Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Elara
The hearth in Daron’s room burns low, settled to glowing coals for the night. A quilt lies over my brother’s body, hiding the marbling that’s spread from his shoulders over toward his collarbone. His chest rises and falls with less violence today.
Still wet. Still wrong.
But not as frantic as yesterday.
I try not to let that small mercy fool me into believing the rot has grown kind and shift on my chair, turning my attention back to the table.
Documents are spread across the little table by the window, delivered carefully by Miss Hampshire earlier tonight: parchment more ancient than the oldest grave back home, edges brittle and yellowed, ink faded to ghost-gray strokes.
Father of Nothing, some priest called Death in one of the documents buried somewhere at the bottom. My fingers drift absently to my lower belly, to the lingering ache there now that my bleeding is finally easing after a few days.
Can Death even father a child?
He seems to think so, which indeed is a worrisome thought at best. If I fall pregnant with his child, would it be godly? Mortal? And how would it change—
Now I’m getting ahead of myself.
I chuckle into the room as if my situation is funny, then groan until the candle beside me flickers because it’s anything but. For all I know, his caution is just a convenient excuse to avoid bedding, a lie to distract me from a goal he’s making impossible to reach.
A polite rap on the door, followed by the bristle of Miss Hampshire’s skirts as she enters with a basket clasped underarm. “The straw you requested, Your Majesty.”
“Put it beside the bed,” I say with a jut toward the blood-drowned bucket that already rests there. “I’ll take care of it myself in a bit.”
She does as told before she straightens and looks at the littered table, eyes narrowing. “Your Majesty might wear a crown now, but even queens need rest. Would you like me to have a maid prepare your bed?”
“Not yet.” My fingers lift to my face, rubbing the itch from my eyes. “How do I get my husband to show me his full true form?”
My head of staff gives a high-pitched, almost offended huh. “Whyever would you want to see such a gruesome thing?”
“I have a feeling it matters.” I press my thumb to the edge of a brittle page, grounding myself in its roughness.
Vale fights the bedding tooth and claw, but what if I’ve been aiming at the wrong target all along?
Maybe I’m not supposed to seduce Vale…but Death.
“If only I could fool him again, maybe he’d owe me another wish.
” My gaze drops to the line of ink. “I could demand he show me his bones. Or better yet, ask for a proper bedding.”
Miss Hampshire’s brows lift, straining the angry-red wound where her pustule finally popped a few days ago. Then she turns to shake at a curtain. And another, her eyes narrowing as if palacekeeping is fueling her thoughts.
“Your first wish was only granted because you convinced him you had plotted behind his back with the late king, may God rest his poor soul.” Her half-hand taps her apron when she turns back around to face me.
Her gaze meets mine, sharp, calculating.
“It sounds to me as if you have fooled him a second time already.”
“Technically, he fooled himself.” And yet, her words settle into me like a spark finding dry kindling, small but viciously bright.
“One must wonder if technicalities matter.” Miss Hampshire curtsies—stiff, habitual—then slips out, leaving the room to hush and candlelight.
A second wish. A second lever.
For a moment, that spark flares…only to be blown out by one drafty fact. Demanding payment requires me to confess that my first wish never had a foundation to begin with. And that’s a risk that might not just crumble my marriage into a divorce, but straight up annulment.
A husband unmade. A god released, making me lose the only chain I’ve managed to get around his throat thus far. And then what?
The sense of defeat is a deadweight that pulls my chin toward my chest, but I stop it by anchoring my gaze to a document before me. The script is nothing like I’ve ever seen. The letters don’t flow. They snarl: sharp angles, strange loops, marks above vowels like little teeth.
A part of the curse in the olden language.
My gaze slides to its original translation on the right…
“To break the Crown, love must rise,
The sovereign binding Death
in lover’s guise.
In the bed of the night,
the sovereign shall yield,
Receiving Death on the corpse’s field.
For the string restores
not by the blade’s cruel art,
But snaps only within
the shattered heart.”
A knock sounds at the door.
“Why don't they ever leave me alone?” A huff escapes me, pure annoyance scraping my throat. “Enter.”
