Cursed Wishes

by Marcy Kennedy

  She rolled out from under the bushes and slithered forward on her belly. She cleared the underbrush, bounced to a standing position, and edged forward, staying out of the wavering circle of light cast by the coals. For what little it mattered. With a full moon out, she might as well be standing in a clearing lit by torches.

  A branch snapped behind her, and she froze. She slowly turned her head. Gavran crouched at the tree line. His expression was darker than tar, and she knew what he’d love to do if he had the feathers. He put his hands out palms up, a plea for her to stop or return—she wasn’t sure which.

  She held position. He patted his hip where a money pouch would hang and then held his hands up in a shrug.

  She cringed. She didn’t know where his dadaidh might hide his money pouch while traveling.

  She waved Gavran towards her. He frowned but left the cover of the bushes. She tiptoed forward and peeked over the side of the wagon. Gavran’s dadaidh lay on his back, his mouth hanging open, a soft snore vibrating from his chest. A large, gray woolen blanket covered him from chin to toes. No money pouch in sight.

  Gavran stopped beside her. He pointed into the wagon and tapped his chest between his collar bones. She squished her eyes shut for a second. If his dadaidh normally kept his money pouch beneath his leine, as soon as he felt someone reaching under his blanket, he’d be up and waking Tavish, and she was no match for a man.

  Gavran skewered her with a this-would-have-been-easier-under-the-bushes-where-we-could-talk look. She pretended she hadn’t seen it.

  She poked a finger in the direction of Tavish and mimed hitting him in the head. Gavran shook his head so hard she feared it’d topple from his neck. She nodded just as vehemently.

  Course, if one of them was going to hold down Gavran’s dadaidh, it ought to be Gavran. He was stronger. She picked her way to the tree line and found a heavy branch on the ground. She scooped it up and brought it back.

  Gavran had planted his feet wide and folded his arms over his chest, his body language screaming that he wouldn’t budge.

  She pointed up into the wagon again and then put her hand over her mouth. Hopefully Gavran would figure out she wanted him to climb up and keep hold on his dadaidh while she knocked out Tavish. And hopefully he’d comply once he realized she intended to go forward with or without him.

  If not, she might end up going to the kirk to stand trial for witchcraft and thievery.

  She slipped around the tongue of the wagon and raised the branch. Tavish jerked awake and hollered.

  There was the sound of a thump—Gavran launching into the wagon?—from her left. She swung her branch at Tavish, but he easily deflected it. She sprinted for the tree line. If he chased her, they might yet have a chance.

  Heavy footfalls raced after her. She dodged to the left. She couldn’t leave the clearing or risk going too far from Gavran. Tavish would catch her for sure if that happened.

  Scuffling and thumping were definitely coming from the wagon now. She spun around and jabbed her branch back toward Tavish. He rammed into it stomach-first. He let out an oomph, and they rebounded in opposite directions.

  The branch flew from her hands, and she hit the ground hard. She gasped for air that wouldn’t come and skittered backward like a crab. Her lungs released, and she sucked in a deep breath.

  Gavran launched out of the wagon, and his gaze raked the clearing. She crawled to her feet, using a tree trunk for support.

  She knew the second he caught sight of her because he raced straight for her. His dadaidh climbed from the wagon, shouting.

  “Go!” Gavran yelled.

  He snatched her hand on the way past and dragged her along behind him.

  They ran until she stumbled to her knees. Her lungs burned, and her head felt fuzzy. It’d been a long time since she’d run so far.

  Gavran glanced back the way they’d come. “I think we made it, but we need to get under cover for the night. Can you stand?”

  She couldn’t grab enough air to answer. Gavran reached out as if he wanted to rub her back, and then pulled back. His hands were empty. Where was the money pouch? They wouldn’t get a second chance.

  “Did we…get…the…money?” Each word was a struggle.

  He patted his belt. “I got it. But they’ll be hunting for us harder and longer now. Like as not they think you’ve bewitched me into becoming a criminal. They’ll want to rescue me before you get me hung.”

