by Jordan Rivet
“Which inn do you usually stay at when you’re here?” Archer asked when the two farmhands passed out of earshot.
Briar hesitated. “The Bumblebird.”
He barked a laugh. “Classy.”
“I’ve been short on coin.”
“Let’s take a room at the Window Inn, then.”
Briar stiffened, her grip tightening on his coat sleeve. “We can’t do that.”
“We’re not going to stay the night.” He patted her hand again, hoping she wasn’t about to bolt. “You need to rest your swollen feet before we brave the Mud Market. It’s the first thing a young couple like us would do after a hard walk, given your condition.” Archer had no idea if that was true, but he had his own reasons for the stopover.
“I mean we can’t go to the Window Inn.” Briar lowered her voice as they reached the stone plinth marking the town border, where a few local watchmen loitered, inspecting the new arrivals. “I cursed it last time I was here. Every fourth person who walks through the front door gets the runs.”
Archer choked on his blade of grass. “That’s a pretty nasty curse.”
“All curses are nasty.”
“Still, what did the Window Inn ever do to you?”
“Nothing. It was a job.” She looked up at him, eyes fierce. “But the owner used to harass the serving girls whenever he checked up on the place. Now he stays away, and his business is dying.”
“I wasn’t judging you for it,” Archer said, surprised by her vehemence. “Although you did tell me you’ve only talked to the paint seller here.”
Briar’s gaze darted to the side, as if checking for escape routes. He didn’t think her wariness meant she was afraid, but she picked her battles carefully. “I’m entitled to a few secrets.”
“Fair enough.” Archer decided not to push it. They needed the day to go smoothly. Bringing Briar into town with him was already enough of a risk. “Hasn’t the innkeeper noticed the pattern of illnesses?”
“Yes, but last I heard, they hadn’t found the curse. I put it in an inconspicuous spot.”
“Care to fill me in?”
The ghost of a smile crossed Briar’s lips. “It’s on the underside of a floorboard behind the bar. I put the barman to sleep with a small curse and pried up the board to paint the big one where no one would find it.”
“Clever.”
“Thank you.” Briar lapsed into thoughtful silence for a few paces, then she said, “I don’t talk about my work much.”
“That’s a shame. It sounds like you’re good.”
“There are no good curses.” Her brow wrinkled. “That’s the problem.”
“You’re skilled, then.” Archer gave her a friendly nudge, but Briar’s smile didn’t return. He was beginning to understand what she meant about only working for a particular type of client. She wanted to be a moral curse painter. What a life that had to be. He wasn’t sure it was even possible. The curse on the Window Inn’s owner, for example, would have negative repercussions for the customers and the servings girls who may find themselves out of work before long. Briar had set herself a difficult task.
They walked farther into town, the dirt streets around them coming to life with scurrying farmers and eager craftsmen, hawkers and gawkers, and merchants of all types. Mud Market took its name from the sprawling covered market located beside the banks of a narrow fork of the Sweetwater River. The river marked the boundary between Barden and Larke territory, and some believed the fork’s location made the town part of Larke’s land too. Fortunately for Archer and others of his ilk, the ongoing disputes over jurisdiction kept the authorities occupied, making Mud Market an excellent place to flout the law.
The end-of-summer rush swelled the town’s population by threefold. Many of the visitors were honest, hardworking farm folk, who stared wide-eyed at the crowds, intent on drinking in a year’s worth of humanity before returning to their isolated fields. The myriad distractions presented by Mud Market made the rural visitors easy targets, though Archer preferred not to steal from those who had little to begin with. He didn’t have a problem with stealing in general—that would be no attitude for a career thief—but he focused on wealthy people with soft hands and heavy purses. They made for more interesting targets, with their bodyguards and their strongboxes full of coin.
Abruptly, Archer recognized a corpulent merchant he’d once held up on the road outside of town. No fewer than six armed guards surrounded the fellow as he ambled toward them, heading away from the market proper. Archer quickly steered Briar down a side street.
“How did you put the barman at the Window Inn to sleep?” he asked as they cut through an alley beside a stable reeking of horse manure. “Did he let you paint his hand or something?”
“I used a scrap curse.”
“Eh?”
“It’s just what I call them,” Briar said. “You can paint a curse on something, like a scrap of canvas or a rock, and touch it to your victim to get the magic to affect them. It’s called the Law of Proximity.”
Archer glanced behind them, but the corpulent merchant was no longer in sight. He drew Briar out of the alley and into the next street over. “I didn’t know curse painting has laws.”
“Three,” Briar said. “The Law of Proximity is number two. It says that a curse applied to an object can affect any person who comes in direct contact with that object except the painter. There’s also the Law of Wholes—a curse applied to an object affects that object in its entirety, regardless of whether the pieces are intact—and the Law of Resonance—a curse applied to an object of emotional significance can affect a person from a distance.”
“Emotional significance?”
“That’s right. Resonance is the strongest of the three laws. Touching someone with a random cursed object isn’t as powerful as, say, painting a curse on their favorite hat, which can work from a distance.”
