Chapter 15
Emrys
I knew I was asleep, and yet I couldn’t escape it. The curse fed on my memories, and it enjoyed reliving my worst moments too much to free me from them.
The steel of my sword hummed in my right hand as searing flames danced around my left.
I couldn’t remember my squire’s name—a cruel lapse—but I remembered the way he held my shield steady, his grin too wide for the carnage around us.
He’d been maybe seventeen years old. Brave enough to make a name for himself within a few years, brave enough to survive.
One moment he was beside me, mud caked to his boots. The next, he was gone. The enemy’s blade had sliced so cleanly that his grin remained fixed in place, even as his throat gaped open.
I felt the spray of his blood, still warm on my cheek. Heard the wet gurgle in his chest.
I cut his killer in two.
The curse arrived faster than my grief, swallowing my scream.
The monster rose within my skin. A blaze of my fire carved a path across the battlefield, leaving behind a trail of ash and destruction. Screams turned to groans. Metal melted into skin.
The battlefield became a pyre.
The stench came next. Burning wool filled my nostrils, followed by the porky, nauseating odor of human flesh cooking.
I wanted to be sick. Wanted to cry. But the curse allowed no room for weakness, which meant there was no room for my humanity.
Something brushed against me. It wasn’t wind from an open window nor was it the brush of my own deadly fire.
Magic.
It was impossibly gentle, like a cool cloth applied by a mother’s hands, like chill, spring-fed water on the hottest summer day—the complete opposite of the force hollowing me out from the inside. There was no hunger in it, no echo of the endless destruction that defined my own power.
I hadn’t felt anything so clean since… Caervorn.
The fire in my dream paused, and the scream in my chest lost all the air it had been waiting to unleash. The memory cut off before I could reenact the bloody culmination of one of my greatest failures of restraint—the moment I stopped being a man and became death, walking.
If the dream had played out, it would’ve shown me kneeling on the ground. My lungs would make a deafening, inhuman roar. Then the magic would explode out of me, obliterating my allies and enemies in a single searing flash of light and heat.
The name they gave me after that, Stormdan, echoed repeatedly in my ears as the cool magic continued to douse the flames of my curse.
Gasping suddenly fully awake, I thrashed against the stifling weight of my sweat-soaked sheets.
I sat bolt upright, throwing them off, waiting to see if the monster would come ripping out of me.
I needed to prepare if I had to abandon this soft place to hide in the wilderness so I wouldn’t hurt anyone.
But no. The usual agonizing whispers of my curse were absent. I experienced only blessed silence. It was as if the monster had been poisoned into a lethargic slumber, its usual ferocity muted.
Was it her?
I’d trained with my father growing up then with the best mages the Assembly had to offer after my curse, but this was altogether unique. It was a cool, softly steady force that felt like river water washing away the blood covering my soul.
I wanted to bask in it, but I also had to know—I had to see her. So I jumped out of bed barefoot, not caring that my trousers were rumpled and my shirt clinging to my damp skin. I crossed the room in three strides, fortified my mental walls, and opened the door.
Isca stood just outside, her back to me, swathed in a heavy fur robe.
The cascade of her hair spilled down her spine, soft and gleaming like sunlight even in the dim corridor.
She hadn’t moved, but I knew she felt me the instant I stepped into the hall.
Awareness—not fear, I hoped—caused her shoulders to tense.
The air shifted between us. I should’ve slammed the door, locked it, buried myself in my own self-loathing, and warded my room until the urge to reach for her passed.
Instead, I stepped into the hall like a fool. “What do you think you’re doing?” My voice came out too harsh, as if I were furious. But I wasn’t. I was terrified.
She turned slightly, just enough for me to see the edge of her profile. Her jaw tightened, and her brows pulled low. She was angry.
Good. It would be easier to keep her away.
“Trying to help,” she hissed, her voice its own reprimand despite the whisper. “To do exactly what I’m here for! I’m working.”
With one sleepy eyebrow quirked, I made my voice suggestive. “Working at a bachelor’s door…in the middle of the night… If you have plans in that direction, I’m willing to entertain them.”
I didn’t have to force the expression of pure lust onto my face. It seemed to always be there in the background when it came to her, roaring at me for fulfillment.
“Not like that!” She was indignation incarnate. “You know what I mean!”
I snorted. “If that’s what you call working, you’re very bad at it.” Another hurtful lie. She was incomparable. “You should leave.”
“Why?” Her head turned fully now, her eyes catching the light and flaring sparks of green and gold.
“Because I’m not safe.” It was a hasty, unpolished reply, but it contained all the warning I could without showing her the hell I lived in.
I stepped forward, hands lifting without permission. My fingers brushed her upper arms through the fur—just enough to persuade her to walk back toward her room.
“Careful.” Her laughter was as gentle as a feather falling to the ground.
“I think this is officially no longer safe, dangerous even,” she teased as she walked ahead of me.
She’d seen me cut a man in two, so I’d expected her to scream and shrink away from my touch.
