Part Three Ash and Oath
Part Three
Ash and Oath
“Coming here?” Liora asked.
Her voice sounded wrong in her own ears—too thin, too human for a fortress that had just screamed itself raw on something older than words.
Kael shook his head, the chains chiming softly. “Not in flesh. He rarely stoops so low. But he felt you. New blood in the Oath. He will press. Test.”
“Through the curse,” she said slowly.
“Yes.”
“Through those . . . Remnants.”
“And through me.” His jaw clenched. “He prefers familiar toys.”
There was a rawness in that last word that made her stomach knot.
“Sit,” she said.
He blinked, shoulders still braced against the doorframe. “What?”
“Sit down before you fall down,” she snapped, the healer in her finally shoving through the terror. “You’re bleeding, and you look like you’ve been hit by a runaway cart. Twice.”
For half a heartbeat, there was silence. Then something like reluctant amusement flickered behind his eyes, hairline cracks in the mask he wore even without the bone.
“You speak to your king like this?” he murmured.
“You’re not my king,” she said. “You’re my patient.”
The words steadied her as surely as any mantra. Patients she understood. Kings and gods and screaming fortresses, she did not.
She crossed the room before she could think better of it, grabbed the heavy chair by the table, and dragged it toward him. It scraped over the stone with a stubborn screech that, absurdly, made her feel better. Physical sound. Normal sound. Something she could push against.
Kael hesitated, chains chiming softly, then sank onto the chair with the gracelessness of someone whose limbs might not obey much longer.
Letting her arrange him like that wasn’t a command.
It was a choice. For the first time since she’d stepped into his realm, he was trusting her with his body for something other than dying.
The closeness made her painfully aware of him, of the heat that rolled off his skin, the rasp of his breath, the stubborn thud of his pulse beneath scarred skin.
Her own pulse answered, fluttering at the base of her throat before she could shame it quiet.
Up close, he looked . . . worse. The cracks spiderwebbing his mask glowed faintly at the edges.
The skin around his shackles was torn and scorched, the wounds oozing blood that shimmered between gold and crimson before settling.
“Do you have salves?” she asked. “Bandages?”
He huffed. “I have chains and curses, Eliora. Not a healer’s hall.”
She bit down on the sharp retort that wanted out—maybe if you’d thought to stock one, half a century of brides would be less dead—because that wasn’t fair, not after what he’d just said.
Instead, she moved to the basin, plunging her hands into the water. It was cool against her skin, blessedly normal. She splashed some into a small stone bowl, grabbed the cloth folded beside it, and returned to him.
“Give me your wrists,” she said.
His brows lifted behind the cracked mask. “You don’t know what you’re touching.”
“Bleeding wounds,” she said. “Those, I understand.”
He watched her for a long, searching moment, looking for something in her face: a flinch, perhaps, or the kind of reverence priests wore. When he didn’t find it, he exhaled and extended his hands.
Up close, the shackles looked like a cruel kind of jewelry: bands of black iron inlaid with tiny, intricate sigils that pulsed slowly with light. The edges were serrated inward, as if designed to bite with every movement. His skin had grown around some of them, then torn away again.
Liora swallowed hard and set the bowl on the arm of the chair.
“This will sting,” she said.
“I am familiar with pain.”
“So am I,” she said. “Bite your tongue instead of me.”
A short, incredulous sound escaped him. It might have been an actual laugh if it weren’t dismantled halfway by exhaustion.
She dipped the cloth and pressed it gently to one wrist.
He hissed, muscles tensing. The glow along the sigils flared, then steadied.
“Sorry,” she murmured.
“You warned me.”
“I’ve learned that doesn’t always help,” she said. Her fingers worked quickly, cleaning blood from the jagged edges, wiping away the shimmer. Each touch sent a faint shiver up her own arms, like static. The curse lived in this metal; it hummed under her skin, curious and vicious.
“You shouldn’t—” he began.
“—touch cursed iron, I know,” she said. “We’re well past the point of safe choices, don’t you think?”
His mouth tightened. “Your priests didn’t teach you caution.”
“They taught me obedience,” she said. “I’ve been . . . weaning off it.”
The confession slipped out more easily than she expected. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Or the absurdity of having a life-threatening heart-to-heart with a cursed king in a room that felt like someone had nailed a star to the middle of a bad dream.
“You don’t believe in their god,” he said, watching her hands.
