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“I brought your Last Will And Testament,” said Claude, setting up a swan-feather quill and a jar of black ink. “I have updated the terms per your instructions. Amelie is the sole beneficiary of your estate, and I will remain as executor. Is this all correct?”

Davron nodded and motioned for the quill. “Pass me the parchment.”

“Just keeping on top of things, are you?” asked Claude with a nervous glance at Davron. “You are not, uh, unwell, or anything of concern?”

“Nothing of concern, no,” murmured Davron as he signed the document, flecks of black ink staining the smooth cream margins.

“Well, that is good to hear. And, well—” He cleared his throat, shifting in his seat.

Davron fixed him with a piercing garnet stare. “What is it?”

“Your uncle. King Leonid. You know he is ill and not expected to see another summer. Yet, there are rumors that he will marry by the next full moon. I would be remiss if I did not mention that you are the rightful heir to the throne. That is, if you were to pursue your claim.”

“I have no interest in that,” he replied flatly.

“Right. Of course. But his rumored wife-to-be is a Garstang of Morktland. You know how they?—”

“What would you have me do?” asked Davron with a low growl. “Bring my curse across the sea? Infect all of Klatos with it? Is it not enough, the damage I have wrought here?”

Claude’s face turned redder than his hair. “Of course not, My Lord. Apologies.”

“It’s fine.” Davron sighed. He finished signing the documents, then slid them across the table to the esquire. “Please send my regards to my uncle, since neither of us can travel. I have fond memories of him and wish him well.”

“Right you are, My Lord. Will there be anything else?”

Davron pushed the chair back and stood. “Not for today. But I will need you to present to Castle Grange once you return from Klatos in the coming weeks. To tie up some loose ends. Nothing urgent.”

“Certainly, My Lord.”

“You may go.”

With a distinct air of relief, Claude gathered up the parchment, stowed away the quill and ink, gave another bow, and then left the room. His footsteps rapidly faded toward the keep. A few minutes later, the drawbridge closed with a heavy thud.

Davron exhaled. There was nothing more to do, and no one else to see. He was truly alone now, just as the Dark One had always intended.

All he could do was wait, and resume his pacing. Without meaning to, he kept gravitating toward Amelie’s chambers. He had not been inside since she left. The idea of it was too painful. If he saw a single hair from her head, or a garment she left behind, or caught any whiff of her scent, he would demand Nero from Oskar and ride straight to her. He would gather her into his arms and never let her go again.

No. It was safer out here in the corridor.

He continued walking.

The skull tattoo on his forearm began to sear in the afternoon. The pain was intimately familiar to him, having experienced it for a decade, but he would no longer use the potion from the apothecary to ease it. Fighting the curse would contravene his agreement with the Dark One—the agreement granting Amelie her life.

The pain stabbed him like hot needles, becoming slowly but steadily worse. The tattoo itself shifted and morphed on his skin.

The images were tattoos by name only. Levissina had made the marks on his skin when she cursed him, along with all of the other grotesque physical changes her magic wrought upon him when he would not die as his kin had.

He had witnessed his parents and fiancée perish. The curse took his father violently, hastened by his weakened state. Black tentacles of Levissina’s hatred had shot from his mouth and punched through his chest. The tentacles wrapped themselves around his body and squeezed until there was nothing left of the king except a mangled, blackened corpse.

The queen, his mother, had been turned to charcoal the moment she returned from the Beyond on her fruitless mission. Her incinerated body lay on the ground, uniformly grey and featureless, the Heartstone twinkling in the palm of her hand. Ash rained from the clear blue sky over Klatos for days afterward.

Davron’s fiancée died in her sleep. A handmaiden found her body in the morning, with no apparent wounds or signs of illness. He had never said this out loud to anyone, but he sometimes wondered if the painlessness of her death was a small act of mercy on behalf of Levissina. A sign of humanity, when everyone believed by then that she was no longer human.

In a race against the dark sorceress, the High Magus granted magical protections to Davron, which covered the cursed prince’s body in arcane symbols. The protective tattoos quickly intertwined and mingled with the Dark One’s vile stamps, leaving his body a war zone of magic.

Having paced the castle many times, Davron wandered outside with vague notions of visiting the rose garden. There, he could reminisce about Amelie without the risk of touching anything that belonged to her. He strode through the drizzly, dismal afternoon, his arm smarting.

The rose garden was dead, as if poisoned. He walked through it, taking in the morbid sight of withered rose bushes and piles of wilted petals. The smell was sickly, the damp weather turning the decomposing foliage rotten.