Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Elara
“Lineage and stewards only.” Bam. The scribe slams his book shut, letting a whirl of dust cough into my face.
“All I need are the annals of the late queen.” I step closer to the scribe’s worm-eaten lectern because cowardice is a disease, and I wasn’t born with that affliction. “Diary entries pertaining to the king. Notes on health.”
“What you need is the door behind you.” The old, bald-headed scribe looks up just long enough to cough into his rag and stain it the color of old cherries. Spots freckle his cuff where blood and pus didn’t quite make it to the rag. “Maids look at linen ledgers, not royal annals.”
“I’m not a maid,” I say. “I’m the king’s personal caretaker. The more I understand about his upbringing, the better I can serve His Majesty.”
He dips his quill, and the tremor that rakes the length of his hand makes the ink stutter across the page. A wet rattle stops the spill. He leans aside and spits into a chipped basin without shame, threads of red webbing the porcelain.
“Lineage.” He taps a bone-thin finger against the cover of the nearest tome. The knuckle clicks. “Stewards.” His gaze lifts to me, one eye brown, the other a dry, wrinkly plum rotting away in its socket. “Leave.”
I turn on my heel hard enough to scold the floorboards and storm back into the corridor, fury as biting as lye under my tongue.
It’s bad enough that the king slammed himself shut again in the garden after he’d finally started to talk.
Now the books won’t open, either! How am I meant to pry at the hinge of this curse when every hand in this place teaches doors to stay closed?
It’s impossible! “Ugh!”
The library is truly off-limits. Vale talks only when he wants to. For the past few days, not once. How else can I—
Something in my belly tips.
A small whirl. A shift in gravity.
My feet falter to a halt right where an alcove of shadow opens to my right. My eyes lift uninvited, landing on the double doors of the unused royal chamber.
That whirl in my belly intensifies.
It’s older than Ophelia, Vale had said. But if that’s true, then why would the king care? It makes no sense. And if neither Vale nor the library will speak to me about it, well, then perhaps the room will!
I lay my palm against the latch and wiggle it a little. The doors are closed today, but unlike the greenhouse, they aren’t locked. I listen for a breath on the other side. Nothing. I press.
The handle yields, and the door swings on a sigh, as if it’s been holding it in for years. Inside, the room still has that tidy loneliness, the mirror veiled, the bed draped.
A glance over my shoulder.
Nobody there.
I slip inside. Close the door. There has to be something in here. A letter. A journal entry. A long-forgotten secret. Anything that can tell me why the king avoids this room, and how it might relate to the avoidance of his duty of feeding the crown.
So I start.
Drawers: lined in paper gone brittle, but nothing inside that holds as much as a single stroke of ink.
Wardrobe: gowns asleep on their hangers, stitched for festivals that turned into funerals.
A chest in the corner: cedar breath, clean blanketing, nothing anybody would bother to hide.
I dip my fingers into the seam under the mantel. It gives me nothing but soot.
Footsteps creak.
I step behind the bed drapes and make myself flat. Four counts, high in the chest. The sound passes.
I move slower. Rooms give up their secrets to people who stop hurrying. The mirror asks to be unveiled, but I refuse. Mirrors are far too good at making people believe that what they see is true. Wood, however…
Wood doesn’t flatter.
It keeps score.
The shine on a chest lid tells you how often a hand sought it for comfort. You can smell whether a board was fed beeswax or lye; hear if a floor is lying about rot by the way it sighs under your knee. Joints confess the craftsman; splinters confess neglect.
Mirrors are opinions.
Wood is evidence.
Kneeling, I palm the boards and let the grain talk—knuckle taps for hollows, fingertip presses for give, a slow pry where a seam looks sullen.
Only dust answers. No loose tongue of plank, no hidden graves for secret notes.
I crawl the perimeter, knees drinking the cold, cheek near the wood to hear if it lies. Nothing. Nothing. Nothi—
There! A freckle in the plank, close to the rug.
Not dust, not a beetle. Too uniform for dirt, too flat to be sap. Brown the way dried things become.
Like old blood.
I hook my fingers under the rug and peel it back slowly. The weave clings like a scab, then lets go with a rip…
…and the stain blooms.
It starts as a wrong shine, a circle polished by a hundred frantic scrubs that shaved it smaller and drove it deeper in a way that makes my stomach turn. Saliva pools under my tongue as I lift the rug more, making the stain grow and swell like—
“What are you doing?”
I jerk, rug slapping down on the floor in crumpled folds, my breath pinned too close to my heart. My head snaps toward the door.
Vale leans against the jamb as if the wood has been built around him. Sunlight from the corridor draws a seam over his shoulder, giving his face a warm glow.
“Breaking rules,” I say, because I don’t like being caught, and I like being scolded even less. “What’s your excuse?”
“I heard a complaint from the scribe. A maid asked to gain access to the library.” His mouth almost smiles. “Obstinate, he said she was. I decided not to argue with his talent for adjectives.”
Neither do I, shifting from my knees to my rear as if to convey that I have no intention of leaving this situation behind. “So you hunted me down.”
“I looked for you,” he corrects. “You were not in your chamber. Not with the king. Not prying at the greenhouse lock. That left…” He tilts his head at the room. “Here.”
“To do what?” I throw the words in his direction, low and dangerous. “Keep me from figuring out what you’re not telling me?”
He’s quiet for a heartbeat before he closes the door behind him—does not latch it, but shuts it enough that the hall will have to work to overhear. He steps in and lowers to the rug beside the blood, as if kneeling were something he rarely practices.
