Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Elara
Lungs burning, I sprint toward the massive iron-banded gates. The morning mist hasn’t yet lifted from the cobblestones of the lower courtyard. It clings to the stone, a creeping white tide that smells of wet earth and moss and the faint metallic tang of the portcullis.
Kael stands in the midst of it, a dark shape carved out of gray. Charcoal wool, silver embroidery that steals what little light the sky offers. He glances back at me as I skid to a halt at his side.
“I looked for you in your chamber,” he says. “You weren’t there.”
There isn’t enough air left in my lungs to breathe a lie, so I just nod once, sharp. “They’re early.”
His gaze travels over me with a slow, meticulous weight. From my hair—likely knotted and tangled—to my wrinkled dress and down to the hem of my skirt. I feel acutely aware of what I just did, as if his brother’s touch is still on me, fingerprints rising from my skin like steam.
“The rain did not wash out the Oakhaven bridge the way it often does,” he answers.
“That explains it…” My voice comes out thinner than I’d like.
I resist the urge to claw my dress straight, to scrub at the damp stain, to sniff if Vale’s scent is stitched into the cotton. But I force my hands to smooth down the fabric with agonizing care instead, as if all I’m brushing away is dust and not a tower’s worth of sin.
“Do not worry yourself, Elara.” Kael’s hand settles warm and steady at the small of my back, rubbing up and down in the same rhythm he used when I wept against his chest. “I had Miss Hampshire prepare the best rooms in the west wing. Your family will be looked after.”
I lean into his touch before I can stop myself. Maybe my body remembers its comfort, even as my mind cautions me not to trust it fully. Not with what I heard behind that door. Not with how he’d looked at my boot.
I stare down the winding road that disappears into the fog-choked tree line. Somewhere beyond that veil, a carriage rattles toward us.
Mother. Daron.
“Thank you, Kael.”
It sounds small. Pathetic, even. Too thin a word, given how I held his brother mere moments ago. Too flimsy for a king who stepped into the pain of daylight to hold my grief.
I flinch at my own confliction.
How did this all get so…tangled?
“Do not thank me for decency,” he murmurs, his hand stilling at the base of my spine. “It makes it sound rare.”
“Perhaps because it is,” I answer. “You didn’t have to do this.”
He turns fully then, and the silver thread at his cuffs pulls a glint out of the gray air. There’s something kingly in that, how he commands grace without trying. But when he wraps his arms around me? There’s nothing regal in how he inches me into the warmth of his body.
“I wanted to,” he says into my hair. A beat, then softer. “For you.”
My throat tightens like a knot tugged from both ends. His warmth crawls under my skin, turning it hot. It makes my nerves prickle, like an itch under my flesh, as if I’m being held by the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong—
No. That’s nonsense.
It’s just my stupid head scrambling even stupider delusions. This is the right man. The one whose love I need. The one who has to put a crown on my head and hold a knife to my throat.
Not his brother.
I shove the confusion down. What if he wasn’t even suspicious about my boot?
What if that was just in my head? And what if I’m making progress here, and whatever I heard between him and that messenger was nothing but the frail leftovers of a plan he is slowly abandoning?
Didn’t he hint at that in the spring? Is he not here to receive my family with me?
“Elara…” His hand, still resting at the base of my spine, presses just a fraction more firmly. Not pushing, just…holding, anchoring. “I need you to stop worrying. This was my choice, and you owe me nothing for it in return.”
His eyes flicker down to my mouth, then back up. A question, a hesitation. Giving me room to pull away.
I don’t. I bridge the last bit of distance and press my lips to his with a determination that makes his breath catch.
When it returns, it does so with fire. His hand slides up my back, splaying between my shoulder blades, pulling me closer in a way that feels urgent. His lips move against mine with desire, faster as if—
A throat clears. Loudly.
We both jolt.
But only I move, breaking the kiss, pulling back to find Miss Hampshire standing a few paces away: jaws tight, lips thin, wrinkles carved between her brows. Maybe she suspected, but she’s never seen us intimate until now—and after she caught me coming down the tower. Will she tell?
