Seravyn
Since I’ve been in Kravenholt, King Aldric has never once come to my bedchamber. It’s the one relief I’ve been granted, knowing I have that protection, that he can’t enter without invitation, or a ceremony to claim me as his.
Tonight, that frail sense of safety is broken.
It’s late evening when the intrusion comes. The afternoon light has faded and the corridors are quiet, and the only person near me is Isolde, sitting on the chaise mending a tear in my riding cloak.
Aldric has always summoned me to him. The throne room. The great hall. His private dining chamber. An audience always on his terms, in his spaces.
So I’m shaken when my door swings open, seeing him in my mirror.
And I question if he’s inebriated, his crown slipping slightly askew atop his white-blond hair.
He fills the doorway with his crimson silks, his long fingers stacked with rings, and the smell of him precedes his entrance into the room.
A heady cologne he wears, smoky notes of vetiver, woodsy sandalwood, and cardamom spice.
Nothing like the sweet mint and sugar I experienced with Ren.
Isolde rises so quickly her needlework hits the floor. “Your Majesty.” She drops into a curtsy. “Forgive me, I wasn’t—”
“Leave us.” Aldric doesn’t even look at her. His arctic blue eyes are fixed on me seated at the vanity. I feel his prowling gaze touch the back of my head, trailing the curve of my neck just visible above the open collar of my nightgown. “Now.”
Isolde’s spine stiffens. Her eyes find mine in the mirror, a question flashing there, the silent offer that she will remain if I ask her to. She’d risk a flogging for me, I know she would. But I couldn’t bear it.
I incline my head. The smallest nod, permitting her to leave.
She curtsies again, slower this time, before she reluctantly slips past the king.
Aldric crosses the room toward me. Bracing my spine, I hold my place. I keep my hands in my lap, my back straight, my eyes fixed on his approach in the mirror, refusing to face him directly. Letting my body speak for how inappropriate this invasion of privacy is.
Whatever he came here to do to me, he will have to be brute about it.
I won’t make it easy for him.
He stops behind my vanity stool. His ringed fingers clasp my shoulder. I’m thankful for the thin silk of my night robe that prevents his bare touch.
“My beautiful bride,” he murmurs, his deep voice overly saccharine. His touch turns possessive, his thumb tracing my spine, inducing a reactive shiver.
But I do not flinch.
A blade does not weep.
“I feel like you’ve been hiding from me,” he accuses. His fingers drift lower, brushing the edge of my neckline, making my skin prickle. “Holed up in your rooms with your books and your handmaiden. I begin to wonder if you’ve forgotten you have a king to serve.”
I lift my chin. “I forget nothing, Your Majesty.”
“Aldric,” he corrects sternly.
I lift my chin a measure higher. “As you wish, Aldric. I simply meant, you’ve been kept away much by the revolt, your attention needed elsewhere.”
His other hand finds my hair and lifts the dark strands, his fingers sliding through the length and applying a testing tug that makes me tense. “Mm,” he hums. “Seems I’ve been neglectful of my bride. I will have to remedy that before we’re to be married in a few weeks.”
A few weeks.
The number lands in my chest like a stone dropped into a well, hollow and sinking. I’ve been measuring my time in days, given the illusion of a longer timeline. I haven’t been allowing myself to look at the calendar, to see that it’s now less than a month that the whole of my freedom has shrunk.
“The weeks will pass quickly, My Lord,” I say softly in an attempt to pacify him. My hand clenches the fabric of my gown.
“I fear not quickly enough.” His hand moves to the back of my neck, where the fine hairs lift in protest. His fingers linger there, applying the barest pressure, just the threat of a grip.
A reminder of how easily he could close his hand and end my breathing if he chose.
“And do you know what I’m most looking forward to, my bride? ”
I don’t provide an answer.
His chuckle is low. “As a Threnmere girl, I think you can imagine.”
His voice has dropped to a low rasp, intimate, seductive. His thumb strokes the nape of my neck. His other hand slides down the front of my shoulder and finds the slope of my chest above the neckline, pausing just at the edge of decency, his rings cold against my skin.
