Chapter 32
When I wake, the light in the room is wrong.
For a few disoriented seconds, I don’t recognize the ceiling, then the carved wood and pale silk come back into focus and I realize I am in my own chambers at the palace.
My head aches with a dull, persistent pressure, as if I have been crying for hours, though I don’t remember doing so.
Then I remember everything.
The tavern. The chanting. The moment the ring left my finger and something inside me tore open. Ashford’s arms around me, his voice steady and close, anchoring me while the world fractured.
My hand moves instinctively to the ring. It sits where it always has, looking innocent and unremarkable.
I sit up slowly. The room tilts, but not enough to frighten me. When I pull back the curtains, evening spills in—that soft violet light that comes just before a full dusk. I must have slept the entire day.
There are flowers beside my bed.
I tell myself they could be from anyone, but I let myself hope they are from him.
After dressing, I leave my chambers to look for Aileen. I need to know what happened after I lost consciousness. The corridors are quiet at this hour, lit by lanterns that throw long shadows along the stone.
I turn a corner and nearly walk straight into Pepin.
He startles more than I do; he actually recoils.
“Your Majesty,” he says quickly, glancing over my shoulder as though checking whether someone is following me. “I did not mean to—I wasn’t aware you were awake.”
It takes me only a second to understand. He is afraid. Not of me, of course, but of Ashford.
“It’s quite all right,” I say, and I soften my tone deliberately. “I was hoping to speak with you.”
That clearly unsettles him more than my presence does.
“With me?”
“Yes. Would you walk with me?”
He hesitates long enough that I consider withdrawing the offer. But then he nods, stiffly, and falls into step beside me.
We make our way along the castle walls, where the air is cooler and the city hums below us in the fading light.
“I know you are upset with me,” I say at last. “I have little desire to spend any time with you, especially not after what happened at the estate. I understand that we are unlikely to become friends.”
A faint, humorless breath escapes him.
“But we do share something,” I continue. “A desire for stability. For this kingdom not to fracture.”
He stops walking and rests his hands on the stone parapet. For a moment, I think he will dismiss me.
Instead, he asks, “What do you know about my mother?”
The question catches me off guard.
“Very little,” I admit. “Only what people repeat. That she and Charles were young. That perhaps you were conceived before their marriage. That he set her aside to remarry and that she died not long after.”
Pepin studies my face in a way that makes my skin prickle.
“So you truly do not know.”
A quiet unease settles in my chest. “Know what?”
He does not look at me when he answers, “Generations ago, Charles’s ancestors made a bargain. They feared losing the throne, feared rebellion, feared obscurity, much as they do today. They wanted their bloodline secured for centuries.”
“With whom did they bargain?” I ask, though I already feel the shape of the answer forming.
“With the Devil himself.” He says it plainly, without drama.
I want to dismiss it. Laugh, perhaps. But something in his tone prevents me.
“In exchange for dominion,” he continues, “a soul was promised. The soul of a queen.”
I stare at him.
“Since then, every king has believed the same thing—that one of his wives will be the one finally accepted.”
“That is superstition,” I say, though my voice lacks conviction.
“Is it?” Pepin asks quietly. “Have you not noticed how easily they replace them?”
Memories flicker to life in my mind, tales of strange illnesses befalling the Queens, women quickly replaced when one had served her purpose.
“My mother believed she had failed him,” Pepin says. “Not as a wife. As an offering.”
The word settles heavily between us.
“He married again,” Pepin continues. “And again. Each time hoping. Each time disappointed. They do not seek love,” he says. “They seek permanence. Legacy. Victory over whatever they fear is coming for them.”
I grip the cool stone at my side.
“You will end as she did,” he adds, not cruelly, but without softness. “Ill. Forgotten. Set aside when you are deemed insufficient.”
Each breath I draw feels heavy, panic tightening around my rib cage.
“No,” I say instinctively. I have seen cruelty, I have felt it on my own skin, bones breaking. And yet I refuse to believe I am simply a pawn in an age-old game.
He looks at me with something akin to pity.
“It will not matter how intelligent you are. Or how beautiful. Or how careful. The pact predates you. It does not bend for preference.”
My thoughts race—to the ring, to Charles’s growing intensity, to the way he looks at me lately as though searching for something beyond my face.
“If this is true,” I say slowly, “why tell me?”
“Because you deserve to understand the game you are in,” Pepin replies. “Even if you cannot win it.”
He steps away, leaving me at the wall with the city stretching beneath me, unchanged and indifferent.
For a long time, I stand there, trying to decide whether I believe him.
A pact for a queen’s soul.
An inheritance of obsession.
If he is lying, it is an elaborate cruelty.
If he is telling the truth—
Then Charles’s love is not merely twisted by magic.
