Bonds: A Cursed Six novel (The Cursed Six Book 1)

by Clarrisa R. Smithe

  As a newly appointed homosexual prince afflicted with impotence, he was more restless than when he awoken from his dreams.

  He'd thought time with his sisters would ease his mind, as those girls had the ability to make anyone forget their worries by the time they finished jabbering about the small-large things they enjoyed yammering over, but after having them braid his mane into one thick rope, he'd about took a blade to his earholes to stop the noise.

  Women.

  And then Mama had requested he dine with her and Wesley and Tristian.

  Neverending suffering, really.

  A jut to the side and his precious stallion was moving faster than the wind itself, and like this, Rhenan could almost imagine he himself was the wind and the world going on around him was neither his concern nor responsibility.

  But freedom was nonexistent.

  He'd recently spoken to his family's banker to gather funds for his excursion west on due business with the rowdy tax refusers, only to stumble upon the news that his father, King Gregor himself, had pardoned the City of Erros of their debts, an absolve which triggered the neighbouring city into demanding similar treatment, only to have the king obey and send them coin for a mid season celebration.

  Both cities were already over 120,000 roses in debt, and it was no secret their ruling lords were well-known conspirators against the crown.

  Did no one else see what he saw?

  Did Mama not even see it? How her husband sent ships to the Westland Kingdom over arbitrary matters?

  Oh, they stopped importing the golden tree silk his father adored. How about we kill them then! He'd give it two moons before pennants of vengeance hailed from their coastlines.

  Rhenan rode faster.

  Redthorn was a kingdom which had only recently this century found peace.

  The Sirista and his father were two catastrophes waiting to end the streak.

  But so long as he breathed, he'd never see his kingdom set to fall. No matter what needed to be done to see to such a truth.

  ~DIADARA~

  The knock came unexpectedly at the hour of the owls and mice.

  Diadara placed the wooden bowl of mushroom soup on her father's bedside stand before taking his wilted, bony hand. "Papa, I'll be right back."

  She kissed his forehead once, gathered up her skirt and hurried down the steps, where she threw open the front door and nearly suffered a failed heart.

  "P-prince Rhenan, what are you doing here?"

  Cursedly gorgeous, deliciously menacing, annoyingly sure of yourself.

  "Did you just roll out of bed?" he asked, shouldering past her, disregarding her hiss inward. "You look like a lake critter risen from the dead."

  Her tongue refused her as she watched him instantly rummage around her father's home. The wooden self-built structure had always been small, quaint, but only upon having the hulking male prowl its boxy nest did she realise how truly small and impossibly quaint it was.

  He was dressed in his usual cutting black garb: leathers with straps of every weapon ever invented on Thornston soil only a reach away, a Fresion import doublet concealing the sinewy arms of lethal muscles, a coarse, wiry braid stuffed beneath the two-sword sheaths holstered across his back, hilts protruding above either shoulder. He found his way to cupboards above the small round dining table that acted as a crafts table as well.

  The male grabbed the first vial he saw and tossed it up, caught it by its glass neck and squinted at the leafy contents inside. "Eatable?"

  She blinked at him, then glanced briefly outside. Five men mounted upon well cared for steeds ambled about the empty pastures, watching the shaved sheep and main road.

  "Loyal men," Rhenan assured.

  Diadara kicked the door closed and rushed forward. "Give me that."

  He held it up out of her reach. "Your home is made for a dwarf. Have I not supplied you with enough roses to afford a home better than your barn—or was this the improvement?"

  She gave up attempting to get the vial and simply fell into the chair at her table. "To what do I owe this visit—and no, it's not edible. It's poisonous."

  Rhenan froze, the lid off the crushed hackney leaves, then he dropped it on the table and groaned with an absurdly exaggerated reverberance. "Woman, I've been riding for hours. I need food."

  A few moments later, he was scoffing down the third and last bit of mushroom soup she had prepared, having not looked up once until he was sucking the spoon, relaxed back in her 'irrational, hobbit-made slab of hard-as-rock wood'.

  It was only when the man yawned and appeared dangerously close to nodding off that she decided she'd had enough. "Prince Rhenan, what are you doing here? The last we spoke, you made it clear what I am to you." She lowered her voice and eyes and hope. "And the medicine isn't due for another two moons or so."

  Slowly he removed the spoon, watching her with those damn golden eyes and forcing a flutter in her chest.

  "I need your help," he said. "With a number of things."

  Even though she'd strictly forbid herself from hoping it was more, she could not help the disappointed frown or the curdle of her stomach. The same as she could not help but give her usual reply, "Anything."

  He leaned forward and rest his heavy arms on the table, peering at her so deeply she felt the urge to cower. "You're intelligent for a woman. Almost manly."

  "How nice of you to notice."

  "In fact, your masculinity shines more brightly than those hee-haws outdoors."

  "Please, do go on. Your compliments are making me blush."

  "I tend to have that guile over brutish, manly ladies."

  She had nothing to fling at him, so she made a crude gesture instead.

  He returned it. "I need to know, is madness carried down through bloodlines?"

  "Depends," she said without hesitation. "On the kind of madness."

