The Broken Crown

Chapter 14

Anaïs

 Outside of the castle, everything was calm and peaceful, as though it was a different world. The common people were hard-working, like bees, so many of them. Still, there was something peaceful about them, about their work.

 In the beginning, the distant sun glimpsed in lakes and was shadowed by tall, dark trees. They walked through fields of wheat and corn in the daytime, and in the night time, set up tents beneath the starry sky.

 Every night, the Kahari would visit her. Sometimes it was only to talk and to hold her tight, and if not, she had become good at accepting him. Her body would go numb and her mind would be free and in control. Her act would be complete.

 The Kahari had begun insisting she should call him by his name. Sundar. She had been quick to learn to call him that when she spoke, yet in her mind, she could not force herself to call him that. With a name came a person, with history and emotions and relationships – a real person – while a title was as hollow as the mask she wore for him.

 He seemed genuinely worried for her. When he looked at her, his golden eyes would fill with emotion. It still scared her.

 One night, he had even told her how a Kahari could never marry. Anaïs had felt bottomless relief; marriage was a bond, tying her to a place she did not want to stay. Even if a part of her knew she could never return to Etheron, she was not ready to let go of her hope just yet.

 As they travelled further south, the sun grew hotter, burning away any sort of growth. They had not travelled a week when they reached the desert which marked the borderlands between Etheron and the lands of the Yaguar. In order to have hopes to survive, they had to follow the western Sister – the only river that survived the heat of the sand ocean.

 Here, the days were long and hard and hot. The Kahari forced her to drink water until she was close to vomiting, and even so, on the second day, she grew dizzy and ill. That day the Kahari decided to let the clan rest while he fed her gallon after gallon of water.

 But as the days were hot, the nights were cold. They froze to the bone with winds harsher than anything she had felt, sweeping up the sands. The travellers hid in tents, cuddled up and warm. When they awoke, they would be bathed in sweat and with the air inside the suffocating tents burning from the strong morning sun.

 Sand founds its way in anywhere. Anaïs had learned to remain distanced at the court; if she let herself be touched by aching feet at the end of the day, or an insult thrown in her direction, or by the sun when she was forced to stand outside for hours, then she would never have survived. But the sand – the sand got to her, crawling through her defending layers of clothes and itching even more when her skin was sticky with sweat.

 On the second day of travelling in the torturous desert, small strands of grass began to appear. Throughout the day, the grass grew taller and the flood wider. There were even water holes, around which trees grew. And that was the first time she saw them.

 For all that Anaïs knew cats did not grow taller than a height where they could reach her knees by standing on their back paws. But these cats, for they were certainly cats, stood as tall as Asha and maybe taller. Thomas Bonney would have to look up to see into their eyes.

 The first one she saw was a male, lying in the sun without a care in the world. His eyes were closed against the sun, his sand-coloured fur gleaming in the sun. A majestic halo of light brown hairs stood from his head, flooding down around him. Even as he slept, the clan kept a keen eye on him, walking in a large circle around him.

 “We do not fear the male,” the Kahari explained as he grabbed her arm and stepped into her line of vision. “It is the females. They are somewhere, and they are the hunters. They have been known to take children.”