Page 20 of The Half King
She shook her head.
“Sand melon tastes exactly like it sounds. Everyone raises honey fruit instead, which doesn’t grow here naturally. The royal family imported the saplings hundreds of years ago when they started using priests to multiply the rainfall.”
“So?” she asked.
“So now farmers are dependent on weather patterns that shouldn’t exist. No one wants to raise native crops anymore. They want to grow imports that need steady rain to thrive.”
Cerise turned up both palms.
“Who do the priests serve?” Daerick asked.
“House Mortara.”
“And when the Mortara line ceases to exist?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“No one knows,” Daerick said. “Not even me, and that’s saying a lot. We don’t even know why the priests are bound in servitude to the Mortara dynasty in the first place. But I can tell you one thing: the priests aren’t going to stay in this dusty hellhole if they’re free to go wherever they want. If Kian vanishes without an heir, it’s possible that no one will be able to command the priests. And if that’s the case, it’s only a matter of time until they leave Mortara.”
Now Cerise began to understand about the rain.
Daerick touched her wrist. “A good king protects his people. And if he knows his time is coming to an end, he makes sure they can survive without him. The priests know that, but they didn’t explain it to the farmers. Doesn’t that make you wonder who theyreallyserve? They rely on faith, but it’s not faith to ignore common sense. It’s foolishness.”
Cerise considered Daerick’s words. She didn’t want to believe that the priests had intentionally misled anyone, though it did seem odd that they hadn’t explained their reasoning to the crowd. But more than that, she couldn’t reconcile Kian, the stumbling drunkard, with the selfless ruler Daerick had described. “Does a good king skip his council meetings to drink ale and gamble on fighting birds?”
“He might, if he was a firstborn with only six moons to live.”
She drew a breath to argue, but Daerick beat her to it.
“You’re not a firstborn,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to count down the days until you disappear, either inside the void of your own mind or into the shadows.”
Cerise glanced at her toes. He was right. She didn’t know that pain.
“Try to picture it,” he said. “Imagine how you would prepare for your curse, how you would harden yourself to face your inevitable suffering. Now imagine that after years of detaching yourself from everyone and everything that brings you joy, you finally grow a thick enough callus over your heart that you no longer fear the end. You’re prepared for it. You’ve made peace with your fate…until one day, news arrives that a mighty oracle is coming to save you.”
Her guilt multiplied.
“Your first reaction wouldn’t be excitement,” Daerick said. “It would be fear. Because the callus on your heart took years to build, and you’re terrified of reopening that wound. But you can’t help it. Despite your better judgment, you allow yourself to hope.”
“And then the mighty oracle turns out to be ordinary,” Cerise said. She remembered the way Kian had looked at her in the garden, as if she had failed him. He wasn’t punishing her for her lack of Sight. He was punishing the both of them because he had allowed himself to hope, and in return, he had doubled his pain. “He’s given up on life.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Daerick told her. “I imagine it’s hard to have faith when nobles are already killing each other to eliminate competition for the throne.”
“That’s happening?”
“Two dead in Calatris already. There will be more. That’s just the way the wind blows.” Daerick lifted a shoulder. “So you can probably understand why hope is a cruel mistress for the king. Almost as brutal as the shadows.”
Two dead in Calatris. That must have been the incident General Petros had referred to the day before, when he had confronted Father Padron on the palace lawn. But before Cerise could give it any more thought, her attention was drawn by something else Daerick had said.
“Brutal as the shadows?” she repeated. “Father Padron told me the king has no memory of his nighttime hours.”
“That’s what Kian told me, too,” Daerick said. “But I wonder…what healthy twenty-year-old carries a tin of stomach soothers in his pocket?” He arched a brow. “All firstborn nobles feel anxiety. They all have ways to dull it, but few have to medicate themselves.”
“What do you think happens to the king at night?”
“I have no idea. But I recognize torment when I see it.”
Cerise didn’t want to hear any of this. She didn’t want to believe that Kian was suffering when the shadows claimed him after sunset, because that would mean an eternity of torment for him when he vanished completely. According to lore, Mortara firstborns didn’t truly die. They remained in darkness forever.
