Crown Me Yours — Chapter 13

Chapter

Thirteen

Elara

he carriage rattles over the cobblestones, a rhythmic, jarring percussion that makes for a miserable journey to the orphanage.T Inside, the cushions are faded but intact, the curtains freshly shaken free of dust, and the lantern hook above my head holds a lamp that lends some warmth to a morning of suffocating gray.

Providing a sense of normalcy, one of the few remaining ministers agreed. A measure to keep the hopeless from piling at the palace gates, a sovereign who goes to an orphanage with a husband at her side. A message to the realm: the new queen is trying to save it, unlike the late king, who refused everything that might save anyone but his own conscience.

I glance behind the white curtain, watching a higher part of Marrowbrae shape from homes with brittle daub and muddy alleys between them. “I

think this is the orphanage Kael sent his meals to.”

Across from me, Vale sits rigid against the velvet squabs, staring out the window, his jaw locking so tight a muscle feathers beneath the skin of his cheek. “My, my…a man decaying, a meal for the worms long since, and yet my wife still speaks his name with nothing short of reverence.”

I frown at him, which somehow brings out how his usually pale complexion seems to have a sickly, grayish cast today. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He doesn’t turn. “Presume it makes a husband wonder.”

“That’s strange, considering that you don’t even want to be my husband.” I scoff, pulling my black shawl tighter around the shoulders of my gray wool dress. “You can feel joy, sadness. Anger, clearly. But I’m curious…what of jealousy?”

“I am Death, Elara.” He finally turns his head to look at me. “I covet nothing experienced by mere mortals.”

I take him in. The strange tint of his skin, the blueish shadows beneath his eyes, the slight hollowness in their sockets. For a god, he looks pretty mortal today. Fragile, even.

When he shifts his weight under my scrutiny and returns his attention to whatever lies behind the curtain, I only watch him harder. “Are you sulking

because of the wish?”

“I am not sulking.”

The carriage rocks over a rut, jolting his shoulder against the frame. His hand flies to his chest, fingers splaying against the black wool coat that covers his sternum. For a breath, I catch the faintest hitch in his inhale— like a man pretending he’s not hurt.

“Why are you holding yourself like that?”

He doesn’t blink. “Like what?”

“Like you’ve got a thorn stuck in your ribs.” A knot forms in my stomach, tightening there. “Is it…is it because I touched your heart? Did I hurt it?”

“You did not…hurt it,” he grits out, his voice strained and thin. “The liberty you took that night warrants another spanking to be certain—oh, if only my wife wasn’t so fond of them.” Vale exhales through his nose, controlled. “I’m simply exhausted. It is the tediousness of this travesty.”

A sinking sensation caves in my chest. I chose the wrong wish, didn’t I?

I had wanted to show him my acceptance, to bring us closer. Instead, he

feels worlds away.

Abrasive. Cold.

We travel for minutes without a word. The wheels grind over wet stone.

The driver clucks and curses the road under his breath. The silence becomes a third passenger, heavy and unpleasant.

Until the carriage lurches, frame groaning under the strain of the sudden wobble. Vale groans, too, his entire body seizing up as his fingers dig into the wool around his chest like a dagger just stabbed into it.

That does it.

“You look like you’re about to faint!” A stumbling step brings me to his side, the leather creaking beneath me on the bench when I sit and reach for his chest. “Let me—”

“Don’t,” he snaps, pressing himself into the corner. “I do not want your care.”

“And I don’t want to look at your sulky face for the rest of the day,” I spit back before I settle my fingers beside his, the tension in the muscle beneath as severe as that of stone. “Just let me touch.”

“I don’t want your touch, either.” His jaw works. His gaze slides away to the curtain and the narrow slit of light, as if he’s searching for dignity in fabric.

“I need your hands on me,” I mock in a high-pitched voice, words he once spoke in the tower. Then I dig my thumb into his chest, rubbing the muscle, fingers working with practiced efficiency. “What did you do? Did you sleep wrong?” A moment’s hesitation. “Do you even sleep?”

He lets out a noise, half groan, half growl, but his hand lowers a fraction, reluctantly conceding space. “Perhaps I would,” he grinds out, “if you’d only take a real husband, love him, and slit his throat.”

