Crown Me Yours (Heartstring Duet #2)

Chapter 2

Chapter

Two

Elara

We wrap the dead with our hands steady and our mouths shut while the afternoon sun hangs bloody over the palace graveyard, casting long, distorted shadows that stretch toward the open maw in the earth.

Mother and I lift the king from his bier. Not a gilded thing, not a carved coffin fit for songs; just a plank of wood laid across two trestles, because even royalty runs out of ceremony when rot has eaten the world’s appetite for pretending.

Kael is lighter than his height and stature suggest, hollowed out by years of carrying a curse. Mother’s arms still tremble, harder when she looks at me, then up at the golden spikes fused to my skull.

“Legs,” I say, just to cut the silence. My voice sounds like gravel, mostly unused since I crowned myself dead in the throne room yesterday, since Death vanished in a whirl of shadows and rage.

“I’ve got them,” Mother whispers, voice cracking.

A shroud covers Kael’s face, clean linen pulled tight enough that the shape of his nose makes a small ridge, the hint of his mouth a soft dip in cloth. It feels wrong that I can’t see him. Wrong that I’m relieved I can’t see the slash across his throat.

I adjust my grip under his shoulders, his body cooling rapidly in the autumn air. Stiffness clings to his joints, that rigor that gravediggers know intimately, the body’s final stubborn refusal to bend.

We lift him onto the lowering straps. Practiced. Efficient.

Mother reaches into the woven willow basket at her feet. Dried marigolds. Bright, orange, cheerful, offensive little things. She takes a handful and arranges them around the shrouded head. Another handful, larger this time, she lines up across his neck.

Mother watches her wrinkly hands work and slowly shakes her head. “To hide the blood that crusts in the fibers.”

The petals settle, masking the angry red grin I carved into his throat. A mercy for the observers. A lie for myself. If you cover the slash with marigold, maybe it’s just a garden, not murder.

Maybe.

Something knots between my ribs, tightening with each breath, gaze going to those sunken hollows where Kael’s blue eyes would be.

Daron is best with the eyes. He would have been gentle with them, carefully sliding the spoons under the lids.

Instead, my brother lies in his bed in the west wing, rattling and gurgling, too weak to attend a king’s funeral.

A restless shuffle draws my eyes up from the grave. A handful of people stand in a semicircle. Two priests in white robes that look too clean to be holy. A scattering of courtiers gather behind them, looking like they’re watching a play they don’t understand.

Neither do I.

Miss Hampshire stands apart from them, her hands clasped tight over her starched apron.

She keeps glancing at the crown on my head, the gold biting into my scalp with the patient insistence that it belongs there now.

It doesn’t slide when I lean, doesn’t shift when I swallow.

It sits fused to my skull, part metal, part bone, a pulsing thing that only moves when I lift it with my own hands.

“This is improper,” one of the priests mutters, his face like risen dough, his eyes darting nervously to a palace guard stationed nearby. “A king’s funeral rites ought not to be carried out by a…a new queen.”

The last word comes out like he scraped it off the bottom of his shoe—thick with contempt, edged with disgust for women who dare touch things reserved for men.

“A queen just the same,” I say, my voice flat. “The dead don’t care which hands lower them, so long as they land soft. And nobody drops them softer than a gravedigger. All that shoveling numbs the arms. No choice for us but to handle the body with care.”

He bristles, his pious indignation fading behind narrowed eyes. “This is a disgrace.”

Mother exhales, slowly and funneled. “Elara,” she whispers, voice thin as a hair. “What…have you done?”

I straighten, wiping my hands on the black mourning silk Miss Hampshire found me in a forgotten wardrobe. It’s a habit. A reflex. “I did what I thought I had to.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have for now.”

“The people will be outraged,” the priest says, louder, looking into the half circle of people in support. “A common gravedigger woman wearing the crown? It spits on the royal bloodline. The monarchy is built on tradition, not…not dirt under—”

“You have been in the chapel for too long, Father.” It is Miss Hampshire who speaks up, her voice dry as old parchment, cutting through the priest’s sputtering. “You forget the smell of the streets.”

The priest blinks, his doughy face slackening. “I beg your pardon, Miss Hampshire?”

She lifts her head, and the pustule above her brow catches the fading sun, shiny and defiant.

“The realm has been rotting for years. Children eat mud; mothers eat their stillbirths.” She looks at me then, her gaze sharp, assessing, but not unkind.

“The common folk won’t care if she digs graves, so long as they don’t get rolled into them.

They will only care,” she continues, her voice rising just enough to carry over the wind, “that there is a new ruler who might yet end this rot.”

The priest opens his mouth to retort, perhaps to cite some scripture about the sanctity of royal blood, but he looks at the crown and closes his mouth. He steps back, defeated by a housekeeper with missing fingers and a queen with dirt under her nails.

I look at Miss Hampshire, at the ally I least expected, then back at Mother before I give a nod. “I’ll take the shoulders.”

Mother takes the feet. Her eyes are wide, glassy with unshed tears, but her jaw is set in that line I know so well—the line that means we have a job to do, and we will do it until it’s done. We grab the straps.

Kael is unwieldy the way dead things are, weight pulling toward the earth, eager to return to it. We shuffle to the edge of the hole I dug this morning. The soil is dark and rich here, fed by generations of mostly royal decay.

