Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Elara
Dawn breaks like a rotten egg—sickly yellow and with the smell to match.
We come up the alley with our shoulders aching and our eyes full of grit. The graveyard fence crouches like a rib cage, iron spikes crowned in rust. Our house—two rooms and a lean-to—sits just beyond the nearest row of stones. It’s quiet in that way that isn’t silence.
More like the hush after a shout.
Mother stops so fast that my hip bumps her basket. Daron stumbles into my back and steadies himself on my shoulder, but the pressure is wrong, too light, as if he’s there, yet already a step gone.
“What’s this?” Mother asks.
Our door hangs open.
I give her shoulder a squeeze and slowly venture forward. Pushing the door with two fingers, I listen to the room breathe.
Oh no…
Chairs tipped. The small chest overturned. Bowls on the floor, one smashed, one left whole by accident. The peg where Mother’s shawl should be is bare. The nail where Father keeps his shaving knife hangs empty and splintered, as if someone yanked the steel and took the wood for spite.
Daron scoffs, the sound half amusement and half shock. “They robbed the house.”
“Not only the house,” Mother whispers as she jerks her chin at the lean-to door at the back that stands ajar, her shadow cutting the slant of early light.
I walk over and peek in. No spades on the hooks. No mattock under the bench. Rope coils stripped. Linen gone. Even the pitch we use to seal seams pried out of its pot with a spoon.
“I’ll fucking bury you,” I ground out as if the thieves might be waiting in the bushes to be corrected. “Of all the people out there, they come and steal from us?”
Mother runs her fingers down my strands as if combing out my rage. “We are all hungry,” she says in a voice that holds no excuse. “Hunger makes thieves of the gentle and beasts of the rest.”
“We deal in death,” Daron says. “Since there’s plenty of that going around, they think that means coin.”
“They think wrong,” I say. “If death were coin, then Father would be king.”
As if the word tugged a string, Father coughs inside.
No, not a cough. A tearing.
We run inside.
He lies where we left him, propped with pillows that were once fluffy goose down but are now tired sacks.
His beard is gray at the corners and dark where the sweat clings.
Beside the bed sits the bucket they didn’t bother to take.
The surface is pink, flowered with bubbles.
A clot slides down the inside as if it’s trying to leave without troubling anyone.
Mother takes his hand. “Husband.”
He blinks. For a moment, his eyes are young and bright, and offended by the dust in the morning sun.
Then the fog floats back and settles. He reaches for the bucket by instinct…
and fails. Daron lifts it with reverent hands, and Father spits a string of blood into the rim, gasps, and falls back into the narrow world of damp sheet wrinkles.
“Sleep,” he breathes into a room that smells like pennies and soggy wool. “Let me sleep.”
After a pat on Father’s hand and a nod that straightens the useless worry from her mouth, Mother goes to the hearth and takes stock of what the thieves left us. A carrot so old it’s wrinkly. Two onions, one moldy. A nub of lard. No salt, because of course not.
She sets the pot anyway. That’s the kind of woman she is—building a fire even when the thatch is wet, lighting the flame with determination alone.
“It’s not so bad,” Daron says with a slow, tired swat of his hand. “We can—”
His voice turns to coughing so violent his knees bend to sit on the stool. But the wood shifts, and his shins hit the floor, ripping another heave from his caving lungs.
I reach him too late, but I stay with him, one hand on the nape of his neck until the fit passes. “What did I say? That you should stay home, right?”
“It’s fine,” he says when he gets enough air to lie. He wipes his lips with the back of his wrist, a gray smear left behind. Gray, not red. Somehow that feels worse. “Someone has to step in for Father. Two women can’t carry a big man.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be carrying anything at all,” I snap, because if I say it gently, I’ll break. “Lie down.”
“For once, I shall obey the queen of the broom,” he murmurs, but when he tries to stand, his hand slips on the stool’s seat.
I shoulder his weight the way I did last winter when he woke with his fingers numb as stones. He’s too light. Young men should feel like carved wood when you lift them, not like empty baskets.