“Oh, you’re as real as they get.” The bite in my tone is easier than admitting the worry nibbling at my ribs. I shouldn’t have touched his heart… “Is it your heartstring?” I slide my fingers closer to his sternum, feeling the rigid hardness there, the way his body has been bracing around something he refuses to name. “Here?”

“Yes.” The word lands rough, tired. “Mmm…”

Beneath my fingertips, his heartbeat stutters—three uneven knocks, a pause that makes my pulse jump, then a return that’s stronger, cleaner, as if whatever was choking the rhythm untangled itself. The tension eases some.

“Better?” I ask quietly.

For a beat, he doesn’t answer. He simply sits there, breathing shallowly through his nose, eyes fixed on some point beyond the curtain slit, as if staring hard enough might dissolve the question.

“I…” His throat works, the word caught like a splinter. He swallows it down, jaw tightening, then forces the answer out in a voice that is quieter than I’ve ever heard from him. “I fear so.”

His hand slides back up to his chest. Not to push me away.

His palm settles over mine just as his head lolls back against the carriage wall. When he turns to look at me, the green of his eyes has gone darker—less moss, more stormwater—caught between relief and something I can’t name.

“I shouldn’t have reached into your chest that night, hmm?” My admission is a little above a whisper, tasting foreign on my tongue. “I’m…

I’m sorry.”

He arches a brow. “Pardon me?”

“I won’t repeat it,” I say, and it’s enough to bring a small but sincere smile to his mouth. “If you didn’t catch it, all the better.”

We stare at each other for a long, stretched moment, the carriage’s jostle fading into the background, the road noise turning dull and far away. I can feel his heart beneath my palm—steadier, heavier—can feel the faint tremor in his fingers where they rest over mine, as if he’s holding himself in place with that touch.

Then the spell snaps like thread as the carriage slows, the wheels sucking at mud. Vale’s hand lifts from mine, his expression shuttering back into something sharp.

He adjusts his coat with brisk efficiency, eyes already turning toward duty, toward distance. “I believe we have arrived,” he says, as if the last ten seconds never happened at all.

When the door opens, Vale steps down first, boots landing in the mud with that impossible quiet of his, as if the ground itself makes room. He doesn’t look back at me. He simply straightens, cloak settling, posture snapping into that composed, courtly silhouette he wears so well.

I gather my skirt and shift toward the door, bracing one hand on the frame. I’ve hauled corpses heavier than my own body without help. I don’t

need a god’s gallantry like—

A hand appears in the doorway.

Vale’s.

For a beat, I just stare at it, suspicious of the gesture the way one is suspicious of a wolf going still. Then I take it.

His fingers close around mine—firm, steady, warm enough to jolt me— and he doesn’t tug me down so much as anchor me, guiding my weight as the carriage shifts under my feet. When my boot searches for the ground and finds only slick mud, he adjusts without a word, stepping closer, angling my descent so I land where the earth is solid.

“You’re playing well at this travesty,” I murmur low. “For one startling heartbeat, I thought I had a husband.”

His thumb drags once over my knuckle—so small it could be accident, yet it feels deliberate—before he releases my hand. “Start hallucinating virtues in me, and I might be forced to have you committed for hysteria before I demand a divorce from some priest.”

Before I manage a rebuke, a woman emerges from a doorway. Busty.

Face flushed pink. Apron stained.

“Your Majesty.” Her low curtsy almost makes her topple over before her eyes dart to Vale. “And…My Lord.”

I look at the orphanage behind her: a low stone building with patched windows and a roof that sags as if it’s tired of holding itself up. The courtyard is damp and bare, nothing but trampled dirt and a few crooked benches. A line of small bodies stands inside the door.

“You’re the matron?”

“Sister Merin, Your Majesty. That’s what they call me. Not a nun, just… someone who stayed. Please…” Her arm opens wide in invitation. “We were not expecting… that is to say, when King Kael—God rest his soul— still visited, he usually sent word weeks in advance so we might…scrub.”

“We didn’t bring judgment, Sister Merin,” I say with a gesture to the driver. “What we did bring is oats. Several sacks of them.”

“And how grateful we are. Come.” She waves us toward the door where the herd of children scramble. “Sister Margo will have the older boys grab the sacks. Now please…this way.”

The air inside is damp and thin, reeking of lye and piss. Straw pallets line the walls, some holding curled children like a question mark. A few older girls stir a pot over a small hearth. They go still when Vale enters, staring at him with an attention that’s not quite rational, but not quite wrong, either.

