Curse and Whisper

by A J Gala

  “Yes, Aleth, she is.”

  He would not be convinced. “Then bet on it!”

  Naia and Tizzy exchanged a glance, and then Naia sighed. “Well, princess, how about it? Are you willing to place a losing bet? Because my money is on Doddie.”

  Tizzy crossed her arms and looked down at Aleth. He was as happy as she’d ever seen him. His smile was pleading.

  “Bet on me! Please?”

  “Alright. Fifty gold that Aleth wins.”

  “Holy shit! Fifty gold? Are you crazy?” Naia patted down her empty pockets. “I don’t have that kind of money! I was gonna say ten silver. Then you go and turn this into some kind of high stakes bullshit—”

  “Fine. How about our tab?”

  Naia’s jaw was still ajar. Tizzy’s new suggestion didn’t sound any safer than her last. “Your tab is ungodly. If you lose, you’ll be paying twice. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  Tizzy looked down at her brother again, whose eyes were starting to look a little glazed over, then turned and shook Naia’s hand.

  “It is. May the best fifteen-year-old win.”

  Naia almost felt bad. She knew how games usually ended between Troll Daughter and Aleth and had seen hundreds of people lose a fortune by betting on the nightwalker. Smirking, she watched them square up, grasp hands, and count off.

  “He’s a baby bloodkin,” Naia explained. “And besides, a troll is a troll.”

  “Are these reasons why I’ll win or why I’ll lose?” Tizzy was surprised at Naia’s confidence. It seemed like Troll Daughter and Aleth were evenly matched.

  The greenkind made no efforts to hide her frustration, grunting Orcish swears while she threw her weight. On the opposite side, Aleth wasn’t frustrated in the slightest. Tizzy could see the excitement in his eyes as he pushed back and laughed.

  “Come on, Doddie! You can do better than that!” he taunted.

  “Yes!” Naia cried. “You can! And you’d better!”

  Tizzy folded her arms and watched him with pride. Troll Daughter made one last push, pressing Aleth’s trembling arm over farther and farther, yelling in triumph.

  He may have been a bad liar, but Tizzy discovered that Aleth was still quite a showman. Just before his knuckles were going to touch the table, he fought her brute strength bit by bit until he had the leverage he needed, slamming her arm into the table and hollering.

  Naia was silent through Tizzy’s cackling.

  “Doddie!” Aleth wiped the sweat from his brow. “What happened?”

  She declared he was a cheater and rubbed her arm.

  “Guess I’ll go reset your tab.” Naia walked back to the bar, mumbling under her breath about the loss of profits.

  Tizzy stood behind Aleth and draped her arms over his shoulders. “Congratulations, pirate.”

  “Thanks for betting on me.” He was beaming. “How did you know I would win?”

  “I didn’t,” she admitted. “But I could tell you had an advantage. You’ve been pretty drunk lately, and that can only mean there’s blood in your booze.”

  “I can’t believe I won. I’ve never won against Doddie before! Hey, are you leaving?” He tilted his head back to look up at her.

  “Just back to the room. It’s loud down here. I’m ready to relax a little. You know this isn’t really my atmosphere.”

  “I’ll go with you!”

  She bit her lip on a frown. Her quiet night was in danger. “I better not hear a peep out of you, do you understand?”

  “I’m going to be honest with you.” He guided her hand so she was running her fingers through his hair. “Now that the rush is gone, I’m about sixty seconds from passing out.”

  She swayed her hips in thought. “Well, you are quiet as death when you sleep. I suppose I’ll allow it. Come on, pirate, let’s go.”

  They left the table, and when they reached the staircase, Troll Daughter yelled across the room for a rematch. Tizzy wondered how she would fare arm wrestling the troll herself before helping Aleth up the first steps.

  “How about you go easy on the drinks tomorrow?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t think it was this bad.”

  “Do people tell you you have a problem?”

  “Yeah.” Once they’d reached the top, he stared down the hallway. His stomach lurched, and he didn’t know whether he loved it or hated it.