  She forced her legs to straighten. “Let’s find somewhere safe to hide for the night. We can visit the spaewife to buy the cure on the morrow. Then you can go home and tell them that’s exactly what I did.”

  Chapter 9

  Gavran lengthened his strides to catch Ceana, and they melded into the mid-morning market crowd milling on the outskirts of Dunvegan. Hopefully the noise would at last drown out the memories of his dadaidh’s accusations from the night before. Even though he should have slept dreamless, he couldn’t, kept awake by the remembrance of the betrayed look in his dadaidh’s eyes and the sounds of him desperately trying to convince Gavran that this wasn’t him and that the witch controlled him.

  He pulled Ceana to a stop in front of a stall selling bannocks. He paid for three and handed two to her.

  When he’d suggested taking the money from his dadaidh, he hadn’t counted on how his mind wouldn’t be able to rest afterward. He kept trying to come up with a way they could have done it differently and how he might make amends.

  Almost worse, he didn’t know what to call what was happening, and it itched in his brain. He couldn’t even tell Ceana about it and ask her because she’d warned him. If he asked her, she’d think he meant to back out.

  All he could do was make sure the money helped pay Ceana back for what she’d sacrificed.

  And pray Ceana spoke true that seeking help from a spaewife wasn’t sinning against the Almighty. It seemed every right he tried to do forced him into a choice between two wrongs.

  “Where do we find this spaewife?” he asked.

  Ceana took a big enough bite of her first cake that oats stuck to her top lip. She licked them away. “Spaewives usually pitch their tent on the busiest side of the market, offering to tell fortunes.” Her words were garbled by the mouthful of food. “My mamaidh—”

  Her voice caught and she coughed. She cleared her throat. “My mamaidh never let us have our future read, said only the Almighty could know what was to come. But she’d often buy one o’ her remedies for keeping away the fae ’cause even the brownies couldn’t be trusted. They were too easy to offend, and then you’d find your house worse off than before.”

  Gavran finished his bannock and wiped his hand on his trews. His mamaidh said the same. Some of the fae were generous in their help to common folk, but beware of offending them. It was better to care for your own than to take a favor from a fae.

  They moved away from the bannock seller, and Ceana dipped down, out of his peripheral vision. He turned back.

  She knelt on one knee in front of a boy so scrawny that his age was near impossible to guess. He sat cross-legged on the packed ground and stared off center of where he should, his eyes cloudy.

  Pressure bloomed in Gavran’s chest. This feeling was new and strange as well—a heaviness unconnected to a physical injury.

  Ceana picked up the boy’s hand and placed her second bannock in it. She whispered something to him and rose to her feet.

  She took a quick stride as if she’d expected to have to chase after Gavran and stuttered to a stop. Pink flushed her cheeks. “He needed the bannock more than meself. I’d see him there whenever I was in town. I couldn’t help him before, and I always swore I would if I could.”

  She made it sound as if the boy regularly begged in this spot, but in all his visits to the market, Gavran couldn’t remember seeing him once. “He’s always there?”

  Ceana nodded and wove her way through the market day crowd.

  “You’re certain?” Gavran fell into step beside her. “I haven’t not
iced him before this day.”

  Ceana’s eyes narrowed, then her face smoothed. Her mouth twitched. “’Course not.”

  She craned her neck from left to right as if searching for the spaewife’s tent or keeping watch.

  He ought to be watching, too, for his dadaidh and Tavish, but the boy and the feeling in his chest ground away at him. What kind of a selfish clot was he not to notice a starving blind child?

  Though, Ceana wasn’t glaring at him accusingly, and she certainly had no trouble telling him of his other failings. “Why wouldn’t I have seen him?”

  “You’re living outside the wishes now.” She stopped, and the crowd flowed around them, brushing and bumping as they passed. “You didn’t see him when you walked with the blessings because it would have saddened you.”