I put him to bed in the corner where the light doesn’t reach.
He turns his face into the pillow the way he did when he was small, afraid of thunder but pretended he wasn’t.
Half his hand stays outside the blanket where the bandage sits.
I tuck it in. I stand there and pretend that what I’m doing matters. That it will somehow save him.
That clench in my chest worsens.
It won’t.
“We should eat,” Mother says, stirring the pot as if she were stoking a miracle. “Then we right the shack.”
Shaking my head as though it might distract from the mounting pressure beneath my ribs, I head for the door. “You eat. I’ll set the shack now.”
Outside, the graveyard hisses with slow heat, dew rising from the grass in a breath you can see.
The sun lifts itself over the palace hill to the right, smoke coming from chimneys smearing the sky.
The city says it’s their cooking fires, that King Kael is feeding the poor with it and will soon bring an end to this pestilence that starves the kingdom.
The city says many things.
The city lies to itself like a lovesick drunk.
I pass between headstones I know better than faces on the street, the dirt littered with broken trinkets dragged from graves. A brooch with its stone cracked out. A handful of glass beads, sticky with soil.
That’s how deep we’ve fallen.
We steal from the dead now.
I sweep the mess with a branch because the broom is gone, too. Who steals a broom?
What remains, I put into a broken crate. Not because anyone will come put them back, but because I have the feeling they’ll sink if I leave them in the dirt. Iron does that.
Grief, too.
When my hands slow, I let them. No one to watch. I squat between graves with my elbows on my knees and the hem of my dress in the dirt. There’s a place in me that aches exactly the size of Daron’s palm. It has for weeks now.
Today, the ache has claws.
I press my forehead against my palms and let the air leave me, slow enough not to sob. If Daron dies—no…when Daron dies, how will I ever smile again? How could I possibly?
The light changes.
Boot leather whispers on dust.
My pulse drums against my throat, but I don’t flinch. If it’s a thief, I want him to see a woman who doesn’t bend to fear.
“Long night,” a man says conversationally, his voice somewhat familiar. “Death kept you busy.”
I look up…
…and frown.
The same man from Gutter Lane sits on the gravestone across, his long leather-clad legs stretched out, his starchy, white-ruffled sleeves crossed in front of polished vest buttons. His black curls are cut ordinarily, but the shine defies the dullness of the world around us.
“You again,” I say, unsweet. “Have you come to steal what’s left?”
Eyes like moss assess the trinkets strewn about, the crooked lean-to, the footprints in the dirt. “I’m not in the trade of stealing shovels.”
“What’s your trade then?” Sitting back on my heels, I let my hands dangle between my legs in all their heaviness. “If it’s forcing conversation on bored young women, then I suggest you should learn a new one.”
A scoff tumbles past his lips before he shakes his head. “My trade is as old as breath.” He glances over the field of stones before his eyes lock with mine. A beat suspends the moment before he says, “As is yours.”
“Death work isn’t a trade.” If one has the stomach and the nerves, it takes little to dig a grave and drop a body into it. “It’s a heavy shovel you get handed when the wolves come.”
“A shovel you carry, oh so well.”
“Commendations are for the dead,” I say and brush the dust from my fingers. “Save your compliments for obituaries; they need it.”
His mouth curves up, a line so perfectly even it seems studied, mocking. “And what do the living need?”
“Bread.” I stand slowly because my knees are a debate I’m tired of losing. “And for men in pretty vests to say what they came to say.”
“Very well…” His lips straighten. “I brought you a choice.”
Because life isn’t cruel enough already, we definitely need more of those. “Humor me.”
A curt nod. “Turn me away and watch your kin die while rot hasn’t claimed your eyes yet. Or…” His gaze flicks to the palace roof far away, then back to me. “Help me and sacrifice your own life to save those of your loved ones.”
I don’t flinch at sacrificing myself. I flinch at the audacity of the word save, the most casual delusion when we all know there’s no cure for the rot. No hope for us. “Did you bring bread with that choice? Might make it easier to swallow.”
“The crown needs to be fed.”
