Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King, #2)(73)

Elm clamped his jaw shut so tightly he worried for his teeth. He dropped his hand into his pocket and ran a finger along his Scythe, begging the violent churnings in his stomach to settle. He pictured riding horseback through a meadow, free and at ease. Calm, he told himself. Calm. Steady. Easy.

Filick led them to the door with a rearing stallion carved into its frame. No one spoke a word. Filick entered the room, but Elm stalled at the threshold. He hadn’t been inside Hauth’s room since he was a boy.

Ione shifted behind him. Her voice was frostbite cold. “I don’t want to see him.”

Elm shut his eyes a moment. “You needn’t go in.”

“What about you?”

He didn’t have an answer. He wanted to lock his fist in her skirt and keep her with him like he had in the library. Everything was out of focus, dark around the edges. He heaved a rattling sigh, his voice strange in his ears. “I’ll be fine.”

He stepped inside.

Hauth’s bedchamber was overwarm, lit by dozens of candles, the fireplace roaring. Not even the smell of the Physician’s herbs and balms could mask the foul odor of unhealed wounds. Of blood.

Elm put a hand over his mouth and pushed past two other Physicians, planting himself against the wall where the most shadow remained. Filick moved to the center of the room, where Royce Linden and two other Physicians were gathered around a large canopied bed.

The body on the bed groaned.

No ease, no steadiness. Zero fucking calm. Hauth was awake.

“Any improvements?” Filick asked, rolling up his bloodstained sleeves.

“A little less blood in his saliva,” another Physician replied.

Linden’s voice was sharp. “That’s good, right?”

Filick gave a stiff nod. “Has he said anything?”

“Nothing yet.”

A tremendous bang shook the chamber. Several candles snuffed out and then the King was stomping into the room, eyes red and wide, mouth agape and smelling of wine. “Son,” he barked, “how’s my son?”

Drunk. The King was very drunk. Elm squeezed deeper into shadow.

“Alive and stirring, sire,” Filick said. “He hasn’t opened his eyes.”

The King stalked forward, pushing to get to the bed. When he passed Elm, he held out a brutish hand. A test of obedience. “Come, Renelm.”

Elm’s vision went foggy. For a blissful second, he considered disobeying. He’d walk out the door and down the stairs and just keep walking. He’d done it once with Ravyn.

A stone dropped into Elm’s stomach at the thought of his cousin. Trees, what he wouldn’t give to see Ravyn walk through that door, all angles and blades, and simply lay waste to anyone who so much as looked at him wrong. Everyone was afraid of Ravyn. Even, though he’d never admit it, the King.

And Elm—no one was afraid of him. His Scythe, maybe, but not him. He was a rotted-out tree, and Ravyn the impenetrable, untouchable vines that held the pieces of him together.

The King came back into shaky focus. So did the candlelit room beyond him. The body on the bed. Elm sucked in a breath, dragged a foot forward—

Ione stepped into the chamber. She traced her cold eyes over the room, the Physicians, the King. When she found Elm, her gaze softened a fraction. Her body was rigid. But her shoulders rose in the smallest shrug. She’d come. Into Hauth’s room.

For him.

The fragments of Elm’s rotted-out heart rearranged themselves. He stepped forward, surer. Broader. So tall that, when he reached the bed in the heart of the room, he looked down even upon his father.

Ione came up next to him. Their knuckles brushed.

They stood at the foot of the bed, facing it together. Hauth’s lips were a pale gray, pressed so tightly that they looked hemmed shut. His cheeks and neck were parceled by long, ugly claw marks, similar to the ones he’d gotten the night Wayland Pine’s Iron Gate Card had been stolen. Only worse—deeper. His eyelids were split, purple with bruises, his skull wrapped in thick, bloodstained linen.

The King leaned next to the bed, coarse hands gripping the quilt. “What of my Nightmare Card?” he gritted out. “Have you been able to reach him with it?”

Filick shook his head.

“We should try again,” Linden said. “Where’s the Card?”

“There, sire,” a Physician offered, pointing to a long mahogany chest at the foot of the bed.

All eyes turned to Ione, who stood near its latch.

“Get it,” came the King’s barking command.

Ione’s eyes remained untouched. She pushed open the heavy lid of the chest. The smell of leather and copper filled Elm’s nose, calling back the nausea from before. He clenched his jaw and peered into the chest, watching as Ione pushed past bandages and tonics, searching.

She pushed aside a belt, and there it was—the Nightmare Card. The one her father had traded on Equinox to earn her a place on the dais. The Card that had tied her to Hauth.

Ione stared down at it. The room was overwarm. But there was nothing but coldness in her face.

“Are you daft, woman?” Linden said. “The Nightmare Card. Now.”

“She’s getting it, asshole.”

Linden’s gaze shifted to Elm. “She should not be in here. It was her cousin that did this. There are plenty of empty cells in the dungeon, yet she wanders the castle like a harlot, twisting her betrothed’s brother around her finger—”