by Dora Machado
“You think you have answers for everything,” the curse giver said, flashing her malignant leer. “Yet you’re unable to face your reality. I won’t help you. I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure my success and I won’t relinquish my gains now.”
The puddle of water on the floor shimmered with a luminous glint. An image formed from the light, showing the curse giver igniting the fire in the tidy kitchen, stoking it into high flames.
Lusielle’s fingertips ached from gripping the lute. “You?”
The curse giver smiled. “Me.”
* * *
Lusielle had just washed the dishes after a slow night at the inn and an intimate dinner with her parents, brother and Elfu and Carfu. Fresh roasted capon, she remembered, a luxurious treat for a regular weeknight. She kissed her parents good night and raced her brother up the steps to their little rooms above the kitchen. The scent of soap clung to her hands as she fell asleep in her pallet, listening to her parents’ quiet laughter as they too came up the stairs. It was the last time she had ever felt safe in her life. It was the last time she had gone to sleep happy.
She woke up to the acrid scent of smoke scalding her lungs. Plumes of black smoke erupted through the floor boards. Fiery sparks ignited the thatch roof above her head. The heat pressed all around her. The famished flames lunged after her, consuming everything in the way. She was succumbing to the smoke when the door flew open. Elfu crashed through the flames and pulled her out of the burning room. Carfu dragged a senseless Tristan.
“My parents!” Lusielle cried out, dodging Elfu’s grip and running to their room. A surge of black smoke punched her when she opened the door. The chamber groaned and screeched under the flames’ assault. Everything in the room was ablaze, including the bed, where the flames fed like ravenous beasts on her parents’ smoldering bodies.
“We have to go!” Elfu shouted, dragging her away.
“No,” she said. “No!”
The floor of her parents’ chamber collapsed into a fiery pit. The roaring fire below swallowed it whole. Then Elfu and Lusielle were running as the boards beneath their feet gave way, racing the fire’s angry breath, barely escaping the destruction that ended Lusielle’s blessed childhood and hurled her into a bleak and painful world.
* * *
The image of her parents’ scorched bodies kept repeating on the water’s lustrous reflection. The tears were hot on Lusielle’s face. The lute groaned under her clutch. The curse giver was laughing like the hideous fiend she was. Madness nibbled at Lusielle’s mind. Rage quaked through her body.
She could barely keep from shouting. “How could you?”
“I could, and I did and I enjoyed the whole of it.” More laughter. “Your mother, she would’ve been the only one remotely capable of taking me and my curse on. She wielded the Goddess’s mark, not easily visible, mind you, but she had it all the same.”
“Is that why you killed her?”
“I trumped fate, just in case. Now, child, come and get me.” The curse giver beckoned. “Revenge will be satisfying.”
The provocation was too much to resist. The impulse to slam the lute and crush it into splintered pieces was overriding. But that was exactly what the curse giver wanted, a chance to punish Lusielle, a justification for murder, the lute out of play and an easy opening to kill her.
Lusielle swallowed her rage and curbed the loathing in her voice. “You overlooked something important that night.”
“I don’t make mistakes.”
“You overlooked me,” Lusielle said. “You didn’t know that I, too, wielded the mark.”
“You were never any threat.”
“You killed the wrong oddity.”
“I did not!”
“You wanted to trump fate and killed my mother, but it was I who was fated for the Lord of Laonia, not my mother. You made a mistake, and now fate is about to catch up with you.”
The curse giver snarled and charged at the same time. Lusielle raked the strings, repelling the ferocious attack with the jarring sound. The curse giver gasped as if mortally wounded, but still, the need to murder was stamped all over her face.
“Killing is your only solution.” Lusielle strummed the flute in a frantic crescendo. “You think you’re so fierce and yet you’re not brave at all. You’re a devious coward who eliminates the competition in advance. Your mother. My mother. That’s also why you killed Shehana, because she realized the monster you were becoming, the evil she had helped to create. Isn’t that the truth?”
