“I don’t know what that means.” It was more that she didn’t want to know. But she didn’t look away.
“It means that while families often hold on to the throne for some generations, this is because they tend to consolidate their power, not because there is a blood requirement.” He shifted, which made his previous stillness seem that much more extreme by comparison. “My mother’s lover was no fool. He knew he could not take the throne by force. The Daar Talaas army cannot be manipulated. They serve the throne, not the man.”
He had never looked as distant as he did then. Bleak and uncompromising. He stepped back, Amaya’s hand fell to her side, and she thought she’d never felt so empty.
Yet Kavian kept going. “He slit my father’s throat as he sat at the dinner table, in a place where there is meant to be only peace, even between enemies. Then he killed my brothers, one by one. Then both of my father’s wives, including my mother. Especially my mother, I should say. Because even the man she colluded with hated that she was traitorous enough to betray her own husband. Her own king.”
“Why did he spare you?” She hardly recognized her voice.
That wasn’t a smile he aimed at her then. It was far too painful. It cut too deep.
“My mother had a servant girl who she did not so much trust as fail to notice. The girl knew of my mother’s lover and enough of the plans they made that when the first alarm sounded, she ran. She took me out of the palace and claimed I was her own.”
Amaya knew who he meant immediately. “The woman with the wise eyes. All the other women looked to her today.”
“She is the wife of the chief here,” Kavian said, but there was a flicker in his gaze that told her she’d impressed him, and it warmed her. It more than warmed her. “Back then, however, she took a terrible risk in bringing me to her father’s tent, alone and unwed, with a toddler she could not prove was the king’s missing son. The elders might not have believed her. She risked her life and her family’s honor to save me.”
“But they believed her.”
“They did.” He studied her face. “And they are simple people here, not aristocrats with agendas. Good people who follow the old ways. Blood begets blood, Amaya. They raised me to avenge my family, as was my right and responsibility as its only remaining member.”
Amaya couldn’t speak for a long moment. She thought of a tiny boy who’d lost everything and had been given only vengeance in return, out here in this harsh, desolate place without a single hint of softness. It made her heart hurt, as if he were the great sky pressing into her, as impossible and as far away. As beautiful and as untouchable.
He had been a lost child and they had made him into a stone. And now he thought it was a virtue.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That seems like an undue burden to place on a child.”
“You misunderstand me.” His gaze was too dark. His eyes glittered. “I am not telling you this story because I regret what happened to me. What is there to regret? I was lucky.”
“You are also now the king.”
“I am.”
“Does that mean...” She searched his face, but he might truly have been made of marble then. He was that unyielding. “Blood begat blood?”
“It means that I grew up,” Kavian said quietly. With a deep ferocity that tugged at her in ways she didn’t understand, as if his story was changing things inside her as he told it. Shifting them. “It means that I dedicated myself to becoming the necessary weapon to achieve my ends. And it means that when I had the chance, I exacted my vengeance, and know this, Amaya, if you know nothing else about me. My single regret is that the man who murdered my family could die but once.”
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS A TEST, Kavian reminded himself harshly. The most important one.
This had all been a test. The long ride into the most remote part of the Daar Talaas Desert, abandoning her to see what she would do under the watchful eye of the woman he’d long considered his real mother. Then this. Throwing out the bloody truth of his family and his own dark deeds to see what she would make of them.
To see what Amaya was made of, after all. Who she really was when there was nowhere to run. If she was, truly, the one woman who could embody all he wanted.
Kavian stood there, stone-faced before this woman he had chased across the world, and awaited her reaction. It would determine the whole of their future.