  "Say there was a man," he said, keeping in tune. "And say his mind was digressing into that of a youngling. He is capable of speech and higher intellect, but his grasp of reality and grave matters is slipping."

  She turned her head to the side and postulated the list of cases her father had received daily before taking ill. "As though he is aging backwards?" she asked.

  "Exactly."

  "I would need to know the cause."

  Across from her, Rhenan shifted.

  "I'm to assume you cannot bring this person to me?"

  He clipped his head in agreement.

  "If it is a mass resting near the brain, yes, entirely plausible. If it is a trauma impairing his mental stability, then no, it is not passed through bloodlines."

  The answer seemed only to deflate the prince, his shoulders weighing down as he turned in his chair to look around her medicine cupboards and glass cabinets.

  She was already shaking her head. "I do not know how to cure a patient I cannot diagnose. You know this Rhenan. It would help if you told me who they were. You can trust me."

  "Ah, I know your superb mind can think of something."

  They both glanced up at the ceiling when her father called down, "Diadara, my darn boot has fallen!"

  Rhenan lifted a brow.

  She flushed. That's right, he had never met her father, as their meetings had never taken place at her home. "That's my papa. I see to his needs. You arrived at a poor time, forgive me."

  He shook his head. "Can I meet him?"

  "No!" she said hurriedly, and when his smile grew daring, she insisted, "Please no. If he discovers I'm harbouring a heathen royal under his roof, it'll be the end of us both."

  "So I am not to tell the man this heathen royal has stuck his heathen cock inside his non-heathen—"

  She rolled her eyes. "Is that all you have come for? That one question?"

  "You're not going to get the man's boot?"

  "He will do nothing but hurl it back onto the floor."

  "I came because I need your help in this. Is there no way to diagnose this man without your meeting him? This is for your safety a
s much as it is all parties involved."

  She studied him closely for a moment and saw the occasion was of utmost importance to him. She trusted him. She trusted that he trusted her. But whatever—no, whoever—the patient was, simply knowing his name could get her and others killed. The list was too long to ponder.

  So she offered an alternative answer instead. "If you are able to get close enough to this person, then there may be a way, but it would require you document their reactions nightly."

  She pointed a finger to the top cabinet where dark jars gathered. Then she smiled. "It should be simple. The macchinine, will you hand it to me?"

  Rhenan folded his arms and followed the direction of her finger. Then looked back at her. "You get it."

  She made a face. "You're right there."

  There was no lust or coy game in his eyes. Simply defiance.

  "I'm too stuffed to move."

  "And I'm too short to reach it, unless you would have me climb atop my chair." Even then she was still too short, for the hard candies were a medicine she had never sought. Only her father had and he was a tall man. Or used to be.

  Rhenan looked at her for a moment, then pushed up from the chair and reached the top cabinet with fluid grace.

  When he plucked the door open and browsed the white labeled jars, she said, "Macchinine, it is beside the holly."

  He stood, his back to her, head arched, staring back and forth along the row of jars.

  "Rhenan...it's right there."

  He grabbed a jar at random and set it on the table.

  "That's peppernick."

  He looked at her and she'd swear she saw a glint of anxiety.

  When he pulled down another wrong jar, she wondered briefly if he was blind. It was either that or...

  She sat back in her seat when he placed another jar on the table. He interpreted the posture as his having selected the proper jar, grinning in satisfaction as he rejoined her.

  "You can't read."

  The grin vanished. There was no denial. Only a brief glimpse of deflection and a slight narrow of his eyes as though waiting for the derision.

  She merely looked at him.

  Then he went and said the most ridiculous thing. "Will you teach me, then?"

  "How astounding," she said, and she meant it. Here sat a man of many wonders. A man who never ceased to amaze.

  He scowled at her.

  "The Prince of Redthorn is illiterate. How does that happen?"

  His scowl deepened, then billowed into defence. "I serve no true purpose to my household, woman. For what reason did I have to learn? So long as I looked princely and walked my brother's shadow, I was never prompted."

  "Can you write?"

  His silence was answer enough.

  "How do you expect to document the patient?!" she asked, bewildered.

  "It is not my fault I never learned!" he fired back.

  "Do you want me to pity you?"

  He growled. "I want you to bloody teach me!"

  "Are you asking me or telling me?"

  "Diadara."

  "Prince Rhenan. You always come to me when you need something, never anything more. I'd say you're like a stray dog, but even they would show someone who feeds them affection."

  Rhenan flinched at the remark.

  "Diadara!" her father's muffled voice insisted frantically. "MY BOOT!"

  She squeezed her temple and came to her feet. "I do apologise, believe me. I do not mean a word I've said. It has been difficult these past few years with my mother gone and my father unable to sustain his service. I do not think I will have the time to teach you. But Rhenan, there are many at the castle willing to. You need only ask them. Besides, they can do a far better job than I can."

  He too stood and closed in on her, lids growing heavy. He took her hand and instantly she was buoyed, ready to submit, to throw her heart any which way she needed if only to feel him closer.

  His scent was that of a sunny forest, yet dark as a moonless night as he brushed his lips over her ear. "But I do not want them," he whispered, sending a shiver from her scalp to the base of her spine. "I want you to teach me. You would not whisper behind my back and use my flaws against me."

