Cursed

by Frank Miller

  The other monk blinked, unsure of what he’d just seen. He noticed dark pools forming and clouding the pond. His hands cupped the water and came up red. A sliver of emerald surged up out of the darkness. The sword entered his sternum at an angle, puncturing heart and lungs, before biting through his back. The monk coughed a red mist, then toppled into the pond face-first.

  One of the brothers onshore looked out and saw only red robes drifting on the pond surface. He slapped the knee of another paladin, whose mouth was full of biscuits, and pointed.

  The water stirred and Nimue rose slowly from the pond, the Sword of Power clutched in her fists, paladin blood washing down her stolen clothes. The hum of the Hidden throbbed in her ears. She couldn’t feel the chill of the pond for the heat of the blood rushing through her. She laughed. It was a cold, dark chuckle from deep within her. Her wolf howl.

  The paladins retreated back to the rocks, convinced that Nimue was some kind of nature demon.

  “It’s her,” one of them growled.

  “She’s—she’s murdered them. Falto!” The youngest monk, Gunyon, shouted to one of the floating bodies. “Now she’s come for us!”

  “This isn’t natural, one girl—” Another paladin, Lesno, was losing nerve.

  Thomas, their bent-nosed commander, barked, “Look with your own eyes, you dim toad! She’s just touched is all, and it’s made her bold!”

  At his words the brothers collected their senses and saw the maid, not the rumors, standing before them; a girl, barely five feet tall.

  “She’s just one Druid whore!”

  “Burning’s a mercy for this one.” The commander loosened the flail from his belt. He let the spiked iron balls hang down to the gravel. He smiled at Nimue.

  “I call the sword,” Robert, one of the other brothers, blurted.

  “The one who kills her gets the sword,” Thomas corrected him.

  “This will please the Father,” Lesno said as he picked his scythe off the ground. They spread out over the length of the shore.

  “Come on out, love, let me warm you up,” Thomas called to her.

  Nimue’s eyes darted from one to the other. She waved the sword at them. Its worn leather straps under her palms and the weight of the blade emboldened her. “Who’s next?”

  “Let’s keep her alive, brothers. Never seen a witch like this one.”

  “Not like those other pigs—”

  “I don’t see any warts.”

  “I want to see the rest of her.”

  Their boots sloshed into the waters.

  “Come on, then! I’ll gut you all!” she screamed.

  Two of the paladins chuckled at the threat. The others were deadly serious.

  “Don’t be afraid, love, we’ll have a nice party before it’s all over. Gunyon, pull her out of there!”

  Gunyon sounded alarmed by this command. “Why me?”

  “I’ll have your eyes!” Nimue swung at them as the monks sloshed closer, only ten feet away, encircling her.

  Gunyon took a deep breath and plunged under the surface. Nimue hacked at the waters as their commander hurried up behind her and caught her by the hair.

  “The sword!” he barked.

  Another paladin splashed forward and reached for the blade. But even with her head yanked back by the commander’s fist around her hair, she wrenched the sword around and hacked through the paladin’s fingers. The monk shrieked and bent forward, clutching his hand as an ax—intended for him—hurtled past him, headed for Nimue, and she barely got her sword up in time to block it.

  But the sword was knocked clean from her hands and vanished into the pond waters, which had been muddied from blood and debris kicked up from the floor.

  Nimue saw Arthur cursing his aim and readying another hand ax that he’d freed from the paladins’ own horses.

  “What did you do?” Nimue shouted at him. Without the sword, her arms were suddenly deadweights. The cold and pain fell on her and she gasped for energy. Fear returned with a mule kick, and she could barely track the shouts and movement and bodies all around her.

