The Broken Crown

Chapter 46

WARNING: mention of religious drug use

Anaïs

The jaguars that Asha had brought home five years ago, no older than a few weeks, were now fully grown. With majestic and almost supernatural elegance, they crept around the city. Some of the townsfolk still feared them, them and their penetrating golden eyes, but Anaïs did not fear them. They were creatures of the hunt, but they did not hunt the Yaguars.

No, she was not surprised that the two jaguars did not attack the humans they lived with. It was the face that they seemed so content living there, the fact that they actually obeyed the Kahari, that filled her with wonder.

“We are one,” the Kahari had explained to her people. “We descend from the same being, our blood runs the same way. It is natural. Once, they saved one of ours. Now we save two of theirs.”

 Asha was truly a Kahari now. It made Anaïs feel old to watch as Asha neared her seventeenth summer, so grown and so mature already. She had grown taller than most of the Yaguars, with muscle visible in her arms and legs. The army was in a good level, with the help of whatever knowledge lord Thomas had given the girl, even though Asha had followed the advice given to her years ago and stopped planning to go to war.

 The omens still did not favour war. The red star in the night sky had vanished after Sundar’s death, but the stars still did not favour war. Nor did any other omen, even if Asha insisted that now would be the perfect time. Neither the royal army nor the rebels were strong any longer, and it would be easy to sweep in and take over.

 “Anaïs!” she heard someone call, and she instantly recognized his hoarse voice.

 The Shadow had not stayed for the entirety of the past five years. His presence was needed elsewhere; however, he always returned. After a while, she learned to expect that. And soon after that, he began leaving extra sets of clothes when he left, at first for her to keep, but after a while he was given his own rooms with a family.

 She still called him Shadow. Zacharias never fit, and with him she did not need to hide that she felt thus the way she had with the Kahari.

 He did not smile back at her when she turned, but she had learned that that did not necessarily mean he was not happy. He was running towards her, his chest bare and full of sweat from his hard work. It was the middle of the dry season and there was no refuge to be taken from the heat. “Talia wishes to see you.”

“Does she?” There was a teasing tone to her voice as her hand snaked around his neck to pull his lips to hers. It was rather chaste; he did not like to display affection, in public or private. But she did, and she decided that sometimes they would have to do it her way. “Where is she?”

 “In your cottage.” If his voice was slightly more hoarse now, she pretended she did not notice. Talia was waiting, after all.

 She left him then. Their relationship was far from ordinary, but then she had never been in an ordinary relationship. On their first night, he had laid out some basic rules; that everything he told her should remain a secret, and if she could not keep it, she should know that she would be forcing him to leave her. She knew that him trusting her was one of the most extraordinary things in her life, including murdering a king, and so she made sure never to do that.

 “Talia?” she questioned as she entered the darkened room of her shared cottage.

 “Ah, there you are.” The old woman stood and walked out from the shadows. How she kept standing in her age was a wonder, but her wiry old muscles still managed to keep her upright, even if she now needed a wooden stick as help sometimes. “I wanted to prepare you.”