11. Ash
Chapter 11
Ash
He’d chosen power and his beliefs over me. It stung worse than any heartache I’d had. Deep down, I believed everyone only wanted to be chosen, to be regarded above all else. Having the person I loved choose something other than me was something I didn’t know if I’d ever recover from. Maybe that was only me holding on to silly childish beliefs. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to ask him to choose, but then again, who actually knew what was right in this world? People that said they had life figured out were only lying, because tomorrow would be a new day and it would all change again. The only form of truth that I could find came in the form of the aching in my chest.
“What life? You’d be hunted until you were old and wrinkled. If we ever had children, they would be hunted too. If we ran off together, the King would hunt until he found us. That’s no life,” Diesel murmured.
I could now see his reasoning and why he’d chosen to keep it from me, but I felt this irreparable crack in the deep confines of my heart that told me what we had was broken. Not only that, but I continued to lie about not having what he said could be a blonde ability, and he continued to believe me. That had to be the reason I kept seeing visions of the future every time my adrenaline spiked. What else could explain it? Diesel thought I was normal, a beacon of change, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. I thought of telling him the truth, but something stopped me. Diesel had tried to kill me when he found out I was blonde—he hated blondes. I could see it in the way he sometimes looked at my hair. He had convinced himself that I wasn’t like them… Was that the only reason he had fallen in love with me? He lied to himself until he believed his own convictions. Would he really wholly accept me for who I was and not what he believed me to be?
“Did you know we were supposed to be married?” I asked, accepting the harsh reality of his words.
His eyes darkened at my question. “How much of the letters did you read?”
“Enough.”
“I was supposed to kill you, Ash. The King wanted you dead. It had been sixteen years and Liam still hadn’t come back for you. He had given up on you and thought you would be better off dead.”
“Then why didn’t you finish the job? Why am I still alive?”
“I am completely and totally in love with you. I couldn’t do it. I would never do it.“ His voice turned raspy. “The soldiers that came during the spring festival brought the letter with my orders. I tried to distance myself from you, but I couldn’t. You’re so deeply ingrained in my soul that I can’t get you out. When those bastards took you, I lost it. The only thing that mattered was getting you back. I could have let them take you, let you go, did what the King wanted. They would have taken you to Hope, and the King would have taken care of you for me. I told you I would never let anything happen to you, and I meant it. If Will hadn’t been there to help, I would have burned Rollins down to find you. As for the marriage,…it was my idea.”
His emerald eyes watered in the darkness. I swallowed hard. How was it possible to love and hate someone so intensely?
“But you still didn’t tell me…” I whispered.
“I know…” he whispered, rubbing his hands along the thighs of his dark pants. “After my dad came to live in Cedar Hill with you, Maximus took me in. Your grandfather raised me until I came to live with my dad five years ago.”
“The day we met?” I had already puzzled it together, and I only wanted to hear him confirm it.
“It was my first day in Cedar Hill. I came with the soldiers that passed through that day. It was a complete accident how we met.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked again.
He paused for a moment, trying to find the right words, before his face fell. “Stay true to Novum,” Diesel murmured into the dark night. “I made a vow as a soldier that I would put Novum first—I made a promise to my father that I would not tell you. I could not break either of those promises.” I felt as if he still neglected to tell me something. Why did he hate blondes so much? Surely it couldn’t just be because that’s what he’d been taught his whole life?
“But what Maximus is doing to blondes and even what his soldiers are doing when he isn’t looking is wrong.” I raised my voice, remembering the story Silas told me.
“Things that we can fix, together,” he assured me.
He slipped his hand into mine, and I studied his face, his green eyes, dark with sadness weighing them down and his beard, grown out from days of traveling. I loved him, even after all the lies he told me. I still loved him, and I hated it. I hated that every time I looked at him, I felt like a stupid, naive girl who found her first love and should have seen the red flags from five miles away, but continually gave him the benefit of the doubt. I hated that I had been weak for him. I hated that I could see his stupid, bleeding heart and I still loved it. I loved that even after all he’d been through, he was able to find his humanity and care about me, even if it was in his own messed-up way, but it still wasn’t enough.
I pulled my hand away and silently shook my head as I stared at his big brown boots that were nestled close to the fire.
“I will always love you—we are getting married. You can hate me forever or learn to love me again, and we can change the world…together,“ he said.
I loathed his words. “You can’t force someone to love you, Diesel.”
“No I can’t—but you don’t have many other choices.”
“If you could let me go, let me be free…would you?” I turned my eyes to him again.
He didn’t dare look at me when he answered. “No, you are mine until death separates us, and if you go first, I’ll follow you there.” Maybe he believed in his own words, but his actions screamed otherwise .
“Unless the King orders you to do something else, right?” He made no move to answer the question that lingered between us. I was done talking to him. He may have shared his truth with me, but it wasn’t enough—I wasn’t enough for him. He chose Novum, my grandfather, and everything else over me. He caged me into a trap I could never escape.
I turned to lie back down and caught blue eyes full of sympathy staring from under a bedroll. Jerek had heard every word.
The trees became scarcer the further south we rode. Towns and villages popped up often. Wide expanses of grassy valleys and rolling, treeless hills accompanied us on our journey. We rode through Rollins, the halfway point, where I had the unfortunate pleasure of staying in a basement on the outskirts not long before.
People stared as we rode past, whispering things about the Prince and Princess of Novum. I pulled my knit hat low and the black hooded coat over my head so that nobody would look my way. Especially since my hair had long since returned to its silver blonde color, shining like a beacon in a sea of dark-haired people. With me slouched on my horse with only my hands peeking out, it was easy for everyone to glance past me—meanwhile Diesel rode with his back stiff as a board and his chest high.
