Curse Painter (Art Mages of Lure Book 1)

by Jordan Rivet

  The cave smelled of bat feces and bone dust. Briar spread out her bedroll on the softest patch of rock she could find, wishing they could stay in an inn just once. Stealth was more important than ever since they’d entered Larke County, though they hadn’t exactly been models of discretion so far. Archer seemed to leave nothing but chaos in his wake. Briar had that in common with him.

  The others were still tramping around the cave as Briar lay down to sleep. Perhaps due to her weariness, it was the first night she didn’t set up her bedroll as far from the others as she could get. She felt safe with them—at least for the moment. She hid some paint supplies in her blankets, though, a brush at her fingertips. She never wanted to be defenseless again.

  Esteban squatted to build a fire on a flat stone a few paces from her. Pushing his sleeves above his tattooed elbows, he used flint and tinder rather than magic to light it. After announcing his presence at the river, he couldn’t reveal which direction they were heading with so much as a whispered spark spell.

  Briar watched him strike at the flint, wondering why he’d helped her back at the river. He didn’t like her, and for a moment, she’d thought he would allow her to be captured. Had he changed his mind out of a sense of team solidarity? Perhaps he wanted to prevent her from telling Sheriff Flynn everything she knew about them.

  She knew less than she’d thought. Esteban was no ordinary voice mage for starters. Battle spells were rare, especially among grumpy old hedge wizards in the outer counties. Esteban had worked for the king once. She was sure of it.

  Esteban grumbled over the flint and tinder for a few minutes before the kindling ignited into a proper flame. He finished building the fire and, perhaps sensing Briar’s eyes on him, approached her bedroll and knelt beside her, smelling of smoke and old parchment.

  “You are more than you claim,” he whispered. “You have not always been a seller of petty revenge. Who are you?”

  “I’m Briar,” she said evenly. “I don’t see how my employment history is any of your business.”

  Esteban snorted. “Only a handful of mages can paint ambulatory curses as precise as the ones you created at the river, much less do it over and over again. Archer might not understand how impressive that feat was, but I do.”

  Briar’s fingers twitched toward the paints in her blankets. “Is that supposed to be a compliment or a threat?”

  “Consider it a warning. I will discover your secret.”

  “Does Archer know your secret?” Briar whispered back. “That you used to be a Crown Mage, possibly even the Crown Mage?”

  Esteban’s mouth tightened. “He knows. If you figured that out from a few battle spells, that tells me even more about you.” He studied her in the feeble firelight. “You can’t have practiced for long at your age, but your teachers must have been exceptional.”

  Briar tensed. Esteban would know her parents’ reputation even if he wasn’t connected enough to High Lure to recognize her. He’d apparently been wandering the outer counties for decades, but they were the deadliest curse painters in the kingdom. Whatever he suspected about her, it was unlikely he would connect her to Saoirse and Donovan Dryden themselves. Still, she had to deflect his suspicions.

  “How do you know I’m not self-taught?”

  Esteban sniffed. “Don’t insult me.”

  Briar raised herself up on her elbows so he couldn’t loom over her. “You’ve been your own man long enough to know there is power outside the Hall of Cloaks.”

  “Indeed.” A shadow flickered across Esteban’s gaunt face. “And I know a mage or two who has adopted that philosophy to the detriment of the kingdom. But a self-taught virtuoso wouldn’t know about Crown Mages and the frictions in the Hall of Cloaks.”

  Briar ground her teeth, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. The destructive urge roiled in her chest. Tired as she was, she was already planning out six different curses to use against Esteban. That would definitely give away her identity.

  “Can I get some rest?” she asked, keeping her voice level with effort. “Or do you want to threaten to kill me if I betray the team? You’d need to get in line.”

  “Quite the opposite.” Esteban hunched his thin shoulders, as if surprised and a bit irritated by what he was about to say. “If you have truly stepped away from the life I suspect you led before, this team might be the best place for you. Goodnight, Miss Briar.”