We lower. The straps hiss against the wooden supports as Kael descends into the dark, black earth. It’s a sound I know better than my own name. Friction of rope on bark. The soft, inevitable thud as the body finds its final bed.

The strain in my forearms grounds me, calming the screams in my head into the honesty of gravity. Death is simple.

You stop breathing. You get heavy. You go down.

There is a comfort in the finality of it.

The palace graveyard is quiet, but not peaceful. Trees, tall and clipped, their shadows long and thin. The stone markers are carved with names that once mattered enough to be chiseled. But rot doesn’t care about names. It eats everything just the same.

Including Daron.

Beyond the graveyard fence, the palace walls loom—wet raven slate and sweating stone, the air still carrying that faint vinegar stink they use to pretend the sickness can be scrubbed away.

Farther still, the city squats under a haze the color of decaying leaves. Smoke from a thousand small fires smears the horizon. Hunger doesn’t stop because a king dies. Rot doesn’t pause to see who wears the crown now.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, the words catching in my throat, too low for the people to hear. Most of them are already turning away anyway, not seeing the single tear that tracks hot down my cheek. “What am I supposed to do now?”

A pat on the back is all the advice Mother can offer before she, too, turns away. “Time to look after your brother.”

I look after her for a moment, gaze catching on those dark veins on her neck. Aside from that first telltale sign of rot, she’s asymptomatic, but for how long? How many days, weeks, or months until rot will show on a finger? A toe?

When the first shovelful of dirt hits the shroud, Miss Hampshire steps up beside me, black dress starched to cracked whiteness at the seams, cap pulled low. “He was a good man.”

“Was he?” I watch the dirt cover his hand—the hand that had held mine in the spring, that had trembled against my cheek. “I can’t help but feel like I knew nothing about him. Nothing.”

She shakes her head, watching the grave fill. “I know he was fond of you.”

The words land soft…

…and still, they split me.

My throat tightens until swallowing feels like dragging cloth through a wound. I keep my face still—queen-still, gravedigger-still—while my insides lurch like a cart wheel hitting a rut. Fond…

He’d been cruel and stubborn and half-mad with hope. He’d kept his secrets locked up like coffins, so tight that even when he shoved the crown onto my head, he couldn’t spare a breath to tell me what I’d become. And yet…his hands had trembled when he touched my face.

I stare at the dirt swallowing him inch by inch and feel myself pulled in two directions. One part of me wants to spit on his grave for leaving me with this mess. The other wants to claw the earth back open to shake answers out of him.

It doesn’t matter. He’s gone because my hands did what they do best: deathwork.

“What am I supposed to make of all this?” I turn to Miss Hampshire, the early evening sun now slanting through the trees, turning the fresh mound of dirt into a golden smear. “Did he mention anything? Leave instructions? Anything at all?”

She shakes her head, watching the footmen work silently, rhythmically, the spades slicing the earth. “He came to me that morning like a man possessed,” she whispers. “Eyes wild. Shirt unbuttoned. He looked…terrified. And hopeful. He told me to prepare for the rite, and that is what I did.”

I watch her profile. The lines around her mouth are deep canyons of worry. “Did you know he would make me queen?”

“No, not until…” She hesitates, stalling until the footmen carry off the spades. “Our best hope to break the curse. That is what he called you before he sent me to ready the knife.”

“But how?” I all but breathe.

“I…I do not know. He kept his counsel close, Ela—Your Majesty.” A solemn dip of her head. “He kept me in the dark, same as you. Only the dead know now. And the messenger.”

“What messenger?” The one I saw in Kael’s room? Someone else entirely? “What’s his name? How can I find him?”

Miss Hampshire’s mouth works as if she’s trying to grind the right words into shape and finding nothing but grit.

Her half-hand lifts, nubs flexing once against her apron before she clamps it there again, fingers she no longer has curling into the fabric.

When she finally meets my eyes, the silence she offers lands in my gut like a stone.

“So he just crowned me clueless…” The familiar sense of defeat sinks its teeth into my ribs. If I don’t figure out what I’m supposed to do, the curse will keep eating the realm—and Daron will be its supper. “For all we know, that messenger might be dead, too.”

“Perhaps.”

She curtsies—a stiff, formal dip that looks ridiculous given the situation, given that I am standing over a fresh grave with dirt on my shoes. It’s a gesture of manners, a desperate cling to order in a world that has dissolved into chaos. Then she walks off.

Only the silence stays with me, descending onto the graveyard as the sun finally dips below the horizon. It bleeds a vivid, violent red into the gray sky for a bit, until twilight deepens and swallows it whole. The air grows cold, smelling of damp earth, wet stone, and the promise of winter.

I remain by the grave until my legs ache, staring at the dirt. This is where I belong. Not on a throne, not in a palace. No, I belong among the silent and the dead, and the decay that whispers through the headstones.

“It’s about ending it at the source,” I whisper as a few tears slide down, warm and furious, dripping onto the thirsty grave. “What the fuck did you mean?”

A wind picks up, rustling the dead leaves around the headstones. It swirls the mist around my ankles, cold and biting. It carries a familiar scent, so at home at a graveyard. Not rot, not earth.

Carnations.

My spine stiffens, a million goosebumps pebbling my skin as memory flashes before my mind. Moonlight. Bone. Black pits where eyes should be. A ribcage that held a rumbling moan in lieu of a heart.

“You have a nasty habit,” a voice says behind me, smooth as oil and cold as the grave, “of fighting me like I am not inevitable.”