Curse-Maker- the Tale of Gwiddon Crow

by Alydia Rackham

  What would the prince have looked like?

  Surely not wearing some drab grey with only a hint of silver. No, he would wear splendid white, ornamented with gold, the warm light shining in his hair and refracting across his dark eyes—eyes so dark and so deep, yet twinkling with mischief, alert and bright, missing nothing…His smiles of secret amusement beaming across his face with suppressed and boyish delight…

  And what would I wear? Nothing like the rags I had on. I’d wear a gown of green velvet, off my shoulders, with long sleeves that came to elegant points across the backs of my hands. No jewels, except flickers of sparkling jet in my long, voluminous skirt. My hair partly done up in curls, the rest tumbling down my back. My face pure and beautiful, my lashes long, my skin unscathed. White as the snow, my lips like the petals of a rose. My glance smoldering, captivating. Irresistible.

  Just like all those princesses who’d been given fairy blessings.

  And how would we dance?

  Not slowly and gingerly, like two elders complaining of rheumatism and gout. No, the young prince and I would dominate the ballroom floor, swirling and stepping in perfect concert, my skirt billowing like a storm cloud as we linked arms, grasped hands, spun round and round, our faces mere inches from each other…

  And all the women of the court would watch me in envy, wishing they could be in my place.

  And all the men would look at the prince the same way. But neither of us would care—or even notice. Because I would be lost in the radiance and deep darkness of his warm gaze. And he would be lost in mine.

  He took a deep breath in my arms.

  I came back to myself.

  And found myself with my left arm wrapped up and around his right arm, my nose nearly touching his shoulder. He had pulled me against his chest, and I could feel his chin touching my temple.

  And in a movement that sent painful, delicious chills through my whole body, he slowly, purposefully, shifted his grip, and interlaced the fingers of my right hand with his.

  “I was just thinking,” he whispered—rocky and unsteady, his breath vibrating my frame. “Well, wondering really…What it would have been like to have you here on one of the nights of a feast. And a dance. We…We sometimes dance in here, too…” I felt his fingers tremble in mine, and he swallowed. “Everyone runs in and out, it’s noisy, and all the lamps and the candles are lit, and we…” He took another shaking breath. “We talk and dance in here. And I was thinking…I was just imagining you in a green gown, with long sleeves, and it would sort of…sparkle with black stones in the skirt. Your hair up, but in curls all around your shoulders. And I’d be talking to somebody when you came in the door, but I’d forget all about them when I saw you…and I’d come up to you, and I’d…”

  I pulled my head back, my heart skipping three beats only to thunder to life again. I searched his face, heat rising into mine. But his silvery eyes couldn’t see me. We came to a standstill.

  His lips parted, as if he was about to speak again—but he didn’t. My heart hammered all through my ribs.

  “What would you do?” I whispered, barely able to make a sound.

  “I’d say,” he said, offering a hesitant smile. “‘Crow, you’re late. I was waiting for you for the first dance—they’ve started without us.’”

  “You would?” I said—completely bewildered. But a strange, fluttering delight darted through my chest.

  “Mhm,” he said plainly. Then, he chuckled. “What, you think I could help myself when you looked like that?”

  The illusion fell away from me.

  It collapsed like a fallen curtain, and the glow went out of everything.

  I looked up at him, almost seeing myself reflected in his eyes.

  “I don’t look like that,” I muttered, the back of my throat hurting. He canted his head.

  “Like what?”

  “A…A beautiful face,” I tried. “Skin white as snow, with lips—”

  “—like the petals of a rose,” he finished.

  I stared at him, my eyes going wide.

  He squeezed my fingers.

  My knees went weak.

  “I don’t,” I insisted—but I could only whisper.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But that’s what I saw in my mind. And…that’s all I have.”

  I swallowed hard, and pulled out of his arms.

  I felt the loss of his warmth like a slap to the face. But I backed up further, gently tugging my hand free of his.