“Does it?” I lift a brow. “Do I need to take you back to the head doctor? Is he missing one of his patients?”
He takes the rebuke like wine—pleased it stings. “Insolent. He will like that. As will the crown.”
“Listen, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m sure the crown has teeth enough to feed itself.”
“The crown has no teeth.” He rises from the headstone. “The king does. For now.”
My gaze trails to the faraway roof of the palace, its spires like spindly fingers. The Reign of Rot, the city calls King Kael’s tenure. Each year since his ascension has been nothing but a step deeper into pestilence.
“You’re from the palace.” It’s pretty clear now, beyond his health and the meat on his bones.
They’re suffering neither rot nor hunger there, are they?
“Are you working for the king? Is that your age-old profession? Pulling strings in the background to distract the common folk from a king’s incompetence? ”
His jaw clenches for a second, muscles jumping beneath skin as flawless as polished stone. “That sums it up well.”
“So you’re what?” Dressed and fed like this, moving about with such certainty, he had to be consequential. “His…steward?”
He hesitates for a second. “Indeed.”
“And what do you want of me?” The words come out flat so they cannot shake. Not even the palace rats ever make it down to the city, so why is this peacock strutting between my graves? I don’t trust him. “What does it mean? The crown needs to be fed?”
“The kingdom is rotting, and the people rot with it. As does everything else, turning the realm into an endless field of death the likes of which existence has never seen before.” His mouth slants, something like exhaustion carving into its line.
“This will not stop. Not until everyone is dead. Or until the crown on the king’s head is fed as its curse demands. ”
“Curse?” That word alone braids cautious dismissal through my rumbling stomach. “What do you mean, curse?”
“The crown gives certain powers to the king who wears it. But the cost is…” A solemn nod, gaze sinking to a torn ribbon trampled into the dirt. “Blood is what the crown demands. Your blood might do.”
My blood.
I turn that over once, the way you’d investigate a gold coin looking for rust. A gravedigger’s blood, smelling of lye and river water and other people’s rot. Sure. That’ll do it. That’ll save the world.
“There’s no such thing as curses.” Nothing but superstitious nonsense mumbled into empty ale jugs. “I’ve never heard of this. Not even from the drunks in the tavern.”
“Because the royal families did a fine job of keeping the curse a secret. Rightfully so.” He meets my eyes, the way the rising sun casts over them, bringing out specks of gold in his mottle-green irises.
“Simple folk love to trade in gossip. Gossip breeds fear, and fear makes kings look very mortal, and that cannot be allowed. Only the bloodline, the priest, and those who clean the bloodstains are permitted to know what the crown truly costs. The rest of the world sleeps better believing it’s just a crown. ”
That clench in my throat, I swallow down. “What a load of drivel.”
“King Merrick, Kael’s father, reigned for nearly five decades,” he says with more force in his voice. “Fifty years of fat harvests and flowing wine. Have you ever wondered why his three queens all died?”
I can only tilt my head at his ridiculous question because I didn’t even know he had three queens. “Not a single damn time.”
A scoff tumbles from his lips, but his mouth carries no bemusement as he turns away. “Right.” His slender fingers rake through his short black curls, straightening some of them before they twist again. “Peasants don’t ask what happens at the palace. They ask if the baker has any bread left.”
“Take your silly stories and get off our land,” I grind out. “I don’t believe any of it.”
“Belief is a lantern.” He leans close, too close, cooling the air between us. “Dusk comes either way.”
I laugh because I am not made to show fear with my mouth shut and turn back toward the house. “Get off the graves before I bury you in one.”
“Very well.” He gives a tug at his white cravat. “Should curiosity change your mind, find me after sunset. The copse behind the graveyard,” he calls after me. “Come alone. Bring no light.”
Back at the door to our house, Father drags at the air. Daron coughs until his ribs creak. I stop in the doorway with my fists full of nothing and glance back over the empty graveyard. Behind it, the palace roofs swim in the rising heat like marrow under the steam of broth.
I don’t believe him.
I count the hours to dusk, anyway.