Cursebreaker

by Carol A Park

  Vaughn started pacing again, with renewed energy. “If we could get our hands on that chest…it’s a slim hope, but who knows? Maybe your father also recorded something of the expedition and kept the notes.”

  We? We? His words drew her back to reality. There was no going back, literally or metaphorically. “There is no we in this scenario,” she said flatly.

  He ran both hands through his hair and left them on top of his head while he stared off into the distance. He obviously hadn’t heard her.

  “I can send a letter to the woman I gave it to,” Ivana offered. “If she’s even still there, and if she still has it, you’re welcome to it.”

  He dropped his hands and waved one in the air. “No, no. That’s unnecessary. I’m going to Ferehar after this anyway—for Yaotel. I can do what he wants while also hunting down this lead. It’s perfect.” He bobbed his head to the side. “Almost perfect. If there’s anything to learn, we’ll need to be back at the shrine by the next sky-fire, which puts us under a time constraint I’m sure Yaotel didn’t have in mind.”

  There was the we again. Did he think she was going to go with him? That was absurd. She couldn’t go back to Ferehar. She had avoided it successfully for fourteen years, and she wasn’t inclined to change that now. Especially now. Right? “You seem to be under some delusions about the extent of my desire to be involved in this.”

  He counted on his fingers. “Two and a half months. There should be plenty of time, if we don’t delay.”

  There was nothing for her there. Even if she did find her father’s old chest. What good would that do her? She had buried those memories for a reason.

  Her hand went to the rose pendant at her throat. And yet, all these years, she had retained this one thing, this one anchor to her past, despite everything. What did that mean? Had she come full circle? Did she need some sort of closure to find peace and move on with a new life?

  She clenched her hand around the rose, and the metal leaves bit into her palm. No. It was a terrible, dangerous idea. Her defenses were too weak; she knew that path too well. It wasn’t worth the risk. “Vaughn!” she said, raising her voice. “I am not going to Ferehar with you!”

  Apparently, her words had finally pierced the whirlwind of his renewed excitement, because he turned to face her, surprise on his face. “But…I’m certain this acquaintance of yours isn’t just going to hand over a treasured possession given into her care to a random man she doesn’t know.”

  My life here is fine. “I’ll send a sealed letter with you.”

  “She knows your seal? Your handwriting? Your signature? I can’t take that chance.”

  And that’s what you always wanted, was it? Fine? Ivana slammed her hands down on the desk. She would not do this to herself again. “I am not going to Ferehar with you!”

  Everything on Ivana’s desk rattled. Her empty liquor glass. The knife. A pen. Even the book jumped.

  Vaughn stared at her. Fury flared in her eyes and then dissipated as quickly as it had come.

  Ivana pushed herself off the desk and took a deep breath. “I am not going to Ferehar with you,” she repeated more evenly.

  “But—”

  She cut him off with a chop of her hand. “This is ridiculous. More likely than not, there is nothing in that old chest that will mean anything to you.”

  “I’ll take the chance. If you’re right, I’ll admit defeat.” Do it Yaotel’s way.

  His stomach soured at the very thought.

  “I’m trying to rebuild a life here,” Ivana said. “You can’t just waltz in and expect me to drop everything to go with you on some fool’s errand!”

  Was that desperation in her voice? “Look, I get it. I don’t particularly want to go back to Ferehar, either.”

  Silence. She placed one hand on top of the book. “I think it’s time for you to go,” she said, all traces of fury or desperation gone. Her voice was steel, and her eyes were ice.

  He knew that voice. He knew those eyes. But they belonged to someone who was supposed to be dead. He met the challenge and dared to push. “Or what…Ivana?”

  Air hissed through her teeth. Her eyes flicked to the knife still on her desk, to the book, and then to the door. She left the knife where it was, but she picked up the book, strode to the door, and flung it open. She looked expectantly at him.

  The hope she had stoked in him fizzled and died. In its place was resignation. This was it. This had been his last hope of escaping Yaotel’s plans for him. It had been a stretch, to be sure, but somehow…he had been convinced if anyone could do this, she could.

  A month in travel lost—for nothing. Danton wasn’t the only one who was going to kill him.

  He walked over to the door but hesitated on the threshold. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for ‘bothering’ you up here in your little sanctuary, though I doubt that will last. We’ll be off in the morning.”

  He held out his hand for the book.

  She hesitated, then placed it in his hand, but she didn’t let go of it when he attempted to take it from her.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  There was a long pause. “Leave it,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ll…take a closer look tonight. Perhaps something will come to me.”

  He let go of it, and she tucked it in close to herself.

  “Stop by in the morning,” she said. “You can get it on your way out.”

  He met her eyes. The ice was gone, but her face was tense.

  There was a moment of silence while she held his gaze, and he lifted his hand to touch her cheek, much as he had when they had parted last. Her deep bronze skin was warm and soft—like her lips, as he still vividly recalled—her brown eyes dark and inscrutable, as always. “Circumstances notwithstanding, it’s…been good to see you again,” he said softly.

