Seravyn
Ihaven’t smiled in twenty-nine days.
I know this because I’ve been counting them. Every morning, before the handmaidens come to dress me in silks and paint my face, I add another mark to the tally I keep scratched into the wood of my wardrobe.
A small, private rebellion. One I took up when the king all but commanded me upon our first encounter to give him a beautiful smile.
I made it a point right then that I’d never give in to his desires.
It’s been twenty-nine days since I left home. Since my mother pressed her lips to my forehead in the courtyard of our keep, her hands trembling but her voice steady. “You are not a sacrifice,” she told me, though we both knew the truth. “You are a blade. And blades do not weep.”
I haven’t wept, either. My mother would be proud of that, at least.
Now, King Aldric has made it his personal cause to cheer his sad princess.
I don’t know what infuriates him more. That I refuse him a simple smile, or that I simply refuse him.
It would be a lie to say the king isn’t attractive. His outside, yes—with hair so light is flows white beneath his heavy crown of gold, and eyes of the clearest blue sea, he’s as beautiful as the alabaster statues that adorn his rich kingdom.
Yet it’s what tarnishes the inside of his striking facade that casts him in the darkest shadow. No light to be found in those dark-rimed pale eyes that watch me with a calculation that makes my blood run cold.
I shiver as the cool air of the throne room settles against my skin. Giving my hands a purpose, I adjust my silver and amethyst crown against my head, my Thorn Court heirloom. I can feel the touch of Aldric’s gaze slipping over me, even as he appears to look ahead.
Jesters of all kinds have been parading through this room since dawn.
Jugglers, acrobats, performers with pet animals.
Each one enters overly confident and leaves dejected.
Some even furious, all because they couldn’t pry so much as a grin from me.
As if my smiles, my laughter, are something owed to them as much as the king.
As if I’m just an ornament on top of a music box to wind and perform for them.
I’m not some broken thing. What I am is in mourning. For my home, for the life I’ve had to leave behind, the one I wanted for myself. For the version of the girl I left standing in the courtyard.
When my expression remains impassive, the current jester exits the throne room, his head hung low.
Aldric’s strong hand finds my knee as he leans close. “Perhaps the next one, my love.”
I am not his love. I am his purchase.
My family’s dominion—Threnmere, seat of the Thorn Court, whose black keep, Vassal, has stood since before the realms had names—is dying.
Has been dying for longer than I’ve been alive.
The mines ran dry two generations ago, and the crops that replaced them never took in our soil.
Our land is beautiful but barren. It grows nightshade and wolfsbane and belladonna with a fervor, but it will not grow wheat.
Our people are hungry. Our walls are crumbling.
And the dark craft that once made our name feared across the realms is now the only thing keeping the fire burning in our great hall.
King Aldric of Kravenholt offered my father a fortune. A reverse-dowry—a Bride Price. With enough gold to feed Threnmere for a decade. All he wanted in return was me.
A young wife to bear his heir.
A trophy to parade before his court.
While my father wept when he told me this, he still inked his name to the marital contract.
My mother did not so much as frown. She took my hands, looked me in the eye, and said, “You know what we are. You know what you carry in your blood, my daughter of Morrishan. This king is buying a bride, a thing he can own. Your father is paying a debt. Yet Vaelstrom does not realize he’s bringing a serpent into his house. ”
My father sold me to settle a debt centuries old. My mother weaponized the sale.
And somewhere beneath both, in the deep soil where the Thorn Court’s workings root, is a promise my mother made to Morrishan long before I was born—one she has never named, but never ceases to remind me.
I carry her words like a second spine. On the days when the king’s hands find my waist, when his breath warms my neck, when his deep voice curls around my name like he owns every syllable—I recite her words.
A blade does not weep.
A blade sharpens while it waits to find its home.
I think we’re almost through with this day until another fool enters. I almost don’t bother looking up.
The steward hesitates as he says, “Just Ren. The…jester.”
Something about the way he pauses pulls my gaze toward the center of the throne room, and my heart stammers.
Goddess, everything about this jester is just criminal. The outfit doesn’t quite fit him. The bells are tarnished. He’s tall, yes, but gaunt, and he moves with a quiet fury, like a man walking into a fight he doesn’t deign to win.
