Read Chapter 25: The Cure for Curse

Elara moved through the palace library with the single-minded focus of a woman hunting buried treasure. She had dismissed the servants at dawn, and now the great oak tables were covered in parchment—genealogies, royal chronicles, and the one book she had found hidden behind a false panel in the archives: *A Treatise on the Old Blood*, its leather binding cracked with age.

Alaric found her three hours later, his boots echoing against the stone floor. "The cooks are worried. You missed breakfast and luncheon."

She didn't look up from the page. "The curse predates both our kingdoms. It's older—much older. It comes from the mountain clans that ruled before the crowns were forged."

He pulled out a chair and sat across from her, close enough that his knee brushed the table's edge. "And?"

"There's a remedy." She looked up, her eyes bright with fierce hope. "A draught brewed from a rare flower called the frost-blossom. It blooms only when the first snow of winter melts into the earth, and it grows only in one place: the high valleys of the Caeris Range."

Alaric's face went still. "In Caldoran."

"Yes." Elara tapped the passage. "The book says the blossom lasts only three days after the melt. The first snow fell two weeks ago."

"Then it's already gone."

"No." She turned the page, revealing a carefully drawn map with annotations in a hand that was not the original scribe's. "The valley where it grows is high enough that the snow lingers longer. A small window remains—perhaps a week, perhaps less. We need only reach it before the melt completes."

Alaric leaned forward, studying the map. "The Caeris Range surrounds the heart of Caldoran's territory. Even if we traveled openly, crossing his borders right now—" He shook his head. "The treaty is signed, but it's young. And we both know how easily ink dries."

Elara set down the book. "Then we don't travel openly."

The silence stretched between them. In the distance, a temple bell tolled the noon hour.

"You're suggesting we slip into the kingdom of a man who tried to kill us," Alaric said slowly. "On the eve of our wedding."

"I'm suggesting we survive long enough to have a wedding."

He exhaled sharply, a sound that might have been a laugh in another context. "You are the most impossible woman I have ever known."

"And yet you kissed me anyway."

That drew a genuine smile from him, brief but warm. "I did, didn't I." He pulled the map toward him, tracing the mountain paths with his finger. "There's an old trade route here, along the eastern ridge. It's unused now—the border disputes made it dangerous. But it leads directly into the valley marked here."

"How do you know this route?"

Alaric hesitated. Then he met her eyes. "Because I used it. Before I was king, my father sent me to Caldoran to pose as a merchant—to learn his weaknesses, his alliances, his patterns. I walked that path three times."

Elara studied him, seeing the younger man he'd been beneath the crown: a prince willing to lie and scheme for his kingdom's sake. She knew that version of herself too. "Then we'll go as merchants again. A married couple, traveling to trade silks."

"Our wedding is public. Everyone in two kingdoms knows our faces."

"Everyone knows the crowned Elara," she said, pulling a braid of dark hair over her shoulder. "A merchant's wife from the border towns would look nothing like her. Disguise is a skill I learned long before I was a princess."

Alaric's gaze swept over her—the dirt-smudge potential of her pale skin, the sharp intelligence in her eyes that no dress could dull. "It will be dangerous. If Caldoran's men catch us—"

"They'll catch the King of Valdris and his betrothed, and they'll have leverage over two thrones." Elara nodded, acknowledging the weight. "Or we find the flower, break the curse, and return in time to marry. I've faced worse odds."

"Have you?"

She thought of the bomb beneath the great hall, humming with death. Of her father's corpse, of Roland's cold confession. "Yes," she said simply.

Alaric rose and walked to the window, looking out over the courtyard where servants were beginning to string decorations for the harvest-month wedding. "If we go, we go quietly. Four guards at most, disguised as our retinue. We tell no one—not the council, not our closest advisors. Too many blades hide in friendly robes."

"The enemy who planted those talismans in my trousseau," Elara agreed. "They knew about the curse. They'll be watching for us to seek a cure."

"Then we give them something else to watch." He turned, a plan taking shape behind his eyes. "I'll announce that I'm traveling to the eastern holds to secure grain shipments before the wedding. The real expedition will split off from the royal party before we reach the border."

"And I will be sick with wedding nerves, confined to my chambers for a week."

"You'll need to fake it convincingly."

Elara gave him a wry smile. "I convinced half the Valdris court I was a brainless ornament for three years. A few days of imaginary illness is nothing."

It was decided then, in the quiet space between words. They stood across from each other, and she felt the pull of his presence—the way his steady confidence made her own fears feel smaller.

She picked up the book, turning to the final chapter. But a slip of parchment fell out, fluttering to the floor. Alaric bent to retrieve it, and when he straightened, his face had gone pale.

"What is it?" Elara crossed to him.

He handed her the parchment. It was a letter, written in a script she recognized with chilling familiarity—her mother's hand. The same hand that had warned her not to marry Alaric.

*To she who seeks the frost-blossom: know that the cure requires not only the flower, but a blood-price. The one who collects it must sacrifice what they love most. The mountain does not give freely. The curse was not laid to be broken easily—it was laid to be survived by the strong or endured by the fool. Choose wisely, daughter. I did not.*

Elara read the words three times. Her throat tightened.

"She wrote this," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Before she disappeared. She knew I would find this book. She's been guiding me—and warning me—since the beginning."

Alaric's hand found hers, warm and steady. "A blood-price. What does that mean?"

Elara thought of her mother—the stories she'd been told of a queen who died in childbirth, then the truth of a mother who had vanished under dark circumstances. She thought of the locket around her neck, of the silver veil, of the talismans stitched into her wedding gown.

"I don't know," she said slowly. "But she expected me to pay it. And that means she knows what it costs."

She folded the parchment carefully, tucking it into her sleeve. The cure was no longer a simple quest for a flower. It was a test—one her mother had laid for her across years and miles.

"Pack light," she said to Alaric. "We leave tonight."