Page 24 of Humans Don’t Have Horns (A Crown of Blood and Magic #1)
Chapter Fifteen
Dahav
My knees hurt from kneeling. I’ve lost track of time while I’ve been here in front of the shrine.
Just a little bit longer, and I’ll get up.
Noka says I pray too much. When your priest tells you that, you know you’re overdoing it.
Just a little more. I inhale. I can still smell the burned flesh in my nostrils.
It penetrates the heavy scents of incense that fill the temple even though it has been a day and night since the bodies were burned.
I could never get used to that smell. It is disconcerting how the stench of the women’s flesh burning is similar to that of burnt cattle.
I expect men’s burning flesh to smell the same, but I wouldn’t know for sure.
Death by immolation is reserved only for women.
Men are hanged when they receive the death penalty.
In Aldon, they burn their dead. I suppose that is why widows are burned instead of hanged.
In Kozari too, we burn our dead. We only embraced certain parts of the True Religion.
Yet this sacrilegious tradition of burning the widows was too happily adopted by my grandfather.
It is repugnant the way the men of my family knead and twist our faith to their benefit.
I run my thumb along my Sun charm and repeat the passages I know by heart. If I concentrate just a little more, I can stop hearing the widows’ screams. But I’ve been kneeling for hours, and still, their screams are loud in my ears. It is the guilt. Well-earned guilt.
I should have saved them. Ashar had a harem of fifty-three women, and they burned them all.
Fifty-three souls. It took hours. First, they burned Ashar’s corpse, or what was left of it.
They usually don’t cover the corpses, but the state of it was so appalling they had no choice but to drape it in gilded silk.
Then they burned his concubines. And in a matter of hours, two hundred and four bastards were orphaned. I should have done something.
But I couldn’t risk revealing my true intentions just yet. Fifty-three souls. Some mothers, some sisters, and some friends. Dead. Burned alive. Fifty-three and I did nothing. It will haunt me to the death. Mira, who taught me how to avoid getting pregnant, was one of them. She was not yet twenty.
I grip my Sun charm tightly until the rays cut my flesh. I did nothing to save her. “You do right by her children. But you can do right by them only if you are queen,” Nass said when I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t breathe. “You can help no one if you fail,” he hissed at my unwaning dismay.
Four days have passed since Ashar’s death was announced. In three days, they will crown his brother Zorer the new king of Kozari. If I fail.
A woman has never ruled Kozari. Women’s place here is only under the boot of men. But Ashar overstepped. He shook the balance of power. He made traditions and laws seem too flexible. Something that was previously unheard of in Kozari might now be tolerated. You can only knead faith to some extent.
Ashar was not a stupid man, but darkness ruled him.
Who knows better than me how dark he was?
And in his darkness, in the pleasure he took in hurting people, he forgot that power isn’t secured to the ones born with it.
It comes to those who take it, who nurture it.
He did not consider that the noblemen in this land could take his insults only to a limit.
For years, he wronged them, took gold from them, gave them only crumbs of influence.
He didn’t consider that the noblemen were armed, that they were dangerous.
And he was right in a way, since they never rose up against him.
But Zorer’s teeth will darken from the rotten fruits Ashar ate.
Ashar went too far with Sheva. He raped almost every woman I know, but he crossed the line with Sheva.
Because her husband was a nobleman. True, not one of much significance.
Yet a nobleman still. Ashar arranged for his death and then took his wife, Sheva, as a concubine.
When it happened, I couldn’t understand why he did it.
After just a week in her bed, he returned to pester all of us again.
But I abandoned any attempt to understand Ashar years ago.
There is a darkness that even the burning light of Sun can’t reach.
The only explanation I can find for his darkness is the use of the Cursed Ones’ horns.
I truly believe their hunted souls darkened his mind.
Yet I’m too young to remember what he was like before.
And now he is dead, not by sickness, not at a good age.
He was preyed on by vultures. But vultures don’t attack the living.