There’s mud on his boots, and he’s tracking it across the stone. I can tell by the hard set of his jaw that he doesn’t notice nor care.
This is who has come to make me laugh? It feels entirely wrong—he feels wrong. And it makes me wonder what his true purpose is here.
I question this the way I question most things, by some extra sense that lives beneath my skin. Like the way I know when a storm is coming by the charged, ozone taste of the air, or when a plant is poisonous by the way the leaves feel.
The craft, my mother calls it—what the Thorn Court women carry in the blood.
Right this instant, that buzzing sense beneath my skin is warning me that this man walked into the throne room carrying something far heavier than a jest.
He reaches the dais, sunken eyes aimed at the floor. Then he looks at me.
And I feel the intensity of his gaze down to the marrow of my bone.
He’s beautiful in the way a pressed flower is, its dead petals brittle yet still carrying the memory of when they were once soft and vibrant.
His ink-black hair spills across one eye, trying to conceal a scar that runs through it, from brow to cheek, stripping the color of the once deep shade.
Now pale and ghostly, like the rest of him—a specter in a torn and ragged costume haunting the hall.
While the courtiers look at me with a morbid curiosity, and Aldric looks at me with ownership, this hardened man looks at me like he’s just been struck. As though I’ve hit him square in the chest, and he can’t catch his breath.
He looks at me with such a bottomless emotion—and I recognize it so deeply that it nearly fractures my composure.
Grief.
It’s heavy and fresh. The kind that reshapes a person from the inside. I know its face. I see it in my mirror every morning before the handmaidens arrive to paint over it.
The jester—Ren—bows. Graceless, too fast, and the bells give off a death rattle instead of a jingle.
His eyes return to me when he straightens, and an uncomfortable flush warms my face.
Because, despite his ill-fitting motley and ragged appearance, he’s strangely beautiful.
The chiseled, lean muscles that sculpt his body.
The full lips, the sharp cheekbones. That arresting mix of pale and dark eyes.
When he opens his mouth and begins telling the oddest story about a potato striking him, I feel my lips twitch. His baritone voice alone moves me, but it’s the candor of his words—raw, stripped, matching that openness of his eyes—that fills the silence, and I feel something crack behind my ribs.
My lips further betray me, fracturing with an almost smile. I press them together, fighting it, because if I smile, it will be just another thing Aldric claims as his.
I glance sideways, the barest flick of my eyes, to where Isolde stands near a stone pillar.
My handmaid. My shadow. My friend. The one piece of home I was allowed to bring with me.
She’s watching the jester with an intrigued, bewildered expression, her lips pressed thin.
She catches my glance and quirks an eyebrow in amusement.
I look away before she makes me crack a smile.
Ren bows again, retreating, and I think it’s over, that I’ve held strong—then goddess divine, he trips, muttering an oath.
The silence that follows is uncomfortable, making it worse. And the sound escapes me before I can cage it—a giggle, bright and traitorous, rising to echo around the room. I clap my hand over my mouth, but it’s too late.
It feels like the first full breath after being held underwater for twenty-nine days.
Aldric’s smug eyes slide over me, a victorious smirk stretching his own lips, before he surges forward, bellowing orders to get the jester quarters, food, whatever the fool wants. And the jester, Ren, is hauled to his feet and steered toward the door.
He looks back just once.
Our eyes meet across the length of the throne room. For one breath, the mask slips, and the smallest smile graces my mouth. Maybe, at least, my failure will grant this man some kind of hope.
Then I tuck it away. Fold my hands. Fix my gaze on the far wall.
The king’s hand returns to my knee. He’s speaking about a celebration, about more festivities and drink. I let his words pass through me like water through stone, unmoved.
And yet, beneath my composure, something has shifted. Something small and dangerous, like the first hairline crack in a dam.
Later in the evening, Isolde finds me in my chambers.
She doesn’t knock, simply appearing the way she’s appeared at my side since I was nine years old and she was fourteen, assigned by my mother to be my handmaid, my tutor, my keeper. She’s the only person in this palace who knows me.
She closes the door behind her and leans against it, arms folded, her pretty face unreadable. “What the goddess was that, Seravyn?” she asks.
I’m seated at my vanity, pulling pins from my hair. “I was caught off-guard.”
“You were smitten,” she accuses.
Curse her for knowing me so well, for being able to read me.
