Renick
The king is dying.
It begins small. A pallor that the powders can’t quite hide.
A tremor in his hand when he lifts his goblet, there and gone.
He no longer wears his rings, so the gold doesn’t clank against the cups.
While His Majesty halted his rides to the frontlines of the revolt for the wedding, he hasn’t returned, and new rumors are slithering through the great hall like a draft.
At first he’s simply too enamored with his new wife. Then he’s indisposed. Then fatigued by the revolt. Then, in the lowered voices of the bolder courtiers when they think no fool is listening, fearful of Lord Bramwich’s uprising.
I watch it happen and I feel nothing I expected to feel.
I thought, when this moment came—when I finally saw the cruelty drain out of that handsome face, when I watched the man who taxed my sister into a hawthorn grave begin to wither—I thought I’d feel triumph. Vindication. The clean, cold satisfaction of a debt being paid.
I came to this palace with murder in my teeth and a dead sister’s name in my chest, and here is murder, slow and certain, unspooling exactly as I once craved it.
Instead I feel like a man watching a storm roll in from far away, knowing it will reach him eventually, unable to say what it will take when it does.
Because it isn’t my hand doing it.
It’s hers.
Sera tends Aldric with perfect devotion.
That’s the part that undoes the court entirely, that silences the whispers before they can sharpen into suspicion. The sad bride who would not smile for her king has become his most attentive nurturer.
She holds the cup to his lips with her own hands.
She sends away the healers’ foul-smelling draughts and insists on brewing his restoratives herself, her face a portrait of devoted worry, and the court murmurs about how the marriage softened her, how love bloomed where no one thought it could, how touching it is to see the queen so faithful to her burdened lord.
Heavy is the crown…
The one she now shares with him, helping him bear its weight.
And yet, I know that every cup she lifts to his mouth is another measure of his death.
That the restoratives she brews with her own hands in her garden room, surrounded by her poisonous blooms, are sending him into the grave.
I know that the wolfsbane she’s tended by moonlight since the night I found her crouched in the dark is finding its way, drop by drop, into Aldric’s blood.
She is killing him in plain sight, and not one soul in this gilded court suspects that the cure is the poison.
Gods, she’s magnificent.
And gods help me, that I should be terrified of this beautiful creature of the Thorn Court.
We meet in the afternoon, by the flickering light of candles of the library in our dead queen’s wing, the dusty quiet that has become our escape, our stolen world.
Sera comes to me there when she can, slipping through the tapestry and up the hidden stair, and the moment the door closes behind her she’s in my arms and nothing else exists.
Today, as the king is tending to revolt affairs, she asks, “How does it make you feel when he touches me?” Her cheek rests against my chest, my arms wrapped around her like I could hold the whole world out.
I pause stroking her hair. We don’t speak of it often—this strange, errant thing we’ve become—but it sits between us in every silence.
“Does it bother you?” Her voice goes quiet with the honest question.
I release a long breath. “It should,” I confess as her fingers curl into my open tunic. “That it doesn’t is what bothers me most.”
She’s silent for a beat, then she pushes up onto her arm to find my eyes. “Where I’m from, it’s not looked at the way it is here in Kravenholt,” she says. “Maybe you’re secretly of the Thorn Court, Renick Ashbourne.”
A small smile twitches at the corner of her soft mouth, and that, right there, is all I truly care about—that my queen, my love, is happy.
I place a gentle kiss to her lips. “I only ever love to watch your face slacken with pleasure,” I whisper over her mouth, coaxing her into a kiss, while leaving the rest unsaid.
Which has become a dark secret I carry in my chest, that whether her pleasure comes by my hand or his, I’m only bothered if I’m not there to help bring her to completion of that pleasure.
“Touch me now,” she whispers, and I, of course, cannot deny her command.
She’s poisoning a king slowly to death, and maybe we’re both bothered that we’re not feeling enough guilt at that. Like a missing tooth, probing the empty socket, disturbed more by the absence of it.
And I—
Well, I came here to do the same, didn’t I? Far worse, admittedly, by putting a rusted blade into Aldric’s heart before his whole court. I’m no innocent in all this. I’m a murderer who simply hasn’t yet managed the deed.
