The Devil's Debt: A Kiss That Binds the Damned

CHAPTER EIGHT: The King's Chamber

The room where King Aldric Varyn had died was sealed with seven locks, and none of them had keys.

Kael stood outside it at dusk with a candle in one hand and the silver thorn throbbing on his wrist. That afternoon he had tried to picture his mother's face, just to be sure, and found only a warm, familiar outline with nothing inside. He had not mentioned it to anyone. He did not intend to.

"The locks are a ward," said Seraphine. "Your father made them himself. Hell cannot cross them."

"Then how can you?"

"Because I am bound to you." She laid her palm against the first lock. "And you are the heir."

"And her?"

They both looked down the corridor. The bride sat on the bare floor at the far end, white skirts spread around her, humming something low and tuneless. She had not come closer than twenty paces. Whenever she tried, the air rippled like water, and she drew back with a faintly pained smile. "Do go in," she had called. "I will wait. I am excellent at it."

Something about her cheerfulness made his skin crawl.

Seraphine pressed her wrist to the lock. The thorn glowed. One by one, the seven bolts slid back with a sound like bones settling, and the door swung inward.

The chamber was cold.

It had been left exactly as it was found: the great bed unmade, the candles melted to stubs, a chair overturned by the hearth. A glass of wine stood untouched on the desk. And on the walls, floor to ceiling, in every direction, were scratches.

Kael had been told that his father had clawed at the walls. He had imagined panic. Animal terror.

This was not panic. The marks were words.

He lifted the candle. They had been written in blood and plaster dust and something dark that might have been ink, in the cramped, furious hand of a man running out of time. Names. Dates. Columns of figures. A diagram of seven concentric circles. Among the names, one repeated more often than any other: Lysandra, his dead wife's, and beside it the date she had died. And one word, carved again and again until the stone was nearly worn through.

Sorry.

Seraphine stopped at the foot of the bed. Her face did not change, but he saw her throat move.

"He wrote that for you," Kael said.

"He wrote it for himself." Her voice was flat. "It is easier."

He searched the walls for a door, a lever, a seam. His fingers found the carved head of the bedpost, an old lion with a worn gold mane. When he pulled, the panel behind the headboard slid aside, and stone steps descended into the dark.

A draft rose from them, cold and sweet, smelling of wet earth and old incense. And beneath it, faint as a heartbeat, he heard a steady scraping.

Like a man dragging a chain.

"The chapel," Seraphine whispered. "It is where he is. It is sealed until the seventh sunrise. Even I cannot open it before then. We came to see. Now you have seen."

Kael reached to close the panel, and the ward bit him.

It was only a thin silver line of light across his palm, but it opened the skin like a razor. He hissed and snatched his hand back. Blood welled, bright and shocking.

"Stupid," Seraphine said, and caught his wrist.

She drew him toward the candle and turned his palm up. She pulled a scrap of black silk from her sleeve and pressed it to the wound. Her hands were warm.

He noticed that. Of everything he might have noticed in that ruined room, with his father's last words scratched into the walls and Hell waiting at the bottom of a staircase, he noticed that her hands, which had been cold the night they met, were warm now and gentle.

"You should not have done that," she murmured, without looking up. "The mark will not forgive carelessness."

"I did not know the ward would bite."

"That is what makes it a ward."

She tied the silk around his hand with small, sure movements, and when she was done, she did not let go. He could feel her pulse beneath her thumb, quick and light as a bird's. He could smell her, roses and smoke and warm skin. The candle flame between them stood perfectly still.

"Seraphine."

"Do not."

"I have not said anything."

"You were going to." She lifted her eyes, dark and bright and unguarded in a way that made his chest ache. "You were going to say something kind, and then I would have to remember that I hate you."

"Do you?"

A long silence.

"Not when you do things like that," she said.

He did not decide to move. He was simply closer, a half step, a breath. She tilted her head. Her lips parted. In the quiet, he heard the bride humming beyond the door, a sound that seemed to come from very far away.

His forehead touched hers.

"You said not to kiss you."

"I did."

"Was that an order?"

"It was a warning." Her breath trembled against his mouth. "Not the same thing."

The silver thorn on his wrist flared white.

And the world dropped out from under him.

He was standing at the top of the east stair. It was a warm, windy night in late autumn, and he was seventeen, with a stone in his pocket and a half-finished letter in his hand. Below him, in the great hall, torches guttered. His father stood at the door in black court robes, his face stripped of everything but a terrible, resolute calm.

Four guards were dragging a girl across the marble.

She wore white. She was not struggling anymore, only staring up at the stair, her wrists bound with red cord, her mouth shaping a name over and over, so hoarse it was almost silent.

Kael.

He had known her at once. The girl in the east garden who had taught him to whistle through a blade of grass. The girl who sang off-key and unashamed while she hung the washing. The girl his father had looked at, that spring, with a softness Kael had never seen him show his own wife.

She screamed his name. Once. Twice. Seven times.

And Kael, seventeen years old, with a whole kingdom's weight already on his shoulders, had turned around and run.

The vision snapped.

He was back in the cold chamber, on his knees, gasping. Seraphine knelt in front of him. She had not let go of his hand. Her face was perfectly white, and her eyes were wet, and she was not looking away.

"You remember," she said.

"I was there."

"Yes."

"I saw you. I—" His voice cracked.

"I know," said Seraphine. "I saw you, too."

She drew a long, unsteady breath.

"I called your name, Kael. Seven times." Her voice was almost gentle, and the gentleness broke him. "And you ran."