“Look at you,” she says, stepping forward. “You’re still blushing.”
I meet her large eyes in the mirror. Isolde is lovely, with high cheekbones and long auburn hair. Her mouth settles into a line, prepared to refute whatever lie I’m about to construct.
“He was very amusing,” she says, offering me a lifeline.
She also carries her loyalty like a blade of her own. She’s the closest thing I have to home in this gilded prison, and she is, at this moment, offering me a safe space, a small measure of freedom.
“He was filthy,” I say, removing another pin from my hair. “And not a real jester.”
“Which is just curious. Don’t you think?” She crosses the room to me. “He must have been desperate. To go before the entire court, the king himself, without any sort of routine.”
I hold the pin, my knuckles paling as I grip it tight. “The king’s doing, undoubtedly.”
She takes the pin from my hand, then starts removing the others from my hair with the practiced ease she’s mastered of undoing my hair since childhood. Her fingers work through the dark strands, gentle despite the sharpness of her tongue.
“The king is cruel,” she says in earnest agreement. “I hate that you’re here, Sera. In this situation.”
Sera, the name my family uses, the name that belongs to the girl I was before I came here, lands like a stone in a shallow pool. I watch the ripples move through my own reflection.
“I started brewing the dwale,” she whispers lightly, her fingers feathering my hair. “You can take it at night, right before you’re to be with him, and it will be as if your mind is elsewhere.” Her hands still. “You won’t remember a thing.”
She pauses. Her eyes find mine in the mirror, and something knowing and unsaid passes between us. The silent language of women who have been keeping secrets together for a long time.
A tight swallow scrapes my throat. “Thank you, Isolde,” I manage. I already take a tincture to ensure I won’t end up carrying his heir. This is simply a different kind of precaution.
She kisses the top of my head. “Your mother would tell you to sit straighter.”
A throaty laugh escapes. “My mother told me to be a blade.”
Isolde shakes her head knowingly. “Ah, a blade that laughs at vagrant jesters is a blade losing its edge.”
Ren, I think. That’s his name. I let another smile slip. “Again, I tell you, it was involuntary.”
“Of course. He is rather handsome, though,” she remarks with a wink.
Heat rises in my cheeks. “I didn’t notice.”
“Liar.” She resumes her work on my hair. “He’s gaunt as a stray and twice as feral. But the bones are good. Oh, I’m sure he has a very good bone…”
I swat at her, mortified. “Isolde—”
“And those eyes. One dark, the other light with that scar cutting through it, so dangerous looking. Nythera’s veil…” She trails off, then catches herself, straightening. “Not that you’ve noticed anyway.”
“I haven’t.”
It cannot notice. I’m tasked with only one purpose here.
“I suppose it’s at least some amusement to pass the time,” she says. “A daily performance to keep you entertained. No harm in that.”
Her comment reminds me that that’s exactly what the jester will be, that he will be required to make me smile, to laugh. Every day.
My own personal court jester.
Isolde studies me for a moment. Then she sets the last pin down on the vanity and rests her hands on my shoulders. Her grip is firm. Grounding.
“Just be careful, Sera,” she says. “That one has an anguish in him, scars that tell of it, and that makes men reckless.” A heavy pause. “And you, my girl, have your mother’s heart, which means you’ll try to save him. And that—” she squeezes once “—is not what you were sent here to do.”
She leaves without another word. The door clicks shut behind her.
I sit in the silence of my chambers, my dark hair loose around my shoulders, my hands still in my lap. Through the arched window, the last light of the day is bleeding out of the sky, turning the palace grounds the color of bruised flesh.
And I think about the fool. His one pale eye, his other full of depth. The grief I found there in them. The scar that speaks to pain, and violence. The raw scrape of his voice as he told his truth in a court full of lies.
I think about his hands, shaking when he bowed.
The way he looked at me like I was real.
I open the small drawer beside my vanity and retrieve the thin sliver of metal I use for my tally. I press it into the wood of my wardrobe and scratch through the twenty-nine marks.
Twenty-nine days, undone by a fool in bells.
I hesitate just a moment before scratching a new line below.
Tomorrow, I will not break.
I will be as silent as the belladonna growing in my private garden.
A blade does not weep—and a princess does not smile for the cruel king she has vowed to kill.