Warrior's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  “You don’t believe Gray will break the curse and win back his throne?”

  “I don’t think he’ll survive beyond the end of the year. And there’s nothing he—or anyone—can do about it.”

  “Gray believes he’ll succeed.”

  “Does he? Or does he tell you what you want to hear? Why alienate someone who might come in handy down the road, if you know what I mean?”

  “He wouldn’t lie to me about that.”

  “No? Then perhaps he’s lying to himself.”

  * * *

  Gray sensed the moment the sun dropped below the horizon. His skin crawled and his stomach clenched. His muscles constricted and his eyes blazed with a blue and silver fire as his body struggled against the draught. He clamped his jaw and gripped the arms of his chair until the spasms passed. A few moments that felt like a few hours.

  “It grows worse. I can see you struggle.”

  “I leave for London before dawn. Lucan reports the roads are clear. If I’m careful and fast, I can be there by sundown tomorrow.”

  Arms encircled his chest as Meeryn came up behind him, leaning over his shoulder to kiss his cheek. His groin tightened with anticipation and the smell of her perfume. “Take me with you,” she replied.

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  “You’ve said yourself you need Jai Idrish to break the curse. I am Jai Idrish. You can’t succeed without me.”

  “And I can’t risk your death while I struggle to work out what I’m doing wrong.”

  He pushed his work away and passed a tired hand over his face. Hours he’d spent reviewing the pages he’d stolen from the Deepings library, but they were scattered and useless without the weight of his own research to guide him further. His eyes fell on each disk in turn, gold, silver, bronze, and copper. Four keys that unlocked a hole in the very fabric of reality. Four objects borne of Fey magic and Imnada power. He arranged them at the compass points; north, south, east, west; maiden, mother, crone, and specter. Rearranged them into a line, edges touching. Stacked them one on top of the other.

  “What am I missing? What is staring me in the face that I cannot see?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time you were blind to the obvious,” she said, coming around to bump him with her hip as she cast him a long-suffering sideways glance.

  Leaning over the table, she tilted her head regarding the disks and the scattered pages. Turned to look on him. Turned back to the table, lip caught between her teeth. She lifted off the gold disk and set it on the table. Followed by the bronze and the copper. The silver she handled with care as she pushed it into position. “Four disks to represent the four faces of the Mother,” she muttered.

  Something Jamie said niggled at him even as she spoke. They’d been talking about Adam and the curse. Jamie had said . . .

  “Four disks could represent the four seasons or the four elements or the four points of the compass . . .” Meeryn suggested.

  “He said there were four of you. That was Jamie’s comment when he spoke of Adam’s work on the draught,” he muttered to himself. “Of course! They represent us. Four disks. Four men. That’s why it didn’t work, Meeryn. We have to work the spell together.”

  “But you can’t. Adam’s . . .” Her words trailed off into an uncomfortable silence. She shook her head, eyes dark in a face gone white as chalk.

  He leaned back, careful lest the slightest movement double him over. He touched each disk before placing his hands in front of him. Smooth and untroubled, barely a flicker behind his half-lidded eyed . . . a howling yawning horror squeezing off his breath, raking his innards until he felt torn inside. “Yes, I know. He’s dead.”

  * * *

  Meeryn was given a reprieve from having to offer either a comfortless reassurance or an overwrought denial. Lady Estelle entered just then with news of a letter come from her husband in London and the two departed. Gray was as colorless and expressionless as if he already lay in his grave, his stare distant, his manner exact, his posture frozen.

  She touched his sleeve as he passed her and their eyes met briefly. “This is not the end,” she murmured with a quiet intimacy.

  His shoulders stiffened, hands to fists at his side. He paused as if he might answer, but Lady Estelle turned still speaking of couriers and travel times and Gray nodded, continuing on silently around a corner, and was gone.

  Meeryn knew her words sounded trite and ridiculous under the circumstances. Adam was dead. The four who together found themselves bound by the Fey-blood’s spell could never be reunited to break it. For Gray, this must seem exactly like the end. And who was she to offer him different?

