by Rain Oxford
The Raven’s Curse
The Sorcerer’s Saga Book 3
Rain Oxford
Part 1
Ayden
Chapter 1
“Thank you for seeing us, curse breaker,” the woman said.
I didn’t have much of a choice, since the woman had arrived with her daughter in the middle of the night, woken the entire castle, and insisted I break the curse on her daughter. Of course, the only people currently living in the castle were myself, Merlin, and Magnus, but her loud voice probably woke everyone in the land.
Still, it was my job.
I didn’t get paid, but it was my job nonetheless. “What is the problem?” I asked, sitting in the throne in the main room. Magnus tried to make guests feel welcome by providing food and meeting them in one of the studies. I was too tired.
“My daughter has been cursed!” she snapped, pushing her daughter forward. I studied the small child.
She was about ten with light brown hair and hazel eyes. The color of her eyes told me she didn’t have magic. There was nothing about her appearance that looked strange. She seemed like a perfectly polite little girl, which made me wonder if she was adopted. “Can you be more specific?”
“A neighbor boy put a silencing curse on her! Break it!”
Merlin, half asleep next to me, growled at her sharp tone of voice.
I decided not to say anything, since I knew she was very upset that her little girl was attacked. I wished children could be protected from all curses. I waved the girl over and she came… followed very closely by her loud mother. When I reached out for her hand, she turned away. “I’m not going to hurt you. I need to take a look at the curse.”
“You can’t do that without touching her?”
“I can, but it won’t be as gentle.” I had always been able to break curses, but when Merlin taught me to detect magic around me, I found a way to use it to make breaking a curse over someone safer.
“Give him your hand, Kika.”
After a moment of hesitation, she did. My magic quickly flowed into her and encountered the sorcery. I sighed and let go of her hand. “Merlin, would you grab my wand please?” I asked.
He nodded and took off up the stairs.
The woman put her hand on Kika’s shoulder. “Is it going to hurt?”
“No, and it’ll be quick.” The magic was so poorly done that I could guess what happened easily. The boy had tried to stop her from telling people a secret, but his magic was uncoordinated and it turned into a flimsy silencing curse. I figured if Kika had anything important to say, she could have overcome the curse on her own.
Merlin returned a moment later with my wand, which I took and pointed at Kika. Break the curse. Since the curse was so poorly done, I didn’t have to tear it apart slowly. I imagined my magic flowing through her and capturing all of the foreign magic.
The sinister energy easily succumbed to mine and followed it back into me when I pulled my magic back. Of course, the curse was completely useless against my magic, so after a moment, I didn’t even sense it anymore.
“That should do it,” I said, slipping my wand into my pocket.
“I… I can talk!” Kika said excitedly. She turned to her mother. “I want a wolf like him,” she said, pointing to Merlin.
Merlin growled.
“You have plenty of animals,” her mother said.
Kika stomped her foot. “I want a wolf!” she turned to me. “My mother will buy him. How much?”
“Merlin is not for sale.”
“Everything is for sale for enough gold. Just tell me how much.”
Merlin growled again. In fear, the woman took her daughter’s arm and dragged her out. I sat back in the chair. “Somehow I feel like I did a disservice to the world.”
Merlin laughed in my mind. “It would hardly matter. Even knowing she is a rotten child, you would still break her curse if she came back with a new one. You are too nice a person to refuse to help someone, even if they are as bad as your brothers. That is why you have so many friends who would drop everything to help you.”
I rested my head on the armrest.
“Go back to bed. If you sleep here, you will wake with cramps.”
“I’m going to transport myself up. Do you want me to send you up as well?”
“No, thank you. I think I will go for a run before returning to my room.”
I managed a grunt, already half asleep. I pulled my wand out of my pocket and imagined my room. As soon as I felt my magic wrap around me, I felt something go wrong.
* * *
“Wake up.” The voice tore me from my sleep so violently I gasped. It was a voice I would dread hearing for my entire life.
Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes, I still couldn’t see anything. “Mother?”
“I’m surprised you remember me.”
I couldn’t move my arms or legs, although I didn’t feel anything strapping me down. “Where are we? How did I get here?” The last thing I remembered was breaking Kika’s curse.
I felt her hand on my face and jerked automatically, but she only removed the blindfold from my eyes. I was lying on a wooden table in the basement of my mother’s house. I had only seen the basement once, because Mother didn’t allow us down there. It wasn’t used for storage or torturing people, so I couldn’t be sure what it was for. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be there.
I was also completely paralyzed from my neck down.
“You betrayed me, Ayden.” She was exactly as I remembered— immaculate, composed, and deadly. She was tall and thin with long, straight, black hair, cold burgundy eyes, and prominent cheekbones. Her appearance always made me think of a beautiful, venomous spider.
“You want to kill me and take my power.”
“That is my right. I created you and your brothers for one purpose. Your power is mine.”
