Chapter 6
When he burned out, there would be no new King to take his place. There would only be the fire, and the broken earth, and the ash of the man who had loved me enough to damn his own soul to hell.
I slipped through the shadows behind the gallery, turning my back on the feast, on the music, on the cowardly lords laughing into their gilded cups.
I knew the secret ways of Oakhallow better than any guard Galen had placed upon the gates. I knew the hollow walls behind the tapestries; I knew the dry aqueducts that ran beneath the royal bedchambers; I knew the sovereign doors that opened only to the resonance of my voice.
I adjusted the lute upon my shoulder, drew the oilcloth hood low over my brow, and stepped into the pitch-black mouth of the servants' corridor.
I was done singing for coppers.
It was time to collect the King’s debt.
The dust in the sovereign flue tasted of dried clover and centuries of cold lime.
I pressed my back against the narrow channel of stone, barely broader than my shoulders, listening to the muffled thunder of the banquet below. Through the ventilation grates, the court sounded like a distant animal—all stomping feet, drunken laughter, and the tinny squeal of pipes.
None of them looked up. In six hundred years, no monarch had ever bothered to remember the conduits carved into the spine of Oakhallow. My ancestors had used them to spy on plotting chancellors; I had used them as a girl to hide from my tutors, slipping like a ferret between the palace’s hollow ribs while Galen searched every garden and armory, his frantic shouts echoing down the galleries until I burst from a hidden panel to laugh in his face.
*“One day, Aurelia,”* he had growled, thirteen and scowling beneath a brow already perpetually furrowed, *“someone who isn’t me will find you in those walls. And they won’t be carrying lemon cakes.”*
*“No one finds me unless I want to be found, Galen,”* I had told him.
I had been right then. I was right now.
I navigated the dark by touch. My fingers traced the mortared joints—one pace, two, three—until the stone beneath my palms turned from rough granite to cool, slick porphyry. The air shifted. The scent of roasted venison and cinnamon wine thinned, replaced by the bitter, dry bite of scorched sulfur and ozone.
The King’s private solar lay on the other side of this wall.
The locking stone was shaped like a stylized swan’s eye, carved flush into the joint where ceiling met lintel. A normal pick was useless against it; the mechanism was counterweighted with silver bells inside the masonry. Strike it with iron, and the bells would chime an alarm through the guardroom.
I didn't use iron.
I leaned my forehead against the stone, letting my breath warm the frost-rimmed granite. Then, hummed.
A single, pure G-sharp, held steady from the bottom of my diaphragm.
It was the fifth measure of the *Lullaby of the White Mare*, the song my mother had sung to the stones when the royal wing was consecrated. The sound traveled along the seam. Inside the wall, brass gears clicked, recognizing the resonant frequency of royal blood and ancient cadence. With a soft, pneumatic hiss, the masonry swung inward three inches on oiled counter-levers.
I slipped through the gap into the suffocating silence of the royal quarters.
The panel clicked shut behind me, sealing out the world.
I stood motionless, my dagger drawn, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom.
The grand solar of Oakhallow had once been a room of breathtaking, decadent light. My father had furnished it with sapphire carpets woven by eastern dervishes, shelves of vellum manuscripts bound in morocco leather, and vast, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the misty orchards of the valley.
Now, it was a tomb.
The velvet hangings had been ripped down; bare curtain rods stood like skeletal ribs against the dark windows, which had been boarded over with heavy, iron-strapped planks of white oak to block out all daylight. The carpets were gone, stripped away to reveal the bare, cold flagstones, which were crisscrossed with chalked geometrical circles, runic tallies, and dark, crusting stains that looked sickeningly like dried blood.
There was no bed. In the center of the vast chamber stood only a single iron trestle table covered in shattered glass, dried inkwells, and stacks of yellowed parchment curling from moisture. Beside it, on an iron stand, rested the ancestral greatsword of the First King—unsheathed, its silver fuller tarnished black by some foul, acidic taint.
The smell in the room made my gorge rise.
It was not rot. Rot was natural; rot was the earth taking back what it was owed.
This was the stench of a soul being incinerated in an airtight room. It smelled of lightning-struck stone, charred marrow, and the rancid, copper tang of arterial hemorrhage.
A rasping breath broke the stillness.
I stiffened, my hand tightening on the hilt of my knife.
Near the boarded window, half-swallowed by the shadow of a stone hearth that held no fire, a figure was draped over an oak bench.
Galen.
He was no longer wearing the heavy imperial mantle of silk and velvet he had worn before the court. He had stripped down to a linen tunic—once white, now soaked gray with sweat and crusting brown along the collar—and scarred riding leathers.
He was trying to strap an iron greave to his left shin. His hands, claw-like and twitching with violent, rhythmic tremors, fumbled with the leather buckle. Every time he pulled the strap, the strain caused his torso to heave, his chest hitching in agonizing, broken sobs that he choked back behind clamped teeth.
*“Gods,”* he hissed into the empty room, his voice a ruined shred of gravel. *“Damn you. Hold. Just hold… one more hour.”*
He dropped the greave. The iron clattered loudly against the stones.
Galen rested his forehead against his knees, his broad shoulders—once so straight, once the broad wall I had leaned against when my father died—curved into a wretched, shuddering curve.
The silver in his hair was not hair-dye, as the court gossips whispered. It was dead hair. White, brittle, bleached of all vitality, falling in limp, ragged strands across ears that were tipped with the dark frostbite of necrotic rot.
My foot moved.
A floorboard groaned beneath my boot.
In an instant that defied the broken wreckage of his body, Galen moved.
The iron greatsword left its stand with a scream of sheared metal. In a single, fluid arc of desperate violence, the blade swept through the darkness, stopping a hair’s breadth from my throat.
The air pressure from the swing sliced a lock of hair from my cheek.
The edge of the blade hummed against my collarbone. It was cold—so cold it bit through my wool tunic like winter ice.
Galen stood braced, his chest heaving, his jaw set in a snarl of lethal instinct. But as the shadows settled and the faint amber light from the brazier flickered across my face, the blade wavered.
His pupils, swollen and rimmed with necrotic violet fire, dilated until they consumed the gray.