“They’re quiet today,” Sister Merin says nervously, wringing her hands in her apron. “Usually there’s a din—shouting, playing. But with the weather…and your arrival…”

I approach the nearest pallet, the boy in it maybe five. Wet rattles drudge through his lungs at each breath, the straw near his mouth soiled black.

“He took ill only three weeks past. The winter damp gets into their chests. We’ve given him nettle tea and steam, but…” she trails off, the unspoken ‘we have nothing more’ hanging in the air. “Death will find mercy on him soon.”

Weakness somehow creeps into my legs with such force that I have to lock my knees. For weeks, my sole focus was on Daron. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend years with the dead: you go blind to the sorrows of the living. But standing here, smelling the sickness and the stale straw… My gaze goes to Vale. I don’t know, maybe I’m hoping that his eyes lock with mine. Maybe I’ll see there’s still something left in that chest of his that can come up with enough love, or even just pity, to end this curse.

My eyes find only his profile.

Because he’s looking at the boy, the shadows beneath his eyes standing out like bruises. His lips are pressed into a thin, white line, not in cruelty, but in restraint.

Then his eyes lock with mine. For a fraction of a second, the misery in his expression is so profound that it knocks the wind out of me.

Then, he breaks contact.

He tears his gaze away from the pallet and turns on his heel, his black coat swirling around his ankles as he strides behind a few healthier-looking children.

I stare at the empty doorway where he vanished. That was not the reaction of a vengeful god. That was not a monster reveling in his curse, clinging to a grudge for the sake of wounded pride.

Then what was it?

“Your Majesty?” Sister Merin squeaks, jolting me out of my ramblings.

“Someone mentioned firewood when they announced your visit.”

“Right, um…” Closing my eyes for a second, I call my focus back. “We allocated some for the orphanage to be brought in regular intervals.”

“Nobody can afford it anymore with how the woods are starting to rot now,” she says. “Once the snow comes, we’ll have no choice but to throw

the pallets into the fires.”

“I know you’re doing the most of what you can with the little you have at your disposal. Trust that you have my support.” I gather my skirts, and turn toward the small doorway. “If you’ll excuse me.”

The hallway beyond is narrow and reeks of damp stone, the commotion of the main hall soon replaced by the faint, muffled sound of voices. What’s this?

I round the corner toward another room, which holds only a ragged rug, a few battered stools, and shelves lined with worn blocks. Where did he go?

Why did he — I stop dead in the doorway.

Vale sits there on a low wooden stool that looks ridiculously small beneath him. His long black coat puddles on the floor around his boots.

Standing in front of him is a girl, no older than nine. A mess of curly red hair. Smudges of dirt on her cheek. She holds something up to him, her

expression serious.

“It broke.”

Vale leans forward, his elbows resting on his knees as he examines the wooden toy. “Everything breaks, little one.” His voice is something I’ve rarely witnessed, soft and gently cadenced, letting a strange warmth rise in my chest. “It’s the nature of things.”

“Can you fix it?” she asks, undeterred by his philosophy, and lowers a wooden bird into his hand, one of its wings snapped off.

“I don’t fix things,” Vale murmurs, yet he turns the toy in his long- fingered hand. “I’m usually the one who takes them away when they’re broken.”

“Oh…” The girl frowns, putting her small, chubby hands on his knees.

“So can you fix it?”

“Why would I?” Vale asks, not unkindly, but there’s a certain weariness in his tone. “Even if I mend it, little one, the wood is old. It has cracks. One drop, and it’s broken forever.”

“I know,” she says simply. “I still want you to try.”

Vale frowns. “If you know it will end in pieces, then why does it matter?”

The girl looks at him, throwing her hands up as if severely offended.

“Because I want to play with it some more now. Sister Merin always says…

she says”—a dramatic punctuation with her little hands—“now is all we’re ever given.”

Vale stares at her, his lips parting in a silent exhale while mine curls with a smile. He looks nothing like a god in that moment. More like a man humbled by a girl. Or a father schooled by his daughter?

The thought sends an unexpected pang through my chest, a quiet but warm kind of inkling. If there was a time when he longed for a wife, did he ever long for a child? Family? Does Death ever get lonely?

My knee gives a little crack.

The girl’s gaze turns to me, her eyes widening until they nearly swallow her face. Her mouth drops open in a perfect little ‘O’ as she points a grubby

finger toward my head.

