he get in and how did he get past the guards?
No one has answers and it’s infuriating. I ignore the latent nausea twisting my gut, but there’s little I can do about my shivering hands or the inexplicable cold chilling me from the inside out. I pray Eros is all right—he’s a strong fighter, but if my guards allowed an assassin to sneak into my room … is Eros in danger from more than just the assassin?
Neja has sealed and wrapped
my foot, and I’m about to demand an update when the door bursts open and a group of three guards drag two men onto my floor. They are both cuffed and painted in blood and one of them is extremely irritated.
“You idiots,” I snap, crossing my arms over my chest where my thin-as-a-bedsheet robe obscures little. “Uncuff Eros immediately. I would be dead without his assistance tonight.”
One of the guards deactivates and removes Eros’s cuffs, and he steps beside me, rubbing his wrists. The bearded man hasn’t moved since he was deposited on the floor. A pool of scarlet is forming beneath him and he lies perfectly still. Perfectly dead.
I look at Eros, but he shakes his head. “It wasn’t me.”
I turn to my guards. “Why is he dead?”
The men glance at each other, then back to me. “I assumed he was killed in the fight,” one says.
“Not according to the one who fought him.”
They don’t say it, but the way they glance at Eros then look at me says it all. “I trust his account, as should you. He wasn’t killed in the fight, which means he was killed sometime afterward. Unless someone else was involved in this arrest, I must assume that one of you three delivered the fatal blow. So then? Who was it?”
No one steps forward or speaks. They stand still as stone, their gazes frozen above my head.
I shake my head. “Get him out of here. I want this cleaned up. Eros, with me.” I stand—and gasp. Hot pain streaks from my foot to my hip and my knee buckles under me, but a strong arm sweeps around my waist and pulls me up. Eros gently pulls my arm over his shoulder and helps me balance.
We move like that to the sitting area outside, and I’m impossibly aware of his warmth against me. You would think I’d be accustomed to his nearness by now, given that we share a bed, but this is … different. Intentional. His body is strong and muscular against my side and yet his fingers are delicate, barely grazing my ribs.
“Are you all right?”
His voice is a splash of cool water on my face. “Sha, I’m fine.” I lean against the banister and breathe in the clean desert air as Eros closes the doors behind us.
After a pause, he says, “Thank you.”
I raise my brows. “I should be thanking you. What are you grateful for?”
He stares over the waves of sand, the light of four moons bathing his face in cool light. “You trust me. Publicly, no less. That’s no minor favor coming from … someone like you.”
“Trust is earned. You earned it tonight.”
“It’s not going to backfire on you, is it? I mean, politically?”
I sigh and run my fingers through my hair. “Everything backfires on me politically. I’ve given up trying to please everyone.”
“People will always find fault where they want to,” Eros says.
I nod. “I don’t suppose you know which one of the guards killed the assassin?”
He shakes his head. “I was a little distracted arguing with the guards trying to arrest me. I didn’t even notice he wasn’t moving until you did.”
I groan and press my palms against my eyes. “I’ve half a mind to remove all three of them from their posts.”
“Why don’t you?”
I pull my hands away and sigh. “The guards already favor my brother. I don’t need to give them further reason to despise me.”
“Because you’re a woman?”
“Because I’m not a warmongering commander well over six and a half measures tall.”
His lips go tight and his fingers clench the banister. “You attacked my people easily enough,” he says evenly, but the pain is clear in his eyes. A hot pang strikes my stomach, and I look away.
“It wasn’t easy, nor was it a decision I made lightly.” I accidentally shift onto my throbbing foot and pain spears through my leg. I grimace. “I know I’ve said this before, Eros, but—”
A door behind us opens and my brother leans out. “A word?”
Oh, he’s speaking to me now, is he? I suppress a glare as Eros helps me off the banister and back into my room. Dima barely looks at me as I hobble back to my bed and sit. The guards salute my brother and a flash of heat sets my hands trembling again—they didn’t even acknowledge me when I entered the room.
“Sha, I’m doing fine, by the way,” I say, reining my temper in—although not by much. “Neja says the cut should complete healing by tomorrow night.”
“Good,” he says. “I presume you’ve begun preparations for retaliation?”
I arch an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“Surely you won’t allow this act of war to go unpunished.”
“Naï, but—”
“Then you must attack the remaining rebels of the west. Silence them for eternity.”
“He wasn’t one of us.” Eros crosses his arms over his chest. “I know every face from my camp, and I’ve never seen that man before.”
“Then you missed a face,” Dima spits. “Know your place, half-blood.”
