Ella POV
The crown was heavier than Ella expected.
Not that she was holding it yet. It sat on the altar two feet away, gold and ancient and glowing faintly in the afternoon light, and she could already feel the weight of it from here. The weight of everything meant.
She leaned sideways toward Seraphine anyway.
"If I trip walking up these steps," she whispered, "I need you to tackle the High Priest so everyone looks at him instead."
Seraphine pressed her lips together so hard they went white. Her shoulders were shaking. "Ella. Stop."
"I'm serious. Full tackle. Take him to the ground."
"I will end you."
"Silence," the High Priest intoned from the altar, and both of them snapped forward, faces perfectly composed, like two girls who had absolutely not just been plotting to commit assault at a coronation.
Ella exhaled slowly and looked out at the crowd. Every noble. Every elder. Every face she had known since she was small enough to fall asleep in her father's throne room. They were all watching her with the same shining, expectant look, the one that said you are exactly what we made you to be.
She had spent nineteen years becoming exactly that.
She started up the steps.
The Sacred Grove was beautiful today. It was always beautiful, but today the trees had been coaxed into full bloom out of season, with white blossoms everywhere, the air thick with their smell. She's doing it, actually. She'd slipped out at dawn and encouraged them a little. A small gift of her power, her last act as a princess before becoming something more.
She was proud of that. She wanted to remember it.
The High Priest lifted the crown.
Ella climbed the final step, turned to face the crowd, and smiled. Her father was in the front row. King Aldric. Fifty-two years old, silver-haired, and sharp-eyed, and the person she loved most in the world. He was smiling back at her. His eyes were bright.
She thought: I want to remember this too.
She turned back to the altar.
She reached for the crown.
Her hands touched the gold and went black.
Not shadow. Not shade. Black. The color of something dying.
It shot up her fingers so fast she couldn't breathe, dark veins splitting across her palms like cracks in winter ice, racing up her wrists, her forearms, swallowing the white of her skin in long, horrible lines.
The crown fell.
Ella stared at her hands and felt nothing for exactly one second, a blank, suspended nothing, and then the pain hit.
It was like being set on fire from the inside. She heard herself make a sound she had never made before, high and broken, and she grabbed the altar to keep from falling. Under her fingers, the white blossoms went grey. Then they crumbled. A hundred flowers turning to ash in three seconds, petals dissolving before they hit the ground.
Someone screamed. Not her. The crowd.
The priests scattered. She heard their robes snapping as they ran, heard the rapid slap of sandals on stone, and she wanted to tell them to stop, please, she wasn't doing this on purpose but the words wouldn't come because something was cracking open in the center of her chest and pouring out of her like she'd been holding it her whole life without knowing.
The trees shook.
The great ancient oaks that lined the Sacred Grove, hundreds of years old, older than the throne, older than the tribe itself, began to rot. Not slowly. All at once. The roots darkened at the base, and the color drained upward, killing the bark in long rushing waves, and the white blossoms that were left fell dead before they touched the ground.
Ella screamed. She couldn't stop.
She pressed her hands to her own chest to keep them away from everything else, and the dark veins crawled higher, reaching for her collarbone, her throat, and she thought wildly, absurdly: I was just laughing. I was laughing thirty seconds ago.
"Ella." Seraphine. Right beside her, close too close, "Ella, look at me."
"Don't touch me." The words ripped out of her. "Seraphine, don't touch me, I'll kill you, I don't know what this is."
Seraphine froze. Her face was white. Her eyes moved over the veins on Ella's arms, and something happened in them that Ella didn't understand, not just fear. Something worse.
Recognition.
The grove was nearly silent now. The crowd had pulled back in a mass, thirty feet of empty stone between them and the altar, and Ella stood in the middle of it with her blackened hands and her crumbling flowers and her ruined trees, and she had never felt so alone in her life.
She looked for her father.
He was still in the front row. He hadn't moved.
That was the thing she would think about later, in the cold dark of a dungeon she hadn't imagined existed beneath the palace. That he hadn't moved. While the priests ran and the crowd scrambled, and Seraphine went white, her father had simply stood there.
He was watching her.
Not with the bright eyes from before. The smile was completely gone. In its place was an expression she had never seen on his face in nineteen years, not once, and it took her too long to identify it because it was so wrong on him.
It wasn't horror.
It wasn't grief.
It was the look he got in closed-door meetings when someone presented him with a problem he'd already decided how to solve. Quiet. Still. Deliberate.
Calculating.
Like he was watching something happen that he had already, somewhere deep and hidden, prepared for.
Like he had known.
Ella's chest cracked open the rest of the way, and this time it had nothing to do with the curse.
She whispered, "Papa."
He looked away.
He turned to the High Elder beside him and began to speak in a low voice, and Ella stood at the altar with dying trees and ash at her feet and understood, in one terrible instant, that her father stepping back had nothing to do with fear.
He had already decided.
She just hadn't known there was anything to decide.