The Half King

17

T here was no muting the echo of Father Padron’s voice during the day’s ride. It chanted in time with Ash’s hooves: won’t-last won’t-last , concu-bine concu-bine . A new fear tightened her chest and reminded her of what Kian had said in the dark, stone room—that he had dreaded the pain of losing her more than the disappointment of never having her at all. At the time, she had thought it silly of him to let his fear of tomorrow steal his joy from today. But now she understood him all too well.

Mere hours had passed since the king had promised his soul to her, and already the fear of losing him had begun. A ball of ice formed in her stomach when she imagined giving her love to him, freeing him from his curse, and then watching him marry another woman. But that was the inevitable outcome. A king needed legitimate heirs, and ladies of the temple weren’t permitted to marry.

Father Padron was right. Her time with Kian couldn’t last.

She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, that there was a purpose for every season, and now was the summer of her life. She could enjoy summer’s warmth or not, but dreading winter’s arrival wouldn’t stop the cold from coming. She had to be brave in order to love… Such a deceptively simple idea, but in truth, it was the hardest challenge she had ever faced.

She distracted herself from her troubled thoughts by riding alongside Daerick at the back of the caravan, where she shared with him in whispers the details of her visit to the Mortara underworld the night before. Daerick had already been watching her intently since her sudden recovery from her ailments that morning. As Kian had told her, her excuse about her courses hadn’t fooled him. She also suspected that her recovery was linked to her visit to the shadows. The timing of the two events couldn’t be a coincidence.

“At first I thought it was a vision,” she added in her softest voice, so Father Padron wouldn’t overhear. “And that I was finally receiving the Sight. But my spirit left my body and came back to it. That’s unlike any trance or vision I’ve ever heard of.”

Daerick held up a hand. “Wait a minute. So you’re telling me the underworld is a place—a place that actually exists—but it’s a purgatory for firstborn Mortaras?”

“It seems that way.” For a moment, she forgot her worries. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than returning to that place every night, except staying there for eternity. Now more than ever, she felt the weight of Kian’s curse on her shoulders.

“It almost sounds like you experienced astral projection,” Daerick murmured. “But you say your body was solid when you followed Kian through the portal?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m certain of it.”

“Then I don’t know how to label this new gift of yours.”

“Gift?” she asked. It had only happened once. “How do we know it’s a gift?”

“I suppose we don’t,” Daerick admitted. “Not until you can repeat it. But you said Kian told you you’re the only one who’s ever followed him into the shadows. You’ve done something no one else can do. If that’s not the definition of a gift, then I don’t know what is.”

“All right, let’s say it is a gift,” she said. “Do you think it’s the only one I’m meant to receive? My Claiming Day is soon. Am I fooling myself by hoping for the Sight?”

Daerick laughed without humor. “In these unusual times? Who could say? My Claiming Day is still moons away, and you saw my lapse in sanity. The rules of nature don’t seem to matter anymore.”

At that moment, she glanced at the front of the caravan and found Kian’s horse in want of a rider. Kian must have only just vanished, because his clothes were still balanced on his saddle. As the linen pile slid onto the packed dirt trail, General Petros smoothly dismounted his beast and rescued the king’s clothing before resuming his ride as though nothing had happened. No one seemed surprised by Kian’s disappearances anymore. The loss of his daylight hours had become commonplace, and that worried her.

“Why, though?” she asked Daerick. “Why do you think the curse is breaking through the veil of time?”

Daerick cast a heavy look at the landscape on either side of the trail—the cracked and barren ground, the dried tumbleweeds, the vastness of death all around them. “I think it’s this place. The blight here runs deep. Nothing good has ever happened on this mountain.”

Cerise touched his hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Let’s see if we can change that.”

…

The group approached the mountain summit at midday. The Blighted Shrine hadn’t come into view yet, but as Cerise peered ahead of Nero, she noticed there wasn’t much higher to climb…unless he meant to lead them off a cliff.

She used one hand to fan the back of her neck. The temperature at this altitude was unbearable, and the air was too thin and stank of decay. No matter how many breaths she took, she couldn’t satisfy her lungs. Blue was struggling, too. He panted as he jogged alongside her horse, and poor Ash had slowed his pace as well, his ribs expanding between her knees.

“Not much farther.” She rubbed Ash’s neck and asked Nero, “Right?”

