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

CHAPTER SIX: Seven Nights

Captain Rowan drew his sword.

He did it without thinking, the way a man pulls his hand from a fire. He stood at the top of the cellar stairs in the gray hour before dawn, lantern in one fist, blade in the other, staring at the two women who had followed his king up out of the earth.

"Your Majesty," he said hoarsely. "There are two of her."

"I am aware, Captain."

"Put it away," said Seraphine. "It will not help."

"It will not hurt," said the bride cheerfully, and Rowan took a half step back.

Kael studied his friend. Rowan's face was gray with exhaustion, and he had not once looked away from the king. "When did you last sleep?"

"I have not been able to, sire. Not since the coronation."

"Then do it now. Tell the Lord Chancellor I will see the council at noon. And tell the cook we will need breakfast for three."

"Three," Rowan repeated faintly, and went.

Kael watched him go. Rowan had stood outside his door since Kael was a boy. If there was one man in the palace he would have trusted with his life, it was that one, and it was oddly comforting to be certain of something.

His bedchamber, which had seemed enormous that morning, felt very small with the two of them in it.

Seraphine took his father's chair by the fire without asking and sat with her spine straight, a queen enthroned in someone else's kingdom. The bride walked once around the room in her stained white gown, trailing a fingertip over the bedposts, the desk, the books, and sat down in the center of his bed, on the pale linen, her bare feet tucked beneath her.

"It is smaller than I imagined," she said. She patted the mattress. "He is welcome."

"He is not," said Seraphine.

"He will sleep in the chair," said Kael.

"That is my chair," said Seraphine.

"That is my chair," said Kael.

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Then the bride burst out laughing, a bright, delighted sound entirely unlike anything Seraphine would have allowed herself, and for one strange second he glimpsed what the woman by the fire might have been, long ago, before Hell.

He sat on the hearth rug between them, his back to the dying fire. "Rules. No one touches me without my consent. No one enters this room armed. And no one lies to me under this roof."

"That is a dangerous rule," said Seraphine. "I am bound to answer you twice more. If you ask the wrong question, I cannot refuse."

"Then I will ask carefully."

"How convenient for you," the bride said, with sweet malice. "To have a woman who cannot lie."

"I hate it," said Seraphine through her teeth. "I hate you."

"No," said the bride gently. "You hate what I remember."

She turned to Kael, her eyes enormous in the pale light. "When you were nine, you hid beneath the east stair whenever your father shouted. You counted the steps to keep from crying. Fifty-two. You kept a flat gray river stone in your pocket, and when the shouting got loud, you held it until your hand hurt."

The room dropped away.

He had never told anyone. Not his mother, not his tutors, not a living soul. Yet he could feel the stone now, cool and smooth against his palm, exactly where it had always been.

"How do you know that?"

"I remember everything," said the bride. "She remembers only what hurts."

"I remember what matters."

"You remember what kills you." The bride rose to her knees, her skirts pooling around her. "I remember the garden at dawn. The first time we laughed so hard we couldn't breathe." She smiled, and it broke something in her face. "I remember that we were happy."

"We were never happy," Seraphine said hoarsely. "We were deceived."

He tightened his fingers around the stone in his pocket as though to prove it was still there. Then he looked from one woman to the other, and a new understanding unfolded in him, cold and slow as a stain spreading through cloth. They were not enemies, or strangers, or a woman and her mirror. They were one sentence cut in half, each half insisting it was the whole, and he could not tell which half was lying. Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.

The bride crossed the carpet and knelt in front of him. She reached out and straightened his collar, her fingers icy against his throat, smoothing the fabric with a lover's care.

"You are tired," she murmured. "You have not slept in four nights."

"Do not touch him," said Seraphine.

"He did not object."

"Kael."

She had risen without his noticing, and now she stood over them, hands trembling, eyes dark and bright and furious. "Tell her to stop."

"Why?"

Her mouth opened, closed. A flush climbed her throat. "Because she is using you. That is what she does. She makes you feel seen, and then she takes whatever you offer."

"And what do you do?" Kael said.

Silence. The bride's smile curved. Seraphine did not look at her.

"I keep you alive," she said.

"By hiding things."

"By surviving them."

He got to his feet. The fire had burned to a few red coals, and the room smelled of roses and smoke. Two women watched him from either side, one warm and one cold, one with a heartbeat and one without. Between them lay a debt, a gate, and a past so tangled he could not find the end of it.

A tray of breakfast arrived and sat untouched on the desk, three cups going cold.

But the bride had spoken one sentence on the stair, and it had not left him.

He's alive, you know.

He thought of the servants' whispers: a king clawing at the walls, begging Seraphine's forgiveness. Not the ramblings of a dying man. The plea of a prisoner.

He could spend the second truth on anything. The Devil, the Houses, the wedding. He could ask the question that every hour of the night had been circling, the one he knew would cost him whatever fragile trust he had earned.

He looked at Seraphine. "Who is still alive?"

She flinched as if he had struck her. "Don't."

"I am sorry."

"Do not make me."

"Please," said Kael.

It was her own word. He saw it land.

Her eyes closed. Her jaw worked. On her wrist, the silver thorn began to glow, and a tremor ran up her arm, and he watched her fight it with every ounce of her will, and lose.

"Your father," said Seraphine.

The room went absolutely still.

"Aldric Varyn is alive." Her eyes opened, wet and furious. "He is the lock on the gate beneath your palace. And he has been screaming for three nights."