The snow thickens. My red cloak grows heavier. My knuckles go numb. Still, I don’t move, watching the sun bedding down on the mountain ridge ahead under the scrutiny of the rising moon.
“Every day, you sit there.” Human cadence, not the rumble that shakes bones. Vale. “Aside from getting frostbite that heals within minutes, what are you endlessly doing out in the freezing cold, Elara?”
I close my eyes for a moment, sensing the grief in my chest make room for the tiniest spark, like a match struck on a rib. “Waiting for Death. As always.”
Long silence.
“I assumed—” He stops. Clears his throat, a human sound that seems ill-suited for Vale, and most definitely Death. “I thought you probably didn’t want to see me again for a while…if ever.”
The vulnerable honesty of his words, the guilt-stricken weight in his tone, touches me deeper than I want to admit. He expected my anger, didn’t he? My hate.
So did I.
Perhaps we’re both confused.
My neck crackles as I turn my head slowly to where he stands a few paces away, black jacket buttoned high, his curls equally dark against the white backdrop. Snow clings to his shoulders and melts there, dampening wool, his eyes going to Daron’s grave before they return to me.
“Death does as Death is.” Not even my grief will let me pretend otherwise anymore. “You know full well it was never your nature I held against you.” I lift the translation with a shaky hand and reach it back toward him. “And now it seems like I can’t even blame you for a curse that simply can’t be broken.”
Vale steps close enough to take the parchment. He doesn’t fully read it. He merely glances at the ink before he returns it to me.
“Was it you who ensured the first translation was wrong?” I take the document back, folding it neatly before it disappears into the pocket inside my cloak. “Make sure generations stay in the dark? Keep Kael stumbling in search of light, hiding that there is none?”
“There was no urging required on my part.” He looks down at the grave again, then slowly—almost reluctantly—lowers himself to the snow beside me. “The king who first wore the crown was a cautious, power-hungry…cunning man. It was he who requested the translation be altered, ensuring that any reference to a wife of mine vanished, that any risk of a predecessor breaking the curse was diminished.”
“Diminished? It’s impossible in its very nature.” My throat tightens because, even though I already knew it, hearing it aloudmakes it final. “The curse is unbreakable. Because you cannot love. You can never love…”—a gulp—“…me.”
My teeth grind together.
I don’t know why I said it like that.
The wind picks up, whipping his black curls across his forehead. The skin along his cheekbone pales and thins beneath the rising moon, the illusion of Vale stripping away more with each passing minute. Yet he stays, eyes going to the horizon where low-hanging clouds go from dark purple to night.
I let my gaze settle on the same spot. “If you could undo the curse, would you?”
Vale shifts, angling one leg to brace his boot against the snow. “I cannot undo it.”
“I understand that.” But for once, I want to understandhim,too. I pull my knees to my chest, trying to hoard what little warmth I have left. “But would you? Break the crown? Return your heartstring?”
A muscle twitches near his throat. “No.”
The answer chills me more than the cold of winter. “Why not?”
Vale’s mouth tightens, and for a second, I think he won’t respond. Then he gives a small nod—one of those stiff, controlled motions that suggests even he agrees he owes me answers.
“I have walked this earth for a long, long time, Elara,” he says softly. “Long enough to witness things that startled even Death. A man, a farmer, who loved his wife with a ferocity that bordered on worship.” He pauses for a breath. “Then he found her in bed with his brother.”
I glance sideways, watching how his face pales, speckles, a slow revealing of the bone beneath. “What did he do?”
“He strangled him dead.” Vale’s jaw shifts once, the motion letting flickers of teeth flare beneath those first, untainted raysof the moon. “The guilt drove him mad. I watched him succumb to drink, and then…I watched him beat the very woman he claimed to adore.”
I nod solemnly, if only because the story doesn’t shock me. I’ve buried its aftermath—women with bruises blooming like dark flowers beneath cotton.
“Then there was a woman,” he continues. “Her husband left her, abandoning her with two newborn babes. She loved him so much, she couldn’t breathe without him.” His voice fractures, the warmth of Vale’s lilt slowly replaced by the hollowing grind of Death. “On a storming spring morning, I watched her cradle them, one in each arm, walking through the rain toward a river churning with snowmelt.” Death shakes his head, half of his curls now faded from his skull. “She waded into it, deeper and deeper, crying, wailing for her husband, her love…until the current swept them under and carried their souls straight to me.”
The wind howls once more.
A shiver wracks my entire body, trembling straight into the crown that clings to my head. Snow melts through the wool at the motion, sending a damp chill into my skin that makes my teeth chatter. The more I listen, the less his heart reads like a tragic mistake.