The curse giver covered her ears and, groaning in agony, fell to her knees. “She had turned weak and feeble,” she rasped. “She was afraid of me.”
“You had to survive.” Lusielle stopped the noise. “You had to retain your right to exist. How does an odd creature who thinks she’s entitled to eternity fight against time?”
“You’re dying,” the curse giver said, “back at the shrine. You’re drowning. There’s only so much the inhaler can do for you, only so much your body can take. Give me the lute and go.”
The curse giver was right. Lusielle’s strength was ebbing like a fickle tide. But she was determined to get the information she needed out of the curse giver. She also knew the curse giver was not likely to forgive the affront and forgo her murder.
“A curse is life’s affair,” Lusielle said. “Death is nourishment, craft is breath, work is life, grief is gold. A curse is breath for you, the gold that pays for your prolonged existence. You kill to live. You’re into the long-life trade, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been able to live for so long. Shehana knew about it, and used it to prolong her own life until you killed her. You learned it from her. If you don’t curse, you die.”
“So what?” Jalenia said. “We all pay a high price to exist.”
“How many years did you gain from Edmund’s virulent curse?” Lusielle asked. “Twenty? Forty? Eighty?”
“It was a profitable venture, that’s all I’ll say.” The curse giver smiled. “In any case, you can’t pretend to understand my words without the madness. I won’t ask again. Give. Me. My. Lute.”
“It’s been hard for you to find a place over the ages,” Lusielle said. “Purges, persecutions, proscriptions, the occasional mischievous rival, all of that is hard to survive. Secrecy requires isolation. Friends are few and far between. When they die, they leave you alone again.”
“Who needs friends when you’re as powerful as I am?”
“Perhaps you lived in the kingdom, until Riva came. Perhaps you fled from there to Laonia. It doesn’t really matter how you got to Laonia. The fact is that you met Edmund and now you’re going to tell me what happened.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Lusielle plucked at the lute.
“Play all you want, torture me if it amuses you,” the curse giver said. “You might be able to disable me with the sound, but you can’t kill me. You can’t stay here forever either. When you’re done wasting my time, I’m coming after you, and even if you run, I’m going to find you.”
The lute’s string twanged when Lusielle snapped it off the lute.
“No!”
“I hear that a good string takes years to cure.” The fire hissed when Lusielle threw the broken string into the flames.
The curse giver’s eyes were bright with rage. “I’m going to kill you.”
“You said you liked Edmund’s intellect,” Lusielle said, “which meant that you two had a friendship at some point. Edmund was passionate about many things, Laonia, his lovers, his library. He wasn’t so passionate about shields. What did he really steal from you?”
When the woman didn’t answer, Lusielle yanked another string from the lute. “Should I also throw this string into the fire?”
“My shield,” the curse giver said. “Edmund stole my curse giver’s song.”
At last, an answer that rang true and viable. “What exactly is the curse giver’s song?”
“It’s the curse I cast and composed to
protect myself from gods and mortals.”
“That’s why Shehana was afraid of you,” Lusielle said. “Not only was she afraid of your powerful curses, she was also terrified of your protective curse. No one could stop you once you wrote and sang your song. No curse giver, no matter how strong, could touch you, and that included Shehana.”
It all began to make sense to Lusielle. The curse giver’s song secured the fiend’s existence. The riddle, the verses, they composed her masterpiece. The song was a protective curse which she wrote and sang in order to defend herself from dangerous rivals. It was also a preemptive strike.
“You were proud of it,” Lusielle said. “You used the most precious vellum in the world and conjured a magnificent work of art. And somewhere around the twenty-third year of Edmund’s rule, you showed it to him, because you knew he would admire and appreciate it. Once he saw it, he wanted it for his collection. And in the ways of the highborn, he took it without your leave.”
“He ignored the warning,” the curse giver said. “He deserved the curse.”
