Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Six: The Blood That Waited

POV: Elara Voss

I sat.

The stone bench was colder than it looked, cold enough to leach up through my skirts and settle into my bones, but I barely noticed it, because Mira had gone very still in the way of someone gathering two hundred years of silence into a shape small enough to hand across a table.

"Ashgrave wasn't always cursed," she said. "You know that much, I assume. Every village within three days' ride knows the shape of the story, even if they've forgotten the truth under it."

"A witch," I said. "Wronged by the first king. She cursed the bloodline to wear the wolf."

"Half of that is true, and the half that's true is the least important part." Mira's clouded eyes caught the silver light and held it, and for a moment I could have sworn I saw something moving in them, like weather behind glass. "Her name was Wren. She wasn't wronged by the King she loved him, and he loved her back, badly, the way men who've never had to earn anything tend to love. And when the court decided a witch wasn't a fit match for a crown, they didn't banish her. They killed her, in this castle, in a room not far from where you've been sleeping."

Something cold settled low in my stomach. "That's not the story they tell in Thistlewood."

"Thistlewood tells the story the crown wants told. It has for two centuries." Mira's scarred hands folded tighter in her lap. "Wren didn't curse the bloodline out of spite, little moon. She cursed it because it was the only power left to her in the moment she was dying, and dying people don't reach for spite. They reach for whatever will make the wrong thing matter. She bound the Ashgrave line to the wolf shape until one of their blood chose, freely, to love one of hers the way she should have been loved the first time without shame, without hiding, without a crown deciding it wasn't allowed."

"Then it should have ended already. Two hundred years is a long time for no one to have simply"

"Loved a witch's descendant?" Something that might have been a smile moved across Mira's ancient face, gone as quickly as it came. "There haven't been many of us left to love, child. Wren had a daughter before she died, hidden away, raised under a different name in a village so small it didn't survive to have its own history. That line has been thin and scattered and mostly unaware of itself for two hundred years buried under ordinary names, ordinary lives, no more magic left in most of them than a fondness for the moon and a habit of carving wolves out of scrap wood they never could explain."

The carved wolf. My father's careful hands, working scrap pine by firelight, a habit he said he'd learned from his own mother and never asked why he loved it so much. I felt the shape of it in my pocket even though I hadn't reached for it, felt the weight of every year of my life recontextualizing itself in the space of one held breath.

"No," I said. "That's not my family's from Thistlewood. Generations. There's no witch's line in Thistlewood, everyone knows everyone's"

"Everyone knows the names people are given," Mira said, not unkindly. "Not the ones history erased on purpose." She reached across the space between us slower than I expected, careful, the way you'd move toward something easily spooked and turned my hand palm-up in hers. The scars on her own fingers seemed to catch the light differently as she traced one careful line across my palm, and where she touched, warmth bloomed, faint and strange, like a coal remembering it used to be fire.

"There," she said, quiet. "You feel that. You've felt it before and told yourself it was nothing. The night you slipped a manacle and Kael Ashgrave's hand brushed yours."

My breath caught. I hadn't told her that. I hadn't told anyone that.

"How do you"

"Because I have been waiting to feel it for two hundred years, Elara Voss, and I would know that particular warmth in my sleep." Mira released my hand, and the warmth faded slower than it should have, lingering under my skin like an ember refusing to go fully dark. "You are Wren's blood. Thinned, buried, unaware of itself for six generations, but hers all the same. And the curse has been waiting this whole time not for any tithe, not for any sacrifice, but for one girl of that bloodline to walk into this castle and choose to stay."

"Choose." The word came out thinner than I meant it to. "You make it sound simple."

"It has never once been simple. That's precisely why it's taken two hundred years." Mira's clouded eyes found mine, and there was something almost fierce underneath the ancient stillness of her face. "The curse doesn't break because a witch's descendant sets foot in this castle. It breaks because she loves the man wearing it freely, fully, without being asked to, without a crown or a curse or a dying woman's grief deciding it for her. And it has to be him who lets himself be loved that way too, which is its own kind of impossible, because that man has spent ten years teaching himself not to want anything he can't lose safely."

I sat with that for a long moment, the silver light pooling and shifting around us, the weight of my father's careful hands and his careful wooden wolves settling into a shape I didn't yet know how to hold.

"You're not telling me this so I can decide whether to fall in love with him," I said slowly. "You're telling me because you think it's already happening."

Mira didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice had gone softer than I'd heard it yet, almost gentle. "I'm telling you because in four nights I heard you get out of a warm bed and walk toward the sound of a man screaming himself apart, when every soul in this castle who's ever loved him has learned to stay in their rooms and wait it out instead. That isn't nothing, little moon. Whatever it is, it isn't nothing."

I opened my mouth to argue, and found I didn't have the argument in me. Somewhere above us, through all that black stone, a bell began to toll the hour, or a summons, I couldn't tell which and Mira's clouded eyes flicked upward as though she could see straight through solid rock.

"Go," she said. "Before you're missed. And Elara" I stopped at the passage entrance, looked back at her sitting small and ancient and lit from nowhere in the center of that silver-pooled dark. "Say nothing of this to Draven. He loves his brother more fiercely than anyone in this castle, and fierce love makes people dangerous in ways gentle love never does. If he learns what you are before Kael does, I cannot promise what he'll choose to protect."

I climbed the crooked stairs back toward the ordinary dark of the upper castle with my father's wooden wolf pressed hard into my palm, and understood, for the first time since the lottery stones had gone cold in my hand, that I had walked into Ashgrave Castle carrying something far heavier than I'd ever been told.