Ella POV
The dungeon smelled like wet stone and old iron and something she couldn't name that made
her think of graves.
She hadn't known there was a dungeon.
Nineteen years in this palace, every corridor memorized, every secret door and hidden garden and servants' shortcut, and she had never once known that below the east wing, past a staircase hidden behind a tapestry of the First Harvest, there were cells. Real ones. Stone walls, iron doors, grates in the floor that breathed cold air up from somewhere deeper.
She sat with her back pressed against the wall and her knees pulled to her chest and her hands flat on her thighs, where she could see them. Where she could watch them.
The veins had slowed. They weren't racing anymore, not like on the altar. Now they just pulsed. Slow and dark, like a second heartbeat living just under her skin, reminding her every few seconds that it was still there. Still spreading. Still hers.
She had not slept.
She didn't think she was going to.
Outside the door, two guards were arguing. They'd been at it for an hour. She'd stopped pretending not to listen.
"Protocol says we slide the tray and step back."
"I'm not going near the grate. You go near the grate."
"She's not contagious, Bren, it's a curse, not a cold."
"You don't know that. Did someone tell you that? Because no one told me that."
A long pause.
"...slide it from the left side. With your foot."
The food tray appeared under the door. Bread and water, shoved through so fast, half the bread flipped over. She heard footsteps immediately retreating. Both of them. Gone before she could have spoken, even if she'd wanted to.
She looked at the bread for a long time.
She wasn't hungry. Her stomach felt like a closed fist. But she pulled the tray closer anyway, because it gave her hands something to do that wasn't pressing against the stone and feeling the cold go wrong when it touched her skin.
She didn't eat. She just held the bread.
You're being so calm, she thought distantly. Why are you so calm?
She wasn't calm. She was the opposite of calm. She was so far past not-calm that she'd gone quiet on the other side of it, like a scream that had been going so long it stopped making sound.
She called for her father at midday.
She knew it was midday because the light through the grate shifted, a thin grey rectangle that moved across the floor while she watched it. She had nothing else to track time by.
"Papa." Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "Papa, I know you can hear me. The staircase isn't that far. Please."
Nothing.
"I don't understand what happened. I didn't do anything. I touched the crown and it just I don't know what it is, but we can figure it out. You have healers. You have records, the old archives; there has to be something in them."
The silence was the same quality as before. Not empty. Chosen. She could feel the difference.
She pressed her forehead against her knees.
"I'm still me," she said, quieter. "Whatever this is, I'm still me. Please just come see me. You don't have to open the door. Just come to the gate. Just let me see your face."
The grate breathed cold air at her. That was all.
She called for Seraphine an hour later.
She wasn't sure why she waited that long. Pride, maybe. Some leftover piece of herself that didn't want Seraphine to know how scared she was, even now. Even here.
"Sera." She hadn't meant it to sound like that. Thin. Fraying at the edges. "Sera, it's me. I know you're not supposed to be down here. I know you're probably in trouble already, just because I'm not asking you to let me out. I just want to hear your voice. That's all. Just say something."
The guards outside were quiet now.
Everything was quiet.
She thought about the look on Seraphine's face at the altar. The way she'd stepped toward her, then stopped. The way her eyes had moved over the dark veins, as if she was reading something. That flicker of recognition that Ella had been trying not to think about for hours.
Sera knew something. She was almost sure of it. Not the curse, she couldn't know about the curse. But something. Some piece of this she wasn't saying.
People didn't look at things with recognition if they'd never seen them before.
Stop it, she told herself. You're sitting in a dungeon making up reasons to be more afraid than you already are.
She pulled her knees tighter and made herself breathe.
In. Out. Watch the veins pulse. Don't touch the walls. Don't think about the trees.
Don't think about the trees.
She heard her father's voice just before the light through the grate went dark.
Not at the door. Not close. It filtered down from somewhere above a room overhead, she realized. The floor of whatever room sat directly above her cell. His voice was low and measured, and she had to hold completely still and stop breathing to catch the words.
She caught enough.
"The tribe cannot be seen harboring a cursed heir. The optics alone."
A murmur. Someone else. She couldn't make out who.
"I understand the sentiment, but sentiment is not governance. The decision has already been made."
A pause.
Then the sound she would hear for the rest of her life.
Not a voice. A sound. Small and dry and completely, horrifyingly ordinary.
Pen on paper.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Her father is signing something. Quickly. Like a man finishing a task he'd thought through very carefully and simply needed to complete.
Ella's breath came back to her in one sharp rush.
She pressed her hand flat against the stone floor, and the cold bloomed under her palm, and she
felt the faint, horrible pulse of the dark veins answering it, and she understood. Not the curse. Not the magic. Something worse.
He hadn't come to see her.
He wasn't going to.
He was up there right now, in a warm room with a pen in his hand, and whatever he was signing, whatever document, whatever order, whatever cold political solution he had decided on in the single hour since she fell apart on that altar
He had not once, in all of it, asked if she was okay.
The pen stopped scratching.
Her father's voice came again, quiet and final: "Have it ready by morning."
Ella sat alone in the dark and understood that the crown had never been the thing she was about to lose.