“But have I note shown patience?” he continues, undeterred.
“I even sought a jester to bring a smile to your sullen lips, tolerating your withheld affections, this coy game of yours. I’ve respected you, have I not?
Shown you the deference of your station.
” His voice tightens, edged with a feral anger.
“You should know that I’m not a patient man by nature, yet I’ve been generous in my restraint. ”
I swallow hard at the increasing pressure of his hands.
“My generosity can swiftly come to an end,” he says, his hands halting. “Although, showing some form of affection might pacify me.”
His thumb dips lower, and I shudder at his touch so near my cleavage.
“Don’t you have whores for that, Your Majesty? To keep you satiated?” The ire in my voice does nothing to back him off. Rather, I fear it only entices him further, a dare to strip me of my boldness as much as my gown.
Aldric’s chuckle is mocking. “You’ll soon learn that my appetite isn’t so easily satiated, love.”
Morrishan, still my tongue. Grant me the tolerance to keep my hands folded and not reach for the silver hand mirror on my vanity to drive through his eye—when every drop of poison in my blood is screaming to end him.
My knuckles turn white where I’m gripping my skirt. I measure my breaths. I measure the beats of my heart, which has begun to pound in a high, panicked rhythm I haven’t permitted myself to feel since the day I left Threnmere.
I think of every drop of poison I’ve built into my blood. My tolerance, my survival. My defense. This cruel king will soon learn that I’m not so easily cowed.
Aldric lowers farther, placing his mouth next to my ear, the blue of his eyes, ringed with that storm-gray, holding mine in the mirror. “Part your legs, Seravyn,” he commands.
“My Lord—”
His hand lands heavy on my thigh, forcing my thighs to separate. An involuntary swallow scrapes my throat as I ease my thighs farther apart. He slowly drags the hem of my gown up, his fingers curling atop my thigh to bunch the fabric until he touches skin.
He turns his head, releasing a rough groan into my hair. “I knew your skin would be soft,” he murmurs.
He doesn’t stop. My whole body stiffens at his persistent advance, the coarse drag of his fingers up the inside of my thigh. A gasp is pulled from my throat as his fingers find their way to the curved joint of my thigh, then press against the fabric there, intrusive, slowly swirling.
“Fuck.” The oath is torn from him, ragged and harsh. “You might play coy, but the feel of how wet you are…” He trails off, chuckling darkly. “I just knew Threnmere women were little temptresses. You may love to torture, but you want it, love. Filthy and rough.”
A hot blade of fear cuts through me as he applies pressure right at my entrance, drawing a trembling gasp from my throat.
It amuses him, the gleam turning dark in his eyes before he slowly withdraws his hand, but leaves his touch lingering on my thigh, as if savoring the imprint he’s left on my skin.
I force my gaze to hold his, to not waver, my heart pounding violently in my chest.
Aldric straightens behind me, his chin cocked, a devilish smile twisting at his mouth. “For you, love, I can continue to be patient,” he says, his voice abraded, his restraint fraying even as he claims it. “I have a feeling it will be worth the torturous wait.”
He sends me a wink, then turns and abandons me at the vanity, my mind and body left reeling.
The door clacks shut, and at last, I flinch at the sound. I hear his footsteps retreat down the corridor, fading into the drone of the palace, and I sit perfectly still at my vanity until I’m certain he’s gone.
I can do this, I tell myself as I stand and walk to the basin, loathing the betrayal of my body as I feel the slick heat between my thighs. I can do this—take his cruelty in doses. Just as I do with poison, training my body to carry what would otherwise kill me.
I pour the cold water with hands that have begun to shake, then scrub my neck where he touched me.
My shoulder. My collarbone. My thighs. I tear my undergarments off, banishing the thin fabric to the bin with an aching knot in my throat.
Then I scrub myself until my skin is pink and stinging, and I can no longer feel the caress of his fingers, and even then it isn’t enough.
His touch is in my bones, rooted in the marrow. In some place no cleansing water can reach.
Isolde finds me there. Without a word, she wets a fresh cloth to help me, her jaw locked tight with rage.
