Crown Me Yours — Chapter 4

Chapter

Four

Elara

aron breathes like someone poured soap water into his lungs and forgot to drain it. Each inhale is a wet rattle, each exhale a thin,D exhausted pop that makes his ribs show beneath the blanket like a cage struggling to hold in life.

I sit on the edge of his bed and pretend the damp cloth I press to his forehead is making a difference. We both know it’s not. “Hang in there just a while longer.”

How long, I have no idea. Weeks? Months? Every time I seem to take a step closer to breaking this curse, fate strips days from my brother’s life and seemingly turns them into new hurdles for me.

What do I demand of Death?

“Broom queen…” Daron struggles his eyes open. “You smell like…

dirt.”

“I’ve been around it.”

He tries to smile and fails halfway, pupils catching on the gold rimming my forehead before they disappear behind wax-pale skin again. “Always wearing that thing now.”

The crown on my head hums faintly as if it enjoys being mentioned. It bites where my hair parts, a constant reminder that no matter how I sit, no matter how I lie down, I’m tethered to this mess.

I could give it to Daron.

Crown him king.

The thought has been chewing my guts since last night, since meeting Death in the graveyard. If I place this thing on his head? Put the knife in his hand? If he slits my throat and bleeds me over the crown in one swift, deep slash?

The idea is so hungry it almost tastes like hope. Until he winces, blue- veined lids trembling, struggling to open, only to fold under pain.

If he can barely lift his lids, what are the chances that he can lift a knife?

And I’m not allowed to help with the rite—that much I remember Kael saying—rendering this idea as useless as all the others. Unless I demand Death restore his health?

That still leaves Mother rotting, though, the wish potentially wasted. If I swap the roles? Crown Mother queen, and wish for Daron’s health? But then we’re back to Daron potentially falling sick again.

My arms turn heavy enough to make my shoulders ache. No matter how I twist and turn this, there’s no true solution. It also goes against what Kael wanted…whatever the fuck that might’ve been.

“Elara?”

I jolt, blinking away the various contemplations of my own murder.

“I’m here, Daron. Right here.”

He tries to turn his head, a grimace of effort twisting his lips. “Itches,”

he rasps. “Cannot…reach.”

“Where? Where does it itch?”

“Behind…the ear.” He tries to lift his hand.

I watch, breath held, as his wrist trembles. The tendons strain, his knuckles turning white with exertion, but his hand lifts a fraction of an inch off the mattress before gravity reclaims it with a heavy, lifeless thud.

A chill sweeps through me.

No, he can’t do it.

“I got it,” I whisper, forcing my voice steady. “Let me see.”

I lean forward, gently moving his sweat-dampened hair aside. The skin behind his ear is inflamed, a dark, angry purple. I touch it lightly with the damp cloth, intending to soothe the itch, but the moment the fabric makes

contact, the skin moves.

No. It slides.

A layer of wet, gray flesh sloughs off onto the linen, revealing the raw, weeping meat beneath. The rot isn’t just in his lungs anymore; it’s eating its way out of him.

“Just a bit of dry skin.” My stomach lurches violently. I swallow the bile, my hand shaking as I toss the cloth onto the floor. “I need… I need to get the comfrey salve for that. It’s in the infirmary, but I’ll be quick.”

Daron merely grunts.

I rise before the anxiousness in my stomach becomes too heavy, and hurry from the room. The hallway is silent this morning. A lantern flicks in a wall sconce, throwing thin light over my skirts as I hasten along the runner rug before I pass doors, nooks, more doors. Once I take care of Daron’s wound, I’ll still have to check on Mother, see if— A hand clamps over my mouth, a hard, brutal seal that stifles my scream before it’s born. An arm, rigid as steel, hooks around my waist. With one hard yank that lets air whoosh from my nose, someone pulls me into an

alcove of tapestry and shadows.

Heart pounding, I thrash. “Mh-hmm!”

Heels kick at shins.

Fingernails claw at leather.

“Quiet, Your Majesty,” a voice hisses in my ear—rough, urgent—and the hand tightens over my lips until my teeth threaten to shatter. “Quiet, or Kael died for nothing.”

The man hauls me backward through a narrow door, into darkness that smells of mildew and old stone. The door shuts right before my eyes. My feet scramble, plop-plop-plopping down a spiraling stone staircase. Deep.

Deeper.

Darkness presses against my eyes, black and absolute, the stench of vinegar replaced by rust and damp earth. Until the man finally stops and releases me.

Flint strikes. Sparks hiss.

“Who the hell are you!?” I scramble backward, back hitting the damp stone wall, fingers digging into the mortar to the sound of a torch sputtering to life. “What do you want from me?”

“Please, Your Majesty, lower your voice.” He brings the torch between us, letting the flame skitter over thick brows, a sweat-slicked forehead, cropped hair as brown as his mud-streaked travel leathers.

“I know you.” Not by name. By memory. “You’re the messenger. The one who came into Kael’s room that day.”

