Curse and Whisper

by A J Gala

  He stirred in his sleep a little, and she didn’t notice he’d opened his eyes.

  Alor didn’t look toward the door this time. He didn’t really look at anything, only staring ahead blankly into the shadows. He knew he’d been sick—he’d been hearing people say as much every time they passed by him. He’d felt hot and uncomfortable mostly, which he attributed to sickness as everyone kept saying, but there was more than that. It was harder to think now, like his head worked differently.

  He wondered if maybe he would start having visions like Mariette. Was this how it started? He had no idea. But thinking made him feel stuck now. And it made him angry. Frustrated? No, angry. But he was too tired to talk about it or show it beyond gripping the blankets tight. Why did the anger stay so long? He’d been angry lots of times, but it never lived past the moment. Not like this. This anger sank in deep and made it hard to think. A daze.

  He didn’t even know what he was angry at.

  Adeska swept her fingers through his hair again. The brief moment of comfort was enough for him to fall asleep again.

  “I hope everything turns out okay,” she whispered with a sigh. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s even possible anymore.”

  He heard her words but didn’t process them.

  “Once upon a time, everything was so simple.” She gently rubbed his little shoulder. “It’s shocking how complicated it’s all become. And it only looks like it’ll get worse. Like we’ve started something that’ll carry on long after we’re gone…”

  He was out cold, breathing slow and peaceful. She smiled.

  He looked so much like Centa. He was tall for his age already, and his little features were on the way to becoming strong and commanding. But there was something soft about him too. A gentle soul that wasn’t like Centa’s or her own. She thanked Rori for it.

  As she thought of Centa, she expected more pain. But instead, her heart swelled, and she couldn’t understand it. He was gone. He’d left and taken Phio—which she did feel pain over—and it was likely that she’d never see him again. The love of her life. Yes, he was violent and uncontrollable, but it was never anything that she’d grown to hate. On the contrary, she loved it.

  She had the same tendencies towards violence and the overbearing emotions that accompanied it. She had learned a great deal more control over those tendencies than he ever had, but, in a way, his own horrible flaws made her feel safe. Validated. She was safe to love herself despite her own terrible nature.

  Their love was violence. The people that knew had always told her to break away from something so awful. They’d said it was wrong, that no one who loved her would hurt her. But how could they say something so blind? She loved him with all her heart and was just as guilty of hurting him. She and Centa had never been scared of each other. They accepted each other. They understood. No matter what horrible things they had done to each other over the years, they were always beside each other to help heal the damage. And it had made them strong.

  It was a love no one believed in. Phio was the only one who had come close. He knew Centa better than anyone. He knew the violence just as deeply as she did. But unlike her, Phio believed he deserved better than Centa’s darkness and was dedicated to changing it. Was that how she was supposed to be too?

  He couldn’t be changed. But even though she loved him exactly the way he was, she did wish he could have been tempered at least a little bit… for the sake of their children.

  Adeska missed him. She knew she did. She was supposed to. But she couldn’t find the feelings of loss and longing that she expected. Rather, the more her thoughts lingered on how she’d never see him again, the closer she felt to him.

  In fact, since she’d woken, she felt closer to him now than she ever had. It felt like there was a piece of him coursing through her very being, like he’d never left her side and never would.

  She pushed him from her thoughts, focusing on Alor’s breathing. With her head still resting on the blankets, she glanced over to him, watching his little body gently rise and sink. He looked so comfortable.

  “Your sister is with Athen right now,” she muttered. “When you’re better, you should spend time with him too.”

  House Hallenar was in a state of utter chaos, at least compared to what she was used to. People were coming and going, some permanently like Centa and Phio, and some temporarily to be considered as house staff. Cato’s arrival had stirred things up too, and Adeska worried about what all the changes would do to her usually stoic Mariette.

  She was a girl who could tolerate just about any surroundings, but everyone had a breaking point. Adeska couldn’t help but worry. Athen had decided to spend some time with his niece, having a nice meal and some story time with her to try and restore a sense of normalcy.

