BOUND TO THE ENEMY KING

THE SMELL OF NOTHING

I knew something was wrong before anyone said a word.

It was the smell.

I had grown up in the south, where the land was soft and dark and smelled of turned earth and river grass even in winter. Northern soil was different, harder, drier, a cleaner scent. I had spent three years learning to ignore the difference, because noticing it made my chest do things I couldn't afford.

But that morning, carrying the breakfast tray down the eastern corridor, I smelled neither.

What I smelled was nothing. A hollow, airless absence, like the inside of an old tomb. Like something that had once been alive and wasn't anymore.

I stopped walking.

Down the hall, one of the kitchen girls was leaning out of an open window, and even from a distance I could see that her face had gone the wrong color.

"Close the window," I said.

She turned to look at me. Her mouth was open.

"Yva." I set the tray on the nearest surface and crossed to her. "Close the..."

I looked out the window and stopped.

The palace gardens had been green yesterday. I knew because I had looked at them the way I always looked at growing things, carefully, a little desperately, the way you look at something that reminds you of home.

They were not green now.

Every plant, every shrub, every climbing rose on every trellis had gone black overnight. Not the black of frost damage or disease, I had seen both. This was something older. Something final. The flowers had not wilted. They had simply stopped, mid-bloom, as though the idea of living had been removed from them between one breath and the next.

And it was spreading. Even as I watched, the blackness crept along the garden wall and touched the ivy there, and the ivy went dark and still.

"Holy gods," Yva whispered.

I said nothing. Something cold was moving through me that had nothing to do with the morning air.

I had heard of this. Not clearly, it was the kind of knowledge that lived in the old stories, the ones the southern elders told around fires when they thought the children were asleep. A curse as old as the land itself, they said. A punishment written into the earth by the first gods, for those who took what was not theirs to take.

The Hollowing.

I had never believed it was real.

I pulled the window shut and picked up my tray and walked the rest of the way to the queen's chambers on legs that felt like someone else's, and I did not allow myself to think about what I'd seen, and I did not allow myself to feel the terrible, traitorous thing that was uncurling somewhere beneath my ribs.

Something that felt, shamefully, like recognition.

Like the land was doing what I had wanted to do for three years and never let myself.

By midmorning the palace was in chaos.

I moved through it the way I had learned to move through everything here, quietly, at the edges, carrying things and arranging things and being useful enough to remain invisible. It was remarkable, how much you could hear when people had decided you weren't worth noticing.

The royal mages had been summoned. The council was in emergency session. Messengers were arriving from the outer provinces with reports that made the receiving steward go grey-faced and silent.

The rivers, someone said. Running black since dawn.

The livestock, someone else said. Won't eat. Won't move.

A child in the lower city, born that morning. Silent. Wouldn't cry.

I set a fresh candle in the corridor sconce and kept my eyes forward and filed every word away.

It was not until I was collecting linens from the second floor that I turned a corner and nearly walked directly into the king.

I stepped back. Dropped into the low courtesy that had been drilled into me in my first month of service. Eyes down. Hands folded.

"Handmaiden." His voice was what it always was, low, even, revealing nothing.

"Your Majesty."

A pause. I kept my eyes on the floor. I had perfected the art of looking at his boots and nothing above them, which meant I knew he wore plain leather, no ornament, and that he walked more quietly than a man his size should.

"Look up."

My jaw tightened. I looked up.

Aldric of Vael was not what the southern stories had made him. The stories had described a monster, and I understood why, what he had done was monstrous, but the man himself was simply a man. Sharp-featured, dark-eyed, a quality of stillness about him that I had once mistaken for coldness and had since decided was something more complicated. He was watching me now with an expression I couldn't read, which was usual.

What was not usual was that he looked tired.

"You've heard," he said. It was not a question.

"I hear very little, Your Majesty," I said. "I'm just a handmaiden."

Something moved through his eyes. He knew exactly what I was doing. He always seemed to know, which I found deeply inconvenient.

"The mages have identified the affliction," he said. "They're calling it the Hollowing."

My hands stayed folded. My face stayed still.

"They say it requires a specific remedy." A pause. "We'll be speaking to the senior staff this afternoon. You'll attend."

"Of course."

He looked at me for a moment longer than necessary. Then he moved past me down the corridor and I stood very still until his footsteps faded, and then I pressed the stack of linens against my chest like a shield and breathed.

He had come to tell me himself.

He hadn't needed to do that. A steward could have summoned me. He had walked to this corridor and told me directly, and I did not know what to do with that, so I chose, as I chose with most things I didn't know what to do with, to do nothing at all.

I finished collecting the linens.

I did not let myself think about the garden, or the rivers, or the silent child in the lower city.

I did not let myself think about the look on the king's face.

I went back to work.