It shouldn’t have hurt; I knew she didn’t care about me. “I don’t have dark magic, and you can’t use my light magic.” I was lying; I did have some dark magic, but I hoped she didn’t know that.
Something moved in the corner of my eye and I looked over to see my father standing near the wall behind my mother. He was halfway hidden in the shadows, but I could make out his grave expression. Actually, it was his normal expression.
“Oh, but you’re wrong,” my mother said. “All magic is neutral in its pure form; you make it dark or light. That is the gift you have as the seventh son of the seventh son. As a child, you only used light magic, but I expected you to develop sorcery on your own. I have grown tired of waiting.”
“Why would I start using dark magic, knowing you will kill me if I do?”
“You won’t have a choice.” She reached up slowly and moved hair out of my eyes. “You need a haircut.” Her nails were sharpened like claws and the silver and gold rings on her slim fingers glittered in the dim light. Each of those rings held more than enough power to kill me. She then reached down and pulled the ties on my shirt loose.
In my entire life, I had never learned how to change my mother’s mind. Begging just disgusted her, because that wasn’t proper behavior for a sorcerer. She slowly sliced the skin right over my heart with her nail. It was everything I could do not to make a sound. I was sweating, panting, and desperate.
“Please, Mother, wait. I’ve never asked you for mercy before, so please hear me out this once. There is something I need to do. I promised to help my friend. Let me go, let me help him, and I will come back here. I won’t fight you.”
She smiled cruelly. “Very well. I will return you to Magnus’s castle.”
I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I was getting away that easy.
“However, you may not be willing to break Merlin’s curse when the time com
es.”
“You know about Merlin?”
“Of course.”
“Then you know I’m willing to do whatever it takes to break his curse.”
“Right now, you are.” She pulled out a crystal from her pocket and held it up for me to see. It looked exactly like the crystal that contained Livia’s dark magic, except it was clear all the way through. “This will change your mind.”
“What is that?”
“Just a crystal.” She then held out her hand and a raven flew from out of the darkness to land on her outstretched arm. When she sliced the raven’s chest with her nail like she had mine, the raven cawed and flapped his wings, but he didn’t fly away. The raven’s blood began dripping… outward, towards the crystal. It was absorbed into the crystal easily, and the blood dripped faster and faster until it was a stream of red. After a moment, drops of black combined with the red.
The raven was slowly and grotesquely melting. With increasing speed, the large black bird was absorbed into the crystal. By the time she was done, the crystal was as black as the raven had been.
“I thought you were going to let me go.”
“I will never let you go. I only said I would return you to Magnus. As you use magic, the power of the raven’s blood will change you and poison your white magic. By the time it is done, you will be a true sorcerer, and then you will return to me of your own volition.”
“I won’t use magic!”
“Yes, you will, because you are going to forget all about the crystal.”
“Then why did you tell me?”
“It amuses me to see fear in your eyes.” She then pressed the crystal against the wound over my heart.
Before my eyes, the crystal began to melt and drip into my wound, just like the raven had been absorbed into it. Each drop burned like fire and spread deeper through my body with every beat of my heart. It was one of the most painful experiences I had ever had and I was certain I would never forget it no matter how much magic my mother used.
Behind her, my father shook his head.
Then everything was dark.
* * *
I woke up suddenly, panting and sweating. I was in my room and everything seemed normal, except there was a strange pain in my chest. There wasn’t a wound or anything to explain the pain, which just faded after a moment like a bad dream.
“Merlin?” I asked in the wolf’s mind.
“Yes, Ayden?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, Ayden.”
“I think I had a bad dream, but I can’t remember it.” There was silence for a moment before my door opened and Merlin entered. “I didn’t mean for you to come all the way in here.”
“Our rooms are ten feet apart; it was no trouble. Bad dreams are rarely a coincidence. However, it could just be that you are worried about your mother.”
“Why did she leave Magnus alive? Why hasn’t she threatened me?”
“Maybe she gave up on you,” he suggested.
“My mother has never given up on anything in her life. She has to be planning something.”
“Are you worried she is going to use Magnus to get to you?”
“She left a strong wizard alive after overpowering him. That’s like hunting and then leaving your prey dead on the ground. And why did she wait until we were gone? Did she find out about the crystal from spying on us or did she know all along that he had it?” Magnus had been reinforcing the castle’s defenses since the attack, but I was still worried that it wasn’t enough.
“There is no wisdom I can give you that will help. All I can say is that, as long as you stay true to your heart, your mother will never be able to get any dark magic from you.”
* * *
I was the seventh born son of a family of infamous sorcerers, known for their ruthlessness and malevolent powers. On my world, wizards only used light magic and sorcerers only used dark magic. Unfortunately, I was always the embarrassment of the family, for no matter how hard I tried to cause chaos and destruction, I could only ever do light magic.
