The Curse Giver

by Dora Machado

  Wrinkling her nose and holding her breath, she soaked the strips with the liquid she poured from the bottle.

  “That’s a foul smell, even compared to the rotten bait.” Severo pinched his nose. “Why do I recognize it?”

  “The bottle contains the raw juice leftover from the bitter lout root,” the mistress said.

  “That stinking root you brewed to cure my horse of the giant mite?”

  “That one.” She got up and tied one of the wet strips around Severo’s brawny bicep and a second strip around Elfu’s arm. “Don’t let it touch your skin.”

  “Does the mistress want to poison us?” Elfu said. “What good can this do?”

  “If it repels giant mites and other nasty critters, then perhaps it’ll help keep the yearlings away as well.” She tied a third strip around her own arm.

  “What do you mean ‘perhaps’?” Severo eyed her warily. “Have you tried this before?”

  “No,” she admitted, “but there has to be a way.”

  “No one jumps in with yearlings and survives,” Elfu said.

  “Well ….” Severo cleared his throat.

  “What?” The mistress’s eyes were fixed on him.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Severo said. “There’s an old Laonian legend about a young child who was sickly and lame.”

  “Old tales, new lies,” Elfu muttered.

  “The child’s parents threw her into the Lake of Tears during the spawning season, as it was the custom during those hard times,” Severo said. “It is said that the child survived the yearlings and returned healed from the waters.”

  “Interesting,” the mistress said. “What else did the story say?”

  “It said that the child craved the lake thereafter, and one day escaped her relatives’ custody and joined with the lake. The lake’s daughter, they called her. Legend says she still wanders the Lake of Tears on foggy nights, lamenting her parents’ cruelty.”

  “Sad,” Elfu said, “but it only proves the obvious. We can’t go into the yearling-infested water.”

  “It’s an old myth, a wife’s tale” Severo said, kicking himself for telling a tale that appeared to have no effect whatsoever in dissuading the mistress.

  “Regardless,” the woman said. “I think we should try it my way. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.”

  “You don’t, do you?” Elfu gnashed his crooked teeth. “From all the unwise, dangerous, crazy schemes I’ve heard from you in the last few weeks, this is by far the most reckless!”

  “I’ve always believed in reason,” the mistress said, “never in superstitions and such—”

  “As it should be for Izar’s enlightened ones,” Elfu said.

  “—until now.”

  “What?” Elfu and Severo said in unison.

  The woman’s disturbing eyes were on Severo. “Your lord’s cursed.”

  The blood drained from Severo’s face—no—from his entire body. He exchanged stares with the monkey man and saw that he too was bowled over by her words. The Twins help them. Was she really a witch?

  “I know the truth now,” she said. “So you might as well talk to me about it.”

  Severo didn’t know what to say. “Mistress… I—of that, we can’t speak.”

  “Maybe you highborn have the luxury to mince words,” she said, “but I don’t. It started with your lord’s father. It killed him.”

  Severo’s gut was corroding with sour bile. “H-h-how did you know?”

  “It killed his brothers, too,” she said. “Unless he can beat it, he’s going to die. Soon. Am I right?”

  Severo’s lips sealed in a tight white line. He stared at the woman in horror. What did she know? And if she knew the whole truth, was she crazy talking about it like this? Didn’t she know what could happen? What by the damn Twins was he supposed to do now? And how could he help his lord when the mistress was willing to destroy all of them with her careless questions?

  Her shrewd stare burned a hole through his skull. “You can’t talk about it,” she finally said. “I don’t know exactly why, but it entails oaths, honor, consequences and lives.”

  Severo lifted his hands in the air and let them drop. He was helpless. What could he say?

  “I’m assuming the consequences of breaking an oath of silence have to be very dire, terrible in fact,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. “The consequences probably extend beyond the line of Uras to Laonia, because Bren’s quest is about more than himself.”

  At least she was bright enough to see that.

  “So I started thinking,” she said.

  He groaned. He really hated it when she did that.

