I take the ring and slide it onto her finger the way mortals do. And for a moment, I could swear I sensed my heartstring chime in her crown…
“Do you, Elara,” the priest starts, voice strained, “take?—”
“I do.” Her answer is a bark as her fingers dig into mine. “I’ll make it a point to sleep and bathe with the crown.”
The priest blinks, flustered. “Your…Your Majesty?—”
“I said yes.” She shifts, letting the rope bite deeper, clench harder. “Get on with it.”
“Do you, Vale,” he continues, “take this woman as your wife, to have and to hold, to lead and to love?”
Something crawls low in my gut, letting my gaze shift to the mosaics set into the wall. Tiny tile kings and queens, forever frozen mid-vow, chests tied, their hearts full of love.
My ribs seem to curl inward.
Mortals are obsessed with it. Love.
It’s a sickness of the mind. A voluntary lunacy. They chase it, sing of it, long for it—a deluded sentiment they crave as if it could ever end in anything other than pain. To love is to open your heart to the blade of grief, offering it a bloody sheath to land in before it cracks under the agony of loss.
Love is madness.
But it is a madness that cannot befall me. So what’s the weight of this vow? Air, nothing more. Irrelevant and?—
Hot breath shatters my thoughts, searing against the shell of my ear with how Elara has leaned in, her lips dangerously close as she whispers, “Tick-tock. Remember? You have places to be.”
I fix my gaze on the priest with nothing short of a growl. “I do.”
The priest swallows hard, but there’s a sound of relief in the gulp. “In the sight of God, I pronounce you man and wife, ’til death do you part.”
The words leave his mouth, letting ancient law amplify that tightness in my chest to a degree that makes me want to scream. Of all the absurdities I’ve observed over the centuries, my wife turning the rite around on me to break this curse is perhaps the most infuriating one.
Oh, how right she is.
How wrong she is…
Chapter
Seven
Elara
“Bring me everything you can find,” I say as I pace the length of my oaken desk in the royal chamber, candlelight flickering across the littering of books. “Every scrap of paper. Whatever Kael stacked, studied, or scribbled—I need to see it.”
Miss Hampshire tosses a final piece of wood into the flames of the hearth, rises, and wipes her sooty nubs on her apron. “His Late Majesty wasn’t fond of leaving ink behind.”
I press a palm to my lower belly—something shifts there, deep and dull. “There has to be something.”
Her gaze flicks toward the doors, then back to me. “He had to make certain Death never caught the scent of his plan. What he did put to paper, he hid like contraband. Burned the moment it served its purpose and?—”
The doors burst open.
A young, breathless messenger stumbles in, followed by a minister I vaguely recall from a dizzying onslaught of introductions. His soft hands, which have likely never seen a day of hard labor, clutch a rolled map.
“Your Majesty! Forgive the intrusion, but the dam has failed!” the minister wails, practically shaking out the map over the books I carefully gathered from Kael’s old room. “The Crying Valley is… It’s gone.”
“Gone, Your Majesty,” the messenger heaves. “Saw it with my own eyes.”
“The lowlands are underwater,” the minister continues, sweat starting to shine on his bald head, flattening the few white wisps he has left. “Graves washed out. Coffins shattered. Corpses sick with rot are floating onto fields, into creeks.” Panic flutters in his throat. “The risk of the pestilence spreading is immense, with the runoff chasing straight toward two other townships. What will you have us do?”