The door opens a cautious crack. The young priest who wed me slips in, face drawn tighter than that day. His eyes flick first to Daron—on the bed, pale and still—then to me and the papers spread across the desk.
His mouth tightens. “Your Majesty called for a priest?”
“Close the door.”
He obeys, though his fingers linger on the latch as if he’d rather be elsewhere. “How can I assist, Your Majesty?”
I tap the parchment. “Translate.”
His brows lift. “Your Majesty?”
“This.” I slide the top sheet toward him. “The old tongue. I want you to read it to me in the common language.”
He steps only as close as he needs to scan the scribbles. “Your Majesty, there already is a translation right beside it. It says it right there in the title. The Stanza of Death’s Heart.”
“I’m aware. Read it about twenty times now, and I still want the original read to me as you translate.”
“The crown’s rites were translated centuries ago,” he says carefully. “This particular document might only recently have re-emerged, but I assure you the translation was—”
“Ordered by men greedy enough to trade lives for power,” I finish and flick the parchment. “I don’t trust a single thing in this castle unless I see it with my own two eyes. And even then, I might still be suspicious of it.” Another tap on the parchment, harder this time. “Read this to me.”
The young man looks as if I’ve asked him to swallow a dagger. “This is not a simple—”
“Do not talk to me about simple.” I sit back, forcing myself to breathe. “Just…read.”
His gaze flicks to Daron, as if trying to remind himself there are more sacred things than monarchy. Then his eyes return to the parchment.
“Your Majesty, this language is dead.” His voice is careful, almost reverent.
“Even in the chapel, even among priests, it is no longer spoken. I…I cannot simply read this.” He hesitates.
“If you give me time, I shall provide you with a new, true translation,” he says, only to add quickly, “Unadulterated.”
Strength leaks out of my spine, making it curl against the backrest of the chair. “How long?”
“The language is dense, often…often metaphorical,” he says, his voice rubbing itself thinner on each syllable. “Diacritics change not only pronunciation, but references in their entirety. To re-translate the entire… It requires cross-referencing with texts kept in the lower vaults to—”
“How. Long.”
He swallows. “Days,” he admits. “Perhaps a week. It depends on the condition of the reference material.”
Days. A week.
Nausea churns my stomach, more violently when I look over at Daron. “Start tonight. If I find you sleeping, I hope it’s in a position where you lean slumped over your lectern.”
“Y-yes, Your Majesty.” He quickly gathers the parchment and scrambles backward with several bows. “I will translate it as quickly as I can. Faithfully.”
He turns and practically runs, his robes billowing behind him. The door clicks shut, sealing the room once more in its suffocating quiet.
I let out a long, ragged exhale, pressing my fingers to my temples. I feel stretched thin, like rope frayed to the breaking point. The encounter with Vale—the violence, the pleasure, the strange, terrifying intimacy of it—still hums beneath my skin.
A distraction I can’t afford.
And now this.
“I was beginning to worry,” a rasping voice creaks from the shadows, “that the priest was here to measure me for the box.”
My head snaps around.
Daron is watching me, his eyes much brighter, shockingly clear against the candlelight. But that’s not what makes my lips part while something even brighter whirls through my core. No, it’s that smug grin on his face.
“Daron.” I cross the room in two strides, that twitching on the corners of my mouth something I can’t—and don’t want to—suppress as I drop to my knees beside the bed. “You idiot.”
His smirk widens—crooked, boyish, infuriatingly alive for a face that should look like it’s already halfway gone. “Still smart enough not to get myself stuck with a crown and a rotting kingdom.”
“Oh, shut up,” I breathe, and the sound that comes out is half laugh, half relief. I grab his hand again like it’s an anchor. “You shouldn’t be witty while you’re pretending to be dying.”
He squeezes my fingers, weak but deliberate. “Family curse, how we’re all feeling right at home in the grave,” he rasps. “Heard there’s more than one curse going around here.”
“What did you hear?”
“The lady without fingers mumbled something once.” He inhales slowly, as if each word costs him breath he can barely spare. “That the crown…brings the rot. That you’re trying to fix it.”
