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The years went by. We grew stronger. Aydon grew sharper. I grew...morepassionate. Every girl I met I believed was destined to be my bride, be it milk maidyan, servant, or duchess. My passion for art and not politics grew—art I shared with every sweetheart, but all it took was one gnash of Mathyr’s teeth for all those sweethearts to retreat. Except for Finleigh. A burning, never-dimming fuse. My first bride. My first true love.
Thayne confirmed his suspicions regarding the identity of mytruefather. And he threw Mathyson into the Void.
So many nights, I’d tempted fate and had wandered the borders of the Void, daring it to take me. My tears coated the ground to mingle with the black blood I’d shed from the countless refter bodies I’d felled those nights. I’d grieved because I could not conquer the Void, could not stop wondering what happened to Fathyr.
Mathyr was never the same. Then again, she was never the same prior either. Mathyson was simply a self-indulgence to soothe her soul scars because Thayne never could. Perhaps if Kryach had spared her out of pity, out of mercy, but he hadn’t. He’d raped what he could.
I was the result of her addiction, of sharing her trauma with Mathyson who dared to love her for it.
One year later, I’d discovered Mathyr straddling Thayne as he’d coughed a fountain of blood. She’d whispered vengeful poison in his ear. And vowed to repay him for killing Mathyson.
Perhaps she’d never conceived the doom to follow. Regardless, she didn’t regret her choice to assassinate the Corpse King. Not when she’d paid the ultimate price to appease Kryach and restore the King. To grant him a form beyond his pain and rot. Nothing in me could fault her; I’d also desired the truest form of revenge.
But a deep, throbbing pang invaded my chest from how Aydon, the brother of my youth, who’d always considered me his truest friend—despite his father and the court’s mocking leers from my bastard status—shook the King while weeping. Aydon’s screams and pleas for him to return would haunt me forever. The King’s ghost had already evanesced, his spirit wandering the halls of our ancestors. I understood Aydon’s grief. I’d felt it when Thayne had thrown Mathyson into the Nether-Void.
What moved me most were Aydon’s tears. Only three years my senior. The one who’d indulged all my childish games and escapes beyond Nathyan Ghyeal. Our dreams and goals and fraternity had never dimmed despite our differing personalities.
He knew his oncoming fate. Yes, Mathyr had survived the Curse, but it was never truly broken. He knew he would become a living refter corpse. It was a matter of time before Aryahn Kryach descended to inhabit the descendant of the former Corpse King. Aydon knew he would arrive here someday...but not so young and handsome with the entire Citadel enamored with him and singing the Prince’s favor.
A millstone of grief, of regret, inundates my chest when I remember how the God of Death began to inhabit my older brother’s form. Aydon would have slit his wrists before becoming the pawn of Aryahn Kryach. He was birthed for the politics of the throne.
I wantednothingto do with it.
At the time, it seemed like thedecenttrade.
A deep knot encroaches into my stomach, tightening my rib cage when I remember how I dove into the River Cryth and begged the spirits to bring me to the God of Death. They took pity on me. I’d surrendered to their icy embrace and allowed them to drag me into their coldest source of an undertow until I’d found myself in the spirit planes of the gods. On the first level where Aryahn Kryach had somehow managed the will to lower himself to meet with me.Me! A bastard! A broken but illegitimate child of the true Corpse King. Not worthy of the honor or sacred Talahn-Feyal customs and traditions.
“Speak your words, Allysteir, son of Gryzelda,” he dictated in a lowered voice bordering upon fatality like his river.
Son of Gryzelda. No, it was not the father. The CorpseKing’slineage didn’t matter. Mathyr’s did. The fruit ofherwomb. He’d citedhername and not the Corpse King who was always loftiest among our regal ancestors’ tombs. While my mother had scorned the God of Death for many years, he’d elevated her position to one of honor.
The King had forsaken so many brides after they’d turned refter, which I only knew since Mathyr had shown me the hidden glen she’d created for them?onlymeand not Aydon. The King had abandoned them to the depths of the White Ladies. But Mathyr had collected them, preserved them as best she could in the hidden glen.
Despite the high price, I approached Aryahn Kryach.
And begged him to givemethe Curse, not Aydon. I fell to my knees, lowered my head, and respected the God of Death, the highest God in all the Isles, save for the long-distant angyl and demon Highest Goddess and God.
Aryahn Kryach paused. Soon, his shades engulfed me; they could nullify my soul within moments. But I kept my head bowed and leaned into those icy, fatal shades as they curled along my flesh as if curious. As ifintrigued.
Finally, Kryach approached me until his deathly robe brushed its decay across my meager Feyal-flesh. The High God of Death tucked his fingers beneath my chin and uttered two words to change my fate for the next five hundred years.
“You’ll do.”
After his pronouncement, the shades stabbed into the fabric of my flesh, my blood, my heart, and the thinnest and darkest realms of my soul. Death was the ultimate, the finality to everything. It was the coldest and truest conquest. The undefeatable, irrefutable, untranscribable truth and beauty I could ever imagine. I hated him all the more for it. For how a Curse could be torture and punishment and yet beauty and understanding—of rot and ruin and yet temptation and tantalization. Perfect verity.
I returned to Mathyr. I returned to Aydon who still wailed over his father’s body. They knew. In mynewform, I faced them, standing only due to Kryach’s power. The moment their eyes widened in unchecked horror while Mathyr’s tears cascaded to the floor blotted in Thayne’s blood, I knew my actions, my choice had broken her heart. I was her last scar to seal the coffin of her soul. Because the Curse fulfilled through Aydon would have been her final act of retribution. I’d stolen it from her...
“And I have paid the price every single day since. But my brides have paid the truest,” I conclude, my past finished, my history revealed.
Isla sets down her wine cup. I drain mine and fill another bone goblet to grant me the emotional reserves to cope with sharing my past. For I could not hope to deny her this. Not when I’ve spent the past six months desperate to repair the bridge of trust between us in hopes she will forgive me for the wedding night, for everything.
Spine steeled, I tap the side of the goblet, knocking bone against bone because I rarely wear my gloves with Isla anymore. I slam the goblet on the table, causing her to flinch, but she recovers. With the grace of a true Queen of Nathyan Ghyeal, of Talahn-Feyal, of perhaps all nations, Isla rises, and strides around the table to me.
I hiss through snarled teeth when she dares to tiptoe her fingers to the lower edges of my mask. But while I wince, I clench my teeth—on the cusp of breaking one. Clench my phalanges when she ever so slowly lifts the mask. To my astonishment, she does not tear it from my face. She does not fling it to the floor to haunt me with its echo upon the stone. No, she merely berths it on the barest edge of my upper lip. All she does is expose my ruined mouth. Full lips on one side with masticated withered flesh stripped to expose my teeth on the other.
I slam my eyes shut when she tiptoes her fingertips along those jagged teeth. She’s so fucking close, I smell her blood and flesh of the sweetest and richest Isle-wine. Her pulse thrums as it heightens to the risk she takes.
I gasp, I growl when Isla presses her luscious mouth to my broken one and kisses me long and deep and full.
