“Break the curse, how?” I press, ducking under a low archway. “Nothing makes any sense!”
“Shh…” Corvin’s eyes flick over his shoulder to my crown, and something bleak shifts in his expression. “He wasn’t lying… It truly took,” he murmurs, as if to himself. “You’re the first queen to wear that crown longer than a few seconds, you know. The original translation of the curse was changed toson, notheir.King, notruler. Priests scrubbed the language, swapped consort for bride, and sealed it into tradition so the curse would travel through men and men alone.”
Original translation. I reach up, touching the cold metal of the crown. “Kael discovered the changes.”
“One of his pigeons brought me a note the day you slit his throat. Hastily written, barely legible, demanding I seek you out. Said you mentioned the bloodline was impure already, and he found proof of that, too.” A scoff. “Can’t believe we wasted a year tracking down a distant cousin about a dozen times removed.”
“The farm girl.”
“Aye.” He casts a nervous glance at the shadows pooling between empty wine racks. “Kael believed that crowning her queen would finally pave the way to breaking the curse.” He shakes his head, resuming his frantic pace. “I was careless. Stayed in one place too long.”
My throat narrows. “What happened to her?”
“Who knows? When I returned with supplies…the house was ice. Just ice. She was gone.” A shrug. “She’s irrelevant now. Destroying this devilish crown is a task for a queen. For you.”
I stumble over uneven flagstone, first beads of sweat gathering on my nape. “How?”
When we turn into a corridor that smells like wet iron and old piss, his steps slow, bunched brows frowning back at me. “The note also said that he thinks Death took you as his lover. That true?”
My steps falter, slowing us further as heat floods my neck, letting a single pearl of sweat run down my spine. “I… It’s true.”
Corvin falters to a halt. For a heartbeat, the only sound is water dripping somewhere in the dark and the faint, exhausted hiss of my breath. His eyes hold mine—sharp, disbelieving.
“Saints…” It’s not so much a whisper as it is a faintly breathed laugh. “Not even rumors exist. In a thousand years of lore, not a single sound about Death taking a lover. He’s solitary. Rarely touches the living unless it’s time to reap them.”
Shame claws at my throat, heated memories of Vale’s naked body flashing like a bruise pressed too hard, but it’s drowned by a harsher need. “So I was told, but I still don’t fucking know whatto do with that. What does it change? I’m still carrying a cursed crown. My brother is still rotting.”
“When Kael put that darned crown on your head, he changed the debtor to awoman,” he says, gaze drifting to nothing behind him before his eyes find mine again, the flame of the torch letting hints of gold ripple across his brown eyes. “Now, Death’s lover carries the curse, and?—”
He winces, eyes frantically darting to a glistening sheen of sweat on the wall. A fine white crust creeps outward from the edge of the wet patch, spidering over the mortar in delicate veins. The torch flame shifts, bending away as if a mouth just exhaled in the dark. Cold, sharp and sudden, slides under my skirts—not from the floor, but from the air—biting straight through wool and skin until my knees prickle and my teeth threaten to chatter. Then I smell it.
Carnations.
“We have to go.” Corvin’s fingers dig into the flesh of my arm once more. “We stopped for too long.”
He yanks me forward again, faster now, making me stumble a few steps before I manage my strides. We pass rusted bars that line one side, prison cells, doors hanging open like mouths. A chain hangs from one door, black with age.
“The crown is a magical binding, demanding a debt to be paid,” he huffs, pulling me toward a stairwell that spirals upward a short distance, faint light casting down on it. “But what happens when the curse gets fed with the blood of the creditor?”
The scent of Death fades slightly, or perhaps it’s the burn in my lungs fooling me. “I don’t understand,” I pant. “You want me to feed Death’s blood to the crown?”
“Not just that, but complete the entire rite. Come on.” He shifts behind me, hand releasing my arm and wandering to the small of my back, herding me up the tight spiral as if my bodyis the only door he can slam between us and what we’re running from. “Up this way, Your Majesty!”
The stone stairs sweat harder beneath my soles than my armpits do, slick and warm, and with each turn the air thickens—less piss and iron, more damp heat, like breath trapped under glass. A wet gust hits my face, heavy with loam and something mellow. Sap. Leaves. Growing things.
The torchlight dies behind us, and a pale, sudden brightness spills down from above, so abrupt I blink hard, eyes stinging as my pupils scramble to adjust. Green flickers; yellow-speckled leaves clinging to life, blackened stems, a tangle of branches that scratch against iron trellises. Dirt crumbles beneath my heel. My breath catches. Glass glows. Condensation weeps. Where…?
I squint into the light, and my stomach turns over. “Is this?—”
“Queen Maeryn’s greenhouse, yes. Your Majesty…” He steps in front of me and drags a breath deep enough that it makes his chest rise. His eyes flick once to the panes above—too much light, too exposed—then back to me. He scrubs a hand over his stubbly jaw, the words stumbling as if they’re reluctant to be born. “If…if he’s got a body, he’s got blood. If he’s got blood, it can be spilled. And if that blood touches the crown while the rite binds you together…then the loop closes. The curse shatters.”
The words land like a punch. “The rite? But how?—”
“Coronation,” he blurts. “Making Death your consort is our only hope. Your Majesty, you have to…have to…” Another deep breath. “You have to wed him. Bed him. Crown him. Then slit his throat and bleed him over the gold.”
An unexpected bark of laughter rips out of my throat, sharp and hysterical, bouncing off the glass panes. My head spins, the scent of damp soil and warm greenery suddenly cloyingly rich, turning my stomach. I stumble back, hitting a potting bench hard enough to rattle the clay pots stacked there.
“Wed him? Bed him?”Again?“Put the crown on a god’s head and then slit his throat?” The sheer, towering absurdity of it makes the world tilt, the condensation-streaked glass above swirling into a kaleidoscope of gray sky and rotting leaves. “This is madness.”