“You have a real crown!”

Vale stiffens. The muscles in his back seize as he realizes his audience has grown by one. But before he can retreat behind his walls of ice and indifference, I step fully into the room, crouching down until my skirts pool on the dusty floorboards, bringing me eye-level with the two of them.

“It’s heavy and scratches terribly,” I whisper conspiratorially, offering the girl a smile.

“You’re the queen,” she breathes, looking as if she might vibrate out of her skin. She looks back at Vale, her earlier demand for a fix forgotten in the face of royalty. “Are you the king?”

Vale scoffs. “God, no.”

“Not yet,” I correct him. “But I’ll crown him my consort soon.”

He turns partially toward me, the ghost of that earlier softness still clinging to the corners of his eyes while his mouth twitches a little.

“Never.”

That lures a soft chuckle from my chest. “Just one more wish away from it.”

He looks at me then, his gaze dragging from the toy to my face, catching on the curve of my smile. For a heartbeat, the air holds still.

Slowly, helplessly, his lips betray him. They twitch more, then soften, curving upward in a shy, beautiful echo of my own amusement.

His blink fractures the moment.

A strange, twisted expression crosses his face—half resignation, half reverence—as he looks back at the wooden bird.

“You would do better to ask Her Majesty, little one,” he says quietly, extending the fractured toy toward me. His fingers brush mine as the wood changes hands, a fleeting, tingling contact. “My wife possesses an exasperating talent for mending things that, by all rights, should remain destroyed.”

I take the bird, my chest tightening. I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but I’m getting the sense that it’s no longer about the toy.

“I’ll do my best,” I murmur, holding his gaze.

“Clearly,” he replies, the words barely audible, before he finally stands to lean his shoulder against the wall.

I turn the bird over in my hands, aligning the jagged edges of the wing with the splintered body. It’s a clean break, thankfully. With a bit of pressure and a whispered hope, I wedge the wood back into its groove. It holds—precariously, but it holds.

“There,” I whisper, handing it back to the girl. “Fly it gently?”

“I will! Thank you, Your Majesty!” She snatches the bird with a grin that could outshine the sun and darts off toward the hallway, her footsteps thudding away into silence.

Left alone in the quiet, I brush the dust from my palms and straighten. I don’t follow her out. Instead, I turn and step closer to the wall where Vale leans, resting my back against the plaster right in front of him.

“I fixed it,” I say softy, tilting my head back to meet his gaze.

Vale stares down at me, his expression unreadable, though the tension in his shoulders hasn’t returned. “I feared you would.”

I take a half-step closer, my skirts brushing the toes of his boots.

“You’re making it sound like it’s a terrible thing.”

His gaze drops then. It slides from my eyes down to the bridge of my nose, settling on my mouth. The air between us thickens, growing heavy and charged, like a storm that hasn’t quite broken. He doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t make a sarcastic remark, nor does he say anything hurtful. He just looks at my lips as if they’re a question he’s afraid to answer.

“It is dangerous,” he breathes, his voice dropping to a rough timbre that vibrates in the small space between us. Then, slowly—so slowly it feels like he’s fighting his own instinct to flee—he lifts a hand. His long, cool fingers shape to the side of my neck, his thumb resting gently against the line of my jaw. “Terrifying beyond your understanding.”

He lowers his head. There’s plenty of time for me to pull away, ample time for him to stop, but neither of us moves an inch in retreat. The distance evaporates until there’s no air left to breathe, only him.

His lips brush mine. It’s not a demanding kiss, nor a hungry one. It’s soft, hesitant, and devastatingly gentle. I melt into it, my hands finding purchase on the lapels of his coat, anchoring myself against the sway of the earth beneath my feet.

When he pulls back, he does so with the reluctance of a tide being called back to sea. He doesn’t go far—just an inch, maybe two—keeping his forehead rested against mine as our breath mingles in the damp air between us.

He doesn’t speak. He just breathes, a shuddering, uneven sound that rattles in his chest. His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone as his eyes open. The look in them is raw, full of a quiet, aching wonder that steals the air from my lungs.

Then, the mask slides back into place—slowly, painfully, as if it hurts him to wear it again.

He drops his hand from my face, though his fingers linger in the air for a heartbeat before falling to his side. “I will wait for you in the carriage.”