The closer we got to Hope, the denser and more joyous the crowds of people became. They flocked to the places we passed to get a glimpse of the company riding through. Jerek received the most attention. With a face like his, I could see why. Women approached him on his horse and in the places we stayed in the evenings. He graced them all with a dazzling smile, gifting them with winks and murmured words.
The weather grew colder by the day. The leaves were gone from most of the trees, and the grass faded to nothing. Snow would soon fly, and I dreaded the winter that would come with it.
We hadn’t slept a night on the ground since Diesel spilled all his secrets. Residents of the passing towns lent us rooms for the frosty nights, trying to gain the favor of the King. None of the people seemed to garner the same sort of hatred and wariness of soldiers as the people on the outskirts of Novum. They even seemed glad when the soldiers strode into their town, offering them gifts and free food without a fight. The soldiers changed too—they were kinder to these people than they were to the lowly population that lived on the outskirts of the country. I observed all this in silence from behind my hood as we rode.
It was as if we had lapsed through time into a whole different world. A world where the country’s citizens were protected rather than harassed by the soldiers. Where the people believed in the man leading them. The differences were astounding; they were better dressed, with fewer hard lines marring their faces from days of hard work and stress from trying to get through another day. Towns grew larger with bakeries, clothing shops, and butchers inside actual buildings where you could go buy your goods. Nothing like the tiny vendor carts that lined the street of Cedar Hill on a good day. These men and women knew nothing of the hardships that we had suffered through in that tiny cabin, so far away.
No wonder Pop had liked to leave and explore the wonders of the world outside of Cedar Hill. I wanted to go rummage through some of the shops myself, just to see what it was like. If my father didn’t know where Pop took me when they met all those years ago, it was no wonder that he never found me. Cedar Hill was like a pinprick on the map, the cabin where I spent most of my time even tinier, impossible to find amongst the pines.
Diesel’s words played on an infinite loop in my head.
I will always love you—we are getting married. You can hate me forever or learn to love me again, and we can change the world…together.
His dauntingly tight grasp on me made me wonder if I’d ever be free of him. It was the part about changing the world that caught me. Did he want to change Novum—change it for the better? Was it possible that we could stop the terror and hunting of the blondes? Did he want that?
In every town we passed, I searched and searched the people for any who possessed the same color of hair as me, only to find nothing. Were the people blissfully unaware of why that was or too stupid to care?
Peters’s talk of the rebellion in the North still burned in the back of my skull like a beacon, calling me to action. For years, I had longed for a better world where I could be free—truly and unequivocally free. Free from the hair dye and hiding, from the stress that chipped away at my soul every day in an effort to simply put food in front of my family. What did the people fighting against the King in the North stand for? Were they truly as wild and savage as they sounded?
I would help, I decided. I would help anyone who wanted to take my grandfather’s power from him, as long as they would help the blondes. Pop said I could change the world with his book, and I intended to try. I didn’t believe blondes were inherently bad because we possessed superhuman abilities. Diesel was right when he said there were two sides to every story. I only knew the King’s side, I didn’t know why the blondes had killed the original King Etan. Or why Liam had let them free, or why they raided the King’s house, or why they killed Beth. Was her death intentional or did she get caught in the crossfire? It sounded to me like there were errors on both sides.
Part of me may be broken by my own naivety from believing in Diesel and all those days spent in terror at the hands of the mountain lion and then the bounty hunters, but I could still help. I was the Princess of Novum, and that had to mean something—it had to hold some power. I was done with living my life and letting things happen to me as they pleased; it was time that I was the thing that happened to life . I was the master of my own fate and a force to be reckoned with. No one would get in my way again. I was angry, and I wouldn’t stop until the blondes were free and the people I loved were safe.
Life was so much bigger than the narrow lens that I had seen it through in my hometown—so much bigger than the petty love between Diesel and me. There was so much change that could be wrought on the world, but someone had to take the first step. I would do anything to make the world a better place for Nan, Marva, Anne, and Pete. For Ruth—the little girl with so much hope in her eyes that would be smashed by the world. For the woman Silas spoke of that didn’t deserve the ending she endured. And for the blonde man I had seen in Cedar Hill the day I met Diesel that had so much gloom in his face.
Run.
Run , he had mouthed to me. Did he know what came for me?
All these people and countless others deserved so much more than they had. They deserved a place in the world without fear. Could I give that to them? I had to try—it was the only thing I had left to hope for.
I calculated and plotted as we rode. It was like hunting—a game. A game full of moves and countermoves. I had to be smarter and stealthier than my quarry. It was the only way that I would be left standing in the end. The biggest piece of the game rode next to me atop a black horse like my own, always sending glances my way.
We can change the world…together.
Did he mean it? What did Diesel really think of the King? He had never really said. In fact, he never really commented on the soldiers or the cruelty either. He claimed to love me, to love me enough that he would follow me into death. I could use that, use his love to make him stand by my side against my grandfather. He was to be the King—he would attain more power than anybody, and I had more sway over him than anybody else did. I had to use that to my advantage. If he could lie about loving me, then I could play too—probably. My heart still yearned for him, my first love. I wanted to yank the thing out and feed it to the wolves so I wouldn’t have to feel anything anymore. I grabbed hold of the feelings of betrayal and held them as hard as I could. They would be like a weapon I could wield in the coming days…months. However long it would take, I would win. I could lie and manipulate just as easily as Diesel could. The only way to overthrow the monarchy was to turn the people against the King or steal the Prince’s heart. I’d already done one.
This time, when Diesel glanced my way, I sent him a small smile—an olive branch. Let the game begin. His eyes softened slightly, and his throat bobbed in a swallow. He sent a small smile back, and we rode into the heart of the monster’s lair.