Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Elara
The evening porridge lies to us. It steams as if it’s rich, smells as if it remembers milk. But milk isn’t gray, and certainly not specked with black grit to give it weight.
Mother sets two bowls.
“We’ll need a third.” I rise from the chair by the table and turn toward Daron’s bed. “I’ll get him.”
“Don’t.” Mother’s voice is a thread pulled tight.
“He has to eat; he needs strength. He can’t keep sleeping through meals and expect—”
“Elara!” My name snaps, brittle as dead twigs. “Let him rest.”
I turn. The rebuke prickles, and for a beat, I’m ready to sling mine back. Until I see it, the wet glint she swipes from her pallid cheek with the heel of her hand, quick and secret, the way a strong woman hides her sorrows.
I swallow, put my ass back on the chair, and pick up my wooden spoon as I watch Mother fill two bowls. Then she sits without sitting, her spine like a spear that won’t bend, and stares into her porridge.
“Daron will eat when he wakes,” she says, softer now, and scoots her bowl toward me. “Take half.”
“I’m not that hung—”
“Take half.” No more argument in it than gravity. “It will only be the two of us tonight. Best fuel your strength.”
I split the porridge and push the rest back. She nods once and lifts the spoon. Our roof pops. Father coughs in the back, and the bucket answers him.
I keep my eyes on the window so they don’t run to Daron and turn damp. The sun’s begun to slide behind the yew, stripping the color from things as it goes. The graveyard is a page going blank, line by line.
A pulse starts along my ribs, a little drum counting down each annoying second.
If there’s a curse—there’s not—then where did it come from?
Who put it on the crown? Why? And if the rot will leave when the crown gets fed—which sounds so ridiculous—then why hasn’t King Kael done it already? Is he cruel? Stupid?
I could’ve asked that stranger.
I should have…along with his name.
Sighing, I dip my spoon into the porridge, scalding my tongue with a steaming mouthful.
He was right about one thing: the palace keeps its stories close, always has.
That’s how they like it: quiet halls, quiet people.
Births, coronations, heirs, funerals—always a whisper, never a word.
Privacy for holy rites, the priests say.
Now it smells more like secrets…
“Mother,” I say, not looking away from the window. “What do you know of the palace and King Kael?”
She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be the spoon knocking her teeth. “Is this the hour for gossip?”
“Not gossip. Just wondering.”
“He was kind once.” She nods into the steam. “Lowered the city tax the year the barley turned yellow. Opened the granary when the river climbed the wharf. Men do not forget kindness from a king. They forget everything else.”
“And then?”
“Then the harvests halved, fifth year. Halved again. Bread went dear. Rats fattened on the dead.” She stirs, even though the spoon has nothing left to do.
“Perhaps he fattened with them, hiding in his palace, not showing his gut to those who starve. Perhaps the palace stinks like the river by now.” Her mouth twists the way it does when she threads a needle into tough cloth.
“What should a woman whose roof leaks care why it leaks? She sets out buckets.”
“What of King Kael’s father?”
“King Merrick?” Her eyes focus on nothing, spoon hovering. “Times were good. The poor grew round. Festivals were honest. Even when the rain fell, it fell politely.”
“And his queens?” I keep my tone flat, curious but not too curious. “He had many, didn’t he?”
“Three.” A frown, spoon pausing mid-air.
“Or four, maybe. The priests change their songs so often, who bothers to keep count? One of them—Queen Ophelia, I think—gave him the heir. Or maybe it was the one before her?” She shakes her head.
“Doesn’t matter. Stories change like bed linens. Deathcloth doesn’t.”
“How did they die?”
She lifts one shoulder. “Birthing, fever, sorrow. A slip on the steps. A cough that did not stop. Depends who you ask. The palace gives no reason. The reason is that women die. Elara, I don’t care why queens fade if the ovens are hot and the winters tolerable.”
“You’ve never wondered?” I press, impatient for answers, for a thread of hope that the stranger’s story is true. That there is a curse. A solution. “Ever?”
“I have wondered if the butcher would forgive our debt,” she says. “I haven’t wondered about palaces, or queens, or kings.”
A soft thud on the window.
I look back at it.
A moth kisses the glass and leaves the powder of its wings. Behind it, the sun rubs itself smaller on the hill, and the palace roofs catch the last light, holding it like a secret you cannot force from a mouth.
After sunset, he said. At the copse behind the graveyard. Come alone. Bring no light. What sensible girl ventures into the night—to meet a stranger, no less—without bringing a light?
“What will you do?” Mother asks when I rise.
I carry my bowl and spoon to the washbasin. “Walk the grounds. See if the thieves dropped anything of use when they hurried off.”
“Do not go far. Night will set soon.”
“I won’t.”
She hears and doesn’t believe me, folding her hands over her knee until her knuckles pale. “Do not be brave.”
“I don’t know how.”