Renick
Ishouldn’t have followed her.
That’s the truth I keep folding smaller and smaller in my chest as I stand in the black hedges of the night garden, watching my queen kneel in the wet grass with her face turned up to the full moon.
But a dying man hoards what he loves. Every glimpse of her is a coin I’m stealing from a purse that’s nearly empty, and as a thief till my last breath, I’ve never been able to keep my hands off what isn’t mine.
She’s wearing almost nothing. Threnmere silk, that gauzy, smoke-gray weave her dominion spins from goddess-knows-what—and the moonlight goes through it the way water goes through cupped hands. She kneels among the wolfsbane with her dark hair unbound down her spine, and her lips are moving.
She’s breathtaking as she prays, looking like a goddess petitioning a goddess.
The wind shifts, and it carries her voice to me in pieces.
“—take the wanting out of me,” she’s whispering. “Cut it out. Burn it out. I don’t care what it costs—”
My heart does its sick little stumble. The one it does now every hour or so, that catch-and-drag, the poison keeping time inside me.
“—make my heart stop wanting them both. And if a life is the price—” Her voice frays. “Then take mine. Not his. Mine for his, goddess. A queen for a fool. It’s a poor trade, but I’m told you like those.”
Even praying, she jokes. Even bargaining her life away on her knees in a cold garden, she has to make the dark laugh first.
Gods, I love her.
And that’s why I close my eyes and I do the only kind of praying a heathen thief knows how to do. No goddess ever answered me. No goddess ever came to Harrowglade when the fever did. But I send my will up into that silver moon anyway, and I pray against her.
Don’t take her trade.
Take mine.
Let her let me go. Unstitch me from her heart gently, so there’s little pain.
Let her wake one morning and find the wanting gone, and blame it on time.
She was forged for more than mourning a jester.
Let me go, and I’ll die grateful. I’ll die laughing.
Apparently, in my last days, it’s what I was meant for.
The moon says nothing back. Curse the gods, moons never do.
I watch Sera rise from the grass, the silk clinging to her. She walks down the sloping lawn toward the river like something the water dreamed and is calling home.
The full moon rite. Of course, that’s where she’s heading. The daughters of the Thorn Court bathe under the full moon, wash the month’s workings from their skin. I should turn back. This is hers, and I’ve already intruded once on her holy worship.
Fuck it.
A dying man’s last request.
I follow her through the orchard, watch as she wades into the river to her waist. She lets the robe go, and the current takes it downstream, and I stop breathing for reasons that have nothing to do with poison.
Moonlight on wet skin. Her arms lifting, her palms cupping river water and pouring it over her shoulders, over and over, an anointing. Her lips still moving. Asking her goddess to break her own heart cleanly.
That’s when I hear it.
A footstep on silt. Deliberate. The kind of sound a man makes when he’s done being silent—when he’s been silent a long while and wants you to know it.
I don’t have to turn. I’ve spent a season learning the weight of those eyes—icy blue, ringed in gray, the coldest weather in the palace. I know better than most when the king is looking at me. We share a cursed bloodstream, he and I. We are, in the worst wedding ever executed, one flesh.
“You watch her like you’re looking through a keyhole,” Aldric says behind me, low and rough. He sighs. “I should know, because it’s how I watch her. How I’ve watched both of you.”
My heart stops, and I face him.
He’s alone. No guards, no torch, no crown.
Just the king in a dark doublet with his collar open, and there’s something ruinously wrong with his face, because it doesn’t appear cast in that cruel way of his.
It’s hungry, yes—Aldric Vaelstrom is never anything else—but underneath the hunger is a thing I’ve only ever seen on beggars.
Want. The kind that’s been starved.
“The library has a false wall,” he says.
“Her garden room. The way she looks at you across my hall like you’re the last lit window in a dark realm.
” He steps closer. My hand aches for a knife I didn’t bring, because he still has it.
“I’ve known the entire time, fool. I’ve stood in the dark and watched my bride come alive under another man’s touch, and do you know what I felt? ”
“Homicidal, I’d imagine,” I say, no fear left in my weary bones.
“Yes,” he agrees. “Murderously envious.” His eyes narrow on me through the dark.
“She has never once looked at me and come alive. I didn’t think I even wanted her to.
I was tricked into a marriage, but then…
” He trails, shrugs. “I saw her. I wanted her. From the very first moment, I was hers. But she gave herself to another—to a gods-damned fool.”
“You could’ve killed me.”
His chuckle is low, a mere scraped breath from his chest. “And lose her completely?” He tilts his head.
“I too know what it feels like to accept scraps, jester. Willing to have the smallest piece. And I wouldn’t get the whole of her by doing away with you.
That’s not how a king reigns over an entire kingdom. ”
In the river, Sera has gone still. She’s seen us. She stands in the water with the moon on her shoulders and her chin lifted, and she doesn’t cover herself, doesn’t flee. She looks at her husband and her lover standing mere feet apart on the bank, and I think she makes some kind of decision.
I will wonder, for whatever's left of my life, what moved in her in that moment. Mercy, she'll call it later. One act of mercy for a dying man who doesn't know he's dying. But I saw her face, and mercy has never looked so much like hunger.
“Come into the water, Aldric,” she says.
And the king of Kravenholt—conqueror, tyrant, insatiable appetite—obeys his wife like the helpless wretch he’s just confessed to being.
He strips as he wades, and Sera receives him like the goddess she is.
Without flinching, without loathing. And I stand rooted on the bank with my stuttering heart, watching her guide his hands, watching her grant what she’s never granted him—not on their wedding night, not in any bed in that stone palace. Given, this once, freely.