Yet, her voice was a remarkably calm whisper.
I’d most definitely underestimated Isca’s resilience.
Her eyes flicked down to my hands, where I was still touching her. “You’re shaking, Lord Prince.”
“Cold,” I lied.
Even through the robe, her heat burned into my hands like a sacred brand.
That thought had me second-guessing every move I made.
I was so touch-starved that it had apparently warped my descriptive abilities into something overly fanciful.
The poetic way of thinking had to be a symptom of my celibacy.
I’d stopped pursuing women a decade ago.
But it was there when I touched her, the searing, reverent kind of awe that felt like a religious experience.
I couldn’t allow her to face me again. Couldn’t look at that face, those eyes, those lips, and retain all my faculties. I needed her gone.
So I gently steered her toward her room’s doorway. By the time she stepped across the threshold, it felt as if my palms were burned down to the bone.
From where I stood filling the space behind her in the doorway, my shoulders blocked the firelight from the torch behind me, casting her small form in half-shadow.
I reluctantly pulled my hands away from her shoulders and curled them into fists at my sides.
“I don’t need another Assembly puppet crawling through my home,” I said, forcing cold into my voice, though the lingering warmth of her magic was still a pleasant tingle on my skin.
“Pretending to heal what can’t be healed.
I forced the last one to leave so I wouldn’t kill him. ”
Even as I said it, I hated myself for it. No one else had ever managed what she’d done through a door. But hope was too dangerous. It would make her stay, and I couldn’t protect her from me if she stayed.
“I didn’t come to pretend,” she argued, still turned away from me. All I could see was her glorious hair, the back of her head dipping with her rising chin.
She turned, and I nearly lost my footing.
“I came to help, Prince Emrys. Or at least, I intend to. But perhaps your brother has misrepresented you to me. Perhaps you do not truly want peace?”
I dreamed of peace more than anything. But I gritted my teeth, not ready to give up the fight even after she’d delivered that sucker punch. “This is a warning. You don’t know what kind of hell you’re walking into.”
I stepped closer. Still not touching her, but close enough to feel the warmth of her skin, the slow thrum of her magic like a spring rain. She smelled of lavender and reminded me of perfect summer evenings watching the sunset—but I’d always been alone for those.
“I apologize for using magic on you without your permission,” she whispered.
An apology? For giving me a reprieve from the monster? For giving me a moment of silence inside my own skin? I never wanted that feeling to stop.
What she said next nearly froze my heart. “Show me your hell, Prince Emrys.”
I liked the way my name sounded on her lips.
My heart became a war drum in my ears, and every breath threatened to crack me open anew.
She tilted her head up to meet my eyes, calm despite my trembling form mere inches from her. “I can’t know what you experience if you always have a wall between us when you’re around me.”
She wanted to see into the hellscape of my inner world? I couldn’t bring myself to even consider the idea of letting her near that again.
The curse shifted beneath my skin, ready to wake, ready to take over my tongue so I could no longer speak to her as a sane man. As I clenched and unclenched my fingers, a tremor ran through my body. I was fighting it, but I could only keep it contained for so long.
Through my struggles, this stubborn, fearless woman held my stare as if she could see right through me. But I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I’d already used up what little time the dream and her magic had given me to speak with her so far.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to burn the hall down just to keep her from taking one more step toward me.
My voice came out hoarse. “You can’t save me.”
“I’m not here to save you.” She didn’t as much as blink. “I’m here because your kingdom needs direction…and because I believe we can find relief from your burden.”
Then she wrapped her fingers around my upper arm. It was a simple touch, but I felt it everywhere. It took every bit of my willpower not to allow the shudder that took over my body to show.
I didn’t dare move. If I did, I might collapse, or kiss her, or do something else unforgivable. The proof was undeniable—the curse aimed to drive me mad, and her presence was driving it to new lengths.
“I still think you might be able to achieve peace.” Another calming whisper.
Gods, that word again. I’d only glimpsed that beautiful, unattainable ideal in fragments throughout my adulthood.
She had no way of knowing what peace ultimately looked like for someone like me.
Peace was oblivion—no more pain, no more constant fighting, no more daily torture.
But telling her that truth would be another cruelty heaped on top of all the others I’d already shown her.
“We haven’t even started yet. But even if it’s just for your kingdom, we have to try.”
Isca was right. That I would continue to suffer for.
I didn’t trust myself to tell her to leave Darreth again, so I swore under my breath. Her hand dropped from my arm, and I turned and stalked back into the hallway as a snarl built in my throat.
I used magic to shut the door between us. Heard her little yelp of surprise and the stomping of one shoeless foot as I closed my own door.
I let her believe I was turning her away. That I wanted her gone. When really, I was running away again.
I told myself it was the magic that made me feel this way. But I knew better. There was something about this woman that called to the curse, that made it stand at attention. But, more dangerously, Isca also called to the last part of me I thought still worth saving.
And, cursed gods help me, I selfishly didn’t want her to stop.