Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Elara
Daron was best with the eyes.
Always had been, his fingers sure, even when the rot chewed away at his nails, working the spoons under with a care that almost resembled love. He was steadier than Mother. Gentler than me.
Still, I try my best when I slide the metal under his pale lids where he rests on a bier, readying him for burial. A quilt lies over his body, thick and plain, hiding the marbling that has crawled farther than I wanted to admit.
We covered him carefully.
We cleaned him as best we could.
Mother’s sobs come from my right, raw and uncontrolled, the kind that makes people avert their eyes because there’s nothing to do with that kind of grief. “Oh…my son,” she keeps wailing, the words breaking apart in her throat. “Oh, saints, my baby.”
My fingers shake harder. A violent tremor that starts in my wrists, scraping down along my knuckles before it numbs my fingertips. I quickly break the last handle off.
When his lids sit plump and still, I ruffle his brown curls one last time. His scalp is cold. A cold that returns no warmth, no matter how long you touch it.
Then I look at the two guards and nod.
They move with solemn respect, hands going under the handles, lifting Daron as if he’s still fragile, still alive enough to hurt. People watch, gathered in a half-circle once more, a dark mirror of the vigil we held just weeks ago.
Same faces. Same graveyard.
Different agony.
My legs tremble. Not from the cold, but from weakness.
A reminder why I decided not to lower him down myself, what with how I can’t trust my limbs right now.
My conscience wouldn’t have any forgiveness left for myself if I dropped him.
Not after I collapsed in the greenhouse yesterday, neither Mother nor I making it to his side before Death.
A lump clogs my throat, thinning my breaths. Because of me, he died alone.
As the men position Daron over the open earth, Mother cries even harder. “It is not natural,” she wails, rocking back and forth, the green shawl around her shoulders flapping with the motion. “A mother…burying her child. It goes against the earth. It goes against God! My son… Oh, gods, my son!”
The straps hiss as Daron is lowered. The sound is too familiar: rope sliding against wood, friction whispering through the air.
His body descends.
Mother’s cry turns into a strangled, animalistic sound, and she lunges forward as if to follow him into the hole. It’s Miss Hampshire who catches her by the shoulders, gentle but firm, holding her back from falling into the grave with him.
“He’s gone,” Miss Hampshire hushes in a low voice, her usual restrained demeanor broken by a single tear that runs down her cheek. “Do not cling. All it does is trap his soul.”
That last word lands like a dagger, but it doesn’t just pierce. It eviscerates, stabbing into my gut and tearing upward, thinning the air in my lungs until all strength leaches from my body.
“I will take your soul,” Vale’s voice whispers around me, “and I will drag it down to the deepest, darkest pit.”
My next inhale struggles past the sensation as I lift my eyes from grave to thicket. Vale stands far from the funeral, at the fringes of the forest near the gnarled roots of a tree. A part of it, yet utterly separate. Uninvited, yet observing from a distance. Present, yet not daring to step closer.
Mist drifts from the shrubs and curls around him, turning his long black coat nearly gray. He stands stiff, unmoving, his gaze set on the grave, blending so perfectly with his dreary surroundings that one blink might make him disappear.
I wait for the anger. I wait for the familiar, purifying inferno of rage to rise and clean everything else out. So I can hate him. So I can loathe him.
Somehow, I can’t.
Maybe my chest is too full. Packed tight with desperate grief, suffocating shame, and a guilt so heavy it threatens to crack my ribs. Maybe there’s no room left for hate. No energy for loathing.
I just stand there with a resigned calm, a defeated acceptance. The urgency that has driven me for weeks—the goal to save my little brother—has been stripped from my muscles. I am naked in my failure.
How did I ever think I could win against Death? After all this, how could I possibly love him?
Vale lifts his eyes.
They connect with mine across the damp expanse of the graveyard. The distance is significant, dozens of yards of mist and headstones between us, yet I see him with painful clarity. I see the shadows beneath his eyes, the rigid line of his shoulders, lips clenched into a thin, pale line.
Or maybe it’s just what I want to see.
Maybe I need to see that this loss has carved a piece out of him, too, just to fan that lonely, tired coal in my chest back into a struggling gleam.
The fog seems to indulge me in this foolishness, blurring his edges until he looks less like a god and more like a man standing alone in the cold. Self-exiled.
Why didn’t he break the curse?
He said he couldn’t. He roared it at me in the greenhouse, his voice cracking with an agony of his own. But how can that be? He created it. And even if he isn’t the one who can break it, then why fight my attempts with such determination that it took from me what I held most dear?
The confusion breeds a spark of heat.
Not quite anger.
Defiance.
I lift my chin. It’s a sharp, deliberate movement, cutting through the lethargy of my grief. I make certain he sees it. I make certain he feels the weight of my eyes on him, burning through the fog.
I hate you.
He shifts then. His chin sinks toward his chest, almost a gesture of profound submission, and his gaze drops away from mine. He looks down at the grave again. At the first shovel of dirt sprinkling my brother.
