Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
Elara
Death stayed gone for days.
Not in the literal sense, of course. After all, the business of collecting souls is ceaseless. By all accounts of my ministers, my husband has been a diligent god, sweeping through the realm of Issoria with an efficiency that doesn’t pause for grief or ceremony.
I spent just as many days out in the biting cold, sitting beside the mound of Daron’s grave.
For hours, I sat in face-numbing stillness, trying to conjure him just so I could ask why.
Why did he wipe my tear with his bloodied hand before he said he was sorry?
Why did he stay with Daron? Why is he avoiding me now? Why, why, why for so many things.
But where his wife is concerned, Death remains absent…
A heavy, wet flake sticks to my eyelashes before it melts against the numb skin of my cheek. I don’t brush it away. I sit unmoving on the frozen ground, my woolen skirt fanning out like spilled wine across the white blanket that covers the graveyard.
Snow makes the world quiet in a way that isn’t peace.
More like the arrest of time, muffling the rot-stink rising from the soil. It softens the sharp edges of broken headstones. It covers the mud where too many feet walked too recently. It hides the fresh dirt, and the brother who lies frozen beneath.
My fingers tremble in my lap, pink-tipped and numb, holding down the priest’s new translation, where ink blurs under the moisture of melted snowflakes.
I read the words again, their true, unadulterated meaning letting a darkness settle inside me so profound that it feels like I’m trapped at the bottom of a deep, deep well.
To break the crown, love must rise,
Death binding his queen
in lover’s guise.
In the bed of the night,
his wife shall yield,
Receiving Death
on the corpse’s field.
For the string restores
not by the blade’s cruel art,
But snaps only
within his shattered heart.
His shattered heart.
Not my heart. His.
Kael was mostly right, yet wrong on one part as crucial as it is hopeless. Whatever this warmth is at my core—be it gratitude, growing affection, or even inklings of devastating love—it’s useless. It’s not my heartache, not my love that the gold wants.
It’s his.
Death didn’t lie when he said he cannot break the curse. Trying to draw love from him is about as reasonable an attempt as drawing blood from a stone.
Whatever grudge against Vale or Death sustained me for weeks finally fizzles out, leaving me with nothing but the cold hard truth: I can’t blame a stone for not bleeding…and I can’t hate a shattered heart for failing to love.
The snow thickens. My red cloak grows heavier. My knuckles go numb. Still, I don’t move, watching the sun bedding down on the mountain ridge ahead under the scrutiny of the rising moon.
“Every day, you sit there.” Human cadence, not the rumble that shakes bones. Vale. “Aside from getting frostbite that heals within minutes, what are you endlessly doing out in the freezing cold, Elara?”
I close my eyes for a moment, sensing the grief in my chest make room for the tiniest spark, like a match struck on a rib. “Waiting for Death. As always.”
Long silence.
“I assumed—” He stops. Clears his throat, a human sound that seems ill-suited for Vale, and most definitely Death. “I thought you probably didn’t want to see me again for a while…if ever.”
The vulnerable honesty of his words, the guilt-stricken weight in his tone, touches me deeper than I want to admit. He expected my anger, didn’t he? My hate.
So did I.
Perhaps we’re both confused.
My neck crackles as I turn my head slowly to where he stands a few paces away, black jacket buttoned high, his curls equally dark against the white backdrop. Snow clings to his shoulders and melts there, dampening wool, his eyes going to Daron’s grave before they return to me.
“Death does as Death is.” Not even my grief will let me pretend otherwise anymore.
“You know full well it was never your nature I held against you.” I lift the translation with a shaky hand and reach it back toward him.
“And now it seems like I can’t even blame you for a curse that simply can’t be broken. ”
Vale steps close enough to take the parchment. He doesn’t fully read it. He merely glances at the ink before he returns it to me.
“Was it you who ensured the first translation was wrong?” I take the document back, folding it neatly before it disappears into the pocket inside my cloak. “Make sure generations stay in the dark? Keep Kael stumbling in search of light, hiding that there is none?”
“There was no urging required on my part.” He looks down at the grave again, then slowly—almost reluctantly—lowers himself to the snow beside me.
“The king who first wore the crown was a cautious, power-hungry…cunning man. It was he who requested the translation be altered, ensuring that any reference to a wife of mine vanished, that any risk of a predecessor breaking the curse was diminished.”
