Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
Elara
Vinegar. Wormwood. Witch hazel.
Only the first came easily this morning.
Still, I balance all of it on a slat of wood that used to be a shelf but is now a tray, because I say so.
Balls of boiled sheep’s wool ride my belt in a linen pouch Miss Hampshire let me borrow, and a rag sleeps in my collar in case I have to wipe maggots off my face again.
“His wounds would heal faster than they can decay with some salt,” I say. “A good soak.”
“The kitchens are short on salt. The king’s tolerance for soaking in it is shorter.” Miss Hampshire half-hand-taps our steps toward the king’s chamber. “Neither does he need an incident like yesterday. Too much excitement wears on his lungs.”
I’m not here to argue about stupid rules that clearly keep failing them. “Yes, Miss Hampshire.”
The low door is still an ugly tongue of bubbled paint and iron. Still that same stench of vinegar and wound-breath leaking from the seam. I set my tray’s edge to the latch, shoulder the weight, and enter.
The chamber is a lung that forgot how to exhale, trapping stale air and the sicknesses that cling to it. Even the candles struggle under its weight, barely flickering as I approach the screens, where he sits in the same place I left him on the low couch—a sick man learning his chair too well.
“Leave,” he says in greeting.
I set the tray down on a nearby stool and head for the carafe on the table. “Good morning to you, too, Your Majesty.”
Miss Hampshire shifts uncomfortably in the doorway, but then steps back into the corridor. “I will not be far…”
The door closes.
For once, she leaves me be.
“You again…” The king tips his head, unbothered by how the crown digs into fresh pink skin that had the audacity to heal overnight. “Are you deaf?”
“Only when it suits me.”
A sound tries to be a scoff and pays for the attempt. Pain wrinkles his mouth. He hides the wince the way men hide all weaknesses: by being louder. “Who coached your bluntness?”
“The lesson that rich and poor wind up in graves the same size.” I pour. Raise the cup. Hold it without plea. “How are you feeling on this fine day?”
He exhales, loud, annoyed, almost theatrical.
His shoulder draws in minutely—as yesterday—guarding the right side, then he reaches. Not for the cup, but for the gauze over his breastbone, peeling it away from the pustule he lanced. It’s damp and shiny, angry red where maggots devour flesh straining to heal.
He lifts a sparse brow that still carries some nobility. His voice wobbles with pain and contempt in equal shares. “Rotten.”
“There’s only so much healing a body can do in a day, and it clearly focused on your face.” I bridge the wasted distance and shove the cup into his hand. “What’s with your shoulder? Pain?”
His fingers, swollen at the knuckles, twitch around the cup. He could throw it. He did yesterday.
Instead, he studies me from those cold eyes, like a once-beautiful lake of blue trapped under ice. “Stiffness.”
The word is seamed with embarrassment, as if admitting it were a ridiculous luxury amid all this obvious ruin.
“You sit like a corpse; you ache like one.” I fish a sheep’s-wool ball from the pouch and drown it in witch hazel.
It comes up dripping, sting already parting the air.
I sit beside him, wool clasped between my fingers.
“You sit, you sweat, you rot. When was the last time you left this room? Moved about the gardens? Visited the sea?”
He sidesteps the question because answering it would probably admit that he’s lost track. “Are you lecturing me?”
“Someone should, since your staff swaddles you like a babe, only to leave you to stew.” I lift the tired gauze higher.
No rip. No speed. Let it unstick with its own awful sound.
The skin comes with it for a breath before surrendering, slick threads snapping like sinew pulled too far.
Three more swollen hills show themselves, skin stretched so tight a breath might split them.
“Gauze is a blanket for rot. These need air, not pity. Sun, if we dare. For now, this.”
He sniffs at the soaked wool. “It reeks bitter.”
“Rot likes sweetness. I mean to disappoint it.”
Edge work first. Always the edges. I swipe around the pink rings where new healing fights old offense, circling until the skin glistens. The center can sulk.
At another swipe, he jerks his head in protest. The crown doesn’t move, not even a tilt. It sits there, seemingly welded to him by the curse. Only when he anchors his fingers on the gold does it shift, leaving two pale crescents pressed into his temples.
“It burns,” he mutters, lips curling in pain.
“It has to sting.” The light is so thin, I might as well be working with my eyes closed. The skin wavers at the edge of my sight like heat on the horizon. “Witch hazel dries without a blade. No need to lance and invite—”
“I said, it burns!”
His hand clamps my wrist with a strength I didn’t think he’d kept. He drags my palm lower, over the worst of it, heat radiating like coal under his skin.
Then he presses down.
The pustules give with a wet, obscene pop, the sound bursting against the silence like a scream drowned in muck. A spatter leaps—warm, thick, vile—hitting his throat, my chin, the front of my dress. The smell hits next: sharp, metallic, rancid. Like meat left in milk and forgotten.
Bile climbs. My throat cinches around it. Because, all night, I practiced not gagging.
