The Cursed Queen

by Sarah Fine

  Halina walks stiffly through the door, her eyes wide and her hair a frazzled mess. Sander stands behind her, his hand on her shoulder, the point of his dagger between her shoulder blades. But when he turns, his eyes find mine, dark and unreadable. You jumped, I almost say. . . . But then I realize I’ve done exactly the same thing. Now I must live in the wreckage.

  “I said it wasn’t Halina who told me,” I say, my voice breaking.

  “I know,” says Nisse. “But tell me this, Ansa—if you overheard something and understood it, the messenger must have been speaking Krigere, not Vasterutian. And how many of the servants in this castle can do that? But no matter. I already had several pieces of the puzzle. I just needed the rest.”

  My blood seems to be draining from me, pouring into my feet. “Oh.” I look over to Halina, who is staring out the window. They meant me to hear. “What will you do now?”

  “Make an example of her. But not only her.” He gestures toward the door as Thyra walks in. She looks pale and thin, but her eyes are full of defiance as she sees me standing next to Nisse. Jaspar is holding her upper arm and his dagger is unsheathed.

  “Oh, no,” I breathe.

  She can’t possibly hear me, but perhaps she reads the horror on my face. “This is not your fault, Ansa.”

  But it is. I know it is.

  “It’s time, Carina. Take all the warriors and go,” Nisse says, his voice echoing off the stone walls. “When you have the rebel warriors subdued and disarmed, bring them to the courtyard.”

  Nisse crosses the room to stand in front of Thyra and Halina. “It turns out this diplomacy of the south is useless. Now we do things as Krigere should. Now we will show every soul in this city what it means to cross me.” He looks Thyra up and down. “We found the messages you sent to your warriors, Niece. Carved into your dinner plates. You were starving yourself to keep them covered so your Vasterutian friends could shuttle your instructions to your tribe.”

  Thyra glares at him, but her lips curve up at the corners, a ghost of a smile. I stare at her hollow cheeks, her sharp shoulders, her skinny wrists. All this time, she had a plan, and was willing to destroy her own body to see it through. She will never beg for mercy. She will never even bend. “Your warriors thought cleaning my dishes was beneath them,” she says. “They’d grown accustomed to having Vasterutian servants do it for them.”

  “And we will hunt each and every one of those servants down. We’ll let them live just long enough to regret helping you,” Nisse says as he waves at the door. “Take these two up to the parapet and wait for me there. I’ll come when we have gathered all our warriors and the Vasterutians who will travel to Kupari with us. They’ll be witnesses to the unification of our tribes.”

  My entire body trembles, and I know this feeling—I’ve had it before. My hold on the magic is cracking like thin ice beneath a heavy boot, the weight of my love and fear. “What are you going to do?”

  Nisse’s hand closes over the hilt of his dagger as he turns to me. “I’m going execute Thyra and Halina for their treachery while their fellow rebels watch.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  No!” Fire bursts from my palms as a bitter cold wind roars through the room. I draw back my arm, thinking only of saving Thyra and Halina, preparing to hurl flames at Nisse and his guards.

  But the air swirls warm around me, and the fire disappears as quickly as it formed. I blink down at my hands, and the flames sprout instantly, only to disappear again. Hands close around my arms, hot and cold. I cry out as Sig and Kauko pull me away from Nisse, who is immediately surrounded by his personal guard. “Let me go,” I shriek, jerking back and forth as I try to loosen their holds.

  “Be calm,” says Kauko as his fingers dig into my flesh. Every time my skin flashes hot, his palms turn ice cold. Every time my skin frosts over, his hands flush warm as a summer day. Sig holds just as tight, providing heat as my magic tries to freeze him, but he curses each time my skin turns hot, just until Kauko can cool me down again. They’re countering my magic, and I don’t have the focus or control to fight them.

  I’m powerless.

  “They will keep you from hurting yourself,” Jaspar says loudly. “I had them at the ready. I suspected this news would upset you.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I shout. “Our warriors will never stand for it! You’re condemning them to death too!”

  “They’ll be disarmed,” Nisse says as Thyra eyes him with fury. “And we will reveal the full extent of Thyra’s betrayal.”

