Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Elara
The carriage waits where the eastern bridge sags over the river, a relic that barely remembers being beautiful.
The gilded trim? Dulled by weather. Those carved dragons along the frame?
Gnawed to toothless lizards. The crest on the door?
Gouged to a smear, as if the city took its knife to pride and kept cutting when it bled.
I stand with my hand on the latch and look back.
Our house makes itself small in the distance the way animals do when they’re shrinking from a predator. Mother is not in the doorway. No, she’s at the stove, pretending that I hadn’t announced that I would leave to work at the palace.
It would be a lie to say it didn’t break my heart to leave them behind, with little excuse beyond the coin we needed for useless medicine and even more useless healers.
It’s not fair how I’ll get to sleep on starched linen tonight with my belly full of bread while my family beds down with rats, their stomachs twisting.
I climb into the carriage.
Vale sits inside, wearing the same clothes as…well, always: clean boots meant for better floors, a fine vest that refuses to stain, white ruffle at his throat, bright as a dove held too tight.
He taps the seat beside him. “Close the door.”
I do. The driver clucks his tongue, and the carriage lurches. The curtains shiver and fall still.
Vale leans over, unspooling the tie on the nearest curtain, drawing it shut. “Privacy.”
“For what?” I settle knee to knee with him because the carriage is stingy with space. “Whispered treason? Riddle lessons?”
“For your education,” he says. “And because I dislike the way light invents me when I’m not paying attention.”
Arrogant peacock. “Is that a joke?”
“Almost.”
The wheels strike a pothole deep enough to bury a child. I bounce and catch myself on the curtain pole. Vale’s hand comes to my knee—steadying, supportive, too warm. He leaves it there until the road turns less evil, then takes it back with a rubbing of his fingers as though he touched dirt.
“First,” he says, businesslike, “you will not pity him.”
“Pity him?” I echo. “Why would I? I lost neighbors that I knew and relatives that I didn’t, all because he’s being stubborn.”
But that’s not entirely true, is it? The king is trying to break a curse. I just don’t know if that’s stupid, or valiant, or both.
“Second, and perhaps more importantly.” Vale shifts to sit a little slantwise, thigh resting against mine in that practical way people have when they ride and pretend they aren’t touching. “Breathe with me. Deeply. Into your chest.”
“Pardon me?”
“Elara…”
“Vale.” I smile with too many teeth. “You want me to pant in a box with you at dawn? At least buy me supper first.”
“Miss?” A voice comes through the window from the driver’s box along with the ca-lop of the horses. “Are you quite alright?”
My molars dig down on the fleshy inside of my cheeks for a moment before I shout, “Just bored with the company.”
“Breathe,” Vale repeats, unamused and very patient. He touches two fingers to the soft place just under my ribs. “Not here.” He moves his hand up, flat over my sternum. “Here. Quiet. Fill the top of your lungs. Deeper. Less”—he flicks a glance at my throat—“less apologetic.”
“I never apologize.” But I do as he asks because the carriage is small and my bravado can’t stand up in it without hitting its head. “Why are we doing this?”
“Like this, the king will notice that you’re not strangling your breath,” he says. “That you’re not flinching.”
“From his…authority?”
“Precisely,” he mumbles as he retrieves his hand. “He’s notoriously difficult, rejecting any aid offered. When you speak to him, never say that you wish to help. No. You want to…to…stay.”
“Help makes men smaller.” Mother told me that a hundred times whenever Father refused her holding his bucket. “Stay makes them feel—”
“Wanted,” he finishes. “He has not felt wanted for a long time.”
“Hard to believe,” I say with a scoff. “Rotting kingdom or not, he’s still a king. Surely, girls line up on the palace gravel for a chance to exchange plums for potatoes.”
His jaw grinds. “Power does not quicken every pulse the way songs promise.”
The road takes a long breath and exhales on its own, rocking us. A village slides past the narrow slit of light where the curtain doesn’t quite meet the frame: black windows, a goat on the stoop chewing cloth as if it were hay, two boys playing at knucklebones with teeth.
A woman darts from a doorway, thin legs flashing pale in the rutted dust. She runs after the carriage, hands out, like the air might drop bread into them if she just reaches far enough.