  “I’m not a princess,” I told him, my hands closing to weak fists. “I’m…I’m not even presentable. Not here, not in this castle.” I gestured to the room. “Certainly not at any of those grand balls or feasts. If I came, you…You wouldn’t say that to me. You wouldn’t even look at me.” I turned away from him, and made for the fireplace, my vision blurring.

  I stepped into its glow, sinking down onto my knees on the thick rug in front of it. Shivering, I shifted so I could sit cross-legged, and wrapped my arms around myself. I suddenly felt cold, my stomach tense, prickles and chills racing all over my skin.

  A shin hit a tabletop behind me.

  “Um. Ow,” the prince muttered. I didn’t turn to look at him—just stared into the wavering flames. His footsteps came nearer, and I felt him stop, and stand over me.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “I don’t want to trip over you.”

  “I’m right here,” I said, my voice completely unsteady. I reached out behind me without looking, and my hand bumped the fabric of his trousers, near his knee.

  And all at once, inexplicably, tears spilled down my face.

  I gasped, shut my eyes, and bowed my head.

  “What? What is it?” the prince asked—firm but quiet—and he sat down beside me. He seated himself very close, his own knee bent so that his shin pressed against my thigh. Then, his fumbling right hand bumped into my shoulder, felt its way down and found my hand. He grasped it, squeezed it, and held on.

  “What?” he asked again. “We’re the only people here—maybe the only people who ever will be here. And I swear, I won’t breathe a word of what you tell me, not till my dying day. I swear.”

  I glanced over at him, more tears burning down my cheeks. His face bent close to mine, and his eyes searched uselessly, his brow dark with attention.

  Reflexively, my fingers tightened on his. He returned the pressure, tipping toward me.

  “I…” I began, my brow twisting—suddenly unable to stop myself. “I was born in a village called Cam, between Winterly Wood and the Eisenzahn Mountains. My father worked in the opal mines, my mother was a bal maiden. I had an older brother, Tom. Two years older than me. We lived in a stone hovel with one room. My parents had a bed, my brother and I slept on the dirt floor. My mother was…She was thin and quiet and weak. She sang songs to us sometimes, when my father wasn’t home. As soon as I was five years old, I went to work in the mines, too. Pulling carts behind me on my hands and knees, into the narrowest tunnels. Like a donkey. I scarred up my hands and legs pushing through the rocks. Tom worked with my father. He got tall, and strong. But my father took almost everything we made, and went to the inn and drank, and came home and beat us when there wasn’t food for him to eat.” I took a deep, shuddering breath. “But when Tom turned sixteen, and I was fourteen, Tom said he wasn’t going to give his earnings to our father anymore. He told him so one night, in front of several of the men. My father hit him—and Tom hit him back. They fought, and Tom threw him down on the ground. Humiliated my father. The next day, all the men went into the mine to work…But in the evening, Tom didn’t come out.”

  I felt the prince’s attention sharpen. I stared blankly into the fire, feeling tears trail endlessly down my face.

  “My mother realized what had happened,” I whimpered, swiping at my face with my free hand. “And she…She went mad, she attacked my father started slapping his face. He hit her with an iron pot. She fell on the floor and didn’t move. He killed her. And I just…” I swallowed, and shook my hea
d. “I went out of my head. I threw myself at him, I bit him, I kicked him, I pulled his hair. Like a cat. And to get me off him, he…” I stopped. I saw nothing in front of me. I couldn’t even feel the prince’s hand. “He pulled a fire shovel out of the fire and held it to my face. I didn’t even feel it. Somehow—I don’t know how—I got it away from him. And I stabbed him with it. And then I ran. I ran and ran, as hard as I could, straight into the woods. I stayed there for days. I had nothing to eat. I’d gone blind in my left eye, from the shovel. I sat down by a tree when I couldn’t walk any more. And I knew I was going to die.” I closed my eyes, more useless tears wandering down and dripping off my chin. “And then Baba Yaga found me. She picked me up, she carried me home. She fed me. And she healed my eye. But my…my hair had gone white, and she couldn’t fix the scar that was all over the left side of my face. I knew how ugly I was, so I…I just took it in stride. I tattooed the Fundamental Runes on my fingers, I knot my hair and fill it with beads, I mark my eyes with khol, I wear black battle clothes and I never…” I sucked in a steadying breath. “I never look in a mirror.” I stiffened, ducking my head. “What you imagine isn’t real. It never could have been. And I…”

  I trailed off when the prince moved. He shifted, letting go of my hand and lifting his up toward my face. His fingers bumped my chin. And, gently, he turned my face toward him.

