To Break A King's Curse

Zara I have a system for bad days. Three deep breaths before I get out of bed. One good thing identified before my feet hit the floor. Forward momentum from there — don't stop, don't look back, don't give the bad thing room to grow roots. I had been using this system for fifteen years and it had never once failed me. Today it failed me. The first sign was small. Dorian's side of the bed was cold — not the recently-vacated kind of cold that meant he'd risen early, but the settled, hours-old cold of someone who had never come home at all. I lay there for a moment with my hand flat against the empty sheet and filed this information away without examining it. He had late nights sometimes. Council functions ran long. There were a hundred explanations that didn't require me to sit up and start thinking. I sat up and started thinking. The second sign was less small. His jacket was on the chair in the corner — the one he'd worn yesterday, the one I'd watched him put on before he left for what he'd called a routine territorial briefing. The jacket was fine. The jacket was expected. The pale blue ribbon threaded through the buttonhole was not. I knew that ribbon. Everyone in the Ashenveil court knew that ribbon. It was the calling card of Lady Voss of the Third Territory — her personal seal, distributed to those she wished to mark as hers. Allies wore it on their lapels. Lovers wore it somewhere more private. Dorian had worn it through his buttonhole and left it on the chair in our shared room like he hadn't even thought to hide it. I sat with that for exactly as long as I could afford to — which was not long, because I had work and the royal archives didn't open themselves and three years of building something careful and quiet with a man I had believed in did not entitle me to fall apart on a Tuesday morning. Three breaths. One good thing: I still had my system. Forward momentum. I got dressed. I went to work. I did not cry, which I considered a significant personal achievement given the circumstances. I was two hours into cataloguing a collection of pre-war territorial maps when Seris appeared in the archive doorway with the expression she only wore when something had gone wrong and she wasn't sure how to say it. "Don't," I said, without looking up. "I haven't said anything." "You have the face." "What face?" "Seris." I set down the map I was holding. "Whatever it is, just say it." She came in and closed the door behind her, which was never a good sign. She sat across from me and folded her hands on the table in the careful way of someone organizing their thoughts into an order that would hurt least. "Dorian was seen last night," she said. "At Lady Voss's private residence." "I know." She blinked. "You know?" "He left evidence." I picked up the map again. "I'm fine." "Zara—" "I said I'm fine, Seris." She looked at me for a long moment with the particular expression of someone who knew me well enough to know that fine and fine were two very different things depending on how I said them. She let it go. For now. "There's something else," she said carefully. I looked up. "The king has called an emergency court assembly." She hesitated. "All staff. All territories. Everyone present in the palace by noon." I frowned. Emergency assemblies happened perhaps once a decade. They happened for wars, for deaths, for catastrophic territorial failures. "Do you know why?" Seris shook her head. But something in her eyes said she had heard things. Rumors had a specific velocity in a royal palace and Seris had always been good at catching them before they arrived officially. "What have you heard?" I asked. She was quiet for a moment. Then, "That it's about the king. About his health." She paused. "About the curse." The word landed in the quiet archive like a stone dropped in still water. I felt the ripples of it without fully understanding why. "The curse is a story," I said. "Old royal mythology." "Yes," Seris said. Then, very carefully, "except that it isn't." *** The assembly was held in the great court — a room so large that the voices of a hundred people gathered inside it still left space for echoes. I stood near the back with the other palace archivists, which put me behind three rows of guards and two rows of lesser nobility and one row of people who were technically above me in rank but had arrived late. I was good at finding the back of rooms. I had spent most of my life there. The king arrived without ceremony. No trumpets, no formal announcement — just the doors opening and Caelan Ozais of the Ashenveil bloodline walking to the front of the room like a man who had long since stopped requiring pageantry to command attention. I had seen him before, the way anyone who worked in the palace had seen him — at a distance, in passing, on formal occasions where he existed as a figure rather than a person. He was tall and dark-haired and had the specific quality of stillness that I had only ever seen in two kinds of people: those who were completely at peace and those who were containing something enormous. He was not, I suspected, completely at peace. He stood before the assembled court and looked at the room — not performing the look, just doing it, taking stock with the level attention of someone who was extremely meticulous — and then he spoke. "Seven months," he said. His voice was low but it carried perfectly. "I have seven months before the blood moon. You are all aware of what that means." Silence. "The curse is not a mythology," he continued. "My father died at thirty nine years and eleven months. His father at thirty nine years and eight months. The pattern is documented. It is real. And I am thirty nine years and five months old." I became aware that I was holding my breath and released it carefully. "My fated mate has not been found," he said. "My search has been ongoing for eleven years. Someone in this room, or connected to someone in this room, has been ensuring that search fails." His gaze moved across the assembled faces, steady and unrushed. "That ends today." A ripple moved through the crowd. I felt it pass through me too — something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite recognition but lived somewhere between them. "I will find her," he said simply. "Whatever it takes." He turned and walked out. The room erupted around me. Voices everywhere, the specific noise of a court in shock. I stood in the back and felt something strange and inexplicable move through my chest, like a compass needle swinging, trying to find north. I put my hand over my sternum and pressed really hard. Stop it, I told whatever that was. It didn't stop. *** I found the ribbon on my desk when I returned to the archive. Not Dorian's. A different one, crisp and new, folded into a precise square and placed exactly in the center of my workspace where I couldn't miss it. Pale blue. Lady Voss's seal. I picked it up between two fingers and looked at it for a long moment. Then I set it down, opened my desk drawer, took out a small piece of archive parchment, and wrote two words on it in my neatest hand. *I know.* I folded it around the ribbon and left it on the desk where I'd found it. A message received. A message sent. Whatever was coming, I was not going to pretend I didn't see it. I never had.