  He scuttled off toward the mouth of the cave, where Lew and Jemma were silhouetted against the starlight, lingering over their cold suppers. Briar watched him fold himself to the ground beside them, feeling unsettled. Was that Esteban’s way of saying he approved of her after all? Or even that he understood where she had come from—and why she wanted to leave?

  She needed to be careful. He could still betray her secrets to Archer and the others. They might not be so willing to welcome her to the team if they knew the full extent of what she’d done. As Archer had said, they were thieves, not murderers. She was beginning to feel comfortable with the gang, enjoying their camaraderie and their commitment to each other. She’d spent most of the past year alone, except for meetings with her clients. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed having company.

  Briar pulled her blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes, but sleep eluded her. She couldn’t help thinking about the life she’d left behind—not the one in the cottage, always too idyllic to last, but the one she had escaped. Tired and drained as she was, it was difficult to keep the memories at bay.

  So much pain had flowed from her brushes. So much evil coated in pretty colors. The faces of the people she had harmed swirled around her, drenched in paint and blood. She had been seven years old the first time she’d cursed another human being. She’d barely understood what she was doing, but the sound of her victim’s leg snapping and the scream that followed were all too clear. That snap had reverberated through her memories for a decade, the rhythm for all her regret-filled nightmares.

  In their studio by the sea, her parents had taught her to think of the people she cursed as subjects not victims. Curse painting was a calling, a vocation. They were artists, talented at finding new and creative ways to add evil to the world. Her mother, Saoirse, was explosive, with a gift for incendiary curses and destruction. Her father Donovan’s work was subtler, emphasizing illusions and nightmares and psychological terror. The pair had no equals—something they told her regularly—and they wanted Briar to be even better than they were.

  But she didn’t want to be better. She wanted to be good. Briar had asked why she couldn’t learn kinder spells as a child, when she realized the beautiful paintings her parents taught her to make, the ones that made their eyes shine with pride, always seemed to result in other people’s tears.

  “I want to make something nice,” she’d said to her parents once as she ground precious lapis lazuli to make ultramarine blue in their studio. “Like the voice mages who make roses for the queen’s garden in winter.”

  “Your paintings are more beautiful than the queen’s roses.” Her father had looked out from behind a large canvas, his eyes as large and owlish as her own. He was a handsome man, as handsome as her mother was beautiful. “They are far more than nice.”

  “But they always do bad things,” Briar said. “They hurt people and break things.”

  “They are exquisite,” her mother said. She twisted back Briar’s frizzy hair to keep it out of the paints and wrapped her favorite emerald-green scarf around her temples. “And one day, you will make true art.”

  Briar blushed as her mother knotted the silk scarf with her paint-smudged hands. Her parents knew no higher compliment than to call something art, but she had seen art cause pain. She didn’t understand how it could be so good and important when it did that. She wanted to heal and build and strengthen, not destroy. But no matter how hard she studied, how hard she tried, curses were the only tools her parents gave her.

  It would be a while yet before Briar understood that art wasn’t inherently good at
all—and longer still before she realized her parents didn’t care about good and evil. For them, it was about the creative act, the hot rush of producing unique works more beautiful and complex than any other artists could. If they had been anything but curse painters, they might not have traveled such a dark path. For them, pain and death were byproducts of their calling not the ends.

  As she witnessed more snapping bones and tear-filled eyes, Briar had tried to assert her burgeoning sense of morality, though she lacked a model for it in the closed world of their studio. By age twelve, she was going out of her way to avoid hurting people with the curses her parents assigned her. After one such incident, the two of them cornered her on their flat rooftop, where she often retreated for a view of the sea.

  “Did you warn Lord Randall’s carriage driver?” her father demanded.

  “That curse you had me paint on the carriage would have hurt him.” Briar avoided her father’s gaze. “I just told the driver not to sit on that tall seat for a few hours. The curse worked.”

