Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Four: The Feral Hour

POV: Elara Voss

Nobody told me the full moon was three days away. I found out the way I found out everything in that castle — the hard way, alone, in the dark, with no one willing to look me in the eye long enough to warn me first.

It started with the servants.

I noticed it the way you notice weather changing before you can name what's different about the air — a tightening in the corridors, doors closing a half-second faster than they had the day before, voices dropping when I passed like the walls themselves had started listening harder. Bex, who'd brought my meals without a word for two days straight, set my tray down on the third morning and didn't let go of it right away.

"You should stay in your chamber tonight," she said. Not a suggestion. An instruction dressed up as one, the way all the real instructions in that castle were.

"Why?"

"Just — stay in. Bar the door if you have one. You don't." She said that last part like it troubled her, like she'd only just realized it and didn't like what it meant. "Stay near the window instead. Don't go toward the lower stairs."

"Bex. Why?"

She looked at me then, and for the first time since I'd arrived, the pity in her face had company — something closer to fear, old and practiced, the kind you carry so long it stops looking like fear on your face and starts looking like exhaustion instead.

"It's the moon," she said finally, quiet enough that I had to lean in to catch it. "Three nights from now. You'll want to be as far from the lower levels as this castle allows."

She left before I could ask anything else, and I spent the rest of that day turning the words over, running my thumb along the edge of them the way I used to run my thumb along the carved wolf in my pocket, trying to find the shape of what she wasn't saying.

I didn't have to wait three days to understand.

I woke that first night to a sound I will never, as long as I live, be able to fully describe, because language wasn't built for it. Not a howl — I'd braced for a howl, had steeled myself against it the way you steel yourself against a storm you can hear coming. This was worse. This was a man's voice, unmistakably a man's voice, tearing itself apart trying to become something else, caught in the half-second between two shapes and unable to finish becoming either one.

It came from below me. Far below, through stone thick enough that I shouldn't have been able to hear anything at all, and the fact that I could hear it that clearly told me more about what was happening down there than any warning Bex could have given me.

I sat up in the dark, chain looped loose and forgotten around my wrist, and I did not go back to sleep.

The sound came again an hour later, and this time there was a word buried in it — one word, torn nearly past recognition, and it took me three repetitions to understand what he was saying.

Stop.

He was telling himself to stop. Begging the thing happening to him to stop, and it wasn't listening, and nobody in this entire castle full of wolves and soldiers and a court that whispered instead of spoke was going to go down there and help him, because I understood, with a cold certainty that settled into my chest and stayed there, that there was nothing to be done. This was the curse. This was what Bex had been warning me about. This was the thing every story in Thistlewood had tried and failed to capture, because no story could survive being that accurate about a man screaming himself into a monster three floors beneath where I slept.

I thought about the gentleness of his hands closing that manacle two nights before. Loose enough to slip free. I'm not going to hurt you. I thought about the way he'd looked at the chain like it disgusted him more than it could ever disgust me, and I thought about the fact that the man who'd said those words was, at that exact moment, somewhere below me, becoming something that made even his own guards refuse to go near.

I got out of bed.

I want to be honest about why, because I've told this part of the story to people since and they always assume it was courage, or love — and it wasn't either yet, not that night. It was closer to fury. Some ugly, protective thing had woken up in me hearing that voice beg itself to stop, and it didn't care that I had no business being awake, let alone moving toward the sound instead of away from it.

The corridor outside my chamber was empty. Every torch burned lower than usual, like even the fire in this castle knew to make itself small tonight. I made it as far as the top of the spiral stair before a hand closed around my arm hard enough to bruise, and I spun expecting Bex, or a guard, and found Draven instead, his eyes gone gold and strange in the dark, breathing like he'd run the length of the castle to catch me.

"Where," he said, each word bitten off short, "do you think you're going."

"I heard —"

"You heard nothing. You're going to go back to your chamber, and you are never, under any circumstance, going to walk toward that sound again, do you understand me?" His grip didn't loosen. If anything it tightened, and beneath the anger in his face I saw something else — something that looked almost like grief, badly hidden. "That is my brother down there. That is my king, and there is nothing on this earth that gets to watch him like that, do you hear me? Nothing."

"I wasn't trying to watch. I was trying to —"

"To what? Help him?" A short, humorless sound tore out of him, not quite a laugh. "There is no helping him. There has never once been helping him. There is only enduring it until dawn, and you will do your enduring from your chamber, where you belong, or so help me, sacrifice, spy or not, I will chain you there myself."

He didn't wait for an answer. He turned me bodily toward my corridor and did not release my arm until the door had shut between us, and I stood there in the dark with my heart going too fast and that terrible, wordless scream still echoing somewhere under my feet, and understood, for the first time, exactly what kind of curse I'd been given to.

It didn't stop until near dawn. I sat by the window the whole time, the way Bex had told me to, and I did not sleep, and somewhere around the fourth hour I stopped being afraid of the sound and started being afraid of something else entirely the shape of the question forming in my chest, low and insistent and impossible to unthink once thought.

What if no one has ever actually tried to help him.