Kael’s hand doesn’t leave me. If anything, it tightens as he turns toward his head of staff. “The linens are laid out? The hearths started?”
His tone is calm, as if being caught kissing a gravedigger in a king’s courtyard is nothing more than an item on his morning agenda. His hand strokes once down my side, soothing, entirely unconcerned with how her eyes flick to me, heavy with what looks like judgment. Maybe concern.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” She curtsies, then her gaze drifts to the gate. “The carriage is coming over the rise.”
My heart hammers against my ribs, echoing loudly enough between my ears it almost drowns out the rhythmic crunch of gravel, the jingle of harness bells, the heavy creak of wood under strain.
They’re here!
The carriage cuts through the fog, its shape slowly resolving out of the gray: black wood, iron-rimmed wheels, two horses slick with dried mud. The driver hauls back on the reins. The horses snort, tossing their heads. The whole contraption shudders to an uneven halt.
For a breath, nothing moves—no door opens, no curtain parts. Then, the latch lifts with a click.
Mother steps out. She’s…smaller, somehow. Her dress hangs looser at the shoulders, and there are new lines etched around her mouth in a way that makes my stomach knot. What if I made it all worse by leaving?
“Elara,” she breathes.
I run. My shoes skid on the damp stone, and my arms fling themselves around her, whether she’s ready or not. I bury my face in the familiar hollow of her shoulder, where she smells faintly of soap, potatoes, and…iron?
I turn my head, spotting dark purple veins webbing up the side of her neck, each one like rope tightening around my chest. No. Not her too…
“Mother…”
Her arms come up tight around me, fiercer than her body looks capable of. “Let me see you.” She pulls back, her rough fingers cradling my face, turning it this way and that. “You look like you’ve been worrying yourself into the ground. Are you—”
Her gaze flicks past me.
Up.
Over my shoulder.
“Your Majesty,” she says, and I hear the tiny adjustment in her tone. Less loving, more formal. “Thank you. Thank you for bringing us.”
“Of course.” Kael inclines his head. His voice is perfectly even, but I feel the brief, reassuring press of his hand at my back again. “Welcome to the palace. I am sorry the circumstances are what they are.”
“A roof that doesn’t leak and bread that isn’t green already improves them,” she answers bluntly.
“Ma’am.” The driver shifts on the box, glancing toward the still-open carriage door. “The boy…”
Daron. I move before anyone, elbowing past one of the approaching footmen to peer inside the carriage—and still.
A shudder rakes my spine.
What happened to him?
Laid out on a makeshift pallet of wood and layered blankets, his long limbs look like kindling atop the wool.
The rot that started at his nails has crept further, climbing up his hands, mottling his wrists, licking at his forearms like frost. His cheeks are hollow, eyes too big in his gaunt face, but when he sees me, they brighten with a sick little spark.
“Hello, broom queen,” he croaks, trying to push himself up on his elbows. The effort makes him wheeze.
“Don’t you dare move.” I crawl inside, sweeping stray brown curls away from his clammy forehead. “Look at you, trying to leap out of your deathbed. You’ll have me out of work.”
He grins, or tries to. It comes out lopsided, but it’s there. “Wouldn’t want that. World needs its gravediggers.”
Something tight and hot squeezes behind my eyes. “Idiot.”
One of the footmen clears his throat. “If we may—”
“We’ll carry him up.” Kael appears at the carriage door, his presence filling the space like he’s pushed the fog back. “Slowly. Hands under the wood, not him. No jolting.”
Kael ducks inside—never mind the mud, never mind the cramped space, never mind the stink of rot—and takes one end of the board himself. Another footman takes the opposite side.
“On my count,” Kael says. “One. Two. Three.”
Daron groans as three men maneuver him through the narrow carriage door, but the sound is less pain than effort. I jump back, then scramble alongside as they carry him through the arch and into the shadowed cool of the palace interior.
Miss Hampshire follows, as does Mother, right to my side, but with a brittle kind of silence. The corridors feel different with Daron in them. The rot is more present, somehow. More personal. Every dark spot on the wall, every faint smell of damp and sickness feels like it’s leaning in to listen.
