Chapter 8
I pressed my bare palm flat against his sternum, directly over the epicenter of the black web.
The song tore at my own chest. A metallic, copper taste flooded my mouth; my lungs burned as if I were inhaling pulverized charcoal. I felt a sliver of his agony slip across the threshold into my own blood—a terrifying, freezing weight that made my vision blur with gray spots.
I didn't break the note.
I held it, pouring three years of lonely roads, three years of tavern smoke, three years of unspent love and bitter fury into the vibration until the necrotic light beneath his skin retreated, sinking back down into the deep, dark marrow of his bones.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Galen lay limp across my knees, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged hitches. His skin was still translucent, his face still hollowed out like a death mask, but the madness had gone out of his eyes.
The pupils had shrunk back. They were gray again. The soft, storm-cloud gray of the boy who had stolen warm rolls from the imperial kitchen to bring to my music lessons.
He looked up at me.
His hand, trembling and cold as a corpse’s, lifted an inch from the stone. His fingertips, blackened at the nails, brushed against the frayed hem of my travel-stained wool skirt.
“Why did you do that?” he whispered, his voice cracked and hollow. “It’s poison, Aurelia. It’s the Sovereign Rot. You… you let it touch you.”
“I’ve had worse things touch me in tavern stables,” I said, wiping a mixture of blood and soot from his cheekbone with the sleeve of my chemise.
A bitter, pathetic shadow of his old smirk touched his cracked lips. “You always were… terribly unrefined for a royal.”
“And you were always an atrocious liar.”
Galen closed his eyes, a shudder passing through his frame. “I told you to stay in the West. I gave the carriage driver two hundred gold sovereigns to take you past the sea. Why didn't you take ship? Why didn't you cross the water to the Sun Islands?”
“Because my crown was here,” I said softly.
“The crown is a curse!” he snarled, trying to shove himself up from my lap, his elbows shaking violently before collapsing back down. “It’s not an empire, Aurelia! It’s not silk robes and dukes bowing at your feet! It’s a pyre! It has always been a pyre!”
“I know,” I said.
He froze.
His gray eyes snapped open, searching my face with desperate, terrified intensity. “What did you say?”
“The First Covenant,” I murmured, leaning down until my breath brushed his forehead. “The annals of the Dragon-Priests in the High Cathedral. You tore the third chapter out before you banished me, Galen. You thought you were so clever. You thought the apostate monks were all dead.”
Galen went utterly still. The blood drained from what little color remained in his cheeks.
“You read the annals,” he breathed.
“Every line,” I said. “I know what the High Seat of Wraithmark is. I know what sits beneath the basalt steps. I know why the old kings went mad every three winters, and why the history books called them tyrants to hide the shame of what this kingdom demands.”
My voice cracked, the fury I had held inside my ribs for three long years finally bleeding out into the room.
“You stole my birthright, Galen Vance. Not because you wanted power. Not because you wanted the treasury, or the army, or the praise of the lords.” I grabbed his linen shirt with both hands, shaking him, my knuckles white against his chest. “You took it because it was meant for me. It was my bloodline. The debt belongs to the House of the Swan! My mother burned on that chair! My grandfather burned on that chair! And you… you arrogant, suicidal bastard… you shoved me out the door so you could burn in my place!”
Tears spilled from my eyes, dropping hot and wet onto his scarred throat.
Galen didn't deny it.
He didn't sneer. He didn't put on his tyrant’s mask.
The iron wall he had maintained for three years crumbled into dust. A single, broken sob tore from his lungs, and he reached up, his freezing fingers tangling into the damp hair at the nape of my neck, pulling me down until his forehead rested against mine.
“You were nineteen,” he wept, the tears washing pale tracks through the soot on his cheeks. “You were nineteen, and you loved the spring, Aurelia. You loved the lutes, and the apple blossoms, and the way the western wind smelled when the frost melted. How could I let them lead you down into the dark? How could I stand at the base of that dais and watch you scream while the earth ate your soul?”
“So you thought you’d do it alone?” I choked out, clutching his shoulders. “You thought you’d let the entire kingdom call you a monster? You let them spit on your name! In every tavern between here and the coast, they drink to the day your head ends up on a pike!”
“Let them,” he whispered, his eyes closing, leaning his weight entirely into my embrace. “What do I care what commoners sing? The rift stayed shut. The harvest came in. For three years, the children in the valleys didn't wake up to the ground opening up beneath their cradles. That was my bargain. My life for your peace. My name for your life.”
“Well, you failed,” I said, my voice fiercely steady despite the tears streaming down my chin.
Galen opened one gray eye, confused. “Failed? Aurelia, the borders held—”
“They don't hate you anymore.”
He blinked. “What?”
“For three years, I didn't hide in a hole,” I said, a fierce, feral smile breaking through my grief. “I walked every road in this cursed kingdom. I slept in every ditch. I sang in every tavern, every taproom, every crossroads inn from the Dragonmouth Mountains to the southern marshes. I sang *The Iron Warden*. I sang *The King of Ash*. I sang the verses of a man who stands upon the wall while others sleep, who bears the burden without asking for love.”
Galen stared at me, his breath hitching. “You… you sang of me?”
“I made them remember you,” I said, my thumb tracing the hard line of his jaw. “I made them sing your name without venom. They threw coppers at my feet, Galen, and every time they sang the chorus, they gave me a sliver of their belief. You thought you could die an oath-breaker in the dark. I won’t let you. If you burn, history will know you were the greatest king this rotten realm ever had.”
His hand tightened in my hair, his throat working convulsively as he tried to speak, his lips parting in an expression of raw, unendurable wonder and grief.
“Aurelia…” he breathed, his voice breaking on the syllable of my name. “You shouldn't have… I didn't deserve…”
Before he could finish, the world tore in half.
*BOOM.*
It was not a tremor.
It was an explosion of raw, kinetic violence that ripped through the core of the mountain.
