The Crown That Kept Him Bleeding

Three mornings after that kiss, Ronan dropped a cup at breakfast.

I had just stolen a piece of toast from his plate. He had been pretending to object.

The cup broke against the hearth.

His hand closed over his heart. The color left his face so completely that I stood before I understood why.

"Get Mara," he said.

Then he fell to one knee.

I caught his shoulder. The heat burned through my sleeve.

"Nell!"

She looked in, saw him, and ran.

Ronan pushed himself toward the open terrace doors. Each breath sounded dragged through broken glass. Black scales spread over his arms, and his fingernails struck the stone as curved claws.

I followed.

"Stay inside."

"You are bleeding."

"I am aware."

A jagged ridge rose beneath the skin along his spine. He gripped the balustrade. Stone cracked under his hands.

I stopped several paces away.

"Tell me what to do."

"Leave."

His voice had changed. Beneath the words lay another sound, deep enough to vibrate in my teeth.

"How far?"

He turned his head. One side of his face had begun to change, the golden eye larger, the skin along his cheek dark with scales.

"The doorway," he forced out. "No closer."

I backed to it.

He bowed over the railing, unable to complete the transformation. His shoulder shifted with a sound I would remember in dreams. Blood dripped onto the snow.

I wanted to run to him. I wanted to run away.

Instead, I put both hands against the doorframe and made myself stay where he had told me it was safe.

"I am here," I said.

He made a furious sound.

"Yes, I know you can hear me. I am saying it for myself."

His claws dug deeper into the stone.

"Nell has gone for Mara. I will stay in this doorway. You do not have to watch me as well."

He closed his eyes.

I talked because silence made the sounds of his pain unbearable. I told him about the mistranslated treaty. About Tavin's attempt to convince me a rooftop was a perfectly reasonable place to eat lunch. About the apple I had hidden in his study because he kept missing meals.

"It is in the top drawer," I said. "You will have to recover before it rots among your state papers."

Something that might have been a laugh caught in his throat.

Mara arrived with two guards. She ordered them to clear the rooms below the terrace, then crouched just outside his reach.

"Ronan. Listen to me. Let the change go. You cannot follow it through."

He shook his head once, violently.

"She wants you to fight it. That is how she tears the wound. Let it go."

The meaning landed cold in my stomach.

The queen.

Afterward, they carried him inside. I washed blood from the place where his fingers had broken the railing, unable to make myself go farther away.

Mara found me with a bucket at my feet.

"You kept your distance," she said.

"He told me where to stand."

"People sometimes decide love makes them immune to teeth. It is an expensive mistake."

I looked at her. She did not smile.

"May I see him?"

"He asked the same question about you. I told him you were unharmed. He did not believe me."

I left the bucket where it stood.

He lay propped against pillows, bare to the waist, a clean dressing over his heart. His hair clung damply to his face.

When I came in, his gaze traveled over me with painful attention.

"I didn't come closer," I told him.

"I know."

"Then you can stop counting my fingers."

He closed his eyes. I sat on the edge of the bed and held out my hand.

After a moment, he took it.

"The crown," I said.

"Yes."

"She can do that whenever she wants?"

"It takes considerable strength at this distance. Closer to the capital, she could do worse."

"Why today?"

"To learn whether I was still hers to hurt."

I thought of the queen selecting ribbons for my hair, deciding which colors suited me. I wondered how many other kinds of possession I had mistaken for affection.

"You knew she could do this."

"I suspected. I had hoped the broken chains would change the connection."

"You should have told me."

His eyes opened. "And what would you have done?"

"Asked better questions before you collapsed. Called Mara sooner. Stopped wondering whether you were hiding some terrible illness from me. You don't get to decide there is no use in my knowing."

He looked toward the terrace.

"I did not want you watching me wait for it."

The anger in me faltered, but it did not disappear.

"I am watching now."

"Yes."

We sat with that for a while.

Then I asked what taking the fire would do to the border wards.

He let go of my hand.

"Must we discuss that today?"

"If she can use it to do this, we have to discuss how to end it."

"By taking back what she stole."

"And the villages?"

He pushed himself upright, wincing.

"What would you have me offer them? Another year of this? Another fourteen?"

"I am asking whether there is another way to protect them."

"Isolde has had fourteen years to find one."

"She benefits from pretending there isn't one."

He looked at me then.

"I used to copy maintenance accounts," I said. "She moved money away from the old boundary houses every winter. I thought the houses were obsolete. What if they were allowed to fail?"

"You are hoping for an answer that leaves no one hurt."

"I am hoping to look before we decide there isn't one."

His mouth tightened. "I cannot promise your kingdom will be spared the consequences of her choices."

"Neither can I. I still want to try."

I stood before either of us could say something we would regret.

At the door, I turned back.

"I don't want the wards kept alive at your expense. Please stop hearing that whenever I mention them."

His expression changed, but he did not call me back.

I spent the afternoon in the library, turning pages so angrily that the librarian threatened to take them away. By evening, I had found three references to paired boundary houses, one on each side of the border. None explained how they worked.

When I returned to my room, a fresh apple waited outside the door.

Beside it lay a note in Ronan's severe handwriting.

I was listening badly. I would like to try again.

I picked it up and stood there, smiling despite myself.

Then Mara came up the stairs carrying a sealed letter.

"From Isolde," she said.

I broke the wax.

The queen offered me seven days to return alone. After that, she would withdraw royal protection from the southern border towns and announce that my desertion had made their defense impossible.

At the bottom, in the handwriting that had corrected my childhood lessons, she had added a personal line.

You know what you owe the people who raised you.

I went through the connecting door without knocking.

Ronan looked up from his bed. Whatever he had meant to say vanished when he saw the letter in my hand.

"Read it with me," I said.