Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
Elara
The kitchens at night aren’t kitchens.
They’re a chapel after mass: everything clean and tidy, chairs pushed in, the congregation gone, as is their gossip. The hearth has been banked to an obedient glow. A cooling pot sighs beside it.
“I smelled cabbage earlier.” It’s a funny sight, how Vale lifts lid after lid from pots, layered cuffs fighting him at each attempt, frowning into whatever contents he finds. “Where on earth did they…”
A girl comes through the larder door with a cloth over her arms and startles to a dead stop.
She’s pretty in the way hunger makes women pretty—small wrists, blonde curls framing a slender face, big eyes that grow even bigger as she looks at me, Vale, then me again, as if she’s assessing the order of danger.
“Whatever food remains,” Vale says, voice soft as a secret, “if you please.”
The girl blinks and stumbles into action. “Yes, of course.”
She scurries to the sideboard and returns with a loaf end, a heel of cheese as white as fear, a spoonful of tiny onions only brushed by mold, and a pot that holds remnants of broth.
She sets it all down and curtsies so low that the cloth on her arm nearly tumbles. “It’s all they have.”
“It’s plenty,” I say so she’ll stop apologizing with her body. “Thank you.”
“Take what you need,” Vale tells her, and there’s nothing cruel in it, but there’s no space, either. “Then go and be silent.”
She shakes her head as if relieved he didn’t ask for anything she can’t afford to give, then vanishes like smoke through the door. Vale’s sustained calm makes it clear that he isn’t at all concerned about her having seen us together. Does she know about Vale’s scheming?
“You terrify her,” I say when we sit at a scrubbed table that holds the scratches of a thousand knives. “Whatever have you done to her, Vale?” I keep my head still, letting my eyes slide his way in a playful, taunting way. “Threatened her family? Ruined her in some dark corridor?”
“No need to go through such efforts,” he says.
“Fear is often a byproduct of failure. She was the previous one I had sent to seduce the king. Pretty enough to catch his eye, employed long enough to make herself unassuming, yet entirely incompetent at everything else. Retched on the floor the moment a pustule split open on his bottom lip.”
So, she probably figured out right away why I’m here, newly arrived, sitting in the kitchens beside the treacherous steward at the hour of the wolf. That dampens my hunger for a second.
“What if she tattles?”
“And add having known about treason brewing inside the palace on top of her failure when she tried to partake in it?” He shakes his head. “Silence is not so much a command she obeys for me, Elara. She obeys it to keep her head.”
“Who else knows?”
“As few as possible.”
“Miss Hampshire?”
“Saints, no.” Before I can object, Vale hands me the entire end of bread. “Not even rot speckles that woman’s loyalty to the crown. I avoid her just as she avoids me.”
“Won’t you eat?” I ask. “There’s plenty of food for both of us.”
Shaking his head, he pours water from a clay jug that sweats like stone in summer and sets the cup by my hand. “Eat your food, Elara.”
I eat in the kind of silence that knows how to sit without fidgeting. The onions are dull. The cheese is hard. The bread? Stale, of course.
“Why no wife?” I ask after a while, curiosity getting the best of me. “You don’t long for one?”
His jaw twitches once, twice. “I have longed for a wife longer than I have had a name for longing.”
“Dramatic,” I say, because if he wants me to be gentle with his sadness, then he should’ve asked someone else to supper.
My eyes go to those barely-there wrinkles at the corners of his eyes—the only thing betraying age against the virility that seems to seep off him in waves.
“You can’t be much older than the king.”
“He is slightly younger, to be certain.”
I weigh my next words like coin I can’t spare but spend them anyway. “Then you’re still young. Healthy. And”—I make a vague, irritated circle at his face as if that might smudge the truth—“handsome.”
Heat climbs my neck right then. I pretend it’s the stove, and not the fact that he truly is an attractive man. How wrong is it that I notice?
Vale inclines his head as if staring at a gift brought to the wrong door. “How superficial, coming from a woman as pragmatic as you.”
His unfazed rebuke stings more than I would ever admit. “Right, well, if it isn’t the wrapping, then I presume there’s something wrong with the contents.”
He takes a breath and lets it out tunneled. “What about you, Elara?”
“What about me?”
“Why no husband?”
I shrug and scrape the tough crust through the broth. “Like you said, death keeps me busy.”