I watch her shrink to nothing and bite my tongue, because what’s the point of a king trying to starve a curse if it starves all of us first? Maybe he is selfish.
“There will be staff,” Vale eventually says. “Not many. The sensible ones left when the smell started.”
“Smell?”
“Vinegar, myrrh, and the like,” he says with a dismissive swat of his hand. “To keep the rot away.”
“What do I call him? The king?”
“Your Majesty, until he tells you not to,” Vale says. “Ideally, he forgets he has a name whenever he’s speaking to you.”
“You want me to be flirtatious.”
“I want you to be true.” He tips his head. “Speak your opinions the way you do. Be blunt, don’t sugarcoat. Do not curtsy too low.”
“I wasn’t planning on throwing myself onto the floor. I do that only for death and spilled soup.”
A strange kind of focus settles around his green gaze, but it’s gone with a quick shake of his head. “You will bring no flowers. Ever.”
“Tragedy. I look gorgeous behind lilies.”
“Never open the curtains.” He flicks his eyes toward the slit, where the morning sun fails miserably against the gray haze that lingers over the countryside. “Light is unkind.”
“Why not just say that the king is hideous?” That Vale doesn’t correct me only confirms what generations of royal inbreeding can do to a face. “How do I get him to sacrifice me? Gaining his love first seems pretty counter-intuitive to that.”
“It is a challenge we will see to once it presents itself. At first, his refusal to take a queen was sheer stubbornness.” Vale rubs his thumb over his lower lip, his gaze getting lost in the world behind the curtain for a moment.
“But the determination to break the curse he developed in the last year…”
The last year? That’s quite recent. So, that begs the question: what changed? Someone or something must’ve planted the thought of trying to get one over on Death yet again. A dream. A priest. A memory. Something.
“Do you know where it came from?” I ask. “The idea to break the curse?”
“At this point, I believe it must have been a fever dream.” Vale’s gaze lifts, unreadable in the half-light. “He won’t say, and I found no recordings, no witnesses of anything that suggests otherwise.”
“Well, this is quite the lover’s list. The king sounds about as pleasant and personable as a porcupine for wiping your ass after a stew of beans.
And you want me to seduce him? Tie into his soul?
With long, dull hair? Eyes of the most ordinary brown?
And not a single clue about the few female graces I possess.
” To make a point, I hold my hands out. “I’m a gravedigger’s daughter. ”
He studies my hands—my calloused, practical hands—and takes one. He turns it, thumb finding the center of my palm as if he means to press a coin into it. Instead, he traces small circles there, light enough that heat climbs my neck in a wave that wishes it were anger.
“Never reach for him first; you will let him reach. You stay if he retreats; you do not chase.” He moves closer, knee touching mine once again. “That is the seduction.”
“And words.” I pull my hand back, because if he keeps caressing it, the carriage will run out of air with how fast I’m breathing. “What do I say?”
“Nothing sweet,” Vale says. “He would hear mockery. Nothing cruel; he is already cruel to himself most the time.” He tilts his head, studying my mouth like a craftsman measuring a seam. “Let him hear that he is good.”
“Good,” I repeat. “As in…you’re doing so well, Your Majesty?”
“As in,” he says, and the words drop heavy and certain between us, “you are not a thing I fear.”
The carriage hits a rut that should have been a grave, and I pitch forward. Vale catches me at the waist, one hand braced at the small of my back, the other sliding to my arm. The curtains slap the windows and sulk. His breath is right there.
“See?” he murmurs. “Let the man reach. He will.”
“I hate you,” I say, if only to release some of this damned heat trapped under my collar.
“Excellent.” Vale sets me back exactly where I was, but with more distance. “Hate is a clean line. Love is all spills.”
“Oh, I know spills.” That nonchalance in my tone brings some bravado back because I need it. “Sounds like you have this all figured out.”
“I do not, actually.” Giving his long legs a stretch as far as the cabin will let him—which is not very—he folds one over the other. “Like I said, love is a troublesome thing. Much will be improvised as we get closer to our goal.”
We rattle on. Noon comes. Noon goes. The driver stops once to water the horses. Vale stays inside, curtains closed, and passes me a heel of bread and a shard of hard cheese from a little cloth bag as if I’m on a picnic and not being carried to my death.