Kael leads us not to some cramped servants’ nook, but to the west wing he promised. Up one flight—slowly, with pauses for Daron’s wheezing—then down a broad corridor lined with faded tapestries.
The room he opens is…nice.
There’s a large bed, piled high with clean linens. A small hearth already crackles with welcoming heat. A jug of water, a basin, folded cloths. A chair by the window, another by a table.
“Oh, this is much nicer than the city,” Mother says, and there’s a catch in her voice that almost sounds like awe.
Kael nods, then jerks his chin at the bed. “Gently.”
They lower Daron onto the mattress, blankets and all. He sinks with a soft grunt, hands curling into the sheets.
I rush to his side. “Here, let me—”
I grab a pillow, intending to wedge it under his head, but the moment I lift his neck, his back arches off the bed.
A sound claws its way out of his chest—half cough, half scream.
And with that sound comes a streak of gray.
It bubbles out his mouth before it runs down the corner and onto the clean linen, seeping into it like frothy tar.
I drop the pillow. I step back.
My feet freeze two paces away, useless as the sound rattles through him. His knuckles whiten. His toes curl. Another dark, viscous strand dribbles from the corner of his mouth. How did it get this bad, this fast? How can I possibly still save him?
Kael pushes past me.
“Easy,” he says, one knee on the mattress, one foot on the floor to brace himself. He slips a hand behind Daron’s head with a careful steadiness that speaks of practice and lowers his head back down. “Miss Hampshire! More pillows. Large ones, so we can elevate his entire upper body.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” she answers with a curtsy before she spins around, leaving with the footmen.
“Least I can do is make myself useful carrying it all,” Mother says before she hurries after them.
The room goes quiet, save for the crackling fire and the wet rattle of Daron’s breathing.
Kael moves to the window, where his entire posture seems to collapse, a slow, heavy sway that drags his chin down to his chest, tumbling his golden curls forward in a curtain that shrouds his profile and swallows the gleam of his crown.
I look back at Daron.
He is unrecognizable. Gone is the boy who hid his sickness to spare us the worry, who kept joking and laughing to keep death away. In his place is a skeleton wrapped in skin the color of wet clay.
His eyelids flutter, battling weight I can’t imagine, until they drag open. They roam the unfamiliar ceiling before locking onto me. His lips part. “El…” The rest of my name dies in a wet rasp.
I’m there before he can try again.
My knees hit the floorboards beside the bed, ignoring the impact. Carefully, so very carefully, I slide my hand into his. “I’m here.”
He blinks, forcing a focus that makes his brow furrow. Then, a ghost of a smirk pulls at the corner of his cracked mouth. “You look…”—a wheeze—“…like you let a drunk goat…do your hair.”
A wet laugh bubbles out of me, burning my nose. “Stop wasting your breath on nonsense.”
His thumb brushes my hand, a flutter of pressure. “If I die…in this palace…I’m haunting you…”
That burn climbs my sinuses, creeping and crawling behind my eyes until my vision blurs. “You’re not dying.”
He smiles that same lopsided, boyish thing he’s always flung in the face of bad news—only now it trembles at the edges.
His eyes slick over, wet gathering in the corners with each slow blink.
He holds my gaze for as long as he can, like he’s trying to make this lie I’m telling true by sheer stubbornness alone.
Then his lashes drag shut and don’t lift again. A single tear escapes, slipping down the grayish hollow of his temple, and in that tiny, shining trail is the truth neither of us can outrun:
My little brother is dying.
A sob claws its way up my throat, a jagged, sharp thing that I have to crush behind my teeth until the taste of iron floods my mouth.
Lies. Messengers. Plots and schemes. Fuck all of it!
I look over at Kael. Tonight, I’ll go to his chamber. If I can bring out his guilt, I’ll use it. If I can bring out his desire, I’ll use that, too. Whatever it takes—tonight, I’ll bring myself one step closer to queen.
To coronation.
To death.