  Inside, Tizzy shut the door and watched him slump over in front of a hearth full of cold ashes.

  “Are you okay?” She brought him a pillow from the bed.

  “This is nothing.”

  “Gods.” She sat by him and tugged at his tunic until he finished shrugging it off. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

  He could only smile. “Because sometimes it’s fun. Didn’t you ever get drunk?”

  “Like you? Once. And if you think I’m a bitch now, you would have been blown away by the night I had a few extra glasses of wine. I made Athen cry. He’s not like you, you know. He doesn’t shed a tear for anything.”

  “Shut up,” he laughed. “Some boys cry.”

  “Tell me about it. I know one who cries a lot.”

  He kept laughing, and she decided she’d never heard anything better in all her life. She leaned down and kissed his forehead.

  “I like it when you’re happy. I do. But when you drink, you just—” she took a deep breath, looking for words, “—you feel a million miles away.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  She didn’t really understand, either. There was no way to explain the way she could feel him in the room the same way she could feel if the air was hot or cold. She could sense where he was and how he felt.

  She shrugged. “Someday, you will. Are you going to sleep?”

  “If the room ever stops spinning.”

  She grinned and started a fire in the hearth, then grabbed her book and prepared for her bath.

  He couldn’t remember if the room had quit spinning or not before he passed out. In no time at all, he was in his usual dreamless void. Once upon a time, he thought he might dream if he drank enough or indulged in the right substances. But it had never worked, and those who had told him otherwise were long since dead from their vices.

  He didn’t want to be in his void. Nausea clung to him like a second skin, and he had a desperate need for fresh air. Open your eyes, he thought. Open them, Tizzy will be there, you’ll be fine. He kept talking to himself until he willed himself awake.

  He woke in the dark, in a small, scratchy bed, to the smell of pine and tea. When it dawned on him what was happening, he was breathless.

  “Tal!”

  The woman winced when he roared. The orange flames in her oven flickered brighter, and she stepped out from the shadows.

  “Don’t yell at me!”

  “Get out of my head!”

  He pressed his hands to his temples and clenched his jaw, fighting to push her out. The struggle was a hot knife carving deeper and deeper into his skull.

  “Stop that!” she cried, grasping at her own head. “Will you just calm down?”

  He didn’t. Lightning ripped through the sky outside, lighting up the treehouse through its cracks. Thunder shook the ground.

  “I’m not letting you kick me out like this, Aleth!”

  “I’ve told you before. You are not allowed inside my head! Get out!”

  He tried to fight, to take control and change her landscape, but the nausea was too strong, and he stumbled out of the bed and onto the ground. The chaos stopped. Talora looked around, feeling a thin line of blood dripping down her nose.

  “You must be drunk. Guess that means I win.”

  “Fuck you. I was having a good night before this. What do you want?”

  She helped him back onto the bed, then put her kettle over a flame and picked out a jar of tea. “This wasn’t what I wanted either. I’m sorry. But Tizzy won’t go to sleep.”

  “Then you wait!” he snapped. “How hard is it to just wait?”

 
“I’ve been waiting!”

  He rubbed his forehead, trying to massage away the throbbing pain. “She hasn’t been sleeping.” After a moment, he sighed. “She feeds regularly now, so I guess she doesn’t need it. She just stays up and reads most of the night. I’ll sleep the whole day away if she lets me…”

  “You have to come back, Aleth.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You mean Tizzy and Mar—Amaranth have to come back. Don’t call her that, by the way. Tizzy’s been calling her Maran.”

  “I meant the three of you. Louvita has threatened to turn Lilu over to her caste if we don’t get Tizzy and Maran back to the Convent. Don’t act like you don’t care. I know you do. I know Lilu means at least something to you.”

  He didn’t say anything and folded his arms tight, ignoring Talora’s prying stare. She waited through his silence until the water started to boil.

  “What is it?” She poured the water over two cups of fragrant, minty tea.

