Curse and Whisper

by A J Gala

  “There’s only one way you could know that.”

  He shook with a short, brittle laugh. “There’s a lot of ways I could know that. Even by nightwalker standards, I should be dead. I’ve been hung, I’ve been drowned, I’ve been beaten, had my fucking organs taken from me… shit, the Crux Bolt from the Botathorans was the closest I’ve come to dying in a long time, but I just keep healing. I just keep healing.” He waved away the smoke. “And here I am with a thousand gaping wounds on my soul waiting for the same luck.”

  She cried into him with no warning. It came, and she sobbed into his back, grasping onto him like he would slip away any second. When she felt his guilt, she cried harder.

  “Tizzy, stop it. I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not!”

  He crumpled the letalis in his hand and threw it into the hearth. “I will be. Stop crying over me.”

  “How can I? You just told me—”

  “I know what I just told you! Just please, go back to bed.”

  She calmed herself a little and stood but couldn’t leave him. She raked a hand through his hair, and he leaned into her touch.

  “Come back with me. Please. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

  He wanted to be angry, but the flames of rage died out quickly. As they always did. And when they did, they left him cold and hollow. He would have given anything to just be alone, but there was a tiny part of his heart that still sought her, despite everything.

  “How did you even do it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Everything is different with you, like I have some kind of connection. I’ve never done that with anyone else. Just you.”

  “You made me, Tizzy. You’ll always have a different connection with me.” He let out a deep breath into his hands, then got up and walked with her back to the bed. But it was suddenly an uncomfortable and foreign space. He couldn’t settle in beside her the same.

  “Maybe that’s all it was. Just something I was able to do because I turned you. Because we’re connected that way.” It eased her to know she might be able to control it.

  “Maybe.” He stared up at the ceiling. “You’ve got some strange abilities. When are you going to develop something that doesn’t have a mystery attached to it?”

  She turned to look at him. He kept a gap between them where they laid.

  “I’d like to do something useful that doesn’t require being asleep.”

  “You are at a disadvantage in a fight, for sure.”

  “Come here.” She wove her fingers with his and tugged, and at last, he rolled into her and let her embrace him. “You can be mad at me. You should be.”

  “I’m allowed to be mad at you, yet you won’t give me distance.”

  “You’re right! I keep getting this wrong! I’m sorry. You can go if you want.”

  He sighed. “Tizzy, look… you fucked this up.” His skin still felt like crawling off his body. “But it’ll pass. Everything does eventually. And sometimes, being alone helps me get there. I’ll come back. Last time may have taken ten years, but… but I came back, didn’t I?” He still couldn’t bear to look at her. “Just keep messing with my hair. I told you I’m going to be fine. One day.”

  “Alright.” She sniffled, and her face ached from the crying. She ran her fingers through his hair and could feel the room grow calm again. “If you could go anywhere right now, where would you go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t know either. She wanted to go home, but the thought of all the familiar faces wasn’t as comforting as it used to be. What would everyone have to say to her after all this time? She’d been gone about half a month already. She wondered if Stormy would still be excited to see her.

  “Have you ever been to the ocean?” Aleth asked.

  “No. I could never get away.”

  “Maybe that’s where I’d go. The East Coast is nice. Hevena, that big coastal town north of Ebinno, it’s nice. It’s not loud like it is everywhere else. The ocean drowns out all the noise.”

  “The ocean is really loud enough to do that?”

  “Yeah.” The faintest grin was on his face. “I’ve only seen the Shimara Sea, but I bet Death Pass and Equenhol are the same. The way the waves crash against the beach, there’s no other sound like it.”

  “We should go sometime.”

  “I’ll take you one day, I promise. Just stay out of my memories, alright?”

  All her tears had exhausted her, and she was soon asleep. Every limb weighed her down a thousand pounds, and she went deeper and deeper into slumber. She hadn’t slept so heavy in days. Then, she hit the bottom. Something was solid beneath her feet.

  “Now what?”

