Seravyn
It’s less than a week later that I realize something is amiss.
I’ve continued to deliver a careful administration to Aldric, but once I noticed his health was making a rebound, I increased the dosage.
Two drops in his wine instead of one. Yet he’s resilient, as if he’s pulling strength and remedy from some unknown source—and it has me questioning every other time my draughts failed on him.
It has me questioning myself, my capabilities. My mother’s recipe.
Because today, Aldric is as vital as ever—crueler, more ravenous, prowling the halls and his queen with the same restless appetite. If anything, he seems stronger. And as I watch him across the great hall, his energy undimmed, a cold suspicion uncoils in my belly.
The dwale that should have dropped him at the feast only made him brazen. Same as the one I fed him on our wedding night. And now my own poison, the most patient and reliable preparation in the whole of the Thorn Court’s dark arsenal, is no longer taking root.
It’s simply not possible. Not by any natural means.
As I walk the hall, I think about the way Aldric drinks from no cup he hasn’t watched poured.
The way there’s a particular servant who attends him each morning, a stooped old woman I’ve glimpsed only in passing, who carries a covered cup into his chambers every morning.
I’d assumed it was a tonic for his head, a hangover cure, or some vanity.
But what if it’s something else…a defense?
What if Aldric Vaelstrom, who has made enemies of half the realms and bled the other half dry, has his own dark practitioner somewhere in the bowels of this palace—a witch, a brewer, a hedge-sorcerer—feeding him something that arms his blood against any attack.
Beneath this unease is something colder and more curious, because if he has a counter-brew, then there’s a recipe, which means there’s a weakness.
One I need to discover if Ren and I are to be free.
My gaze finds the jester across the hall where he leans against a pillar in his motley, and for one stolen second his eyes meet mine, and the whole loaded, dangerous weight of everything we are passes between us in a single breath.
He gives me the smallest nod, a summons to meet him soon in our place.
I breathe it in, letting it rekindle my efforts as I continue to follow the king, hunting this elusive defense of his.
For days I’ve watched his chambers. I’ve shadowed the old servant down to the dim cellars.
I’ve spoken with Isolde, seeking some answer from her knowledge of the old workings. And now—
Now, I crave a moment’s peace, to lose myself in his arms, not have to think and worry for a few brief moments.
When I see Aldric heading off in the direction of his war chamber, I escape Isolde and hurry to the north wing.
Once we’re sealed inside the secret library, his mouth finds mine, kissing me with a passion like he hasn’t tasted me in ages.
I push his tunic up to press my mouth to his warm skin, and my heart stills. Scattered across his collarbone, spreading down his inner arm, are bruises. Mottled yellow and green of old hurt layered under blooming new purple, and spreading.
Fear grips me in a vise. Because I know… Suddenly, I know there is no witch in the cellars. No counter-brew recipe for Aldric’s strange immunity. It’s not in Aldric’s blood at all.
It’s in Ren’s.
“Goddess divine,” I whisper as my fingers gingerly ghost over his skin.
“Sera…?” Ren breathes my name, and suddenly, terribly, I also hear how shallow that breath is.
I swallow, my fingers traveling over the bruises along his collarbone. “When did these come?”
He glances down. Shrugs, and the shrug costs him something—I see it, the small wince. “I don’t know. I bruise easy these days. Clumsy fool, I guess.” He tries for a crooked smile. “Occupational hazard.”
“Nonsense.” My voice comes out harsher than I intend. “You’re a thief. An especially good one. Thieves are not clumsy.” I press my palm flat to his chest, and beneath it his heart catches with a sick, familiar lurch.
The same lurch I felt when I laid my hand on Aldric’s to check that he still breathes.
No.
“How long—” I can barely speak the words. “How long have you felt unwell?”
His beautiful features close off. He doesn’t answer, yet his silence says enough.
“Tell me,” I demand.
I watch him decide whether to lie to me. His hand comes up to cover mine where it rests over his stuttering heart, and his pale and dark eyes go soft and sorrowful and unbearably gentle when he says, “Since you started administering the poison.”
I shake my head, slowly, refusing to believe it.
He presses my hand harder to his chest, so I can feel it skip again. “I hoped I was wrong,” he says. “I hoped it was in my head.”
And the floor drops out from under the whole of my world.
I think back, noticing how Ren has been tired, how I believed it was the strain we were both under. Yet I see it now, there’s a grayness to him, a thinning. His hands shake. And there’s a cough now—dry, small, tucked into his shoulder.
And I understand now. All of it. The poison that wouldn’t take root in Aldric. The wrongness stirring in the walls that I felt and couldn’t name.
The curse didn’t fail.
I bound it to my hatred, wove my loathing of the king into the wolfsbane and set it loose in his blood to unmake him.
But magick is fickle. It reads the truth of us, what’s buried in our hearts, the whole dark tangle.
And I realize now, I fear too late, that the curse I cast on Aldric has bound my hatred and my love together. As the king withers, so does Ren. My heart holds them both in some twisted form of love, and the magick has fused them.
This is the cost. My cost.
“Oh, Ren. I’m so sorry.” I frame his face with my hands, and he lets me.
Something vast and terrible and just as consuming opens up between us.
At the root, in the deep soil where the Thorn Court’s magick draws from, they grow from the same stem. Love and hatred. The two great appetites. And I have poured both of them, in full, into these two men.
I have fused them. Me. I have bound the man I swore to kill to the man I’d die for, twined their fates together like two vines on the same trellis, so that the poison meant for one feeds on the other.
As I murder my enemy, I murder my love.
Every drop I’ve slipped into Aldric’s cup, every patient measure of death, I’ve been giving to Ren, too. With my own hands.
I have been killing him.
