The door closes with a soft click behind me. We’re alone here. Together.
That should be encouraging, but in the face of all Lilith has shown me, it is not. I have failed to break this curse. No matter what I do this season, I have harmed my people. Likely irreparably.
Harper stops in the middle of the room and looks at me. “Please come in. You don’t have to stand in the doorway.”
We’re not in my chambers, but the windows are full of darkness, and after days of facing Lilith at night, I feel tense and twitchy. I’ve seen men die by my father’s order—but until tonight, no one has died by mine. “I ordered a man’s death, Harper.”
“Grey said that mercy and kindness can become a weakness if pushed too far. If that guy was willing to trick you tonight, who knows what his next move might have been.” She pauses. “He killed a guard. Mave swore an oath to you two days ago. The Seneschal killed him. Over silver coins.”
I flinch. She is right, but even if the choice to kill this man was the right one, it does not negate all my other failures.
I think of my family, torn to shreds along the castle halls.
I think of the children the monster ripped to pieces in front of their parents.
I think of the people starving throughout Emberfall, those without access to a city, to walls and protection and work.
“What Lilith is doing to you is wrong,” Harper says. “We all make mistakes. You slept with her without any intention of a relationship. Who cares? You’re not the first man to do it. And she’s not innocent! She sought you out because of who you are.” Her jaw is clenched. “I hope she does come here. I hope she comes to this room. Because I don’t care what I have to do. I’m going to end her.”
I go still, my back against the door, unable to breathe. I’m terrified those words will summon Lilith right this very instant.
But the air does not change. Lilith does not appear.
Harper steps up to me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t invite you in here to start yelling at you. Especially not right now.”
I grimace. “On the contrary. Your passion on my behalf is quite inspiring.”
A blush lights her cheeks and she takes a step back. “Well, your passion on behalf of everyone else is quite inspiring.”
I move to her window and look out at the darkness. Soldiers stand at the entrance to the stables, stationed there by Grey or Jamison, I am sure. In the distance, torches light figures standing sentry on the guard towers at the edge of the forest. These men and women have sworn to defend me—while I cower in the castle.
“Some passion.” I glance at Harper. “I am hiding in your room.”
She joins me by the window. “You agreed to come inside. For a minute there, I wasn’t sure you’d even do that.”
I was not sure, either. My eyes fall on the scar on Harper’s cheek—I was so sure Lilith’s action would break her. Instead, after so many seasons, it seems Lilith broke me.
“Do you want to sleep?” Harper’s voice is so earnest. “You can have the bed.” She pauses. “You look like you haven’t slept since we returned from Silvermoon Harbor.”
“Indeed.” I shake my head. “I cannot sleep. Not yet.”
“I can light more candles. Do you want to play cards?” Her voice is almost teasing—but I can tell the offer is genuine, too. “Shoot arrows out the window? Dance?”
I raise my eyebrows. “You must truly pity me if you offer to dance.”
Her expression loses any hint of humor. “I don’t pity you, Rhen.” She pauses. “Do you pity me?”
“Never. You are the strongest person I know.”
“That’s not true. You know Grey, for goodness’ sake. You know Lilith.”
I shake my head a bit. “It is true.”
That blush finds her cheeks again. “Well. Same. About you.”
For the first time, I want to tell her about the creature. I long to be honest with her so badly that my chest aches.
I do deserve this pain, Harper. You don’t know what I’ve done.
“We can dance,” she says. “If that’s what you want to do.”
If she touches me with any kind of gentleness I will collapse against her.
I turn back to the window and rest my fingers along the ledge. My voice is rough. “There is no music tonight.”
That throws her for a moment, but then her face lights up. “Wait. I have an idea.”
“My lady?” But she’s already flown to the door, and she leans out, speaking quietly.
After a moment, she closes the door again. “Music is coming right up.”
“I beg your—”
“Just wait. You’ll see.” She returns to my side, a little breathless. Her voice softens. “Do you want to lose the armor?”
I hesitate. I’m loath to remove any of it. This evening’s events have left me shaken. Lilith’s visions have left me gutted.
Harper’s fingers close on my bracer, and I pull away.
“Do you trust me?” she says softly.
“Yes.” When I blink, I see my creature eviscerating one of the first girls. I imagine doing the same to Harper and draw a shuddering breath. I force my eyes to open. “I do not trust myself.”
“Well, I trust you.” She takes hold of my hand. Her fingers are warm against my palm and I challenge myself to allow it.
After a moment, she turns my wrist over and goes to work on the buckles. “Is this okay?”
“Yes.” My voice is barely more than a rough whisper. Her gentle touch is breaking me in an entirely different way.
Each strap of leather slowly gives. Our breathing is loud in the quiet space between us, and I find myself wishing there were more buckles than three. That bracer yields and she tosses it on a chair, then moves to the other.
The silence is almost too much to bear. Her closeness, her kindness, the soft warmth of her touch. I long to rip the other bracer free and take her face in my hands.
I cannot. This trust is such a tenuous thing. On both sides.
“You are quite talented at this,” I say softly. “You should be a squire.”