  It wasn’t her voice. She turned around, and Aleth was behind her.

  “Oh!” She suddenly had an idea. “The ocean! Think of the ocean again!”

  In seconds, she could taste salt in the air. The ground below her was rocky and sandy, showing off little tufts of waxy plants she had never seen before. She followed the ground to the edge, to a rough cliffside covered in algae and barnacles. At the bottom, the ocean’s low tide lapped at the sand.

  “Is this really what it’s like?” Her eyes were enormous, staring at the horizon.

  He was confused. “This is exactly what it’s like.” A sharp wind tousled his hair.

  “I had no idea it was so big! There’s so much of it. It looks like it goes on forever.” She started laughing. “It doesn’t even look real.”

  He shivered. “It’s cold.” He rubbed his arms and smiled. “It’s actually cold.” But he felt his skin and stopped. “Tizzy, look!”

  “Your scars!” She grabbed his hands. “They’re gone. All of them!”

  “Even—”

  “Yes, even that one!”

  He started to feel up his neck for the bite scar when she pulled him in for a kiss. His lips were warm, and so were his hands as they cupped her face.

  “What did you do?”

  “I thought you did this,” she said. “This is your memory, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “It’s the same place, but I came here years ago, in the spring.” He pointed to a live oak in the distance that was full of coppery leaves. “It’s fall here. I think this is now. I think we’re really here.”

  She laughed again and dove into his arms. “I used my Ethereal form with you! I took you with me! Aleth, this is incredible. We could go anywhere together.”

  A cold coastal breeze ripped through them, and they held each other tighter. The blue expanse beyond them rippled beneath a gray sky.

  “I didn’t think the waves would look like that,” she said. “They never describe it that way in my books.” She couldn’t peel her eyes away.

  “The way they swell up and get dark before they curl over and crash?”

  “I never expected everything to move so much.”

  He rested his hands on the small of her back. “I feel human again.”

  She hoped they would never wake. She’d never have to see the vicious faces at the Convent, they could never be hunted by Rhett, and Aleth would never again be plagued by the bloodkin curse she’d given him. He had said there was no other sound like it, she recalled. Like the ocean. He was right.

  A different noise broke through the rolling waves and cutting wind. A cough. Tizzy pushed herself away.

  “Did you hear that? Is someone here?”

  “Not someone,” he said.

  He stared at the line of trees behind them, at something large and black sweeping down from the highest branches. The raven landed beside them on the edge of the cliff.

  Aleth clenched his fists. “What do you want?”

  “Aleth, it’s just a bird.”

  “No. Not this one.” He jabbed his finger at it. “He followed me every single day I was here, for a whole month and a half. What do you want?”

  She thought he was crazy, but then she spotted a detail that changed it all. A detail that was significant enough to make th
is bird different. He had recognized the raven by one tiny white feather above its right eye. It opened its mouth for another raspy caw.

  “The coincidence is a bit irritating, isn’t it?” Tizzy chuckled. “I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a falcon following me around.”

  “He wouldn’t even leave when I tried chasing him off.” He sat down with his legs crossed and pulled up a tuft of grass. “He just stood there looking at me like I was an idiot. Like right now.” He threw the grass at the raven, and it merely blinked.

  “He and every other thing in this world knows you wouldn’t harm a fly.”

  He grunted. “I’ve harmed my fair share of flies. And what’s with that white feather? Is that from some kind of scar? Is he old? Does this bird just have a distinguishing birthmark? If he could talk, Tizzy, actually talk, he’d talk your ears off. I already know.”

  Tizzy sat down with him and looked back out to the sea, and the raven cawed into the air again as if trying to say a word.

  “What are you?” He swatted at the bird again, and it didn’t move. “A herald of consequence? Here to tell me I have no right to feel human again? I know.”

  “There is no divine purpose behind this bird, Aleth. Stop it.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Sure there is. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t have a special bird screaming to me about consequence, so why do you get one? What makes you so damn special?”

