Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Two: The Wolf's House

POV: Elara Voss

The gate didn't creak. That was the first wrong thing.

Everything about Ashgrave Castle should have groaned, should have sounded as old and hungry as it looked but the iron portcullis rose in total silence, like the castle had learned a long time ago not to announce anything it was doing. I stepped through into a courtyard of black stone slick with sea-damp, and the gate came down behind me with a sound like a verdict.

Nobody screamed. Nobody chained me on sight. For one absurd second I almost laughed, because some small, stupid part of me had been braced for violence the moment I crossed the threshold, and instead there was just... a courtyard. Guards drilling in a far corner. A boy hauling water. The ordinary machinery of a household, except every person in it moved like they were listening for something none of the rest of us could hear.

"Move," the scarred soldier said, and I moved.

He walked me across the yard fast enough that I had to work to keep pace, past a well, past a row of black-leaved hedges trimmed into shapes I didn't have time to identify, toward the main doors and that was when the wolf came down the steps to meet us.

I knew immediately he wasn't the King. There was a coiled, restless violence to him, but it sat on the surface, all teeth and no weight behind the eyes not the bone-deep exhaustion I'd expect from a man cursed for two hundred years. He was younger, dark-haired, built like an argument waiting to happen, and he stopped three steps above me so he could look down the length of his nose without having to bend his neck to do it.

"This is her?" he said, to the soldier, not to me. As if I were cargo that had opinions but not the standing to voice them.

"Elara Voss. Thistlewood's tithe."

"The record said Lyssa Voss."

"She traded."

Something moved behind his eyes at that not sympathy, something colder and more useful-looking, like a man filing away a fact he intended to use later. Then he finally looked at me, and I understood, in the space of one held breath, that this man had already decided what I was before I'd said a single word to him.

"Draven Ashgrave," he said. "Beta of Duskmoor. My brother's Head of Guard when Soren's occupied elsewhere, which is often." He came down the last three steps slowly, circling me the way you'd circle a horse you suspected of being lame. "Do you know what a lesser sacrifice is for, girl?"

"To buy my village a season of peace."

"That's what the villages are told." His voice had gone soft, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted. "It's also, historically, the easiest way to get a spy inside these walls. A frightened orphan girl nobody will miss. Sympathetic. Forgettable." He stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tip my chin up to hold his eyes. "Veyloth has tried it before. Twice. I buried what was left of the last one myself."

My mouth had gone dry, but I would be damned if I let him see it. "I'm not a spy. I'm a girl from a village so far from any war you'd have to squint at a map to find it."

"That's exactly what a spy would say."

"So is anything I say, apparently, so I don't see the use in arguing."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth not quite a smile, more like the memory of one, quickly buried. Behind him, up on the steps, a woman in grey had appeared and was watching the exchange with the flat, professional patience of someone who'd seen this particular performance many times and had already guessed how it ended.

Draven leaned in close enough that I caught the low-banked heat coming off him, the way you feel a fire before you see it. "I'll be watching you, sacrifice. Every hour. Every corridor. The King is soft where you're concerned before he's even met you, and soft is how kings die." He straightened, and the warmth, if it had ever been there went out of his face entirely. "Take her up."

The woman in grey came down the steps and took my arm, not ungently, and steered me toward the doors before I could decide whether Draven's warning had been meant to frighten me or protect me. I still don't know, honestly. I've had two hundred pages of my life since that moment to think about it, and I still don't know.

The inside of Ashgrave Castle was colder than the yard, which I hadn't thought possible. Black stone corridors lit by torches that seemed to burn without giving off any real warmth, tapestries so old and dark I couldn't make out what they depicted except that they involved wolves, always wolves, teeth and moons and a woman in white who appeared and reappeared through the weave like she was being chased down the length of the castle by every artist who'd ever tried to capture her.

"Who is she?" I asked. "In the tapestries."

The woman in grey, I would learn later her name was Bex, though not that day didn't answer for three full strides. "You don't ask questions here," she said finally, quiet, not unkind. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. It's safer."

"Safer for who?"

She looked at me then, and there was something in her face I recognized immediately, because I'd been wearing a version of it myself since the lottery stones went cold in my hand. Pity. Genuine, weary pity, the kind you save for something you've already grieved.

"Safer for you," she said, and led me deeper into the castle without another word.

We climbed a staircase that spiraled up through the cliff-rock itself, torch-shadows lurching against the walls with every step, and the deeper we went up, though it felt like descending into something the more I became aware of a sound underneath the silence. A low vibration in the stone. Not quite a growl. Not quite anything I had a word for.

"What is that?" I whispered.

Bex's hand tightened on my arm. "The castle," she said, which wasn't an answer at all, and was somehow the most honest thing anyone had said to me since I'd crossed the gate. "Ashgrave's always making that sound. You get used to it."

I didn't believe her. I still don't, if I'm honest. There are some sounds you don't get used to. You just stop mentioning them.

At the top of the stairs was a single door, iron-banded, black wood gone almost silver with age, and Bex stopped in front of it with the particular stillness of someone who has walked another girl to this exact door before and is trying very hard not to think about what happened to her.

"This is the King's chamber," she said.

My whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the stone. "I thought, I assumed there would be some kind of court. A presentation. Something before"

"There isn't. Not for the tithe." She reached for the latch, and her hand was shaking, just slightly, just enough that I noticed. "I'm sorry," she added, so quietly I almost missed it, and I understood she meant it for whatever was about to happen to me, not for the fact of opening the door.

The door swung open on that same unnatural silence, and I stepped through into the King's chamber, and the last thing I heard before it closed behind me was Bex's footsteps retreating down the stairs at something very close to a run.