Warrior's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  “Unmarked rogue. Emnil. The sentence for trespass upon clan lands is death.” Thorsh drew his sword, the same rippling eerie glow bouncing off the longer heavier silver blade. “May your soul be damned to dark corners and never find the Gateway home.”

  He lifted the sword high as he prepared to drive it deep. Gray never moved. His golden head remained lifted in challenge, unwilling to bend an inch, even if it might mean his life.

  “No! Stop! Please!” she heard herself shout, though pleading gained her nothing.

  Thorsh grunted his dismissal of her and lunged, the sword slamming toward Gray’s chest.

  Meeryn closed her eyes in horror only to have them fly open at a surprised shout from Thorsh as Gray rolled onto his feet with the stolen sword miraculously in his hand, the length of it resting on the back of Thorsh’s exposed neck.

  None would know what might have happened next, for a shouted halloo and a jangle of harness heralded the arrival of a gleaming black carriage, the crest upon the doors familiar to all assembled.

  It drew to a halt. A groom leapt down to open the door, and Sir Dromon Pryor descended in a scented wave of hair oil, cologne, and sweat. He surveyed the tableau before him with smiling excitement as if he regarded a pantomime at Vauxhall. “Welcome to Deepings, my lord. It’s good to have you home.”

  * * *

  The short carriage ride was completed in a silence thick enough to chew and swallow. Sir Dromon sat beside de Coursy, so close their elbows touched now and then as they hit a rut or bounced through a puddle. So close he could drive a knife through the filthy emnil’s heart and be rid of him once and for all. He ignored the impulse. Such crude methods had never been his style. De Coursy’s death must be seen as justice, not murder. Barring that, an unfortunate accident might serve as well. He’d erred badly when he’d forced His Grace’s hand and had the young lordling exiled. Far better to have kept de Coursy close where he might be used, then subtly guided toward his own destruction.

  Sir Dromon sniffed a quick sigh and dismissed past mistakes. The Munro slut had done her work; de Coursy had come running home. All progressed according to his design.

  “The N’thuil claimed I would be safe so long as I traveled in her company. I must admit, your enforcer’s attack made me doubt her veracity. I’m relieved to see she wasn’t as mistaken as I feared.”

  “It is just as she stated. The N’thuil may offer sanctuary and safe passage to any lost soul she chooses. Mr. Thorsh shamed the order of Ossine by attacking your coach in such a fashion and ignoring Miss Munro’s authority. He shall answer for his insubordination, you can be sure of that.” He offered de Coursy an obsequious smile. “I’m honored you answered my summons, Lord Halvossa.”

  “Please, it’s Major de Coursy. I don’t choose to use that title.”

  “As you wish, Major. I wasn’t certain you would return to a place with such . . . sorrowful memories for you. I’m glad to see you put the good of the clans ahead of your own personal feelings. It shows the true nobility that is so prevalent among your house. A true son of Idrin, you are. His Grace, the duke, would be proud.”

  “There’s a first for everything.”

  Sir Dromon tittered into his sleeve. “Together, we can find a way through our current troubles. I’m sure of it.”

  “Fewer of your monsters set loose on the countryside would be a good start.”

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Thorsh and his ilk are necessary in these unstable times. More so, now that we are unsure of the Fey-blood’s intent. The clans cannot sit idle while the enemy masses.”

  De Coursy eyed him like a disease. “Yet they seem more interested in killing shapechangers than in defending the Palings against a Fey-blood attack . . . or am I mistaken?”

  “All issues to be discussed, all problems to be solved,” Sir Dromon said with an accommodating smile.

  The coach rolled beneath the arched stone gateway of Deepings outer wall and into the enormous inner yard. Towers punctuated each turning in the thick gray stone fortifications, while straight ahead stood the tall central house, a tangled maze of elegant apartments where the family lived, as well as miles of drafty corridors, twisted stairwells, bustling servant quarters, and dank halls.