  Diadara swallowed, willing her arms not to wrap around his large body. Not to hold him close as she wished to. Not to ask him what thoughts plagued him this eve, what nightmares, what horrors, what demons.

  "I...can't," she forced.

  And then her back met the surface of the table, his body between hers. "It's rather easy," he chuckled. "You just lie there, like this, like you are now. And I will do all of the work for you. A trade in, yes? You can have me and in return you will teach me."

  Her nostrils flared as surely her ears were deceiving her. To think he was so arrogant as to deem his body a trophy tantamount to the time it would take her to teach him. To think his body a trophy at all! "Get off of me!"

  He didn't move. If anything, his base instinct propelled the prince closer, a dog whose jowls tightened on its bone when one attempted to remove it. She felt all of those sharp items stabbing at her skin through their padded holsters, and when she pushed up, she realised then just how much he outweighed her.

  She'd heard the stories. That of the prince who took no bedmates for his habit of culling them off—accidentally or intentionally, no one knew, though neither premise was desirable.

  Diadara went still. She wanted to be the love of his life, not his confidant, nor his cautionary tale.

  "Rhenan," she whispered frailly for the first time in his company, for this was the first time she knew fear in it as well. "Please, Your Highness."

  The appellation sent his form rigid against her, his head lifting. What she beheld in his eyes stole her breath away, for it was so pained, so fathomless and lost, she recoiled back against the table.

  It mattered little; he was recoiling himself, seeming to remember where he was, yet not truly present when he looked to her. "Your Highness?" he asked.

  Hesitantly, she sat up, watching him warily. She did not trust herself to speak, so she gave a small nod.

  He looked down after a moment and gave a nod of his own. Then he knelt to pick up something.

  When she noted the honey maple shells spilled onto the floor, her heart leapt. "No!"

  Hurrying and kneeling to collect the little black, gold, and red shells, she gasped when she realised not one, but all of them were cracked. Fallen. From the table when he'd so carelessly tossed her against it.

  Her stare hardened as she looked to him.

  He held one out to her. "Diadara, if it is affection you truly want, I can try, but you must understand, I'm not... made for it."

  Affection? Affection?!

  She practically snatched the shell. "Keep your pint of affection, Your Highness."

  He reached for her; she jerked away.

  His hand fell away. "I did not mean to be rough with you."

  She knew this. She knew it and yet she was shaking inside, her body reluctant to calm when she willed it, her eyes unable to find his even as she felt his gaze so prominently.

  She saw him reach for another shell. "Please," she said a bit too harshly, soothing her tone into something more acceptable for the royal prince. "Please, do not touch them. They belonged to my mother."

  His hand stalled, then he was moving away. "Fuck me. What were their cost?"

  "Invaluable."

  "Shit."

  Placing the fragile shells into their home one by one, she came to her feet and stared down at her tattered shoes. She could not ask him to leave, nor did she believe his staying was a wise path.

  "Perhaps—"

  "I should go?" he finished and his voice sent a stab of guilt through her chest.

  "My father, he needs me."

  As though practiced, her father shouted down, "My boot! Dear God, my boot!"

  Rhenan glanced at the table, his mouth a straight line whereas it was usually found with a razor grin and challenge. He ruffled around silent
ly in the pouch dangled from his holster. He fished out a handful of spherical roses and placed them carefully on the table.

  "For the meal and your time."

  "Rhenan—"

  "Wouldn't want to seem like a stray dog," he explained, then he smiled and she wished he hadn't, for it was one that told her she'd been awful towards him.

  But it was too late, she'd seen it and she'd regretted it and she felt the lashes of misery at her back as she watched him attach his trained smile to his face and back away from her when all she wanted was for him to come closer again. To know she was sorry and that she would teach him whatever he wanted. She would give him whatever he pleased. Do whatever he wanted.

  But the smile was there, the distance was there. "As always, nice to see my little medical girl."

  "Rhenan...stay."

  He reached out... and ruffled her hair. "Maybe next time."

  She puffed up her cheeks and pouted, because that was what he was used to. That was what his searching gaze wanted from her. A signification that they were still friends and nothing more or less.

  To further the act, she notched her chin at the door.

  His brows rose routinely and the smile became more genuine. "I do believe I'm being dismissed."

  "Then hurry before I get hostile," she jested, but only felt a twinge of pain.

  He raised surrendering hands. "Consider me gone."

  But when the door closed behind him, she felt nothing but loss and a peasant gape in her chest. A gape that soon accommodated ire as her father called down, "Diadara, dear, my boot! My boot!"

  With a sigh, she climbed the stairs to retrieve the black footwear so he might fling it down again.

  17

  ~ ASTRID ~

  Thelle Castle, Thellemere

  Thelle, Thellemere

  Eight weeks later...

  She pursed her lips as she gazed at her reflection. The girl staring back was sulking. Brunch. What sort of foolish word was that? Breakfast and lunch. Why not say early lunch? Late breakfast? The servant who announced it almost had the volume of folk tales left upon her bedside table hurled in their direction when they dared to interrupt her slumber.