Then Aldric turns his head to find me through the night, his eyes as colorless as his hair beneath the silver moonlight. And for once, the cruelty there is heated by a different kind of threat.
“Come here, Renick.”
Not fool. Not jester. My name, in the king’s mouth—and it slays me more than any dagger he could’ve wielded. He knows…or perhaps he’s always known everything, and this is the strangest execution ever devised.
Fuck it.
I find I don’t care.
“Come touch our girl,” he says. “Feel how she craves our touch.”
Our.
Angels above, devils below—desire burns through my veins at that.
I go into the river.
The water’s cold enough to make my ruined heart lurch, and then her hand finds mine beneath the surface and nothing is cold anywhere. We fold around her, the king and the fool, her enemies, her lovers, her men—and what happens then isn’t sex or fucking. I’ve fucked plenty.
This is a liturgy. A holy communion.
We worship our queen the way drowning men worship air. His mouth at her shoulder from behind her, and mine at her throat before her. Her fingers wound in his hair and her nails scored down my spine, and the moon pours itself over us, the only witness.
Sera gasps against my jaw. Arches back against his chest. Says both our names in one breath, tangled, as if they’ve grown from the same dark stem.
And they have. That’s the horror and the mercy of it.
I hold her, and through her skin I can feel his heartbeat—strong, so strong, robust with everything it’s siphoning out of mine—and I press my cold lips to her wet shoulder and, as he tugs up her silk nightdress, and she wraps her thighs around my waist, I thrust inside my poison princess.
And gods, fuck, it’s some sort of dark magick in itself. The water slowing our rhythm to a torturous grind, fusing us impossibly closer, the throaty sounds spilling from her soft lips. I take her mouth, licking into it, my tongue tangling with hers, tasting her, devouring her.
Aldric rocks her body from behind, whispering encouragements, praises, heightening the stimulation. His hands wander over her beautiful breasts, teasing her nipples, making her clench around my cock until I’m swearing oaths into the kiss.
With one last sensual roll of her hips, I bury myself inside her deep, the pleasure torn from me on a shuddering avowal, groaning against her neck. Her heat wrapped around me, my body trembles and jerks with the release, pumping once more to let her have all of me.
I kiss her, slowly disentangling myself, allowing Aldric to come up beside me, where I break away and move into position behind Sera. I hold Aldric’s eyes, already growing hard again as his mouth goes slack at the feel of plunging inside our girl.
“Gods-damn, love, you kill me in the best way,” he mutters, his muscles flexing against the rippling water. His motions are faster than mine, hungrier. His jaw clenched against his need, he fucks into her with vigor, commanding me to angle her hips higher, touch her—her breasts, her clit.
Her ass rubs against my hard cock, and I swear to whatever goddesses she prays to, I’m about to come against her backside at the filthy, slick feel of her soft skin. Maybe Aldric already came once, right here, and the dirty thought catches me off guard, and I spill right against her.
His wicked smile finds me over her shoulder, and he thrusts into her, hard, demanding, chasing his pleasure and hers, sending a ruinous thrill through my overheated veins.
“Pinch her clit,” he commands me. And I do—I slip my hand between their grinding bodies, already becoming aroused again at the feel of his pelvis flexing with each desperate thrust into her.
My chest heaves as I work her until she’s crying out, pleading for more, her body cresting too high with pleasure. Her body undulates against us both, as I tighten my circles around her clit, and Aldric fucks into her, the water breaking over all three of us as Sera shatters in our arms.
Aldric, drunk on her release, takes his pleasure, plunging into her with fierce rolls of his hips until he growls, his jaw clenched. He doesn’t stop until she’s shaking and he’s spent, breaths heavy and fogging the cool night air.
Sera kisses him slowly, tenderly, giving herself in equal measures as her hand clings to mine in the water. Aldric grasps the back of my neck, his ringed fingers drawing me closer, sealing us together in the moment.
After, Sera floats between us in the shallows, her hair fanned dark on the silver water. Aldric strokes it back from her brow with a tenderness I’d have sworn was bred out of him. And she lets him. She turns her face into his palm.
She kisses him.
Unhurried. Unforced. Her hand still holding mine under the water, her mouth on his, and I watch it happen and wait for the jealousy to come and gut me.
It never does.
Because this is so much more than mercy. It’s the proof of the same dark seed brewing in her that I feel splitting open in my own chest—cast there by her own curse, her own hands, her own will.
She fused our fates in wolfsbane and hatred and love, and magick reads the truth of us. Maybe it read a truth none of us had the courage to speak, and has simply been growing it in the dark ever since.
Maybe we’re all cursed now. Damned, the three of us, root and stem. And this dark desire is the reckoning—not the punishment that comes after the sin, but the sin and the punishment sharing one skin, indistinguishable, the way we’re all are indistinguishable in this water.
Because even as I know I’m dying—right alongside this cruel king, drop by patient drop—I also yearn for this. To watch him worship her. To tangle the three of us so tightly in this web of want that the outside world can’t find a thread to pull.
And maybe this is the price Sera said there’d be to pay. Not with our lives.
But a slow, decayed withering of our very souls.
Because I hold her in the water, and he holds her, and she holds us both, and I ask the moon the question I couldn’t fit into my heathen’s prayer… What kind of love could we ever find in this realm?
The moon says nothing back.
Fuck, moons never do.
But Sera’s heart beats against my ribs, and the king’s beats through her skin into mine, and my own stumbles along between them, clinging to what time it has left.
Let the reckoning come.