CURSED TO LOVE THE BEAST KING

CHAPTER FIVE: THE FIRST WARNING

Corwin found me three days later in the garden that no longer deserved the name.

It had once been something beautiful, I could tell that much from the bones of it, stone paths curling between beds that had long since gone to weed, a fountain standing dry and cracked in the center like a wound the castle had never bothered to close. I had taken to walking there in the early afternoons, when the halls felt too much like waiting and my mind needed somewhere to go that was not the library, not the throne room, not anywhere I might run into Kael and have to keep pretending I did not think about him more than I should.

"You have made yourself comfortable," Corwin said, appearing at the garden gate the way he seemed to appear everywhere, without the courtesy of footsteps I could hear coming.

"I was told I was permitted to walk the grounds."

"You were." He came closer, hands folded behind his back, his eyes moving over the dead garden as though he found it more interesting than he found me, though I did not believe that for a moment. "You have also been spending a great deal of time in the library. Reading about curses, I am told. Old family history. Things that should mean nothing to an orphan girl from Ashford."

"I am curious," I said. "I did not expect to survive the first night. I would like to understand why I did."

"Would you." He stopped a few feet from me, and for the first time since I had met him, the false warmth dropped entirely out of his voice. "I have served this family for thirty years, girl. I watched the old king burn half this castle to the ground trying to undo what he had done. I watched his son become what he is now, alone in a throne room, killing anyone who dared approach him, for six long years. And in six years, no one, not a single soul, has walked into that room and lived to see a second sunrise. Then you arrive, and not only do you live, the curse goes quiet around you like a dog recognizing its master's hand."

My whole body went still. "I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do." Corwin's eyes were sharp now, all pretense gone. "I have spent thirty years around old magic, Wren, or whatever your name truly is. I know what it looks like when a curse recognizes its own blood."

I kept my face carefully blank, though my heart was moving fast enough that I was certain he could hear it. "That is a strange thing to accuse an orphan of."

"I am not accusing you of anything. Yet." He took a step closer, and though he was not a large man, there was something in his stillness that reminded me, briefly, of the way a snake goes quiet right before it strikes. "I am telling you that I intend to find out exactly who you are and where you came from, and when I do, I expect you will wish you had told his lordship the truth yourself, rather than let him hear it from someone else."

"Is that a threat?"

"It is a warning," he said. "There is a difference, though I understand it may be hard to tell from where you are standing." He straightened his robes, the false smile sliding back into place as easily as it had disappeared. "His lordship is not a fool, whatever the villages below believe about him. He will feel the truth long before I ever have to say it aloud. I would rather you spare us both the trouble."

He left the way he had come, without another word, and I stood alone in the dead garden for a long time afterward, my hands pressed flat against my stomach as though I could hold my own fear inside my body and keep it from showing on my face.

I found Kael that evening in the same corner of the library, another old book open beneath his claws, and for once I did not sit across from him. I stood in the doorway and watched him for a moment, the careful, patient way he turned each page, a king who had spent six years searching for an answer that might never come, and I felt something in my chest that I did not have room for anymore.

"You are standing very far away," he said, without looking up.

"I did not want to interrupt."

"You are not interrupting. You are hovering. There is a difference." He finally lifted his eyes to mine, and whatever he saw in my face made the patient amusement fade out of his own. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened."

"Wren."

It was the first time he had said my name like that, quiet and direct, not a question but a request, and something in me nearly broke apart from the simple weight of being asked so plainly to tell the truth.

I did not tell him. Not yet. I was not ready, and some instinct older than my own fear told me that the moment I said the words aloud, everything between us would change in ways I could not take back.

"Corwin does not trust me," I said instead, which was true, only not the whole of it. "He thinks I am hiding something."

Kael was quiet for a long moment, studying me the way he had that first night in the throne room, searching for whatever it was that made the curse go quiet around me. "Are you?"

The question hung in the space between us, simple and enormous, and I understood that this was the moment, if I wanted it, to tell him everything. My mother's name. My blood. The reason the curse had knelt instead of killed.

"Everyone is hiding something," I said instead. "Are you going to tell me you are not?"

Something in his expression shifted, not anger, not quite, but a kind of tired recognition, as though he understood exactly what I was doing and had decided, for now, to let me do it.

"No," he said quietly. "I suppose I am not."

He closed the book in front of him and did not open another, and for a long while we simply sat together in the dim light of the library, two people carrying secrets heavy enough to end each other, saying nothing at all, and somehow that silence felt more honest than anything either of us had said aloud since I arrived.