The Songbird & the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia, #3)

by Carissa Broadbent

She looked at him like he was a question answered. He looked at her like she was the only one worth asking.

I was, despite myself, fascinated. “This bathtub washes away death?” “The potion washes away death,” Asar corrected. “The bathtub is just a bathtub.”

“I believe you when you say that you didn’t want this power,” he said. “But it’s not my brother’s anymore. It’s yours.

Still, the next morning, the girl waved her friend off from afar, careful not to notice the dimple in his cheek. She walked the long way back to the Citadel. The lush greenery was wild and untamed out here, but she glimpsed a flash of light among the emerald green. The bars of the gate were lovely polished gold. She wrapped her hands around the warm metal. She didn’t mean to push against them, but she found herself doing it anyway.

As if he could hear my doubts, Asar said, “We all have ghosts in our pasts, Iliae. We can’t give them the power to define our futures, too.”

He hadn’t torn down that wall so he could save me. He had done it to hand me the weapon I could use to save myself.

You are too good to be this afraid of yourself, Iliae, he snapped. You are better than this.

My anger caught me off guard. “Do you think that I don’t know what darkness is?” I said. “Why? Because I smile too much? Because I talk too much? It’s my choice to be the way that I am. A choice that I make even when it’s hard. That doesn’t make me weak, Asar.”

“It is an injustice, Mische, that this is what you got when you asked for love,” he murmured. “This isn’t what love should feel like.”

I wouldn’t speak because I wouldn’t let him hear the tremble in my voice. There was nothing I could say that he deserved to hear.

“I won’t let you die here because you’re too ashamed to live, Mische,” he said. “You are so much more than this. And it would be a waste to throw all that magnificence away—for what? Because the sun told you to hate yourself? No. I won’t allow that.”

“I like how your pleasure looks.”

I would always be with him, I knew in this moment. I would never be able to leave.