“When Edmund realized what he had done,” Lusielle said, “when he realized the true nature of what he had stolen, he burnt the warning verse, thinking he would defuse the curse that was likely to befall him if he didn’t burn it.”
“He was such a proud, stupid fop.”
“Instead, when he burned the verse and cut up the vellum, he destroyed your protective curse, leaving you vulnerable, forcing you to flee further into isolation in order to protect yourself. It took you ten years to compose and cast the virulent curse that would end Edmund’s life and his line. You stretched the curse’s provisions over ten more years to account for your years of strenuous work.”
“This has all been very entertaining,” the curse giver said, “a brilliant intellectual exercise. But what is it to you, remedy mixer? You gain nothing from knowing my story and you lose him all the same.”
Lusielle’s craving for air suddenly became more pronounced. Her body shuddered like a bag of bones. She didn’t know why, but the trickle of air that Khalia had been blowing into her lungs stopped flowing and didn’t come again. Either her body had quit taking in breath or Khalia had ceased giving it. Khalia’s touch was absent as well. In the shrine, the last of Lusielle body’s reflexes drew only a load of water. Her listless body settled at the bottom of the pool.
“Jalenia, please,” Lusielle said. “Does your song have any provisions that can help Bren?”
“No.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“The curse can’t be redeemed, defused or lifted.”
“Are you sure?” Lusielle said.
“By my soul, your lord will die a cursed man.”
Lusielle’s knees gave up. She plopped down on the hearth’s ledge. It took a great effort to replace the lute on the stand.
The curse giver frowned. “You’re giving up?”
“Almost, but not quite.” She winced, bending over her sore ribs and her aching arm, giving into her body’s weaknesses.
Jalenia’s voice rumbled with the warning. “Even if you’ve put the lute down, I won’t forgive you.”
Lusielle looked up. “You could’ve killed me when I first grabbed the quill.”
In a blink, the curse giver merciless grip wrapped around Lusielle’s throat. “Don’t assume I’m capable of good, ‘cause I never served it and never will.”
“You’re a selfish witch and nothing’s ever going to change that,” Lusielle rasped. “But—”
“But what?”
“You can’t kill me, not even if you wanted to, which I doubt you want to do even now.”
Jalenia hissed. “You people don’t make any sense when you’re dying.”
“You cannot kill me because I put a curse on you.”
The curse giver’s grip faltered then tightened again. “You can’t put a curse on me.”
“You’ve wronged me,” Lusielle said. “More than one time. You killed my parents. You burned the inn. You destroyed my family and my life. You’ve tortured the one I love. You’ve lied to me. You’ve even tried to kill me. I’ve got good reason to want to curse you and I did.”
“You’re no curse giver.”
“I’m odd,” Lusielle said. “I’m not so different from you.”
“I’m divine!”
“If you are divine, so am I.”
“Has the lack of breath addled your brain?”
“We are all Suriek’s children,” Lusielle rasped. “No matter how much we try to enforce our differences, mortal or divine, highborn or baseborn, whatever you want to call yourself, we all spawned from her. We are one and the same.”
“You’re deluded if you fancy yourself part goddess.”
“Only as deluded as you may be.”
It was strange, but the curse giver actually pondered the idea.
Lusielle seized on the chance. “I think that the gods—they’re part of us, too. Maybe they’re our past, or maybe they’re our future. Oddities, we have a strange sense of straddling time and realms, and an ability to draw deeper from the Strength’s bottomless well, but we are no different than the rest.”
“I’m a fallen goddess,” Jalenia said stubbornly.
“We have all risen and fallen throughout our lives.”
“You can’t expect to match my power and skills.”
“I’m a daughter of the Odd God who’s one and the same with Suriek,” Lusielle said. “I’ve got the skills to cast a curse and the means to do it properly. I wrote it down on my annotation book and I said my little prayer over it. My vellum might not be as precious as yours, but it’s transformative all the same. My curse is cast. You’re cursed, curse giver, and if you try to kill me, you’ll kill yourself.”