  The fine carriage had exploded in a shower of splinters and ripped silk in the king’s courtyard, her paint on the footboard, the driver nowhere in sight. Briar had enjoyed the blast all the more because no one had been hurt.

  “You ruined a carefully laid plan,” her mother said.

  “The driver was supposed to get hurt? I thought you just wanted to break the carriage.”

  “And cause Lord Randall a minor inconvenience?” Her father raised an eyebrow. “Of course the driver was supposed to get hurt.”

  “You are old enough to know better by now,” her mother said irritably.

  At the time, Briar hadn’t admitted that she knew her parents had intended the driver to die when the carriage collapsed, though she didn’t understand the reason. The driver was kind, and his young wife had recently given birth to a baby boy. Briar had watched from the hayloft in the castle stables when the young couple had brought the baby to pass among their friends, all taking care to support his little pink head. Briar had wanted to hold him, too, but her fingers had been stained with paint. She couldn’t touch the innocent little thing with hands that had caused such pain.

  Even as she’d begun to resist her parents’ instructions, she’d struggled to admit they were bad people. It had taken her far too long to leave them. The day she’d finally broken away, the result had been as bad as anything else they’d made her do. She could run from them, but she couldn’t outrun her destructive power.

  After fleeing to the outer counties, she’d tried to forge a new path by favoring weaker people over the powerful, even if they were only after revenge. She’d made some strides with her magic, such as figuring out how to make a dangerous ambulatory curse slow enough to safely transport people across a river, but she’d destroyed so much in the process. There had to be a way to live that would allow her to stay in a peaceful cottage smelling of oil paint and wood smoke and dry thatch, far away from snaps and screams and tears.

  Briar rolled over on her bedroll, a paintbrush jabbing her side. A few members of the team were still talking quietly by the cave entrance. Someone on the other side of the fire—she thought it was Nat—snored loudly, but the ripping snores couldn’t drown out the memory of all the destruction her family had created together.

  Even in the northernmost county in the kingdom, far away from High Lure, Briar couldn’t escape her parents’ art. She liked the camaraderie of the team and the positive nature of their mission, but they wanted destruction from her too. They’d gotten a taste of her power at the river, and she feared what else they would ask of her now.

  Chapter 11

  Archer watched Briar tossing and turning beside the fire. His gaze strayed to her often lately. He told himself it was because he had just seen her do something remarkable. Lifting them all to the other side of the river had been a magnificent deed. But she’d done remarkable things every day he’d known her, and it felt different somehow after their time in Mud Market.

  She gave a little sigh, her lashes fluttering, and he wondered what was going on behind those eyes, beneath that frizzy hair.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Huh?”

  Jemma rolled her eyes. “You were the one who called this meeting. Pay attention, won’t you?”

  “Sorry.” Archer repositioned himself so he was facing Lew, Jemma, and Esteban, who had gathered at the cave entrance for a conference while Briar and Nat slept. “What were we talking about?”

  “The fact that the whole county knows we’re here, thanks to Esteban hollering his location to the four winds,” Jemma said. “King Cullum himself probably knows what we’re up to by now.”

  “I was following orders,” Esteban said sullenly.

  “We didn’t have a choice,” Archer said.

  “Actually, we did.” Jemma looked over at Briar’s blankets and lowered her voice. “I understand she’s useful, but there’s no point having a powerful curse painter if we make a scene every ten miles. You should have left her on the other side of the river.”

  “After what she did for us?” In addition to hoisting them across the river, Briar had saved Archer’s life. He had wanted to test her trustworthiness, and as far as he was concerned, she’d passed with flying colors. “She could have walked away with her new paint supplies and left me to Barden’s cronies even before the river.”

  “This is what she does for a living,” Lew said delicately. “I doubt it would hurt her feelings if we let her go with payment for services rendered.”

