Chapter
Twelve
Elara
he kitchens at night aren’t kitchens.
They’re a chapel after mass: everything clean and tidy, chairsT pushed in, the congregation gone, as is their gossip. The hearth has been banked to an obedient glow. A cooling pot sighs beside it.
“I smelled cabbage earlier.” It’s a funny sight, how Vale lifts lid after lid from pots, layered cuffs fighting him at each attempt, frowning into whatever contents he finds. “Where on earth did they…”
A girl comes through the larder door with a cloth over her arms and startles to a dead stop. She’s pretty in the way hunger makes women pretty —small wrists, blonde curls framing a slender face, big eyes that grow even bigger as she looks at me, Vale, then me again, as if she’s assessing the order of danger.
“Whatever food remains,” Vale says, voice soft as a secret, “if you please.”
The girl blinks and stumbles into action. “Yes, of course.”
She scurries to the sideboard and returns with a loaf end, a heel of cheese as white as fear, a spoonful of tiny onions only brushed by mold, and a pot that holds remnants of broth.
She sets it all down and curtsies so low that the cloth on her arm nearly tumbles. “It’s all they have.”
“It’s plenty,” I say so she’ll stop apologizing with her body. “Thank you.”
“Take what you need,” Vale tells her, and there’s nothing cruel in it, but there’s no space, either. “Then go and be silent.”
She shakes her head as if relieved he didn’t ask for anything she can’t afford to give, then vanishes like smoke through the door. Vale’s sustained calm makes it clear that he isn’t at all concerned about her having seen us together. Does she know about Vale’s scheming?
“You terrify her,” I say when we sit at a scrubbed table that holds the scratches of a thousand knives. “Whatever have you done to her, Vale?” I keep my head still, letting my eyes slide his way in a playful, taunting way.
“Threatened her family? Ruined her in some dark corridor?”
“No need to go through such efforts,” he says. “Fear is often a byproduct of failure. She was the previous one I had sent to seduce the king. Pretty enough to catch his eye, employed long enough to make herself unassuming, yet entirely incompetent at everything else. Retched on the floor the moment a pustule split open on his bottom lip.”
So, she probably figured out right away why I’m here, newly arrived, sitting in the kitchens beside the treacherous steward at the hour of the wolf.
That dampens my hunger for a second.
“What if she tattles?”
“And add having known about treason brewing inside the palace on top of her failure when she tried to partake in it?” He shakes his head. “Silence is not so much a command she obeys for me, Elara. She obeys it to keep her
head.”
“Who else knows?”
“As few as possible.”
“Miss Hampshire?”
“Saints, no.” Before I can object, Vale hands me the entire end of bread.
“Not even rot speckles that woman’s loyalty to the crown. I avoid her just as she avoids me.”
“Won’t you eat?” I ask. “There’s plenty of food for both of us.”
Shaking his head, he pours water from a clay jug that sweats like stone in summer and sets the cup by my hand. “Eat your food, Elara.”
I eat in the kind of silence that knows how to sit without fidgeting. The onions are dull. The cheese is hard. The bread? Stale, of course.
“Why no wife?” I ask after a while, curiosity getting the best of me.
“You don’t long for one?”
His jaw twitches once, twice. “I have longed for a wife longer than I have had a name for longing.”
“Dramatic,” I say, because if he wants me to be gentle with his sadness, then he should’ve asked someone else to supper. My eyes go to those barely-there wrinkles at the corners of his eyes—the only thing betraying age against the virility that seems to seep off him in waves. “You can’t be much older than the king.”
“He is slightly younger, to be certain.”
I weigh my next words like coin I can’t spare but spend them anyway.
“Then you’re still young. Healthy. And”—I make a vague, irritated circle at his face as if that might smudge the truth—“handsome.”
Heat climbs my neck right then. I pretend it’s the stove, and not the fact that he truly is an attractive man. How wrong is it that I notice?
Vale inclines his head as if staring at a gift brought to the wrong door.
“How superficial, coming from a woman as pragmatic as you.”
His unfazed rebuke stings more than I would ever admit. “Right, well, if it isn’t the wrapping, then I presume there’s something wrong with the contents.”
He takes a breath and lets it out tunneled. “What about you, Elara?”
“What about me?”
“Why no husband?”
I shrug and scrape the tough crust through the broth. “Like you said, death keeps me busy.”
There’s a twitch on his lips before he says, “Yes, yes, we settled that already.”
“It might come as a shock to you, but gravedigging girls aren’t the most sought-after during times of pestilence. Or ever, really.” I take another bite,
because bitter truth still tastes better when your mouth is full. “Every night, I carry disease on my dress. Every morning, I come home smelling of rot.
Few men find it anything other than appalling.”
“I find it to be honest work.” Those full lips of his soften some before he asks, “Still hungry?”
