Morgause kept her eyes fixed on the painting.
“Her name was Kaia.”
I didn’t ask anything right away.
The human woman in the portrait had brown hair tied back carelessly, a sword hanging from her waist, and a smile so wide she looked as though she was about to say something inappropriate.
Morgause ran her thumb along the edge of the frame.
“She was an adventurer. Loud, reckless, and completely incapable of realizing when someone wanted her to leave. The first time she entered our territory, she was chasing some creature from the mountains. She got lost for two days and ended up walking straight into one of our border outposts.”
A strange expression crossed her face. It didn’t quite become a smile, but it came close.
“Twenty soldiers surrounded her. Kaia raised both hands, looked at them one by one, and asked which of them knew how to cook, because she hadn’t eaten in two days and was starting to think dying of starvation would be far more embarrassing than being killed by demons.”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“I think I would’ve liked her.”
Morgause glanced at me.
“That is exactly what concerns me.”
For a moment, I recognized the Morgause I knew.
Then her attention returned to the portrait.
“They brought her to me because no one knew what to do with her. I expected to find a terrified human. Or an arrogant one. Instead, she sat down, accepted the food they offered her, and started asking me questions. About the castle, demons, my horns…” She paused. “She asked if she could touch them.”
My eyes almost drifted upward on pure instinct.
I stopped them in time.
Definitely not the moment.
“I told her no. Then she started arguing with me about how I was wasting an opportunity for cultural exchange.”
“Yeah. I definitely would’ve liked her.”
This time Morgause actually smiled a little.
It was tiny and tired, but it was there.
“She left the next day. I assumed I would never see her again. A week later, she came back and said she’d returned because she wanted to see me. No mission. No orders. No reason I considered remotely sensible.”
Kaia kept coming back.
Sometimes she brought news from human cities. Other times she appeared carrying some strange object she had found during her travels. Once, she crossed the border for no reason other than to bring Morgause a cake because, according to her, no one living in such a depressing castle could possibly have tasted a decent one.
Eventually, Morgause stopped wondering when she would leave.
She started wondering when she would come back.
“There wasn’t a moment when we decided we were friends,” she said. “I simply realized I had started waiting for her visits. There were things I would save just so I could tell her when she returned.”
Her fingers tightened slightly around the frame.
“Kaia was the one who started insisting on an agreement between humans and demons. She said that if she could sit across from me for hours, annoy me, drink my wine, and still leave the castle with her head attached to her body, then maybe the rest of the world could learn to do something similar.”
“That’s not a terrible argument.”
“I thought it was.”
“But you listened.”
Morgause went quiet for a few seconds.
“Yes. I did.”
At first, the agreements were small.
Trade routes watched by both sides. Permits allowing certain adventurers to travel through demon territory. Areas where humans and demons could trade without entering armed.
And it worked.
Not perfectly.
But enough for Morgause to start believing that maybe Kaia had been right.
That was when she began trusting her with things no human had known before.
Routes used by demon soldiers. The locations of small villages. Border posts. Safe ways through certain regions, and details about the defenses protecting some respawn points.
“I didn’t tell her because she needed to know,” Morgause said. “I told her because I trusted her. I thought anything I placed in her hands would be safe.”
I looked at the woman in the painting.
I already knew it hadn’t been.
“One day, Kaia stopped coming back. At first, I wasn’t worried. Disappearing for several days was normal for her. If she heard a rumor about some unusual creature, she could chase it to the other side of the continent without telling anyone.”
The little warmth Morgause had recovered began to disappear from her voice.
“On the third day, the spirit I had given her came back.”
I stayed still.
“It was a minor spirit. She didn’t know she was carrying it. It couldn’t protect her from anything truly dangerous, but it could neutralize poisons, warn me if she was seriously injured, and return to me if something happened that she couldn’t handle alone.”
Morgause lowered her eyes.
“When it came back, there was barely anything left of it.”
The little spirit had spent nearly all its energy trying to keep Kaia alive.
It reached the castle while losing its form, its light dimming little by little.
It couldn’t speak.
But it still had memories.
And it showed them to her.
“They were human,” Morgause said. “Men serving the same kingdom that had signed the agreement with me. They discovered Kaia knew things they wanted, and they decided to take them from her.”
