Page 8 of Four Ruined Realms (The Broken Blades #2)

Aeri

City of Quu, Khitan

I race out of Euyn’s suite and back to my room. For the past week, I’ve thought about how my father knew his brother, Prince Omin, was assaulting and murdering young girls and he did nothing to stop it. No one did.

And I was almost one of his victims.

Mikail mentioned it as just another scandal. Another in a long line of Baejkin misdeeds. The thing that has haunted my nightmares for years. The invisible scars I bear. The stealing of lives from countless girls who had the misfortune to be powerless in the presence of someone like Omin. Just another character flaw.

My stomach turns and my throat burns, the meal threatening to come back up. Innocence is a cheap flower to be plucked and torn apart by powerful men.

Before I can get my room unlocked, Sora comes up behind me in the hall. Because of course she’d follow and check on me. Of course she cares. She’s Sora .

“Are you all right?” she asks.

Tears sting my eyes. I try to blink them back, but I know my face is red. My nose and mouth feel hot and flushed, my throat tight.

“I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it—for lying, for trying to bring you in—but I am not the same as my father or my…family.”

Sora remains quiet for a moment. She has a way of listening, not just hearing people.

“No, I don’t think you are,” she says plainly.

I stop trying to unlock the door. My hands shake too much to get the key in, anyhow. I look over my shoulder at her. She stares at me, sympathy etched across her beautiful face.

“Are you really this good of a person?” I sigh, slouching.

She utters a single laugh. “No, I don’t think so.”

It’s an honest answer. She moves to take the key from me, and I let her. She opens the door. I step inside and wave her in.

We don’t talk. Instead, I go over to the fire and busy myself stoking it back to life. She stands quietly—because she knows I need a minute to collect myself, and she’s nice enough to give it to me.

“Don’t you find it exhausting to care about everyone all the time?” I ask. “To always take the high road?”

She closes her eyes and smiles slowly. “Aeri, from the second I realized King Joon wasn’t a god, my plan was to steal the Immortal Crown and give it to my sister. Tiyung talked me out of it by saying that Daysum would just end up dead. But there’s only so much high road, and I’m not walking it.”

I turn to her, my mouth falling open in shock. It didn’t seem like she wanted the relic or had any desire to be royal. “Why would you give the crown to your sister?”

“Because she may be dying.”

She says it without emotion, but pain twists in my chest for Sora and a girl I’ve never even met.

“Oh, Sora. I’m sorry.”

She nods and inhales deeply, her chest rising. “Anyhow, it’s hard to be too upset with you for keeping secrets when I had my own. And, in all honesty, I need you now.”

I blink. “For what?”

She steps closer to me, stopping at the other end of the mantel. “To take the throne of Yusan.”

I laugh, then look at her face. She’s not laughing or even smiling. She’s dead serious. “Wait, you’re not joking?”

“You’re the daughter of the king,” she says. “That gives you a birthright to the throne, above Euyn.”

I shake my head. If I were a boy that would be true, but I am not. “Yusan has never had a queen.”

“I remember in school there was a rumor that there had been queens in the past,” she says. “That there’s evidence in the Temple of Knowledge. I hadn’t given it much thought until Euyn mentioned the Yoksa.”

I chew my bottom lip and worry the hem of my dress. Even if there had been queens, it was so long ago that no one remembers it outside of rumor. And although I am Joon’s daughter, I wasn’t raised to rule. I wasn’t even brought up in the palace. “But Euyn is…”

She stares at the fire, her expression grave as her hand curls into a fist. “It can’t be Euyn. It just can’t be. Your father can’t keep the throne, but Euyn will only be more of the same.”

“What makes you think I’ll be any better than him? I’m Baejkin.” I shake my head, then smile a pained grin.

“You aren’t your family. Ty…” She trembles as she exhales. I’ve noticed it before—her right hand shakes a little sometimes. She balls it in a fist before releasing it. “Tiyung made me realize that people can grow to be different than the soil they were raised in.”

“Or sometimes they are the same.” I think about my father, Euyn, and Omin murdering without conscience. The story goes that my aunt is just as bad or worse—but that’s a tale told by killers.

“It was true, then, that Prince Omin…” Sora begins.

