1
By the time the kettle started whistling, Liora Vale had already lost three small battles and one large one.
Battle one: her quill.
Battle two: her landlord.
Battle three: the smug candle that refused to light unless she begged.
The large battle was her life, in general.
She stood in her workshop—if “workshop” could describe a single-room attic that smelled like ink, rain-soaked wood, and the faintly tragic ambition of people who swear they’ll be famous someday. Stacks of parchment leaned at dangerous angles. A shelf of labeled jars—Truth Dust, Moon-Salt, Frog-Luck, Contract Ash—clinked softly when the wind hit the window wrong.
She set two mugs down on the table.
One for her. One for Pip.
Pip, a ferret with an overdeveloped sense of justice and an underdeveloped sense of shame, sat on the edge of her ink tray like a miniature king.
He sniffed the tea with disgust. “This smells like ‘trying.’”
“It’s mint.”
“It’s poverty.”
Liora dropped into her chair and held her head in her hands. “Please. Just—one quiet hour. Let me finish this contract and I’ll earn enough coin to buy food that doesn’t come in a suspicious sack.”
Pip’s black eyes glittered. “Your aura screams single.”
Liora looked up slowly. “My aura… what?”
Pip leaned closer, whispering dramatically as if the jars might overhear. “It screams. Like a kettle. But with loneliness.”
“My aura does not scream.” Liora dipped her quill, dragged it across parchment, and muttered the last line of a binding clause. “And even if it did, it would scream about rent.”
Pip pointed his tiny paw at her paper. “You wrote ‘consent’ wrong.”
“I did not.”
He squinted. “You wrote ‘concent.’ That’s a different spell. That summons an aggressive pigeon.”
Liora hissed. “That was one time.”
Pip’s whiskers twitched. “It was six pigeons. They unionized.”
Liora snapped the parchment up to inspect it—
—and the door below her attic exploded open with a sound like the world’s worst decision.
Footsteps climbed the narrow stairs, fast and certain, like whoever was coming had never once considered whether it was rude to invade someone’s home.
Liora pushed back from her table, reaching automatically for the protective sigil carved into the underside.
“Pip,” she whispered.
Pip slid into a defensive stance that looked ridiculous because he was a ferret, but the intent was noble. “If it’s the landlord, I bite ankles.”
The attic door swung open.
A man stepped in, and the air changed.
Not in the dramatic way of someone wearing expensive perfume. In the way the atmosphere shifts before a lightning strike—like the room itself realized it was not the most important thing anymore.
He wore black, but not mourning black—court black. Tailored coat, clean lines, silver clasp at the throat. Boots that had never known mud. A sword at his hip that was too beautiful to be practical and too practical to be decorative.
His hair was dark, falling back in a careful, impatient sweep. His face was carved by exhaustion and pride, like someone who’d been trained never to ask for anything and punished for wanting it anyway.
His eyes found Liora.
And then found her like he’d been searching.
“I need a scribe,” he said.
Liora blinked once. Twice. “You need a better door.”
He didn’t look at the broken hinge. “I don’t have time.”
Pip hopped onto the table, chest puffed out. “Time is a social construct,” he declared. “But manners are mandatory.”
The stranger’s gaze flicked to Pip with a brief, baffled pause—then returned to Liora with urgency sharp enough to cut.
“Marry me,” he said. “Or you die.”
Silence swallowed the attic.
Even the kettle stopped whistling as if it, too, wanted to hear what nonsense came next.
Liora’s brain performed a slow, offended somersault. “I’m sorry—did you just threaten me with a wedding?”
The man’s jaw tightened. “It isn’t a threat.”
Pip lifted a paw like a lawyer. “Objection.”
“It’s a condition,” the man said, voice low, strained. “A curse.”
Liora stared at him.
She had dealt with curses before.
Curses that made your hair fall out in interesting shapes. Curses that turned your voice into frogs. Curses that made you hiccup tiny flames at inappropriate times.
But nobody—nobody—burst into a scribe’s home and proposed like an executioner.
Liora took a step forward, tilting her chin. “Name.”
He hesitated. Just a flicker.