Morgause breathed slowly before continuing.
Before questioning her, they destroyed the bond connecting her to her respawn point.
They knew that as long as it remained intact, Kaia could try to escape through death.
So they made sure death would be permanent.
Then the questions began.
The routes.
The settlements.
The military posts.
The respawn points.
Everything Morgause had trusted her with.
“They stripped her,” Morgause continued, almost whispering. “Not because they needed to. They wanted her to feel helpless. They wanted her to understand that she no longer got to decide even what they could take from her.”
Her eyes remained fixed on the floor.
“They kept her tied up in a stone room. When the spirit showed me what it had seen, her wrists had been torn open by the ropes from struggling so much. Her ankles were injured, there were bruises across her ribs and arms, and she could barely stay conscious. Every time she refused to answer, they started again.”
My stomach tightened.
Morgause continued with difficulty.
“She resisted for hours. Maybe longer. The spirit couldn’t tell how much time had passed.”
Her hands began to tremble.
“In the end, she talked.”
I looked at her.
“I never blamed her.”
She hadn’t even waited for me to ask.
“Not for a single moment. She could have told them every secret she knew. She could have drawn them a map straight to my bedroom and it wouldn’t have changed anything.”
Anger finally entered her voice.
“She didn’t give them that information. They tore it out of her.”
The little spirit used the last of its strength to show Morgause where Kaia was.
Then it vanished in her hands.
Morgause went alone.
“When I got there and saw that place… I didn’t think.”
Her voice dropped lower.
“I saw the men who were there. I saw the blood. I saw what they had done to her.”
She closed her eyes.
“And I killed them.”
There was no satisfaction in those words.
“I didn’t ask for names. I didn’t ask who had given the orders. I didn’t let them explain anything. At that moment, I didn’t even want explanations. I only wanted everyone who had laid a hand on her to stop breathing.”
I said nothing.
Morgause didn’t try to justify herself either.
“When I was done, I went looking for her.”
Kaia was still alive.
Barely.
Morgause broke her restraints, wrapped her in her own cloak, and tried to heal her.
It wasn’t enough.
Her respawn bond had been destroyed, and her body had endured too much.
“She opened her eyes when I took her into my arms,” Morgause said. “I was covered in blood. There were bodies everywhere, and the first thing I thought was that she would be afraid of me.”
Her voice cracked slightly.
“But she looked at me and told me to stop making that face.”
A small, broken laugh escaped her lips.
“She was dying, and she still had enough strength to bother me. I asked what kind of face I was supposed to make. She said I had always been far too serious.”
A tear ran down Morgause’s cheek.
She didn’t even seem to notice.
“Then she asked me to come closer. And she said… ‘Thank you for being friends with someone as strange as me.’”
Another tear followed the first.
“I held her until she stopped breathing.”
I didn’t try to answer.
There was no sentence that could make that memory any less cruel.
For several seconds, all I could hear was Morgause’s uneven breathing.
Then she continued.
“I didn’t know there was a child hiding in that house.”
I raised my eyes slightly.
“I never saw him. I don’t know who he was. Maybe the son of one of those men. Maybe just someone unlucky enough to be there. But he saw me.”
Morgause clenched her jaw.
“He saw human bodies all over the room. He saw me covered in blood, holding Kaia. To him, there had been no interrogation, no torture, no betrayal. There was only a demon surrounded by corpses and a dead human woman in her arms.”
The child ran.
He found the kingdom’s knights.
When they arrived, they didn’t find Kaia being interrogated.
The men responsible were already dead.
The spirit that had witnessed everything was gone.
All that remained were the bodies.
And Morgause.
“I tried to explain,” she said. “At first, I still believed the truth would matter. I told them to investigate. To look for documents, orders, anything that would explain why Kaia had been there.”
She let out a bitter laugh.
“But by then, they already had a much simpler story.”
The Demon Queen had crossed into human territory.
She had massacred its people.
She had murdered an adventurer.
The agreement died with Kaia.
The borders closed again. The merchants disappeared. The attacks began all over again.
Some people tried to defend Morgause.
It didn’t matter.