  “We can’t, Tal. I’ll do what I can for Lilu, but if I bring Tizzy back, nothing good is going to come of it. I can’t do it.”

  Curiously, she narrowed her eyes. “Aleth, what do you know?” She handed him a cup. “You know something. I can see it in your face.”

  He chewed the inside of his cheek, cursing his face. “Forget it. Maybe it’s nothing. We’ll go back.”

  “You’re lying. What is it? Tell me!”

  “I—” He stopped, swallowing hard. He watched one of the leaves sink to the bottom of the cup. “I have to stop her.”

  “Tizzy?”

  “I don’t know how it happens, but I know she’s going to do something terrible. She’s going to do something that she’d never do now. But if I bring her back, she’ll become that person.”

  “What do you mean you ‘know?’”

  “I’ve always known.” Another leaf sank to the bottom. The shape it made reminded him of a cawing raven. “I don’t remember ever not knowing. I know it sounds crazy.”

  “So what will she do?”

  He shook his head, sipping the tea. He recognized the taste—Talora had given it to him before on other occasions he was too drunk for his own good.

  “Aleth—”

  “Don’t. I don’t want to talk about it.” He drank even though the tea was still scalding.

  “But you are talking about it.” She sighed, rubbing her arms. “Sounds a little bit like an oracle, don’t you think?” He said nothing. “I know someone who can relate. I think you should talk to them about what you saw. I can tell it’s scaring the shit out of you.”

  “I’m not talking to a stranger about a horrific vision of my sister, Tal.”

  “Good. I’m not asking you to talk to a stranger.”

  He should have seen it coming, but he didn’t. She snapped her fingers, and everything was ripped away. He was back in his void as though he’d never left, drifting through a slumber that he knew would leave him exhausted. But one by one, things changed. There was dirt beneath him, tightly packed dirt that a hundred people traveled on day after day. It was warm and bright, spring or early summer. A sea of oak trees were in the distance, and there was one silver trunk of a birch that cut at his heart.

  “No, Tal, not this. Why am I here?”

  He knew the little houses and their thatched roofs, and the wooden palisade that encircled them all. He knew the four stalls in the market; he knew the single tower at the wooden gate. Once again, he couldn’t breathe.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  Her voice was in the air. “Because it’s a place you both know.”

  “No!”

  He turned around and saw Adeska standing in the square of Crana Camp. When she heard his voice, she turned to him.

  “Aleth?”

  “Tal, what the fuck are you doing?”

  She wasn’t anywhere in sight, but he could hear her loud and clear. “You won’t take a step in the right direction unless it’s the end of the world! Well, push comes to shove, even for me!”

  Adeska searched for the source of the voice. “Tal? What’s going on?” When she received no answer, her shoulders drooped in defeat, and she took a step closer. “Of course you two know each other. I don’t know why I ever believed otherwise. It couldn’t have been just a coincidence that she kept hanging around, even after she followed Lazarus back from the Besq Mainland with Lora.” She showed him a gentle smile.

  “Stay away from me!”

  She clutched her hands together and held them at her chest. He was just as full of vitriol as he had been the night of the party. It was as though no time had passed at all.

  “What’s happening?” she asked him. “Why is she doing this?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He knew he could breathe, he knew he had been breathing, but he still felt like he was suffocating. “How thoughtful of her to put us here when it still looked like this.”

  “I knew I had seen you here.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  Her smile widened. “Yes. I did. You’ll always look like yourself, no matter what you do. It’s those eyes. You’ve got Mother’s rust-brown eyes.”

  “Shut up.” He felt like he was shaking, but his hands were steady. “Just shut up, Adeska.”

  “I’m sorry for what we did. For all the destruction of these places… we thought we were doing the right thing.”

  He walked away from her, ambling through the empty paths of Crana Camp until he came to a covered stall with painted charms dangling from the thatched awning.

  “You knew what you were doing.” His voice was almost a growl.

