Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
Elara
The sky is already the color of prunes when I step outside and fetch the good lamp.
I trim the wick clean. Oil is dear, but so is getting stabbed by a lunatic I don’t see coming.
I take a rusty knife from an old milking bucket and tuck it into my belt, more for the comfort of the weight than any hope it could cut and kill.
The graveyard leans toward night as I walk along the headstones. Names sink, rise, stretch, and narrow as my lamplight washes over them. I pick my way between stones, lamp low, the light puddled around my boots. Moths come to drown and leave their lace on the glass, following me into the trees.
They sit where the fence fails into brambles. No path. Only a suggestion where others have passed—boys to dare each other, men to piss, lovers to ruin each other gently. I hold the lamp higher, and the trees answer by knitting closer, leaves whispering above my head.
“He said after sunset,” I mutter. “Of course he’s not here. Men who speak in riddles can’t be trusted with punctuality…or anything, really.”
The ground dips, slick with leaf rot. The lamp throws more shadow than comfort now. Then, the air cools.
“Fine,” I call out. “Steward? Court rat? Pretty vest? If you’ve dragged me out to be murdered in a romantic setting, I’m charging—”
A hand seals over my mouth.
Another clamps my wrist.
“Saints blind you,” the man hisses against my temple, angry and close. “Bring no light, I said. Dusk, I said. Not beacon.”
His hand slides off my mouth. A breath brushes my cheek as he yanks the lamp from my grip, flame roaring up for a fight until it sighs out with a pop. Dark slams shut.
My eyes see nothing.
My pounding heart imagines too much.
“I like to see the blade pointed at my belly.” I shove at a chest as hard as a slab of iron. “Or do you prefer women to stumble into your knife so you can feel gallant when you catch them on the steel?”
“If I wanted you gone,” he mutters, low and furious, tossing my lamp into the shrubs, “then you’d be waking up in a cell with your name written wrong on the door.”
“Such an important man you are,” I shoot back, because if I don’t argue, I will notice that we are still close enough to share a damn heartbeat. “If you expected me to arrive like an obedient fool, then perhaps you asked the wrong girl to come.”
“I asked exactly the right girl,” he says. “After all, you came.”
He shifts, and his shoulder brushes mine.
Now that my eyes have adjusted to the darkness, I can see the line of his cheekbones sharpen inches from my face.
Hints of moonlight filter faintly through a canopy of a thousand leaves that rustle above, bringing out the fine curvature of his dark brows, that thin shadow around his full lips. Annoyingly handsome.
“Don’t enjoy that too much,” I mutter, which is bravado dressed as wit. “I came for answers. Haven’t decided a thing.”
He lets out an annoyed breath. “Very well, Elara. Answers, then.”
“Stop saying my name like you own it just because you heard my mother hiss it at the Gutter Lane house.” Heat slips under my words. “What’s yours, anyway?”
He hesitates the smallest half-beat. “Vale.”
“That’s a place, not a name.”
He shrugs, unbothered.
“Fine, Vale.” I fold my arms. “Where does this cursed crown come from?”
He smacks his tongue. “It is from Death.”
A laugh climbs my throat and thinks better of it when it finds no air. “From death,” I repeat flatly. “As in…what? Grave dirt climbed onto a throne one morning?”
“As in…Death,” he says, capital in his tone like a bell-strike. “A king tricked him a very long time ago.”
“Him?” I blink at Vale. “Death isn’t a person. It’s sickness, rot, a sermon, and a shovel.”
“And life is birth, breath, a prayer, and a miracle.” He doesn’t flinch. “Language cheats. Death is a man, and he bargains like one: keeps ledgers, honors debts, takes what’s owed. And what is owed is blood.”
When the wind howls through the canopy above, he looks up and leans us both deeper into the shadow under a branch, steering me with a hand at the small of my back. The touch is warm, precise. Infuriatingly gentle.
I huff against the frustration in my chest. “Cheated Death, how?”
“That hardly matters at this point, unless you came for history lessons.”
“Fine,” I drawl. “Let’s say Death is a man, and a king cheated him. What’s that got to do with the crown?”
“A very long time ago,” Vale says, “a king demanded a crown that held every grace greedy men beg for: prosperity for his realm, health for himself, and protection for his rule.”
“Protection for his rule?”
“Aside from the sand of life running out on him eventually, our kings cannot die. Not of sickness, disease, or injury,” he says. “Not while he wears the crown, which is fused to his skull unless he decides to lift it.”
“And Death gave away such a crown?” I ask before I can help myself.
“Death doesn’t break the law,” Vale says softly.
“Nor does he forgive what it cost him to keep it. He tore a string from his heart and tempered gold around it. That string sits inside the circlet even now, humming like a nerve. The crown does what was wished, but the heartstring grows hungry for blood, about every fifteen years. Sometimes much sooner.”
“And then?”
“Then it must be fed.” His breath moves the hair near my ear. “Fed on a king’s wife—a queen. Her life poured into the gold to quiet the string.”
“And if not?”
“Sickness. Rot.” He lifts his arm, gesturing into the blackness of the night. “Death.”
