KAPITEL FÜNF: WAS CAIN WUSSTE

Cain was in the library, where he always was at this hour, and looked up at Darius's arrival with the expression of a man who had been expecting this conversation for seven months and had arranged his thoughts accordingly.

“Sit down,” said Cain. This was not the way subjects usually spoke to kings, and Darius only allowed Cain to do so because Cain had been saying it since Darius was eight years old – the habit was too deeply ingrained to be worth discussing.

Darius sat down.

"You were with her," Cain said.

“I offered her the title of Luna.”

"I assume that went well."

"She refused."

“Of course she did.” Cain put down the document he had just read and folded his hands on the table. “What exactly did she say?”

Darius repeated it with the exact same precision he used when gathering information. Cain listened without interruption, which meant he was taking the words seriously, rather than just processing them mentally for a response. When Darius finished, Cain was silent for a moment.

"She is intelligent," Cain said.

“Yes.”

“More than that. She’s analytical. She’s not moved by authority, comfort, or attraction. She’s moved by evidence and reason.” He paused. “She already knows there’s something wrong with what she’s feeling. I had tea with her yesterday morning.”

Darius looked at him. "You drank tea with her."

“I had tea with her,” Cain confirmed with the composure of a man who had made his decision and was at peace with it. “I told her I would explain the history of the kingdom to her. In context. Over time.”

"Without my authorization."

“Without your authorization,” Cain readily agreed. “Because you wouldn’t have given it to me, because she deserves to understand what she’s been dragged into, and because I’m sixty-one years old. I’ve spent three decades managing the fallout from decisions made for the wrong reasons, and I’ve decided I’m no longer willing to do that when a better option is available.”

A long silence ensued.

“You knew,” Darius said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement, spoken in that cautious, flat voice he used when he was approaching something he didn’t really want to look at directly.

“I had a suspicion,” Cain said. “Regarding the tape. Regarding its effects. Regarding why the Alpha command didn’t work on her on the road to Ashenford—something Captain Oren mentioned in his report, and which you never directly addressed with me, even though you knew I would notice.”

"What do you know about the curse?"

Cain's expression changed. Only slightly. It was the precise adjustment of a man who had long remained cautiously in the background and now decided to emerge. "I know what Mira said to you in the clearing," he said. "Oren included the contents in his confidential report to me. He recognized the language."

"Does Oren speak the old language?"

“His grandmother was a member of Mira’s circle,” Cain said. “He never thought it relevant to share that with you—for reasons you can probably guess.”

Darius processed this for a moment. "What is the curse?"

"Based on what Oren translated and what I've been able to research in the archives since: The hatred you spread throughout your reign is being reflected back at you by your mate. Her feelings for you carry the full weight of everything you've done to others—and with twice the intensity—until the causes of that hatred are resolved. Under the curse, the bond cannot function properly. Her she-wolf knows you are her mate—she's been fighting the curse since the bond was activated—but the curse overrides everything the bond would normally create."

The library was very quiet. Somewhere outside the window, night had now completely settled in.

“It’s not her,” Darius said. He said it as a matter-of-fact piece of information, not as something resembling emotion, because he hadn’t yet decided what to make of that specific piece of information.

“No,” Cain said. “It’s not her. The anger she feels is real in the sense that she actually feels it. But its origin lies in the curse, not in her character. If she were left to her own devices—” he paused. “From what I can tell, she’s not a woman who loves lightly. But she’s not a woman who hates without reason either. What she’s going through right now is completely out of proportion to the person she actually is.”

Darius remained silent for a long time. Outside, a night bird called once and then fell silent again.

"How is it broken?" he asked.

“That,” Cain said cautiously, “I don’t know. The archive contains records of curses that were lifted by countermagic, by the death of the caster, or by the passage of time. Mira is dead. Countermagic for spells of the ancient tongue requires a practitioner of her caliber or above—and the surviving members of her coven are, and I mean this with absolute accuracy and not in a derogatory way, three women in their seventies who specialize in agricultural blessings and medicinal tinctures. They cannot undo what she has done.”

"And what about time?"

“I don’t know the timeframe,” Cain said. “Curses of the ancient language don’t usually work according to fixed schedules. They work according to conditions.”

"What conditions?"

Cain stared at him intently. "That," he said, "is exactly what I think you need to find out."

Darius did not sleep that night.

This was nothing unusual—he had spent sleepless nights before, during military campaigns and political crises, and his body was accustomed to functioning under sleep deprivation with the practiced reliability of a system often pushed beyond its limits. But those sleepless nights had always been outward-directed. Operational. Tonight was different.

He sat on the chair by the window of his chamber and thought.