  The answer came back to her like a slap to the head, and she straightened with renewed determination. She was the bloody N’thuil, that’s who. She had the sum of Imnada wisdom at her fingertips. If she couldn’t find an answer, there was no answer to be found.

  Fleeing to her rooms, Meeryn grabbed up the hold-all where she’d stowed Jai Idrish upon their arrival. The sphere spilled into her hand, the weight of it seeming greater than before, the milky light gleaming within every facet of its surface seeming to shine with a prism’s colors. She placed the orb on a desk in her room, propped up by a perfume bottle, a box of hairpins, and a ladies’ magazine to keep it from rolling onto the floor. Hardly dignified, but altogether serviceable. She placed her palms upon its surface. Cleared her mind.

  “Three pearls from my bodice and two from my hem are missing.” Lady Delia stomped down the hall. “The bloody laundresses are robbing me blind.”

  A door slammed.

  Meeryn silently wished the woman to the devil as she sought to focus her mind once more and try again.

  “Jamie is trying to sleep. Would you please take your fit of vapors somewhere else? I hear the Far Antipodes are lovely this time of year,” Lady Estelle hissed as she hurried to intercept her sister.

  Raised voices and slammed doors and more grumbling followed until Meeryn finally surrendered. Taking up Jai Idrish, she retuned it to the hold-all, and took everything with her as she left the house for calmer parts—like the Far Antipodes.

  She paused at the bottom of the terrace steps.

  The hidden wooded glade would do perfectly.

  The walk across the park stretched her legs and soothed her heart. By the time she reached the ferny clearing and the lily-covered pool, she was breathing hard but the stitch in her side had taken the place of the ache beneath her ribs.

  An oak had fallen, its roots pulled up through the soft earth in a knot of reaching twisted limbs. One such tangle was a perfect receptacle for the sphere. A thrush called from the bushes. Another sang high in the ash trees, shaking the branches as it hopped. Frogs chirruped along the banks of the pool or splashed amid the ferns. But no sisterly squabbling. No crow’s contemptuous cackle.

  She was alone.

  Once more she placed her hands upon the sphere’s roughened crystalline surface. Once more she sought to empty her mind of everything but the question tearing at her heart, though this proved harder than she imagined. Gray’s face swam before her, the futility of his final gesture, the helpless rage burning in his bright eyes.

  She opened her mind as she might when seeking to path, searching for the connection that would link her to Jai Idrish and the wisdom of the ancients. For a time, nothing happened. Her arms and shoulders grew sore; her fingers grew stiff and her knees ached where she knelt upon the loamy earth. Her eyes burned as she stared unblinking into the crystal’s center, where the light coalesced like an altar flame. Jai Idrish remained cold and silent. The ancients fled as if they’d never been.

  She wanted to cry. Tears leaked from the edges of her eyes to trickle salty into her mouth. She wanted to scream at the sphere; a useless rock. And she a useless Voice. Perhaps Lady Delia was right. Perhaps Gray lied to himself. Perhaps there was no way to break the curse. The Fey-blood sorcerer had done his work too well.

  Just as she started to pull her hands away, the light withi
n the crystal flickered and expanded. It blew outward like a ripping curling tidal surge, dragging her under as it receded, pulling her far from shore to the deepest places where light never shown. She was no longer in the glade or even in the world she knew.

  She felt no ground beneath her feet, heard no call of birds or whispering breeze. She was suspended within an infinite darkness surrounded by the specks of distant stars, great spiraling clouds of glittering dust and the boil of brilliant suns brighter than the one that shone above her every day. She searched farther, seeing the planets like points upon a map. The space between like a great ocean with depths and currents and shoals and hidden rocks. And just at the edge of her vision, an infinite stretch of horizon banded by a great rolling cloud of shadow, black and ominous as a cyclone. Eating the distance between them, swallowing the specks of stars, gobbling the blue planets, blotting everything out forever.

  “. . . naxos nreothma lioxnahal . . . dark angels aloft . . . naxos briothmeh ionuhath . . . katarth theorta . . .”