  Frowning, I looked at him in bewilderment. He shifted again, balancing himself, and bringing his other hand up to cradle my face. With a look of deepest concentration in his sightless eyes, he began to move his fingers…

  And with his fingertips, he explored every inch of my face.

  Letting out a shivering sigh, I felt my eyes drift shut, my heart pounding. His thumb traced my nose. His forefingers followed my eyebrows. He wandered over my forehead, down my temples, venturing down my jawline. And when his touch ghosted over the bumps and edges of my scar—a scar that covered the left side of my face from my eyebrow bone to the corner of my mouth—it felt like flaming metal was searing my skin again.

  Heavy, hot tears leaked from my eyes, tumbling down my cheeks. I could feel his fingers catch them, suspending them on my skin, interrupting their tracks. Then—

  He kissed me.

  He dropped his left hand, leaned in, and met my mouth with his. And he pressed deep.

  I pulled in a sudden breath, tasting my own tears on his lips. His mouth was soft, gentle, insistent. And his right hand pressed against my face, his thumb lying across my scar, its warmth leaning against my eyelid. His fingers wrapped around behind my ear.

  And then his left arm came around me, winding around my waist, and holding me against him. Strong—but not fierce. Warm. Secure.

  I let him kiss me. I breathed the scent of him as I used to breathe the spray of the sea when I would steal out past the forests and onto the moors. His hand never strayed from my scar. And the burn of his touch finally faded to something soft and soothing, like spring rain after a fire.

  His lips parted from mine. I opened my eyes.

  He remained just inches away.

  He breathed unsteadily, and color had flushed across his cheeks. His hand settled down against my throat.

  “Marry me,” he said—his voice rough and low. “Marry me, Crow.”

  I swallowed. He felt it. His fingers moved against my skin, and his brow furrowed.

  “You can’t marry me,” I said. “I’m nothing that you want.”

  The edge of his mouth twitched.

  “Amor omnia vincit, my lady,” he murmured.

  My brow twisted. My whole body trembled.

  “Utinam ne illum numquam conspexissem,” I whispered jaggedly. And I tore myself away from him, climbed to my feet and, wiping the last of my tears away, I fled the library.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I pushed through the hall of fountains, stumbling and sick, my vision blurred so I was nearly as blind as the prince. I floundered into the gardens, gasping, and leaned against a pillar, my breaths coming in short, ragged gasps.

  I was dying.

  I could feel it.

  I was losing sensation in my feet, my whole body felt cold. My heart beat too hard, too loud in my ears—my pulses hurt my veins.

  And I was hemorrhaging magic.

  That was the only way the prince could have seen so clearly into my thoughts like that. Like a mirror being held up to my mind. I was bleeding unconscious spells, they were seeping out through my skin, my breath…

  Something hot, stinging and caustic suddenly filled my mouth and spilled from my lips. In horrified reflex, I slapped my mouth, staring down at my hand…

  To see magic, the color of blood—shimmering like crushed diamond and glowing like liquid glass—dripping from my fingers.

  “Oh, Bohkh!” I gasped, terror lancing through me. I staggered forward, not knowing where I was going—filled with the vague and panicked feeling that if I could just keep moving, then those icy fingers clawing at the back of my neck wouldn’t catch me…

  I stumbled through the doors, out of the garden, and into the circular room with all the upward-leading staircases. Magic gushed from my lips again, and dripped out my nose and off my chin. I could feel it welling up in my eyes, like tears—and it ran down my cheeks. I choked, spitting it out, coughing as I dragged myself across the wide, round room toward the opposite doorway.

