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“She wouldn’t let me see you,” Melanthe said, as if that were an excuse enough to kill over.

“As she had every right!” The King’s roar rang off the stone, and the chains of the prisoners around us clinked as they flinched as one. “I should have taken the child the moment he was born and killed you straight after. That would have been mercy. But now you receive none. Not after what you did to her.”

For just a flicker, beneath the rage, something older crossed his face. Something closer to grief. And I understood it, even here, even now. Because the woman in that cell had driven a blade into the only soul in all the world he loved. And some part of the King was breaking apart even as he raged, a great and proud man cracking quietly down the middle.

He shoved away from the bars and dragged a ragged hand down his face, a gesture Atlas had obviously inherited. And when he turned back, there was something almost savage in the grief.

“My wife lives,” he said.

The words landed like a blow. Melanthe flinched.

“She lives,” he said again, harder now, and there was a terrible, broken triumph in it. “You drove your blade into her, you poured your darkness into the wound, and still she breathes. Still, she wakes each morning, knows my face, and calls me by my name. She is stronger than you ever dreamed, witch. Stronger than your foul little magics. You did not take her from me. You did not win.” His voice cracked. “You failed in your revenge.”

Beside me, I felt Melanthe go very still.

“She’s… alive?” she whispered, and there was no triumph in it at all, only a hollow, disbelieving shock. As though of everything that could happen in that dark cell, this was the one thing she had not been prepared for. It was as if she had been so very certain of what her blade and her darkness would do.

“Alive,” the King confirmed, mistaking her shock for defeat. “And mending. The healers tell me the worst has passed.”

And that was when the true horror settled into me. Because I had been there. I had stood at those gates and watched the darkness pour into Ianthe’s side and drown the color clean out of her eyes. I had felt it take root in her, slow, patient, and wrong. And looking at Melanthe now, at the flicker of something that crossed her ruined face, half-buried beneath the shock, I understood with a sick and terrible certainty that the King was wrong. That the worst had not passed at all. That his Queen was not dead, her sickness only slowed. That the only soul in either world who might ever draw that darkness back out of her was the woman kneeling in the filth of this cell.

And I had a feeling, after his previous threat, that he had come down here to kill her.

He didn’t know.

The poor, grieving fool didn’t know what he was about to do. Oh, how wrong I hoped I was.

For a moment, Melanthe said nothing, and whatever had crossed her face was gone, smoothed back into that cold, glassy calm.

“Then it seems she is stronger than I thought,” she said quietly. “Now where is my son?”

The King went very still.

“Where he should be,” he said. “Far from here. Far from you.”

And something in her chest seemed to ease, even now, even at the very end. “So you have taken him in.” It came out almost like hope. “You will keep him. Raise him as your…”

“No.” The word was quiet, and final, and it landed harder than any blow yet. “He will never find a home within these walls. He will never bear my name, nor sit at my table, nor be told a single word of the blood that made him. That much, I cannot give him. Not without bringing my whole house down around his ears.” He drew a slow, unsteady breath, and when he spoke again, there was something almost gentle buried beneath the grief.

“But I am not the monster you would make of me. I will not leave a child to starve in the gutter for the sins of his mother. He has been given to a good family. Farmers, far to the south, who wanted a son and could not have one of their own. They will feed him, and clothe him, and love him as if he were truly theirs, and never once speak your name, or mine.” His eyes hardened. “He will grow up whole. Happy, even. He will learn to live without you. And in time, gods willing, he will forget you ever drew breath at all. It is the only mercy left in any of this. And it is a great deal more than you have earned.”

I watched the words go into Melanthe like driven steel.

Not the promise of her own death, as he wouldn’t give this information so freely otherwise. Though, it looked like she had long since made her peace with that. But this… the knowing that her son would grow up safe, and fed, and loved, somewhere she could never reach him, by people who were not her, carrying no memory of her face at all.

It was, I realized with a slow and dawning horror, the single cruelest thing the King could have done to her, even if it was wrong. For most loving mothers, this would have been a dying wish, but not hers. Not with all the bitterness that consumed her heart.

Because I understood, as most would, that it was the kindest thing he could have done for the boy. And he had chosen it, knowing full well that it was both a blessing for him and his own revenge cast on a woman full of hatred.

“You would erase me,” she breathed.

“I would set him free of you,” the King said. “There is a difference, witch. Though I would never expect you to know it.”

That was when the last of his restraint gave way.

“It is past time this was finished,” he said to the guards, his voice gone flat and final. “Open it.”

The cell door rattled wide. And I knew then, with a sick and certain dread, that the King had come to do exactly what I thought.