  “Why would a group of Laonian highborn stick to a doomed lord the way Hato and the Twenty do?” She stared at him. “I like to believe in loyalty, but I think there’s more. These dangerous consequences can somehow affect you and the Twenty as well.”

  Severo wiped the sweat off his forehead. She was a damn seer for sure.

  “Whatever it entails, this ailment affecting your lord protects itself and in doing so, raises the stakes for a man who’s doomed.” She came to stand very close to him. “Your lord has very little time left, Severo. I don’t know that I can help him, but I have information he needs to have. That’s why we can’t stay here. We have to go. Now.”

  The urgency in her eyes touched him. Her loyalty to his lord stunned him. The grit he saw in her stare frightened him. Any other woman would have run in the opposite direction knowing what she did, and yet she wanted to go to him instead?

  Severo tried to sort through his mind’s confusion. His lord wanted him to keep the woman safe, but the woman wanted to risk her life in order to keep his lord alive. Talk about divided loyalties. What was he supposed to do?

  “Madness.” Elfu stomped a foot on the deck. “I won’t do it. Neither will he. We will not allow you to do it!”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Severo said. “The lord wouldn’t like it.”

  “You are right.” She sighed. “My theory is unproven. Escaping entails considerable risk. We probably wouldn’t make it.”

  Severo exhaled a sigh of relief. At least she had listened to reason.

  “We will stay here and wait,” she said. “All of us, except perhaps … me.”

  The mistress stepped forward and dropped into the chute.

  Chapter Sixty

  BREN RAN ACROSS THE DECK, DODGING rolling barrels and leaping over runaway casks. He had a vision of the hull shattering as it crashed against the rocks, of the barge breaking apart and sinking like a defeated beast. He saw his men, drowning in the swift current, and Laonia’s tribute, strewn about the shore, bobbing downriver, lost to the Nerpes’s endless gluttony.

  Shipwrecked. That’s all he needed to put a swift end to his run for Teos and Laonia’s freedom.

  “To the anchors,” he shouted, praying the ship wasn’t too far into the shallows. He grabbed one of the heavy anchors and, mustering all his strength, swung it around, once, twice, thrice, before hurling it as far out as he could throw it, bellowing like a bull.

  The anchor landed upriver with a splash. With his heart hammering in his throat, Bren watched the ropes unraveling at his feet. Following his lead, his men launched the other anchors. The moments stretched into what felt like years.

  As soon as the anchor hit bottom and the ropes stopped running, Bren grasped the ropes. “Heave,” he shouted, threading the thick ropes through the deck’s iron loops and pulling until his muscles burned. “Heave!”

  The balance of the Twenty heeded his command, manning the ropes. It was an uneven tug-of-war. Their efforts seemed fruitless against the river’s immense power.

  “We’re going to wreck!” Someone panicked. “We’re running aground!”

  “We’re not going down!” Bren shouted. “Do you hear? Heave! Come on, my pretty girls. What are you? Afraid of breaking your nails? Heave!”

  The barge lurched against the current. The iron rings on the deck groaned. Slowly
, painfully, reluctantly, the race towards the looming rocks began to slow.

  “It’s working,” Hato rasped, tugging the ropes right behind Bren.

  “Keep pulling,” Bren said. “Let’s get her upriver, my lovely girls, further into the channel. Let’s give them lazy lungs something to do!”

  By the time the barge was securely fastened away from the rocks, every man in the crew was wheezing and on their knees.

  “That was close,” Hato said, puffing.

  “Too close,” Bren agreed, reclaiming his legs to inspect the broken tillers.

  “Can you repair these?” he asked the pilot.

  “Fortunately I can, my lord. The screws were loosened but not stripped, to take us by surprise, I suppose. Given a few hours, I can fix these. The sails, on the other hand, are a different problem. We won’t make it to Teos on time without them.”

  Bren clutched the gunwales until his fingers ached. It was as if the Triad itself was working against him. He had no spares to replace the shredded sails. Crossing over to the kingdom’s shores and falling into Riva’s trap wasn’t an option. He was only a little better than shipwrecked. He was dead in the water, stuck without hope for help or rescue and already late for the tribute.