My throat tightens, but I keep stroking the ridge of his knuckles. “It’s complicated.”
“And,” he continues, eyes narrowing with a spark of mischief, “I heard you got married.”
My molars grind. “Also complicated.”
He lifts a brow, shaky but no less taunting. “Is he one of those noble peacocks? Is he handsome?”
I roll my eyes. “Don’t start.”
“Handsome,” he decides. “That’s new. You always said you’d marry a corpse.”
That shuts me up for a second. “Did I?”
“Years ago.” Daron laughs, small, wheezy, but real. His grin softens. “What’s his name?”
My throat tightens again. I hate how saying it feels like inviting him further into something I want to keep him from.
“Vale.”
Daron’s eyes narrow, processing. “Vale,” he repeats, then coughs softly. “That’s a place, not a name.”
That rips a chuckle from me, a reluctant spark of humor warming the tension from my throat. “How are you feeling?”
He shifts slightly, wincing. “Better.”
The word lands like honey in a starving mouth, letting my hope leap before I can leash it. “Pain?”
He blinks, eyes drifting toward the ceiling. “Less pain,” he says slowly. “Less itch. Less…” His throat works. “Less everything.”
“Your ear? It’s not itching anymore?”
Daron shakes his head. “No.” He shifts, frowning slightly as his bones press against the mattress. “Help me sit up? If I have to look at that ceiling one more hour, I shall die of boredom before the sickness takes me.”
Nodding, I rise to sit beside him. “Alright. Gently now.”
I slide my arm behind his shoulders—his body light like a bundle of dry kindling—and hoist him up against the pillows. He gasps, his arms twitching uselessly before they settle once more.
“Better.” He looks at me, his gaze scanning my face with a terrifying perception.
“Do you remember when you asked if you looked royal?” His breath hitches, but he grins anyway.
“You said you’d sell my hands to the king.
Saints, Elara, now you are the king, and my hands have gotten pretty useless.
” Daron’s mouth twitches, grin lifting even higher.
“Can’t even become your guard and fight off your enemies with a stale crust.”
A soft laugh breathes past my lips as my vision starts to swim. “At least you haven’t lost your wit. That’s more than most guards have to begin with.”
His grin fades into something softer, a quiet sort of nostalgia settling in the lines around his eyes. “You remind me of Father,” he whispers. “Especially when you’re blunt like that.”
The mention of him is a sudden, sharp ache in the center of my chest. “I miss him.”
“Me, too. Do you remember the harvest before the big freeze? The year I ate too many candied apples?”
I blink, the memory rising unbidden through the haze of my grief. “You threw up on the walk home.”
“Before that,” he corrects. “I got tired. My legs were too short to keep up with the crowds. Father didn’t say a word.
He just lifted me up and put me on his shoulders.
” He presses his eyes shut is if to enhance the memory.
“I remember the smell of his coat: pipe tobacco and wet felt. I fell asleep up there, high above everyone else. I felt…invincible. Like nothing in the world could touch me as long as I was held by him.”
A tear slips free, tracking down my cheek. “I hate that the grief is the only thing I have left of him.”
Daron’s thumb brushes against my knuckles. The touch is weak, but his eyes, when they open again, are lucid and burning with a sudden, fierce intensity.
“No,” he says, his voice finding a surprising strength. “You’ve got it backward, big sister. Grief is just love hiding in a mourning dress, piling up inside you because the person you want to give it to isn’t there to take it.”
I sniff, wiping my face on my sleeve, abandoning a queenly dignity I never had to begin with. “Doesn’t make it hurt less.”
“Pain is a good thing.” He lets out a dry, rattling breath that sounds painfully like a chuckle. “Reminds us that we’re alive, right?”
The words land gently, yet they burn somehow. I’m not sure if a boy whose voice hasn’t even fully dropped should make peace with agony as a companion in this way.
I stroke an oily strand from his face. “Well, no box for you just yet.”
His boyish grin curls up once more, wobbling at the corners with the strain before he murmurs, “Not yet.”