Page 68 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

“You miss it,” I say, and she only nods. “I’ll take you there. When this is done, I’ll take you home, Sera. I’ll walk you through those gates myself. And I’ll spend the rest of my days learning every poisonous plant you love.”

I want to mean it.

She goes still against me. “You’d really do that,” she says, not quite a question. “You’d leave this kingdom, leave everything. For me.”

“I’ve told you, I have nothing here but you.” I press my mouth to her temple. “Harrowglade is a grave and a hawthorn tree. You’re the only home I know now. So yes. When you’re free of this place, I’ll take you back to the Thorn Court, and I’ll be the luckiest fool who ever lived.”

I feel her smile against my chest. And then I feel it fade.

“I want to believe that,” she whispers, her fingers tightening on me. “But there’s something else dark stirring in the walls of this palace as the king withers…and it frightens me, that we’ll not escape it.”

A chill settles over my skin. “What do you mean,” I say.

She lifts her head, and there’s a shadow in her eyes that has nothing to do with the dying candle. She pulls the blanket around her, her dark hair spillingover her bare shoulders, and she looks at me, a furrow carving between her brows.

“What I’ve given to Aldric,” she begins slowly, “it’s not just herb and tincture, it’s will. Intention. My purpose bound to it, and the binding is what makes it more than a tea that withers.” Her jaw tightens. “It’s more than poison, more than wolfsbane. It’s a curse.”

“That sounds like witchcraft,” I say, and I mean it as a jest, but she doesn’t laugh.

“The blood of Morrishan runs to old, dark things,” she continues. “I tried to tell you this that night in the garden, that I deal in the forbidden arts.” She wraps her arms around her knees. “And the thing about binding your will into your working is that the craft is not a tidy thing. It doesn’t always cut where you aim it. It has a price, always.”

“What price,” I say, fear drawing me up beside her.

She swallows. “I’m not sure yet,” she says. “But I can just…feel it. Hovering. We need to be careful. Until it’s over.”

I pull her into my side, wrapping my arm around her shoulders. “And what until then,” I say. “What does he suffer until it’s finally over,” I dare to ask, a new fear trembling through me that I try to smother.

And I realize, as Sera tells me how the withering works, that I’ve begun to experience some of the same symptoms. For days, I’ve been telling myself it’s nothing, just the circumstance of our situation.

A tiredness that doesn’t abate with sleep. A morningwhere my hands shook lacing my boots—just for a moment, just a tremor, there and gone—and I stared at them and told myself it was the cold. Then the dizziness when I rise too fast. The night I woke with my heart stuttering in my chest, missing a beat, a sick lurch.

I told myself it was grief, or guilt, or the strain of loving a woman I have to share with a king—I told myself a lot of things.

So when Sera looks at me across the guttering candlelight and tells me this dark magick of hers has a price, I can no longer tell myself anything?—

I know.

And I say nothing, keeping this gnawing dread to myself.

I pull her back down into my arms and I press my lips to her hair. “We’ll figure it out,” I promise her. “Whatever’s stirring, whatever the price. We’ll find it and we’ll pay it and you’ll be fine. Trust me.”

And she nestles into me and lets herself be comforted, and I lie there in the dark with her heartbeat against my ribs and my own stuttering treacherously beneath it, and I make a decision that I know, even as I make it, is the kind of foolish only a man in love can manage.

That so long as this withering curse takes the king, I’ll let it take me, too.

Because in the end, it will set her free.

Here is the truth I’ve known since the throne room, since she laughed and mended somethingbroken in me:

I came here to die.

I made my peace with it before I ever knew her name. And if loving her, if freeing her, if giving her the home she deserves costs me the breath in my body—then that is a bargain I’d have leapt at the day I dug my sister’s grave. I have always been willing to die for something. She simply made it something worth dying for.

So I’ll hold her in the dark. I'll let her dream of Threnmere. I'll smile and caper and play the fool and love her fiercely, and I'll say nothing of the gray creeping in at the edges of me.

She's bewitched me. Something I have no doubt her craft can accomplish—and gods, she's cast some spell over my heart too in this way. And I'd let her do it again. I'd let her do it a thousand times over.

I just didn't know that when I gave myself over to her that her spell would be so literal.