DUSK CAME AND went, and a new dawn emerged. The sun ascended over the horizon and took its rightful place in the sky, embedded in blue among the clouds. The stars faded and then vanished altogether as the sun cast its radiance across the sky. The moon struggled to remain afloat, drowning slowly until it was finally swallowed by Heaven's ocean.

Sunlight stained with shades of pink and orange trickled in through windows and the cracks beneath doors. Wind rustled leaves and created ripples on the surface of water.

       Human beings were living and breathing and dying. Some bled out through their skin and pores, and some bled from their hearts—for living is bleeding, and bleeding is dying. Somewhere, escaping mouths were screams of anguish and pain. Somewhere else, people were laughing their precious little sanities away. Pride and greed and wrath stole into battlefields like deadly plagues, drawing in victims and perpetrators with nothing left to distinguish between the two. Feverish sickness crept into households and left with dozens of helpless souls.

Everything was exactly as it had been before. Exactly as it should be.

       Flowers blossomed and withered.

       Hearts broke and mended.

       Stars exploded.

       But it could not be denied that something had changed between the king and his prisoner.

That was why, when Maarit joined the king for breakfast in the dining hall and found him staring intently and ferociously at a scroll, eyebrows pulled together tightly, she was not filled with hatred. In fact, she felt something akin to endearment upon seeing the confusion at whatever he was reading swirling in his eyes. She had even grown accustomed to the guardsmen that were always at his side. She didn't see them at all. She saw only the king with a nearly comical expression gracing his countenance.

She sometimes wished to return to the ordinary world. The same world that was filled with poverty, sin and hunger also happened to possessed love, happiness and the scarce, ephemeral little moments in which one closed one's eyes and thought, Yes, this is it. This is what I have endured my suffering for. And if I am to die right now, at this very moment, it would not feel quite so tragic. Sometimes, she wondered if she'd ever feel that again.

But her desire to leave the castle and part ways with the king was not quite as strong as it had once been.

       She had next to nothing to return to. She hadn't had a home in a long while.

       "What is that?" she asked curiously, referring to the scroll he held, forgetting to greet him. Though Maarit enjoyed sitting at the end of the table due to the fact that it made her feel like she herself was a monarch, she slid into the seat at his side instead.

       "Good morning to you too, darling," he scoffed playfully. "Don't I get a polite greeting?"

       "We've been over this. I don't greet anyone politely, and I only say 'Your Majesty' ironically," Maarit told him with a small smirk. "Come on, what are you reading? You seem quite confused by it. If the words are too complex for you, I'd be happy to explain it to you very slowly."

       Theodoracius's gaze trailed over her. His eyes softened for only an instant before he sighed deeply and said, with evident annoyance, "One of my advisors has compiled a list of things that would put me in better graces with the population. To win their favour, in a way. He seems to have quite the sense of humour. Meet with rulers of other kingdoms to maintain good relations. Win the hand in marriage of a princess. Find the cure of a plague. They all surpass the line of possibility. I don't exactly have natural charm that would make other monarchs enjoy my presence, I have no interest in princesses, and curing a plague is simply... I do not even know what he meant by that. My advisor was clearly intoxicated when he wrote this list. I'll have to kill him later."

"He must've been completely delusio—wait, what?" She whipped around to look at him. "Was that a joke? Do you make jokes now?"

He smiled, displaying a row of pearly white teeth. "I always make jokes about murder."

Maarit shook her head in exasperation, unable to keep the grin that slid onto her face at bay. "So would marrying a princess really make people like you?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

His smile slipped away, replaced by a slight frown. "I suppose so, in a sense. At the very least, it would show that I have a soul, which I apparently do not have. Besides, I'm sure you know that all anyone seems to care about is getting married and having children, so those children can then get married and have children. The whole familial affair would make me seem more human.

"But, as you know, it would have to be a princess. Royalty marries royalty. And at some point, our families are all so closely intertwined that we are all related. My parents," he explained, his nose scrunched up in disgust, "were third cousins, which is not bad compared to the rest of my ancestors. I am the result of centuries of inbreeding." At that, he let out a mirthless chuckle. "Apparently I'm the only monarch to be disgusted by that, too."

"Would you, though? Marry a princess, a cousin you've never met, I mean? Or would you want to marry for love?" She pursed her lips—on one hand, she was only curious, and on the other hand, she wasn't sure why she had bothered to ask at all.

"Don't be ridiculous," he scoffed, his face devoid of any emotion, "no one would love me either way."

Maarit almost felt sorry for him, but he said it so matter-of-factly that she wondered if he even wanted to be loved at all.

