The Cursed Queen

by Sarah Fine

  My heart is thumping like the wings of a dragonfly. Sander is close to Jaspar. He already suspects me of witchcraft. If he sees that I’ve killed Aksel—and how—the entire tribe could turn against me . . . and Thyra, too. My fear rises hot inside me, and a glow at my sides draw my gaze down.

  My fingertips are dripping fire.

  “Aksel! Where in heaven are you?” Sander shouts. He’s just on the other side of the outcropping. I have to decide how to handle this. I have to get control of this evil force inside me before I kill again.

  Unless Sander is also Jaspar’s wolf. That would change things.

  I clench my fists in an effort to contain the curse-fire. Then I step from the shadows.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sander freezes when he sees me emerge from behind the outcropping. I inhale the thick night air, wishing for a cold wind to blow the stink of cooked flesh out over the water.

  Sander’s short, dark hair flutters as the breeze gusts over him. He squints at me in the darkness. “Are you bleeding?”

  I glance down at my tunic, the collar of which is stiff with my blood, dried under the heat of my curse. “Just a little.” I whip out one of my own daggers. “I lost my footing while I had it unsheathed.”

  His eyebrows shoot up. “And nearly cut your own throat?”

  “The trail is treacherous in the shadows.”

  “Such truth,” he says, his voice thick with suspicion. “Have you seen Aksel?”

  “Not since he went away to pout like a child.” The heavier my conscience, the easier the lies flow, it seems.

  Sander chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Any chance he slipped and fell onto your dagger too?”

  My laugh is ugly and loud. “He always was a little clumsy.” My stomach turns as I catch a whiff of him. “But I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.”

  Sander steps toward me like he means to go around the outcropping, and I move to block him. “He’s definitely not back there. I’ve just walked along that stretch. I was the only living soul for miles.” I smile and tuck my arm—the one Aksel sliced as he attacked me—behind my back. “Why are you looking for Aksel? Thyra sent me to find him.”

  “I was concerned for him. He acted very rashly by the fire.”

  I squint at his face, trying to read it in the dim light of the winking stars. “I think Thyra would rather have such things said to her face than whispered behind her back. Though it seems there’s quite a lot of that going on.”

  He doesn’t take my bait. “Of course she prefers open challenge, especially from someone like Aksel. It allows her to prove her mettle in front of everyone, at his expense.”

  I scoff. “What would you have done?”

  “Avoid the need to prove myself in the first place.”

  “Are you still doubting Thyra? Has Jaspar drawn you into his nest of intrigue?”

  “Jaspar just wants what we all want. Victory.” Sander’s chin juts out. “If our tribes are united, we’ll be able to attack Kupari in the spring.”

  “And no doubt he sees Thyra as a barrier, especially now that she’s gained the loyalty of Edvin’s closest comrades.”

  “You said that. I didn’t.”

  My fists are tight balls, holding the flames inside, but just barely. “But you’re thinking it.”

  He sighs. “I don’t know what I’m thinking, Ansa. Everything has fallen apart. I just want to be part of something powerful again. And I’m not one for intrigue. I like things simple. Don’t you?”

  “Of course. But that doesn’t mean I’ll cozy up in the arms of a traitor.”

  “Jaspar told me there’s more to that story than we were told.” He carves a divot in the sand with the heel of his boot. “He hinted that Thyra was involved.”

  I groan. “You sound just like Aksel. Maybe Jaspar’s simply trying to sow doubt among us, to undo the work Thyra has done.”

  “Or maybe we were lied to!” He shakes his head and turns to look out on the water. “Don’t you ever wonder if Thyra’s hiding something from us? Nisse is a strong leader, Ansa. One of the best strategists we’ve ever had. Lars listened to him.”

  “Lars listened to Thyra, too!”

  “Thyra was always trying to poke holes in their plans, though. Nisse and Lars weren’t at odds.”

  “But Nisse wanted the chair for himself.”

  He turns to me, regarding me quietly for a moment before saying, “Or someone wanted Lars to believe he did.”