  The feeling was sadness. She said it so matter-of-factly, but to never have experienced sadness…Maybe he should be thankful for that. This feeling wasn’t one he’d wish on another. But to not experience it meant he either felt no sympathy for others or, like with the boy, didn’t see their suffering at all.

  His mouth turned to old leather inside. He couldn’t begin to wrap his mind around what he’d never experienced thanks to Ceana’s wishes. They’d spared him, but they’d also cut short his ability to do any real good in the world, for he couldn’t see the depth of suffering happening around him.

  “There she is,” Ceana said.

  She pointed towards a double-belled wedge tent pitched on the fringes. The tent was the kind used more often on the northern reaches of the isle by those whose tent was also their home. The wedge shape and triangular cross-section would give her the maximum amount of space inside while still being able to withstand the worst nature lobbed at her.

  The tent flap was down.

  “Do we knock?” he asked.

  Ceana rapped on the fabric, and the front of the tent rippled.

  A woman his mamaidh’s age with dark hair and skin pale as curdled cream opened the flap for them. Somehow he’d expected her to be old and haggard.

  “We need to hire your services,” Ceana said.

  Without a word, the woman stepped aside and held the flap open for them.

  Directly in front of them stood a table no bigger than a barrel top, with two rickety chairs Gavran doubted would hold his weight. Along the shorter side of the tent to the right lay the woman’s narrow bed, covered in red and brown blankets. Smoke from a fire foolishly lit inside made the room as hot as the type of summer day where you didn’t even have the energy to swat flies. The smell of lavender, thyme, spearmint, and smoke filled his throat to bursting and burned his eyes.

  The spaewife motioned at the chairs. “You’re here to buy, not to have the future told.”

  Gavran’s skin crawled. She might have guessed their purpose, but there was no way she could have known.

  “So what is it then that you be needing?” the spaewife asked.

  Ceana ignored the offered chair, but shuffled a little closer, the money sack in her hand. “A cure. For a fae curse.”

  “Cures for fae curses are complicated.” The spaewife held out her hand, palm up, and rubbed her thumb, pointer, and middle fingers together. “They come with a steep price. Let me see what you have, and whether it’ll be enough.”

  Ceana handed over the money sack.

  The spaewife poured the coins into her hand and poked through them with a finger. The coins caught the light from the flames as if they would catch fire as well.

  The spaewife dumped the coins into a trunk at the back of the tent, locked the lid, and handed the empty purse back to Ceana. “I usually ask for more, but I’ll make an exception.”

  Gavran couldn’t keep his hand from moving to cover his own hidden coin purse. Surely she would have said the same no matter how much they offered her. Ceana had wanted to give the spaewife everything in the money sack, but he’d taken out a few coins. Once the spaewife cured the curse, he’d be able to go home or find his dadaidh and claim he convinced Ceana to release her hold on him, but she’d have nothing and no one to turn to. He needed to be sure she could at least eat until she found honest work.

  The spaewife circled the tent pole, touching one bundle of herbs hanging from it, then the next. The spiky needles of rosemary, the white flowers of chamomile, and many others even his mamaidh likely wouldn’t recognize.

  The spaewife stopped and broke a stalk free, moved on and plucked another. She tossed them into the pot of boiling liquid over the fire. “Fae curses are unique to the type of fae who cursed you and to what they wanted you to suffer from. I’ll need more information to finish the potion. Was it a trow?”

  Ceana glanced back at Gavran.

  He shrugged. He had no idea how to tell one fae from another. He’d never seen one outside of his dream—or the night the dream happened.

  Ceana ran her tongue over the edge of her lips. “I don’t believe so. We thought she was a fairy. She looked like a woman. Tall, slender. Hair the same color as mine. But she seemed…I felt as though I could see through her even though she was solid.”

  The spaewife pulled a jar from a shelf and flicked a pinch of seeds into the liquid. “And the curse itself?”

  “I cannot succeed at anything I try, and I’ll never find love or happiness.”

