BOUND TO THE ENEMY KING

I HAVE CONDITIONS

The council chamber smelled of old wood and nervous men.

I had never been inside it before. Handmaidens did not attend council sessions, we existed in the corridors outside them, refilling water jugs and pretending not to listen. But I had been brought here by a senior steward who had not met my eyes once during the walk over, which told me everything I needed to know about how this meeting was going to feel.

There were twelve of them around the long table. Lords, mages, military advisors in their dress uniforms. They looked up when I entered and then looked away, the way people look away from things that make them uncomfortable. I was familiar with that particular quality of not-looking. I had been on the receiving end of it for three years.

The king sat at the head of the table. He did not look away.

"Seren of the southern province of Aethmoor," the head mage said. He was old, white-haired, with the careful precise voice of someone who had spent a lifetime choosing words like weapons. "Daughter of the House Vael-Wyn, through your mother's line."

I had not heard my mother's family name spoken aloud in three years. It landed somewhere soft and unprotected and I kept my face perfectly still.

"Yes," I said.

"Are you aware of your bloodline's significance?"

"I'm aware my mother came from old southern stock, if that's what you mean."

A murmur around the table. I had not softened it into court-speak and they didn't like that. I didn't particularly care.

The head mage folded his hands. "The Hollowing is a curse of ancient origin. It is triggered when land is taken by conquest, by blood and fire, as the old texts describe." A pause in which no one looked at the king and everyone was aware of not looking at him. "The curse will consume this kingdom entirely within one year. Crops, water, livestock. Eventually the people."

The room was very quiet.

"There is one remedy," he continued. "Documented in texts older than this kingdom. The conqueror and a true-blooded daughter of the conquered must willingly bind their fates together and complete three sacred rites at the old sites across the afflicted land. All three. Willingly." He emphasized the word like it meant something. "The ritual cannot be forced. Both parties must consent freely or it will not hold."

I looked at the table. At the grain of the wood. At my own hands resting against my skirt.

So that is why I am here.

"We have made inquiries," another man said, a lord, broad-shouldered, with the look of someone delivering bad news he was glad wasn't his problem. "The surviving noble daughters of the southern provinces have been located and contacted. Three could not be found. Two refused." A pause. "One agreed but the binding ritual rejected her, the mages believe her lineage was not pure enough to satisfy the curse's conditions."

"Which leaves you," the head mage said to me.

I raised my eyes from the table. "How long have you been looking?"

Silence.

"How long," I said again, "before you thought to look at the girl who has been scrubbing your floors for three years?"

More silence. The uncomfortable kind.

"Seren." The king's voice. I turned to look at him, which I tried never to do directly if I could help it, because looking at him directly required more composure than most things. "You are under no obligation. The choice is yours entirely."

"You need me," I said.

"Yes."

"The kingdom dies without this."

"Yes."

"And my people are in this kingdom." I said it flatly, not as a question. "They've been in it since you made it yours. They're dying alongside your crops and your rivers."

Something shifted in his expression. Almost imperceptible. "Yes."

I looked around the table at the twelve men who had not thought to look at me for three years and then needed me the moment the land itself called for reckoning. I thought about the garden gone black overnight. I thought about the child who was born silent that morning into a world that was rotting.

I thought about my mother wrapping bread in a burning kitchen, telling me to run.

"I have conditions," I said.

Another murmur. The broad-shouldered lord looked affronted. I ignored him.

"Name them," the king said.

"My people in the southern provinces receive aid from the royal stores immediately. Before we leave. Not promised, delivered." I held up a second finger. "I am no longer addressed as handmaiden in this palace or anywhere else for the duration of this, whatever this is. I have a name." A third finger. "And when this is done, however it ends, I walk away free. No service. No obligations. No gilded cage with a different lock on it."

The room was very still.

The king looked at me for a long moment. His expression was unreadable in the way it always was, but there was something underneath it that I couldn't name, something that might have been, if I were inclined to be generous, which I was not, something like respect.

"Agreed," he said. "All three."

A lord at the far end of the table leaned forward. "Your Majesty, we haven't discussed,"

"All three," Aldric said again, quiet and final, and the lord sat back.

I nodded once. Turned back to the head mage.

"Tell me about the rites," I said.

The binding ritual was performed at dusk in the palace courtyard, with the mages arranged in a circle and the sky above us the color of a bruise.

They had me and the king stand facing each other, close enough that I could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, the way his jaw was set. He held his hands out, palms up, and I placed mine on top of them because the mage told me to, and I stared at a point somewhere past his left ear and thought about the grain of the council table.

The head mage spoke in the old tongue. I caught fragments, words my mother's mother had used, worn smooth with age. Land and bone. Blood and breath. What is taken, what is owed.

The thread appeared between our wrists like something that had always been there and was only now visible. Golden, finer than silk, pulsing with a low steady light. I felt it before I saw it, a warmth at my wrist, then a hum, like a second heartbeat that wasn't mine.

I looked down at it.

Then I looked up at him.

He was already looking at me. His expression, for once, was not composed. He looked like a man who had just understood the full weight of something he'd agreed to before he understood it.

Good, I thought. Now we matched.

"The binding holds," the head mage said. "You have one year from this night."

Neither of us spoke.

The courtyard emptied slowly around us, mages and lords and stewards filtering back into the warm palace interior, until it was just the two of us standing in the cooling dark with a golden thread between our wrists and a dying land in every direction.

"We leave at first light," Aldric said.

"I know."

"Is there anything you need before then?"

I thought about it. About my small room and my sleeping mat and three years of careful, controlled survival. About everything I was walking away from, which was not much, and everything I was walking toward, which was worse.

"No," I said.

I went inside without looking at him again.

I did not sleep at all that night, not because of the dream, for once, but because I lay on my mat in the dark and pressed my hand against my wrist where the thread had been and felt it still, faint and warm and patient, and thought:

What have I agreed to.