  Adeska tried to imagine what kind of story Athen would tell her, but her train of thought was broken by screaming and crying and the pitter-patter of bare feet running down the hallway outside.

  Mariette.

  Adeska sat up and rose. It wasn’t like her daughter to succumb to hysterics. Something was wrong. She opened her bedroom door, and Mariette came to her red-faced, out of breath, and in tears.

  “Mari! What’s wrong?” Adeska picked her up and cradled her for a moment before bringing her inside and setting her down on her rug.

  Mariette tried to calm herself, but still, her words dribbled out shaky and broken. Adeska sat with her and held her hands.

  “It’s too soon!” Mariette sobbed.

  “What’s too soon? It’s okay, Mari. Go slow. Everything is going to be okay—”

  “No, I don’t know! It happened too soon!” She crawled up onto Adeska’s lap and grabbed little fistfuls of her shirt. “The mirror broke too soon!”

  “The mirror.” She picked Mariette up and gently set her back down on the floor, then tipped her face up and stared into her eyes. Adeska had handed off the debris to Madame Blanche to dispose of before coming to Alor. “Are you talking about Tizzy’s mirror? The one that Rori dropped?”

  “Everyone was supposed to see something.” Mariette wiped her tears away, but more came. “But they didn’t. The mirror broke too soon.”

  Adeska’s heart started thumping wildly. “When you say everyone is supposed to see something, Mari, do you mean like… like a vision?” She smoothed her skirts down. Her fingers ran down the rough fabric and a bump from an object in her skirt’s pocket. “Do you mean like the vision that I have? You know the one. Don’t you?”

  “Auntie Tizzy and that man. Under the moon.”

  “Yes. You probably know about… about—” she took a chance and said his name, “—Aleth’s too, don’t you?”

  “All the bodies by the river.”

  Adeska bit her lip. “And when you say everyone is supposed to have one, do you mean the rest of your aunts and uncles too?”

  “Even Uncle Rhett saw something.” Mariette hiccupped. “Someone. But his wasn’t a vision. It was a visit.” She wept, the fat tears rolling down her puffy cheeks. “But the mirror broke. It’s gone. I don’t know now. I don’t know what everything means now.”

  Adeska tried to piece her daughter’s words together. Was the mirror the catalyst for the family’s emerging visions? She took Mariette’s hands in her own.

  “No one cleaned up the mess right after it happened,” Adeska told her. “I walked into Tizzy’s room earlier looking for a book I had lent her years ago when I walked into it. I cleaned it up and then asked around to find out what happened. Rori told me she dropped it this morning, but she wouldn’t tell me why she was in there in the first place.”

  “Things don’t look right anymore. I can’t see. It’s clouds.”

  “Your visions? Like the ones with the people in the fire sometimes?”

  “The mirror is gone! It’s too soon! It wasn’t supposed to happen yet!”

  “It’s…” Adeska touched the bump in her pocket again. “It’s not all gone, Mari.”

  “What?”


  Adeska slipped her hand inside her pocket and took out a fragment of the mirror. “I couldn’t just throw it all away. It was my mother’s. I cherished it. We all did. I wanted to keep a piece.”

  Mariette stared up at her with big, glassy, blank eyes.

  “What do you see?” Adeska asked her.

  “Everything. Nothing.”

  Adeska looked at the mirror fragment. She’d softened the edges on a stone so they couldn’t cut her. It had been reduced to just a pretty trinket.

  “Your visions. They’re in flux.” A chill pricked up all the skin on her body. “If you saw everyone get a vision because of the mirror but now the mirror is broken and they can’t, what does that mean? Are your visions not set in stone? Are any of them? Are you saying they can change?”

  “It’s never been clouds before.”

  Adeska showed her the piece of the mirror. “Mari, what do I do?”

  The girl started crying again, harder than before.

  “Mari, please! The things that Aleth has seen, they need to change! Those visions can’t come true!”

