A Priestess for the Blind God (Legends of Rahasia Book 1)

Chapter Five

            When I walk back to Ryu, I expect that even he will sneer at me. Instead, he stares at me with sympathy, something that makes me even sicker to my stomach than sneering.

"What?" I snap at him, ready for the laughter to start. Or, even worse, the baby-coddling. "I have every right to be here as you."

"Oh no," Ryu rubs his hairless chin. Despite being shoved into the dirt, he still manages to make himself look pretty. "I've seen many things growing up in a harem. I had my suspicions from the start, but I simply assumed that you were like Aster the Strong, wearing borrowed robes because you wanted to."

"No, I was born a woman, and I still am very much a woman." I feel for the familiar weight of my Diviner's mirror, tucked safely into my belt. "And her name was Astera the Beautiful. May the gods love her more than people in this world do."

He closes his eyes at the benediction. "Of course, I am mistaken. Forgive me."

My stomach growls, and I grimace at it. I'd been so nervous about the registration that I'd forgotten to eat. "Damn."

Ryu laughs, slinging his arm around me, his hoop earrings glittering in the light. "Come, my traveling cases must have been delivered by now. Yours must be there too. We can mark off our sleeping areas and get some rest. Throw a miniature feast, what do you say?"

I tense up, remembering that the practice sessions begin tomorrow. "I think the only dreams I have tonight will feature Alef's ugly face."

Ryu laughs that off too. Damn him. Is there nothing he worries about? "All the better. Can I switch my dreams for yours? I find him attractive, in that brutish, horrid way."

We walk over to the sleeping area of the encampment. The richer lords could afford to spare some servants from their hundred-staff houses to tend to their sons' needs. Meanwhile, my cousins are heading back to the house, the only thing passing for extra "servants" who bully me when my father isn't looking. Aside from that, my father has one nurse who takes care of his old arrow wound. She's only eight years older than I, but she's kind as a maiden from a fable.

When we get closer to the camp, I shudder to see there's a giggling tent filled with women next to the largest tent. The cloth is decorated in war scenes from the gods' most notorious war, the war where Kane the Blind had his eyes gouged out by his eldest brother. In those scenes, Cato the Elder appears glorious, a halo surrounding him while blood drips down Kane's skeletal, goblin-like face. Diviners look longingly at the rich man's portable harem, the womanly silhouettes laughing and eating figs within the candle-lit space.

"I'd fight all the gods myself to get into that tent." One of the Diviners mumbles. His buddies laugh and slap him on the back. When he turns around, my heart plummets to see that it's Alef, making his brutish rounds. He opens his mouth, and I prepare myself for the verbal abuse suggesting that I also enter that tent and learn my place as a woman when...

The sun disappears from the sky. Somebody screams.

In that horrible, shadowy silence, a man leaves that tent. He's twenty-one years old.

How do I know that?

It's because I've heard his stories from the cradle, the infant who Cato the Elder blessed to harness the power of the sun itself without a Diviner's weapon. The crowning son of our mighty Emperor, the warrior who goes into battle without armor because it would liquefy if it stayed on his heated body. The warrior who, at fourteen years, stood against a golem and roasted its heart with his bare hands. It's not cheating the Divine Contests if the gods have blessed mortals. It's only cheating if a mortal does it. Thus, one slot of this competition had been reserved by Cato before it ever began.

This is the man who owns the sun, Heir to Rahasia, Prince Elio the Chosen.

***

Hello my Champions!

Prince Elio could not have a more dramatic entrance if he tried. Come now, making the sun disappear? Sheesh. Princes!

Love

Sophia