Page 19 of Embers of Ruin

At that moment, my thoughts drift back to Onyx. There’s something about him I can’t quite understand, and against my better judgment, it makes me want to know more. It would be easier if Onyx made sense.

I close my eyes and lean back against the curved copper, letting the water cradle the full weight of me for the first time in days, and of all the things my traitorous mind could choose to dwell on, it chooses him. Not the king waiting at the end of this journey, though he should haunt every thought I have. Not the danger of being here, though that would be sensible.

Onyx.

His laugh on the road after I threw my flask at him. The way his face changes when the people of Lycar call his name. The softness that appears around the edges of him when a child shoves an ugly wooden horse into his hand and insults his mare to his face. The anger that flickered across him when I spoke of the Shadow King as rot. The patience he shows me one moment and the maddening arrogance he shows me the next.

I drag my wet hands down my face and sink lower into the tub. Because none of those things fit neatly together, and I am beginning to suspect that is the very reason he unsettles me. A cruel man would be easier to hate. A cruel man who serves a cursed king, kidnapped me from my home, and hauled me across a dying continent would fit every story I’ve ever been told. I’d know where to place him in my mind then—somewhere dark and simple and safely monstrous. But Onyx won’t stay there. He keeps stepping out of the shape I have made for him, emerging as something more complicated every time I think I finally understand him.

It’s deeply inconvenient.

I think of the way Otto and Talia greeted him, not with fear or stiff respect, but with the easy affection people reserve for those they trust. I think of how the villagers smiled at him in the street and how children ran toward him instead of away. No one in Lycar looked at him as if he were the king’s shadow made flesh.

Either everyone here is a terrible judge of character, or everything I know about the Shadow Guard is incomplete. I don’t particularly care for either possibility.

I scrub the soap through my hair again, more aggressively this time, as though irritation might somehow help me order my thoughts. It does not. If anything, it makes them worse, because then I remember the look he gave me downstairs when Otto announced there was only one bed—calm, unreadable, and entirely too unconcerned for a man who is apparently content to share a room with a woman he abducted. Perhaps he truly is that unbothered. Perhaps I’m the only one making this more complicated than it needs to be. The thought sits like a boulder on my chest.

By the time I rinse myself clean, the water has cooled just enough to be bearable rather than blistering, and my limbs have grown heavy with that dangerous sort of comfort that makes a person believe they might never need to move again. I tilt my head back and watch steam gather in faint droplets along the shutter above me, and for one reckless moment I let myself imagine remaining here indefinitely—warm, unseen, suspended in the only pocket of peace I have felt since leaving Elvora.

But beyond the door waits a room with one bed, a continent full of questions, and a man I understand less with every passing hour. Which means, naturally, the bath cannot last forever.

Cruelty truly does take many forms.

* * *

Later, back in the room, the quiet is unsettling. Not the uncomfortable silence I expected when Otto shoved us into a room together, but something more…tense. Neither of us seems eager to start a conversation, but I feel the need to fill the silence. I don’t like the idea of sitting with my thoughts for too long, which is a burden in and of itself.

I sit cross-legged on the bed, carving a wooden horse from a block of oak while Onyx settles into the chair near the hearth. I picked up the hobby long ago, and muscle memory makes each careful stroke almost effortless. The fire casts a warm amber glow across the room, softening the hard angles of Onyx's face as the faint scar along his jaw catches the light. For a while, we simply listen to the crackle of the fire.

“I still don't understand you,” I admit eventually.

His eyes lift from the fire. “I know.”

Two words. That’s all he gives me. Irritation flares hot in my chest. Of course he knows. He’d sooner bleed than tell me what he’s thinking.

“That wasn’t a compliment,” I mutter.

“So now you want to know your alleged kidnapper?”

I roll my eyes. Gods, this man is impossible.

“I thought everyone on this continent feared the Shadow Guard.”

“They do, for the most part.”

“Not here, they don’t. Not the way they do back home. The Lycarians avoid speaking about the King, but they aren't deathly afraid of him the way they are in Elvora.”

Like my people.

A muscle shifts in his jaw. “Lycar knows us. They know they have nothing to fear.”

I frown. “And what exactly does that mean?”

“It means they know the difference between stories and people, and they understand history. They don’t make fear shape what they believe.”

The answer settles heavily between us, and I scowl. I don't like what he’s implying. Mostly because I don't know how to argue with it. He’s undoubtedly seen more of the continent than I ever will, and I can’t ignore the possibility that he’s right.

Outside, the village settles into the night. Laughter drifts through the streets, mingling with the quiet hum of ordinary life. The sort of sounds that don't belong in a kingdom ruled by a cursed king.