The realization comes up my throat like acid, and I press my forehead to his chest, listen to his faint heartbeat. Ren holds me close on legs that aren’t steady, and he lowers us to the floor, wrapping his arms around me.
“You understand what’s happening to me,” he finally says, voice low.
I can’t look at him. “It’s the curse,” I say honestly. “You're bound to him. As he dies, you—" The word won't come.
There’s a pause, then he questions, “Yet Aldric no longer withers—”
His words break off, as if he realizes the truth the moment he speaks it.
I turn my head up to look at him then, furious with grief. “I don’t understand it wholly, but it’s as though…somehow, his lifeforce is syphoning off yours. I’m not sure if this means he’ll perish or not, but…”
Ren nods gently. “I will, regardless.”
As long as I keep feeding him the cursed poison.
Maybe even if I stop.
Ren lifts our joined hands and presses his mouth to my knuckles, and his lips are cool, too cool. “You can’t stop, Sera. It’s your only chance to be free. Even if it’s only a chance.”
His light and dark eyes hold mine, and there’s no fear in them, none at all, only that terrible tenderness that has undone me since the first day. “Let the poison finish him,” he continues. “Let it run its course. Let it take him, and me with him, and walk out of this palace. Go home to Threnmere.”
A broken sound claws up my throat. “No,” I say, adamant. “You know I can’t do such a thing.”
He touches my chin. “You were sent here to kill a cruel king.” His thumb strokes my cheek.
“You were sent across the realm to do this, and it’s almost done.
Don’t throw your purpose, or your life, away for a fool in bells.
I was already a dead man when I met you.
I made my peace with that long before, Sera. ”
The words tear out of me, fierce and shaking. “You are a fool if you think I’ll buy my freedom with your life, Renick Ashbourne.”
He looks at me with such sad, gentle love that it nearly breaks me. “There’s no other way, Princess.”
Stubborn determination rears inside me. “Then I’ll make one.”
I take his face in both my hands, this beautiful fool who pulled me back from the brink.
“I dealt this magick, I bound this curse, and a blade that made a wound can find a way to close it. I swear it on Morrishan. I swear it on Nythera. I swear it on every goddess of my blood and every drop of poison in my veins—I am not going to let you die.”
And I mean it with everything I am.
Even as, somewhere beneath us, a king sleeps his cruel sleep with my hatred in his blood.
Even as, in my own divided heart, the terrible truth beats on: that to save the fool I love, I must somehow spare that king, and defy my task, my vow—my mother.
I leave Ren before the sun sets. Once alone in my chambers, I take down my mother’s books. And I begin—by candlelight, on my knees, praying to a goddess—to look for a way to unmake the ruin I’ve made.
Hours later, Isolde finds me on the floor of my bedchamber, my back against the wardrobe with its tally marks, my knees drawn up, my gaze lost.
She takes one look at my face and she crosses the room, sinking down beside me on the cold stone, her soft eyes pleading. So I tell her what I’ve done.
For a long moment she says nothing. Her hand clasps mine and holds it, her thumb moving over my knuckles the way it did when I was a child waking from nightmares in a keep of black stone.
“You know what your mother would say,” she murmurs at last.
“That magicks always have a price,” I say, the words tasting of ash.
“There’s no working, no brewing, no calling on the goddess that doesn’t ask something back. A give and a take. A sacrifice for anything you dare to ask of Morrishan.”
I laugh, and it’s an awful, broken sound. “It’s an awful exchange.” I turn my face to the stone. “The price is him. Otherwise, I will be banished from my home.”
My mission was clear. The debt Threnmere owed his crown was not paid in full by a bride. My father will never allow me to claim Threnmere as home again, and my mother will have to abide it.
I shake my head. “The curse may backfire anyway,” I tell her. “It may not even take the king, and I will have lost him, will have sacrificed his life, for nothing. How have I made such a terrible mess.”
Isolde is quiet. Then, carefully, in the voice she uses only when she’s about to tell me a truth I don’t want to hear, she says, “Magick is a fickle thing,” she says, “because the heart is fickle. I think you’ll find, in the end, that this was never the true desire of yours, Sera.”
I go still as her dark eyes hold mine, steady and sorrowful. And there it is. The whole shape of the trap, laid bare.
To keep the man I love, I have to keep the man I loathe. To spare Ren, I not only have to spare Aldric—I have to make a sacrifice.
The blade my mother forged, sent from our dark dominion, into a tyrant’s house for one single purpose, must sheathe itself.
I should feel grief at that. Rage. The bitterness of my task failed. My home lost.
Instead, goddess forgive me, what floods through me first is something worse.
Relief.
Because some traitor-deep part of me does not want to let the king die.
I loathe Aldric Vaelstrom. I do. I have counted the days of his cruelty. I have felt his teeth in my skin and his hands bruising my wrists. Every reason I have to hate him is real, and carved deep.
And yet.
And yet, somewhere in the long, strange weeks of this courtship—in this palace, in the sharp exchanges, in the terrible magnetism of a man who reads my body—something else has grown alongside that hate.
Maybe not love, not yet, but something with the same roots.
Something that flares when he’s cruel and clever in the same breath, something that answered him in my bedchamber that first night he entered, when my body heated against my will, something that doesn’t want the world emptied of him even as it wants him punished for filling it so cruelly.
That is the truth I’ve been hiding from, deeper than the poison, deeper than the marks on Ren’s skin. That my heart holds them both in some twisted, tangled shade of the same devouring want.
The dark and the light of me.
The blade and the girl.
Aldric feeds the part of me my mother forged; Ren feeds the part of me that survived that forging.
I don’t just want them both—I need them.
Wholly. Equally.
The deadliest thing I carry has never been a blade, not even the poison living in my blood—but my own divided heart.