There’s a twitch on his lips before he says, “Yes, yes, we settled that already.”
“It might come as a shock to you, but gravedigging girls aren’t the most sought-after during times of pestilence.
Or ever, really.” I take another bite, because bitter truth still tastes better when your mouth is full.
“Every night, I carry disease on my dress. Every morning, I come home smelling of rot. Few men find it anything other than appalling.”
“I find it to be honest work.” Those full lips of his soften some before he asks, “Still hungry?”
I shake my head as I empty the last string of overcooked vegetable from the pot. “How bloody was Queen Ophelia’s sacrifice?”
Vale’s gaze finds mine. “I beg your pardon?”
“O-phee-li-aaa.” I stretch it out extra-long just to pretend he’s slow. “King called her name in his sleep. His mother?”
“Indeed.”
“Clearly, her memory is working on him.”
His eyes search my face as though he’s chasing it for answers to questions he doesn’t dare voice. “How does this tie into your goal of being bedded, wedded, and killed?”
“Just wondering if his mother somehow planted the idea of breaking the curse in his head.” If I know where the thread started, then maybe I can unspool it where it’s still thin. “Besides, it’s easier to win a heart if you understand how it beats, don’t you agree?”
“Hm…” His lips pout. Flatten. Shove around. “He loved her dearly. Her coronation was…traumatic.”
“Coronation?”
“It is what the kings call the sacrifice.” His thumb finds my forehead before I can think to shift back, tracing a slow, deliberate path along my hairline.
Something in it makes my breath go shallow.
“Kael will lift his crown," Vale says, almost gently, “and place it upon your head.
The Queen's Coronation. Then he will slit your throat.”
My esophagus bobs once at that. “How was Ophelia’s coronation traumatic?”
“She had no vision of dying.” His eyes focus on a knot in the wood for long seconds before he shrugs. “From the little I know, I believe she wasn’t…informed of the fate that awaited her. Have you spoken to him about his mother?”
“I can barely speak to him about the weather without him spitting his foul mood at me. His body might forever be rotting, but his soul seems rather dead already.”
There’s a scrape of something sharp in his tone. “Difficult man.”
“How long have you been his steward?”
“Too long if measured by my exhaustion,” he says on an exhale. “Not long enough, given how far the previous steward allowed the realm to deteriorate before the man hung himself three years ago.”
“What if the curse got passed on to someone less difficult?” I ask, too mild to be innocent. “Someone more…willing to kill a queen.”
His brow lifts. “Are you plotting a king’s death in front of his steward?”
“Oh, so deceit, treason, and marching me to a blade sit fine on your conscience, but the king’s throat is sacred? Convenient.”
A laugh cracks out of him like flint on steel, which is a startling experience given his usual indifference. Then he shakes his head. “For that, the king will have to lift his crown. And trust me when I say that he has no ambition to do so, passing on a curse he’s determined to end.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Books,” he says, and the word is almost a flinch. “Coronation annals. Ledgers no one reads unless they are paid to be lonely. Margins priests wrote in the years heirs were birthed. Letters inked by queens in the years before they died.”
Letters.
That word strikes a chord somewhere inside me.
Perhaps even diary entries? If anyone ever recorded how this madness started—how the king got the idea that the curse could be broken—it might be buried there.
Maybe a sermon, maybe a journal. Whatever it is, it’s more talkative than the king is, and a damn sight easier to reason with.
“Can I read them?”
Vale stares at me for a moment before he says, “Stewards and bloodline only.”
“Um, you are the steward. Take me?”
“And risk my position, along with my head?” He tortures his upper lip for a moment. “Rules are strict, always have been. Too many secrets hiding in the library.”
“Secrets?”
“The kind that the priests fear will be the end of all kings,” he says, voice low and almost amused. “The royal family line itself is…”—his head tilts left, right, left again—“no longer intact.”
“Intact?”
“At least once in the past, the curse went to someone not meant to carry it. The incident was hidden under words, stories rewritten and birth ledgers burned, may the crown reign long and prosper.” He chuckles, but it holds no humor.
“Even a whisper from the wrong mouth can turn faith into doubt—and doubt topples thrones faster than pestilence ever could. Hence why there’s no getting past the scribe with you in tow, and not enough coin left to motivate me into slogging through the recordings of some king’s bowel movements again. ”
In other words…
No books, no annals, no letters.