If I succeed.
And I have to. Fast.
“Don’t forget the coin for my mother,” I say around a chew that would break weaker teeth. “And bread.”
“You have my word,” he says. “Someone will knock with it. They can say that you like the palace if she needs the story to be kind.”
“She doesn’t need kind,” I say, and that old ache that fits Daron’s hand yawns open. “She needs food.”
“She’ll have it,” he says, and for all his many words, he doesn’t make that one into a riddle.
By the time the light outside the curtains turns sullen, my bones know the jolt of this road by heart. The carriage slows, then slows some more before it lurches into a careful crawl like a person trying not to wake a dog.
“Look.” Vale shifts the curtain with two fingers, barely enough to make a blade of early evening slide in.
The palace rises out of the hill, ugly and tender to look at, not at all what I saw from our home.
The roofs are crumbling slate, the color of wet ravens; the windows squint through cobwebs and cracks.
No banners. The stone around the servant’s gate has a rash of black where torches once spat smoke.
The air smells of vinegar, tallow, and old water.
“It’s quite the eyesore up close.” Unexpectedly so, though it makes sense, I guess. No coin, no taxes. “Sad.”
“It’s exactly what it is, and no better,” Vale says when we draw up at the low gate.
Two boys with lanterns stand shoulder to shoulder, both thin as fence pickets, and the carriage stops.
“Only some souls inside the palace know about the power the crown holds. Fewer are those who know its cost. Toward the king, you will pretend to be one of the latter, else he may grow suspicious.”
“Makes sense.”
“You will not speak of me. To anyone.”
I frown at him. “Why not?”
“The fewer things that connect us, the safer,” he says. “My work takes place in the background. If the realm knew the king isn’t the one keeping them breathing—even if barely—he’d become what every starving man already suspects.”
“Incompetent? Ripe to be overthrown?”
One corner of his mouth twitches. “Our king ensures I get no credit because credit grows into loyalty, and loyalty grows into power. But make no mistake, he can tolerate my work so long as I remain invisible.”
“And if I need to seek you out?”
“I will be the one seeking you out.” His brows lift. “Do you understand?”
It’s not a question of understanding.
It’s a demand for quiet compliance.
“I’m plain,” I say, “not stupid.”
The coachman climbs down with a groan and knocks on the side door with the butt of his whip. Behind him, where palace stone meets rugged oak, the servants’ door opens. What comes out, I presume, is the head of staff.
I expected crisp linen, tidy shoes.
At least the performance of order.
Instead, I get a woman who has starched the same black dress so often it cracked into white at the seams. The skin at her temple gleams with a wetness I dare not name, and her cap is a dirty gray.
As are the few fingers she has left.
A sudden wave of dizziness washes through my head, drowning my bravery under cresting dread. They would never hire a sick, infected servant to work so close to the king, inviting rot into the palace.
Unless it’s already here…
“Caretaker?” The woman’s smile is a line a knife drew once when she opens the carriage door. “At last. Come, then.”
I barely remember I have legs. Still, somehow, I gather my brown cotton skirts, step down, land on stones, and stare at the fat, shiny pustule above the woman’s right brow. Something squirms inside it.
Maggots.
Behind me, reins snap.
“Coin!” I quickly turn back to the carriage, to the storyteller who lured me into yet another graveyard. “For my family. Tod—”
The carriage jolts away with a hungry lurch. The curtain flutters once, just enough for me to catch the dark shape of a sleeve inside. And then the carriage is already sliding down the lane, shrinking into the haze.
I swallow whatever curse my mother wouldn’t forgive and breathe past my dread.
Breathe. Deep.
Again. Deeper.
The palace is rotting, too. So what?
I’ll feel right at home.
I turn and face the woman. “Elara. That’s my name.”
“You may call me Miss Hampshire.” She reaches for me with nubs instead of fingers. “Your chamber, girl. I will show you the way.”
Her palm is warm, damp.
The missing digits make a cradle for my hand that I cannot wiggle out of without insulting the kindness it offers. I count: one, two, gone, gone, three. More fingers missing than my brother.
I let the half-hand lead me along stone that sweats with disease and death, telling myself that’s not an omen.