His gaze sinks to what’s still visible of the stain. “You found it.”
His tone is unimpressed, unsurprised.
“It’s old.”
“There’s older.” The words scrape out like he wishes they didn’t. “The palace has stains in its bones. In the kitchens. Under the chapel. On the privy floors.” His mouth tightens. “This one isn’t even the worst of them.”
“Why did you keep this from me?”
“Because you’re going down a rabbit hole,” he says softly. “And there is nothing at the bottom of this one but splinters.” A scoff. “So much about you not wanting to waste time.”
That last part lands heavier in my stomach than I want it to. “Whose is it?” I ask. “Ophelia’s?”
He exhales through his nose. “No. Before her.”
“So a queen died in this room.”
“Queens have died in many rooms.”
I look back down, peeling the rug another inch to expose the jagged edge of the discoloration. “Who bled here?”
“Elara, this palace is a butcher’s block wrapped in velvet.” He glances at the stain with a boredom that feels studied. “You found a spot. Congratulations. If we peeled back every rug in this wing, we’d find a dozen more just like it.”
“Goddamn it, Vale, who—”
“Queen Maeryn.” He reaches out and flips the corner of the rug back over the wood, extinguishing the stain from sight. “King Merrick’s second wife and sacrifice.”
I frown at the rug, unconvinced. “Then why does Kael refuse this room?”
“Merrick’s bed. Merrick’s mirror. Merrick’s chamber pot.
Presume he avoids it because it reeks of a father he loathed.
” His voice edges into something sharper.
“Every night, that massive blood stain would remind him of what ought to happen to his future wife, what his father had done to a mother he adored.”
My fingers curl away from the rug as if they want to believe him. And it makes sense. Given how Kael spoke of his father in the gardens? Yes, it makes sense…but then why does something keep murmuring in the back of my head?
I shake it away for now because there’s no way I’m getting a different story out of Vale, anyway. “Why did you come?”
“To apologize.”
I bark a small laugh and stare at the rug. “Of course.”
“For the greenhouse,” he says, the words leaving him like shards. “For…raising my voice. For putting my hand on you. Rather roughly.” He doesn’t even pretend it had been anything else. “I am sorry.”
I keep my eyes on the speck of blood, because if I look at his face, I might forget to be upset. “It changes nothing.”
“Look at me…” His hand comes up slow—heel of palm first at my jaw. Warmth settles, thumb resting just under my cheekbone. He doesn’t turn my face. He waits, asking with skin what strength would bruise. “Will you look at me, please?”
Not a command.
A plea.
I tell myself I don’t lean into the cradle of his palm as my gaze finds his. God forbid I notice the clean heat of him, the faint scent of carnations, the way my stupid pulse steps too obediently into his touch.
What is it about this infuriating man?
“The more the king drowns in determination and disease, the more work finds me,” he says on a slow exhale, heavy enough it turns the air between us thick.
“Moving bread from where it rots to where it won’t.
Seeing to taxes no one can pay. Signing decrees that no longer change anything.
Filling the silences he leaves behind. Burying the truth before it festers into rumor.
Elara, I am…” His voice trips, tangles, then finds itself again. “I am tired.”
His words sit bare and vulnerable between us, and something loosens under my collarbone—a small, soft give like dough rising under steady warmth. Compassion slides in before I can bar the door. Because I know what it feels like, being tired of a million efforts that lead to nothing.
“I need this to stop.” His palm shifts along my cheekbone, not even pretending it’s anything else but a caress.
“Not for the sake of the realm, for I will not pretend to be that valiant. For me.” His thumb drifts, slow as thought, tracing the edge of my jaw before stopping at the corner of my mouth.
“If I put my desperation over yours, then I’m sorry. ”
My pulse flutters against his touch, shy and sharp. He’s so close. So warm, making me want to press my face deeper into his touch.
I don’t, though.
Maybe I don’t know how, with my skin trained for the cold of death, for weight that does not answer back. So I twist away, letting his hand fall, trying not to shiver at the cool air settling across my cheek.
“He…he opened up to me,” I say, quickly swallowing the thickness that somehow gathered in my throat.
“A little. He made a joke in the gardens. He smiled. He spoke about his mother. Asked about my brother.” I feel the betrayingly soft edge on my tongue at the mention of Daron and sharpen it.
“But it isn’t enough. Every second counts.
I need to understand him faster without having to pester him about things that darken his mood.
A view into his past will not only do that, but it might even give me a hint about how to convince him to feed the crown. ”
Vale’s jaw tightens the way men tighten a belt when the work is about to be ugly. “If the library held an answer to that, don’t you think I would have found it by now?”
“Men can stare straight at a thing and still not see it.”
“Some things you claim to know about men…” He sits in silence just long enough for me to realize I’m listening to his breath like a fool. When he speaks again, it is with resignation wearing good manners. “In five nights, I will try to take you to the library.”
“Five?” The word comes out too fast. “That might as well be the number of fingers my brother loses in that span of time.”
“Well, the scribe coughs more on Thursdays, and the sound will give us cover,” he says sarcastically. “Lineage and stewards, Elara, and that rule is tighter than the gauze on a leper’s hand. I am one, but you are neither, which means that this excursion requires…finesse.”
“Alright.” My eyes go to the speck of blood that peeks out from the edges of the rug. It’s old, yes, but not ancient. “In five nights.”