The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride

The north wing room was larger than my east room. It was warmer. The stone here had been treated with something that held heat differently, and the fireplace was bigger, and the window, which faced the interior courtyard rather than the forest, had iron shutters that locked from inside.

Someone had already moved my things before I arrived. Everything arranged with careful precision not the impersonal efficiency of Heda, but something more deliberate.

My books in order. My few personal items placed as though someone had studied where they lived before and reconstructed it.

Kael, I guessed. The small considerate logistics that he performed without announcing.

The connecting door was on the west wall. Heavy oak, iron fittings, a bolt on my side and, presumably, a bolt on his. Something very secure. I looked at it for a long moment and then deliberately did not look at it anymore and unpacked the bag I had carried up myself.

At midnight I was still awake.

Not from fear. I was just thinking.

The north wing was safer than anywhere I had been in Ironveil, and I had a functional sense of that safety in my body.

I was awake because the room was unfamiliar and because the mark on my neck was doing something new. It was vibrating. A very low frequency hum, like a note played too deep to hear but felt in the chest.

A response, I realized.

He was on the other side of that door. Close enough that the partial mating mark was responding to his proximity the way a compass responded to north. I pressed my palm over it gently and breathed.

Then quietly, from the other side of the connecting door, I heard him.

Not pain this time. Not the labored breathing of the curse pressing against him.

Something different. Movement. The sound of someone who was also awake, also not

sleeping, also aware of the eight inches of oak between them and something they hadn't found words for yet.

I thought about knocking.

But I didn't.

I moved my chair to my side of the connecting door and sat in it and read by firelight until nearly two in the morning, and the vibration in the mark gradually eased from urgent to settled the way the sea eased after a storm passed.

When I finally slept, I slept without waking for the first time since the carriage.

Morning brought Aldric and a harder lesson.

We were two hours into the session when he told me what came next after the candles.

"Active contact," he said. "Not with the curse itself. Not yet. With a contained sample. I

have a piece of cursed iron - bound with the same class of dark magic as what's in Caius,

though considerably smaller in scale.

I need you to practice reaching into it the way you reached into the candle locks."

He placed it on the floor between us. A piece of iron perhaps the size of my fist, dark at its

center in a way that had nothing to do with the metal itself.

I could feel it immediately. The wrongness of it. Like a word in a language you don't speak

that you still somehow understand means something bad.

"And if I reach wrong?" I asked curiously.

"The sample is contained. If you lose control of the contact it will - it will be unpleasant.

But limited."

"Unpleasant?" I asked confused.

"Pain," he said. Honest. "Brief. And then we adjust and try again."

I looked at the iron. Found the current in my blood. It was faster now, more accessible, the nineteen years of suppression cracking daily with use. I reached toward the dark knot at the iron's center.

For three seconds it was exactly like the candles. I felt the lock, felt its structure, began to work around the edges the way Aldric had taught me.

It bit back.

Not like a candle. The dark magic in the iron recognized the contact and pushed - hard,

aggressive, the difference between a sleeping thing and an awake one. Pain shot from my hands to my elbows and I pulled back instinctively and the contact broke.

I sat there breathing with my hands in my lap feeling the echo of it fade.

Aldric was watching me carefully. "Again" he instructed.

"It - it pushed back" I said.

"I know. Again. The first time it pushes back you learn what it feels like.

The second time, you learn not to be surprised.

The third time, you start to learn what to do about it."

I looked at the iron. I gathered courage then

I reached again.

But it bit again. Less surprising this time. I held the contact for two seconds before pulling back.

Third time I held it for five. Felt the structure of the dark magic more clearly. Felt where

the edges were. Felt, underneath the aggression, something like logic. Like a language.

Like something that could be learned.

When I finally sat back, my hands were trembling and I was sweating despite the cold of the underground room.

"Good,very good" Aldric said quietly. "That's enough for today."

I looked at the iron. At its dark center, slightly less dark than it had been an hour ago.

"I think I did something to it," I said.

"You began to," he replied. "It will recover. But yes. You touched the structure of it." He paused.

"Sera, what you did today with a contained sample - Caius's curse is the same class of magic. But larger. Older. More deeply embedded. But the same."

The same. "How long?" I asked.

Aldric was quiet for a moment.

"If you develop at this rate?" he said carefully. "Six weeks. Perhaps eight in the farthest. Before you would be ready to attempt contact with the actual curse." Six weeks.

I nodded. Caius had been dying for three years. Six weeks was nothing. Six weeks was everything.

I went upstairs with my trembling hands and walked directly into Caius in the corridor outside the hidden stairwell, which had stopped surprising me.

He looked at my hands. At my face. At whatever I was carrying. He said nothing. Just stood back so I could pass. But as I walked by him, I felt his hand briefly, barely brush my shoulder.

Not claiming. Not possessive. Just present.

A man saying, without words, that he saw the cost of what I was doing.

And that he wasn't going to pretend he didn't.