It may be driven by a force far older.
* * *
There is only one person I can ask about the deal with the devil, and I find him deep in prayer inside the chapel. The bishop is on his knees, his eyes closed, hands folded so tightly that his knuckles have gone pale.
If what Pepin told me is madness, I need someone who understands madness dressed up as faith. And if it is the truth he speaks of, then I need someone who has spent his life studying the language of bargains and damnation.
The air inside the chapel is cool and faintly scented with wax and stone. Candles burn low along the walls.
I sit in one of the back pews and wait.
His voice is low, almost exhausted. When he finally rises, he turns slowly—and freezes when he sees me.
His eyes are as unsettingly blue as ever.
“Your Majesty,” he says, bushy brows lifting. “I was not aware you were here.”
“I did not wish to disturb you.”
He studies me, then walks toward me, the hem of his robes whispering across the stone.
“I assume,” he says quietly, “that you are not here for comfort.”
“No.” I rise to face him. “Or maybe yes? I guess it depends on your answers. I-I will not waste your time with pleasantries. Someone has confided in me about the bargain that was made for a queen’s soul.”
He does not ask which bargain, he barely reacts at all.
“The one made with the devil?” I add.
He does not laugh, he does not even look surprised. Instead, he turns his head slightly and gestures toward the chapel doors behind me. “They are iron,” he says. “Do you see the fracture near the hinge?”
I turn.
It is subtle, but it is there—a thin, jagged line running through the metal.
“Yes.”
“When Charles married the woman before you,” the bishop continues, “he believed she was the one. The soul that would finally satisfy the pact. But she was rejected.”
The words echo unpleasantly in the sacred space.
“When it became clear that nothing had changed, that the bargain had not settled, he stormed from this chapel in a fury. He struck those doors with such force that the iron split.”
I stare at the crack again, imagining the sound of it, the rage it must have taken.
“Are you telling me it is real?” I ask.
“I am telling you,” he replies carefully, “that the story did not begin as rumor.”
“I do not know if I believe in God,” I admit after a moment. “Or in the devil. I have seen men commit cruelties that require no supernatural explanation. If there is a devil, I am not convinced he is worse than we are.”
The bishop’s expression shifts, not offended, but thoughtful.
“The devil is not evil in the way people like to imagine,” he says. “He does not create ugliness. He reveals it. He tempts, yes—but temptation only works where something already waits to be awakened.”
I think of Charles. Of the way his love feels less like devotion and more like hunger.
“So the bargain itself did not corrupt them?” I ask. “It merely gave them permission to be their true selves?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
I let out a slow breath. “If my life was promised before I was born,” I say, “if I am simply another name on a list of queens meant to be weighed and discarded, then what is the point of anything? Of resisting? Of hoping?”
The question sounds smaller aloud than it did in my head.
The bishop regards me with an intensity that makes it impossible to look away.
“All our paths are laid out before us,” he says. “Scripture teaches that nothing unfolds beyond God’s sight. But foreknowledge is not the same as imprisonment.”
“That sounds like comfort, not truth,” I laugh ruefully.
“It is truth precisely because it is not comforting,” he replies.
He begins to pace slowly, hands clasped behind his back.
“If fate were immovable, there would be no need for faith. No need for struggle. No need for conscience. We would be no more than pieces on a board.”
“And are we not?” I ask.
“Perhaps,” he says. “But even a piece can move.”
I watch him carefully.
“Nothing in this world has ever changed because someone accepted it quietly,” he continues. “Empires fall because someone resists. Tyrants lose their crowns because someone dares to challenge what appears inevitable.” His gaze sharpens. “That is why I support the opposition.”
After a brief pause, he continues.
“If Charles’s bargain determines your end,” he says, “then it also determines ours. It would mean he cannot be dethroned. That his line cannot be broken, that our efforts are meaningless.”
“And you do not believe that?”
“I cannot believe that,” he corrects softly. “If I did, I would despair. And despair is the only true victory the devil ever claims.”
His words settle into me slowly.
“So you think there is room,” I say, “to change what was promised.”
“I think,” he replies, “that bargains made in fear can be undone by courage.”
The chapel is very quiet.
“And if I am the soul the devil has been waiting for?” I ask.
He holds my gaze without flinching.
“Then you must decide whether you will walk to that altar willingly,” he says, “or whether you will force Heaven and Hell alike to reconsider.”
I look once more at the cracked iron door, at the mark Charles left behind in his rage, and I understand something I did not before.
He is afraid.
Of losing his throne, of losing his legacy, of losing the bargain. And fear makes men reckless.
“Thank you,” I say quietly. As I leave the chapel, I do not feel safer than before, but I no longer feel passive. If my path was written before I was born, then perhaps it is time I begin editing it.