  I managed the first downward step, then the second—but on the third, my legs turned to water and I collapsed, tumbling down the remaining four steps and crashing onto my hands and knees on a warm marble floor. I spat out more magic. It splattered in a dark, ink-like stain across the pristine floor.

  And it had changed color. It wasn’t red anymore—but an emerald green that sparkled like a midsummer sky.

  Tears mingled with the hot, stinging magic trickling down my face.

  My heart magic.

  The Seal was about to kill me.

  My head dropped down, my hands opening toward the ceiling—claw-like and shaking. My wrists trembled against the floor, my back went weak. I sank into prostration, choking and feebly spitting as magic drained from my mouth, nose and eyes and pooled on the floor in front of my face.

  The murmur of water reached me. Murmuring—but not muttering bitterly, as it seemed to have done before. As if it were asking me a question.

  “Gahh,” was all I could answer, magic searing the inside of my mouth as I screwed my eyes shut. My nose filled with it, blocking my breathing—

  And all at once, with a jolt of fear—

  I had to cough. And cough again, and again, with all my strength—

  But my lungs, my throat, were filling up.

  I jerked my head up, my eyes going wide as I kept coughing. My hands clenched to fists as magic spilled from my mouth, but I couldn’t pull in any air.

  I was drowning.

  The rush of the water in my ears turned to a roaring buzz. Its mutterings babbled uselessly through my skull, like the chatter of strangers speaking a language I didn’t know.

  Icy fingers crawled up my spine, fastening to my head, my neck, wrapping around my throat, sinking into my back…

  I clawed my way forward, away from that horrifying feeling, my body wracked with coughing, leaving a smeared trail of magic behind me. The tumble of the waters rattled all around me, nothing but rising, deafening, incomprehensible noise—

  And all at once—

  A word.

  A word like the voice of a thousand winds—like the howl of a gust upon the moor, like the western gale thundering through a canyon.

  “COME.”

  The claws piercing my back jolted.

  The cacophony clarified.

  I lifted my head, and my eyes cleared—just for an instant.

  And in front of me, I saw the water.

  A broad pool of water, with falls tumbling across the rocks and crashing into the surface—all sparkling and steaming and shimmering against my mind’s eye.

  I was in the Fountain Room. And the
water…

  “COME.”

  The shadowy black claws hesitated. Inches from plunging into my heart.

  I surged forward.

  I flung myself across the floor. The invisible claws tore loose, dragging down to my hips.

  “Aaagghhh!” I howled through my teeth as that pain wrenched through my body, grabbing potted plants and flinging them behind me as I shoved myself forward on my hands and knees.

  I scrambled to the half wall of the pool, hauled my upper body up onto it and fell across it. Magic gushed from my lungs and out my mouth and nose, spilling with steaming splashes into the fountain.

  But as my blurry eyes stared into the water—

  Instead of lurking like blood or ink to the bottom, the magic swirled away from me through the water like a ribbon, sending out radiant sparkles beneath the ripples.

  The dark claws fastened to my spine.

  I jerked.

  My hands clamped down on the edge of the pool.

  “Nnnnnnooo,” I hissed, lowering my head and bearing down with everything I had, pulling myself toward the water like a horse beneath a load of granite.

  There was nothing else I could do. I had no choice. This water could kill me—it was certainly powerful enough to do so.

  But that wrenching, grasping, clawing darkness stabbing into me was afraid of it.

  “Gggggggnnnnnnnah!” I shouted, with all the air I could muster—and I jerked myself forward.

  And I fell in, face-first.

  I went under, head-over-heels, flipping over and sucking water up my nose, down my mouth, into my lungs. Everything spun in light and dark bubbles, spinning and dizzying.

  Hot. It was hot.

  My head thwacked the bottom. My heartbeat skyrocketed. I blinked, trying to see—

  The claws came loose. The shadow leaped back out of the water as if it had been scalded.

  I thrashed, pushing off the bottom with my elbow…

  My head came through the surface. My stumbling feet found the bottom. I stood up with a furious, splashing rush. My upper body broke loose as the water foamed around my waist.