  The spaewife’s glanced at Gavran, but her expression remained passive. “Is that all?”

  He brushed a hand over his face. The smoke built a barrier in his throat that he couldn’t clear. Even though her expression hadn’t changed when she’d shifted her gaze to him, he’d have sworn it carried an accusation. Or perhaps that was only his own conscience projecting his own emotions outward.

  Ceana gave a tiny shake of her head. “I never dream of the night we met her, and he receives the opposite of everything I’m cursed with.”

  The spaewife picked up a bottle this time. The glass was thick and green, but the liquid that oozed from the dipper was red like blood.

  The spaewife ladled out a scoop from the pot into another glass bottle. “You must not drink this within the town. There’s too much iron here, too many things that dilute the power of fae and cures for the ills they cause.”

  Ceana’s hands trembled.

  Gavran stepped forward and accepted the bottle from the spaewife. If she dropped it, they couldn’t afford another. He tucked it inside his cloak.

  He ushered Ceana from the tent. Her tremors shook the hand he rested on her back.

  As soon as they were out of the tent, she reached for his pocket. “Let me see it.”

  He brushed her hands away. “You heard what she said. Not here.”

  “I won’t drink it. I just want to hold it.”

  He wouldn’t let her impulsiveness win this time. Look where that’d gotten them last night. “It could get knocked from your hand or stolen by a beggar who thinks they can sell it for a few pennies.”

  She scowled at him and stalked ahead toward the edge of the market.

  He caught the sound of his dadaidh’s voice through the murmur of the crowd and yanked Ceana back, behind a cart.

  The look she shot him was full of confusion. “What are you doing?”

  He peered around the cart. His dadaidh was only two stalls away, talking to a fishmonger. Ceana pushed close.

  He nudged her backwards. “My dadaidh’s near enough to see us if we kept going that way.”

  She ground her knuckles into her skirt. “Is Tavish with him?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Might be they’ve come to see the spaewife themselves.” He winked at her. “And find out how to stop a witch.”

  Ceana clamped both hands over her mouth, but a laugh spilled from between her fingers anyway. Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

  Her laugh was more beautiful than church bells, light and rich and giving him a sense of peace in the center of his soul. Once the curse was gone, some man would hear it, and she’d have someone to care for her the way she deserved.

  The thought felt vaguely fa
miliar again. A muscle pulsed in his cheek. It was like being caught in cobwebs that he couldn’t wipe off to not know what he’d said in the past to Ceana, what things had been like between them before.

  She stiffened, and a grey sheet fell over her face. “She’ll know they mean us if they describe what we look like. You don’t think she’ll tell your dadaidh we were there, do you?”

  The carnivorous look in the spaewife’s eyes as she counted out their coins with her finger lay fresh in his mind. Whether she turned on them or not depended on how much Tavish and his dadaidh offered.

  He cocked his head towards a gap between two tents. “No sense waiting to find out.”

  She led the way, and he followed. He had to shuffle along sideways to fit through the narrow passage. They came out the other side and cut over two rows of houses.

  He let out the breath he’d been holding. Before nightfall, this would all be over.

  They walked until they couldn’t see Dunvegan, because every time he suggested they were far enough away, Ceana wanted to keep going. To make sure they were truly far enough from town for the potion to work.

  The vial in his pocket grew heavier with each step, almost as if it didn’t want to be drunk. That was likely his own fleshly self again, having second thoughts he shouldn’t have and attributing them to an object that couldn’t think or feel.

  “Where are you going?” Ceana called.

  He stopped. She wasn’t in front of him anymore. He spun around.

  She waited under a blossoming apple tree. “I think we’re far enough now. Give me the vial.”

  He trekked back to her and pulled it from his pocket. Once she drank it, there was no turning back. The wishes would be gone. His family would be on their own. The way he’d felt today would be the norm.

  Perhaps she’d been right, and he’d regret giving up the protection of the wishes.

  Ceana snatched the bottle from his hand, popped the cork with her thumb, and chugged the liquid.