The Queen of Cursed Things (Serpents and Kings Book 1) by S.M. Gaither

Author:S.M. Gaither [Gaither, S.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-11T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The village of Vanish was still filled with merciless whispers.

For nearly a week now, Kian had done his best to escape them. Every day, he left for the fields before most of that village was awake, and he came back after most of it was asleep. He kept his head down and kept to himself.

He didn’t want to hear any more stories—most of which were filled with half-truths and exaggerations—of what had happened.

He didn’t want to listen to the villagers swap gossip, talking of moments they’d spent with Alaya, and of the wild things they were all claiming they’d seen her do over the years. Things that oh, were so clearly signs of the Serpent clan and its curses and who she really was—how could we not have seen that?

None of them knew who she really was.

He was convinced of that much.

Not that he was sure he knew, either.

Not anymore.

And it was hard to think clearly about it, because to him, what Alaya was at the moment was simply gone, and that word seemed to have lodged itself in his brain, where it had swollen and puffed itself up like an infected wound that left room for nothing else.

Gone, gone, gone.

As the days passed, he’d constantly found himself looking to the path that she had been carried away on.

He could see it clearly from the window of her room, which was where he’d ended up tonight; he’d wandered in after his work around the orphanage was finished, braced his arms against the windowsill, and he hadn’t managed to move ever since.

The night stars were clear enough to count.

The orphanage was quiet.

Most of the smaller children—and several of the older ones, even— were huddled together in Ma’s quarters, far in the back of their home. He couldn’t remember her ever allowing them to sleep in her space in such a way.

Not before this week.

Gone, gone, gone.

He kept hoping that this might be the most elaborate prank that Alaya and Sade had pulled off yet. That the two of them would both come bounding down the path any second, cackling with that mad disregard for their own mortality they seemed to have sometimes. And Auric would scold them both, and punish them with a particularly grueling training session or two—which Kian would then have to listen to them complain about.

Soon, they would all be laughing about this.

How funny that I thought you were really gone.

He stared harder at that place where she had disappeared.

He thought he saw something shifting in that space—a strange flicker of shadow, a displacing of moonlight— that snapped him out of the trance he had fallen into.

He took a step away from the window only to double back. Paused. Kept his eyes on that distant space while absently tending to the candle he had left burning on the sill, pouring out the melted wax that was building around the wick and threatening to snuff out the flame. Then he slid it safely to the side and braced his arms against that sill once more.

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