  “Her betrayal? What about yours? This is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it? First you try to kill her with poison!”

  Nisse’s face contorts with rage. “How dare you accuse me of such a thing!”

  “You tried to kill her again through challenges in the fight circle,” I yell. “Don’t pretend you’re righteous now.”

  Spittle flies from his mouth as he rages. “She tried to kill me by framing me for murder,” he roars, drawing his dagger and pointing it at her. “She cost me my tribe and my family!” His nostrils flare as he sucks in a deep breath and sheathes his weapon once more. “I have been the soul of mercy and patience. All I ask for is your loyalty. Your obedience.” His eyes meet mine. “Stand by me and be the treasure of my tribe, Ansa. Betray me, and you will be caged like an animal for the rest of your days.”

  I lunge for him, struggling against my captors. “The only way I would stand by you is if I were about to cut off your head!”

  Jaspar waves toward the door. “Kauko, she’s all yours.”

  His cold words strike right at my heart. “How can you do this?”

  He glances at his father, who has turned away to stare at the map on the table. “Because you didn’t choose us, Ansa,” Jaspar says simply.

  I give Sander a pleading look as Kauko and Sig drag me to the door. “Don’t let them do this!”

  “I jumped, Ansa,” Sander shouts just before the wooden door shuts in my face. The last thing I see is Thyra’s eyes, clear and blue and hard and cold.

  It’s going to be the last time I see her. This can’t be happening.

  I scream with the agony of it, arching and fighting, kicking and clawing, but held tight between two magic wielders who are raising blisters and the white crust of frostbite on my arms right through the fabric of my long-sleeved tunic, I can’t get purchase. My feet barely touch the ground as they wrestle me down the stairs. Kauko speaks in a trilling, round tone that he must think is soothing, but every syllable cranks my rage higher. Sig is silent and grim on my other side, the ridge of his jaw sharp enough to cut stone. He will not meet my furious gaze.

  I am bruised and blistered and torn by the time they force me into a tiny, windowless stone chamber that I recognize as the room where Sig has been sleeping. There’s no bed here, though. No torches or candles, either—the only source of light comes from the torches in the hallway. The room contains only a few things—a filthy-looking blanket, a stone bowl, a knife . . . and a set of copper manacles bolted to the rock walls. The cuffs are crusted with blood. I glance down at Sig’s wrists, where his swirled scars lie, and then at Kauko.

  “You chain and bleed him every night, and then you heal him every morning, don’t you?” I put as much venom into my words as I can, but the elder only smiles.

  “I must,” he says. “To keep the balance.”

  He and Sig each wrestle one of my wrists into the manacles, still using their magic to subdue mine. Between the two of them, there’s too much for me to fight, and the pain from my injuries is so intense that I can barely think past it. They chain my ankles, too, tight to the wall, making it impossible to kick. “No fighting,” says Kauko, stroking my arm as I fight in vain to pull away. “I will help you.”

  Sig looks away, and it’s the last betrayal I can take. “I thought you were helping me,” I say in a choked voice. “I thought you were on my side.”

  Kauko chuckles. “Sig is a naughty boy. He needs very much discipline.”

  S
ig lets out a shaky breath that warps the air with its heat.

  “Sig,” Kauko says as he rolls my sleeves to my upper arms, revealing what I already knew was there—skin so damaged and broken that it’s a wonder it’s still holding together. Then he says the Kupari word that I know means “blade.”

  Sig kneels over the stone bowl and the knife, his back to us. He’s moving slowly enough that Kauko gets impatient. He gives Sig a little kick in the rear and snaps at him in Kupari. In response, Sig turns toward us with the knife and the stone bowl, the latter of which he hands to the elder. Kauko takes it and then pokes at the crook of my elbow, still chattering at his apprentice, whose blond hair is so pale it almost glows in the dark as he moves closer. He clutches the knife tightly.

  Kauko is telling him to cut me. I try to twist my arm away, but Sig’s clammy palm presses the limb to the cold stone. “Shhh,” he murmurs. His thumb strokes gently over the tender skin on the inside of my forearm.