I taste unease and the porridge that lied. “You expect me to believe this? That Death—an actual person, no less—plucked himself like a harp.”
“Believe it or don’t. The fact stands whether peasants accept it or not.”
“Ridiculous.” But what if it’s not? What if it’s true, and there’s an end to this rot?
A chance for Father and Daron to recover?
To live! “Alright,” I venture carefully.
“Assuming that I believe you, why hasn’t King Kael fed it then?
If this is all so neat? Marry a girl, bleed her out, make a sacrifice. Why no wedding? Why no funeral?”
“Because our king is selfish.” That last word carries a sharpness to cut. “He thinks if he denies the crown, denies the blood, then it will starve the curse. Break it.”
“What if he’s right?” The words come too quick, too defensive, like I’ve taken the king’s part without even fully believing this story. “What if starving it works? What if the curse shatters and we all dance with bellies full and pockets heavy?”
“Then you will have buried half the realm to get there.” Vale’s voice is too calm, too certain. “If it breaks at all,” he adds, “which it will not.”
“You speak like a man who knows the end of every story.”
“I know the end of your brother’s story.” His words are like a blade pressed against a wound already weeping. “How much longer does he have, you’d wager? Enough time for the king to condemn hundreds, thousands of lives…where only one will do?”
My throat thickens with whatever tears I swallowed earlier. I hate that he knows where I hurt. Hate that he puts his finger in, swirls it around in my sorrow.
Taking a deep breath, I run his tale through my head like a length of rope, testing for integrity. If it holds, my life buys that of Father and Daron. If it frays, nothing changes but the manner of my death: quickly, inside a palace instead of slowly out here.
“If this heart thing is real, then one life saves the rest. One.” I hold up a finger I’m glad I can’t see. “In trade for my family.”
“An entire realm,” he says with a reverence that doesn’t quite match the lack of heroism in my blood. “What is one life weighed against the realm of Issoria?”
“My life. So you’ll forgive me if I argue the scale.”
“Argue,” he says. “But argue with the numbers, not the story. How many houses boiled filthy water for soup this week? Ask the gravedigger’s daughter how many maggots fit into a woman’s mouth.”
“I am the gravedigger’s daughter.”
“I know,” he says quietly. “That is why I asked you to come.”
I swallow around a dry stone of anger. Anger that I could’ve saved so many sooner. Anger that I might still end up saving none.
“Say I’m a fool and do what you ask,” I venture. “The king hasn’t wed anyone yet. Why would he start with me? A gravedigging peasant.”
“Because…” His gaze slips to my lips, and that shouldn’t cause my stomach to squeeze the way it does. “You have something the other didn’t have.”
Words that would have just about any girl giggly, if not for how my wit catches on his mention of other. “You tried this before? Getting him to marry someone? To feed the curse?”
“Once. Obviously with no success.”
“Why not? What’s so complicated about killing a girl when there are plenty to be found in ditches each morning?”
“Because love is a troublesome thing,” he says with a shrug, letting the delicate silver strings embroidered onto his tailored vest shine here and there. “It has to ache his heart when he sacrifices his queen—the crown will accept no less. But he keeps his heart well-guarded, opening it to none.”
“Love?” I all but breathe. “You expect me to walk into a palace and…what? Make a king fall in love with me? By when? Supper? I don’t know the first thing about…” The word sticks, ridiculous and huge in my mouth. “Love.”
“You know more than you think.” The back of his knuckles find my jaw in the dark, just a graze to remind my skin of our closeness.
“You turn down payment so a boy can live for another day. You hold your father’s bucket with steady hands.
You make jokes for your brother, giving the rot in his lungs the sound of laughter. ”
“You’ve certainly paid attention from the shadows.” A realization that has me go still for a moment. “I’d say what you’re doing is treason, plotting behind the king’s back. If King Kael can’t even trust you, then why would I? What else is in this for you?”
“You mean, aside from not having to smell rot wherever I go?” He arches a brow. “Do not let my presentation fool you into thinking that I don’t suffer this curse alongside everyone else.”
“Well, you look very healthy. Fed. Groomed.” I make the mistake of flaring my nostrils in jest, only for his scent of carnations and dew to climb into my nose. “Insultingly clean.”
“At dawn, a carriage will wait for you down by the eastern bridge,” he says. “It will take you to the palace, where you will fill the position of caretaker. Everything has been arranged.”
“Caretaker? Of the grounds?”
He dares to roll his eyes. “The king.”
“I comb his hair, help him into his breeches, button his shirts?”
Vale’s head wavers as though it doesn’t know in which direction to move, but eventually nods. “Among other things.”
“I’ve only ever cared for corpses.”
A strange sound stirs in his chest, like a subdued laugh, his torso shifting to leave. “At dawn, Elara. Assure your family that coin and bread will be sent in lieu of your presence.”
“Wait!” I grab his shoulder, strongly enough I hope I don’t look like I need the answer, but… “What is it I have that the other didn’t?”
His mouth is close enough now that I feel the shape of the words before I hear them. “You’ll see.”