Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Three: A Monster's Mercy

POV: King Kael Ashgrave

I heard her before the door opened. I always hear them before the door opens the particular rhythm of a frightened heartbeat is not subtle to something with ears like mine, and I have had two hundred years of Ashgrave kings' worth of practice learning exactly what fear sounds like when it's being dragged up my own staircase.

Hers was wrong.

Not absent she was afraid, any sane person would be but underneath the fear there was something steadier, something that hadn't broken yet, and some old, starved part of me sat up at the sound of it the way a dog lifts its head at a familiar step.

I hated that part of myself. I have hated it for a decade.

I was standing at the window when the door opened, because I have learned, over many tithes and many girls, that it is easier for both of us if I am not looking directly at her when she first sees the chains. I heard her stop just inside the threshold. I heard the door click shut. I heard her breathing change not sob, not plea, just a long, controlled exhale, like she was steadying herself for something rather than breaking apart in front of it and that was the second wrong thing about her, and I noted it the way I note everything now, from a careful distance, because getting close to anything in this castle has only ever ended one way.

"You can look at the room," I said, without turning. "It won't bite. I make no promises about anything else in it."

"Is that meant to be funny?"

I turned around then, because I hadn't expected an answer, let alone that one dry, almost steady, delivered by a girl standing very straight in a doorway with a torn strip of red cloth tied around one wrist like she'd brought her own flag into enemy territory.

She was smaller than I expected. They're always smaller than I expect, and I don't know why that keeps surprising me, except that the stories that reach the villages about what happens in this room have grown so large over two centuries that I think everyone them and me both half expects the girl to arrive already monstrous, already matched to the thing she's being fed to.

Instead there was just a woman. Brown hair coming loose from its travel-braid, cheeks wind-burned from two days on the Blackwood Road, chin held at an angle I recognized because I have held my own jaw that exact way, every single time I have had to walk into a room and pretend I was not afraid of what waited inside it.

"Elara Voss," I said. Not a question. I'd had the name an hour before she arrived; Draven makes sure of that, makes sure I know exactly who's being fed to me before they cross the gate, as if advance warning has ever once changed what I do with them.

"That's me." Her eyes went, finally, to the bed to the chains bolted into the black iron frame, old and oiled and exactly as ugly as two hundred years of use had made them — and I watched her face do the thing every face does in that moment. The dropping. The bracing.

"I'm told," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it, "that you already know what this room is for."

"I've heard stories."

"Are they accurate?"

She looked at me properly then, for the first time really looked, the way almost none of them do, because almost none of them can make themselves hold a wolf's eyes for longer than a heartbeat. Mine aren't fully human even in this shape. I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago.

"I don't know," she said. "I was hoping you'd tell me before you did whatever it is the stories say you do."

Something in my chest did something complicated and unwelcome. I have not, in ten years of tithes, had one of them ask me that. Ask me anything, really, except to be spared, and I have nothing to give any of them on that count, so mostly I've stopped listening for questions at all.

"Come here," I said.

She came. Slowly, deliberately, chin still up, and I watched her measure the distance between us the way you'd measure the distance to a cliff edge, and when she was close enough I reached out and took the chain, not her, lifted it so the iron caught the torchlight, so she could see exactly what it was and what it wasn't.

"This is tradition," I said. "Every tithe, chained to this bed, for the length of the season. It is meant to remind the villages what they're giving, and it is meant to remind me" I stopped. I hadn't meant to say that part.

"Remind you of what?"

"That I'm owed something I have no right to take." I set the chain down. I did not touch her. I have never touched one of them, not once in ten years, though the whole court believes otherwise, has believed otherwise since the first year I sat this throne and understood exactly what was being handed to me and decided, in the space of one terrible night, that I would rather be called a beast for what I refused to do than become one by doing it. "So no. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not going to touch you. Whatever you were told about tonight, forget it. It isn't true, and it's never been true, though I've let the kingdom believe otherwise because the alternative is worse."

She stared at me. I watched suspicion war with something that looked almost like hope, and hope, on her face, was somehow harder to look at than the fear had been.

"Then why chain me at all?"

"Because if I don't, the court asks why, and the answer to that question is a great deal more dangerous to you than an unlocked chain." I picked the manacle up again, weighed it in my hand. "I'll close it loosely. You can slip your wrist free the moment I leave the room. Tell no one. Let them believe what they need to believe."

"And if someone checks?"

"No one checks. No one has ever wanted to be in this room badly enough to check." I said it flatly, and I watched her hear the loneliness under it despite my best effort to keep it out of my voice, watched her flinch slightly, not from fear this time.

I closed the manacle around her wrist — loose enough, as promised, the metal barely grazing skin and it was in that moment, close enough to catch the scent of frost and woodsmoke still clinging to her from the road, that her hand turned, just slightly, and her fingers brushed the back of mine.

It should have meant nothing. A accident of proximity, nothing more.

Instead something went through me like the moon calling early a heat, sudden and enormous, gone as fast as it came, and I stepped back so fast the chain rattled against the bed frame, and I saw in her face that she'd felt it too, whatever it was, and neither of us had a single word for it.

"What was that," she said. Not really a question. More like an accusation she didn't yet have the evidence to make.

"Nothing," I said, which was a lie, and I have told exactly two lies in this chamber in ten years, and both of them were to her, in the first ten minutes I knew her.

"You should run," I said instead, low, urgent, the words out of me before I'd decided to say them. "Tonight. While the household's still settling from the road. There's a gate on the east wall that isn't watched after midnight"

"And go where? Back to Thistlewood, so your soldiers can collect Lyssa instead?"

That silenced me. I hadn't thought that far. I never let myself think that far, about any of them, because thinking about where they'd go if they ran was a door I couldn't afford to open.

"Then anywhere," I said. "Anywhere that isn't chained to a curse that isn't yours to carry."

She looked at the manacle around her wrist, loose as I'd promised, and then at me, and something settled in her face that I would spend the following weeks trying, and failing, to name.

"I already made a choice at that gate," she said. "I'm not running from the next one just because the room turned out different than I expected."

She didn't know, then, what the wards on this castle did to anyone who tried to leave without my blood-sanction. She didn't know that even if she'd taken the gate, she'd have made it perhaps forty feet into the Blackwood before the forest itself turned her back, gently, inexorably, the way it always did.

I didn't tell her. I told myself it was because she'd find out soon enough and there was no use frightening her further.

The truth is I hadn't wanted her to leave. I have never once, in ten years, wanted one of them to stay.

I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the chair across from the bed and watched a stranger sleep in chains she could have slipped at any moment, and somewhere under my ribs, quiet and unwelcome and impossible to unfeel once felt, something that had been dormant since before I inherited this curse turned over once, and opened its eyes.