  But Mariette kept crying. Adeska sighed and held her, wrapping her arms around her tight. Her daughter was out of her element. She’d gone from being fearless because she knew everything that would happen to suddenly being just as confused and vulnerable as a normal child.

  Soon, Athen was in the doorway, peering inside.

  “I’m sorry, I tried to keep her from running off, but—”

  “Mari.” Adeska looked up at Athen, unblinking. “Mari, I need to know. Has Athen seen his?”

  Between hiccups and gasps, Mariette answered. “It was the baby.”

  Athen’s eyes widened, and he took a step back. “Whoa. Wait, what’s going on? What are you talking about?”

  Adeska rocked Mariette a little, and the cries calmed.

  “The last time you touched Tizzy’s mirror—Mother’s mirror—something happened, didn’t it? You had a vision.”

  His jaw dropped a little. “Th-the baby. I did, I saw—how does she know that?”

  “The mirror was supposed to give us all a vision, except Tizzy, I think. I don’t know how or why—I don’t even know what all the visions are supposed to mean—but Mari says in some way, it was supposed to give us one. But it broke. And now her visions are acting up. I don’t know what that means for her. But I think…”

  “What is it?” Athen said, sitting down with her. “Why did you stop?”

  “The mirror isn’t completely gone. I have a piece. I think I could help everyone else get their visions. But I don’t know if I should. I think when we piece them together, they aren’t going to be something good that we want to happen.”

  She looked down at Mariette, still in her arms. The girl had quieted. She had no more words to say and stared ahead in a daze.

  “Athen, I don’t know what to do.”

  Lord-Hunter Cyrus had commandeered a massive room in the Marble Palace for training purposes. He oversaw Sola and Scara’s lessons with finely crafted weapons straight from Vandroya. Sola was tireless, doing drills all through the day and night with knives and swords and a new axe that was perfectly balanced. The axe was still her favorite. She’d picked up knowledge of a few more petty magic spells for her arsenal too. She felt ready for the field.

  Scara had made improvements as well. She was nimble and flexible and could do tricks with her whip that Cyrus couldn’t have ever dreamed up himself. She knew too much about the human body and where to hit for the most pain or internal damage. Her aim was better than her sister’s, so she’d been trained with a flintlock pistol. After a day, her palms were bruised, but she could hit her target.

  “The moving ones are a little tricky,” she said, massaging the pain out of her hands. “But people are stupid, and you can usually tell where they’re going.”

  Cyrus had brought them to a smaller room, a workspace for his projects and for Scara’s reconstructed poison. She had spent several hours in the morning working on it already. Cyrus ushered in Sola and Ayvar and a dragonkind man they had never met before.

  The dragonkind didn’t have as reptilian of features as many others of his race did. His face was more humanoid, with the exception of a long, square jaw. Mostly tan scales covered his face, but some were dark brown and even blue. A row of little horns lined each eyebrow. His smooth white hair was slicked down his back. As soon as he entered the room, he headed for a silk-lined crate in the corner.

  Sola stood next to her twin and sniffed the air. “Ugh, sister you smell like medicine.”

  “It’s all this gray holland,” Scara said. A pile of fuzzy gray stalks with tiny white flowers was on her station. “I kind of like it. Clears your sinuses right out!”

  Cyrus shut the door on them and joined her, observing her mess of plants and oils. “How is your progress? When can I expect a finished product?”

  “When it’s done,” she scoffed. “My progress is excellent. I think I’ve isolated the ingredients that do the damage, but without anything to test on, it’s impossible to know for sure. But what I’ve made certainly does look and smell like Mother Tryphaena’s concoction.” She held up a glass jar and shook its gray contents. “I hope you know just how difficult a task this is. You were lucky to have found me.”

  Cyrus nodded. “The duchess’s town is full-up with creatures to test on. I will have a subject to you before the night is over.”