“We cannot stay here.” Torch in one hand, he wraps the other around my arm, pulling me over slick stone. “Walk, Your Majesty. Walk with me.”

“What? Why? What do you—” Stone shifts beneath me, letting me stumble over a rock, arm flailing for balance while a rat squeaks somewhere and skitters into the dark. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere, so long as we keep moving.”

“Why?”

“Stillness is like a bell that Death can’t unhear,” he says over his shoulder, not slowing as he guides me along chilled cellar walls, barrels, mounds of stone where they crumbled from the ceiling. “It’s the nature of the grave to be still. His senses are more likely to drift to us if we linger.”

The sheer conviction in his voice—the palpable terror coating his words —makes my feet catch up before my brain agrees with that logic. “Why did Kael crown me queen? What am I supposed to do? He said you’d come. He said you’d explain.”

“I would’ve found you quicker, but I couldn’t take the risk of Death finding me out first.” He takes a sharp left that leads us into a wider cavern that smells of old wine. “As Kael’s only confidant, I’m complicit in undoing this fucking curse, and Death would torture that knowledge into silence if he knew my identity. Name’s Corvin, Corvin Hale.”

“Break the curse, how?” I press, ducking under a low archway.

“Nothing makes any sense!”

“Shh…” Corvin’s eyes flick over his shoulder to my crown, and something bleak shifts in his expression. “He wasn’t lying… It truly took,” he murmurs, as if to himself. “You’re the first queen to wear that crown longer than a few seconds, you know. The original translation of the curse was changed to son, not heir. King, not ruler. Priests scrubbed the language,

swapped consort for bride, and sealed it into tradition so the curse would travel through men and men alone.”

Original translation. I reach up, touching the cold metal of the crown.

“Kael discovered the changes.”

“One of his pigeons brought me a note the day you slit his throat.

Hastily written, barely legible, demanding I seek you out. Said you mentioned the bloodline was impure already, and he found proof of that, too.” A scoff. “Can’t believe we wasted a year tracking down a distant

cousin about a dozen times removed.”

“The farm girl.”

“Aye.” He casts a nervous glance at the shadows pooling between empty wine racks. “Kael believed that crowning her queen would finally pave the way to breaking the curse.” He shakes his head, resuming his frantic pace. “I was careless. Stayed in one place too long.”

My throat narrows. “What happened to her?”

“Who knows? When I returned with supplies…the house was ice. Just ice. She was gone.” A shrug. “She’s irrelevant now. Destroying this devilish crown is a task for a queen. For you.”

I stumble over uneven flagstone, first beads of sweat gathering on my nape. “How?”

When we turn into a corridor that smells like wet iron and old piss, his steps slow, bunched brows frowning back at me. “The note also said that he thinks Death took you as his lover. That true?”

My steps falter, slowing us further as heat floods my neck, letting a single pearl of sweat run down my spine. “I… It’s true.”

Corvin falters to a halt. For a heartbeat, the only sound is water dripping somewhere in the dark and the faint, exhausted hiss of my breath. His eyes hold mine—sharp, disbelieving.

“Saints…” It’s not so much a whisper as it is a faintly breathed laugh.

“Not even rumors exist. In a thousand years of lore, not a single sound about Death taking a lover. He’s solitary. Rarely touches the living unless it’s time to reap them.”

Shame claws at my throat, heated memories of Vale’s naked body flashing like a bruise pressed too hard, but it’s drowned by a harsher need.

“So I was told, but I still don’t fucking know what to do with that. What does it change? I’m still carrying a cursed crown. My brother is still rotting.”

“When Kael put that darned crown on your head, he changed the debtor to a woman,” he says, gaze drifting to nothing behind him before his eyes find mine again, the flame of the torch letting hints of gold ripple across his brown eyes. “Now, Death’s lover carries the curse, and—”

He winces, eyes frantically darting to a glistening sheen of sweat on the wall. A fine white crust creeps outward from the edge of the wet patch, spidering over the mortar in delicate veins. The torch flame shifts, bending away as if a mouth just exhaled in the dark. Cold, sharp and sudden, slides under my skirts—not from the floor, but from the air—biting straight through wool and skin until my knees prickle and my teeth threaten to

chatter. Then I smell it.

Carnations.

“We have to go.” Corvin’s fingers dig into the flesh of my arm once more. “We stopped for too long.”

He yanks me forward again, faster now, making me stumble a few steps before I manage my strides. We pass rusted bars that line one side, prison cells, doors hanging open like mouths. A chain hangs from one door, black with age.

“The crown is a magical binding, demanding a debt to be paid,” he huffs, pulling me toward a stairwell that spirals upward a short distance, faint light casting down on it. “But what happens when the curse gets fed with the blood of the creditor?”

The scent of Death fades slightly, or perhaps it’s the burn in my lungs fooling me. “I don’t understand,” I pant. “You want me to feed Death’s blood to the crown?”