He thought of the clearing, of Mira's voice, and of the words he had only partially understood. He thought of the Alpha command that had shattered against Seraphina like a wave against a rock—something physically impossible under normal circumstances, something he had filed under "inexplicable" since the road to Ashenford. He thought of the anger in her eyes, so absolute and smooth, and—now, using Cain's assessment as a benchmark—seemingly structurally flawed, like something implanted in her rather than growing within her.

He thought of what Cain had said: *Her she-wolf knows you are her mate. She has been fighting the curse since the moment the bond was activated.*

He thought of the four seconds of hesitation he had seen in her face the morning after their second night in the palace, when he had walked past her in the corridor with the guard. The anger had been there, golden in her eyes, but beneath it lay something else. A confusion. A kind of inner conflict.

Their she-wolf, who fought.

He thought of the curse's conditions, which Cain didn't know and which he would have to elicit from an authority of the appropriate standing. There was only one authority he could think of that possessed the necessary power to speak of the work of a dying witch in the ancient tongue, and it wasn't an authority he could simply approach. It wasn't an authority to which the King of Ironmoor, who for eleven years had displayed a comprehensive disregard for the divine order, had the right to make a plea.

He thought about it for a long time.

Then he thought: *I have no other choice.*

That was the truth, and he didn't argue with her because he had trained himself to be honest in situations where any discussion would have been nothing more than self-pity. He had a mate. This mate was under a curse that prevented the bond from functioning. The curse had been cast by a woman he had killed. The terms of the curse were unknown to anyone who granted him access. The only being who knew the curse's terms in their entirety—its origin, its mechanism, its conditions for breaking it—was the one who had created the bond of mates in the first place and had therefore been present when the curse was woven into it.

The moon goddess.

Darius had never spoken to Lunara. He wasn't sure if he believed in her in an active, intervening sense—he believed in the bond of kinship because it was biologically and demonstrably real, and he understood that the bond of kinship was attributed to the Lunar Order. But the distance between accepting an attribution and personally supplicating the attributed source was considerable. He wasn't a man who knelt before anyone.

But he had stood still in the east wing corridor for two full seconds after Seraphina had sent him away, before he left.

He had stopped on the road to Ashenford for that one moment he had before protocol forced him to move on, and he had looked down at a woman in the dirt who was still trying to get up, and he had felt something he hadn't felt for eleven years.

He didn't investigate it further. But he didn't dismiss it either.

He would find a way to reach the Celestial Plane. He would stand before the Moon Goddess. He would gather the information he needed to break this curse.

And then – this was the last thought that came to him quietly and without much fuss, as he finally leaned back in his chair and the pre-early morning grey became visible in the window – he would do whatever the conditions demanded.

He didn't yet know what it would mean. He suspected it wouldn't be something small. He suspected, with the honest assessment of a man who had spent eleven years compiling a balance sheet of himself that could be viewed from almost every angle and found inadequate, that "small" was not the measure by which this particular debt would be settled.

He sat in the grey dawn of his chamber and did not move away from it. He simply remained there, breathing and waiting for morning.

In the east wing, three floors and two corridors away, Seraphina was also awake. She lay on the bed, her gaze fixed on the ceiling, and her she-wolf was unusually calm—not pacified, but still, as if listening for something. She thought about what Cain had said that morning. About the witch. About the timing of the kingdom's most difficult years.

She thought of the anger in her chest and the fact that it had no seams.

She thought about the four seconds she had spent watching his face after he had left her room in the early evening – through the crack she had left open in the door, which he hadn't noticed she had left open.

He had stopped in the corridor. Just stopped. And his face, exposed for those four seconds because he believed himself unobserved, had reflected something she couldn't categorize and couldn't forget.

She closed her eyes. Her she-wolf was still listening.

"What do you hear?" she asked her in the private language between a she-wolf and the human she lived in.

Her she-wolf did not answer with words. She answered in the bond of comradeship—in what the bond of comradeship meant under the fire and the fury, in the very foundation of the matter, before the curse had reached it.

Seraphina lay in the dark palace that did not belong to her, and for the first time felt the deepest level of the bond of companionship, separated from the disturbances of the curse, in the very special stillness of a moment when anger happened to pause for a single breath.

It took four seconds. Maybe five.

That was enough to make everything many times more complicated.

She opened her eyes. She looked up at the ceiling. Outside, the gray dawn had begun, and Ironmoor awoke around her with the slow, heavy certainty of a kingdom that had existed for centuries and intended to exist for centuries to come—indifferent to the private complications of the two people within it who, without consent, were already changing each other.

She did not name what she had felt.

But she didn't undo it either.