POV: Sylra
The council session was fourteen minutes old when the curse detonated.
Lord Harren had been presenting casualty figures from the latest probing attack — thirty-two wounded, six dead, the western gatehouse compromised — and I was tracking his words, cataloging numbers, formulating a response about redeploying the reserve unit from the inner courtyard.
My mind was sharp. My hands were steady on the arms of my chair. Everything was under control.
Then the dungeon corridor slammed into my skull.
Not a memory. Not a dream. A vision so immediate and visceral that the council chamber vanished and I was there — standing in the dark passage beneath the palace, torchlight throwing jagged shadows across wet stone. My hands were not my hands.
They were larger, harder, wrapped around the hilt of a blade still warm from a body it had just opened. Blood sheeted across my fingers, pooling in the creases of my knuckles, and the heat of it was obscene — alive somehow, pulsing against my skin as though the life it had carried was still trying to escape.
The corridor stretched ahead. A cell door stood open. Inside, a woman sat on a bench, her face white, her mouth forming a word I couldn't hear. My hands — the killer's hands — raised the blade. The woman's fingers gripped the bench edge, knuckles blanching, tendons rigid beneath skin. She tried to push herself up. She wasn't fast enough.
The blade went in.
I felt the resistance. The initial pressure of steel against fabric, the give of flesh beneath, the scrape of metal against bone that vibrated up through the hilt and into my wrists. I felt the heat pour across my fingers again, thicker this time, faster, and the woman's grip on the bench loosened one finger at a time as something essential drained out of her and ran down the front of her dress in dark ribbons.
Neressa. The woman was Neressa.
The vision shattered. The council chamber crashed back into existence — the long table, the stunned faces, Lord Harren's mouth hanging open mid-sentence — and I realized I was no longer sitting in my chair.
I was face-down on the council table.
My cheek pressed against the polished wood. My arms were splayed across maps and documents, sending ink pots rolling. A sound was coming from my throat — low, animal, a keening that didn't belong in this room or any room where a queen was supposed to command respect.
My entire body convulsed, muscles firing without direction, and the taste of copper flooded my mouth where I'd bitten through the inside of my cheek.
Every councilor in the chamber saw it. Every single one.
Lord Harren stumbled backward, his chair shrieking against stone. Lady Voss rose to her feet, her face draining of color. Two guards rushed forward, hands reaching for me, and I felt Caelen's presence through the bond — a blast of panicked fury, the sensation of him sprinting through corridors toward me.
"Don't touch her!" Ithara's voice cut through the chaos. The palace healer shouldered past the guards, her lined face grim with a recognition that sent ice through my veins. She'd seen this before. She knew what it meant.
"Everyone out," Ithara commanded. "Now."
"She collapsed in front of the entire council," Lord Harren sputtered. "We have a right to know—"
"You have a right to leave this room before I remove you myself." Ithara didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. Something in her expression — the flat certainty of a woman who had watched kings die and would watch this queen die too if the curse wasn't contained — drove the councilors toward the door in a shuffling, whispering exodus.
Caelen burst through the entrance as the last of them filed out. His eyes found me instantly — still sprawled across the table, my body shaking, my fingers clawing at the wood as though I could anchor myself to something solid enough to resist whatever was pulling me under.
He was beside me in three strides. His hands closed around my shoulders, lifting me upright, steadying me in the chair.
"The curse," I managed. "I saw the murders. Through the killer's eyes. I felt—" My voice broke. "I felt the blade go in."
Ithara was already working. Her hands moved across my arms, peeling back sleeves, her expression darkening with each inch of skin she revealed. When she reached my forearms, she stopped.
Black veins. Not metaphorical darkness, not shadow — actual corruption visible beneath my skin, threading through the tissue in branching patterns that spread from my wrists toward my elbows. The veins pulsed faintly, synchronized with my heartbeat, each pulse pushing the darkness a fraction further up my arms.
"How far?" Caelen's voice was stripped to the bone.
Ithara pressed her fingertips to the leading edge of the corruption, just below my elbows. Her healing magic flared — a brief, warm glow that the black veins swallowed without effect.
She tried again. Same result. The corruption absorbed everything she threw at it and pulsed harder in response, as though feeding on the attempt.
"Past her wrists. Nearly to the elbows." Ithara withdrew her hands, her face settling into the careful neutrality of a healer delivering a terminal prognosis.
"The corruption is accelerating. At this rate, she has two months before it reaches the core meridians — the channels that connect her wolf to her physical form. Once it breaches those, she loses the ability to transform. The golden wolf goes dormant. Permanently."
The word landed between us like a body hitting stone.
"What's driving it?" Caelen demanded. "It was stable for weeks. Why the acceleration?"
Ithara turned to me, and her eyes held understanding. "The curse feeds on unspoken guilt as I said before. The curse converts that silence into corruption." She gestured to the black veins. "This is the physical cost.
"I've been trying to prove my innocence," I said through gritted teeth. "We have evidence. We have Vedran's intelligence. We have guard logs—"
"Evidence gathered in private doesn't counter a curse built on public accusation." Ithara's voice was relentless. "Rovan cursed you before the entire court. He named you murderer in front of witnesses. The curse anchors itself to that public declaration. Until you answer it with equal force — publicly, undeniably, with proof that shifts the accusation back where it belongs — the corruption will continue to spread."
"Two months," Caelen repeated. His hand hadn't left my shoulder. I felt him recalculating — timelines, strategies, the entire architecture of our defense restructuring around a countdown that hadn't existed five minutes ago.
"Two months at current rate," Ithara corrected. "If she suffers another vision episode like this one, the corruption will surge. The next detonation could push it past her elbows in hours, not weeks."
She gathered her supplies, pausing at the door. "The councilors saw her collapse. By tonight, every person in this palace will know the curse is progressing. By tomorrow, Rovan will know too." Her gaze met mine. "Whatever you're planning, plan faster."
She left. The chamber fell silent except for the distant percussion of siege preparations — hammers, shouts, the grinding protest of stone being reinforced against the next assault.
I stared at the black veins crawling beneath my skin. Two months. Sixty days to prove Rovan murdered his own family, break his coalition, win a war with a fraction of the forces I needed, and do it all while the curse devoured me from the inside out.
A knock at the chamber door. Precise. Three raps, evenly spaced.
"Enter," I said.
Lady Voss stepped through.
She closed the door behind her and stood with her hands folded in front of her — the same posture she'd held in every council meeting, the same cold composure, the same unreadable blue eyes. But something was different.
The angle of her chin. The set of her shoulders. The way she looked at me directly instead of through me.
"Lord Harren has been corresponding with Rovan's camp since the second week of the siege," she said without preamble. "Councilor Daven has been providing troop positions through a merchant contact who crosses our supply lines twice weekly. And Seneschal Bryce has been copying your sealed documents and passing them through the eastern tunnel network — the same tunnels Lord Rhys identified in his investigation."
The names landed like hammer blows. Three council members. Three traitors embedded in the heart of my war effort.
Caelen straightened. "How long have you known?"
"Long enough." Lady Voss didn't look at him. Her gaze stayed fixed on me — measuring, weighing, arriving at some private calculation. "I serve the crown, Your Majesty. Not because I trust you — I don't, not entirely, not yet." Her chin lifted a fraction. "Don't make me regret the choice."