The mention of him is a sudden, sharp ache in the center of my chest. “I miss him.”
“Me, too. Do you remember the harvest before the big freeze? The year I ate too many candied apples?”
I blink, the memory rising unbidden through the haze of my grief. “You threw up on the walk home.”
“Before that,” he corrects. “I got tired. My legs were too short to keep up with the crowds. Father didn’t say a word. He just lifted me up and put me on his shoulders.” He presses his eyes shut is if to enhance the memory. “I remember the smell of his coat: pipe tobacco and wet felt. I fell asleep up there, high above everyone else. I felt…invincible. Like nothing in the world could touch me as long as I was held by him.”
A tear slips free, tracking down my cheek. “I hate that the grief is the only thing I have left of him.”
Daron’s thumb brushes against my knuckles. The touch is weak, but his eyes, when they open again, are lucid and burning with a sudden, fierce intensity.
“No,” he says, his voice finding a surprising strength. “You’ve got it backward, big sister. Grief is just love hiding in a mourning dress, piling up inside you because the person you want to give it to isn’t there to take it.”
I sniff, wiping my face on my sleeve, abandoning a queenly dignity I never had to begin with. “Doesn’t make it hurt less.”
“Pain is a good thing.” He lets out a dry, rattling breath that sounds painfully like a chuckle. “Reminds us that we’re alive, right?”
The words land gently, yet they burn somehow. I’m not sure if a boy whose voice hasn’t even fully dropped should make peace with agony as a companion in this way.
I stroke an oily strand from his face. “Well, no box for you just yet.”
His boyish grin curls up once more, wobbling at the corners with the strain before he murmurs, “Not yet.”
Chapter
Ten
Elara
The woods behind the palace don’t like visitors.
They keep their paths narrow and their branches low, as if daring you to stumble over the half-crumbled headstone of the odd grave here and there. Somewhere far off, an owl hoots toward the moon, then goes quiet, like it regrets announcing itself.
Good.
Quiet is what I need.
Stillness, too, though I’ve learned over the last two days that Death listens to my summons with the same enthusiasm as a mule listens to commands: whenever he feels like it.
I stop in a small clearing where the branches open just enough to let moonlight fall like a silver veil across a large fallen tree trunk. Presume my husband is busy with more pressing matters. Like collecting the souls of those dying from a pestilence that only exists because he has a strange fondness for this fucking curse.
Damp cold settles into my lungs with my next inhale. As does a woody undercurrent, slightly spiced with hints of apricot and nuts. I knew it!
Following the length of the rotten trunk, I scan the shadows for the black-dotted caps of ashmorels. To ease the trembling in her fingers, Mother had said before she wrinkled her nose at the kitchen’s sparse selection of dried herbs, although?—
“Whenever,” comes from the shadows beside me, “has there been a story about a young woman going into the forest at night, during pestilence and famine,alone, and it ended well?”
I straighten my spine, then I turn to the darkness just as I tap my nail against my crown with a dullclank. “Temporarily undying, remember?”
“As am I, albeit more permanently so.” Vale leans against the trunk of an ancient oak, its canopy of decaying leaves and gnarly branches shielding him well from the moon. “And yet I once took a fall in this form, a great many feet down a cliff, shattering too many bones to count, but that was only half as miserable as the driftwood that rose bloodied from my guts.” Arms crossed in front of his vest, he lifts one leg, pressing the sole of his boot against the tree. “An experience I would wish on nobody. Least of all my dearest wife.”
I give him my sweetest of smiles. “Pretty kind words coming from a man who was dead set on marching me to my execution mere weeks ago.”
Vale’s gaze drifts over me in that calculating way of his, only for him to sigh. “What are you doing out here?”
“Searching for mushrooms. Searching for my husband.” I take a step toward him, mud slurping beneath my boots. “You’re late.”
His mouth curves, thin. “Late for what?”