But rather than backing down, Eros steps toward him. “He wasn’t even from the desert. Didn’t you see his skin? He’s barely seen a set of sun, let alone cycles baking under two. And our men stay clean-shaven and most keep their hair short. Wherever he came from, it wasn’t any of the encampments.”
“How dare you address me, you—”
“Step away from him.” I stand, shifting the weight onto my good leg. “Eros knows much more about the ways of the rebels than we do, and we would be wise to listen to him.”
Some of the guards scowl and I very nearly throw them out, but I hold my tongue.
Dima gapes. “You’re defending him?”
“Why shouldn’t we listen to him? He was one of them!”
“He’s a half-blood, Kora! The desert trash doesn’t even accept their kind because they know they’re a corruption of the races that shouldn’t exist.”
I pull my shoulders back and stand as straight as I can without toppling over. “Regardless of whether he should be here, he is, and he has valuable information we’d be idiots to ignore. If Eros says the man wasn’t from the deserts, I believe him.”
Dima takes a step back and shakes his head. His lips part and he stares at me as if I’ve just slapped him across the face. “Unbelievable. You’re siding with that waste of air over your own blood.”
I don’t tell him this so-called waste of air has consistently protected me—something my blood can’t claim. I don’t tell him I’d side with much worse over my backstabbing power-hungry brother. “Get out of my room, Dima. And for the record, I’m not authorizing anything.”
As soon as her foot heals, Kora says we’re taking a trip. Whatever that involves.
She tells me to bathe and gives me a new uniform to wear while she does whatever morning ritual she does with Anja. I’m not sure how long I’ve been here, but the cut on the back of my hand has long faded into a neat pink scar. And I’m not sure when it happened, but something about Kora has changed. Or maybe I’ve changed. Or maybe we’ve both changed.
When she first pushed me into that oath, I convinced myself it wouldn’t matter. I was doing it for my people—to buy their freedom back so they could rebuild. I was doing it because it felt like the right thing to do, even if I hated her guts.
And now? Now I don’t know. Now she seems to be trying to be a better ruler, even if it might be too late. Now she seems apologetic for the way she slaughtered my people—even if she was totally convinced that we were somehow at fault for what had happened to hers. Now I’ve seen her compassionate to that little girl in the slums, vulnerable after her nightmares, empathetic to a man with a secret lover who didn’t really want to court her, and strong in the face of people who obviously don’t want her on the throne. People who she should be able to trust, but can’t.
It was so easy to hate her when she was the face of a faraway force we had to run from. When she was one of them—the Sepharon who enslaved us. When she didn’t make me laugh, and she didn’t trust me with her life, and she didn’t turn to me wh
en she felt lost.
Now I don’t know what to think. But even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to hate her anymore.
Kora doesn’t just treat me better than I expected as a servant. She treats me better than the Nomads ever did.
Not that any of that makes her owning me okay. Not that any of that makes what she did to my home, my family, my people okay. But I can’t just ignore it, either.
I take my time washing up mostly so I don’t have to watch Kora get her hair done again. When I’m done, I change into the new clothes—a pair of loose white skirt-pants with red cuffs, weird, sandal-like shoes with more straps than I care to figure out how to use, and a loose white jacket made of some kinduv nearly see-through material. The jacket has a silver seal running along the front, but I don’t bother. My uniform is usually shirtless, so I doubt she’s going to care.
I knock twice, wait for approval, then enter her room. A bag slams into my stomach and I nearly drop it. But not just because I wasn’t expecting it—I more wasn’t expecting Kora. Or rather, I wasn’t expecting such a nice view of her perfectly sculpted and bronzed stomach.
“Good reflexes,” Kora says. “Here, you’re going to want this.” She passes me a white scarf but I’m staring at the smooth skin just beneath her navel, reaching into her low-riding pants. She looks so soft and toned and—
“Something you’d like to say?” she asks, her eyes glinting.
I rip my gaze up to her face. She’s smirking. Of course she’s smirking. Could I be any more obvious?
I clear my throat and take her in, fighting the heat spreading across my body. She’s wearing a tight white top—some kinduv stretchy material covering her breasts, left arm, shoulder and little else—and loose white pants, which sit just above her hips. I’ve never seen so much of Kora and, to be honest, it’s hard to find anything to say at all.
Thank the stars the bag is keeping my dignity covered.
“Are we leaving the grounds?” I manage, focusing my eyes on hers.
“Like I said, we’re taking a trip.” She slides a scarf identical to mine out of her dresser and wraps it around her nose and mouth. “I wasn’t kidding about the scarf. Put it on.”