  “This is dangerous talk, Sander. You’d better be sure before you repeat it.”

  “I’m only sure of one thing, Ansa. I want to be strong again. I want Kupari blood on my weapons. I want them to suffer for what their witch queen did. I want to see her head on the end of a spear.”

  “So do I,” I say, remembering her terrible white face. It’s her fault that Hulda and Aksel are dead. Killing her may be the only thing that can set me free.

  “And I’ll serve the chieftain who can deliver me to her threshold.”

  “We already do.” I hope.

  “What if Thyra doesn’t have the stomach for it?” he asks, speaking my fear aloud. “Every time it comes up, she’s the one reminding us of what happened, instead of planning to change the outcome next time.”

  “She’s never said she didn’t want to defeat them. She’s only urged caution so we don’t get decimated again. Jaspar and Nisse should be grateful.” I stare at his sharp profile in the moonlight. “And so should you. It’s only by the grace of heaven that we survived the first invasion.”

  “Maybe for me. But I think you might have survived for a different reason.”

  Everything in me goes still. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.” He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “The witch left her mark on you.”

  “You’ve gone soft in the head.”

  He scratches at the dark, short beard that has grown during our journey. “I don’t want to fight you. But I will if you’ve become our enemy.”

  I close my eyes as the fire inside me rages, hungry and hot. I hold it tightly, but my control is slipping again. “If you spread lies, I will kill you.”

  Sander’s footsteps crunch on pebbles as he backs away from me. “So you can add me to the list?”

  My eyelids pop open, my eyeballs hot and aching. “Is that an accusation?”

  “I don’t have proof yet, apart from the fact that you’ve just threatened to murder me.”

  “I threaten to murder people all the time. How is that proof?”

  “If my concerns are baseless, why would you want to silence me?”

  “Do you have any idea what we’re walking into in Vasterut? Any rumor you spread will weaken us, no matter how unfounded. And you’re already doing exactly that—echoing stupid stories to frame Thyra and absolve Nisse, just to make it easier for him to take us over!”

  “So I should stay quiet and let the witch’s poisoned dagger inch closer to the throne of Vasterut, and the home of all the remaining Krigere warriors? Does Thyra suspect that the witch has tainted you? Would she want you at her side if she did?”

  “I would never hurt our people!” I shriek, cold tears brimming in my eyes as I realize I already have. First ice and now fire. The storm on the Torden was nothing compared to the gale raging inside my body. “Sander, you need to get away from me.”

  “Why, Ansa? What will you do if I don’t?”

  I sink into a squat and wrap my arms around my knees. “Nothing,” I whisper. The weight of death threatens to pull me straight into the ground. “Nothing. I just need to be by myself right now.”

  Sander looks over his shoulder. “Too bad. Greetings, Chieftain,” he calls out, stepping toward the shore to reveal Thyra striding toward us, a torch upraised.

  Thyra catches sight of me and begins to jog. “Ansa, are you hurt?”

  Sander snorts. “She claims to have had a little mishap with her own dagger.”

  Thyra’s eyes
go wide. “By accident—or on purpose?”

  Sander looks both surprised and troubled as he gazes down at me, and I bury my head in my knees to hide my burning cheeks. “I didn’t realize—” he begins.

  “Sander, go back to camp,” Thyra says in a flat voice. “I’ll deal with Ansa.”

  I raise my head to see her catch his arm as he walks by. “Think about your loyalties, Sander,” she says quietly. “Whatever happens now, please know that I love our tribe, and I will die before I allow harm to come to them. You and Ansa are my only first-wave warriors, and I will not succeed without your strength—and your discretion. My sister is waiting for you in the eternal fields. In her name and memory, if not in my father’s, stay with me.”

  Sander swallows hard as Thyra raises the specter of his lost, beloved mate. “I hear you, Chieftain,” he says hoarsely, then sets off through the dark. Something tells me he needs some time by himself now too.

  Thyra squats beside me as soon as his footsteps fade away. Her fingers slide into my hair, and my eyes fall shut as I treasure her touch. “What happened?”

