Chapter 7: The Curse Unleashed

The scream came at dusk.

Elena was in the east solar, grinding dried feverfew between her palms for the tincture Alaric had stopped taking three days ago, when the sound tore through the palace like a blade through silk. She was on her feet before the mortar hit the floor, skirts gathered in her fists, running.

She knew that scream. She’d heard it in her nightmares every night since the wedding—the same pitch, the same raw animal terror.

She found them in the king’s bedchamber.

Alaric stood in the center of the room, chest heaving, his eyes wrong. Not grey. Not human. Something molten and ancient, gold bleeding through the iris like cracks in a dam. His hands were raised, fingers curled, and around him the air shimmered with heat that had no source.

On the floor at his feet, a serving girl named Mira lay crumpled like a discarded doll. Her arm was bent at an angle arms did not bend. Her lips were blue. She wasn’t breathing.

“Alaric.” Elena’s voice came out steady, though her heart was a war drum. “Alaric, look at me.”

His head turned. Too slow. Too smooth. The gold in his eyes pulsed.

“Elena,” he said, and it wasn’t his voice. It was layered, doubled, like two mouths speaking from one throat. “She touched me. She touched my skin and I—I couldn’t stop—”

The heat in the room spiked. The tapestries nearest him began to curl at the edges, browning, smoking. Elena felt the air sear her lungs.

She didn’t think. She moved.

She stepped between Alaric and the girl, palms up, and let her magic rise. It came cold and silver, the way it always did when she called it—winter light spilling from her fingertips, wrapping around Mira’s broken body like a shroud. She didn’t have the training for this. She’d never healed anything larger than a sparrow’s wing. But she pushed anyway, felt her own bones ache with the effort, felt something inside her tear.

Mira gasped.

Her chest rose. Her arm did not straighten, but her lips flushed pink, and her eyes fluttered open, wild with confusion and pain.

“You’re safe,” Elena whispered. “You’re safe now.”

The heat died.

Alaric staggered backward, and when he looked at her again, his eyes were grey. Human. Horrified.

“What did I—” He stared at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. “Elena, what did I do?”

She didn’t answer. She was still kneeling beside Mira, still pouring the last of her silver light into the girl’s shattered arm, and she could feel the cost of it now—the way her vision was starting to tunnel, the way her fingers were going numb. She’d given too much. She always gave too much.

The doors burst open.

Kael.

He took in the scene in a single sweep—his brother shaking, the servant girl broken on the floor, Elena kneeling in a pool of her own fading light. His face went hard as carved stone. Two soldiers flanked him, swords drawn.

“Seize her,” he said.

“Kael, wait—” Alaric started.

“She did this.” Kael’s voice was ice. He crossed the room in three strides and hauled Elena to her feet by her arm, and she was too weak to resist, too dizzy to do anything but sway in his grip. “She’s been poisoning you for weeks, brother. Whispering in your ear. Twisting your mind with her witchcraft. And now look—look what she’s made you do.”

“She saved Mira,” Alaric said, but his voice cracked on the words. He was staring at the serving girl, at the unnatural bend of her arm, at the way she was weeping silently into the floor. “I did this. Not her. I felt the curse—I felt it take me—”

“The curse is her.” Kael’s fingers dug into Elena’s wrist, and she flinched. “She brought it here. She brought all of it here. The shadow-walker’s daughter, the last of a bloodline that was meant to die out. And you married her.”

Elena’s head snapped up. “How do you know that?”

Kael’s jaw tightened. He didn’t answer.

“How do you know what I am?”

“Because I’ve known since the day you arrived,” he said quietly. “I’ve been watching you. Waiting. And now you’ve shown your hand.”

He turned to the soldiers. “Take her to the north tower. No visitors. No food. No light. Let her rot with her magic until we decide what to do with her.”

“Kael, please—” Elena struggled, but her limbs were lead, her magic spent. “I didn’t hurt him. I would never hurt him. You know that. You *know*—”

He wouldn’t look at her.

That was the worst part. He wouldn’t look at her, and she could see it now—the way his hands were trembling, the way his breath was coming too fast, the way his eyes were fixed on some point past her shoulder like if he looked at her he would break.

He wasn’t angry. He was terrified.

Terrified of losing his brother. Terrified of losing *her*. And so he was choosing the only thing he could control—the punishment, the distance, the walls. Anything to stop the bleeding.

But it wouldn’t work.

“Kael,” she said, and her voice was soft now, almost gentle. “The curse isn’t me. It’s older than me. It’s been feeding on him since before I was born. And if you lock me away, you won’t be saving him. You’ll be killing him. Because I’m the only one who can hold it back.”

He finally looked at her.

For one heartbeat, his mask slipped. She saw the grief underneath, the raw and bleeding thing he kept buried so deep. She saw the boy who had watched his mother die, who had spent his whole life guarding what was left of his family, who would burn the world down before he let anyone take Alaric from him.

And then it was gone.

“The north tower,” he repeated. “Now.”

They dragged her out.

She didn’t fight. She couldn’t. But as the doors swung shut behind her, she heard Alaric’s voice, thin and breaking: “Kael. Kael, what have you done?”

And deeper, beneath it, beneath the stone and the silence and the cold, she heard the darkness stir.

*Soon*, it whispered. *Soon the brother will break. And then they will both be ours.*

She was halfway up the tower stairs when the first wave of the curse hit her—a spike of ice through her skull, a vision of Alaric on his knees, of Kael’s blood on his hands, of a crown of broken vows melting into shadow.

She screamed.

And in the throne room below, Kael stood alone in the dark, staring at his own trembling hands, and whispered the words he would never say aloud:

*Please. Don’t take her from me too.*

But the tower door had already closed. And the curse, patient and ancient and starving, was just beginning to feed.