Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Elara
Iwake to the smell of clean gauze and the tired sweetness honey leaves when it has done what it can.
Where am I?
The light is low and not ambitious. The ceiling above me is the same cracked plaster as always, but the angle is wrong. I’m higher, my blanket heavier. The pillows under my head are good ones, not straw.
The king’s bed?
The moment I move my arms, trying to sit up, a voice stops me.
“Not yet.” The king is seated beside me on the red blanket, elbows on his knees, head braced in his palms. “Rest a while longer.”
My tongue presses up against my gums at the sight of his posture that reads awfully close to despair. How did I get up here? Surely he didn’t heave my body this far and this high when he struggles to even lift his bad arm.
I glance around.
It’s only us.
His shirt is open at the throat, the angry rash there paled to something I wouldn’t call beautiful, but I would no longer call it ugly, either. A line of old muscle still lives beneath his skin, stretching taut with each of his slow inhales.
He lifts his face. The fog over his eyes has cleared some over the last few days, revealing a deeper shade of blue. Red-rimmed, though, like a man who’s held his breath too long. Or had an angry outburst…
“This is not at all how I have been raised to act. How I ought to treat a woman.” Clenching his eyes shut, he releases a slow breath, shaking his head before his gaze returns to the room—only to lose itself somewhere on a wrinkle within the red velvet.
“Or perhaps I have been raised to treat them far worse…”
My ribs are all but counting my breaths. Something changed about his air. It’s denser, yet more open at the same time. Like a door of heavy oak left ajar.
I don’t trust it. What if it swings back on my fingers?
His gaze lifts and finds mine. “Why are you here?”
There’s no anger in his voice, no curiosity.
Only factual blandness, making it impossible to gauge the renewed question.
It could be the kind a king asks when he has caught on to his steward’s treachery.
What did Vale and he talk about before I came into the room?
What has that man done to rile the king up like this?
“My family needs coin.” It’s true enough an answer as I tiptoe around this strangely calm energy that floats in the air between us. “For my father’s lungs. My brother’s fingers.”
“Your brother. Loved.” He’s turning that last word over in his mouth as if tasting if it’s something he might swallow. “How far would you go to save him?”
“Your Majesty?”
“What would you give, Miss Elara…to save him?” His gaze is very plain; plain enough that I can’t tell whether he means to test me or warn me or bless me with a choice I already made even before coming here.
A knot swells in my throat at the sound of my name from his lips, so thick it aches when I gulp it down and carefully venture, “All that I have.”
He bows his head—a little involuntary tilt that I can’t read, that I can’t keep from driving up my pulse. Did his resolve to break the curse crack alongside the marble figurines? Or did my answer just confirm his steward’s scheming? Is he measuring me for the crown or the noose?
He takes a cloth from the bowl on the stool beside him and touches it to my burning temple. Cool. Damp. Smelling faintly of honey. Honey he must’ve used to tend to the obvious cut there while I was unconscious?
“I owe you a king’s apology,” he says, and his voice is court again—not the cruel court, but the one that learned manners and didn’t always forget them. “For the shouting. The yanking. My ill temper. For…all of it.”
For a breath, I just watch him, this man who only ever comes in nasty storms now sitting in still water. No vileness, no biting words.
There’s just quiet and the glimmer of regret in his eyes. It’s strange seeing him like this…stranger still that he looks younger. The ruin is asleep, and for the first time, I glimpse the man beneath it.
How do I meet him, this version I’ve never seen before?
“You upended a chessboard,” I say carefully, because humor is cheaper than righteousness. “The pawns will never forgive you.”
A very small smile disobeys the rest of his face, if only for a second. “I have endured worse censure from men in better positions.”
“Men in better positions still don’t know the weight of a crown,” I say quietly. “It’s easy to judge when you’re not the one bearing the weight.”
An old shadow returns to his face, but it somehow fails to age him the way it has before.
“I’ve brought my people nothing but ruin.
Every day, this kingdom rots a little more under my hand.
” His head lowers, as if readying itself for the executioner.
“The weight of that kind of failure was…too much to bear earlier. It is not an excuse; merely serving as an explanation that begs your forgiveness.”
I should hate him for the suffering he’s causing, but there’s something disarming about the way he says sorry—like a man unused to the word, yet meaning every letter.
He moves the cloth again, slower now, his touch almost reverent.
The damp edge drags cool across my temple, down to the hollow beneath my cheekbone, careful not to press too hard.
His thumb follows, barely there, brushing away a stray drop, and for one disarming heartbeat, I forget which one of us is meant to be healing the other.
When his eyes find mine, he clears his throat. “I shall make amends.” He drops the rag into a shallow bowl that stands on a stool beside the bed, then returns his attention to me. “Tell me how, Miss Elara.”
Tell me how.
Those words bring a tingle to my core. An apology from a king alone is likely a treasure, but this feels like something much bigger entirely: like an opening.
A rare, fragile chance.
The library. I could ask him for access to the queens’ annals, to a hint, a clue about his determination.
No. He would question my reasons. Might grow suspicious. Besides, Vale already said he’d take me.
My eyes drift to the curtains, to those heavy drapes that choke the room in shadow. I could ask him to open them; to let the light touch his room, his mood, his very soul. Too simple, too…still very much bound to this damn room.
It needs to be something deeper. Something that brings me closer to him once more. Something that breeds intimacy. Something like—
My eyes go to the rash at his throat, much improved but still refusing to leave altogether.
That’s it.
“Yes, you shall make amends.” Because he offered, and I’m not a woman who wastes opportunities. “Salt water. You’ll agree to take a long soak while I tend to your skin. It’ll do more than all the wormwood and witch hazel in the realm.”
There’s a faint tilt of his head, a subdued moment of surprise as his eyes narrow for a fraction of a second. “The kitchens are—”
“Short, yes. Everyone is short,” I answer. “Except for the sea.”
“The sea is far. Dangerous at night, and painfully bright during the day.”
I lift a taunting brow. “Sounds as if the king’s desire to make amends ends where his comfort does.”
He gives a bemused scoff.
Then he leans back enough that the open part of his shirt shifts, letting a nearby flame flicker soft and warm over the lean muscles on his stomach.
He had to be strong once, with soft skin raised by the most fragrant oils, and muscles honed with the help of the best sword masters.
With his hair long, perhaps a bit curled, framing those blue eyes?
He had to be regal once.
Handsome, even.
“There is a spring,” he eventually says.
“On the far side of the grounds. It broke into the old salt mine many years ago. It’s a cave’s mouth now, where the air is wet enough that lanterns sputter.
No one uses it. The smell…persuades people that they do not need to discover it.
” He pulls a breath deep into his chest and lets it go slowly.
“If I am to make amends, let it be there.”
“A soak it is,” I say, and no small sense of victory lifts inside my core. “We can go at night, when there’s enough moonlight and no clouds to make us slip on rocks and break our skulls.”
He considers me, then he nods once. “At the next clear moonlit night.”