Nero nodded, seemingly too exhausted for words. The group continued in silence for a short while, until the path inclined so sharply that the horses couldn’t hold their footing and the wagon threatened to capsize. The caravan stopped there, and they tethered the horses in a thicket of dried brush before following Nero up the path to the mountain summit.

What they found next explained the foul smell.

The Blighted Shrine stood above them at the highest peak of the summit. The shrine was simple in its design, constructed from three narrow onyx slabs that formed a waist-high table. At the base of the shrine lay the putrid remains of what appeared to be a stag or perhaps an elk, a once majestic beast that now writhed with maggots. The goddess had rejected the offering. If Shiera had accepted it, the carcass would have been consumed by her sacred flame.

“Shameful,” Father Padron muttered.

Cerise shared a heavy look with Father Padron while pulling her headscarf over her nose. It was sacrilege to defile a holy place with the odor of death. If the shrine had been located in a more hospitable place, priests would protect it and ensure that failed offerings were removed and burned. Whoever had left the carcass behind to rot in the sun had truly been unworthy of Shiera’s favor. The goddess had been wise to reject their plea.

Blue whined and buried his snout beneath his paws. The odor had to be especially unbearable for a nose as sensitive as his. While Cerise bent down to stroke the back of Blue’s neck, she tasted the electric tang of magic and found Father Padron extending a palm toward the shrine. The carcass began to sizzle and smoke until all that remained of the enormous beast was a pile of ash, which Father Padron then swept off the summit with a wave of his hand. He cleared the air and then indicated that it was safe for Cerise to continue onward.

The path to the shrine consisted of nothing more than a craggy set of stones to climb, which meant she would have to go the rest of the way alone. She ordered Blue to stay with Daerick and then she peered at the group one last time in hopes that Kian would reappear. After all the effort they had made to reach the shrine, she had wanted to share this moment with him. But as it wasn’t meant to be, she patted down her pockets to ensure that her offerings were still there, and she turned to face the rocks.

Before she began her climb, she lowered to one knee and transferred a kiss from her fingertips to the ground in a show of respect for her surroundings. Shiera, the great goddess herself, had once stood on this very summit a thousand years ago when she had taken mortal form. Cerise climbed the first jagged rock and imagined what it might’ve been like to be there, to regard the goddess in a body of flesh. She pictured Shiera’s golden armor gleaming in the sun, her muscled arms folded as she surveyed her creation with dual expressions of mercy and wrath.

It gave Cerise chills.

She continued her climb, ignoring the pain of the sharp stones pressing into her palms. The fantasy of treading in Shiera’s footsteps swallowed her so completely that she didn’t notice when one of her sandal straps broke in half. The next thing she knew, her left foot slipped out of her shoe, and she was falling backward toward the rocky ground. She barely had time to gasp before she landed hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs.

There was a collective intake of breath from the group. No one spoke or made a sound, except for Blue, who whined and rushed to Cerise’s side. Blue helped nudge her into a sitting position, and the rest of the group surrounded her as she probed her body for damage. She found nothing wrong. Miraculously, she wasn’t even sore. But as she glanced behind her at the place where she had landed, she discovered a jagged stone protruding from the ground like a serrated blade. The stone should have severed her spine, or at least pierced her from behind. Instead of being impaled on the rock, she seemed to have bounced off of it.

In disbelief, she glanced at the group and found Father Padron bracing his hands on his knees in exhaustion as though he had used his energy to save her life. But he couldn’t have. She tasted no magic in the air.

“Did you…?” she asked him.

“No.” Father Padron shook his head. “I didn’t have time to act.”

“Then how are you alive?” Daerick demanded of her. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but very few things are beyond my understanding, and your ability to cheat death is quickly becoming one of them.”

Cerise felt Nina’s pendant warm beneath her shirt. Her sister’s necklace had protected her once again, but having been sworn to secrecy, Cerise couldn’t say so. “I suppose the goddess—”

“—works in mysterious ways?” Daerick finished with a hint of sarcasm that didn’t escape her notice.

“Yes. Her blessings abound,” she told him.

Though Daerick was too smart to have been fooled by her excuse, he didn’t argue with her. “As blessed as you are,” he said, “try to be more careful.”

“Perhaps this was a lesson,” Cerise said as she removed her other sandal. “I should have taken off my shoes before walking on sacred ground.” She glanced at Father Padron and asked, “Don’t you agree, Your Grace?”

Father Padron was watching her as though she were an incomplete puzzle. He gave an absent nod, but it was clear that her excuse hadn’t fooled him, either.

