She shakes her head, watching the footmen work silently, rhythmically, the spades slicing the earth. “He came to me that morning like a man possessed,” she whispers. “Eyes wild. Shirt unbuttoned. He looked…terrified. And hopeful. He told me to prepare for the rite, and that is what I did.”
I watch her profile. The lines around her mouth are deep canyons of worry. “Did you know he would make me queen?”
“No, not until…” She hesitates, stalling until the footmen carry off the spades. “Our best hope to break the curse. That is what he called you before he sent me to ready the knife.”
“But how?” I all but breathe.
“I…I do not know. He kept his counsel close, Ela—Your Majesty.” A solemn dip of her head. “He kept me in the dark, same as you. Only the dead know now. And the messenger.”
“What messenger?” The one I saw in Kael’s room? Someone else entirely? “What’s his name? How can I find him?”
Miss Hampshire’s mouth works as if she’s trying to grind the right words into shape and finding nothing but grit. Her half-hand lifts, nubs flexing once against her apron before she clamps it there again, fingers she no longer has curling into the fabric. When she finally meets my eyes, the silence she offers lands in my gut like a stone.
“So he just crowned me clueless…” The familiar sense of defeat sinks its teeth into my ribs. If I don’t figure out what I’m supposed to do, the curse will keep eating the realm—and Daron will be its supper. “For all we know, that messenger might be dead, too.”
“Perhaps.”
She curtsies—a stiff, formal dip that looks ridiculous given the situation, given that I am standing over a fresh grave with dirt on my shoes. It’s a gesture of manners, a desperate cling toorder in a world that has dissolved into chaos. Then she walks off.
Only the silence stays with me, descending onto the graveyard as the sun finally dips below the horizon. It bleeds a vivid, violent red into the gray sky for a bit, until twilight deepens and swallows it whole. The air grows cold, smelling of damp earth, wet stone, and the promise of winter.
I remain by the grave until my legs ache, staring at the dirt. This is where I belong. Not on a throne, not in a palace. No, I belong among the silent and the dead, and the decay that whispers through the headstones.
“It’s about ending it at the source,” I whisper as a few tears slide down, warm and furious, dripping onto the thirsty grave. “What the fuck did you mean?”
A wind picks up, rustling the dead leaves around the headstones. It swirls the mist around my ankles, cold and biting. It carries a familiar scent, so at home at a graveyard. Not rot, not earth.
Carnations.
My spine stiffens, a million goosebumps pebbling my skin as memory flashes before my mind. Moonlight. Bone. Black pits where eyes should be. A ribcage that held a rumbling moan in lieu of a heart.
“You have a nasty habit,” a voice says behind me, smooth as oil and cold as the grave, “of fighting me like I am not inevitable.”
Chapter
Three
Elara
Idon’t turn around immediately. I let the wind bite my cheeks and the scent of turned earth fill my nose one last time, grounding myself against the sudden, cloying smell of mourning flowers. When I do turn, he’s leaning against the gnarled trunk of a tree.
Not Death. Vale.
Twilight catches the sharp line of his jaw, bringing out the tense shift of muscles there. Arms crossed over a chest clad in midnight-blue velvet, he looks exactly as he did the day hestepped between the headstones of my family’s plot—arrogant, impeccably groomed, annoyingly handsome.
A devastating facade.
“Dressed up for the occasion, I see,” I say. “Doesn’t the costume feel a bit tight around the shoulders?”
Vale’s green eyes narrow slightly on the fading light tracing the horizon, then they find mine. “I prefer a form that doesn’t send mortals screaming into madness. It simplifies…conversation.”
I step away from the fresh grave, the hem of my funeral cloth dragging heavily in the stiffening grass. “Why bother? I’ve seen what’s underneath the silk.”
“I daresay you haven’t just seen it.” His mouth twitches. Not quite a smile, not quite a snarl. “You have also…felt it.”
I don’t flinch.
I refuse him that reaction.