  She reached up to pull his hand away from her face, but unexpectedly, she didn’t let go of it.

  Neither did he. Instead, he turned her hand over in his and ran his thumb along her palm, tracing the lines, and then the callouses that were evidence of so long spent wielding a dagger.

  She didn’t move. He could almost smell that hint of lavender that had clung to her the last time he had held her close, and the longing to draw her into his arms and breathe her in stirred in him once more.

  She drew both her hand and her eyes away. “And make sure to bring Danton with you,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him again.”

  He shook himself free of the spell her proximity had laid on him. Right. Danton. Yes. Perhaps Danton could convince her. “I knew he would come in handy,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Good night, Vaughn.”

  He grinned at her and inclined his head before he pulled the study door closed behind him.

  Ivana leaned back against the closed door, clenching and unclenching her hand to rid it of the tingle that had started when Vaughn had held it. Damn traitorous body. What was it about that idiot man that set her so on edge, in every possible way?

  She took a deep breath and stared down at the book in her other hand. Why had she said she would keep it? She wouldn’t find anything. Neither of her parents had mentioned this expedition to her, and she had never seen this language before. She was certain of both facts.

  She could gain nothing by looking at that book but further erosion of what she had worked so hard to build.

  And yet now she had it, and she found she couldn’t resist.

  She walked over to the armchair, pulled it back into place, and settled down to read.

  She opened the journal to the first page.

  “Today we arrived on site; there isn’t much to see yet, but I’m terribly excited. I’m so glad G convinced the professor to invite me to be the scribe. Now I get to experience one of these digs firsthand. The first step is clearing the overgrowth out of the area. We can barely see the stone of the shrine peeking through the brush; imagine what it will look like when we have it all uncovered. Donian nomads.
Ha! The danger of doing this right under the nose of the Conclave is almost thrilling, but for today, it will likely be thankless, tiring work…”

  Ivana read on. And on. She jumped when the clock in her study chimed midnight. Had an hour already passed? Sanca would be home soon. She had become sucked into the account of this illegal archaeological dig her parents had been part of. The journal was part official record, and part personal diary. Her mother had made several comments about recopying the official parts when she returned home, leaving out all her personal observations. She never used any actual names, but she often made references to “G.” It was clear he was more than a colleague at this point in her life.

  That her parents had had some life before her had never occurred to her. It was obviously true—but as a child and adolescent, she had never wondered.

  She would have probed further eventually. But she had never been given the chance to grow into an adult whose parents had become her mentors, her confidants, her friends.

  She curled her hand into a fist again. The sense of loss was back. Not only of the people she had loved, but of the life she might have had if things had been different.

  If only she hadn’t—

  No. She poured herself another glass of xabnec. She would not stray there.

  She turned her attention back to the book that held so much of Vaughn’s hopes and focused on doing what she had told him she would do.

  But, as she suspected, it was no use. As fascinating as it was, both personally and professionally, there was nothing in it that clued her in to what language the writing around the serpent was in. Vaughn would certainly be disappointed.

  If only they had one more page. If Ivana had a transcription of this Xambrian tablet the expedition had found, she might have been able to decipher the mysterious language. Perhaps they did decipher it; Ivana would never know since the rest of it was missing.

  What had happened? Why had half the journal ended up behind a false wall in the Weylyn City library, of all places? Vaughn had said the serpent had been destroyed. The Conclave had done it, surely, which meant they had learned about the site.

  Had the expedition been halted prematurely? Had the Conclave found out who was involved?

  Her mother and father had met at the university in Weylyn. She knew that much, and little else. Only that her father had given up his scholarly pursuits to become a private tutor—shortly after her mother had become pregnant with her.

  She had thought it was because tutoring paid better, and he had a family. What if that hadn’t been it at all?

  She slammed the book shut, unsettled, and paced over to the window, unsettled that she was unsettled.

  It doesn’t matter. Who cared if Vaughn and his friends had happened upon a journal written by her mother? On an illegal archaeological dig, thirty-three years ago?

  Who cared that her father had been with her?

  Who cared that right in front of her, written in her mother’s own hand, were hints as to what her parents had been doing eight months before she had been conceived?

  Her father hadn’t even been done with the apprenticeship required during the year after graduation; her mother had made that clear in the journal. Had he not finished? When had they married? In those eight months? And immediately decided to move? Had they already decided to move when she’d been conceived? Why Ferehar? It wasn’t as though they had moved closer to family there. Why not? If he was going to give up the university, why not make it easier on the family and go to at least one of their hometowns?

  A thousand questions flooded into her brain, a thousand questions her parents had never answered, never talked about. Was that a coincidence? Had they hidden it for a reason?

  She couldn’t ask them now.

  She paced back to her desk, sat down again, and clenched her fists. She was thinking about it again.

  She took a deep breath. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t supposed to matter! It was never supposed to matter again.

  But that wasn’t true. She had always known that the memories hadn’t been excised permanently from her mind. If there had been a way to do that, she would have found it.