Before anyone could question her further, she stood and brushed off her hands. She ordered Blue to stay with Daerick, and then she resumed her climb up the rocks, now focused on her handholds and keeping her mind in the present. The craggy stones pierced her tender feet, but the contact gave her a sense of connection that allowed her to scale the ridge without any more missteps. Minutes later, Cerise stood safely at the top of the summit and approached the Blighted Shrine, its onyx surface gleaming in the sunlight despite having burned a thousand years’ worth of offerings.

The air around the shrine stood unnaturally still, as though the world held its breath in wonder. Cerise held her breath, too. It struck her that she was nearer to the goddess now than she had ever been. She planted the soles of her bare feet onto the stone and let her flesh absorb the history of this place.

For the first time, she understood the significance of the blighted peak, the reason it was deemed holy. The acts of love and betrayal that had happened on this peak represented the spectrum of light and dark, like Shiera herself. There was a balance to the mountain that Cerise never would have noticed if Nero hadn’t shown her the secret oasis in the Below. While the mountain’s surface was scorched with blight, deep down, hidden in another dimension, existed a tiny paradise that teemed with beauty.

As above, so below. The goddess embodied all things.

“Mother Shiera, mistress of worlds,” Cerise began in a voice thick with emotion, “I come to you with two humble gifts, and in return I ask for your runes to guide me to the Petros Blade.” She retrieved the titan hyena tooth and held it toward the sky. “First, I offer you a symbol of darkness, for it is the darkness that defines the light. Without suffering, joy is muted. Without pain, pleasure is meaningless. And without the promise of death, time has no value. Your darkness is a gift.”

Cerise placed the incisor atop the onyx shrine, and at once, a black flame consumed the tooth, and it was gone. Her heartbeat ticked with excitement. The goddess had heard her prayer and accepted her first sacrifice.

“Second, I offer you a symbol of light,” Cerise said, retrieving the dried lavender blossom that she had plucked from the Below. “For it is through the warmth of the sun and the beauty of your creation that we feel your love. And your love is what makes life worth living. Your light is a gift.”

She placed the flower on the shrine, and it, too, was consumed. But even though the offering had been accepted, Cerise felt called to do more, to give more. There was too much gratitude inside her to contain, so she did the first thing that came to mind, and she called out to the goddess in song. It was a simple melody she had learned as a child, but its lyrics perfectly captured the way she felt.

From the golden rays of sunshine to the blackest shade of night,

Your sacred presence fills my heart with sorrow and delight.

Your power is eternal, your hand is cruel and kind,

Your mercy has conceived my soul, and so we are entwined.

Cerise had never been proud of her singing voice, but she closed her eyes, put aside her ego, and infused each note with all of the love and faith in her heart. She finished her song and reopened her eyes.

A pair of ten-sided dice now sat atop the shrine. Each die had been carved from marble, and its stone facets bore symbols in an ancient language Cerise had yet to learn.

The goddess had rewarded her.

Just as she reached for the runes, the goddess surprised her with a second reward. A cool kiss of rain misted down from the heavens, glittering in the sunlight and filling the air with colorful prisms. Cerise spread her arms wide to soak in the mist. She beamed with joy as moisture blurred her vision. She didn’t need the Sight to understand that the goddess was singing back to her. She felt it in her very soul, and the warmth that glowed within her chest was more beautiful than she ever could have imagined.

She had been found worthy. Even after her lapse of control with Kian in the tent, the goddess had known what was in her heart.

Pure faith.

When Cerise retrieved the sunset runes and turned toward the group waiting for her below, she discovered that the king had reappeared. Kian stood at the base of the rocks, wearing nothing but a pair of linen pants and a smile filled with so much adoration and pride that Cerise’s throat thickened with fresh emotion. Beside him, General Petros placed a hand over his heart, and Nero seemed to be pretending to fish a speck of dust out of his eye. Even Father Padron grinned up at her, though his gaze held an unspoken I told you so —a reminder of the lecture he had given her that morning about the risk of forsaking her divine purpose.

Blue was the first one to greet her when she descended to the base of the rocks. Close behind him was Daerick, whose eyes shone with welling tears.

“You did it,” Daerick told her. “I didn’t think it was possible, but you actually made one good thing happen on this mountain.”

Cerise returned his smile as she opened her palm to show him the sunset runes. “Now let’s make it two.”