  Gunyon burst out of the waters and bludgeoned Nimue with a wild swing, catching her in the temple. They plunged back into the water, Gunyon’s hands seeking out her neck and squeezing. Nimue sucked in a throatful of water before her air was cut off. She scratched at his bare arms. Where was the sword? Her back hit the rocks of the pond floor, raising another cloud of mud. There was a terrible ringing in her ears. She dug her nails into the paladin’s cheeks and eyes, but his grip only tightened. Her mind filled with flashes of white, and in between the flashes she saw images: tears of blood streaming down lean cheeks . . . Arthur naked and curled up asleep like a babe, surrounded by candles . . . a white owl, impaled by an arrow, flailing in the snow . . . a blue glade, every leaf moving, every leaf a wing, the glade alive, pulsing . . . a sea of banners flapping in a cold wind, their crest a mighty boar’s head . . . a ribbon of silver entwining two women’s hands . . . the sun turned black and blinding . . . a grassy mound of tilting gravestones rising up, spilling clods of dirt, something underneath, older than time, something terrible . . . a beautiful little girl with green antlers . . .

  Nimue felt herself falling into the white void in her mind, giving over to a dream sleep, when rough hands grabbed her arms and yanked her forward. She inhaled another mouthful of pond water as the cold air hit her cheeks. Arthur dragged her through the pond and flopped her onto the gravel shore, where she vomited. A second later he was on top of her, screaming, though her ears throbbed and she could not make out the words. He shook her, and she coughed up more water. Somehow that brought back her hearing.

  “—want to die? Is that what you want? Is it?”

  “Yes!” Nimue croaked, slapping at Arthur and shoving him off. She curled over onto her hands and knees and sobbed as she retched on the gravel.

  Arthur unbuckled his sword belt and flung his dagger in its sheath at her feet. “Then finish it! And let me be done with you!”

  Nimue fell onto her stomach and wept against the cold rocks. Arthur swayed in the breeze, scowling, but did not leave. Instead he sat on the shore, stuffed his shaking hands beneath his armpits, and stared in disbelief at the pond, now a deep red with paladin blood, robes floating like jellyfish on the surface.

  Suddenly Nimue slapped at the gravel around her. “The sword. The sword!” Arthur was too exhausted to answer. Nimue crawled into the water, keeping her chin above the blood. She dog-paddled, pushing bodies away until she spied an emerald glint. She dove down and retrieved the Sword of Power.

  FOURTEEN

  ARTHUR SAT AGAINST A BOULDER and watched Nimue throw one of the paladins’ saddlebags onto the shore. She sat cross-legged and began to rummage through it.

  He bit off a hunk of stale biscuit left over from the ambushed caravan. Every instinct told him to run, to leave the madwoman to her inevitable fate. Yet his eyes drifted to the handkerchief in his right hand, its edges embroidered with purple flowers, the rest brown with old bloodstains. The handkerchief was his mother’s, but the blood was his father’s. It was the handkerchief that bade him stay.

  Tor, son of Cawden, was a restless figure in Arthur’s life, an unsteady earner who would vanish for months at a time on grand quests, leaving his wife and children to tend their meager farm in Cardiff. Typically, his father would return home with nothing more than stories of treasures won and lost, of great battles and glorious jousts. He cut an ample figure, with strong appetites for wine and food, and by the time Arthur was thirteen years old, he took to wearing pieces of armor he’d collected through the years and calling himself Sir Tor. He claimed that he’d been knighted during a siege against English invaders in Gwent.

  After one journey in particular, Arthur noted a change in his father. His lies were bolder, his stories even more fantastical, and his hands were full of tremors. He took to a chair in the local tavern, the Nag’s Head, a bent-over little pub constructed from the timbers of local shipwrecks. His father
proclaimed himself the protector of the village and drank wine every day from morning until Arthur’s mother, Eleanor, collected him well past the high moon.

  For all his many flaws, Arthur still loved his father. He loved his stories of crusading knights and monstrous flying lizards, ghost ships and bloody duels. He knew the local men laughed at Tor. Arthur’s knuckles were always scraped, defending his father from the japes and insults of the older boys.

  Small children adored Sir Tor, and he was gentle and kind to them. In their wide eyes, Sir Tor was indeed the mighty figure he claimed to be. He also had a beautiful, deep voice and could sing. And by Arthur’s sixteenth year, his father had become a local institution, a knight errant, scribing his adventures to song, settling into the comfortable robes of a storyteller.

  And so it was until the day three English knights, not much older than Arthur, rode into the village, seeking only thievery and violence, and the harsh truth of the world collided with Sir Tor’s imagined one.

