Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Seven: What the Moon Left Behind

POV: King Kael Ashgrave

The morning after a full moon, I do not leave my chamber until I am certain I remember how to be a man again.

It isn't vanity. It's mercy for whoever might cross my path in that first grey hour, when the shape of the wolf hasn't fully let go of me yet and my hands still don't feel entirely like my own. I sat by the window with my knuckles split and half-healed, watching the sea throw itself against the cliffs below Ashgrave, and tried to remember, the way I try every month, whether I'd screamed anything last night that mattered.

Draven told me. He always tells me, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jaw tight, like the telling itself costs him something.

"She tried to come down," he said, without preamble. "Third hour. I caught her at the stair."

I didn't need to ask who. There was only ever one she in this castle anymore that made Draven's voice go that flat and careful.

"You sent her back."

"I frightened her back, which was faster." He came further into the room, dropped into the chair across from mine without being invited, which was its own kind of message Draven has never once treated me like a king in private, and I have never once wanted him to. "Kael. I don't like this one."

"You don't like any of them."

"I don't like this one differently." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for a moment he looked older than he was, older than either of us should have had to look at thirty. "The others cower. They count days. This one walked toward the sound of you tearing yourself apart at three in the morning like she had half a mind to help. Nobody does that. Nobody has ever once done that."

I said nothing, because there was nothing safe to say. I had spent the entire feral hour of the night before in whatever fractured, animal awareness survives the change aware of exactly one heartbeat in this castle beating faster than fear alone accounted for, aware of it the way you're aware of warmth on a cold night, and I had hated myself for noticing it even as some starved, ancient part of me reached toward it anyway.

"Where is she now," I said.

"Kitchens, last I saw. Alive. Unharmed. No thanks to her own good sense." Draven's eyes narrowed. "You're going to go find her."

"I'm going to go make sure my Head of Guard didn't terrify a girl half to death for the crime of caring what happens to me."

"That's not what this is, and we both know it." He stood, and for a moment the anger in his face gave way to something rawer, something that looked, unbearably, like fear. "I have watched you close yourself off from every single person who's walked through that gate for ten years, and I understood it, Kael, I did better locked than loved and lost, better a monster on your own terms than a man who breaks someone else's heart along with his own body every full moon. I understood it. I'm asking you not to stop understanding it now, over one girl who happened to hear you scream and didn't run."

He left before I could answer him, which was, I think, deliberate. Draven has never once given me the chance to argue him out of caring, because he knows exactly how good I am at talking myself out of anything that might cost me.

I found her an hour later, not in the kitchens but in the east garden, standing at the edge of the cliff path with the wind pulling her hair loose from its braid, looking out at a sea she had no possible reason to find as endlessly interesting as she appeared to. She didn't startle when I came up beside her. I'd made certain of that — approached from where she could see me, the way you'd approach anything you didn't want to spook.

"You went looking for the lower stairs," I said.

"I heard you," she said, not looking away from the water. "Three nights of it. I'm not going to pretend I didn't, and I'm not going to apologize for wanting to know what was happening to a man two floors beneath my own bed."

"Draven caught you before you got close."

"Draven bruised my arm and told me I belonged in my chamber like I was a dog that had slipped its lead." Something flashed across her face, quick and sharp. "I understand he's protecting you. I even understand why. I don't particularly enjoy being handled while he does it."

I found, unexpectedly, that I wanted to laugh — an urge so foreign after a night like the one behind me that it took me a moment to recognize the shape of it. "He's protective. It's the closest thing to a virtue he's got, and he wears it like armor because he doesn't trust himself with the softer version."

"And you?" She turned to look at me then, wind-loosened hair whipping across her face, eyes very steady despite everything. "What do you wear yours like?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I have spent ten years making very sure I never had to find one, and standing there on that cliff path with the sea wind between us and her eyes not once looking away from mine, I understood, with a dread that had nothing to do with the moon, that I was no longer entirely certain the answer was nothing at all.

"Elara," I said, and stopped, because I didn't know yet what I meant to say after her name, only that I needed to say it, needed the shape of it in my mouth after a night of screaming everything else away.

She waited. She didn't fill the silence for me, which almost no one in this castle has ever had the courage to do, and somewhere in that waiting I felt the last of my carefully built distance start, very quietly, to come apart.