  I press my forehead to my knees again. “Nothing. I’m just tired.”

  She puts her arm around me, gathering me to her. I feel her lips graze my temple. “I know you’ve had to work harder than all of us, and that your burden is great. But I also know you’re more than strong enough.”

  My throat is so tight that I can’t breathe. “I’m trying.” It comes out of me broken and rasping.

  She touches my elbow, near the shallow gash across my forearm, and I flinch. “Did you really slip on the rocks?”

  “You doubt me?”

  Her arms drop away. “I didn’t say that. But before we left the northern camp, you seemed intent on—”

  Killing myself. “It was an accident, Thyra, I swear.”

  She gives me a long, questioning look. “As you say. And Aksel?”

  I shoot to my feet. “I lost track of him—he must have kept to the rocks. No footprints. Let’s go back to the camp.”

  But Thyra doesn’t follow as I start to walk back the way she came. Instead, she looks up and down the beach . . . just as the wind shifts. The stink of burned flesh makes her grimace. “Ugh. What is that?”

  My heart seizes. “Oh, probably from the camp—”

  “No, it’s close by,” she says, taking a step toward the place where Aksel’s corpse lies.

  I grab her arm. “But nothing we need to—”

  She pulls herself from my grip. “Aksel might have been stupid enough to make a fire nearby,” she whispers, drawing her dagger and creeping toward the rocks.

  I lunge between her and the evidence of my crime. “He’s not back there! I already looked.”

  Her eyes narrow, and then she tucks her face against her upper arm as the smell surrounds us, heavy and bitter. “What’s causing that stench, then?”

  “It’s . . . um . . .” I pause a moment too long, and her expression hardens. She pushes past me, her torch held high, and I’m too paralyzed to stop her.

  My stomach turns as I hear her gagging with disgust. She returns to me, spitting onto the sand and looking like she’s about to lose her dinner. “You did this,” she says slowly.

  “No, I swear!”

  “No?” Her voice rises high, matching the blaze of her eyes. “You don’t even look surprised, Ansa! You know exactly what lies behind that rock.”

  My lips tingle cold with the realization that she’s caught me out, that my mountain of lies has crumbled to dust in the space of a moment.

  “Why would you do something like that?” she says in a choked voice. “I can understand meeting him blade to blade, but why did you have to—”

  “He attacked me!” I gather enough courage to look up at her, and immediately wish I hadn’t. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “But you said you could control the curse.” She’s staring at me with that wary look in her eyes again, as if I’m a stranger. “You killed Hulda, too, didn’t you?”

  The sob wrenches itself out of me as Hulda’s frozen eyes rise in memory. “Please, Thyra—”

  “No.” The sound lashes from her like the bite of a whip. She backs away from me. “You lied to me, didn’t you? You’ve been lying this whole time.”

  “I didn’t want you to think—”

  “That you murdered an innocent slave in cold blood? Or—and I find this hard to believe—did she threaten you somehow?”

  “N-no,” I stammer.

  “Hulda was Kupari. Did you do it as revenge, to get back at the witch for what she did to you?”

  “What?” I hold my arms out, but it only causes Thyra to move further away. She looks disgusted, the back of her hand pressed over her mouth. “I had no intention of harming Hulda!”

  “But you did, didn’t you? Only with ice that time.” Her voice is dead. Emotionless. “And now you’ve killed Aksel with fire. Did he really draw first blood?”

  “Yes,” I shout, my voice cracking. “How can you question that?”

  “Because you lied to me,” she roars. “Right to my face! Knowing what was at stake, knowing where we were going, knowing that I was depending on you, you lied to me. Your chieftain.” She rolls her eyes. “Not just once, either. Over and over again, it seems. And I ate your lies like honey cake.” Her voice shakes as she adds, “I was so eager to believe.”

  “I can control it, Thyra. I’m getting better every day,” I say.

  “How can you say that, when Aksel’s roasted corpse lies only feet away from us? His death had to have taken minutes, Ansa, not seconds. He was cooked, not devoured by sudden flames. Either you were controlling it in the most evil way, or you were out of control for longer than you want to believe. Which is it?”

