Chapter 139 A bond that shouldn't exist
Chapter 139 A bond that shouldn't exist
The shadow rising off Aurelian’s back unfurled fully into the torchlight, and the courtyard went silent in a way that had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the particular, animal stillness of people watching something they don’t have words for.
“Your Majesty….” One of the guards started forward, sword half-raised, clearly unsure whether he was meant to protect his king or from him.
“Stay back,” Selyne snapped, grabbing the guard’s arm hard enough to stop him. “You don’t understand what that is. None of you do. I only know what my family’s records say, and they say if anyone goes near him while the curse is fully surfaced, it doesn’t just hurt them. It feeds on them.”
Aurelian was still on one knee, both hands pressed flat against the broken ground now, shadow pouring off his shoulders in slow, smoke-thick coils, his red eyes fixed on some middle distance like a man trying, with everything he had left, to hold a door shut from the inside.
“Elara.” His voice came out wrecked, layered with something deeper and darker underneath it, but it was still, unmistakably, him, fighting to stay him. “Get away from me. Right now that isn’t a request.”
I didn’t move.
I don’t fully know why I didn’t move. Every instinct that belonged to the frightened slave girl who’d spent ten years learning not to draw attention told me to run, the way the crowd around us was running, the way even some of the guards were edging backward.
But something older than that fear something that had once stood in a courtroom and watched a man he trusted decide his death was a fair price for a throne refused, point-blank, to leave anyone he cared about alone with a thing trying to consume them from the inside out.
“No,” I said.
“Elara, I am not asking….”
“I heard you the first time.” I took a step closer instead of further away, and the Crown on my brow pulsed once, sharp and warm, almost encouraging. “You didn’t run from me in that courtroom when the whole Council wanted me locked away. I’m not running from you now.”
“This is different,” he ground out, shadow curling tighter and darker around his shoulders, “this curse doesn’t care who it loves, it only cares what it can—”
I reached out and put my hand flat against his chest, right over his heart, the same place the mark lived on mine, and the bond that formed in that single contact was so immediate and so total that I heard both of us cry out at once, two voices tangled into one sound.
It wasn’t like touching a person. It was like falling through a door I hadn’t known was open and landing inside someone else’s entire life all at once his curse, his loneliness, the particular, crushing weight of being raised from childhood to carry a sin his grandfather committed and never atoned for; and underneath all of it, fresh and raw and entirely unwanted by either of us, the unmistakable, terrifying shape of feeling something for me that he had clearly never intended to feel for a slave girl his own bloodline had once murdered in another life.
I felt his shock at discovering I could feel any of that at all.
I felt his fear, sharper than the curse itself, that the bond now blooming between us instant, complete, utterly unlike the slow, careful courtships every old story insisted a king and his Luna were supposed to share meant something was deeply, dangerously wrong with how fast it had happened.
“This isn’t natural,” he gasped, his red eyes finding mine through the shadow, wide with something that looked almost like grief. “Bonds like this take time, Elara, they’re supposed to build, not.… not slam into place like a door, this isn’t how it’s meant to….”
“We know,” the Crown said, through both our mouths at once, in a voice layered with two different timbres that made every hair on my arms rise. “This bond was never meant to form this quickly. Unless the soul on the other end of it already knew this one. Unless this is not the first time these two souls have been bound together.”
The shadow around Aurelian’s shoulders went suddenly, completely still.
“What does that mean,” I whispered, my hand still pressed flat against his chest, the bond between us humming hot and undeniable and absolutely, terrifyingly real. “Aurelian. What does it mean, that this isn’t the first time?”
He didn’t answer, he couldn’t. Whatever truth had just surfaced in the tangle of memory and shadow and curse between us was apparently too large for either of us to say out loud first and behind us, the waxen figures that had paused, watching, finally began moving again, drawn forward by the sheer, blazing amount of power now radiating off the two of us joined together, while deep beneath the broken well shaft, the vast red-lit thing that had only just opened its eyes let out a low, satisfied sound, like a predator that has just realized its prey has done something foolish enough to make the hunt very, very short.….
It was Selyne who broke first, staring at the two of us with an expression that had gone past fear into something closer to revelation.
“The portrait,” she said, half to herself, her voice strange and far away. “Oh, gods. The portrait in the old gallery. I always thought it was just a stylistic choice, court painters exaggerating to flatter the bloodline…”
“Selyne.” Aurelian’s voice came out strained, the shadow around him still roiling but no longer growing, as if the bond between us had, for the moment, given him something steady enough to brace against. “Now is not the time.”
“It is exactly the time,” she snapped, and there was no court composure left in her at all now, just a woman staring at a truth she’d apparently carried unrecognized her entire life. “Your Majesty, the founding portrait.
The first king to ever stand beside a Luna under this Crown, three hundred years ago, before any of the bloodlines that matter now even existed. I always thought the resemblance to your line was just good breeding. I never once thought….”
“Selyne, say it.”….