Page 128 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

Despite myself, I was curious. He arched his brows at me, taking my silence as tacit approval.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a kingdom of ruin and ash. The kingdom was beautiful once, a very long time ago. But then, some two thousand years ago, the people of this grand kingdom pissed off their goddess, and… well, that’s not the sad tale I’ll tell you tonight.”

The smirk faded from his lips. With the firelight reflecting so harshly on the cut panes of his face—hollower, maybe, than they were a few months ago—he resembled a statue.

“No,” he said. “I’ll tell you a tale of a prince of the House of Blood.”

Oh. About himself. That figured.

“The kingdom of the House of Blood had suffered for two millennia now, its people destined to die early deaths that afford them little dignity,” he went on. “The Bloodborn are a proud people. They don’t allow outsiders to witness the ugliest parts of themselves. But trust when I tell you that the death of a Bloodborn curse is an ugly one. While the other two vampire kingdoms thrived, building empires on the backs of their goddess-gifted immortality, this kingdom clawed its way along, trapped in a cycle of endless life and eternal death. Surviving, but little more.”

I took another drag of my cigarillo. Septimus’s was untouched now, dangling between his fingertips.

“But,” he said, “some time ago, the king fell in love. The king’s lover was young and optimistic. Despite the woes of her kingdom, she believed that things could change. The king… he was no romantic. It’s no easy task, understand, to rule over the dust of a crumbling nation. He was a powerful man, but power could not stop his people from dying or his kingdom from withering or the other vampires from spitting in his face.” A wry, humorless smile twisted his lips. “But love. A powerful drug. Not enough to convince him. Not enough to make him the optimist his young wife was. But enough to make him think a dangerous word:Maybe.

“So the king married his lover, and not long after, she was with child. It is during this time that, as is often tradition with royal families, the king and queen visited a seer.”

I leaned forward a little, curious. I’d heard that the House of Blood often employed seers, though not much about what they often learned from them.

“But insight from seers, as you might know, can be a bit… spotty. While it’s tradition for expecting highborn women in the House of Blood to visit a seer, the results of those sessions are usually vague, ego-stroking affairs—predictions of great skill or loyalty or intelligence, that kind of thing. So this was, perhaps, what the king and queen were expecting when they visited the seer that night. Instead, what they got was a prophecy.”

I scoffed. I couldn’t help myself. Septimus laughed and raised his palm.

“I know. They have quite a reputation. But this seer was trustworthy—while her predictions were somewhat vague, they were never untrue. When she completed her ritual, she was shaken. She told them that their son would either save the House of Blood, or end it. The king was troubled by this news, but the queen was ecstatic. She barely heard the foreboding warning, only the hope for the future. Her son was destined to save their kingdom.”

I stared flatly at him. “So we’re sitting here so you can tell me all about how you’re the destined savior of the Bloodborn.”

The corner of his mouth curled. “You don’t know how to enjoy the twists and turns of good storytelling, dove.” He cleared his throat, and continued. “Months pass, and soon the House of Blood has a new little prince. The king and queen adored their son. They showered him with everything a child could want.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. It was practically unheard of for vampire parents to treat their children with obvious love. I’d witnessed the Bloodborn literally disassemble their opponents in battle. The thought that their leaders could be so softly affectionate… it was foreign to me.

“The years passed, and the boy was raised to be loyal, strong, intelligent, insightful. He was trained in the arts of magic, of war, of battle, of courtly manners. He was… the very best of us.”

Septimus did not look away from the fire. The expression on his face was hard to read—mournful, angry, affectionate, all at once.

The realization fell over me: he wasn’t talking about himself, after all.

“The decades passed, and soon, the Bloodborn prince was ready to take up his mantle as the god-chosen hero of the House of Blood. So he gathered his best general and his best men, and he went off on his mission—to find Nyaxia, prove his people’s loyalty, and earn back her love for the House of Blood.

“He did, in the end, find the land of the gods. And he and his men did complete several trials to earn Nyaxia’s affections, though they cost him many lives. And then he scaled the most treacherous mountains of the gods to find his goddess one final time, to beg for her forgiveness for the sins of his great-great-great-great-grandfathers, to swear his fealty to her, and to free the House of Blood from its curse.”

Septimus’s face had gotten colder, crueler, the smile at his lips looking as if it had been chipped from ice. He leaned closer, the remnants of his last drag blowing in my face with his next words.

“And do you know, dove, what that miserable cunt did then?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink.

“She laughed at him,” he said. “And then she killed him.”

The words came down like the blade of a guillotine.

“She left his general alive—though forever tainted—and sent him back to the House of Blood with the prince’s head.”

Septimus’s eyes slipped back to the fire. “I have only heard my mother cry once,” he murmured. “Only once.”

Understanding dawned on me.

“He was your brother,” I said.

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