Then: “Kael Duskryn.”
Pip’s ears twitched. “Ohhhh. Duskryn. That’s fancy.”
“Title,” Liora demanded.
Kael’s eyes narrowed, like he wasn’t used to being interrogated in his own threat. “Prince.”
“Of course,” Liora muttered. “It’s always a prince. It’s never ‘marry me or you die’ from, like, a baker.”
Pip nodded gravely. “Bakers would at least offer bread.”
Liora jabbed a finger at Kael. “Explain. In full sentences. With logic. Preferably without murder.”
Kael exhaled like a man about to confess to something humiliating. He extended his left wrist.
A glowing ring-like brand circled it—thin lines of light, sharp as etched glass. The symbol pulsed once, and the candle flames bent toward it as if drawn by gravity.
Liora’s professional instincts snapped into place.
Old magic.
Court magic.
The kind that didn’t care about apologies.
Kael swallowed. “In seven days, at the first full reign moon, the curse ends. If I am not wed by true consent, I die.”
Liora opened her mouth—
—and felt a hot sting on her own wrist.
She sucked in a breath and yanked up her sleeve.
A faint shimmer—a matching brand, smaller, newly formed—glowed on her skin like the universe had signed her name without asking.
“Oh no.” Her voice came out thin. “No. No no no.”
Kael’s eyes widened. “It chose you.”
Liora stared at him as if he’d admitted he’d thrown a snake into her bathtub. “It chose me? Like I’m a fruit at a market?”
Pip leaned in, squinting at her mark. “Maybe it chose you because you’re cute.”
Liora snapped, “Pip.”
Pip shrugged. “I’m just saying, if destiny has taste—”
Liora seized a paperweight—heavy, carved stone with a protective rune—and hurled it at Kael’s head.
Kael caught it one-handed without flinching.
Pip clapped. “Ooo. Reflexes. That’s hot.”
Liora’s voice rose. “You just tied my life to yours!”
Kael’s grip tightened around the paperweight like he wanted to crush it. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think it would mark you immediately.”
“That doesn’t make it better!”
His eyes flickered—anger, fear, something wounded. “I was desperate.”
That word landed heavier than the paperweight.
Desperate.
Liora’s breath caught because she could see it now—the tension at his shoulders, the faint tremor in his hand, the way he stood like he expected a blade from the dark at any moment. This wasn’t a man casually proposing. This was a man at the edge of a cliff yelling at the first rope he saw.
Liora forced herself to inhale slowly. “Okay. Okay. If it’s true-consent magic, threatening me won’t work.”
Kael’s jaw clenched. “I know.”
“Do you?” Liora said sharply. “Because your opening line was ‘marry me or you die.’”
Kael looked down, shame quick as lightning. “I—made it worse.”
Pip patted Liora’s ankle. “He’s learning.”
“Shut up,” Liora muttered.
She squared her shoulders and stepped closer to Kael’s wrist, examining the mark like a surgeon. “This is an old contract-curse. Blood-sealed. Binding ring. Anchor—”
Kael went still at the word.
Liora looked at her own wrist. “So I’m the anchor.”
“Yes,” Kael said, voice rough. “If I die, the curse harvests the anchor with me.”
Liora’s stomach dropped.
She stared up at him. “So when you said ‘or you die’…”
“I meant it literally,” Kael whispered.
Pip let out a long, suffering sigh. “Romance is a horror genre.”
Liora steadied herself with rage because fear was useless.
“Fine,” she said. “Five minutes. Start talking. And if you lie, I will curse your hairline.”
Kael’s lips twitched like he almost smiled and then remembered he was dying. “Understood.”
“And Kael?” Liora added.
He looked at her.
“Don’t threaten me again. You ask. Like a person.”
Kael nodded once, solemn. “Agreed.”
Liora gestured to her chair. “Sit. Explain. And after that, you’re taking me to wherever this curse started.”
Kael sat like the chair might bite him back.
Pip leaned close to Liora and whispered, “We’re going to a castle, aren’t we?”
Liora whispered back, “If we live.”
Pip grinned. “Worth it.”