  De Coursy glanced beyond the glass, his face tightening, his hands drumming on his thigh. Then he turned from the view to address Sir Dromon once more, any nervousness vanished beneath a polished veneer. “My coachman will be given all the proper death rites for one of the clans. I should like you to perform the service personally,” he said in a voice that brooked no dissent.

  How was it that half-naked and sweat-streaked, he still bore himself with a prideful dignity, as if the world owed him obedience? As if he hadn’t been stripped of place and position, spared only his life? Sir Dromon gritted his teeth in a grimace of a smile. “Of course. I’ve instructed the Ossine to bring the bodies to Deepings for the necessary ceremonies.”

  “You mean body,” Gray corrected. “My groom was released and sent on his way unharmed, was he not?”

  Sir Dromon smiled and nodded. “A slip of the tongue. I meant to say ‘body.’ The young boy was taken by one of Thorsh’s men to Haleworthy, where he might catch the mail coach for London. It was done just as you ordered.”

  “Not that I don’t trust your men, Sir Dromon, but I should like confirmation of his safe passage. Have the enforcer . . . I believe Thorsh called him Kelan . . . have the young man report to me when he returns.”

  His not-so-subtle jab wasn’t lost on Sir Dromon. It would seem the snot-nosed prig had grown clever in the intervening years. “Directly he arrives, my lord.”

  “It’s Major, Sir Dromon. Let’s neither of us pretend my title of Lord Halvossa or my presence here at Deepings is welcome by either of us.”

  Miss Munro sat through this conversation as though a poker had been rammed up her arse, her lips pressed white in a face like a wheel of cheese. Only her eyes burned with a dangerous light as they rested upon de Coursy in the seat across from her. That was good. Whatever happened between them on the journey from London to produce such hostility could only aid his own plans.

  “I’ve made arrangements to have you placed in the guest hall,” he said.

  De Coursy’s brows lifted in question. “Won’t it be needed for the Gather elders?”

  “The Gather’s summer meeting was put off due to His Grace’s poor health. We hope he regains his strength and the autumn meeting can proceed as planned. Until then, I have tried to fulfill his duties to the best of my abilities, though I could never hope to replace him in the hearts of the clans.”

  “Were my old apartments not available?”

  Sir Dromon offered a humbling hunch of his shoulders. “I’m afraid I took the liberty of moving my own small household into these rooms. With the duke’s illness, it seemed important for me to be on hand at a moment’s notice rather than have to travel back and forth to Drakelow each day.” He paused. “And of course, we did not expect you back.”

  “No, of course you didn’t. I understand completely,” de Coursy replied. “The guest hall will do . . . for now.”

  Sir Dromon found himself flushing scarlet. He despised himself for his cowardice, though it would serve him for now to have de Coursy thinking he was a cowed subservient. He would only learn differently when it was too late. When the traitor’s rebellion lay in ashes around him, his friends dead or driven away, his life balanced in Dromon’s careless hands.

  De Coursy would beg for mercy. Grovel in the dirt like the lowest grub. Piss his boots and vomit his terror with every slow, methodical pass of the flensing knife.

  It would avail him naught as his skin was stripped, his innards pulled from his steaming gut, and his still-beating heart ripped from his broken chest. Buoyed by such cheerful thoughts, Sir Dromon met de Coursy’s steely gaze . . . and smiled.

  5

  DEEPINGS, CORNWALL

  “His Grace has retired for the night, my lord, and is not to be disturbed for any re
ason. Sir Dromon’s orders are quite strict on that point.”

  “Does he know I’ve arrived? That I’m”—he couldn’t bring himself to say home—“that I’m here?”

  “He’s been told, my lord.”

  He’d already tried five times to convince the new Deepings’ butler to stop “my lording” him after every sentence. And failed five times. He wasn’t sure if this was the man’s way of kowtowing to an obvious superior or thumbing his nose at a disowned exile.

  “His response?”

  Mr. Pym’s lips thinned, and he cleared his throat. “His Grace’s response was to throw his dinner plate at a footman and curse your black soul to the grubs . . . my lord. He says he has no wish to see you today or any day.”

  “I see. Thank you, Pym. I suppose if he has the strength to hurl dinnerware, he’s not as close to death as I feared.”