  Arthur was not there to protect his father that night. He was dancing with a local girl in the next village over. It wasn’t until he heard the bells and the shouts and saw strangers on horseback galloping out of town that he sensed something was wrong. By the time he returned, his father had already been carried to an upstairs room at the Nag’s Head. Arthur remembered the toppled tables of the inn, the pools of blood on the floor and on the stairs. An inconsolable barmaid explained to him that Sir Tor had stepped in when the knights grabbed her. The boys turned on Sir Tor like wolves.

  Arthur thought he would break into pieces when he saw his father twisted in the bedsheets, struggling to breathe. Arthur took his large, soft hand in his own and pulled up a stool. Sir Tor was speaking quickly as though several streams of conversation were passing through his mind at the same time. He repeated the word “dogs” over and over, his eyes gradually coming into focus and seeming to see Arthur for the first time.

  “What was—what was I saying? Arthur, where was I, boy? I lost my train of thought.” Sir Tor breathed unevenly as sweat dribbled down his round cheeks.

  “Dogs, milord,” Arthur reminded his father as he pressed a wet cloth to Sir Tor’s forehead. The room was so quiet you could hear the flicker of the candles. Blood-soaked rags were heaped by Arthur’s feet.

  “Dogs, yes, of course, keep a dog. Train him to hunt fowl and you’ll never go hungry on a long ride. I had a—but that wasn’t—there was something else. Why is it so bloody hard to think?”

  “You don’t have to speak, Father.”

  “But I need to, I need to. Never measure your courage by the men you’ve killed. That’s it. Sometimes true courage means avoiding the blow that will take a man’s life. Men who judge their worth by the men they’ve killed are lesser men. Those aren’t knights.”

  Sir Tor grimaced as he adjusted his weight on the cot. Arthur tried not to look at his bloodied shirt.

  “No, milord,” Arthur answered.

  Sir Tor’s eyes fluttered; he searched the ceiling for words as his lips moved. “Keep on with the chess. It, it exercises the mind for war, and—and is a good way to meet other youngsters. You need friends, Arthur. You’re too solitary for your age. Too serious. I’ve told you this.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “That’s—that’s a good boy. I don’t mean to be critical. But you’re only young once, trust me. What was I saying? What else was I . . . ? There was something I had to, um, with your, with your, with your hunting, your arrows.”

  “Mark my arrows. Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t waste that iron. Good arrows cost money. Even in battle I never left an arrow if I could help it. Make sure you mark those arrows, boy. And—and don’t be so serious. You have fine teeth, you should show them every now and then. The girls, the girls like to laugh. I could always make them laugh.” Tor began to pat at his chest and hips, searching for something. “Where is it? Where did I . . . where’s my robe?”

  Anticipating, Arthur placed his mother’s handkerchief with the embroidered purple flowers into his father’s hand, and Tor put it to his nose, drawing in a deep breath that gave him great satisfaction.

  “She smells like morning. And cherries. Is she here? Is Eleanor . . . ?”

  One of Arthur’s aunts had taken fever that morning, and his mother had ridden half a day to look after her sister. She had not yet returned. “Not yet, milord.”

  “She can’t see me like this.” Sir Tor tried to rise. Arthur gently pressed him back to the pillow.

  “Dear Eleanor,” Sir Tor sighed, “why does that girl make me wait so?”

  “Soon, Father, soon.”

  Arthur remembered his father’s hand in his own and remembered how he’d held it until the tremors stopped and his father drifted away. Now he tucked the handkerchief into the pocket of his jerkin. As a peace offering, he tossed a wedge of hard cheese to Nimue.

  She ignored it.

  “You need to eat,” he reminded her.

  “It’s stolen.”

  “What does it matter where it came from? No one will miss it. Look at you, you look sick. When did you eat last? Two days? Three?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “We still have three days’ riding to reach the Minotaur Mountains. Shall I feed you then?”