I tense, but she doesn’t say any more.

“They thought he killed me when I was twelve.” I smile even though there’s nothing to smile about.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she says. “There’s an old expression in my village that sometimes the tongue isn’t ready to speak what the eyes have seen. I believe that. But I’m listening. And I know a thing or two about cruel men.”

She stares into the distance. I know she does.

“He was charming,” I say. “Much more so than Euyn or my father. He charmed my mother so easily. Then again, all he had to say was that the king had made a mistake throwing out a woman like her. That was all it took.”

Sora nods.

“Omin courted her for a week, maybe two, and she was so excited to move into his villa,” I say, wringing my hands. “She was so ready for the life promised to her that she didn’t think twice about it. It was the happiest I’d ever seen my mother. For the two weeks we lived in his villa, we had servants she ordered around, great food from the kitchens, expensive gifts and lavish surprises. Anything she wanted, Omin gave her. Including his carriage to go visit with her sister.”

Sora frowns. “Powerful men can often appear charming until their masks slip.”

“He attacked me the night she left,” I whisper.

Sora inhales sharply.

“And then I…um… I killed him.”

She exhales. “I’m sure you didn’t have a choice.”

Did I? I guess I could’ve let him take what he wanted and then butcher me instead. I would’ve gone to the Ten Hells with a clean soul and spent my three years in Elysia. But I hadn’t meant to murder him. I just wanted him to stop touching me. In my nightmares, he watches me sleep. Sometimes the sewing scissors aren’t on my bedside table. Sometimes they are, but I miss his neck. I’ve relived a hundred different versions of the same horrific night. Same beginning of him waking me and pulling down his trousers.

I shudder and stare at the fire, remembering the flames of his villa rising into the night sky. All I wanted was for people to think I was dead and to be unsure of how he died. That’s all I was thinking when I broke the oil lamp under the bed, but I learned that three servants died in the blaze. I think about them all the time—how they did nothing wrong but died all the same.

I killed four people that night, and I will be judged by Lord Yama for all of them.

“After he was dead, I was on my own,” I say. “I knew I wouldn’t have been believed. I knew I couldn’t go home.”

“You did what you had to in order to survive,” she says softly.

I look away, the heaviness in my chest nearly unbearable. She understands, and I’m not certain whether that makes it better or worse. I’m not even sure why I told Sora all of that. I’ve never told anyone.

Still, I don’t mention the amulet I found on his wrist. Prince Omin wasn’t even supposed to have the Sands of Time of the Dragon Lord, but somehow, he did. And now, I do.

I didn’t know what it was when I took the relic from his body. I just saw a gem and stole it. I had to figure out on my own that it stopped time. The price I paid was aging four years in the minutes it took to clean his blood off me. The curse of the amulet was the reason I couldn’t see my mother again. I couldn’t explain suddenly looking sixteen when I was only twelve. I thought I would see her again one day when I was older and the age difference wouldn’t matter, but she died last year. I was too late. My only family was gone.

“You aren’t your bloodline,” Sora says, stepping closer.

I sniffle. “I know.”

But I am a killer. Unlike my family, though, I’ve suffered consequences. I paid for the murders with loneliness, with never seeing Mama again, with constantly worrying that someone might find out that I killed Omin, with staying awake wondering if I’d die of old age clutching the amulet while I dreamed, with no one caring if I lived.

All of it hits me—all of the things I don’t think about.

I died, and no one mourned me.

Tears stream down my cheeks, and I can’t stop them.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Sora takes another step.

“Sora.” I put my hands up to defend myself. Not because she’s hurting me but because she’s getting close to me. And no one, other than Royo, has been close to me. And now he hates me. He hates to even look at me because I can only hurt or abandon the few people who love me. I am doomed to live this life alone.

“You were a child trying to survive,” she says. “And you are not your family.”

She opens her arms, and I lean on her shoulder and cry. A really ugly, gasping cry while she strokes my hair and lets me ruin her dress.

As I cling to her, I get it. I would do anything to keep this feeling of being cared for. And Sora feels a hundred times stronger than this for her sister. She will do anything for Daysum, even if it means sacrificing everything and everyone else she loves.

Which makes her the most dangerous killer in the world.