I shake my head as I empty the last string of overcooked vegetable from the pot. “How bloody was Queen Ophelia’s sacrifice?”
Vale’s gaze finds mine. “I beg your pardon?”
“O-phee-li-aaa.” I stretch it out extra-long just to pretend he’s slow.
“King called her name in his sleep. His mother?”
“Indeed.”
“Clearly, her memory is working on him.”
His eyes search my face as though he’s chasing it for answers to questions he doesn’t dare voice. “How does this tie into your goal of being bedded, wedded, and killed?”
“Just wondering if his mother somehow planted the idea of breaking the curse in his head.” If I know where the thread started, then maybe I can unspool it where it’s still thin. “Besides, it’s easier to win a heart if you understand how it beats, don’t you agree?”
“Hm…” His lips pout. Flatten. Shove around. “He loved her dearly. Her
coronation was…traumatic.”
“Coronation?”
“It is what the kings call the sacrifice.” His thumb finds my forehead before I can think to shift back, tracing a slow, deliberate path along my hairline. Something in it makes my breath go shallow. “Kael will lift his crown," Vale says, almost gently, “and place it upon your head. The Queen's Coronation. Then he will slit your throat.”
My esophagus bobs once at that. “How was Ophelia’s coronation traumatic?”
“She had no vision of dying.” His eyes focus on a knot in the wood for long seconds before he shrugs. “From the little I know, I believe she wasn’t…informed of the fate that awaited her. Have you spoken to him about his mother?”
“I can barely speak to him about the weather without him spitting his foul mood at me. His body might forever be rotting, but his soul seems rather dead already.”
There’s a scrape of something sharp in his tone. “Difficult man.”
“How long have you been his steward?”
“Too long if measured by my exhaustion,” he says on an exhale. “Not long enough, given how far the previous steward allowed the realm to deteriorate before the man hung himself three years ago.”
“What if the curse got passed on to someone less difficult?” I ask, too mild to be innocent. “Someone more…willing to kill a queen.”
His brow lifts. “Are you plotting a king’s death in front of his steward?”
“Oh, so deceit, treason, and marching me to a blade sit fine on your conscience, but the king’s throat is sacred? Convenient.”
A laugh cracks out of him like flint on steel, which is a startling experience given his usual indifference. Then he shakes his head. “For that, the king will have to lift his crown. And trust me when I say that he has no ambition to do so, passing on a curse he’s determined to end.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Books,” he says, and the word is almost a flinch. “Coronation annals.
Ledgers no one reads unless they are paid to be lonely. Margins priests wrote in the years heirs were birthed. Letters inked by queens in the years
before they died.”
Letters.
That word strikes a chord somewhere inside me. Perhaps even diary entries? If anyone ever recorded how this madness started—how the king got the idea that the curse could be broken—it might be buried there.
Maybe a sermon, maybe a journal. Whatever it is, it’s more talkative than the king is, and a damn sight easier to reason with.
“Can I read them?”
Vale stares at me for a moment before he says, “Stewards and bloodline
only.”
“Um, you are the steward. Take me?”
“And risk my position, along with my head?” He tortures his upper lip for a moment. “Rules are strict, always have been. Too many secrets hiding
in the library.”
“Secrets?”
“The kind that the priests fear will be the end of all kings,” he says, voice low and almost amused. “The royal family line itself is…”—his head tilts left, right, left again—“no longer intact.”
“Intact?”
“At least once in the past, the curse went to someone not meant to carry it. The incident was hidden under words, stories rewritten and birth ledgers burned, may the crown reign long and prosper.” He chuckles, but it holds no humor. “Even a whisper from the wrong mouth can turn faith into doubt —and doubt topples thrones faster than pestilence ever could. Hence why there’s no getting past the scribe with you in tow, and not enough coin left to motivate me into slogging through the recordings of some king’s bowel
movements again.”
In other words… No books, no annals, no letters.
No way to pry open the past and find what got us into this mess. And it’s not as though I can ask the king. Pfft… Even getting him to drink a sip of water is like wading barefoot through nests of thorns. The idea of asking about things that might flare his already volatile temper seems like suicide.
Premature suicide.
What else then? What?
“There’s a grand room with a veiled mirror,” I all but mumble, grasping at straws, but what are my alternatives? “Drapes on a large bed. Perfume in
the air that went sour.”
“The royal chamber,” he says. “Yes.”
“He doesn’t sleep there.”
“No.”
“Because it reminds him of something?”
Vale looks at my hands instead of my face. “This curse left no inch of
this place untouched by grim memories.”
“What happened in that room?”
His teeth grind just as the hearth pops, as if the fire were deciding it would rather be a tree again. “I cannot say. I was not there.”
He rises and reaches forward. Sets a bit of wood at the right angle.
Tucks in the coal. Makes a small order out of heat and habit.
Is he…is he evading me?