“I don’t really know what a squire is.” The second bracer gives, and her hands shift to the buckle of my sword belt where it loops through my breastplate—and her fingers hesitate.
Her cheeks have turned pink. We’re both fully clothed—more than, considering my armor—but this suddenly feels more like undressing than disarming. I can all but taste her breath.
Then she says, “I wish you’d told me about Lilith.”
I’ve spent the last few days trying to protect her, not realizing that Harper could have protected me. I am unused to this feeling: some combination of gratitude and vulnerability and relief. “I wish that, too.”
Harper seems to steel herself, and her fingers loop through the buckle. “I know I’m not a real princess. But when I said I would help you, I meant it.”
I nod. The buckle gives. The sword belt comes free.
Her eyes meet mine, and she tosses it onto a chair. “No more secrets,” she says.
I have one secret. The biggest one. The one I cannot share.
The one I want to share with her so badly.
Her fingers land on the leather strap of my breastplate and I nod, because there is nothing else I can do. “No more secrets,” I agree.
“Good.” She tugs the buckle free at the base of my rib cage.
I’m more than capable of doing this myself. I should stop her.
I do not. Instead, I reach to brush that one lock of hair from her eyes. My hand lingers on her face. Desire wars with fear as my thumb traces over the line of her scar. I imagine her blood in the snow. Her lying dead in the courtyard. Like the visions Lilith shared, it is too real. Too terrible. Harper is so foolish. So brave.
She has not pulled away.
My thumb strokes across her mouth, and her breath catches.
I hesitate, uncertain again.
A violin begins to play, a slow, mournful tune, and I startle.
This is not a song I’ve ever heard in the castle.
Harper smiles at my reaction. “It’s Zo. I asked if she would play.” She blushes. “I remember what you said at Silvermoon. About the music.”
Something pulls in my chest. That she remembered, that she thought of this—it’s all too much. My voice is low and husky. “This is quite a gift, my lady.”
At my side, Harper puts out a hand. “Do you care to dance?”
I unbuckle the other side of my breastplate and toss it onto the chair with my bracers. Her hand slips into mine, and suddenly we are face-to-face, with bare inches of space between us.
Her other hand lifts, but I hesitate.
“We don’t have to,” she says. “I really just brought you here to protect you.”
My pride flinches. “It is I who should be protecting you.”
“You’ve been doing that for a while. Maybe it’s my turn.”
I take her hand and move it to my shoulder, then step into her space until my hand falls at her waist.
As hiding goes, I do not mind it as much as I thought I would.
She is as tense as she was on the cliff at Silvermoon. I smile, bemused. “Is dancing truly so different in Disi?”
“Most people don’t really dance. We more … sway.”
“Show me.”
She moves closer, letting go of my hand. Her arms settle on my shoulders. “You put both your hands on my waist.”
I do, and she begins to move. We sway, I suppose, our feet shuffling from side to side.
“Amazing,” I say. “What wonders we have yet to learn from your people.”
She swats me on the arm. “Don’t mock it. I told you I’m a terrible dancer.”
“I am not mocking,” I say. “This is indeed … something.”
“It’s not always this stiff,” she says. “If a girl likes a boy she’ll rest her head on his shoulder.”
“Does this girl like this boy?” My voice is light, teasing like hers was, but my question is genuine.
Her blush deepens and her eyes sparkle in the light from the fire. She says nothing, but then she moves closer, until her body is against mine, and her head falls on my shoulder.
Lilith’s torture has nothing on this.
When Harper speaks, her breath is warm against my collarbone. “There has to be a way to defeat her, Rhen.”
“If there is, I have not yet found it.”
“You can stay with me from now on,” she says. “Or I can stay with you. Whatever. But you don’t have to keep facing her alone.”
“I’ll stay tonight.”
“Every night.”
I do not wish to argue. There will come a night when she will not want me to stay with her. There will come a night when I will put her in more danger than Lilith herself would.
I brush my lips against Harper’s forehead. “I will stay as long as you wish.”
One night becomes two.
Two become seven.
Each night, I lie awake in Harper’s bed, three feet of space between us, her quiet breathing taunting me with sleep that refuses to overtake me. I lie in tense silence, every snap of the fire or creak of the floor assuring a visit from Lilith.
Since I have joined Harper in her room, the enchantress has not reappeared.
By the eighth night, my body’s needs take over and a deep sleep finds me. I awake to find Harper has shifted against me in the night, soft and warm at my side, her hair a wild spill of curls against the pillow. I am tempted to touch her, to stroke my fingers along her skin, but I felt her hesitation when my fingers traced her face.
She trusts me. I trust her. This feels more monumental than love. More precious. More earned. I keep my hands to myself.
Harper has fallen into the role of princess better than I could have anticipated. She is compassionate and kind to everyone she meets, a direct contrast to the royal family of Ironrose in the past. My sisters would have closed themselves away in the castle, but Harper is always with my people, always listening, always learning. Determined to be independent, she insists on training with the soldiers, throwing herself into their routines without hesitation. They believe her limp is the result of a war injury, but Harper is quick to correct them. “I was born this way,” she’ll snap, “and I’m going to die this way, so teach me to work around it.”
