A Princess for the Witch Doctor (Legends of Rahasia Book 3)

Chapter Eighty-Four

I sit between my fathers on the day of the witch doctor's execution.

He's led to the center of the temples, where the images of Aziz, Cato, Ode, and Kane watch on with unblinking, painted eyes.

In the center of the temples of the deities of love, war, death, and life, he stands with his head bowed weakly on his shoulders.

He trembles, but only I can see it since I'm closest. Directly behind me are my fathers, and they don't mention it.

The head priests and priestesses speak simple ritual prayers, and the executioner steps forwards with a curved blade, newly sharpened.

Ratu, the grandmotherly leader of the thieving district, self-named protector of the Jiwanese-Rahasian districts, spits at Ingatan's feet. It's a sign.

He may be Jiwanese, but he's not one of ours.

How old would he have been if he had chosen some other path instead of selling his soul to Rangda? Would he have died peacefully by now? Perhaps he would have married a nice girl and settled down to a calm trader's or gardener's life in the village he came from. Perhaps he would have been happy for his sister, and Nenek Wulan would have brought him to live in the palace in her mercy.

Maybe he would have been somebody great. Somebody to be remembered well, instead of in infamy.

They read a prayer, a charge, and then they raise a blade.

Human necks are fragile.

So horribly, horribly fragile.

"It's over." My fathers tell me, turning me away as I force myself to look at Ingatan, or what's left of him in the dirt. "You've gotten peace without sacrificing an army."

I nod.

That thing in the dirt isn't him anyways. Not anymore.

***

"You're okay with this, with dying?" I peer into his face, seeing it for the first time. Shoulder-length hair. Eyes so intense, illuminated with the sharp edges of his face. But past the torture, the hunger pangs, he's still got that spark in him. The boy who wouldn't be brought down, who turned to bad ends and did bad things to prove himself.

Someone who made one too many mistakes, and only now found himself.

He smiles at me, the smirk of a playboy who's played his last con. Who had a good run, but knows that now, it's all going to slow.

"At least I'm finally free." He holds his face upwards for once, towards the meager light filtering in through the grates above the prisons. "Isn't that what we all want, to die free?"

***

Readers,

I have no words.

-Sophia