  “Lew is right,” Esteban said. “She’s a hired contractor. She understands this is business, probably better than you.”

  Archer bristled at that. “You’re just annoyed because her plan to cross the river worked when you didn’t think it would.”

  “I am not annoyed,” Esteban said with what Archer was quite certain was annoyance.

  “There’s no point in arguing,” Jemma cut in. “After all that ruckus, we should assume the authorities on both sides of the river know what we are intending to do, curse painter or no curse painter. Larke will prepare accordingly.”

  “Let’s not overstate the problem.” Archer pulled an arrow from his quiver and used it to scratch an itch on his back. “They know where we are, but that doesn’t mean they know we’re trying to rescue—”

  “You told Kurt yourself,” Jemma said. “If he sold you out to the town watch, nothing will stop him from selling that information to others.”

  “I am counting on it.”

  “What?”

  Archer figured this was as good a time as any to tell them the new plan, which he’d worked out as they rode through the night. After what Kurt had told him about Horatio Drake’s failure at Larke Castle, he was certain the old plan had to go. And there was another part of the job he hadn’t told them about yet.

  “I’m counting on Kurt peddling the information I gave him like golden teeth. He’ll send the authorities in the wrong direction.”

  “I get it,” Lew said, combing his fingers through his red beard. “A bluff.”

  Jemma looked skeptical. “So, where does he think we’re going?”

  “Larke Castle.”

  Lew’s grin faded.

  “And where do you think we’re going?”

  Archer prepared to leap up and run for it if one of them decided to thrash him for what he was about to say. He ought to be able to escape Jemma, Lew, and Esteban by virtue of sheer youth and stamina.

  “I know you’re going to hate me for this, Jem,” he said, “but I have reason to believe Larke has chosen a location other than his castle for Lady Mae’s confinement.”

  “Her what?”

  “Her confinement. Her lying-in. Her labor and delivery.”

  Jemma’s face paled, looking ghostly in the moonlight. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Serious as a taxman.” Archer glanced at the huddled forms of Briar and Nat.

  They were definitely still asleep, though Nat’s snoring mad
e it sound as though he had transformed into a bear. A bear with a sore throat, who was in the middle of being choked to death.

  Archer turned back to the three older members of the team, the core group he trusted more than his own flesh and blood. “Lady Mae is going to have a baby,” he said, “which means we have to rescue two people, who will hopefully still be attached by the time we get there. But after talking to Kurt, I no longer think they’re in Larke Castle at all.”

  “You’re going to be the death of me, Iva—Archer,” Jemma said, massaging her temples with grimy hands.

  Archer winced. That slip of the tongue wasn’t like her.

  “If you say you’re the father, I shall have my darling, docile husband beat you within an inch of your life.”

  “I am not the father,” Archer said, “but I have a vested interest in this child’s survival. I couldn’t risk Lord Barden finding out about it while we were on his side of the river.”

  “You didn’t trust us?” Jemma asked.

  “Weren’t you threatening to have Lew beat me within an inch of my life a second ago?”

  “But after everything we’ve done for you—”

  “It’s not about me,” Archer said. “This is bigger than me. It’s even bigger than Mae and her baby, who we will henceforth refer to as her ‘complication.’” He glanced over at Briar again. “I think she’s with us, but I don’t want her to find out about the baby until we see how she responds to the change in targets. She’ll have to prepare a whole new set of curses.”

  “And we’ll have to come up with a whole new plan.” Jemma rubbed her temples so hard it was a wonder she didn’t break the skin. “Are you one hundred percent certain Mae is not in Larke Castle?”

  “Yes,” Archer said without hesitation. He was only about eighty-nine percent certain, but they didn’t need to know that. Lord Larke wouldn’t want anyone to discover Mae’s condition. On reflection, the castle was far too busy to keep a secret like that. He should have realized it even before Kurt told him about Horatio Drake’s disappointment. But the castle wasn’t the only secure place Jasper Larke owned.