Chapter 7
“You,” he breathed.
The word was not a greeting. It was an indictment. It was the sound of a man looking at a ghost he had buried with his own bloody hands.
“Put the steel down, Galen,” I said. My voice was low, level, refusing to break. “You’re shaking so hard you’ll nick your own ear before you take my throat.”
His jaw tightened until the muscles threatened to snap. The terrifying, vacant cruelty that he wore before the court surged back into his eyes like a portcullis slamming shut.
“Aurelia.” He spat my name as if it were poison on his tongue. “You miserable, foolish wretch. How did you get past the postern?”
“You forgot to change the bells on the swan-lock,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on his. “You changed every guard, every bolt, every oath in this palace, but you forgot that I know the music of these walls.”
His lip curled into a sneer that didn't reach his eyes. “Then your luck has run out, beggar girl. Did you think three years on the road gave you the right to creep into my rooms like a thief? I should have taken your head when I took your crown. Spared myself the sight of you crawling in the muck.”
“Galen—”
“Get out!” he roared. The fury in his voice was vast, deafening, but underneath it ran the shrill, frantic note of a trapped beast trying to frighten off a hunter. “Get out of this city! I gave you your life! I gave you the western roads! If you are in Oakhallow when the midnight bell tolls, my Vanguard will drag you to the river and drown you like a stray dog!”
“Your Vanguard is down in the hall drinking spiced wine to keep from weeping,” I said, taking half a step forward.
The edge of his blade pressed deeper into the hollow of my throat. A single bead of warm blood welled up against the steel.
He didn't pull back. But his hands were vibrating with such violence that the sword tip chattered against my skin.
“You think I won’t do it?” he whispered, his gray eyes wild, drowning in black veins. “You think because we were children together, I have some soft, rotting mercy left in my heart? I broke my oaths to your father. I stole your throne. I cast you out into the frost to starve. I am the Usurper, Aurelia. Look at me! Look at what sits your father’s seat!”
“I am looking,” I said, and my voice softened, dropping into the register of a song sung over an open wound. “And I see a liar.”
Galen flinched as if I had struck him with an iron rod.
“You know nothing,” he choked out. “You’re a spoiled child playing at wandering. Go back to your taverns. Go back to your—”
His sentence died in a wet, catastrophic gurgle.
The greatsword slipped from his fingers. It didn't clatter; it dropped straight down, burying its point two inches into the mortar between the flagstones.
Galen’s knees folded beneath him.
He didn't collapse gracefully. He hit the stone with a sickening thud, his hands flying to his chest as his back arched in a violent, spastic seizure.
A sound tore from his throat—a wet, animal shriek that had no language in it, the sound of living tissue being ripped apart from the inside.
Through the torn linen of his tunic, the horror was laid bare.
The spiderweb of black, necrotic lines across his chest had broken through the surface of his skin. They weren't just glowing; they were weeping. A thick, dark, oily sludge—black blood saturated with abyssal soot—was bubbling out of his pores, smoking as it hit the cold air of the room. Where the fluid pooled against his ribs, tiny sparks of violet soul-fire sputtered, feeding upon his flesh, devouring his vitality like dry tinder.
He curled into a ball on the floor, his teeth grinding together so hard a thread of crimson ran from the corner of his mouth.
“Galen!”
I forgot the sword. I forgot the three years of exile, the cold stables, the coppers thrown at my feet, the bitter pride that had kept me alive across five hundred miles of frozen dirt.
I dropped to my knees beside him, my skirts pooling in the soot and the black blood.
“Don't touch me,” he gasped, his fingers clawing at the stone, trying to drag his body away from me toward the empty hearth. “Don't… Aurelia… the taint… it will catch… get away…”
“Shut up,” I snapped, my hands clamping onto his broad shoulders.
The moment my palms touched his skin, a bolt of sheer, unadulterated agony shot up my arms.
It felt like plunging my hands into a bucket of boiling pitch mixed with needles. The cold was so absolute it burned; the heat was so intense it froze. The sheer psychic pressure of the necrotic rot slammed into my skull like an iron hammer, filling my ears with the screaming voices of a thousand buried dead, the grinding teeth of the deep earth demanding its meal.
My breath hitched. I nearly let go.
*No.*
*I am the Queen.*
I sank my knees deeper into the stone, leaned over his writhing body, and pulled his head into my lap.
His skin was burning with a horrific, dry fever. The smell of his scorched hair filled my nose as he thrash against my grip, his eyes rolling back into his head, the whites entirely eclipsed by abyssal violet.
“Aurelia… please…” he wheezed, his voice breaking into a child’s whimper. “It hurts… gods, it hurts so much…”
“I know,” I whispered, tears finally springing hot and blinding to my eyes, burning their way down my cheeks through the dirt of the road. “I know, Galen. I’m here.”
I didn't reach for a tourniquet. I didn't reach for water.
I opened my throat.
I didn't sing words. Words were too small; words belonged to the court, to treaties, to the lies men told to justify their small, cowardly lives.
I sang the Root-Tone.
It was the first note of creation, the resonance of the bedrock before men carved kingdoms from the granite. A deep, vibrating, harmonic hum that originated in the center of my pelvis, rolled up through my spine, and poured out through my lips directly into the crown of his skull.
My song-magic was not fire. It was alignment.
Where his ley-veins were jagged, broken, screaming with chaos, my voice offered a plumb line. It was the rhythm of a steady heart, the cadence of the tides, the unyielding architecture of stone that had stood for ten thousand years before the rift opened.
The note filled the empty, shuttered solar.
The dust suspended in the air froze, trembling in place. The iron sword stuck in the floor began to ring in sympathetic vibration, chiming a clear, silver chime that drowned out the muffled roar of the feast below.
Galen’s violent thrashing slowed.
His spine, locked in rigid agony, began to ease, vertebrae by vertebrae, sinking down against the hard floor. The smoking black blood weeping from his chest stopped bubbling; the violet sparks guttered, smothered under the weight of the sound, turning back into dull, dormant soot.