  Scara bit her lip on a giant smile filled to the brim with pride. “It needs a name, doesn’t it? All great poisons have a name, and we can’t just keep calling this one the poison forever.”

  “What did you have in mind, Lady Scara?” He was careful to keep his voice level. There was no emotion, only business.

  She set the jar back down on the workstation and sighed as prettily as she could. “Everyone’s always going on about how bloodkin are injured by silver this and silver that. This poison is loaded with gray holland, and gray is just silver without the shine. Doubly so if it turns out to be the effective ingredient. I’m going to call it root of silver.”

  Sola put her arm around her sister’s shoulder. “Now that is a name that will sell.”

  Ayvar wasn’t interested in the conversation in the slightest and had only bothered to stay at all to watch Cyrus like a hawk. But his eyes drifted. He watched the dragonkind at the other end of the room. He rummaged through crates and had started building something out of thick glass slabs. First, he set up four sides like a box, then set a clean and polished lantern inside that flickered with white light. The next crate he dug through contained more slabs, but they weren’t glass. Ayvar squinted as they came out of the crate. Thick pieces of a milky opalescent material that was smooth and glossy on top. The dragonkind took one in his clawed hands and held it up.

  “Lord-Hunter,” he called, “the viewer is ready. Would you like to go over the lens?”

  “Yes.” He broke away from Scara at once and came to the contraption the dragonkind had called a viewer. “I would like to review that one in particular. Sir Ayvar, ladies, why don’t you come have a look?”

  “Indeed,” Ayvar grumbled, stepping closer with his arms folded. “What is this foolishness?”

  “You’re looking at a viewer for dragonquartz,” Cyrus told him. “Near Yzen Vale is the Wyvern Spine, a long mountain range connected by a single massive cave. The inside is lined with what they call dragonquartz.”

  “It’s not like your quartz,” the dragonkind said, snorting a little. “The alchemists have made a special formula, and when a sheet of dragonquartz is coated with it and held up like this—” he held it out like a window, “—all it takes is one bright flash of some light, and everything in front of the coated side is burned in, and you can look at it like a painting. All you need is some light to view it.”

  “Really?” Scara lit up. “That’s incredible! I want to see!” She rushed over with Sola as the dragonkind set the dragonquartz on the viewer. Lit up from underneath, it was a bright cream color wit
h ribbons of white. The heat trapped in the viewer brought out the details in the dragonquartz. A picture appeared in shades of burnt brown.

  A boy in his teens sat in a chair, his hands chained in front of him. He was scared, his wide eyes staring ahead at the dragonquartz slab, at a procedure he had likely never seen before. The torn, frayed edges of his cloak could be seen in the picture.

  “Who is this boy?” Scara asked. “His face is familiar. I can’t possibly know him, but I can’t shake the feeling that I do. Look, Sola. What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. I suppose he’s familiar. I don’t know about that nose, though.”

  Cyrus put his hands on the edges of the dragonquartz. “This image was captured a long time ago. Nine years, I believe. It’s the boy I told you about, the nightwalker we had in our custody. The Raven.” Every time he looked at the scared face, it made him angry. The boy never should have escaped. His Hunters were useless. “A mercenary camp was reported somewhere between the Bogwood and the Wistwilds yesterday. Every single person was murdered, including three men who work for me. They were killed in a particularly brutal fashion.”

  “You suspect the Raven?” Scara asked.

  “It was a bloodkin who killed some. At least some. Three of them had bite wounds from fangs. And those three were the ones who worked for me. They were three out of a group of four who were in charge of the Raven when he was in our captivity. They were responsible for—” he tongued the inside of his cheek in thought, “—collecting data.”

  “Torture,” Sola said. “It’s alright, Lord-Hunter. We’re all adults here.”

  “It was not senseless, I assure you. It was done with the intent of collecting information on the species of bloodkin. Nightwalkers are illusive creatures that we don’t know—”

  “Did it work?” Ayvar stood behind the girls, stroking his beard with a sour frown. “Did you actually learn a damn thing at all?”