       A silence engulfed them, palpable and awkward. Theodoracius turned back to the scroll in his hands while Maarit watched him. He appeared to be reading the scroll, but when she looked at him more closely, she saw that his eyes were not moving and were, in fact, fixated on one spot.

       Then, so abruptly that his actions startled Maarit, he rolled the scroll back up and turned in his seat to face her fully.

       "What is your favourite colour?" he demanded.

       She was so surprised by the vehemence with which he asked that her mind failed to register his words. "My what?"

       "Favourite colour," he repeated, softer this time. His eyes, rays of brown and melting gold circling an eclipse, bore into hers. She could've sworn he was blushing. "I realized that I don't know very much about you. I know that you love books more than anything and that my library is your paradise. I know that you aren't afraid of bloodshed when someone deserves it, but you're also righteous. I know that you long to be a soldier, especially when told you can't, and that your favourite tea is oolong, and that of all the desserts you've had here, you particularly enjoy the fruit and custard tarts. But I don't know your favourite colour."

       Lips parted, she was quiet for a few seconds. Then she managed to utter, "Purple." She smiled softly at the broken king who cared what her favourite colour was. "What about you?"

       "Orange," he muttered. "Like the sunrise." His lips turned up at the corners, fondness seeping through his teeth along with his words. "Back when my father was alive and I needed to get away from him for a while, I used to take Cassius out for a ride before dawn and watch the sun rise. I must have been no more than eleven when I began to go out alone, sneaking out of the castle when he was busy with his mistresses. I suppose that was around the time when I stopped feeling the urge to sleep. I craved those moments when I could be alone with the one creature that didn't cringe in my presence. And," he continued, lowering his voice to a whisper, no louder than a gentle autumn breeze, "I even thought of running away. More than once."

       "Yet you didn't," Maarit said with a frown. "Why didn't you?"

       Theodoracius shook his head, eyes blazing like the embers of a dying fire. "But I did. I tried once."

       His left hand reached up to graze his collarbone, where the scar was. The movement seemed involuntary, but Maarit understood what it meant—whether he had wanted her to or not.

The king cleared his throat and changed the subject immediately. "What about you? Do you have any—any family members that happen to be missing you?"

"Well," she responded, meeting his eyes, unable to recall why she was hesitating, "no." Without being able to help it, her gaze flickered sideways towards the guards in the room. She would've talked about her parents, but she couldn't—not with them there.

       Theodoracius noticed.

       "Guards," he called authoritatively without tearing his eyes from her, "leave us for a moment." As they poured out of the dining hall, he asked her, with more tenderness than she thought possible from him, "If you'd like to, you can talk about it. With me."

       Swallowing the lump in her throat, she said, "My parents left me when they found out I was a soothsayer. They disowned me because they thought it was a curse. That I would bring them shame."

       "What?" Theodoracius gasped quietly, eyes wide with a mixture of indignation and raw sympathy.

       "I was sixteen when I first became aware of my own soothsaying abilities. I had always known I was a witch because my parents had passed it down to me, but when I found out about the soothsaying part, I was scared. After all, people had been executed for being soothsayers in the past. People seem to think that they had too much power. They didn't believe that we could predict the future. Instead, they thought we had the ability to actually weave the future ourselves, and that we were behind all of the evil occurrences in the world. Anyway, I haven't seen my parents since they left the country without me."

       "They left you for something as trivial as that?" he spat.

       "Yes."

       "No," he replied, shaking his head rigorously.

"Don't pity me," Maarit told him immediately. While she wasn't sure why she was telling him any of this, she did not regret doing so in the slightest. "My life could have been much worse than it was. Don't pity me."

"I don't pity you. You are too strong to be pitiable." He gritted his teeth. "But your parents left you. Even with my own upbringing, that is something I cannot grasp."

       There were a thousand emotions in his stare and a thousand more caught in his throat—for Maarit could tell there was more he wanted to say, but just couldn't. What he did next was not too different from what he had done the previous night; however, this time, they were not in the dark.

       He lifted his hand—which was somehow both soft and callused from handling swords—and slowly, hesitantly cupped her cheek. His fingers were cold and sent shivers from her cheek to her spine. And his eyes, which melded colours wondrously—colours of chestnut and honey and sepia—beheld an unfathomable intensity.

Nevertheless, it was his words—not his eyes, not his touch—that twisted her heart into a knot. "How could anyone leave you?"

Just then, several servants entered carrying trays of breakfast.

Theodoracius dropped his hand from her cheek, plucked the crown off of his head and placed it down on the table just as a plate of food was set in front of him.