  “You told me not to let him bleed me,” I whisper, standing on my tiptoes to hiss in his ear. “You said not to let him.”

  Kauko chuckles. “So naughty, Sig. Make it deep.”

  Sig nods. His brown eyes meet mine, just briefly. But in them I see flames. I grit my teeth as the blade cuts into my flesh and fight the urge to be sick as I listen to the pat-pat-pat of my blood flowing into the bowl, which Kauko holds just beneath my elbow to catch every drop. Sig stays close, holding me to the wall as I bleed. I glare up at him, and he stares down at me, letting me see the fire. The flames are entrancing, the way they undulate within the bottomless black-brown pools of his eyes. Why, I want to sob. Why are you doing this?

  Why am I surprised, though? Thyra pushed me away. Halina turned on me. Sander has joined Nisse. And Sig is serving his master, perhaps to avoid more whipping or whatever torture the elder has forced him to endure.

  And why am I angry? The realization descends on me like a massive wave on the Torden. I’ve given none of them any good reason to stand by me. I’ve been a crumbling wall, a stalk of wheat, a puddle of cloudy water. I’ve stood for nothing. I never jumped, not really.

  I was so hungry for acceptance that I played every side. I served Thyra. Nisse. Kauko. Jaspar. Halina. Sig. Anyone who would give me kindness, I swayed in their direction. While each of them stood firm, held to their positions by principle or greed or hunger for power, I swirled like a flame in the breeze. I deserve every betrayal—after all, I betrayed all of them first.

  I close my eyes and bump my head against the stone. These thoughts are shredding my mind, pulling me even farther from the one thing that could save me—a focus on what I’m willing to give, and on what I truly want. If I don’t figure that out, I deserve to die.

  Kauko presses a cloth to my wound just as my lips begin to tingle. I glance down to see the bowl full to the brim with my blood, black in the dimly lit, dank chamber. He takes a step back, eyes only for the contents of the bowl. It’s as if I’ve ceased to exist—or he only cared about my blood in the first place.

  The image rises in my mind as Kauko licks his thick lips. Sig, the night he told me not to let Kauko bleed me, pretending to drink from a cup. I’d thought he was saying something about drinking too much mead, but as Kauko lifts the bowl, understanding dawns.

  And as Kauko begins to drink, revulsion makes my stomach clench, and I have to fight to keep that porridge I ate for breakfast from spewing from my mouth. I glance at Sig, expecting to find him just as disgusted, but instead he is watching Kauko with his head tilted, his expression blank.

  Kauko lifts his head and shudders, his lips covered in my blood. He looks at me and smiles. “So much power,” he says in a low, shaky voice before lowering his head to drink again. The wet slurping sounds make bile rise in my throat. He drinks like a man dying of thirst.

  “The magic—is it in my blood?” I ask.

  Sig looks at me from the corner of his eye and nods. “Blood is magic.” He rolls up his own tunic sleeve and reveals a scar in the same spot as my wound, confirming my suspicions. Now I understand his pallor, the circles under his eyes, the way his scarred flesh stretches over his skull like thin fabric over a frame of twigs. I wonder how powerful he would be if he hadn’t lost this much blood—powerful enough to escape?

  Horror flows like ice through my heart, turning it cold. Kauko has magic of his own, but he’s used it to dominate Sig and now me, just so he could have more. “Did you do this to the Valtia, too?”

  The question springs from me without thought, as does the memory of the witch queen’s face. I’ve barely allowed myself to think of her since the day it was revealed I was her true heir, that her magic had entered me upon her death instead of entering the girl the elders chose as the Saadella—the girl who now sits on the throne of Kupari, trying to make people believe she’s the real queen.

  Kauko slowly swallows a full mouthful of blood. “Every Valtia,” he says.

  “Every Valtia,” Sig echoes, his fiery gaze on Kauko again.

  “You were supposed to protect her,” I say, my voice breaking. I don’t even know where this anger is coming from, but it’s welling up from the same spot inside me where I felt the witch queen reach and touch that day on the Torden—my heart. She wouldn’t let her priests hurt me that day. She was protecting me.