“Diminished? It’s impossible in its very nature.” My throat tightens because, even though I already knew it, hearing it aloud makes it final. “The curse is unbreakable. Because you cannot love. You can never love…”—a gulp—“…me.”
My teeth grind together.
I don’t know why I said it like that.
The wind picks up, whipping his black curls across his forehead. The skin along his cheekbone pales and thins beneath the rising moon, the illusion of Vale stripping away more with each passing minute. Yet he stays, eyes going to the horizon where low-hanging clouds go from dark purple to night.
I let my gaze settle on the same spot. “If you could undo the curse, would you?”
Vale shifts, angling one leg to brace his boot against the snow. “I cannot undo it.”
“I understand that.” But for once, I want to understand him, too. I pull my knees to my chest, trying to hoard what little warmth I have left. “But would you? Break the crown? Return your heartstring?”
A muscle twitches near his throat. “No.”
The answer chills me more than the cold of winter. “Why not?”
Vale’s mouth tightens, and for a second, I think he won’t respond. Then he gives a small nod—one of those stiff, controlled motions that suggests even he agrees he owes me answers.
“I have walked this earth for a long, long time, Elara,” he says softly. “Long enough to witness things that startled even Death. A man, a farmer, who loved his wife with a ferocity that bordered on worship.” He pauses for a breath. “Then he found her in bed with his brother.”
I glance sideways, watching how his face pales, speckles, a slow revealing of the bone beneath. “What did he do?”
“He strangled him dead.” Vale’s jaw shifts once, the motion letting flickers of teeth flare beneath those first, untainted rays of the moon. “The guilt drove him mad. I watched him succumb to drink, and then…I watched him beat the very woman he claimed to adore.”
I nod solemnly, if only because the story doesn’t shock me. I’ve buried its aftermath—women with bruises blooming like dark flowers beneath cotton.
“Then there was a woman,” he continues. “Her husband left her, abandoning her with two newborn babes. She loved him so much, she couldn’t breathe without him.
” His voice fractures, the warmth of Vale’s lilt slowly replaced by the hollowing grind of Death.
“On a storming spring morning, I watched her cradle them, one in each arm, walking through the rain toward a river churning with snowmelt.” Death shakes his head, half of his curls now faded from his skull.
“She waded into it, deeper and deeper, crying, wailing for her husband, her love…until the current swept them under and carried their souls straight to me.”
The wind howls once more.
A shiver wracks my entire body, trembling straight into the crown that clings to my head. Snow melts through the wool at the motion, sending a damp chill into my skin that makes my teeth chatter. The more I listen, the less his heart reads like a tragic mistake.
It reads like a refusal. Protection.
“When I guided those tiny, pure souls, it occurred to me,” Death says quietly, his jacket melting with the darkness as it spreads and folds, “that love only ever brings loss, grief, and madness.” He looks down at his hand, fingers brightening to bone.
There’s no urgency to hide it from me, as if he’s too exhausted to fight the truth tonight.
“When Eamon died at the king’s sword, I merely grasped a glimpse of this agony. ”
The memory of the ferryman hangs over me like another funeral, quiet at first, then all at once—weight settling into places already torn raw. It isn’t my grief, not truly, yet it moves in, anyway, gentling its shoulder beside Daron’s like it belongs. And perhaps it does.
“And yet it was enough for me to make certain I would never feel such grief again.” Death finally looks at me then, his eyes dark, the whites consumed by the encroaching shadows of his black sockets. “I…I don’t want to love, Elara.”
Nodding, I glance over at Daron’s grave, the sight of the snowy mound making me shiver anew. The grief drives it deeper, a tremble in my bones. Yes, I understand what he means. But given the chance, would I tear that ache of loss out of my chest? If it meant surrendering my love for Daron?
The question summons his voice from the depths of the grave, the echo in my head so clear it almost drowns out the wind. “Daron said that grief is just love hiding in a mourning dress.”
He turns toward me, towering but somehow not looming, just a man seated in the snow beside me. And for the first time, I don’t experience him as half anything. Just Death, and the familiarity of that settles deep in my marrow, letting my spine curl on a long, shuddering release of tension.