  The shadow seemed to boil and roll with new life. It grew in size. As if it suddenly noticed her existence, it turned its immense energy in her direction. Defenseless, she watched it approach like an enormous wave, with the force of the entire universe behind it.

  And, like the seal of her clan, she used every bit of guile and strength to slide clear of its crushing attack. Driving ahead of it, sliding away from it. Moving through the darkness before the shadow, diving down, curling up. She tired, her heart raced, she screamed for Idrin or Aneavala or any one of the thousands who’d come before to help her. Just as the shadow must overtake her, she felt herself falling, her vision burst with the brightness of an exploding star, and she was back in the dim leafy glade, the crystal empty of life but for the tiny flickering gleam of light at its heart.

  “Hold this tight, my lady. It will help to anchor you among the living.” Lucan cupped her fingers around a small jagged stone. The edges bit into her fingers but the pain was welcome after her time trapped in the dark heart of the stone.

  “Not trapped at all,” he answered. “You were freed like none can be free but those who allow Jai Idrish to fill them with its power.”

  She really wished he wouldn’t snatch her thoughts without asking. Surely there were protocols about that sort of intrusion. Perhaps he didn’t even realize he did it, like the boot trampling a hill of ants. They were so small and insignificant, the boot never even noticed them.

  “My apologies, Lady N’thuil. I’m still unused to the lack of mental barriers among the Imnada of today. It is a lack that leaves me a bit like . . . a boot, I’m afraid. But you are no ant.”

  Heat crept into her cheeks. “I suppose if I’m being filled with power, I’m closer kin to a cup.”

  He offered a thin smile. “Did you not wonder why you are called Voice and Vessel? You speak for all those who have passed before you, but you are also the sharpened spearpoint upon which Jai Idrish directs all its power. You are both weapon and wisdom in one divine.”

  She knelt to splash water on her face, disregarding the ruin of her gown. The cold cleared away the foggy drunken feeling left from her time connected to the sphere.

  “Did Jai Idrish offer you the answers you sought?”

  “I don’t know. There was a shadow coming toward me.” She stood up, but her legs wobbled and she had to lean against the dead oak for balance. “No stars. No light. No life within it. But I have no idea what it means. Was it a real seeing? A metaphor?”

  Lucan’s face hardened, his already forbidding features growing bleaker. “I am not N’thuil. And I do not know how Jai Idrish offers its knowledge. If you saw a shadow, you must interpret it as you see best.”

  “But I wasn’t trained to interpret. The crystal’s not spoken to us in centuries. It’s slept until none living remembers how it works or what it does. I wasn’t even supposed to be N’thuil. It was a mistake.”

  “There are no mistakes.”

  “A great darkness is coming that threatens the Imnada. But I don’t know what it means. Is Jai Idrish telling me to beware Sir Dromon, or the Fey-bloods, or . . .” A shadow fell over her, chilling her heated skin, lifting the hairs at the back of her neck.

  “Or me,” Gray answered for her.

  * * *

  “It’s not a battlement, but it does have a lovely view.”

  Gray turned his gaze from a study of the far horizon to the woman standing just this side of a nearby chimney, skirts trailing in the dust, face smudged with a bit of mud from the gutter. She approached, hesitating only slightly upon seeing the silver-bladed knife lying beside him, an empty cup at his elbow, bandage wrapped round his hand.

  “To have the resiliency of youth,” he said.

  Meeryn followed his gaze to where Jamie walked amid the gardens in company with Lady Estelle. She kept close to his side, but only once did her hand reach toward him and only once did he pause to catch his breath aside a long low stone bench.

  “He owes you his life,” Meeryn said,

  “I hope I didn’t save him only to be slaughtered at a later date.”

  “It won’t end that way, Gray. It can’t.”

  He closed his hand more tightly around the wadded handkerchief. The draught worked as it should for now, but he sensed its weakness increasing. He felt the choking evil of the curse as it wrapped its way around his spirit, twisting tighter until he couldn’t move, until he couldn’t fight. Until his body became his worst enemy. It wouldn’t be long now. He had thought six months; he might have three. “You disbelieve Jai Idrish?” he asked.

