She didn’t. Instead, she let her fingers linger before stepping away, her gaze flicking past him. Beyond the gate, Death waited.Black smoke curled from his form, trailing from his broad shoulders as his steed shifted beneath him with a slow exhale. His presence thickened the air, pressing against her skin like a coming storm.
Grim rolled his shoulders, already moving toward the kitchens. “Come,” he muttered. “I’m starving.”
Ilys stood still. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
Grim stopped, glancing back at her. His posture did not shift, but she could feel his scrutiny even from a distance.
“Two-and-twenty," he noted, not unkindly. “And now you think yourself above listening to me.”
“I’ll be but a moment,” Ilys promised. The words were quiet, measured.
He watched her longer before turning, his footsteps fading into the courtyard. She waited until he disappeared. Only then did she turn.
Death lingered where he’d been, his shape merging with the beast beneath him, an absence of light rather than a presence. Ilys approached him with careful steps, like one might approach a wild creature, not out of fear, but to keep from sending it away.
No fear stirred in her chest, only excitement.
And she did not want excitement to be the thing that drove him from her.
“Will you speak to me, Death?” she asked, her voice hushed, carried by the cold night air. “Grim says you do not speak.”
He met her with such characterization.
She lifted her chin. “The King says you are my father. Should you not speak to a daughter?”
A shift. A slow tilting of his head.
You are no daughter of mine.
The voice did not come as a sound, but words she felt, words that pressed against her ribs and curled into her lungs. Hard.Silvery. Weightless and sharp, like the cut of moonlight through frostbitten branches.
You are his lamb for slaughter.
Ilys held her ground, her breath shallow against the sentiment.
“Whose daughter am I then?” she asked, softer now. “What was I born of?”
A pause.
Do I look like a soothsayer? A fortune-teller?His voice cut through her, cold and edged.I am the frost, the night, and the eternities.
Ilys inhaled, slow and deep. The air between them felt thinner now. Standing too close to him unraveled the threads that tethered her to the world.
“Go on then,” she challenged. “Leave. Bring the world to its knees and cease the happiness of another hundred mortal souls.”
Death did not answer. His steed moved, hooves pressing into the earth without sound as he rode away from her, his cloak unfurling like smoke against the wind.
Dissatisfaction clawed at her ribs, whispering its mockery. Answers would never come, nor peace, nor clarity. She’d had her fill of half-truths, of Death’s endless riddles, of the duty that chained her to him.
Ilys found Grim in the kitchen, where Baron had already joined him.
Heat rolled through the air, paunchy with the scent of roasted meat and fresh bread. Grim sat at the worn woodentable, leaning back in his chair, his veil shadowing his face, but his presence relaxed, settled. Baron’s gaze flickered to him, watchful, assessing, and his expression softened at every movement Grim made, every tilt of his head, every shift of his fingers.
Grim regaled them with the stories of his time away, some with detail, others noticeably skimmed over. He spoke of roads he had traveled and people he had met, but Ilys could hear the gaps, the places where truth had been pared down into more palatable fables. She did not press him. Not yet.
One day, she would hear them all.
One day, she would find her fingerprints over countless lives, ones she had changed, ones she had ended.
