Chapter 3 #2
“Interesting,” he murmurs, eyes narrowing as if he’s trying to read the thoughts inside my skull. “I expected a quick, calculated demand, oh-so perfectly arranged by the late King Kael. Or is it possible that he was so busy scheming, he forgot to tell you what ought to come next?”
My pulse throbs inside my ears, but I refuse to let it reveal my ignorance.
I could ask for Daron’s health to be restored.
For his lungs to clear. For the color to return to his cheeks.
Just a few weeks ago, that would’ve been my wish.
But that was before Mother arrived at the palace with dark purple veins, rot spreading silently beneath her skin…
“Tick-tock, Elara.” Vale’s hand slides up my arm, his thumb drumming into the pulse point that betrays my growing panic. “Night is coming. Even I do not have all of eternity to wait for you to make up your mind.”
“I won’t let you rush me,” I snap, jerking my arm from his grip. “Can I…can I wish for my family’s health to be restored?”
Something loosens in his stance—a tension I hadn’t realized he was holding until it evaporated. The corner of his mouth ticks up, not in a smile, but in a look of supreme, insulting pity.
Like…like I asked the wrong question.
“You might as well ask for the health of the entire realm, and that contradicts what this fabulous crown demands in return for its existence.” He steps closer still, until I have to tilt my head back to meet his gaze.
“But I shall make a concession for my lover,” he purrs.
“Daron, or Mother?” His eyes are alight with amusement, watching the wheels turn in my head.
“Choose, and I shall restore his or her health.” He brushes a stray hair from my forehead, his touch lingering. “But only once.”
Only once…
Because rot remains and might claw its fangs into my family all over again. Daron could wake up healthy tomorrow, only to wither again by next harvest, and I would have spent my one bargaining chip on a temporary bandage for an eternal wound.
“I have other matters to attend to, you know,” he murmurs.
“People are dying in droves. Watching you dawdle makes it difficult for me to tend to the souls piling up.” His thumb strokes along my lower lip, slow and intimate, but my breath doesn’t hitch until his mouth dives for it.
For a sick, disorienting second, it looks like he’s going to kiss me, only to tilt at the last moment and press his mouth to my ear with a faint chuckle. “Five…four…three…”
His stupid countdown sharpens my mind like a whetstone. He’s trying to confuse me. Rush me. Trying to get me to make a mistake.
My throat narrows.
I can’t demand the curse away. My family’s health is a fickle wish. I’m trapped in a cage of rules I didn’t write, playing a game I don’t understand. Kael left me nothing: no instructions, no guidance.
Whatever he thought I could do to break this curse, he took it into the dark with him. What am I supposed to do? Take matters into my own hands? Wait around for a messenger who might never come?
My gaze snags on the mound of fresh, damp earth. Kael knew something. Something that could break this curse. If I had five minutes…just five minutes to wring the truth out of him…
I look up, meeting Vale’s smug, expectant gaze. “Can you bring him back?”
The smirk slides off Vale’s face. He blinks, the casual, leaning posture of his body stiffening into something rigid and terrible. “Bring him back,” he repeats slowly.
“Kael,” I clarify, my voice trembling but gaining volume. “Do you have the power to resurrect him?”
He stares at the grave, and then at me. His expression twists into something concerning. Something petty.
“You want him back?” His voice drips with disdain, and beneath it, a current of searing heat. “Why would you want him breathing again?”
There’s no answering that in any truthful way without revealing that this bargain stands on a lie. “My reasons are my own. Surely sharing them isn’t a requirement for you to pay up.”
A symphony of brittle cracks echoes through the graveyard as the grass beneath us turns ghostly white. The frost doesn’t just coat the blades, it entombs them; the chill shooting up through the soles of my boots, biting through the leather with stinging numbness.
Before I can stumble back, Vale’s hands snap up to bracket my face.
The grip is ruthless, his palms pressing against my cheeks with the weight and finality of a coffin lid slamming shut, trapping me in the cold with him.
He lowers his forehead until it rests against mine, the contact burning like ice, his eyes searching mine with a terrifying, fractured intensity.
“Pathetic.” The rage in his voice cuts the air like sleet.
“You stand before Death, owed a wish that could topple fate itself, and you ask for the return of him?” His eyes darken.
