Page 75 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

Let the reckoning come.

Chapter 23

Seravyn

After the night in the river, Aldric and I now share a bedchamber. Tonight, Ren is here, though he won’t stay till the morning. He’ll leave before the sun crests the sky, escaping watching eyes, through dark corridors back to his own chamber.

But for now, I lie in bed between them, listening to three hearts align to a single rhythm.

Startled, I all but stop breathing.

The dawn has already started to gray outside the windows, and before the enormity of what we’ve become arranges itself into something I’ll have to carry through palace corridors in just a few short hours, I dare to hope.

They’re hearts—not keeping the same arrhythmic pace anymore.

I’ve had my hands on both their chests for weeks. One in tenderness, one in murder, and, Morrishan forgive me,sometimes I lost track of which was which. And always, beneath the skin, that terrible twinning. Aldric’s pulse and Ren’s pulse answering each other across the palace like bells in two towers, the same stumble, the same catch, my curse conducting them both with one cruel hand.

Now Ren’s heart beats slow and deep under my palm. Steady.

And Aldric’s, beneath my other, runs its own quick, restless time—a king’s heart, hungry even in sleep.

The tether is gone.

Three hearts, three separate times. And I think of a dance lesson in a sunlit room, my hand over a jester’s heart, teaching him that rhythm is something you feelhere. I taught him this rhythm—the woman who synced his heartbeat to hers, by the very same hand that wove a dark magick to steal it. Now, the working has been undone.

I sit up so fast the sheets shift off them, and they both stir. Cautiously, I press my palm flat to Ren’s chest, close my eyes, and reach down through skin and blood to where the muscle resides, where my wolfsbane curse has been coiled since the week of my wedding.

There’s no longer a thorn, no coiled dark poison. Just a man. Just a heart, bruised and tired and stubbornly, ordinarily alive, going about the remarkable miracle of beating.

“Sera,” Ren says my name questioningly, sleep-rough. His hand comes up to cover mine. Warm.

Hishand is warm.

“It’s gone,” I whisper.

But he doesn’t hear me, sleep already pulling him back under.

I feel for it again, because I don’t trust myself, or this sudden burst of happiness. The working hasn’t weakened. It hasn’t gone dormant, the way curses sulk sometimes, waiting out a full moon. It has been unmade. Taken apart at the root.

I climb out of bed and rush to the window, looking out over my garden where my wolfsbane grows, and every deep violet hood is open. All of them. Facing us—and it doesn't bloom at night, and it has never once in the history of my poisonous bloodline bloomed like this.

Morrishan.

The patient dark. The goddess of thorns, who waits.

She was here. She’s still here, in the way the dark goes soft at the edges, in the smell of crushed green and river water, and I understand—all at once—what she was waiting for.

Not my prayers. I gave her so many of mine. Not my sacrificial offering; she let that bargain lie on the altar untouched. Goddesses of the dark are not moneylenders, whatever my mother’s ledgers say.

She was waiting for the truth.

Mytruth.

The curse was fused because I was fused—hatred and love spun together, and me pouring both from the same hand while swearing to my goddess and myself that Icarried only the one. Magick reads the truth of us. My working was honest even when I could not be. Not yet. And so it bound what I refused to unbind, and it fed on what I refused to name, and it would have taken both of them into the ground still tangled in my lie.

Until the night of the river. Until I stood in her waters under her moon and bared my soul. The whole divided, devouring truth of my heart, held out in open hands where the goddess could see it.

“What’s the matter?”