To wit, my dagger vanished from the chamber floor. Aldric has kept it again, my rusted little murder hinged on the moment he chooses to produce it.
Who am I to flinch from her, then? Who am I to look at the dark thing in her—this daughter of poison, raised in a court of thorns, sent into a cruel king’s house to destroy him—and question it? She’s of a different realm, a goddess in her own right. And who am I to question a goddess’s appetite?
Admittedly, I’ve wanted nothing more than to see the king perish—but I also see how satisfied she is, having us both serve her.
And if feeding her appetite requires my compliance, my utter surrender, then I fear I have little choice in the matter.
Shamefully, I’ve never been more aroused, more desperate with want than the moment Aldric commanded me to fuck her—and I watched him take her with the same breathless want, her body pushed to the brink of pleasure.
By giving in to the king’s lecherous desires, we’re both falling further into a den of lust. All three of us bound to feed our fleshly cravings.
Just thinking about it has my cock achingly hard and pressing into her, my touches turning rough as I pin her to the floor, letting my weight fall heavy on top of her body.
“Goddess, yes…please…” she moans into the kiss, and I deepen it, working the closure of my trousers open and rocking into her with hastened movements.
I didn’t fall in love with a gentle woman. I fell in love with a blade.
“You are the goddess, Sera,” I breathe against her mouth. “My goddess of poisons and devastating ruin.”
She tips her face up to mine. Her dark eyes are searching, vulnerable in a way she only ever lets them be here, with me. “And what does that make you, then?”
I thrust deeper, drawing the sweetest sound from her. “Ruined,” I tell her honestly. “Completely. Utterly ruined.”
The sun is starting to set by the time we’re spent, the candle guttering low, and I know she’ll be slipping out of my arms soon. I hold on regardless, her body warm and loose against mine in the aftermath of our reckless lovemaking.
She’s tracing my face in the candlelight, and her fingertips find the scar. She doesn’t skate past it the way everyone else does. She follows it, slow, like reading a line of text in one of her books.
“You still owe me an answer to a question, Renick Ashbourne.”
“Do I.”
Her chin comes to rest on my chest, her dark eyes lit with wicked pleasure. “I’ve waited long enough to collect.”
“And I presume a Thorn Court woman never forgives a debt.” I sigh, mournful as I can manage. “Go on, then.”
Her finger settles at the top of the scar, where it splits my brow. “How did this happen?”
I look at the ceiling a moment, at the shadows the candle makes of the shelves, and I find I don’t dread telling her.
“I was nineteen,” I say. “It was during a bad winter, right after the third levy, when the grain wagons went to the palace under guard and Harrowglade was left empty. Kammy was eight, and she’d stopped complaining about being hungry, which was worse.
” Her hand goes still on my chest. I cover it with mine.
“There was a grain merchant two villages over. I went over his wall on a moonless night with a sack and every intention of keeping my record as a thief never caught.”
“You were caught,” she says.
I tap the scar. “His guard was stealthier than me apparently. Blade opened me brow to cheek before I even heard him move.” I feel her flinch, and I rub her arm.
“Still, I kept the bread. Went over the wall with two loaves inside my coat, and I’d do it again.
” I grin down at her. “It was very good bread.”
I earn a sweet smile from her. She’s quiet a long moment, then she rises over me and presses her lips to my brow where the scar begins. Then to my eyelid, over the pale eye, so gently, then to my cheek where it ends.
“One dark, one light,” she murmurs against my skin. “I thought, that first day in the throne room, that some god had marked you.” Her mouth curves. “I guess I was right. You were marked for feeding someone you loved.”
She says it like a blessing. She has no idea she’s read my future off my face as easily as my past, and I hold her closer so she can’t read my eyes, letting her think the shiver that runs through me is the cold.
I trace the line of her spine as I change the topic. “Threnmere. The Thorn Court. Tell me about it.”
And she does. She tells me about the keep of black stone, the gardens that grow things that grow nowhere else, the great hall lit against the dark, her mother with her steady voice and her steadier hands. She tells me about the soil, damp and acidic, perfect for the things she loves.