  Or was he?

  His eyes fell on a cluster of spectral shapes looming in the shallow’s darkness. Late was better than absent, and absent was not an option.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  LUSIELLE BARRELED DOWN THE CHUTE IN the darkness. She bounced against the curved walls, banging her hips, shoulders and head, before the chute spat her out of the ship like a lump of refuse. For an instant, she spotted the gray clouds drifting above her. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Then she plunged into the water and the world shifted from fast to slow.

  She sank straight down. Layers of progressively colder water stung her senses. Her skirt flared, closing around her upper body like a tightly folded bud. She struggled, swatting the fabric out of her way. How difficult could swimming be?

  Kick. She pumped her arms and legs as hard as she could. Caught in the powerful current, she managed to ascend a span or two then began sinking again. Swimming was going to be hard.

  A muted rustle captured her attention. She looked up to see a huge shadow looming above her, and the keel of a ship slicing the water. The ship’s bright lanterns and the occasional flashes of lightning illuminated the darkness around her. A shrill twitter broke the underwater silence, the eeriest sound Lusielle had ever heard. That’s when she saw them, a veritable wall of thousands—no, millions—of glowing yearlings coming at her like a hail of lit darts, a white tide shimmering against the black water.

  Lusielle flailed, trying to get away from the little beasts. With synchronized precision, the massive shoal darted past her like a martial parade. Worm-like creatures the length of her fingers flickered in silver flashes as they whizzed by. Few people in their right mind had ever seen the legendary creatures like this, in shoals, this close. Until now.

  Brightly colored organs pulsed beneath the yearlings’ translucent scales. Deeply ragged gills flanked the enormous black eyes protruding around the creatures’ thick-lipped pout. The tiny teeth growing behind the yearlings’ macabre grin didn’t worry Lusielle too much. It was the luminescent beaks glimmering like steel blades inside each yearling that terrified her.

  The fearsome, flesh-drilling tool was capable of puncturing through skin, muscle and bone to devour a body from the inside out. Lusielle’s hopes of evading a gruesome fate waned as the shoal curled around her, a single-minded entity enfolding her in a lethal embrace.

  A whirl of yearlings spun around her, a powerful maelstrom. Yet none of the creatures broke out of order, none approached closer than the others, none constricted their formidable beaks through their flexible jaws to attack Lusielle. On the contrary, they kept swimming about her as if she were encased in a bubble.

  It worked. By the gods, the vile juice of the limber lout root worked to repel the deadly yearlings!

  Lusielle’s elation revived her cramping legs’ efforts. Her euphoria powered her oxygen-starved mind. The swirl of yearlings widened like the top of a funnel as she ascended. She broke through the surface and stole a desperate gasp. Thunder grumbled nearby. Then it was back to the fight, underwater, trying to wrestle the river for a measure of buoyancy, defying the current while angling for the distant lights dotting the shore.

  Engrossed in the contest for her life, she didn’t notice the shadows breaking the surface above her. She cried out when something yanked hard on her braid. Great quantities of the water poured down her throat. Then there was the night again and a whiff of humid air filling her waterlogged lungs.

  Severo’s seemingly disembodied head bobbed in front of her like a buoy. His fist clutched her braid at the base of her head and held her up. Elfu floated in the river as well, hacking at the water with a rusted machete, as if he could really fight off millions of hungry yearlings with a single blade. Lusielle coughed up some of the water she had swallowed, plus a lot of bile too.

  “Take a deep breath,” Severo warned.

  “What?”

  Lusielle went under again, this time pulled down by Severo’s powerful dive. She looked up to see Elfu diving as well, clouds of disconcerted yearlings swimming about, and the swiftly moving lights of yet another boat passing over. She realized they were trying to dodge the newest danger: the boats at the tail end of the White Tide procession.

  “Hang on to my shoulders,” Severo said the next time they surfaced.