“Oh Sera, did he—”
“No.”
Just one word, the only one I can manage, and I say it vehemently—owning some sovereignty over my body.
And when I finally stop trying to scrub myself raw, I allow her to settle me into my bed, trying to comfort myself with thoughts of kings meeting their ends with choking poison on their tongues.
Still, I can’t find sleep. And my thoughts turn to the river, to its fresh, flowing water. Craving nothing more than to submerge myself in its cleansing current.
The thought sparks an image of Ren, of that moment of weakness in the moonlit garden, when I told him about my secret spot. I glance through the arched window. The moon isn’t completely full tonight—but it’s close enough. And I wonder if I’d find him there, if he’d dare to come.
I shouldn’t have told him about it, yet some traitorous, hungry part of me wanted him to follow, to be defiant for me.
And I think, maybe, I crave a little defiance, too. To do something reckless, all for myself.
The chambers are quiet, the candles burned low, Isolde long since retired to her own room down the hall. I ease from the covers of the bed and pad across the room to the wardrobe.
I think about the way Ren says my name. The way it falls from him as if he’s afraid of breaking it.
The way he says Your Highness in a breathless cadence and Princess with a curl to his mouth and Sera with a reverence that makes me shiver—and each one is said with the same devotion, the same hunger held in his intense eyes.
By Nythera’s darkness, I shamelessly think about his fingers pressing sugar to my tongue. His trembling restraint as he held them there. How he hovered at the corner of my mouth as if every muscle in his body was at war as he held himself back.
I think about his thumb at my lower lip and the sugar dissolving on my tongue.
I think about the taste of him. Just the briefest taste. The salt of his skin and the sugary sweetness lingering after, and how my body had responded, bloomed open in some hot, foreign way I’ve never felt before.
And all I can think right now is how I want to feel it again.
The king touches me like I am his.
Ren touches me like he is mine.
The thought pounds in my chest with a force that knocks the breath out of me, and I open my wardrobe, my pulse loud in my ears.
The nightdresses I packed are arranged in the back, untouched since I arrived. Threnmere silk, pale and weightless. Not the heavy brocades the king’s seamstresses have been pressing on me since my arrival.
I take out one of the white ones. Thin enough that I can see the shadow of my hand through it. Sheer enough that in moonlight, on wet skin, it will cling to my body—damp, transparent—in the moonlight.
I slip out of my sleep gown and pull it on. The silk whispers against my body, cool and weightless. I throw a dark hooded cloak over the nightdress, gather it close, slip my bare feet into soft slippers.
Some of the wolfsbane bloom is still in the pocket where I left it, dried at the edges, fragrant with its violence. I touch it, my anchor. My reminder.
I am Seravyn Morvaine of Threnmere. A daughter of poison. I have wolfsbane in my blood.
I slip out of my chambers, the corridors dark and silent, the nearly full moon spilling silver through the high windows. My slippers make no sound on the stone. My breath is quiet. The cloak trails behind me like a shadow I’m dragging into the dark.
There’s a hidden staircase behind a tapestry in the north wing that leads to a door that reaches the outside garden. I found it my first week here, marking my escape if necessary.
The orchard gate is ahead. Beyond it, the path that winds down through the apple trees to the eastern wall. Beyond that, the river.
I think of Ren’s touch, of his ruined exhale as I walked away—and I crave that touch to replace the callous touch of the king on my skin.
I think, with a wild, reckless desire, that I will not allow myself to question—
The bitter cruelty of this king, the uncertainty of my future, the dangerous game I’m playing with Ren—I don’t let myself fear any of it. Not in this moment. Not when I think of the way my belly fluttered as Ren licked his thumb, the second after I’d tasted him.
My very own poison.
As much as I am a daughter of Morrishan, goddess of thorns and the patient dark, a am also a daughter of Nythera—and to desire is to be alive.
To want is to still have something left worth wanting.
And after a month of being hollowed out, the fact that I can still want and desire and crave is proof that I’m not yet a deathless garden.
Sometimes, a girl just craves a little poison.
And tonight, Morrishan forgive me, I intend to drink.