“You miss it,” I say, and she only nods. “I’ll take you there. When this is done, I’ll take you home, Sera. I’ll walk you through those gates myself. And I’ll spend the rest of my days learning every poisonous plant you love.”
I want to mean it.
She goes still against me. “You’d really do that,” she says, not quite a question. “You’d leave this kingdom, leave everything. For me.”
“I’ve told you, I have nothing here but you.” I press my mouth to her temple. “Harrowglade is a grave and a hawthorn tree. You’re the only home I know now. So yes. When you’re free of this place, I’ll take you back to the Thorn Court, and I’ll be the luckiest fool who ever lived.”
I feel her smile against my chest. And then I feel it fade.
“I want to believe that,” she whispers, her fingers tightening on me. “But there’s something else dark stirring in the walls of this palace as the king withers…and it frightens me, that we’ll not escape it.”
A chill settles over my skin. “What do you mean,” I say.
She lifts her head, and there’s a shadow in her eyes that has nothing to do with the dying candle. She pulls the blanket around her, her dark hair spilling over her bare shoulders, and she looks at me, a furrow carving between her brows.
“What I’ve given to Aldric,” she begins slowly, “it’s not just herb and tincture, it’s will. Intention. My purpose bound to it, and the binding is what makes it more than a tea that withers.” Her jaw tightens. “It’s more than poison, more than wolfsbane. It’s a curse.”
“That sounds like witchcraft,” I say, and I mean it as a jest, but she doesn’t laugh.
“The blood of Morrishan runs to old, dark things,” she continues.
“I tried to tell you this that night in the garden, that I deal in the forbidden arts.” She wraps her arms around her knees.
“And the thing about binding your will into your working is that the craft is not a tidy thing. It doesn’t always cut where you aim it. It has a price, always.”
“What price,” I say, fear drawing me up beside her.
She swallows. “I’m not sure yet,” she says. “But I can just…feel it. Hovering. We need to be careful. Until it’s over.”
I pull her into my side, wrapping my arm around her shoulders. “And what until then,” I say. “What does he suffer until it’s finally over,” I dare to ask, a new fear trembling through me that I try to smother.
And I realize, as Sera tells me how the withering works, that I’ve begun to experience some of the same symptoms. For days, I’ve been telling myself it’s nothing, just the circumstance of our situation.
A tiredness that doesn’t abate with sleep.
A morning where my hands shook lacing my boots—just for a moment, just a tremor, there and gone—and I stared at them and told myself it was the cold.
Then the dizziness when I rise too fast. The night I woke with my heart stuttering in my chest, missing a beat, a sick lurch.
I told myself it was grief, or guilt, or the strain of loving a woman I have to share with a king—I told myself a lot of things.
So when Sera looks at me across the guttering candlelight and tells me this dark magick of hers has a price, I can no longer tell myself anything—
I know.
And I say nothing, keeping this gnawing dread to myself.
I pull her back down into my arms and I press my lips to her hair. “We’ll figure it out,” I promise her. “Whatever’s stirring, whatever the price. We’ll find it and we’ll pay it and you’ll be fine. Trust me.”
And she nestles into me and lets herself be comforted, and I lie there in the dark with her heartbeat against my ribs and my own stuttering treacherously beneath it, and I make a decision that I know, even as I make it, is the kind of foolish only a man in love can manage.
That so long as this withering curse takes the king, I’ll let it take me, too.
Because in the end, it will set her free.
Here is the truth I’ve known since the throne room, since she laughed and mended something broken in me:
I came here to die.
I made my peace with it before I ever knew her name.
And if loving her, if freeing her, if giving her the home she deserves costs me the breath in my body—then that is a bargain I’d have leapt at the day I dug my sister’s grave.
I have always been willing to die for something.
She simply made it something worth dying for.
So I’ll hold her in the dark. I'll let her dream of Threnmere. I'll smile and caper and play the fool and love her fiercely, and I'll say nothing of the gray creeping in at the edges of me.
She's bewitched me. Something I have no doubt her craft can accomplish—and gods, she's cast some spell over my heart too in this way. And I'd let her do it again. I'd let her do it a thousand times over.
I just didn't know that when I gave myself over to her that her spell would be so literal.
That the same magick threading death into the king's blood has begun to thread into mine.