  The butler made the appropriate noises and bowed his way out.

  Gray watched him scuttle down the corridor, doubtless, headed straight to Sir Dromon with news of this conversation. It was safe to assume that every Deepings servant was in Pryor’s employ; either bound by loyalty or pressured by fear. It was also safe to assume that, despite Pryor’s toadying, the head of the Ossine wanted him dead as much as he always had. So why had he allowed Gray to return to holding lands unmolested, when up until a few months ago, he’d bent every effort to destroy him? What game did the Arch Ossine play?

  To take his mind from his endless circle of questions, he surveyed the dark tapestried walls and the ponderous, uncomfortable furniture of his guest hall chambers. His lip curled in a humorless smile. Whatever brutal entertainments Pryor had planned, he’d made his first miscalculation. The guest hall had always been a drab, gloomy, unpleasant place. Almost certainly, a tactic of his grandfather’s to keep unwanted visitors to a minimum and the Gather elders from lingering too long. But they didn’t know its secret—Gray did.

  He passed through a study, a salon, and a small private dining room to his bedchamber. Aside from a tester bed resembling something Henry VIII might have died in, the room held little more than a lumpy wingback chair, a folding officer’s desk with a wobbly leg, and an immense wardrobe carved with the de Coursy crest: a double-headed eagle bearing five arrows in its claws. This last piece of ornate furniture took up most of the chamber’s northern wall. Beside it, the hearth yawned cold and black with soot from five centuries or more of oak-fed fires, while above it hung a heavy gold-rimmed mirror, the reflection within its speckled depths revealing a lean high-boned face bordering on gaunt, eyes that had seen too much, and a mouth set in a permanent expression of grim resignation. He raked a hand through his hair, straightened his tired shoulders, and ran a finger along the thin slash of red at his throat where Thorsh’s blade had left its mark. He looked like nothing more than a dour consumptive. Older than his thirty-one years, bent by pain and battered by injury.

  The war had toughened him. The peace that followed had stretched him close to the breaking point. Only determination fired him now. Determination and a sense that all the events since Charleroi—hell since the fateful storm in the Channel had stripped his family from him in one earth-shattering cataclysm—had been leading him to this point and soon he might understand why and what he was supposed to do with this horrible destiny.

  But only if he could gain hold of Jai Idrish.

  Reaching up, he felt along the mirror’s left edge until he found a grooved indentation worked into the gilded frame. He pressed it once, then twice more. A brick at the back of the hearth scraped aside to reveal a narrow cavity—and a key.

  He smiled his relief and thanked the Mother that he’d not been summoned here in winter, when the hearth would have been fed a steady diet of logs and the secret panel lost to the flames. He scooped the key from its resting place and opened the wardrobe door. A servant had already unpacked his clothes, but Gray pushed all of them aside and stepped up into the high wooden cupboard. At the very back behind a mountain of coats and shirts and boots and stockings was the flat wooden panel that made up the back of the wardrobe. In the dusty camphor-scented dark, none would notice the tiny inconspicuous keyhole, but Gray knew it was there. He slid the key in and turned. The secret door opened with a puff of dry stale air to reveal a cavernous hole.

  He allowed himself a smile of success—it paid to bury oneself in books.

  He’d found the secret of the passage in a mildewed journal kept by the third earl of Halvossa, a scholar of history and a skilled warrior. A man who read and wrote extensively when he wasn’t hacking people’s heads off in battle. He gained a dukedom for his loyalty to one king. He ended on the block for his rebellion against another. But his greatest achievement had been Deepings. From rugged keep and earthen ditches grew a formidable defensive fortress. Only the earl knew what he’d truly been defending; the holding of his clan; the remnants of a race gone into hiding against a dangerous world. The journal had been a catalog of the building process, a daily report of bricks laid, ground broken, workers hired . . . and escape routes should the need arise.

  It had not.

  Not in the centuries since. Hopefully not in the centuries to come. The knowledge of these bolt-holes had been lost amid the Deepings library, only brought to light by a fifteen-year-old boy in search of a story to lull him to sleep when the nights seemed endless and his thoughts spun like a Catherine wheel.