“I find it interesting,” I say, “how you seem to know everything… except that.”
“And I find it interesting how you seem to want gruesome details on events that are horrendous even in the mere state of the concept. Whatever it was that happened in that room, it is older, from a time before Ophelia’s coronation, and therefore irrelevant. Now come.” Waving me off the stool,
he juts toward the kitchen door. “The hour is late, and we don’t want to be found here once the kitchen staff starts on the morning porridge.”
We walk the dark corridors, the ghosts of laughter suffocating in the still air as we pass cold fireplaces, threadbare chairs, planters with nothing left but dirt. When we turn into a long gallery, walled with glass that extends into a room I haven’t seen before, something inside me sits up.
“A greenhouse!”
Behind a glass door, moonlight makes ribs of the iron that crowns it, paints the panes silver, and lets the night sky sink down on it in all its glory.
Within, a geometry of tables and trellises holds what was once abundance: leaves like the ears of starving hounds, stems gone black at the joints, rose bushes cut down to stalks, soil caved in where something gave up in the night.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, because it still is. “Even dead things manage it sometimes. Can I go in?”
“Forbidden.” The word is quick and unadorned. “King’s order. The lock is Miss Hampshire’s. She only brings a gardener at first light on odd days.”
“Hmm.”
My nose squeaks when I press it against a pane, trying to get a better look against the mist my breath leaves on the glass. I rub it clear with my sleeve and blink. A small bronze plaque blinks back—oval, riveted into the column like a law.
A GIFT TO THE QUEEN
ON THE BIRTH OF
HIS MAJESTY, THE PRINCE, KING MERRICK’S SON AND HEIR.
The letters catch the moonlight, clean and proud despite the corrosion around them. My breath fogs the glass again before I even realize I’m staring. If this was his mother’s, then why lock it away? If he loved her so dearly, then why let the place she likely enjoyed rot to bone?
Maybe because he loved her.
Maybe he couldn’t stand the sight of her touch living on when she didn’t. The roses that dared to bloom would’ve bled red like her last day.
Easier to cut them all down than let them remind him of what he lost.
Reminders of what the curse took from him.
“It’s cruel,” I say. “Not only having to kill the person you love, but also the mother of your child.”
Vale is quiet for a moment. “Presume it is.”
Beyond the plaque, the gardens open: paths silvered with light, hedges trimmed by someone who appreciates order, even in ruin. A fountain glimmers in the distance, its hooded statue looming over the spill of water.
It’s pretty. It’s…perfect?
A flicker stirs low in my chest. If I can bring him here—let the king breathe air, feel light—then maybe his mood will ease. Maybe he’ll talk.
Maybe I can trace the thread of his madness back to its source and cut it clean.
“On the next clear night, I’ll bring him here,” I say more to myself than Vale. “The moon’s not bright enough to hurt his eyes.”
Vale’s spine snaps straight. “Don’t.”
I peel my face off the pane and look at him. “Why not? He’s listless, grumpy, and impossible to reason with. His mood would be easier to stomach if something as simple as the moon touched his soul once in a while.”
“And what if he uses that improved mood to strengthen his resolve further? Have you thought of that?” His voice cools to stone. “Besides, you’re rushing this, which might very well ruin this plan of mine for good.”
“Without him opening up, it’s ruined already,” I snap. “I need—”
“What you need, Elara, is patience.”
“Patience?” The word bursts sharper than I mean it to. “Daron rots a little more with every day that I waste time tiptoeing around the king’s mood. You want me to sit on my hands while the king broods my brother into the grave?”
Vale exhales through his nose, slow and deliberate. “You don’t understand the mechanics at play. You’ve known the king for days; I’ve known him for years.”
“And what did all those years earn you?” I throw back before I can stop myself. “Failure. That’s how you ended up at my door, remember?” The air between us crackles with anger, defiance. With something hotter tangled between us that I don’t dare name, so I just turn away. “I’m not going to sit around here, waiting for—”
His hand finds my forearm, fast, firm. “Elara.”
The world tilts.
I pivot straight into him, shoulder striking his chest, breath knocked from both of us. The cold pane kisses my spine. He’s close enough that I catch his scent again, dew and carnations, the greenhouse glass humming with the night. Between us, heat threads taut and bright, a wire drawn through silence and sparked at both ends.
My palm finds his vest to steady what pride refuses to call a stagger.
“You’re hurting me.”
His fingers loosen, but don’t leave. His green gaze slides to my mouth, then climbs back to meet my eyes. “Follow the rules,” he murmurs, voice low enough to make the air shiver. “Do as I say.”
When he sidesteps around a gleam of moon, giving me room, giving me an opening, I rip my arm from his grasp and stomp back into the familiar
corridor. “Keep your stupid rules.”
I’ll keep my plan, even if it kills me.
Especially if it kills me.