  Evil. My stomach clenches and I nearly heave as I recall the way Aksel clawed at his belly as his innards boiled. I had no idea how to stop it—the enemy inside me was in control. “It won’t happen again. I swear on my life. I’ll kill myself before I let it happen again. Please.”

  I take a step toward her, but stiffen when she leaps out of my reach. And when the flames of her torch flare, she yelps and hurls the stick into the lake, as if she thinks I would use it against her. Hot tears burn their way down my cheeks.

  “It’s been you all along,” she says raggedly. “When the fires flare. It wasn’t just the ice on the marsh.”

  “I helped you,” I say with a sob. “I saved all those children, all those andeners. They would have perished in the marsh if not for me. You couldn’t have saved them.”

  “I thought you were controlling it, but now I see what a fool I was.” She stares at me with a cold kind of fear. “We all could have ended up like Hulda, though. We’re lucky you didn’t kill every single one of us.”

  “I did everything I could to keep that from happening!”

  Thyra nods slowly, never taking her eyes off me. “And I’m grateful for that. But it doesn’t erase your lies.”

  “So I make one mistake”—I grit my teeth as her eyebrow arches—“two mistakes, one of which was to kill a warrior who had ambushed me with the full intention of cutting my throat, and now you abandon me?”

  “I’m doing no such thing!”

  “Really?” I walk toward her, and she backtracks.

  “Nothing I do is because you killed Aksel! Or even Hulda.” Her face is solemn and exquisite in the starlight reflected off the water, so beautiful that it’s splintering me. “But you lied to me, Ansa. The reason why doesn’t matter. We were alone that night in the forest after Gry accused you. No one else would have heard the truth. It was just you and me, as it is now. You could have trusted me. Confided in me. And instead you put a wall between us, to protect yourself.”

  I swipe my nose on my sleeve. “Please,” I say, my voice thick with tears. “I’ll never do it again. Don’t push me away.”

  Her smile is unfocused. Like a fog off the lake. “When you’ve done it once, the way becomes easier. The paths unblocked, the hesitance rubbe
d away with repetition.”

  Cyrill said that to us, as he prepared us for our first raid. He was talking about killing.

  I never thought one simple lie could be just as deadly. Except it wasn’t just one lie.

  “But I had never deceived you before that moment,” I say in a low voice. “It’s just that with everything that was happening—”

  “When it is difficult, your decisions mean the most. Then we discover what we’re made of.”

  I want to howl with rage as she quotes her own father, standing on the deck of our longship just before we pushed out onto the Torden. The night swirls with a rush of hot and cold air. Thyra staggers backward under the force of it, a look of betrayal and shock on her face.

  I sink to my knees, my fists pressed to my thighs, shaking as I try to hold my curse captive. “Kill me, then, if you hate me so much. Just don’t banish me from the tribe.”

  Her expression crumples. “I wish I could hate you,” she says in a strained voice.

  Hope glows warm in my belly, like a flame on a windy night, precious and fragile. “You know I’m yours. You know I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  She winces, her eyes bright with pain. “You already have, Ansa.” She holds up her hands as my arms rise, trying once again to reach her across the chasm. “Enough. I’m not banishing you. We will tell the others that Aksel ran away after being rebuffed by both me and Jaspar. You will tell everyone that you found his tracks along the shore, headed back to the north. I will say the same.”

  “They’ll ride after him.”

  “No, they won’t. He was one of our weakest warriors, and he had proven himself unstable. Jaspar will let him go. He’s too eager to reach Vasterut to pursue a broken warrior.”

  “What about Aksel’s body?”

  She takes a step forward, her expression smooth. Cold. “We bury him in the stones. It won’t be visible from the bluff if anyone looks down. And then we will go back to camp, tell our story, go to sleep, and get up tomorrow as if nothing has happened. You will not tell anyone of your curse, and you will use every ounce of power and will you possess to suppress it. This is for your safety and that of every member of our tribe. Do you understand?”