23. Aldric
ALDRIC
“What have you done?” I repeat.
The goblet rests against my boot like a corpse washed ashore.
Blue residue crusts its bowl—the same blue that burns in my chest, in my skull, in every wound that will never close.
And Clara stands three paces away, candlelight shaking across her face, wearing my shirt, her hand still up where she held the cursed thing.
I woke to a cold pillow. Reached for her before my eye opened, found linen instead of skin, and told myself she’d gone to the washroom, the kitchen, the garden for strawberries. I followed her scent down the stairs, smiling like a fool.
It led here. To the unlocked cellar. To the open grate. To her hands on my curse.
“Aldric.” Her voice comes out thin. “I can explain—”
I look past her to the alcove, the iron grate hanging open like a picked scab. “You waited until I slept.”
“Yes, but—”
“You slid out from my bed.” Each word feels like opening a wound. “You left in the dark. Silent so your steps would not betray you.”
“I saw something. When I touched it, I saw the witch, I saw—”
“You saw the door.” The words tear out of my throat.
“That is what you were searching for. The crack in the wall. Three days, Clara. Three days you let me believe—” I stop.
Breathe, though I hardly need to. It doesn’t help.
“You set my table. You tore my shirt open to look at my heart. You slept in my arms. And the first morning I trust the dawn enough to sleep past it, you creep into the one room I begged you not to enter.”
“You didn’t beg, you forbade, there’s a difference, and if you would listen for one second—”
“To what? More management of the monster?” I laugh, and it comes out wrong, jagged. “You supervise, isn’t that the word? You supervise the filleting. You supervise the warlord. Feed him kindness, ride his cock, keep him docile while you dig your tunnel.”
Her mouth falls open. “That is not—you arrogant—I wasn’t digging anything, I was trying to break the curse for you, you enormous gothic infant—”
“Do not.” My voice drops to something I have not used since the battlefield, and I hate myself even as it leaves me.
“Do not dress your escape in charity. I have watched hope die in this castle more times than you have drawn breath. Every servant who swore they’d found the answer.
Every scholar’s letter. Every remedy, ritual, prayer.
And now you sneak down here in the dark and put your bare hands on souldust and expect me to believe it was a gift? ”
“I saw her, Aldric!” Clara’s voice cracks. “The witch! I touched the goblet, and I saw her pouring the dust into your wine, and she had—there was something about her, about her ear, her hair—”
“Enough.”
Clara continues heedlessly. “Her hair was like mine, Aldric.”
“Enough!” The word booms off the stone, and Clara flinches, though I am too far gone to care.
The hurt has crawled up my throat and taken command of my tongue, and centuries of discipline suddenly mean nothing, nothing at all.
“You want to know what I believe? I believe you are exactly what you told me you were. A woman who says yes when no is not on the menu. You said yes to Marco with a ring on your finger and a smile on your face, and you were climbing out the window the whole time.” I step over the goblet.
Close the distance. Watch her chin lift even as her eyes go glassy.
“And you said yes to me with your body, in my bed, against my tree, with your hand over my heart… and here you are. Ready to climb out the window.”
Silence.
Clara’s face goes blank. Every ounce of fight drains out of it, and what’s left underneath is worse than tears. It’s the look of a woman checking a wound and finding it exactly as deep as she feared.
“Wow,” she says quietly.
“Clara—”
“No. No, you got there eventually, didn’t you? This whole time, you’ve just been waiting for proof that I’m a liar. Because that’s easier, right? Easier than believing someone might actually be on your side. Easier than hope.”
“That is not—”
She interrupts me now.
“I woke up this morning with butterflies, you idiot.” Her voice shakes and she barrels through it.
“I looked at your ridiculous glowing chest, and I thought, I’m going to break this curse, and then I’m going to teach this dead medieval disaster what a water heater is, and we’re going to—” She cuts herself off.
Presses her lips together until they go white.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve ruled on it. Case closed, my lord. ”
“Clara.” I reach for her.
She steps around my hand like it’s furniture.
“Don’t.” She shoulders past me, small and warm and alive, and the brush of her arm against mine is the last touch I may ever get. I stand there like the corpse I am and let her go. Her socked feet slap up the cellar stairs. At the top, she stops but doesn’t turn around.
“For the record,” she says to the castle beyond, “I was trying to stay.”
Then she’s gone, through the kitchen, down the passage, the garden door groaning open and banging shut hard enough to rattle the copper pots.
Schmetterling remains at the foot of the stairs.
He looks at the goblet. He looks at me. This time, I swear there really is judgment in his feline eyes.
He turns his back, tail straight as a pike, and pads up the steps after her.
He is choosing her, as he chooses her always now.
At the threshold, he pauses to look back at me the way Konrad used to look at spoiled meat.
“I know,” I tell him.
He leaves.
Then I stand alone in my cellar, in the blue light of my own ruined heart, with the goblet at my feet and her words ringing in my tattered ears.
I was trying to stay.