Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Eighteen: What the Morning Cost

POV: Elara Voss

We buried our dead on the third morning after the battle, because Kael said the castle needed that long to stop shaking before it could properly grieve, and I understood, standing beside him at the edge of the cliffside plots where Ashgrave had laid its fallen for two centuries, exactly what he meant. Grief needs steady hands to hold it properly. Ours hadn't been steady yet.

Twelve graves, cut into ground that had taken twelve more before them in living memory and would, I suspected, take more again before this border ever knew a real peace. I recognized only two of the names, a stable boy who'd once shown me where the kitchens kept the good bread, and a guardsman who'd stood two posts down from me on the wall and gone quiet, mid-fight, in a way I hadn't let myself look at closely until it was over. The others belonged to a household I was still learning, one funeral at a time, which felt like its own kind of cruelty.

Draven spoke over each grave, a duty he'd apparently claimed for himself years ago and never once handed off, even to a king and I watched him do it with a steadiness that cracked, just slightly, on the ninth name, a young guard he'd trained himself, and understood that whatever hardness Draven wore like armor in every other room of that castle, this particular ground had never once let him keep it fully intact.

"He blames himself," I said quietly, once the last grave had been closed and the household had begun the slow walk back toward the gate. "For not catching Garrick sooner. For the wards failing at all."

"He blames himself for everything that happens inside these walls," Kael said. "He has since our father died and left him convinced that loving this family properly meant never once failing to protect it perfectly. I've told him, more times than I can count, that grief isn't proof of failure. He's never once believed me when I say it." His eyes found mine, tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "Perhaps he'll believe it from someone who isn't his brother."

I found Draven later that evening on the same stretch of wall he'd held during the siege, staring out at a treeline gone quiet again, and I didn't say anything at first, just stood beside him the way I'd learned, over these strange weeks, that some conversations needed silence before they could properly start.

"You fought well," he said eventually, not looking at me. "On the wall. I didn't expect that, the first hour I marched you through that gate. I expected a frightened girl who'd fold at the first sign of real danger, spy or otherwise."

"I surprised myself too, if I'm honest."

"You surprised all of us." He was quiet a moment longer. "I owe you an apology, I think. For the way I treated you, that first hour. I've spent ten years assuming the worst of everyone who walked through that gate because the worst has, more often than not, been exactly what walked through it. I wasn't wrong to be cautious. I was wrong about you specifically, and I've been slow to say so."

"You were trying to protect him. I understood that, even then."

"I'm still trying to protect him." Something shifted in his face, old grief finally given room to surface. "I've protected him from soldiers and spies and Veyloth's whole rotten court for ten years, and none of it ever once addressed the thing that was actually killing him slowly, which was being alone with this curse every single month with nobody willing to stay close enough to help carry it. You did what I never managed to do in a decade of trying. I don't know how to thank someone for that properly, so I'm settling for an apology instead, since it's the closest thing to honest I've got."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and Draven, apparently satisfied that the words had landed regardless, went back to watching the treeline in a silence that felt, for the first time since I'd met him, entirely companionable rather than suspicious.

It was Mira who found me last, two days after the funerals, waiting at the top of the catacomb stairs rather than in her usual chamber below, which told me before she said a word that something had changed in her too.

"The binding's settled fully now," she said, without preamble. "I can feel it in the stone. Wren's blood, properly returned to this bloodline after two hundred years of exile." She studied me with those clouded eyes, something new in her expression I hadn't seen before not quite surprise, closer to a long-overdue recognition. "You should know what you are now, little moon, beyond simply Wren's descendant. The binding doesn't only strengthen Kael's line. It wakes what's dormant in yours too."

"What does that mean."

"It means the wooden wolf your father carved without ever understanding why he loved carving it that instinct didn't come from nowhere. It means the warmth you felt every time your skin met Kael's, long before either of you understood what it was that wasn't only him recognizing you. That was you recognizing yourself, one piece at a time, without the language yet to name what you were finding." She reached for my hand, the same gesture from our very first meeting, except this time when her scarred fingers traced my palm, the warmth that answered came from somewhere inside me rather than from her touch alone. "You carry Wren's gift now, properly, not just her blood. It will take time to understand fully. I'd be a poor teacher if I promised you otherwise. But I would be glad, if you'd let me, to help you learn it the way I always meant to, the day you finally walked down those stairs and let me tell you the truth."

I thought of two hundred years of a witch's grief finally finding its proper ending, of my father's careful hands shaping wolves out of scrap pine without ever knowing the shape of the inheritance he was passing down, of every strange, unexplainable warmth I'd carried my whole life without a name for it until a clouded-eyed woman in a silver-lit chamber had finally given me one.

"I'd like that," I said. "Very much."

I found Kael that night on the cliff path, where he seemed to find his way whenever the weight of the last few days grew too heavy to carry indoors, and I came to stand beside him without a word, the way Draven and I had stood together on the wall two evenings before.

"Mira says I'm more than just Wren's blood now," I said eventually. "That the binding woke something in me too."

"I felt it," he said. "The night we did the ritual. I didn't have the words for it then, only the certainty that something had changed in both of us, not just me." He turned to look at me fully, the moon, full again, three weeks gone since the last one, and I understood with a small, private thrill that we were about to learn together whether the curse had truly held. "Are you frightened? Of what you're becoming?"

"A little," I admitted. "Mostly I keep thinking about my sister. About Thistlewood. I traded my life for hers at that gate never once imagining it would lead here to this castle, this curse, this entire history I never knew I was carrying." I looked out at the sea, black and endless under a moon climbing steadily toward its fullness. "I think I'd like to send word to her. Let her know I'm alive. Let her know what I've become, if I can find the words for it."

"Then we'll send word," Kael said, simply, like it was the easiest promise he'd ever made, and perhaps, compared to everything else the last month had asked of both of us, it was.

We stood together as the moon climbed higher, waiting, both of us, for the first sign of whether the change would come for him tonight the way it had come for every full moon of the last ten years and when the hour passed, and then another, and his body stayed exactly as it was, steady and human and whole beside me on that cliff path, I felt him exhale a breath I suspected he'd been holding, in one form or another, for a decade.

"It held," he said, wonder threading through every word. "Elara. It actually held."