“Eventually, I stopped explaining,” she said. “I stopped negotiating. I stopped trusting. It was easier to accept that humans saw me as a monster than to keep trying to convince them I wasn’t.”
Her gaze slowly returned to the portrait.
“And for years, I couldn’t stop thinking that if I had never trusted Kaia, she would still be alive. If I hadn’t told her those things, no one would ever have considered her important enough to target. If I had never agreed to that damned treaty…”
“Morgause.”
“No.”
I stopped.
She closed her eyes.
“Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
There was something desperate in her voice.
“Everyone who tried to comfort me said that. As if repeating it enough times could change the fact that it was my trust that made her a target.”
I wanted to answer.
To tell her she was wrong.
That Kaia had made her own choices.
That the people who kidnapped her were the ones to blame.
But before I could put the words together, Morgause’s expression changed.
She tried to hold it back.
I saw it clearly.
She clenched her teeth, lowered her head, and tried to recover that cold expression she always wore around me.
She couldn’t.
Morgause started crying.
Not quietly.
Not elegantly, the way one might expect from a queen.
She broke.
She covered her face as her shoulders shook, every attempt to breathe collapsing into another sob.
And my mind immediately started searching for something to say.
Kaia wouldn’t want to see you like this.
No.
You can trust me.
Not that either.
I would never do something like that to you.
That would sound like I was turning her pain into something about me.
I could tell her I loved her.
Even worse.
I thought of one sentence.
Rejected it.
Thought of another.
That sounded wrong too.
The harder I tried to find the perfect words, the less I understood what Morgause actually needed.
Then I looked at her.
Not the Demon Queen.
Not the woman who had killed me thirty-three times.
Just Morgause.
Crying in front of me.
I stopped thinking.
I stepped closer.
And hugged her.
Her entire body went rigid.
For one second, I thought she would push me away.
She didn’t.
I didn’t squeeze harder or try to force a response either. I simply wrapped my arms around her and stayed there.
For the first time since I had met her, having Morgause pressed against me didn’t summon any of the indecent thoughts that normally invaded my head.
I didn’t think about kissing her.
I didn’t think about her legs.
I didn’t think about what she was wearing underneath her clothes.
I only wanted her to stop trembling.
Her breath broke against my shoulder.
Several seconds passed.
“Kaia used to do this,” she whispered.
I didn’t need to ask what she meant.
“Every time she thought I was too angry, too tired, or locking myself inside my own head again… she would just hug me.”
Her fingers closed slightly around my dress.
“The first time, I almost threw her out a window.”
A small smile appeared on my lips.
“I like her more with every story.”
Morgause made a strange sound against my shoulder.
Half sob.
Half laugh.
Then I felt her arms wrap around me.
At first, the gesture was uncertain. Almost awkward.
Then Morgause held me tightly.
She buried her face against my shoulder and clutched at my dress as another sob escaped her.
I simply held her.
I didn’t try to fix anything.
I didn’t tell her everything would be okay or that she needed to stop blaming herself. None of those words could change what had happened.
So I stayed.
Little by little, she stopped trembling.
Her breathing grew calmer, and eventually the weight of her body truly rested against mine.
Then I heard her voice.
“Nellie…”
“Yes?”
Morgause was quiet for several seconds.
I thought she was about to pull away.
Instead, her arms tightened slightly around me.
“Stay like this a little longer.”
My heart clenched.
Not painfully.
In a way that was much worse for my ability to think clearly.
I held her a little tighter.
“As long as you want.”
Morgause didn’t answer.
But she didn’t let go either.
I rested my cheek against her hair and closed my eyes.
I had spent thirty-three attempts chasing her through this castle, looking for any excuse to get a little closer.
A glance.
A blush.
A kiss, if the gods ever decided to reward my extraordinary perseverance.
But this was different.
For the first time, I hadn’t needed to chase her.
I hadn’t needed to provoke her.
I hadn’t even needed to ask her for anything.
Morgause was in my arms because she had chosen to stay there.
And when I felt her fingers gently tighten against my back again, I understood something that made my chest feel strangely light.
For the first time since we had met…
I wasn’t the one who didn’t want to let go of Morgause.
Morgause was the one who didn’t want to let go of me.