  A girl appeared inside the stall, maybe sixteen, frozen in time. She leaned over the stall casually, as if to gossip or flirt. A bright smile lit up her round face, and dainty hands played with the end of a long black braid.

  “She was a half-elf,” he said, keeping his back to Adeska. “She hid here because she’s not supposed to exist. Her mother and father robbed the Order of the Midwives for the ritual scroll that would let them conceive her. Do you want to know what she looked like the last time I saw her?”

  Adeska stuttered, and the scene changed. She stared at the stall as it smoldered to ashes. The sky rumbled as it filled with smoke. Crana Camp was in ruins. The girl laid in the debris of her stall, covered in thatch and fallen charms. She was left with a gaping hole in her chest and a gaping hole in her throat. Blood soaked her dress.

  “Courtesy of your husband.”

  Adeska swallowed back tears. “I’m so sorry. What was her name?”

  When Aleth finally turned to face her, her sweat turned cold with fear.

  “You—” He could barely speak through his clenched jaw. “Fuck you! You don’t get to know her name! Any of their names! Every time you came to a place like this and massacred it, any of these people could have been me!” His voice broke, and he turned away again.

  “Aleth!” She ran to him, and he shoved her away.

  “No! Don’t act like a hug and a ‘sorry’ is going to fix this. I ran from you! I ran from home, I found new places to call home, and then you and your fucking raiders—I ran everywhere I could, and you still came, and you did this to them all! Did you know?”

  She sobbed. “Did I know what?”

  “Did you know it was me? Were you following me? Is this what you wanted for me?”

  “No, gods, Aleth! Of course it wasn’t!”

  “Then why?” He wiped away a tear.

  “We were looking for someone. A Greater Daemon. We wanted to stop him, Aleth, and we ran out of leads. All we knew was that he had followers in places like these.”

  “So you burned them to the ground whether he was here or not.”

  “We stopped him. Doesn’t that amount to something?”

  “What would it have amounted to if it had been me your husband slaughtered?” he asked, pointing to the girl. “If you really were so confident that you had seen me, did you ever go back and look at the bodies? Would you have ever known?”

 
“I wish I had listened to my gut back then.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  “I knew I should have stopped. Gods, I’ve derailed my whole life because I won’t listen to myself! I knew what we were doing wasn’t completely right, but I did all of this anyway, trying to prove to myself that I knew better than myself. How stupid. Aleth, I’m sorry. It’s all I can say to anyone anymore. I can’t change anything that I’ve done. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re only sorry because I’m here. Before, you wouldn’t have given half-a-shit what happened to me. You hated me.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Yes it is!” he shouted. “You wanted to take over for Mother when she died so badly! You wanted to be the mother, to take care of us, to love us, but you couldn’t!”

  In a second, he was only inches away from her.

  “You—” he shoved her, “—you couldn’t bring yourself to love me. You hated me. But I needed you!”

  She did remember the hate. She remembered that it had filled her like poison. The memories rose up in her like bile, and she cried again.

  “Maybe I did.” She shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know what happened to us back then, but it isn’t like that anymore. What else can I say to you, Aleth? Please, how can I make this right?”

  “You can’t!”

  “Then—” she grabbed his arm, “—then maybe, maybe you should kill me. I’m not good for anything, and I’m dying anyway!”

  He pried his arm away. “What?”

  Crana Camp dissolved into smoke, and the orchard appeared around them. Adeska leaned against the trunk of Genesis.

  “I’m dying.” She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “I think so, anyway. Centa stabbed me—he didn’t mean to. I haven’t woken up since. I have no idea how long it’s been, but I think it’s been too long. And now I keep having these horrible, vivid nightmares. Would it make it better if you killed me right here?”

  “What the hell kind of person do you think I am?”

  “A Hallenar,” she said. “If it’ll make it better, do it. This is the perfect chance. No one would ever know it was you. Mother always used to say, ‘nothing makes a Hallenar free like revenge.’ Maybe you should see if she’s right.”