When I left home to prove that I could be a powerful sorcerer, I ended up releasing Merlin from a magical prison. Merlin was a very powerful wizard from another world who had been cursed. Along with losing his magic and immortality, he was changed into a wolf. With his help, I learned to accept that I had both wizardry and sorcery, banished my evil brothers to another world, and joined Magnus, one of the most powerful wizards of Caldaca.
Then, we went to Merlin’s world to try to find out how to break his curse. Although we got the information we needed, we also discovered that I was the only one who could break the curse, and it would require my death.
After defeating my evil cousin to free my aunt, we returned to Magnus’s castle to find that my mother had attacked him and taken all of my aunt’s dark power, which she had locked into a small crystal. My mother hadn’t taken anything else, so I knew she was after that in particular.
Fortunately, Magnus had recovered from the attack within a few days. Over the next month, Merlin focused on teaching me protection magic over wizardry and sorcery, because he knew I was more likely to try to defend myself and him than attack.
Word was getting around that a “curse breaker” was living in the castle, so a couple dozen people came to the castle to have their curses broken. I enjoyed the practice, and for the first time, I didn’t have to argue with people that I was a sorcerer. I was something new, accepted, and respected.
* * *
“Come and eat, Ayden,” Merlin said, tearing my attention from my book.
I was sitting in the library, as usual. Only when I glanced out the window did I realize the sun had risen. “Oh, I forgot.” I didn’t feel like eating, but Merlin always insisted I eat breakfast, so I didn’t argue. Although I still hadn’t remembered anything about my nightmare, I felt odd.
Merlin and I went downstairs to meet Magnus at the table. The old wizard was writing in a book and letting his porridge and potatoes get cold. “Inquire as to how his meditations are proceeding.”
“Merlin wants to know how the curse reversing is. I think.” I looked at Merlin and he nodded. The main problem we had was that the book wasn’t written in our language. Merlin had to read it in my mind and I had to tell Magnus. I really wanted to ask Vactarus for the Siren, a magical amulet that translated written words and speech, but Magnus didn’t trust it and said that a mistake could be deadly. The second problem was that not all the ingredients in the book were known on Caldaca, so Merlin had to explain them and figure out what the equivalents were.
Magnus set his book down. “I’m afraid it isn’t that easy, for there aren’t ingredients that can counteract all of the ingredients used. We need to make a completely different potion.”
“Then going to Merlin’s world was a waste of time?”
“We discussed this, young sorcerer,” Merlin interjected. “After what Gmork said and the fact that I was not intercepted by his servants after I was changed, we know that it was meant to be. If you had not gone, it would have caused a paradox.”
“It would have been nice to have known that before I had to go through everything,” I said in his mind. “Besides, didn’t you say something about the same thing happening some other way?”
“You are referring to the Novikov self-consistency principle. It is the universe’s means of preventing a paradox. It is, however, just a theory.”
“Not at all,” Magnus said, unaware of the silent conversation between Merlin and me. “We needed the book you found in order to figure out exactly how the curse was done. With that, we can learn what we need to do to reverse it.”
“Did you figure out why I’m the only one who can do it? Or why I have to die to do it?”
“I am working on that. I think you might get more answers from the only one who seems to know anything about it.”
“The fairies?”
He frowned. “Actually, I was talking about the seer. I expect you will have more trouble wi
th the fairies here than on the other worlds.”
“Dessa? We’ve tried to find her before, but she doesn’t stay in one place.”
“There are ways to find people with magic.”
“Dessa is one of the most powerful seers in the world. I bet she knows everything, but she won’t say a word more than she thinks she should no matter how much we ask. If she wants to tell us something, she will make her location known. She insists that telling us too much would be counterproductive.”
Merlin made a grumbling sound, reminding me of his aversion to seers.
A knock on the door echoed unnaturally loudly through the castle. “Fluffy hadn’t warned me of visitors,” Magnus said, standing.
“Maybe it’s another person needing a curse broken.” To be honest, I looked forward to every curse I broke, because it made me feel a little closer to breaking Merlin’s.
“It is the seer,” Merlin told me as Magnus left to answer the door.
Although I didn’t know if he could sense her magic or if he smelled her, I didn’t doubt him for an instant. “I wonder if she knew we were talking about her.”
“All women know when you are talking about them.”
A moment later, Magnus returned with Dessa. Dessa was tall and slim with long, white hair and light blue eyes. Her dress was silver with see-through sleeves and she was barefoot. Seers often distanced themselves from both wizards and sorcerers in order to keep the peace, yet Dessa always treated me kindly, as if it didn’t matter whether I was a wizard or sorcerer.
“Good morning, Ayden, Merlin,” she said.
“Good morning. Where is your apprentice?” I asked. She was always supposed to have an apprentice with her because her visions could strike her at any time and leave her completely vulnerable.
“She is in the carriage outside. She felt uncomfortable entering a wizard’s palace.”
“Why did you send me to my aunt without telling me why?”
“Because you are stubborn and don’t like to be told who you are.”