They love her for it.
At night, when the soldiers retire, she seeks out Grey—or more often now, Zo. They throw knives until she has mastered her aim. They spar with daggers or fists or both at once. When her guards are not available, she brings me a quiver and bow and says, “Come on. Show me how to shoot.” Muscle has begun to form on her frame, a warrior replacing the skinny girl who appeared in my drawing room so many weeks ago. Some nights we lie in her bed together and she tells me about her life in Disi. I hear how much she cares for her brother, how deep his worry runs for her—likely an equal depth to that of my feelings of guilt about trapping her here. I learn of Jake’s secret romance with a boy named Noah, of Harper’s uncertainty over this secret her brother kept from her. She tells me about her mother, and the illness ravaging her body.
She tells me about her father, and the mistakes he made.
In turn, she asks about my family, and at first, I’m reluctant to get lost in the memories. I tell her secrets about my sisters, about how my father was never faithful to my mother, how the castle staff would gossip about us. I whisper my fears of how I will never live up to the man my father was, how tenuous this control feels, as though it may slip out of my grasp at any moment.
I reveal far more than I ever have, to any girl.
A feeling has begun to grow in my chest, blossoming so slowly I almost do not notice it. It is not love, not yet, because that seems too far outside my grasp. It is more than lust and attraction, though. Something deeper. Something more real.
Retired officers and private soldiers have joined our forces, lending me desperately needed support and building loyalty. The castle churns out food for my people—the more we take out of the kitchens, the more that appears there. Two messengers arrive home, bringing news that regiments do stand at the southern borders, and that they will send half their forces to Ironrose. True soldiers, not new recruits.
All to save a country that may not have a ruler in a few weeks.
The change grows nearer by the day. An undercurrent of worry has built a camp in the castle, as my gathered subjects wait for the monster to rematerialize.
Time marches on, and so does the curse.
I’ve been expecting failure for weeks now, for this plan to collapse around me, for my people to turn on me and Harper and overrun the castle. When I am not worrying about Lilith, I worry about a military coup or Karis Luran’s soldiers slaughtering my people.
The only time I forget is at night, when the bedroom is dark and the fire snaps and the world seems to melt away.
When Zo plays music outside Harper’s door, and we sway.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
HARPER
Rhen always wakes before I do—and he’s usually gone before sunlight creeps through my window. By the time I’m dressed and fed each morning, he’s been up for hours, meeting with his new generals or taking stock of the growing army. As weeks pass, he introduces me to nobles who have ridden to the castle, but I can barely keep track of the people living here.
Rhen, of course, knows them all. Some are clearly allies to his family, while others must smell blood in the water, because they dig at him for information about his father, the king, and try to interrogate me about Disi. After what happened in Hutchins Forge, Rhen is more cautious, but still as smooth with his people as he is with me over cards: all precision and strategy. When I flounder with the people, he says the right things to build them up or knock them down.
If I weren’t lying right beside him at night, I’d say he never sleeps. I can’t believe I once thought him lazy and arrogant.
Tonight, Rhen is having dinner with Micah Rennells, an older
man who was a trade adviser to Rhen’s father. I was prepared to join him, but Rhen told me it would be a boring meal full of false flattery and he felt certain I could entertain myself more effectively.
So I am. Zo and I are swinging swords while Grey offers instruction.
Well, Zo is swinging a sword. I’m sweating through my clothes and learning that swordplay might not be my thing. I just can’t move quickly enough. My balance is lacking. Much like with ballet, this is more of a struggle than it should be.
After an hour, I put up a hand to stop, because otherwise I’m going to vomit in the dirt of the arena.
“You can tell me,” I say to Zo. “This isn’t my thing, is it?”
She smiles. “We can try again tomorrow.” She puts out a fist.
I grin and hit it with my own.
“Take the training blades to the armory,” Grey tells her. “Then relieve Dustan in the hall. I will escort the princess to her chambers.”
“Yes, Commander.” She offers a salute, then gathers the weapons to do as ordered.
Grey wordlessly pours me a glass of water at the table by the railing. I drain the whole glass in one swallow.
He gives me a look and holds out a fist.
I blush and hit it with my own. “It’s a custom in Disi.”
“I see.” He refills the glass. “You and Zo have become friends.”
“We have,” I agree. Freya has become a kind of surrogate mother, but Zo is becoming the friend I’ve always wanted. Sometimes late at night, when Rhen is asleep and she’s stationed outside my door, I’ll sneak out into the hallway and we’ll gossip about the silly posturing of the guardsmen or whatever frivolous request a noblewoman might make of Rhen. She’ll tell me how her mother forced her into an apprenticeship with the Master of Song in Silvermoon to settle a debt, and she does an impressive imitation of the man’s blustering. She does an even better impression of Grey, one that made me laugh so hard we woke Freya’s children. We have to giggle in whispers because I don’t want Rhen to find out and put someone more boring outside my door, but I suspect he might know and doesn’t care.
A Curse So Dark and Lonely Page 27