  Lusielle hung tight, helping Severo’s going with her kicks. He swam at an angle, riding the current but aiming for shore, keeping an eye out for the occasional ships that broke through the early morning fog like looming giants.

  Large and small, the passing ships represented a quick opportunity for rescue. But the darkness, the fog and the drizzling rain made it difficult for anyone to spot them in the water. Propelled by a northerly wind, the ships advanced swiftly, making it impossible for Lusielle and her friends to grab a line or climb aboard.

  Cold and tired, Lusielle thought about crying out for help every time she spotted a boat, but their appearance, not to mention their survival in the yearling-infested waters, would raise questions galore. Even if they lied about their identities, anyone participating in the White Tide procession was likely to return her to the Chosen’s galley. The only ship worth trying to hail was Bren’s barge. By her calculations, both the barge and the galley were way ahead of them. Severo and Elfu must have thought the same, because they swam for the west shore.

  “Is that the kingdom side?” Lusielle said. “We’ll get caught!”

  “Saltwharf is ahead,” Severo said in between breaths. Lusielle caught only a few words of what he said. “Port—Lots of ships—Highborn barges—night stop—”

  A port full of ships was a good reason to risk the swim. A port where highborn barges traditionally docked for the night was even better, because they would be on the way to Teos come morning. Lusielle, Severo and Elfu swam hard for shore, assailed by the rain but keeping their eyes on the nearing lights. It took a while before their feet stumbled on the bank’s muddy shores, a few yards upriver from a small town’s port.

  “We need to find passage,” Lusielle rasped, cold, drenched, and still struggling for breath.

  “We need to get you dry, warm and fed first,” Elfu said.

  “We don’t have time for that.”

  “But I’m hungry!”

  Lusielle waded ahead, trying to get a better view of the port. The rain tapped a steady beat on the water. A crow crooned in the distance. A sleepy robin chirped in response. The darkness was beginning to yield in the east. Soon, the stilled quays would come to life and all those ships would sail out into the Nerpes.

  She dismissed the war galley docked nearest to them right away. The standard was lowered, but it could only belong to either Teos or Riva. A number of the smaller boats roped to the main dock could be eliminated based on size an
d condition. She needed something sturdy to get to Teos, not a leaking tub or a tiny craft with a limited range. The passenger ferryboat would be expensive, crowded and slow. It would stop at every port along the way.

  Severo checked his drenched purse and shook his head. “I don’t have enough coin to buy one of us ferry passage, let alone three.”

  “The ferry wouldn’t work anyway,” Lusielle said. “We need something faster.”

  Her eyes fell on the three ornate barges in port. The gods knew the last thing Lusielle needed were more highborn complicating her life, but at least the barges would be sailing in the right direction. They would also be fast, plus they were aiming for the right destination.

  “Severo,” she said, “do you think you could extract a favor out of one of those highborn on behalf of the Lord of Laonia?”

  “My lord is not exactly popular with other highborn.”

  Lusielle wasn’t surprised. She had been hopeful, but not optimistic.

  “This is a bad idea,” Elfu muttered. “Aren’t you in enough trouble as it is?”

  “Look closely, Severo. Perhaps you can recognize one of Laonia’s allies, a vessel from Konia or Barahone, maybe?”

  “Our best chance isn’t Konia or Barahone,” Severo said, wiping the water from his face. “There’s a highborn who lingers here every year during the White Tide procession to visit with relatives. It’s why I lead us here.” He squinted into the darkness. “There. Third barge from the left. The one docked apart from the others, closest to shore. Recognize the seal?”

  The breath caught in Lusielle’s throat. “Does it belong to who I think it does?”

  “Even so,” Severo said. “Without my lord, without lots of gold or some uncontestable reason, they’re not likely to let us come aboard.”

  “Hmm.” Lusielle looked up at the sky and, realizing she didn’t have too many choices, began to wade again.

  “Where are you going?” Severo said.

  “To find our uncontestable reason.”

  Chapter Sixty-two