19. A Curse Of Death
Melanthe…
So, close our arms passed through one another, though neither of us felt it.
Like two ghosts sharing the same cell across years that had already burned.
She stood very straight, her blood-stained hands clasped over the front of her ragged dress, the wool stiff and dark where the Queen’s blood had dried into it.
She hadn’t washed it from her skin as though she wore it on purpose.
It was as though it were the only thing she had left.
And then he came.
The King, Hyperion.
Older now, so much older than the smitten young man in the workroom, his face carved deep with new lines of grief and fury. Carrying an unspeakable secret had gouged into him. He looked, I thought, like a man being eaten alive from the inside.
“Where is our son?” Melanthe asked.
There was a terrible, glassy calm in it that raised every hair on my body as though she already knew and had nothing left in all the world to fear.
Hyperion crossed the cell in three strides and slammed his palm flat against the bars.
“You heartless bitch!” His voice cracked down the middle. “How could you do this to me?” And then the tears came, pouring down that ravaged face like rivers, and I pressed both hands to my chest, sick with the horror and the grief and the sheer, suffocating cruelty of it all.
“She wouldn’t let me see you,” Melanthe said, as if that were an excuse enough to kill over.
“As she had every right!” The King’s roar rang off the stone, and the chains of the prisoners around us clinked as they flinched as one.
“I should have taken the child the moment he was born and killed you straight after. That would have been mercy. But now you receive none. Not after what you did to her.”
For just a flicker, beneath the rage, something older crossed his face.
Something closer to grief. And I understood it, even here, even now.
Because the woman in that cell had driven a blade into the only soul in all the world he loved.
And some part of the King was breaking apart even as he raged, a great and proud man cracking quietly down the middle.
He shoved away from the bars and dragged a ragged hand down his face, a gesture Atlas had obviously inherited. And when he turned back, there was something almost savage in the grief.
“My wife lives,” he said.
The words landed like a blow. Melanthe flinched.
“She lives,” he said again, harder now, and there was a terrible, broken triumph in it.
“You drove your blade into her, you poured your darkness into the wound, and still she breathes. Still, she wakes each morning, knows my face, and calls me by my name. She is stronger than you ever dreamed, witch. Stronger than your foul little magics. You did not take her from me. You did not win.” His voice cracked. “You failed in your revenge.”
Beside me, I felt Melanthe go very still.
“She’s… alive?” she whispered, and there was no triumph in it at all, only a hollow, disbelieving shock.
As though of everything that could happen in that dark cell, this was the one thing she had not been prepared for.
It was as if she had been so very certain of what her blade and her darkness would do.
“Alive,” the King confirmed, mistaking her shock for defeat. “And mending. The healers tell me the worst has passed.”
And that was when the true horror settled into me.
Because I had been there. I had stood at those gates and watched the darkness pour into Ianthe’s side and drown the color clean out of her eyes.
I had felt it take root in her, slow, patient, and wrong.
And looking at Melanthe now, at the flicker of something that crossed her ruined face, half-buried beneath the shock, I understood with a sick and terrible certainty that the King was wrong.
That the worst had not passed at all. That his Queen was not dead, her sickness only slowed.
That the only soul in either world who might ever draw that darkness back out of her was the woman kneeling in the filth of this cell.
And I had a feeling, after his previous threat, that he had come down here to kill her.
He didn’t know.
The poor, grieving fool didn’t know what he was about to do. Oh, how wrong I hoped I was.
For a moment, Melanthe said nothing, and whatever had crossed her face was gone, smoothed back into that cold, glassy calm.
“Then it seems she is stronger than I thought,” she said quietly. “Now where is my son?”
The King went very still.
“Where he should be,” he said. “Far from here. Far from you.”
And something in her chest seemed to ease, even now, even at the very end. “So you have taken him in.” It came out almost like hope. “You will keep him. Raise him as your…”
“No.” The word was quiet, and final, and it landed harder than any blow yet.