“Not just that, but complete the entire rite. Come on.” He shifts behind me, hand releasing my arm and wandering to the small of my back, herding me up the tight spiral as if my body is the only door he can slam between us and what we’re running from. “Up this way, Your Majesty!”

The stone stairs sweat harder beneath my soles than my armpits do, slick and warm, and with each turn the air thickens—less piss and iron, more damp heat, like breath trapped under glass. A wet gust hits my face, heavy with loam and something mellow. Sap. Leaves. Growing things.

The torchlight dies behind us, and a pale, sudden brightness spills down from above, so abrupt I blink hard, eyes stinging as my pupils scramble to adjust. Green flickers; yellow-speckled leaves clinging to life, blackened stems, a tangle of branches that scratch against iron trellises. Dirt crumbles

beneath my heel. My breath catches. Glass glows. Condensation weeps.

Where…?

I squint into the light, and my stomach turns over. “Is this —”

“Queen Maeryn’s greenhouse, yes. Your Majesty…” He steps in front of me and drags a breath deep enough that it makes his chest rise. His eyes flick once to the panes above—too much light, too exposed—then back to me. He scrubs a hand over his stubbly jaw, the words stumbling as if they’re reluctant to be born. “If…if he’s got a body, he’s got blood. If he’s got blood, it can be spilled. And if that blood touches the crown while the rite binds you together…then the loop closes. The curse shatters.”

The words land like a punch. “The rite? But how—”

“Coronation,” he blurts. “Making Death your consort is our only hope.

Your Majesty, you have to…have to…” Another deep breath. “You have to wed him. Bed him. Crown him. Then slit his throat and bleed him over the gold.”

An unexpected bark of laughter rips out of my throat, sharp and hysterical, bouncing off the glass panes. My head spins, the scent of damp soil and warm greenery suddenly cloyingly rich, turning my stomach. I stumble back, hitting a potting bench hard enough to rattle the clay pots stacked there.

“Wed him? Bed him?” Again? “Put the crown on a god’s head and then slit his throat?” The sheer, towering absurdity of it makes the world tilt, the condensation-streaked glass above swirling into a kaleidoscope of gray sky and rotting leaves. “This is madness.”

Corvin looks at me, unblinking. “Kael was certain. He had spent years unrolling scrolls, finding hidden translations to unravel the roots of this curse.”

I grip the rough wood of a bench just to stay upright, breathing through the sudden wave of nausea that threatens to purge my meager breakfast.

“This is too much. It’s too—”

Corvin’s gaze snaps past me to the glass panes above, to the drifting gray light, to the condensation shivering, as if the greenhouse itself has begun to listen.

“He desires you. That’s leverage. Use it,” he says. “I have to go.”

“What?” My grip tightens on the bench until my knuckles blanch. “You can’t just drop a theology of impossible tasks at my feet and leave!”

“There’s too much information to be tortured out of me, and the less we appear to know, the less threatened he’ll feel,” he throws over his shoulder, boots whispering over damp soil before he shoves past a trellis. “There’s no more I can do here.”

“He already knows what Kael tried to do, or he wouldn’t have gotten rid of the girl!” I hurry after him, half stumbling, skirts catching on a thorny branch. “How am I supposed to achieve any of this?”

“In the same manner you managed to seduce Death.” He reaches a portion of wall swallowed by ivy so thick it looks like a rotting curtain, digs his fingers in, and wrenches it aside. Behind it, a narrow door reveals itself, iron-banded and old. “Consult the scriptures if you must.”

“He was furious at my coronation.” My breath comes too fast, dragging dense warmth into my already exhausted lungs. “He was in my face last night, shouting and snarling, so it’s safe to say he hates me!”

“His hate is not your greatest hurdle,” he throws over his shoulder, voice rough with urgency as he fumbles a key ring from his belt. “Yours is.”

Those last words land in my stomach before I can even process them, my mind still stuck on wed, bed, crown, slit—on the absurd choreography of it. “My hate?”

He stutters a key into the old lock, letting the door grind open on age- old rust. “Love. You have to love him.”

Another sharp laugh scrapes out of me, more breath than sound.

“Impossible.”

He squeezes himself through the gap. “Good luck, My Queen.”

“Corvin—”

The door howls shut.

The plant curtain draws.

I don’t move for a long moment. I simply stare at the trembling ivy, dumbfounded, the greenhouse humming with damp life struggling to survive. Water drips from a leaf. A thorn clings to my skirts. Somewhere above, a cloud darkens the already gray sky.

Something shifts at my core.

So this is what it takes… Love aside, if I approach this sequence backward, it appears doable. I look down at my hands, calloused from shovel handles and grave dirt. Fuck, I’d love to drag a blade over Vale’s throat. Put this crown on his head? Be

my guest. And bed him? I’ve done it once. Twice. Kind of. I can do it again.

But how does one convince Death to become your husband?

My lips twitch into a smile.

No, not convince.

Demand.