“Was he your lover, Elara? Did you let him put his hands on you after you denied mine, hmm? Is that why you wept on his grave? Did his death break your stupid, mortal heart?” His thumbs press until flesh meets molars.
“Do you love him!?” he roars, the sound vibrating through the soles of my feet.
“You stand before a god, and you pine for the rotting flesh of a man?”
Fear rips through me so hard it rattles my lungs, stealing the air in a jagged pull. For a moment, I’m nothing but bone and breath trapped between his hands, my pulse hammering against his palms while confusion whirls through my skull.
The way his thumbs dig into my flesh, the wild, wounded accusation, the way his eyes blacken under the rising moonlight with sheer possessiveness—none of this is the reaction of a god fooled.
It’s the jealousy of a lover scorned.
No, impossible. He cannot love. He has no heart to give and apparently, no wish to get its string back. So, whatever this is, it’s not tenderness.
It’s arrogance. It’s ownership.
It’s possessiveness that tries to make me shrink, tries to control me. And I’ll be damned if I let myself be bullied by his stupid, wounded pride.
I lift my chin against his grip, forcing my breath back into my chest, and meet his gaze. “Can you bring him back or not?”
For one heartbeat, he just stares at me, wide-eyed, as if the strike of my question could make even a god bleed. Two seconds. Three. The pressure of his hands increases until my teeth ache. Then, as if he realizes what he’s doing—what he’s showing—his grip breaks.
His hands fall away.
The cold rushes in where his touch had been, and I draw a harsh, greedy breath that stings my throat.
Vale turns from me sharply, shoulders rigid beneath velvet, as though the sight of my face is suddenly too much to bear without losing whatever thin mask of composure he has left.
He rakes a hand through his curls. Smooths his cuffs.
Stares past the headstones into nothing.
When he finally speaks, his voice is stripped of all emotion, a hollowed-out echo of the man who was just shouting in my face. “No.”
“No?”
He doesn’t look at me. His gaze fixes on a sliver of moonlight cutting across the frosted grass, right beside his boot. “Even if I were inclined to grant such a waste…Kael has been cold for hours. He has been dead too long.”
My heart gives a violent lurch. Too long. Not impossible. I step toward his back, unable to stop myself.
“But that means…” I trail off, my mind racing. “That means it’s possible? You can bring someone back?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even acknowledge the question. He simply turns around, his face smoothed into a strange blank mask, the rage of a moment ago buried beneath layers of ancient, impenetrable ice.
“What is your wish, Elara?” he asks, clipped and cold, as if he had not just stood here with his hands on my face and rage in his throat. “Choose it. Now.”
The demand hangs in the air, a blade waiting to drop, but my mind is a whirl. Every wish I conjure—health, wealth, power—feels like a mistake I refuse to make.
My silence seems to unnerve him. He shifts his weight, agitated. His boots crunch on the frozen grass as he takes a step to the left, then another to the right, pacing.
No, not pacing.
Dodging.
The clouds above are thinning, tattered rags revealing the rising, blinding face of the moon, and beams of silver light are beginning to pierce the cemetery canopy like spears.
Something shifts in my stomach. Earlier, he refused to show me his true form, and now the moonlight is slowly stripping him of that defiance. Why, I don’t know—whether shame, or pride, or something else altogether—but it’ll buy me time.
I simply do nothing.
I stand and wait.
“I am failing to see the complexity here,” Vale snaps, the vibration of his frustration crackling in the air between us. He lifts his hand, leveling a finger at my face to punctuate the command. “Speak the words, Elara, or I will rip them from your—”
The wind kicks up, tearing the final rag of cloud from the moon’s face. A beam of silver light hits him mid-threat. It strikes his outstretched hand, and the illusion doesn’t just falter, it evaporates, elegantly tapered fingers dissolving to sinew and bone.
He freezes.
Vale stares at his hand, at the skeletal claw protruding from the rich velvet of his cuff, stark and horrifying against the night.
He jerks his hand back as if burned, clutching it against his chest. “Next time, little queen.”
Vale spins on his heel, the velvet of his coat seeming to lose its solidity, melting into the surrounding darkness.
Shadows curl around his boots, rising like smoke, weaving through his form until he’s nothing but a smear of ink against the night, vanishing completely and leaving me alone in the silent, freezing dark.