“Impossible!”
“Look it up,” Lusielle said. “Shehana wrote about it in her manuscript. I’ve cursed you with something more powerful than vengeance, more defining than rage, more binding than blood.”
“Such a curse doesn’t exist.”
“Oh, yes it does,” Lusielle said. “There’s a curse which by definition is capable of stilling any curse giver’s hand. It’s an endless loop. There’s no way out. It can’t be redeemed, defused or denied. It’s fierce, obliging and merciless. It’s an ailment that can’t be cured. I’m sorry that you don’t know it, but from now on, you will.”
“What curse?” The curse giver demanded. “What kind of curse?”
Lusielle met the woman’s glare. “The curse of friendship.”
* * *
The terror in the curse giver’s eyes confirmed Lusielle’s suspicions. She had chosen her curse well. Friendship was freedom and trap, choice and duty, need, gift, rule and demand.
“But you can’t want a friendship with me,” the curse giver said. “I killed your parents. I cursed your lord.”
“It’s done,” Lusielle said. “I am and will always be your only and most devoted friend. You can’t escape my curse now.”
The curse giver’s fingers slipped away from her throat. It didn’t help Lusielle’s condition much. The darkness drew on her life with an inhaler’s grit. She might have subdued the curse giver, but what was the purpose to going back to Bren if he was going to die all the same?
The curse giver’s voice came from a long distance. “In truth I dabble, but only sometimes. In lies I dabble better. There could be truth in my lies. If the highest are willing to plummet, if the lowliest are willing to rise, the battle will decide and the wicked will prevail.”
Then there was only water and light, light and torrential water.
Chapter Ninety-six
BREN ENTERED JALENIA’S SHRINE WALKING ON his own power, propelled by the potion he had drunk on the way and an urgency he couldn’t control. What he found there gave him no time to think but plenty of cause to despair, because Riva was holding Khalia down—drowning a high Chosen of Teos in the shallow water—and Lusielle’s limp body lay at the bottom of the pool.
The sword was out
of the scabbard before Riva’s surprise registered on his face. It came down at the base of the self-made king’s neck without hesitation. If Bren had been weak earlier, he was now the strongest man alive. The blade hacked into Riva’s vertebrae like a butcher’s cleaver, splitting the spine and leaving the almost severed head dangling over the man’s chest by a tangle of cartilage and spurting blood vessels.
Bren didn’t care that he had just killed a highborn ruler at Teos. He didn’t dwell on Riva’s death as a matter of justice or change. The sounds of Khalia’s hacks coming from Hato’s arms might have given him comfort if his eyes weren’t fixed on Severo, who had pulled Lusielle out of the pool and had her on the side, pounding on her back.
By the turd of the gods. Bren was freezing inside. Lusielle was pale and purple when he knelt by her side. She had become the curse’s latest casualty.
Severo cradled his mistress in his arms, still trying to draw life from her. Hato, supporting a trembling Khalia, shook his head and wept. Khalia frowned when she rested a finger on the crook of Lusielle’s neck.
“You told me we had to fight for the next moment,” Bren said. “Damn it, woman, fight!”
“Tell her you’ll agree to a battle of poisons,” a voice rose from the water, followed by the liquid outline of the curse giver, uncoiling from of the pool like a watery snake.
Severo clutched his mistress to his breast. Hato gasped. Khalia’s mouth opened and wouldn’t close. Bren’s grip tightened on his sword’s hilt as he turned to face the curse giver.
“Down, boy,” she said. “I didn’t come here for strife. Swear on your house’s seal that you’ll agree to the battle, ‘cause she’s not coming back to watch you die.”
“Whatever that means, I’ll do it.” Bren said. “But what if she can’t hear me anymore?”
A column of water shot from the curse giver’s hand, drawing a graceful arch that landed precisely on Lusielle’s ear.