  He stepped into the passage, pausing for a moment until his eyes adjusted to the dark. A faint breeze stirred the air against his face and fluttered the curtains of cobwebs. A dull roar vibrated the stones under his feet where no footprints marred the thick layer of dust and mouse droppings. Ten paces on, the passage became a set of winding stairs that descended hundreds of feet into the cliffs upon which Deepings stood, ending at a trapdoor and a swirling black whirlpool.

  All just as he remembered.

  The journal claimed that a short swim would empty you onto the beach below the castle. Gray had never had the courage to dive into the impenetrable black water to find out. Just standing at the edge and staring down at the churn of waves would bring on gut-seizing tremors. He’d imagine the punch of icy water closing over his head and the crush of burning lungs as he was spun head over feet by the tugging current. The tears would run, his hands would shake, and he would back away sickened and shamed by his cowardice.

  It had been more than ten years since he’d last stood in this spot, but the unreasonable terror still gripped him. He steadied himself, palms sweaty, stomach rolling, and cursed himself for a craven. It would seem the years had hardened him, but old memories still clung like the cobwebs shrouding his clothes and tangling in his hair.

  A hundred yards or a hundred miles made no difference. There was not a chance in hell he could leap into that hole and swim the distance to safety.

  Escape route? Not bloody likely.

  Perhaps Sir Dromon hadn’t been so stupid after all.

  Perhaps entering Deepings had been the easy part, and it would be leaving that proved to be impossible.

  * * *

  “I hope you’ve recovered sufficiently, Lady N’thuil. I want to offer my humblest apologies on behalf of the Ossine. I can only hope de Coursy has apologized as well.” Sir Dromon fiddled with his pocket watch, running his fingers up and down the gold chain, his thin-lipped, chinless smile giving him a puckish, unnerving look.

  “It’s of no matter,” she said, wishing only for the solace of her own apartments where she might scrub the grime of the road from her skin. The memories of slaughter would not be erased so easily.

  “Isn’t it?” Sir Dromon challenged, rising from his desk. “He might have killed you had I not come when I did. Rage fills that man. There’s no telling what he might do. I only hope I didn’t err by inviting him back to Deepings.”

  “Gray had no choice. The enforcer would have murdered the boy as he’d killed the coachman.”

  “But to risk your life in such a callous way. If he could not honor your safet
y as N’thuil, you would think he would at least show respect for a woman in his care. To place you in peril was not the behavior of a gentleman, no matter how he was pushed to the brink.”

  “What was Mr. Thorsh’s excuse? He made it very clear he’d have been more than pleased to see my brains mingling with that of the coachman’s on that road. There was neither honor nor respect in his actions nor even a shadow of gentility. The man’s a monster.”

  “In these times, we use the best tool for the job. Thorsh might not have the manners that come with social rank, but he’s very good at what he does.”

  “Killing?”

  “I was going to say, protecting the clans from those who would destroy us if given the chance.” His purse-lipped, professorial look over his spectacles was meant to set her in her proper place.

  She wished she knew where that proper place might be anymore. She felt tugged in too many directions, like flotsam caught in a riptide. The more she struggled, the more she floundered. “I only want to put it behind me and focus on the reason for de Coursy’s coming in the first place, putting an end to this growing internal divide. The Imnada can’t afford to turn upon each other; not now. Not when—”

  “—the Fey-bloods stand upon our very doorstep? But who put them there in the first place? Who went against every law and custom by revealing our existence to out-clans and Fey-bloods?”

  “Major de Coursy did what he thought was right.” She felt herself retreating in the face of Dromon’s argument. Offering excuses for Gray when what she really wanted to do was throttle him for such a thoughtless stunt. When push came to shove, he’d not pulled the trigger, but that didn’t mean the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.

  “That may be, but the laws were put in place for a reason—to keep us safe, to keep us strong,” Sir Dromon said. “Those who subvert them must pay a price for their presumption. Otherwise, they pollute with their lies those who remain loyal to the old teachings.”