  The tiny grin on his face was light, yet he still seemed heavy with thoughts. “You ever feel like there’s a path you’re supposed to stay on? I feel like I’m falling off something.”

  She shrugged as the wind tossed her stray curls. “If you want to fall off the path, fall off the path. Don’t let a bird tell you what to do with your life.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  The raven flew away, down the cliff, vanishing into the seaside bluffs in the distance. Tizzy looked up into the gray and a speck of rain touched her nose. The coast faded away into nothing.

  Vayven 16, 1144

  Rain fell in Davrkton. Good, steady rain, not yet oversaturating the earth. Oksana stood outside the Marble Palace beneath a smooth arch that bore her personal banner of an ivory doe on white. She stared out to the main gates, pulling at the white hood of her cloak.

  “There they are. You were right. Sorry to have doubted you, Lobsang.”

  Her Master of Dusk was at her side, stoic as ever, a stark contrast to her in his black leather.

  “Shall I divert them away, duchess?”

  “No, no.” She rubbed her elbows. “I like Sir Ayvar, and I’m dying to know why he’s come back. I suspect his girls are up to something.” She turned back inside, and he followed without a word. “So many visitors in one morning. What am I to do?”

  Oksana returned to her throne room, waiting for her servants to usher in Ayvar Garva and the twins. They would be a delightful diversion from her other unexpected guest and something new for everyone to talk about, so they’d quit prattling on about the ghost they saw in the halls. The Marble Palace had no ghost. She would know.

  Lobsang remained in the room but ducked out of sight as Ayvar was brought in with Sola and Scara whispering and giggling behind him.

  “Sir Ayvar!” Oksana’s face twisted up with a soulless grin. “What brings you and your lot back so soon? I remember how eager you sounded to get home.”

  Ayvar glared at Scara and motioned his head to the duchess. “Get on with it, girl. You’re the one poking around where you don’t belong. Tell her what you’ve found.”

  Scara couldn’t contain her excitement and pranced forward with a vial in her hand. “Thank you, Father! Duchess, we returned to the little stone shack where we found that man. I was dying for a closer look and recovered something I thought you’d like to see.”

  Oksana’s eyebrows perked up, and she rose and came off the dais to take it. “What is it? Where in that pit did you find it?”

  “Oh, I just scraped it off the ground. I think—and this is just speculation—but I think it’s poison. And if that’s correct, it paints a bit of an odd picture of the scene left over.”

  “Are you familiar with poisons? Do you think you could tell me which one this is?” Oksana took the cork out and sniffed, then scrunched up her nose.

  “I can tell you it’s not something available around town. It’s either very rare or a custom formula. And I’m familiar enough with truth serums to be able to tell you that isn’t what this is, either. No, I think something else was going on. No one was looking for answers. They just wanted to kill something.”

  “A smart girl you’ve got, Sir Ayvar.”

  “Don’t tell her that. Her head’s big enough as it is.”

  Oksana smirked. “Scara, did your father tell you that man you found was with people who were trying to kill nightwalkers?”

  “He did! That’s why we came back.”

  The duchess nodded, shaking the vial and holding it up to the light. “Good. I wonder if we could recreate this on our own without that wretch Tryphaena. I hate working with her.” She set it down on her throne, then beckoned. “Sola, would you come up here with us?”

  Glad to be roused from her boredom, Sola obliged without question. She stood beside her sister with her hands neatly at her back.

  Oksana snapped her fingers. “Commence.”

  Ayvar was snatched up by three white-armored guards and shoved to his knees with a blade at his throat.

  He grunted. “What the hell is this?”

  Scara snapped out her whip in a second and launched the tail at one of the guards’ faces, taking out an eye. Ayvar wrestled a second one off, and the third was snared by the next whip-snap and brought to Sola’s feet. Sola’s axe blade came down on his neck. The dismembered head rolled to Oksana with wide, lifeless eyes.

  “Duchess.” Sola returned her axe to the strap on her back. “What is the meaning of this?”