Mother’s sobs rise into another wave. She cries out, a high, piercing shriek that snaps the tension. Her knees give out completely, and Miss Hampshire stumbles, barely catching her before she hits the mud.
“I failed him,” she wails, voice breaking into pieces. “Saints, I failed my boy. I…I arrived too late. I was—I went for a walk. To find herbs. By the time I arrived…my boy was gone.”
Miss Hampshire whimpers. “Hush now…”
“No, Mother…” My whole body shakes. Every muscle along my arm quivers as I hook my arm into hers, helping to steady her while all I want to do is collapse into the dirt myself. “It’s I who failed him.”
We watch the hole disappear, shovel by shovel. With each spray of heavy soil, Mother’s wails fracture more, breaking down into small, hiccupped whimpers. Then the hole is gone. A mound of fresh, wet earth rises where my brother used to be.
Dirt finishing what rot started.
Silence reclaims the air, thick and uncomfortable. Ministers. Priests. Maids. One by one, the dark shapes of the mourners detach from the semi-circle, murmuring condolences before turning their backs and drifting away into the gray morning, leaving us alone with the grave.
Eventually, Miss Hampshire releases Mother and turns away with a solemn curtsy. “Your Majesty.”
Mother watches her go, then sags against me, her weight settling onto my arm like a heavy, sodden coat. The hysteria has drained out of her, replaced by a hollow exhaustion that leaves her face slacker and paler than I’ve ever seen it.
She draws a ragged breath, dabbing endlessly at her eyes with a ruined handkerchief. “I should have been there,” she whispers, her voice cracked and thin. “A mother should be there.”
“As should a sister.” I squeeze my eyes shut, the motion hot and stinging against my trapped tears. “Because of me, he died completely alone.”
“No, not alone. Just not with family.” Her voice is thick with mucus and misery. “Well…presume he’s family somehow,” she corrects herself. “But it’s not the same.”
I open my eyes and look at her, blinking through the blur. “What?”
“Your husband.”
My throat tightens until I can barely swallow. “What of him?”
“He was sitting there on the bed beside your brother when I came…pale as a sheet, his clothes bloodied. Looked like he’d come from a war, that man.
” Mother wipes her face with a shaking hand, each of her slow nods making my chest cave more.
“He said…he said you fainted and were looked after by Miss Hampshire, so he came in your stead.”
My mind flashes to the greenhouse, to the overwhelming chaos of that moment. Everything happened so fast. How I slit his throat, if out of rage or desperation to perform the rite, I can’t even say. Probably the latter, given how I slammed the crown on his head.
It hums against my skull once more, my mind going to Vale’s bloody, trembling palm. How it cupped my face, thumb swiping a tear from my cheek. I’m sorry.
That hidden coal flares up—wild, confusing, against any sensibility—only to be quenched by a wash of cold shock. “What do you mean, he came in my stead?”
“He was holding your brother’s hand when I finally got there,” Mother continues, her voice soft now, reverent.
“Speaking softly to him. Telling him not to be afraid, even though he was already gone. We should…we should have been there, Elara.” She nods, a jerky, fractured motion, leaning heavily on me now.
“But all that’s left now is to find peace in the fact that he wasn’t alone. ”
A violent tremor moves through my body. It starts in my chest and surges out through my ribs, flaring with such intensity that it makes me dizzy.
Death can’t die, but I know Vale’s body can suffer, yet he dragged his freshly bled and newly mended body to Daron?
Why would he do such a thing for my brother? Why would he do such a thing…for me?
My eyes snap to the forest.
The space where Vale stood is empty.
I don’t know what to do with the chaos of emotions in my core.
Gratitude, shame, and sorrow arrive at once, none willing to be put in the ground first. Finally, something quieter settles beneath them all—not peace, but the exhausted stillness of a body that has simply run out of ways to fight itself.
A grave of fierce, painful confusion.
“Your Majesty?”
The voice startles me. I turn, nearly losing my balance on the thin frost underfoot.
The young priest stands there, clutching his white robes with one hand and a roll of parchment with the other.
“Forgive me, Your Majesty. I-I didn’t know if I should wait, or,” he stammers, his eyes darting between me and the mound of earth.
“Your request was urgent. I know this is a mourning time, but…” He extends the scroll, his hand trembling slightly.
“I completed the translation only this morn.”
The translation. The stanza.
Urgent, I’d called it. Now the urgency has gone quiet inside me, collapsing into a dull, defeated stillness that makes even lifting my hand feel like work.
My fingers reach for the parchment without feeling, dryness rasping against my skin, gripping the scroll like a thing that belongs to someone else. “Thank you.”
I give the translation a quick, cursory glance. Ink. Letters. None of them of much use anymore because my baby brother lies six feet under. Why did you sit with him? Why did you stay with Daron?
My gaze lifts again. Past the priest. Past the grave. Back to the fog where the oak tree stands stiff and lonely.
But Death is gone.