Her Highness, By Mistake

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 — Alric’s Curse

The sky above the Citadel was a sheet of gray steel, darkening by the hour. Clouds roiled like smoke behind the spires, and the copper-plated weathervane atop the western tower spun without direction. Rain hadn’t yet fallen, but the weight of it pressed heavy in the air—ominous and impatient.

Prince Alric stood in the window alcove of his solar, one gloved hand braced against the glass, the other clenched at his side. The leather was damp, stained a darker red where blood seeped from his palm. A shallow cut, accidental. Or so he told himself. But he hadn’t dropped the blade fast enough after sword practice, and the pain—sharp and hot—had offered a strange kind of clarity.

Behind him, the door opened without knock or announcement.

“You summoned me, Your Highness?” said Duke Valenhart, his voice as clipped and chill as the wind outside.

Alric didn’t turn. “I did.”

There was a pause. Valenhart’s boots clicked softly over the polished stone as he approached. “You rarely invite me here. In fact, you rarely speak to me at all.”

Alric’s gaze remained fixed on the distant gardens. The labyrinth of trimmed hedges, with its fading summer roses, had become a battlefield of dead petals and frost-bitten edges.

“I need answers.”

A soft breath, almost a scoff. “About?”

“The curse.”

Now Valenhart was silent. Alric finally turned to face him. The prince's jaw was tight, his eyes sharper than usual—not with anger, but with restrained desperation.

Valenhart crossed the room and poured two goblets of wine from a crystal decanter set on the carved oak sideboard. He offered one wordlessly, and Alric accepted it without sipping.

“I thought you didn’t believe in such superstitions,” the duke said.

“I believe in patterns,” Alric replied. “And pain.”

Valenhart raised a brow.

Alric tugged off the glove, revealing the thin red line across his palm. It had already begun to close, but the skin around it was flushed and irritated—as though the wound had roots deeper than flesh.

“It happens every time,” Alric murmured. “When I get too close. When I allow myself to want something—someone.”

Valenhart nodded once, solemn. “The soulburn. A mark of Selis’s vengeance. You bear it more acutely than your predecessors.”

“Why?”

“Because the bond grows stronger with each generation. Selis did not simply curse a line—she laced her own soul into it. Your pain is her memory.”

Alric set the goblet down untouched. “Then tell me everything.”

Valenhart leaned against the sideboard, his gaze distant, voice low. “Selis Valenhart lived more than two centuries ago. She was a soulbinder—a rare kind of mage, one born with the ability to see, feel, and alter the threads of fate that tether human souls. The Church feared her. The Crown tried to control her. But she belonged to neither.”

Alric listened in silence.

“She fell in love with a prince—one promised to another. Their affair was brief but intense, and when he abandoned her for political marriage, she swore to never let him forget her. Using soulcraft forbidden even in her time, she bound her essence to his bloodline.”

“She cursed the man she loved?” Alric asked quietly.

“She cursed herself first,” Valenhart replied. “Love turned to obsession. Obsession to grief. Grief to fire. Before she was executed, she vowed that no descendant of his line—your line—would find peace in love until her soul was restored and recognized.”

Alric’s brows drew together. “Restored how?”

“No one knows. That part was veiled. Some think she meant reincarnation. Others believe she foresaw her soul returning in another form—another body.”

There was a long, tense pause.

“And you think that body might be—”

“—Lady Elyanora,” Valenhart finished.

Alric didn’t deny it. He had felt it. From the first moment he’d looked into her eyes—eyes that flickered with too much intelligence, too much awareness—he had known she was not the noble girl he remembered from childhood.

“She has changed,” Alric murmured. “Her manner, her eyes, the cadence of her voice. She speaks like an outsider wearing the skin of a noblewoman.”

Valenhart’s expression darkened. “If she is the vessel, she may not even know it. Selis’s soul was never whole. Possession—true possession—is a slow thing. It begins in dreams. In mirror flickers. A shadow behind the eyes.”

Alric’s heart beat faster. He thought of the way Eira—Elyanora—had paused in the corridor yesterday, glancing into the glass pane of a torchlit window as though someone had whispered to her.

“You’ve seen the signs?”

Valenhart nodded. “And the Oracle confirmed my suspicions. She felt two pulses in one body. The past and the present tangled.”

Alric turned away again, staring out at the storm-dark sky. “Then why allow her to remain?”

“Because fate will have its way, whether we try to guide it or not. Removing her now may only awaken Selis fully. And if Selis rises, she will not be content with silence.”

Later that evening, a fire crackled in the hearth of Eira’s chamber. She sat cross-legged on the velvet chaise, a book open in her lap but unread. Mira had already helped her dress for bed—though sleep seemed like a laughable concept.

She hadn’t told anyone about the mirror.

Or the dream from the night before, where she stood on a battlefield soaked in ash and blood, watching a silver-eyed woman set the sky on fire with a single scream.

Selis. The name haunted her thoughts now.

Ever since the Oracle, her nights had grown stranger. The voices came when the candles flickered low. The reflections didn’t always match her movements. And Prince Alric—

Eira closed the book, pressing it to her chest.

Alric unnerved her. Not because he was cold or cruel—he wasn’t, not exactly—but because when he looked at her, she felt like he was peeling away her skin with his gaze. Seeing past Lady Elyanora. Past the pretense. Into something deeper.

And worse, she didn’t mind.

She had caught herself wondering what his touch might feel like, what his voice might sound like in softness, not steel. When their eyes met in court, her breath caught for reasons she couldn’t explain.

Except… she could.

Because something inside her recognized him.

"He was mine," whispered a voice she tried not to hear.

The flames in the hearth hissed, suddenly rising. Shadows danced along the walls. Eira stared into the glass of the dressing mirror across the room, heart in her throat.

A second face flickered over her own.

Silver eyes. Blood-red lips.

A smirk like a blade.

She blinked—and it was gone.

In the royal archive, beneath the east wing of the Citadel, Alric moved like a ghost among shelves of ancient vellum. Torches sputtered along the walls, casting long shadows between rows of dusty scrolls and forgotten records.

He shouldn’t be here.

But sleep had refused him. And something—something like instinct—had driven him to the restricted wing. To the old records of Selis Valenhart’s trial. To the testimonies. The drawings. The burned-out seal of the Council that had ordered her death.

She had been beautiful. He hadn’t expected that.

The sketches depicted a woman with waist-length hair like raven’s wings and the poise of a queen. Her eyes—despite the crude lines of ink—shone with unnerving clarity.

The final page was a letter. Scrawled in her own hand.

If I am bound by fire, then so shall he be.

If my heart is shattered, so shall his.

But when the wheel turns again—when soul finds soul across the divide—I will rise.

Not for vengeance. Not for love.

For justice.

Alric ran his fingers over the brittle parchment, his throat dry.

He remembered Eira’s voice—how it had trembled when she’d laughed. How she carried herself like someone balancing on a wire.

He had thought her simply odd. Now, he wondered.

Was she the justice Selis had spoken of?

Or the storm to come?

That night, before sleep claimed him, Alric sat by his chamber window and began to write a letter.

One he would never send.

To the one whose soul burns mine…

I don’t know who you are. Not truly. But I feel you when you’re near, like a memory I’ve never lived. Like a scar I was born with.

They say the curse is eternal. That love was never meant to bloom in fire.

But still I reach for you.

And still, I burn.