Read Chapter 22: The Witch's Tale

The dust from the collapsed door still hung in the air as Elara rose on unsteady legs. Her chains lay in a heap behind her, and for the first time in a decade, she stood fully upright, her thin frame swaying like a reed in a storm. Anya caught her elbow before she could fall.

“Easy,” Anya said. “You’ve been in the dark a long time.”

Elara’s eyes, pale and fathomless, fixed on Anya’s face with an intensity that made the princess take a half-step back. “You look like her,” Elara whispered. “The same stubborn chin. The same way of holding your head like the ceiling might crumble if you don’t watch it.”

“My mother.”

Elara nodded slowly. Then her gaze dropped to Anya’s hand, where the onyx ring caught the torchlight. Her face drained of what little color remained.

“You’re wearing it,” she breathed. “Gods above, child, you’re wearing *his* ring.”

Kael stepped between them, his hand resting on the hilt of his blade. “You said the ring was the key. Now you’re saying it’s his?”

“The key and the lock are the same,” Elara said, sinking onto a crumbling stool. She pressed her palms to her knees as if steadying herself against the weight of a decade. “The sorcerer—his name was Malachai—he didn’t place a curse on you, Princess. He placed a curse on your *mother*, as punishment for refusing him. He wanted her favor. Her hand, even. She would not give either.”

Anya’s throat tightened. “So he cursed her.”

“He cursed her to forget,” Elara said. “One day at a time, he would steal her memories, leaving her a shell by the end of the year. It was a slow, exquisite cruelty—he wanted to watch her lose herself, wanted her to come crawling back to him for mercy when she could no longer remember her own name.”

“But I’m the one who forgets,” Anya said, her voice barely a whisper. “Not her.”

Elara’s gaze softened with something that looked unbearably like pity. “Because she took it from you.”

The words hung in the stale air of the cell. Anya felt Kael’s hand brush her shoulder, steadying her as the floor seemed to tilt beneath her feet.

“I don’t understand,” Anya managed.

“You were born with this curse already coiled in your blood—Malachai had woven it into the royal line, knowing the Queen would one day bear a daughter. He wanted to own the next generation of the throne as thoroughly as he would own her. But your mother was cleverer than he knew.” Elara’s voice cracked. “When she learned what he had done, she went to him in secret. She bargained.”

“Bargained with what?”

“Her own mind.” Elara looked away. “She asked the curse to be transferred to herself. Amplified. She would forget not in years, but in days. In hours. And when she could no longer bear it—when the forgetting began to dissolve her entirely—she wove what remained of her magic into the bloodline and passed the burden to you, diluted and slowed. She gave you time, Princess. Time enough to find the truth.”

Anya’s vision blurred. Her mother had died when she was seven, frail and hollow-eyed, staring at her daughter as if seeing a stranger she was sure she should love. Anya had always remembered those final weeks as the cruelty of a distant and fading mind. Now she understood: her mother had been pouring herself out, drop by drop, to spare her daughter a faster fate.

“And the ring?” Kael’s voice was hard, pragmatic. “What is it truly?”

Elara’s lips pressed into a thin line. “The ring is the anchor. Malachai stored the original curse within it—a reservoir he could tap and redirect at will. When he died, the curse should have unraveled. Instead, it found a new vessel.”

Anya looked down at the dark stone on her finger. It had felt warm to her touch. *Alive*. “The ring chose me.”

“Because you were already marked,” Elara said. “The curse lives in your blood, but this—” she pointed at the ring—“this is the *source*. Destroy it, and the curse has no anchor. It will burn out of your blood like a fever breaking.”

“Voss said he killed Malachai.” Kael’s eyes narrowed. “He swore it.”

“Voss is a soldier, not a mage,” Elara said. “He believes what he struck down. But Malachai was a master of illusion and deception. He could cloak himself behind any face, wear any skin. The man Voss killed may have been a servant, a decoy—or a memory of Malachai themselves, left behind to dance at the end of a puppet string.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a razor’s edge. “The sorcerer never left this palace, Princess. He’s worn a familiar face for twenty years, and he’s been laughing at all of you from the inside.”

The torch sputtered. Far above them, another door slammed, the sound echoing down the stairwell like a warning.

“The ring,” Kael said urgently. “How do we destroy it?”

Elara opened her mouth to answer—and then a shadow fell across the threshold. Commander Voss stepped into the cell, his face a mask of stone, but his eyes—his eyes flicked to Elara with something unreadable. Something that might have been fear.

“That’s enough,” Voss said quietly. “You’ve said too much already, healer.”

Anya spun to face him, pulling the ring from her finger and clutching it in her fist. “You said the sorcerer was dead.”

Voss’s jaw tightened. “I said I killed him.”

“But you didn’t.” Anya’s voice shook with sudden, terrible certainty. “You never found the body. You never saw his face fall apart. You just assumed.” She looked at Voss—the man who had guarded her shadow since she was a child, who had sworn an oath to her mother, who had hidden Elara in a dungeon cell beneath his own office. “You’ve been protecting me from a ghost you never actually exorcised.”

Voss said nothing. But his hand drifted to the hilt of his sword, and his silence told her everything she needed to know.

Elara rose, her chains forgotten. “The sorcerer is still in this palace,” she said, her voice ringing like a bell in the hollow chamber. “And he will know we freed me by now. The question, Princess, is not whether you trust Voss or me.” She reached into her tattered robes and pulled out a small object that caught the torchlight—the crescent-moon locket, still warm from being pressed against her skin for a decade.

“The question,” Elara finished, “is what you’re willing to lose to destroy him.”