Epilogue
DOMINION OF THE HEART
Ayear ago, I fished a king’s decree out of the mud and decided to kill him.
I remember the weight of the soaked parchment, the royal seal bleeding wax down the post, some herald’s looping script gone soft at the edges.
Whosoever shall make the princess laugh… it read. And me on my knees outside a tavern with a split lip and broken heart, reading it by fading daylight like a glimmering beacon.
Tonight I’m the one nailing parchment to a post.
The nail goes in with two strikes. The seal catches the torchlight. And there it is, fixed to the great post in the outer courtyard where everyone will read it by morning:
By order of the Crown of Kravenholt: a house of healing shall be raised in every village of the realm, staffed and provisioned at the treasury’s cost, that no subject shall expire for want of a healer’s hand. The first shall be raised at Harrowglade.
And beneath the royal seal, in the space where tradition puts a saint’s name or a dead king’s, one word in my own crooked but practiced hand.
Kammy.
I smile. Though I can’t take all the credit for the idea, as it was the Queen of Kravenholt who first suggested a house of healing. I simply gave it meaning.
The ink’s barely dry and the bells on my hat are ringing because my hands are shaking, and I stand in the cold courtyard and let them. Somewhere behind me, the great hall is filling with light and noise—the Feast of Misrule, the whole drunken glittering machine of it winding up again.
“You’d have loved this place as much as I hated it,” I tell the parchment. Tell her. “The palace, I mean. Too many stairs. Terrible people. The pastries are good, though.” My voice cracks a little at my joke.
There’s now a healer in Harrowglade. Some other fever, some other night—some other brother is going to knock on that door, and it’s going to open.
Maybe you fail to avenge the dead.
But as long as you live, you can help the living in their name.
I straighten my hat, shake my bells, and head inside to commit some misrule.
The hall is crimson and gold and roaring. A year ago tonight, Aldric hauled me up to his throne as a viscous cruelty. He set his own crown on my head like a blade laid across my shoulders—my breath held, waiting to see what a king does to a fool who dares to touch what’s proclaimed his.
Tonight, the king meets me halfway down the hall, carrying a tinsel crown.
“Lord of Misrule,” Aldric says, pitched for the whole hall, and the court howls its approval on cue. But his pale eyes do the thing only three people can read, that warm flicker underneath the ice. “Try not to humiliate me too hard.”
“No promises.” I bow with maximum insolence. “I’ve already committed the treasury to something scandalous. It’s nailed to your courtyard. Terrible precedent. Whole villages are going to survive the winter. The other kingdoms will say you’ve gone soft.”
“Let them.” He sets the tinsel crown on my head with both hands, and there is nothing soft anywhere in him.
This is the man who, six weeks past, answered Lord Bramwich’s eastern revolt by arriving before his own vanguard was believed possible, hanging four lords from their own gatehouse, pardoning every farm boy they’d pressed into a spear line, and then seizing the traitors’ granaries and distributing the whole hoard to the villages those same lords had been starving.
“My softness,” Aldric says, adjusting my crown with ruthless precision, “is only known by one.” A pause. His gray-ringed eyes glitter. “Or would you argue that point with my wife?”
I smirk, heat stirring in my veins at the memory of such soft—and rough—touches among us the night before. “No, Your Highness. I dare not incur her wrath.”
“You’re no fool, Renick.”
He turns me by the shoulder to face the hall, and the court is on its feet, and the minstrels are filling it with sound, and above it all, on the dais, beside the empty throne I’m about to profane for one night—
She is there.
My Poison Princess. The queen of Kravenholt. Seravyn Morvaine of the Thorn Court, in black and violet with wolfsbane worked in silver at her throat, watching her fool walk the length of her husband’s hall in a tinsel crown.
A year ago, they wrote decrees because the sadness of this woman consumed the king. Couriers and commoners alike were bewildered by her. It was a crisis of state, her melancholy, an affront to a king’s ownership.
Make her laugh, and be rewarded beyond measure.
I reach the dais. I take the throne like I stole it, one leg over the armrest, cocking my crown askew, and I look my queen dead in the eye and say, in the voice of supreme royal boredom, “First decree. Someone fetch the king a chair. A small one.”
And Sera first smiles, then throws her head back and laughs.
Beside the dais, the most feared king in all the realms fetches his own small chair, sits on it with the gravity of a man mounting a warhorse, and permits his court to laugh at him for exactly as long as it amuses his wife.
Reward beyond measure. That was the promise.
Decree upheld.
It’s long past midnight when the three of us enter the queen's garden, our unofficial dominion, the wolfsbane silvered under a waning moon. Sera walks the rows with her fingers trailing the violet hoods, no gloves. The poison in her veins greets the poison in the ground like kin.
Aldric has shed the king somewhere on a bench with his doublet. What’s left is just the man, cruel and quiet and content, watching her with hunger.
Day and night, we promised her, and we’ve kept it—but the truth is the borders have started to blur. There are dawns that belong to all of us. There are hours no clock has jurisdiction over.
“The raven returned today,” Sera says, without turning around. “Loosed from Vassal’s black towers finally.”
The garden goes still. Even the wolfsbane seems to lean in.
The raven was sent to Threnmere months ago, Sera’s cryptic confession written so only her mother could decipher its meaning. Sera’s task abandoned, the king alive. For months, there was nothing. Sera pretending she wasn’t watching the sky.
She turns now, and there’s a strip of parchment in her fingers, small as a poison label. She reads it aloud. Her voice doesn’t waver, which is how I know exactly what it costs her.
“You are a daughter of the Thorn Court no more. What you are instead, I am coming to see for myself.”
Silence. Wind in the monkshood.
“She always said a working should know its maker.” She folds the parchment once, and her chin comes up. “It seems she has disowned me for it.” A breath. “At least I get Isolde out of the deal. I get to keep her with me.”
But I recognize the sadness behind her smile. I know it well. Threnmere is her home, as much as we are.
I draw close and sweep her hair behind her ear. “And we get to keep you,” I say, and she answers by pressing her cheek into my palm.
Aldric rises off the bench and crosses to us, stealing the folded parchment out of her hand. He studies it like he studies a battle map.
“Coming to see for myself,” he repeats. Something moves behind his arctic eyes—and he is delighted. “The poisoner of the Thorn Court, coming here, to my house, presumably to make my wife unhappy.”
“Yes,” Sera says.
“My wife,” says the cruelest king, tucking the parchment into his tunic like a favor before a joust, “I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to meeting your family.”
And Sera laughs—smaller this time, darker, ours alone—and places her hands on our chests, right over our hearts.
The fool from the mud. The tyrant from the throne.
Standing in the poison garden of a kingdom we’re remaking one decree at a time, while somewhere across the realms a dark queen mounts a dark road.
Let her come.
She’ll find no blade here to collect.
She’ll find a dominion—small, strange, sovereign, undefeated. Two men, one crown, one fool’s cap, and the woman we love and serve.
And every border of it is her heart.