The throne is cursed. Tonight you sit with the people who must not know.

The court has been at table in the great hall since dawn, while three floors above you the king is dying. Twelve courses were announced; you have survived two of them. Wax drips onto the linen, and somewhere down the table somebody laughs too loud at a joke you did not hear.

Beside you sits Lord Osven, the king's youngest cousin, and he has spent the last hour talking about the kingdom's future as though it already belonged to him. He laughs too often. He does not know what you know. You nod in the right places and touch none of what has been set in front of you.

You found it three nights ago in the tower room, under the old midwife's records: a list of every child the king ever had, and beside each name the same word. Cursed. Not one of them died of illness. All of them fell to the same curse that sits on the throne itself, ever since the king's grandfather perjured his way onto it — whoever holds it without a true claim loses, within a year, everyone who should have followed them.

Osven has no true claim. Nobody at this table does, except the one person missing from it tonight, because the court has believed her dead for twelve years.

A servant refills your glass, unasked. At the head of the hall the door to the spiral stair stands open, and every time it moves the conversation drops for a breath before picking up louder than before.

The chest with the records is still up there, under loose floorboards. Whoever finds it finds that you were there too.

You excuse yourself with the excuse of checking on the physician, and nobody stops you — people are glad when someone else takes on the worry.

The spiral stair is colder than the hall, and the music below fades with every step. A single candle burns outside the sickroom door, and through the gap you can hear the king's breath, shallow and uneven. You pass it and keep going, up to the tower room, where the floorboards sit loose.

The chest is not where you left it. It stands open in the middle of the room, and the midwife's records lie scattered across the floor — not ransacked, but arranged, as though someone had searched for exactly what you searched for, and found it.

By the window stands a woman in the rough dress of a nurse, someone you have watched come and go from the king's sickroom for weeks without ever really looking at her. Now she looks at you.

"So you found it too," she says.

She pushes back her sleeve. On her wrist is a birthmark shaped like a crescent moon — the same mark listed in the midwife's records beside a name nobody has spoken aloud in twelve years.

"They declared me dead before the curse could come for me," she says. "My mother saw to it. I thought I had more time before anyone worked it out."

Below, many floors down, a door slams.

"That wasn't Osven," she says. "I know Osven's footsteps. That was someone else."

You suggest going down together, before the footsteps on the stair find her instead of you. She hesitates for a second — then nods and sheds the rough cloak, revealing a finer one underneath, one she has apparently kept folded and ready under these floorboards for exactly this moment.

The hall goes quiet as you enter. Not at once — it takes a heartbeat before anyone recognises her face, and another before the first person rises. A goblet tips over and nobody rights it.

Osven stays seated. That is the first thing you notice.

"This is a trick," he says, but his voice does not carry the way it usually does. "She has been dead for twelve years."

"I was never dead," she says. "I was hidden, so that I would stay that way." She shows the crescent mark on her wrist, raising her arm high enough for the back tables to see it.

One councillor rises. Then another. Not all of them — half the hall stays seated, faces unmoving, and you cannot tell whether it is loyalty to Osven or plain shock.

Then, three floors up, a single bell tolls.

The king is dead.

The hall holds completely still for a moment, and in that stillness every head turns between Osven and the woman beside you, as though the decision had to be made here, now, in this room.

You step forward and lay the midwife's records on the long table, open to the page with the crescent mark, and say aloud what you have known for three nights: that the throne is cursed, that every child who inherited it without a true claim paid for it in their own blood, and that the woman beside you is the only person at this table who can take it without that price.

A murmur runs through the hall, then silence, then a louder murmur than before.

An old councillor who has served the court for decades rises, crosses to her slowly, as though every step costs him a separate decision, and sinks onto one knee before her. Two more follow. Half the hall stays seated, hands flat on the table, as if waiting for a sign nobody has given yet.

Osven is on his feet. "The birthmark proves nothing," he says, but he says it too quietly, to the wrong person, and you watch two of his own men stop looking at him.

Then, at the far end of the hall, the great door opens, without anyone having called for it.

The guards who enter do not wear Osven's colours. They do not wear the council's either.

The woman beside you goes pale before you can properly read her face, and grips your arm hard enough to hurt.

"Those aren't his people," she says quietly. "They aren't mine either."