Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Eight: The Long Table

POV: Elara Voss

Bex came to dress me on the seventh day, which should have told me something was wrong before she said a single word, because in seven days no one had cared what I looked like beyond alive and breathing.

"There's a dinner," she said, laying out a gown the color of a bruised plum across my bed like it might bite her. "Court dinner. Full attendance. The King requested you be brought down."

"Requested, or Draven's idea of a test?"

Bex's mouth twitched not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one that had learned not to finish forming. "Does it matter? You're going either way."

It mattered to me. I'd learned enough in a week to know that everything in that castle wore two faces, and the trick to surviving it was working out which face was actually looking at you before you answered anything.

The great hall, when Bex walked me into it, was nothing like the cold stone corridors I'd grown used to. Firelight everywhere, long tables groaning under more food than Thistlewood saw in a season, and easily forty people I'd never met, all of whom turned to look at me with the particular, practiced blankness of a court that has learned exactly how much interest is safe to show in anything.

Kael sat at the head of the table, and something in my chest loosened slightly just seeing him — steadier than I expected, given how raw he'd looked on the cliff path three days before. He rose when I entered. I hadn't expected that either.

"Lady Voss," he said, formal enough for the room, warm enough that I caught the difference and knew he'd meant me to. "You'll sit beside me."

A ripple went through the hall at that small, contained, the particular kind of silence that speaks louder than any gasp could. I felt eyes settle on me from every direction as I crossed the floor, and I understood, walking that short distance, that I had just been handed a target dressed up as an honor.

Draven's seat was on Kael's other side, and his eyes found mine the moment I sat, flat and assessing, the way they'd been the very first hour I'd crossed the gate.

"An unusual seating," he said, mild enough that only someone listening for the blade under it would have caught the edge.

"An unusual guest," Kael said, and didn't elaborate, and the conversation moved on around us the way court conversation does bright, brittle, careful to never once land anywhere honest.

It was two courses in when the woman across from me leaned forward, smiling with all her teeth and none of her eyes. She wore Veyloth colors woven subtly into the trim of her sleeve, gray-blue thread easy to miss unless you'd spent a childhood in a border village learning to spot exactly that shade at a glance.

"Thistlewood," she said, testing the word like she was deciding whether to believe it. "Such a small, forgettable place to produce someone who's captured the King's attention so quickly. I confess I'm curious what qualities recommended you."

"I'm told I traded well for a lottery stone," I said. "Beyond that, I couldn't say what recommends me. You'd have to ask him."

A ripple of quiet laughter, quickly smothered, and the woman's smile thinned by a fraction. "Lady Renata," she said. "Envoy from Veyloth's border court. We're always so interested in Ashgrave's tithes. It isn't often the lottery produces someone quite so... composed."

"I've had a difficult week to practice on."

Kael's hand found mine under the table then, brief and firm, a warning and a steadying both at once, and I understood a half-second too late that I'd stepped exactly where Draven had warned me not to into the open, in front of a Veyloth envoy, matching wits like I had nothing to hide when the whole hall already suspected I might.

"Lady Renata," Kael said, easy, unhurried, though I felt the tension coiled under the hand still resting near mine, "was just leaving, I believe. Her escort's been waiting in the yard the better part of an hour."

"Was I." Renata's smile didn't waver, but something behind it sharpened. "How generous of you to remember my schedule better than I do, Your Majesty." She rose, smoothing her skirts, and her eyes cut back to me one last time — not hostile, exactly. Cataloging. The way you'd look at a lock you intended to come back and pick later. "A pleasure, Lady Voss. I do hope Ashgrave treats you kindly. Its history with tithes has been... variable."

She left with her retinue trailing after her, and the hall exhaled as one body the moment the great doors shut behind her, conversation rushing back in to fill the space her presence had hollowed out.

Draven leaned across Kael the second she was gone, voice pitched low and furious. "She'll have that exchange in a letter to her court by morning. A tithe girl trading barbs with a foreign envoy at the King's own table, do you understand what that looks like from Veyloth's side? It looks like exactly the kind of confidence a spy would have."

"I'm not a spy."

"I know that," Kael said, quiet, before Draven could answer. "I've known that since the second night."

Draven's jaw worked. "Then it doesn't matter what you know, brother. It matters what Veyloth chooses to believe, and Renata just watched a lottery girl hold her own at a royal table like she'd been raised to it. That's not nothing. That's a story, and stories are the only currency that border court trades in."

He left the table without waiting for a response, and I watched him go with a strange, unfamiliar guilt settling low in my stomach not for anything I'd said, but for the shape of the danger I hadn't fully understood I was standing in until just now.

"He's not wrong to worry," Kael said quietly, once the worst of the hall's attention had drifted elsewhere. "Veyloth's wanted Ashgrave weak for longer than either of us has been alive. A curse that keeps me tied to this castle every full moon is the softest target they've had in two centuries, and they know it."

"Then why bring me down here at all? Why give them a story to carry home?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer. When he did, his voice had dropped low enough that it belonged only to me, under the noise of forty other conversations.

"Because I've spent ten years hiding every person who mattered to me from this table, and it's cost me every single one of them anyway, one way or another. I'm tired of it, Elara. I'm tired of deciding, before anyone gets the chance to matter, that they're too dangerous to be seen with." His eyes found mine, steady despite the risk written plainly across his own admission. "I'd rather Veyloth have a story about a girl who held her own than the truth about what you make me feel when you walk into a room."

The hall went on bright and loud and careful around us, and I sat very still beside a cursed king who had just told me, in front of forty watching strangers, that he'd decided I was worth the danger of being seen and understood, with a lurch that had nothing to do with fear, that I had stopped, sometime in the last seven days, wanting to be anywhere else.