Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
Elara
The gray dress they gave me looks like deathcloth.
A quiet girl brought it before dawn, a shawl over half her face to hide the rash of red welts across her cheek. She didn’t speak. She laid the folded gray on my cot, bobbed a little, and fled, leaving the air smelling like lye.
I pulled it on. It’s clean, which feels indecent in a place that sweats rot with the same enthusiasm as the whorehouses down in the city.
The hem has been let down and let down again.
The apron ties twice around my waist. I tuck my hair into a plain coil that takes me an annoying eternity to get right.
A knock on the door. “Girl.”
Miss Hampshire.
I open the door.
She takes me in with a long look, smelling faintly of vinegar and whatever putrid things vinegar fails to hide. “Are you ready, child?”
I nod.
Another moment passes where she musters me, but she eventually nods. “Follow.”
She doesn’t waste the word on me so much as spend it on the corridor as she turns into it, leading me deeper into a palace that is no longer a place—just a sickness with rooms.
Along the walls, rushes turn brown and then surrender. Bowls of something sharp sit under window slits, pretending to cleanse the air. Tapestries hang with mildew halos around useless saints. A boy with a lantern blinks past us, his left eye white with film.
Miss Hampshire walks like someone who doesn’t remember what it’s like to stand still. Her half-hand taps the other when she talks, the nubs a metronome.
“You will go when you’re called, and you will leave when you’re told.
” Tap. “No unnecessary noise; no talking to yourself.” Tap.
“No flowers. Never open the curtains.” She glances at me to be certain that I understand.
“And mind who you speak too freely around. Fine cloth does not mean clean intentions.”
There’s a chance she means Vale, so I nod, but not as desperately as someone who’s conspiring with the man. “Yes, Miss Hampshire.”
“On most days, our king will refuse food.” She says it like a fact and not like the confusing sin it is. “If he does, inform the maids so they may arrange for it to be taken to the nearest orphanage. That is how he wishes it.”
A runner catches my toe as if to ask whether I heard her right, slowing my pace. Did I? I came ready to loathe a glutton with grease on his lips and crumbs in his beard, all while the city gnaws its own bones. Instead, meals refused are sent to feed small, hollow mouths? Really?
“Come,” Miss Hampshire urges, half-hand at my elbow, tapping me forward before I can decide what to make of this.
We pass servants’ chambers, where pots hold what bowls can’t hold anymore. Where men with cloths tied over their mouths sit and stare at walls.
Gutter Lane. Sweat Alley.
All of it, here.
Only with stone instead of mud.
We turn down a corridor colder than the rest, where the light seems to shy from the walls. To our right, a set of double doors loom: taller, finer, their brass handles dulled by disuse. Miss Hampshire doesn’t even glance that way as we pass.
“Oils.” She lifts her chin at a narrow table nailed to the wall under a drooping flag. Dark glass bottles stand in a line, each with a scrap of parchment tied around its neck. The handwriting is neat and tired.
“Camphor when his joints ache,” she recites. “Myrrh for…well, surely you know what myrrh is for.”
“For preventing rot,” I say, when what I wanted to say was for pretending we can keep it away.
Miss Hampshire offers a pleased smile, half her teeth gone and the other half graying toward the same fate. “Then there is pine pitch—”
“Pine pitch?” My ears prick at that. “Isn’t that only used for mending split wounds?”
“Wonderful!” she says with a nod that’s too fast. “The staff who wrote your recommendation did not promise too much when she said you know your trade.”
Which has to be the lie Vale used to get me into this position, making it clear that I’m not his only accomplice here. “How kind.”
“Read the labels.” A nubby point toward the end of the line of bottles. “No rose extract. He hates the smell.”
She stops at a low door banded in iron, the paint bubbled from a fire that didn’t take. “Of course you have been made aware of…” She turns, looks me over again as if I might have added—or subtracted—parts since the last corridor. “The crown’s…restorative powers?”
That must be the health part that Vale mentioned. “Yes, Miss Hampshire.”
“The punishment for gossiping about the royal household, for airing anything that happens within these walls, is death by flogging for you, your kin, and whoever you’ve infected with it. That is how it has always been.” The way she lifts a brow lets the pustule above it stretch white-taut. “Yes?”
“I understand,” I say, though her stare pins me until I add, “completely.”
She sniffs, satisfied, and leans closer. “It is not for the lower folk to know the nature of royal afflictions. The peasants would only invent songs and prayers to meddle in what none of them can mend.”
She opens the door and waves me inside.
The room beyond is not grand.
Not even a little.
A long chamber made small by screens and folded panels. Windows blinded with layered cloth that wants to be white but fails. The smell is what cadavers smell like twice warmed by the sun. Candles sit in clusters, short and wide, so their smoke drifts low and gets tired before it can grow black.
And him.
At first, he is nothing but a shape. A man on a low couch behind two screens, one of carved wood and one of gauze. Why? He can’t possibly be sick with rot. Not a king. Not with that crown.
Miss Hampshire goes ahead and bows, not with her back, but with her chin. “Your Majesty. The new caretaker.”
He shifts.
His voice stirs low, worn at the edges like a grindstone in an old mill. “Send her away.”
It’s not cruel when he says it; it’s tired.
“Your Majesty.” Miss Hampshire clears her throat. Then, more gently, she says, “She has traveled far. And of high recommendation.”
“I will see her.” His voice comes after a while. “Then send her away.”
Miss Hampshire looks at me without turning. Her half-hand flicks forward.