No, Lian somehow killed him using the animals. Nass’s spies informed us.
When I first saw Lian, she reminded me of a beautiful doll my mother gifted me once.
It was hard to capture all of her true appearance with those pearls she wore.
I’d never met someone whose hair and eyes weren’t yellow.
And all the other Aldonians’ hair and eyes are red like blood.
Only hers was white, like the freshest snow.
But you could hardly tell, since her hair was mostly covered.
Still, she was strikingly beautiful. And her poise and aura were part of everything a princess ought to be. Like a perfect doll to display to all.
My mother had just died, and they said she might be my new mother.
I was eight at the time, devastated at my mother’s death.
I didn’t realize then how afraid I should have been, and just how much she protected me from him.
I asked Lian if she was going to be my new mother.
She replied with the sweetest voice, “Mothers are irreplaceable, but I’ll be your friend if you like. ”
In the end, she was not. Because Ashar decided to marry the daughter of Homed of the House of Shote, the wealthiest man in Kozari— after Ashar. And Homed’s daughter was no mother or friend to me. But she is dead now, and she matters not.
In those days, I sometimes thought if he’d married Lian, he wouldn’t have come to my room at night.
Maybe she would have protected me. Probably not.
He always knew how to get what he wanted.
When I finally gathered the courage to fight him, he told me he thought I wanted him to come to me but that now he knew I did not wish it, he would go to my little sisters instead. I never fought him again.
“Highness, the duke wishes to speak to you.” Noka’s voice is little more than a whisper.
Nass, the duke. My mother’s older brother, head of the House of Oro.
It was once the second wealthiest house in Kozari, but under Ashar’s regime, it declined to the fourth wealthiest. Yet the duke is even more powerful than Ashar’s brother, who wishes to be crowned king.
Because, unlike Zorer, the duke is not an imperious, complacent man.
Nass had been plotting my coronation for years.
I rise to my feet and take the wet towel Noka arranged for me to rinse the blood from my hands. Noka never hands me the towel. He always leaves it on a gilded tray so we won’t accidentally touch. He knows I don’t like to be touched.
Noka stands by the wall of the temple. His gilded outfit blends in with the golden statue of Sun.
His eyes are set on the floor as he reverently bows his head in front of me.
His eyes are almost amber. Such coloring with our people is a sign of low-class origin.
A nobleman would never marry a woman with such coloring.
He would take her as a concubine, though, because bastards are irrelevant.
Only the intercourse blessed by Sun matters.
But Sun loves all that he shines on, regardless of their colors.
And Noka is nobler than all those who look down on him.
He is only seven years older than me. When I first met him, he was just an altar boy.
But I chose him as my spiritual guide above all other priests.
They spent too much time under my father, shaded by darkness.
Noka is the only one I trust. He has repeatedly proven to be worthy of this trust with his discretion and loyalty.
But also with his ability to guide me spiritually in the darkest hours, during which I have to expel the allure of death from my heart.
It was Noka who told me of a prophecy he’d learned when fasting in the mountains.
He said Amada is under great darkness, a hundred years of night.
And that a woman of no race will vanish that darkness away.
He was surprised to hear I once met a girl with white hair and eyes.
He thought it must have a significant meaning that our paths had crossed.
He didn’t know the meaning. Unlike other priests, he doesn’t presume to know all.
If I am queen, I will make him the head of the Kozari church.
He will lead the people back to the ways of Sun, and away from the dark ways of the True Religion.
As I leave the sweet, heavy smell of the temple’s incense, the scent of burned flesh only intensifies.
I swallow the bile that rises in me. I don’t slow my steps as I near the end of the corridor connecting the temple to the rest of the palace.
A door to my right opens, and I slide through it before the duke shuts it again.
We must not be seen. Our lives depend on it.
I trust only Noka to arrange for the duke and I to meet.
I take in my surroundings. We are in a small chamber, probably for servants, judging by its bareness.