The pustules deflate in a sluggish collapse, oozing a yellow slick threaded with white. Then movement. Tiny, pale ropes push out, twisting, writhing, greedy for air. A maggot drops onto my knee and splits. Another wriggles down the edge of my wrist, leaving a gleaming track.
He watches me, calm and expectant, like a butcher watching to see if the apprentice will faint at the smell. His other hand trembles faintly from rage or pain, or both.
“Leave…me…to…rot,” he grinds out. “My entire body is foul.”
Bile sears the back of my throat. My eyes sting. Every breath is curdled with the stink of him. I want to flinch, gag, scrub my skin raw.
I don’t.
I pin the bitter saliva under my tongue until it scalds my teeth. He wants the disgust to drive me off? To condemn Daron to death?
Not today.
I hold his stare. Rip my hand free. Reach for the bowl again. The wool hits the witch hazel first, then his chest to the sound of his hiss.
“I’ve seen fouler.” I bathe the wound, voice steady. “Your mood, for example.”
The witch hazel bites worse now that he carries open wounds, his mouth twisting around the burn until it becomes rage. “I could have you hanged for speaking to me like this!”
My scoff carries too much amusement and not nearly enough concern. “As the king of a rotting kingdom, you really have to be more creative with the punishments you threaten,” I say. “Of all the deaths I’ve seen this year, none of them was as kind as hanging.”
Another one of those sounds that could be a scoff, maybe even a laugh, but it turns into a rasp as his mouth pinches.
He snatches the cup—not to sip, but to upend.
The water goes down in greedy glugs, as if he’s praying it’s liquor hot enough to cauterize a life.
The last swallow is smaller, defiant. He places the cup aside with a clink, as if to say he’s still king over something.
It’s a small victory that’s supposed to lift something inside my chest. Instead, a shadow falls over it.
No man endures this kind of pain, this burning agony, this undiluted suffering for the sake of stubbornness alone.
Something gave him the strength to endure, dangling the promise of breaking a curse.
Not a mere fever dream, that’s for sure. But then what? What’s the point in making him fall in love with me—which already seems impossible—if he refuses to feed the curse? How am I supposed to undo a belief I can’t even name?
“This should do.” I let the wool drop into the bowl and move to the wormwood.
But the room is all dusk.
My eyes find the exhausted curtains that smother what little day exists, the gauze levees stuffed into cracks where day might seep through. My mood would be sour if I sat in an oversized grave all day, too.
I rise, slip around the screen, and fetch a weeping candle—careful, because the flame is a nervous animal—and set it on my tray.
“The flame,” the king all but whimpers, eyes clenching into slits, lifting his arm against the stiffness in his shoulder to ward off the brightness. “It hurts my eyes.”
“Of course it hurts. Drag anything into the light after letting it fester in the dark, and it’ll complain.
” I angle the candle so its flicker grazes the wounds but spares his face.
Shadow does most of the work; the flame only suggests.
“A midnight walk in the gardens will help. Moonlight first. And the sun…eventually.”
“I am heat under my skin, fire in my joints, flame in my marrow.” His voice slips into a hiss. “And you expect me to go for walks?”
“You’re all that because you haven’t moved from this couch in weeks—months, likely.
Sit in darkness, never shift, and you rot from the inside out.
” Wormwood pinched between my fingers, I press it along the edges, then the center.
The sharp green scent claws its way over the vinegar in the air.
“Seems as though rotting quietly is our king’s most pressing ambition. ”
He mumbles something no priest would forgive, then swerves, grasping for a different battle. “This herb will stick to the pus and embed itself in the wound.”
“No, it won’t,” I say. “It’ll dry out nicely. Maggots only go where it’s wet.”
“You speak with the confidence of a healer, rather than a caretaker.”
“Experience.” The city is a hard tutor. And while I usually care for the dead, he’s not far from that if it wasn’t for his crown. “Swaddle anything wet and it turns to soup. Give it air and it crisps. Bread, grain, wounds—same rules.”
He sinks his head beneath the weight of his crown, the gold as dull as his eyes. “Credentials?”
“Two eyes that don’t faint, ten fingers that don’t shake, and a nose that’s smelled worse than you,” I say, proud. “If I’m wrong, you may declare me an idiot after you stand, walk, and remain upright.”
From a stool beside the couch, I fetch fresh gauze, which I set on his shoulder. My palm lingers there a moment longer, fingers sensing for the tendons beneath.
His head shifts toward my touch—just an inch, barely visible. His gaze conquers the rest of the distance, settling on my hand. “You are tiresome.”
“You’re not the first to say so.”
“Insufferable.”
“Also heard that one before.” I ease off and layer his chest in a vented lattice, not smothering, not bare—lines of breath between lines of restraint. “I’ll be back in the afternoon.”
“Leave,” he answers. “Do not return.”
I rise. My curtsy is a crime against grace, but I commit it anyway because it makes him scowl and me smile. “I’ll be back tonight to replace the wormwood.”
Because if he truly wants me to go away, he’ll have to slit my throat and bleed me over his stupid crown.