  “No, I believe in you.” She settled on the roof ledge beside him. He felt a smile tug at his mouth as he watched her unease, the way she gripped the gutter as she glanced uncomfortably at the shrubbery below before fixing her stare on the distant pair.

  “You’re safe enough. I’ll not let you fall.”

  She jerked her chin up, her face a mask of gritty determination. “Forgive me if I’d rather not test that theory.”

  His smile widened, though his words were meant in all seriousness. “You already have.”

  She nodded as she caught his meaning. “And you’ve been true to your word so I suppose I have nothing to fear.”

  She sounded so certain, but he knew her doubts remained. Of course they did. Hell, he doubted himself when the clock struck three in an empty house and he felt the ghosts thicken. Daylight banished them but they always returned in the dark. Much like the curse in that regard.

  “Sir Dromon wants to erase all knowledge of the Imnada from the face of the earth. He wants to return to the days when we were thought a sweet faery tale. Those days are past, Meeryn. There are too many who know our secret. The Ossine can’t kill them all.”

  “Do you worry what will happen when the walls come down and we’re faced by our greatest enemies?”

  “Of course. But I worry more over what will happen if we bury our heads in the sand and do nothing.”

  She stared out over the treetops, to the blue hills and the haze of sky beyond. “Jai Idrish showed me a darkness without end, a world without light. There was nothing but emptiness forever. Is that what this rebellion is risking? Or is that what we’re fighting?”

  “Forget the crystal’s heart for a moment. What does your heart tell you?”

  She smiled. “It’s telling me I’m a fool to doubt you. But then again, my heart’s never been the best guide. It told me once I should dye my hair raven black and it ended a horrid shade of green.”

  He laughed. “I remember when you did that. The duke was horror-struck.”

  “Not half so much as I was. It took six months to grow out and a year to recover from the humiliation.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I prefer your hair color just the way it is. It suits you.”

  She grinned. “Not too light. Not too dark. Not too straight. Not too curly. I’ve resigned myself to ordinary.”

  “You couldn’t be that if you tried.”

 
Jamie and Estelle followed a path from the garden into the park, the boy’s strength returning and his white-eyed nightmarish panic receding under their hostess’s care. They disappeared near a grove of pines, and Gray was left without a focus for his gaze, a distraction from Meeryn’s unnerving presence. There were things he wanted to say to her but reticence had been his watchword too long. Besides, there was little to be gained by offering her his heart when in a few short months it would cease beating. She would be alone . . . he would have left her again.

  No, best to keep silent. To keep still. To deaden his feelings as he’d always done. But it was harder now. Returning to Deepings had created the first cracks in his granite façade. Meeryn had been the slow incessant drip of water forcing her way into the dead places where nothing had lived but ghosts and regret. She offered him his past back. Then she offered him her love.

  She felt no such reserve. She took his good hand in her own, threading her fingers with his, their shoulders brushed, her thigh warm beside his as she leaned against him. “You’re strong, Gray. Far stronger than your grandfather ever realized, but you can’t carry the world on your shoulders. Sometimes you have to admit you need help. Sometimes opening yourself up to hurt is the only way to gain love.”

  “And if it’s too late?”

  “It’s never too late.”

  Her lips touched his, her breath soft in his mouth as he opened to take her deeper, to own her in a long desperate kiss of claiming. He cupped the back of her head in his good hand, smelled the windswept freshness of her hair and the salt of her skin. She was lush against him, a feast for his senses. He caressed her breasts through her gown, felt the gasping catch of an inhalation, heard the sigh as she surrendered to his touch. He leaned her back against the chimney as she skimmed her hands down his chest, freeing his waistcoat, sliding up under his shirt. He shivered. Groaned her name as she circled a nipple with her fingertips.

  Arousal dragged the blood straight to his groin. He wanted to be inside her, to feel her tight hot muscles close around him, to taste the slick wetness between her legs, to hear her cry his name as she found her release. He wanted to feel this rocketing runaway desire so that when the end did come, he would remember what he had and what it felt like and how close he had almost come.