  They had just been buried, locked and caged, the key thrown away.

  This. Doesn’t. Matter!

  And yet she found, roiling within her, that it did. Unearthed, they carried with them as much baggage and pain as they ever had.

  She picked up her glass, still full of her second helping of xabnec, and downed it. She had to stop herself from hurling the glass across the room in frustration. Instead, she slammed it back down to the desk, her hand shaking.

  She dropped into her chair and dropped her head down on her arms, her face to the desk, her fingers digging into her arms, reaching desperately for the numbness she had once had.

  It wasn’t there. Her armor had cracked beyond repair eighteen months ago, and she had never tried to ensconce herself in a new set.

  She had also never had to come face to face with anything resembling her past in that time. Until now.

  And she was something she hadn’t been in years: utterly defenseless.

  Not even when Vaughn had waltzed into her life and chipped away at her walls until the emotions buried deep inside had been given gleeful leave to run free again; not even when Danton had killed Sweetblade, giving her the unexpected freedom to do something else with her life. Her defense, then, had been to run. To forget. To pretend she could just pick up and move on, somewhere else, someone else. She had done it before, after all.

  Apparently, she had failed.

  And no matter what Vaughn wanted or how that tiny part of herself urged her toward it, she was not going back to Ferehar.

  Danton was lying in his bed on his back, his hands behind his head and his eyes closed when Vaughn returned to their room at the inn.

  His eyes opened the moment Vaughn shut the door.

  “Sorry. Did I wake you?” Vaughn asked.

  Danton sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “No. I was waiting for you.” He leaned forward. “So? How did it go?”

  Vaughn pulled his boots off and tossed them in the corner. “Well, I got away without bodily harm, so I think that’s a positive sign.”

  Danton rolled his eyes. “I told you she wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  Vaughn sat down heavily on his own bed, facing Danton, and wiggled his hand back and forth. “Eeehhh…it’s always a toss-up.” There had been that moment there when her eyes had flicked to the knife on her desk. And when he had, like an idiot, startled her and she had almost gutted him.

  “Hasn’t changed, then.”

  Vaughn had to think hard about that. He had made the quip to her that she hadn’t, but there was something different about her. She had seemed a little more…uneven in her temperament. Then again, he had just popped in and thrown a piece of her troubled past down on her lap with no warning.

  “Anyway,” said Danton, “that’s not what I meant. Did she know anything?”

  Vaughn scratched at his beard. “Sort of.” He related his conversation with Ivana. Danton’s eyes became wider and wider as he talked until Vaughn finished with his failed bid to convince her to go with him to Ferehar to find her father’s chest.

  Danton whistled. “Wow. What are the chances?”

  “Indeed. But she refused to go with me.”

  “Can you blame her? I mean, it’s not as though you’ve been thrilled about returning to your old stomping grounds.”

  Vaughn shrugged and lay back on his bed, mimicking Danton’s posture of earlier. He had reasons beyond his past for not wanting to go to Ferehar, but Danton didn’t know those. “It’s not like I’m going to be knocking on Airell’s door.”

  Actually, the idea bothered him a great deal more than he wanted to admit. To be so close to home and yet know he wasn’t welcome.

  The word was that, once it became clear Gildas wasn’t coming back, Vaughn’s oldest brother Airell had seamlessly taken over as Ri without an election. T
hat didn’t surprise Vaughn in the slightest. It had been a while since the collective leaders of Ferehar had tried to hold anything more than sham elections. Some of them hadn’t even bothered with that; there was no election when his own father had taken over. It had taken political manipulation, important allies, fear, and almost certainly a spot or two of violence to push his way into the position after the old Ri had died. So, there was precedent.

  Vaughn had always wondered, though, what his second-oldest brother and mother had thought of his disappearance. Now that they surely knew he was both alive and a Banebringer, did they care? Or did they wish he had stayed dead?

  He couldn’t risk finding out, even once he arrived in Ferehar. It would be too dangerous with Airell in charge.

  And he didn’t want to allow himself the hope that they might feel different, lest that hope be shattered.

  Danton allowed him his silence for a moment, and then continued. “So…we’re headed out tomorrow, then?”

  “She has the journal. Said she was going to take a closer look at it and we can stop by in the morning. I’m not ready to give up.” He turned his head to look at Danton. “She also said she wouldn’t mind seeing you again.” He raised an eyebrow. “See?”

  Danton grinned and ran a hand through his shaggy mop. “Maybe she does like me.”

  Vaughn snorted. “She’s way out of your league. You never had a chance.”

  “Oh, and you did?”

  It had been a near thing. Vaughn closed his eyes, remembering once again the taste of her lips on his, the press of her body against his own. Danton didn’t know about that, though.

  Ugh. That line of thought wouldn’t get him anything other than a perpetual ache in his balls. It had been a really, really long time since he’d had some fun in bed, and seeing Ivana again…

  He sighed and rolled over. “I’m going to sleep.”

  Chapter Five

  Old Friends