I go.
The gauze reeks of pus, and the tulip pattern blurs when I pass close enough to touch. I stop where the edge of the screen tells me to stop and lower my head.
“Your Majesty.” My voice is low. Even. Not sweet. I practiced it all morning.
Silence breathes between us before he says, “Look at me.”
I lift my gaze…
…and my stomach drops.
I have seen rot. I’ve seen men drowned in their own lungs, women eaten from the inside, and boys with half their faces wasted to something that had the poor taste to smile, anyway.
Never have I seen this. Not alive.
Shuddering, I bite back a gag.
The king’s face is a map of battles no one won.
Whole provinces of him are stitched into borders and then torn open again.
The crown sits on his head, dull, and the place where it touches the skin looks soft and new at the edges, pink and wet, as if the flesh keeps healing to meet it, only to die anew.
His blond hair grows where it can and fails where it can’t, cropped close around matted, crusty wounds, not for fashion but for mercy.
Eyes once blue shift behind a film of slime, drowning under its coldness.
Bile licks at the back of my throat, sharp and burning. Yes, I have seen rot.
Never did I have to seduce it!
The king lifts an arm that sits higher to protect something in his shoulder, the knuckles on the hand he waves thickened and two nails blackened. “Closer.”
I want to vomit. At Vale, most of all, for luring me into the arms of a corpse. This man would cough maggots into my mouth with a simple kiss!
For one white-hot beat, I want to turn and run. But I grind my heel into the floor and pull my breath where that jerk taught me to keep it. Told right, Daron would faint from laughing at this story.
I have every intention of telling him.
“Closer,” the king repeats, so I step up, keeping my face the way Mother taught me to keep it when visitors brought bad news and needed you to be a wall to lean against. His pale gaze musters me, precise, factual. “Name?”
“Elara.”
“Why are you here?”
It’s not a question, and we both hear it. What then? Maybe he suspects what his steward is up to and is waiting to watch me flicker out. Maybe he doesn’t, and this is simply how he sands everyone down until they leave him to rot.
“Because Miss Hampshire promised a warm meal, a roof over my head, and coin.” I pull his stench into my lungs without even a flinch and walk over to the table that holds cups and a carafe. “And because your throat sounds like it’s chewing gravel.”
I pour water. Put the carafe down with an unapologetic clank. Turn around and reach him the cup.
“No.” The word falls sharp as a coin on stone. “You will leave.”
“Just as soon as you empty this.” Stretching my arm further to where he sits on the low couch, I hold his rot-smeared gaze. “Until later, that is. The crusts on your scalp…they need wetting so we can open up the wound for healing.”
“I will not be tended.” His eyes—storm-quiet—slide to the cup and back to me. “You have come here for naught.”
“I’ve been promised a bowl, a bed, and coin for keeping you well,” I say in the gravedigger’s voice I brought with me. “If you collapse, I’ll be the one who gets blamed. So be well, and do it properly.”
He huffs, bemused surprise rather than a laugh. “You have a mouth for the gutters.”
“And you have a mouth for drinking.” Another shove of the cup toward him, bringing me close enough to the rash that runs along his neck and disappears under gauze that radiates heat.
“If you wanted honeyed lies, then maybe you shouldn’t have scared off whoever was before me.
From me, the best you’ll get is salted truths. ”
“Truths.” His hand lifts, not to grab the cup, but to reach for the gauze along his clavicle. “If you insist on truth, then let me give you the whole draught.”
He doesn’t pull his yellowed shirt; he unbuttons. He peels the gauze back with the care of a man folding a flag. The linen loosens. Moisture glistens. The wound beneath the edge shines raw and gleaming, strewn with angry-red pustules.
It’s a test.
He wants the breath-flinch, the eyelid blink, the heel that leans toward the door. He’s made a study of disgust, and I’m the sum he’s measuring.
I give a nod. “I’ll tend to them next.”
From the low table beside him, he takes a thin steel lancet and rests its tip on the swell of a shiny white pustule.
He looks at me while he presses. The skin yields.
A bead blossoms—yellow-white, with a thread of pink—gathers fat, then breaks in a swell of pus that bubbles with maggots.
He catches them neatly in one hand. Scoops them up. Drops them into the cup.
“I said…” He doesn’t blink. “Leave!”
His hand moves—no warning, no flourish.
A clean backhand to the cup’s rim.
Water arcs into the air, the faint pink smear of pus diluting as it flies. The cup slaps my knuckles. Warm, sour, iron-sweet wetness breaks over my face and open mouth. A maggot hits the back of my throat like a flick of rice.
A sound tears out of me as I gag. My hands stupidly slap at my face, one maggot sticking to my lower lip, another wiggling into my nostril.
Before I can command my feet to stay put, they spin me around. Then I run—no, storm—past the screen. Past the curtains. Past Miss Hampshire, who presses nubs to her forehead as I flee through the door and into the corridor.
Vinegar reeks. Stone sweats.
I rake my nails down my cheeks and flick and flick. Off me! Off me! When I think there are no maggots left, another wriggles free from some seam, dropping onto the latch of the door to my room.
I push against it.
The room coughs me in.
I slam the door.
Water. Basin. I upend the pitcher so fast that the lip chips the bowl. I scrub my face with a rag until my cheeks burn and my eyes water.
Straw crunches behind me.
“You stayed longer than the last. Good.” The words drift from behind me, the familiar aloofness in the bastard’s tone making my skin itch with heat. “On a side note, how would you rate the room?”