As if someone had moved it aside to stare at the drawing on the screen.
Chapter 8
Sonara
Lazaris was in Sonara’s hand in an instant, held before her as Jaxon leapt to his feet and took his place at her side.
The Crown Princess of the Deadlands?
At any moment, guards would be pouring into the saloon. Markam,damn him,what had he gotten them into?
But Markam didn’t move an inch. He sighed and plucked a bit of lint from his duster sleeve, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Save us the dramatic exit, Sunny. Azariah means you no harm. Perhaps myself, depending on how she sees the past, but…”
“The past is of no worth to me any longer,” the princess said. Careful words, calmly spoken, but she glared at him with a sudden intensity that had Sonara seeing, for the first time, the darkness in her eyes that matched King Jira’s. “But the future of my kingdomisof great value to me. It is why I came calling.”
The Princess of the Deadlands.
Sonara would have pulled on her curse, tested the air for a taste oftruth,sweet and succulent, orlie,bitter as crushed greens.
But she was so shocked by the revelation, that the cage inside of her fell dark and silent.
“There’s no Princess of the Deadlands,” Jaxon said, as if he were thinking the same exact thought. “Jira doesn’t keep the females.”
The words were not meant to be unkind. For they were all anyone in the Deadlands had ever known. But Sonara saw the way Azariah’s shoulders stiffened. The way her fingers curled into fists. “Everything you’ve ever heard about him and his children… it all stands to betrue.”
The rumor was that when Jira took a bride each year, he sired an unwanted female. Furious, he’d dump the child into the Hadru’s pit. There were countless stories out there of brides he’d taken, who disappeared into his palace only to reappear nine months later, mere shells of themselves. As if he’d stolen something from them that could never be replaced.
Some of his brides never reappeared at all. But every year, at the Choosing, he took another new one. And every year, he was given a daughter instead of a son.
“My father wants a male heir,” Azariah said. “And yet the goddesses have never blessed him with one.”
Now Thali turned her Canis gaze onto Sonara and Jaxon. “Months ago, I journeyed far to find the Lady, when I heard talk of her existence. The clerics have many eyes and ears across the continent. We speak of the hushed things. Whisper of the stories yet untold, beyond our hiding places of worship. I didn’t know if I believed it myself, when I heard tell of the princess that survived. But just because you have never seen something with your own eyes does not make it untrue.”
“So it’s true, then,” Jaxon said softly. “The king feeds his children to the Hadru.”
At this, Azariah chuckled softly. “Not quite,” she said. “The real truth is far darker. My father only sires females. And when he does, he takes us, not to the Hadru, as many whisper in the streets of Stonegrave. He takes us beneath his castle, to the depths of the kingdom itself. And there, he takes a blade and slits our throats.”
The world seemed to have fallen silent.
Even Suzie Quick and her girls were in between songs, their silence nearly unbearable.
“Many have died,” Azariah said. “Countless before me, and countless after. But for some reason, I survived. I cameback.”
“Even if it were true…” Sonara started, swallowing hard as the story suddenly began to mix with her own past, in her mind. A girl from one kingdom, slain by her father. And a girl from another, forced over the edge of a cliff by her mother. “Why would he keep you hidden all these years?”
Azariah looked to Thali, her gaze shifting from something like sadness to wonder.
“Because the princess goes against everything the Three Kingdoms have ever stood for,” Thali whispered. “She is a Child of Shadow. She was brought back to live another life, and such is the reason the king slew her and her siblings in the first place. In hope that one would come back again, with powers that belong in the stories of old.”
The King came from centuries’ worth of Shadowblood hunters and huntresses. They’d wiped them from the surface of Dohrsar, signed a long-ago decree that ensured none would ever rise to power again, after the ancient Shadowbloods rose up. And once the Shadowbloods disappeared,their tale was told as a warning. A way to scare children into hiding. A way to ensure that if a Shadowblood was ever to appear, years later, their bloodline somehow missed in the destruction… people would fear them.
They would hand them over or hunt them down. There were paintings and depictions of slain Shadowbloods all across Dohrsar. In the Soreian palace, they were hung up like portraits in the Hall of Dead. Sonara had seen it, only once, when Soahm snuck her inside. In the White Wastes, there was a Night of Reckoning, where families threw black coals into their hearths, the dark smoke rising into the sky to ward off the evil, to keep the curse of the Shadowbloods from ever entering their lands.
Jira’s family had led itall.The backbone of the Shadowblood extinction.
It wasn’t possible that he’d try tocreateone. Let alone, keep one alive, especially his own daughter.
“He longs for power such as this,” Azariah explained. She held out her gloved hands, and Sonara remembered the lightning swimming across her palms. She found herself glancing suddenly upwards, at the girl’s scar. The mark of a collar upon her throat. Only a lifetime of bearing such a burden would cause a scar like that.