“He will never find a home within these walls. He will never bear my name, nor sit at my table, nor be told a single word of the blood that made him. That much, I cannot give him. Not without bringing my whole house down around his ears.” He drew a slow, unsteady breath, and when he spoke again, there was something almost gentle buried beneath the grief.
“But I am not the monster you would make of me. I will not leave a child to starve in the gutter for the sins of his mother. He has been given to a good family. Farmers, far to the south, who wanted a son and could not have one of their own. They will feed him, and clothe him, and love him as if he were truly theirs, and never once speak your name, or mine.” His eyes hardened.
“He will grow up whole. Happy, even. He will learn to live without you. And in time, gods willing, he will forget you ever drew breath at all. It is the only mercy left in any of this. And it is a great deal more than you have earned.”
I watched the words go into Melanthe like driven steel.
Not the promise of her own death, as he wouldn’t give this information so freely otherwise.
Though, it looked like she had long since made her peace with that.
But this… the knowing that her son would grow up safe, and fed, and loved, somewhere she could never reach him, by people who were not her, carrying no memory of her face at all.
It was, I realized with a slow and dawning horror, the single cruelest thing the King could have done to her, even if it was wrong. For most loving mothers, this would have been a dying wish, but not hers. Not with all the bitterness that consumed her heart.
Because I understood, as most would, that it was the kindest thing he could have done for the boy. And he had chosen it, knowing full well that it was both a blessing for him and his own revenge cast on a woman full of hatred.
“You would erase me,” she breathed.
“I would set him free of you,” the King said. “There is a difference, witch. Though I would never expect you to know it.”
That was when the last of his restraint gave way.
“It is past time this was finished,” he said to the guards, his voice gone flat and final. “Open it.”
The cell door rattled wide. And I knew then, with a sick and certain dread, that the King had come to do exactly what I thought.
Melanthe had driven a blade into his Queen. There would be no trial. No long years left to rot in a cell. He would end it here, with his own hand, the way grief and a crown sometimes demand a thing be ended.
He took the dagger a guard offered him without a word, crossed the cell, and drove it home.
It wasn’t slow or cruel but a swift, certain stroke of a man who could not bear to draw the moment out, and Melanthe folded around the blade with a soft, wet gasp.
And then, gods help me, she laughed.
Bloody, broken, and rattling in her chest, but unmistakably a laugh, and the sound of it raised every hair on my body.
“Oh,” she breathed, her eyes finding his, and there was something almost gleeful in the ruin of her face.
“Oh, you foolish, foolish man. You should not have done that. Not so soon.” Blood spilled past her lips.
“You ought to have kept me. You ought to have begged me on your knees.” Her smile widened, scarlet and dreadful.
“Wait, my king. Just wait and watch and see what becomes of your precious queen. See how long the worst takes to pass. See how strong she truly is when the cold finally finishes its crawl through her veins.”
I watched the words land. Watched the very first flicker of something terrible cross the King’s face. The first cold breath of doubt he would not understand for years yet, and would never, ever forgive himself for once he did.
But it was already far, far too late.
The shadows were already gathering, peeling from the stone, leaking from Melanthe’s dying body like smoke drawn toward a flame.
“My son will know of this,” she breathed, her voice beginning to climb, gathering the dark up around it.
“Wherever you hide him, whatever family you buy, however many years you steal from me, he will know. He will know that his mother died here, on her knees, in the dark, by his own father’s hand!
” Her eyes blazed, black bleeding into the whites of them.
“He will feel it the very moment he wakes. He will carry it every day of his life. And one day, my love… HE WILL AVENGE ME!”
The scream tore out of her, and the darkness erupted with it, bursting outward from her chest in a great black wave shot through with one single, blinding thread of light.
It punched through the cell, through the stone, through the very fabric of the world.
It screamed away into the night as though it were hunting something.
As though it carried something with it… A memory.
A wound.
A poisoned gift.
One flung across the leagues to bury itself in the heart of a sleeping child who would wake in a stranger’s house knowing precisely how his mother had died, and precisely who to hate for it.