  From people like Kauko.

  “You were her enemy,” I say. “Is all of this your plan to snatch power for yourself?”

  Kauko’s thick, bloodstained lips curve upward. “Krigere will help me.”

  I would bet every drop of blood in my body that he has the same strategy Nisse does—use your allies to get what you want, and then dispose of them when you want to sit on the throne alone. Nisse and Kauko use people like weapons, like tools. They don’t care about tribe or family or loyalty. They only care about themselves.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I murmur.

  Kauko chuckles as he upends the bowl and lets the last thick drops fall fat and crimson on his tongue. “No,” he says. “You are going to feed me.”

  I struggle against my chains as his plan wraps around my throat, choking off any intelligible words, clouding my thoughts. The air in the room snaps with bitter cold, but Kauko dismisses the ice with a flick of his wrist. “Today the traitors die,” he says. “And then we march.” He grins like a drunk, revealing blood-tinged teeth and a slightly unfocused gaze. “To kill the impostor and take back my temple. I will . . . rule the . . . Kupari.”

  As the manacles cut into my wrists, Kauko blinks a few times, like he’s trying to clear his head. He leans on the stones as he bends to set the bowl on the ground. He walks his hands up the wall to bring himself upright again, and he has the strangest look on his face as he turns to Sig. “You . . .” he says weakly.

  Sig smiles, his eyes glowing now, pure sunlight. “Me.”

  Without another word, Kauko sinks to the ground and slumps forward, his eyes falling shut and his limbs going slack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  As soon as Kauko’s head thunks to the floor, Sig is on his knees and digging through the pockets of the elder’s robe. He comes up holding a little copper key, which he uses to unlock my manacles.

  “You poisoned the cup,” I say, staring down at the now-snoring old man.

  Sig pulls a small cloth sack from his breeches and waggles it at me. I catch a whiff of something that smells like a strange combination of death and springtime. “From Halina,” he says.

  I press the cloth to the wound in the crook of my elbow, and Sig reaches over and ties it tight for me. As I roll my sleeve down my arm, I nudge Kauko with my toe. “Are you going to kill him?”

  Sig stares down at the man, and now I can see the utter loathing he’s been concealing for so many days. “Yes,” he hisses. “But not today.”

  “Why?”

  He steps back from Kauko, his entire body trembling. “I want him to . . .” He mutters something in Kupari, then uses two fingers to point at his fiery eyes.

  �
�You want him to look you in the eye,” I guess. “You won’t kill him when he’s asleep because you want him to know what’s happening.” He wants him conscious, so he will feel every second of pain and know Sig is the source. The heat of his hatred fills the whole room and makes both of us sweat.

  A slow, malevolent smile decorates the ruins of Sig’s once-handsome face. He wrenches Kauko’s limp body up to sitting and chains the elder’s chubby wrists, leaving him slouched against the wall, his arms in the air, spread as if in celebration or pleading.

  “Now we go,” Sig says as he admires his handiwork.

  “I have to get to the parapet,” I tell him. “That’s where Nisse is keeping Thyra and Halina.”

  I’m going to save them, or die trying. For both their sakes, but also for Preben, Bertel, all the warriors who set their faith in Thyra, and for that little boy who should not be torn from his mother. And not just for them—for Nisse’s tribe, who have been steered in this deadly direction by a man who sees people as resources to be used up for his benefit, who sees andeners as nothing more than wombs with legs, who sees Kupari as yet another land to ruin while their people simmer with hate that will kill us all. Just like the hatred of the Vasterutians has festered, driving Halina and her friends to lethal lengths in their silent war to regain their freedom.

  Thyra was right, I realize. She was right all along. And my need to be a warrior, my need to belong, my need for her to belong, blinded me.

  Sig leads me into the corridor, but he turns before we reach the steps that lead up to the parapet. “Stop,” I whisper, tugging at his wrist, which he yanks out of my grasp like it pains him. I pull my hand back, but point toward the stairs. “We have to go up.”

  Sig shakes his head. “Astia,” he says. “You need it.”

  “What’s an Astia?”