  “Try it and I’ll stomp you.” Nimue found a bundle of scrolls tied together with string. She cut the string and read one of them aloud: “ ‘One hundred gold coins for the death or capture of the Wolf-Blood Witch, who, in agency with the Devil, has transformed herself into animal shapes and drunk the blood of infants and slaughtered women and children in their beds.’ ” On each scroll a comical sketch of a monster with bat wings and curling horns had been drawn. Nimue snorted and allowed the papers to scatter on the rocks.

  Arthur walked over and sat beside her. Nimue stiffened. He picked up one of the pages and managed a light chuckle. “What did you expect them to say? ‘Oh, we should mention this maid of sixteen single-handedly skewered an entire division of our best fighters’?”

  Nimue humphed. Arthur took the opportunity to cut off a piece of the hard cheese, and offered it to her lips. “I warned you that I would feed you.”

  Nimue looked sharply into Arthur’s eyes. She swung her fist up but Arthur caught it and pressed the cheese into her hand. He then guided the food to her lips. She yielded, opening her mouth slightly, taking the cheese. She chewed, wincing as she swallowed. There were purple handprints on her neck from the paladin’s attack.

  “Why aren’t you furious with me?” Nimue asked.

  Why aren’t you, Arthur? he wondered. Because she’s mad. Because she’s braver than I am. Arthur handed her a skin of wine, which she swallowed in deep gulps. He shrugged. “Fear of reprisal, I suppose.”

  Nimue choked a little on her wine at this. She glared at him. He gave her another slice of cheese, which she took more eagerly.

  She’s like a wild animal. Yet so beautiful. Nothing painted or put-on about her. But then he looked over at the pond and the floating red robes. A bloody catastrophe. No witnesses, at least. A cold comfort. They would have to ride fast and far. Nothing and no one would be safe for hundreds of miles. Especially if Nimue kept chopping off hands and murdering Red Paladins.

  He tried to reason with her. “I don’t know if madness drives you, or voices, but I know one thing: there is little reward for courage in this world. And if you go on like this, you will simply burn like a sky fire and be ashes before the dawn. Is that what you want?”

  Nimue took another gulp of wine, not answering, a hint of rose returning to her thin cheeks. She pulled out another batch of scrolls, but this set was different. The parchment was of finer quality, as was the ribbon that bound them. Each scroll had a wax seal: a cross against a two-headed eagle.

  “That’s Carden’s seal.”

  Nimue broke the seal on one of the scrolls and unrolled it. It was a hand-drawn map with certain villages noted with an X. Nimue read them: “Four Rivers, Wick’s End,
the Hollow, Crow Hill. All Fey Folk villages.”

  Next to each village was a list of names. Nimue read those, too. “These must be elders. Clan chiefs.” Nimue tore open another scroll and read it quickly. It was another set of lists, but Nimue could not divine its purpose. She handed it to Arthur. “What do you make of this one?”

  Arthur couldn’t believe what he was looking at. He thought about saying anything but the truth, but he knew Nimue would work it out for herself before too long. “These are Red Paladin divisions. You can see their unit numbers correspond to the X’s on the map.” Arthur pointed to numbers by the village names.

  “These are his next targets,” Nimue whispered. “We know his mind.” She turned to Arthur, eyes brimming with hope.

  It was just as Arthur feared. “You have no intention of running, do you?”

  The road to the Minotaur Mountains was a long and steady climb through dense forests of late November reds and golds. This had been Nimue’s favorite time of year, when the colors turned on the ancient barrow and the geese fled the river with shrill cries, ready to fly on an arrow point to the southern lakes. There would be dances at the stone circle, and Mary would fire up her pot, cooking rabbit in almond sauce, followed by honey cakes washed down with bitter ale.

  Brisk western winds carried chimney smoke for miles, but traffic was thin.

  They rode two horses now rather than overburdening Egypt. Arthur had selected the best of the sad, bony lot the paladins had ridden, a sloe-eyed mare with a coat the color of dirty snow. Nimue couldn’t help but despise the nag, innocent and doltish as it was, imagining the blood that stained its hooves, the screams for mercy it had heard. She also resented that Arthur rode ahead of her at least three horse lengths. Though she’d fallen from Egypt’s saddle—twice—she missed the comfort of being close to him.