“I did,” she said. “When I was small. When prayers still felt like they might matter. When I believed the suffering meant something.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve seen too many children die despite prayers,” she said flatly. “Too many ‘necessary sacrifices’ that conveniently spare the wealthy. If there is a god behind that, he isn’t the kind worth kneeling for.”
Heat bled into the space between them, sudden and sharp-edged.
“Good,” Kael said.
The single word dropped between them, small and heavy.
She looked up. “Good?”
“If you believed in him, you’d be easier to break,” he said. “He likes faith. It makes people pliable. Easier to twist.”
She thought of the whispers slithering under the door, using the softest, most familiar voice. Child.
“Is that what he did to you?” she asked quietly.
The question hung there, dangerous.
She braced for a deflection, for a cutting remark, for the rattle of chains as punctuation. Instead, he turned his hand under hers, palm up, shackles digging into his skin.
“When I was mortal,” he said, “I thought his Oath was salvation.”
Liora stilled.
“You weren’t always like this,” she said.
“No one is born a curse,” he said simply, but the chains at his wrists creaked as his hands closed into fists.
Her throat tightened. She finished cleaning one wrist and moved to the other. His blood stained the cloth a deep, almost luminous red.
“What did you ask for?” she asked. “When you took the Oath.”
His eyes lifted to the ceiling, as if seeing something through the stone.
“Peace,” he said. “An end to the wars. An end to the hunger that drove men to kill each other over scraps. I asked that no more kingdoms burn.”
“And the price?”
“Names,” he said. “He took ours. The old ones. The ones that held our histories and magic. He left me only a title. Unnamed King. And he demanded the Oath be renewed each generation.”
“With a bride,” she whispered.
“With a life,” he said. “He chose the word ‘bride’ to make it sound holy.”
The iron in his voice when he said bride could have cut stone.
Liora’s stomach churned. “He tricked you.”
“He answered exactly as I asked,” Kael said bitterly. “War ended. The realm did not burn. I did not ask what it would cost everyone who came after me.”
The Remnants in the chasm reached for her in memory, whispers trying to wrap themselves around her mind.
“You’ve been trying to fix it ever since,” she said.
His gaze dropped back to her.
“You ask many questions,” he said.
“People keep trying to stop me,” she replied, wringing out the cloth. “It never works for long.”
Something softened at the edges of his eyes. The chains slackened a fraction, as if the curse itself exhaled.
“What do you want, Eliora?” he asked.
The question caught her off guard. “To live through the night, ideally.”
“I mean beyond that,” he said. “If dawn comes and you still breathe, what do you want that has nothing to do with bargains or sisters or villagers who only love you when you suffer for them?”
The words hit like a blade slipped between ribs. She looked away, the answer so old and familiar it burned with shame.
“I want to know,” she said finally. “Everything we’re not supposed to. Why some people live when others die. Why a god demands blood. How to heal the wounds no one believes can close. I want—”
She broke off, fingers tightening around the edge of the basin.
“I want to stop being told that wanting more is dangerous,” she finished. “And I want to be the one who decides which dangers are worth taking.”
Silence pooled between them, hot and heavy.
When she glanced back, his gaze had gone very still.
“That,” he said softly, “is why he felt you.”
She stiffened. “What?”
“The hunger,” Kael said. “Not for power. For truth. For the edges of things. He hoards that. Anyone who reaches for it glows to him like a flame in the dark.”
Her skin crawled.
“Is that why I was chosen?” she whispered. “Because I . . . want too much?”
“No,” Kael said. “You were chosen because the men who run your village paid to keep their own daughters safe.”
The bluntness of it knocked the breath from her lungs more than any supernatural revelation could have.
“How do you—”
“I feel the shape of bargains when they touch the Oath,” he said. “Your mother came here once, did she not? She asked that he pass over your sister.”
Liora’s fingers went numb. “You . . . heard that?”
“I felt it,” he said. “The god listened. He decided it amused him to spare the younger and take the elder. It makes for better stories.”
Stories.
Her life, her terror, her sister’s sobbing in the square—entertainment.
Heat flooded her chest, burning away the last of the numbness. It rushed into something sharper, fiercer.
Hatred.
“Then I don’t care what he wants,” she said quietly. “He can listen all he likes.”
A slow, dangerous light moved through Kael’s eyes.
“Careful, Eliora,” he murmured. “He has a way of turning defiance into chains.”
“So do priests,” she said. “At least with him, the chains are honest.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, barely there.
“Stay angry,” he said. “It will help you survive.”