  There was a slow clap but not from Oksana. Ayvar, white as the rest of the palace, turned around to see a man behind him.

  “Well done. The duchess was not wrong in her assessment.”

  Scara melted at the sound of the man’s voice. It was melodious and deep like silk. He stood tall and broad and was much too old for her. His clean-shaven tan face was full of strong, pleasing angles and disarming charm. Black hair with plenty of gray matched a tailored black uniform and cloak.

  “Sister, contain yourself,” Sola whispered. “You look like a puppy out for a bone.”

  “Who says I’m not?” Scara’s hushed giggle was devilish.

  Sola smirked and shushed her by clearing her throat. “Who are you? Please explain.”

  “Girls. Ayvar.” Oksana stepped between them and motioned the man over. “I would like you to meet Lord-Hunter Cyrus. He’s down from Vandroya with business.”

  “Apologies, duchess, about this spontaneous plan. I hope you weren’t too attached to your man,” Cyrus said, nudging the dead guard’s body with the tip of his boot.

  “No. He was quite replaceable.”

  Flush with fury, Ayvar closed the distance between them. “You were testing them? My daughters? You were about to have me killed!”

  Oksana waved her delicate hand to the twins. “I simply placed your life in the hands of your daughters. You should feel proud. They were capable and quite ruthless too. Zero hesitation.”

  Sola folded her arms. “I don’t like tests.”

  “It was my call,” Cyrus told her. “I apologize. Please don’t be upset with the duchess. The way she spoke of you two made me curious. When she found out you were returning, it was the perfect opportunity to test your mettle.”

  “Did we pass?” Scara asked, a smile eating up her face.

  “Yes. Duchess, might we all be seated somewhere? I have a proposal.”

  “Of course.”

  Servants came to clean up the dead man’s mess while Oksana led them away to a private dining room. Everyone was seated at a large marble s
lab bathed in the yellow glow from hanging lanterns. More of Oksana’s servants flooded in, pouring hot glasses of expensive brandy with citrus slices, and offering a selection of fruits, cheeses, and honey. When the duchess cleared her throat, they left.

  “Everyone comfortable?” she asked.

  “I am!” Scara picked up a little chunk of white cheese.

  “Alright then,” Oksana paused to inhale the slices of lemon in her drink, “propose away, Cyrus.”

  “Yes!” Ayvar brought his fist down on the table. “Please do propose an explanation. What was possibly worth this, this—” his face reddened, “—insulting assault on my family?”

  “We weren’t the ones assaulted, Father.” Scara raised her glass to him. “Just you.”

  Lord-Hunter Cyrus leaned back in his seat and swirled the brandy, holding the glass up to the lantern glow. “You’ve raised fearless daughters, Sir Ayvar. They showed no hesitation when it came time to save you and were not afraid to take another man’s life in the process.”

  “Ruthlessness is in our blood.” Ayvar stared the man down like a hawk. “When you get old and have children, sometimes the savagery is tempered. But Sola and Scara are still as wild as they’ll ever be.”

  “I need that. I need savagery and fearlessness.”

  Oksana could sense the disquiet in the air with Cyrus’s words. The man had hit a nerve in Ayvar. Ayvar sat across from them with something so sour in his soul, she worried it would make them all sick.

  Sola sniffed her drink. “I’ll dismember a man any day, but I do not appreciate being reduced to a ‘fearless savage.’ I am young, and the world is mine for the picking. Don’t talk about me like I’m a soldier.”

  “Forgive me. Sometimes I forget that people are, well, people.”

  Ayvar scowled. “Get on with it, Lord-Hunter.”

  “Very well. My Hunters have been a disappointment to me. I’ve a task to complete, and I seem to have exhausted my resources trying to do that. I have only my most elite left—the Lions—but until I have this threat under my finger, I’m not willing to exhaust them too. I don’t yet know the full force of what I’m up against. All I know is that they are much more than what my sorry Hunters can handle.”