Archer pulled Lew’s broad-brimmed hat off his head. “So you could paint something on this that would affect Lew clear on the other side of town?”
“Correct.” Briar touched the thin strip of red silk encircling the hat’s crown. “The stronger the emotional connection—the resonance—between the object and the person, the greater the distance can be between them. If it were a shirt he’d only worn a few times and didn’t care about, it probably wouldn’t work unless I could actually see him.”
Fascinated, Archer barely paid attention to the crowds as they ambled down a busy street lined with inns and taverns. He knew about the different types of art mages: curse painters, voice mages, and fortune scribes. They could do some of the same magic, like burning or moving things, but their abilities had limits. He’d never heard of the three laws, though, and he hadn’t realized how much a curse painter could do from afar.
“So these scrap curses can work with any object and any person as long as they’re touching?”
“Right.”
“Can other people use them, or does the curse painter have to be the one to touch the scrap to the victim?”
Briar gave him a bemused look, as if she could tell exactly where his thoughts had turned. “Anyone can use them, though obviously you wouldn’t want to touch the scrap with your bare skin or you’d wind up cursing yourself. But if I wanted to put you to sleep, and I didn’t have anything of yours, I could leave a scrap curse where I was sure you’d pick it up.”
“Huh.” A slow grin spread across Archer’s face at the thought of everything he could do with a stash of pre-painted curses.
Busy imagining all the fantastical possibilities, Archer accidentally jostled a broad-shouldered young man with a comically large mustache—a mustache he had seen Nat carefully applying to his face with paste that morning. The sight of one of his crew in disguise reminded Archer they had work to do.
He flipped Lew’s hat back onto his head. “Let’s take a room at the Dandelion. Unless we’ll end up with vomiting fits?”
“That one should be safe,” Briar said, “at least f
rom me.”
The Dandelion Inn was a ramshackle place tucked between two larger establishments, and it appeared to be suffering from the competition. Only a quarter of the tables in the common room were full, even at the lunch hour. The innkeeper handed a brass room key across her desk listlessly, as if she didn’t care whether or not they returned it.
The room, located up a rickety staircase, wasn’t much bigger than the hollowed-out oak back at their camp, and it smelled of moist wool and despair. As soon as they were inside, Archer tossed his hat on the lumpy bed and began to take off his clothes.
Briar stiffened. “What are you doing?”
“Hand over your baby,” Archer said. “Jemma stuck a few things in there for me.”
Briar narrowed her eyes, and again Archer couldn’t tell if she was poised to fight or flee. She yanked the bundle of rags out from beneath her dress and tossed it to him across the cramped room. She turned away as he tugged his coarse woolen shirt off over his head.
Archer chuckled. “Didn’t figure you for a prude, Miss Painter.”
Briar snorted, keeping her back to him.
He pulled a new shirt over his head, this one made of fine—albeit wrinkled—silk. He used the rough farmer’s shirt to scrub the mud off his boots and breeches. Finally, he splashed some water from the washbasin onto his hair, slicking it back until it shined. In all that time, Briar didn’t once turn to look at him. Archer felt a little disappointed by that.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” he announced. “Don’t open the door for anyone but me.”
Briar spun around. “Wait! Where are you going?”
“I’m off to see a man about a dog. We’ll head to the market as soon as I return.”
“But—”
“Don’t forget to rest your swollen feet, darling.”
Archer closed the door before Briar could object further. He was gambling that she would actually listen and remain in the room. She couldn’t accompany him to his meeting, and it would be a good test of her trustworthiness before he risked taking her on the job. He needed to know she wouldn’t run off at the first opportunity. Besides, the whole team was in town in various guises. They would keep an eye out for her.
He slipped out through the common room without the innkeeper so much as looking up from her desk and set off, adopting the saunter of a man with too much money and not nearly enough sense. He needed to drop in on his old friend Kurt at his favorite tavern to see if he would help with a missing piece of the plan. It shouldn’t take more than an hour.
Chapter 7
Briar marched back and forth across the tiny room, debating how much longer she should wait. Archer had been gone for nearly four hours. Afternoon light slanted sharply through the leaded windows, illuminating a patch of the threadbare bedspread. The market would close at sundown. If Archer didn’t return soon, they would be stuck there overnight. Briar didn’t like the idea of sharing that lumpy little bed with him, though she supposed it would be better than the floor.
The memory of the smooth plane of Archer’s back popped into her head unbidden. She’d snuck a glance at him as he’d changed his shirt, though she didn’t think he’d noticed.
Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself severely. She tugged her hair out of the tight bun, letting it fall loose over her shoulders, and rubbed her aching scalp as if to scratch out the illicit image.
Archer had obviously been held up. Dare she venture out to secure the paint supplies on her own? Jemma had given her some money, and it would save them further delay, but she wasn’t sure she could find her way back to the hollowed-out oak alone. The others had probably already finished their shopping and left town. If Archer had run into the local authorities, Briar could be the only thing standing between him and a slow swing on the gallows.
She would face that and worse if she got caught, though. Sheriff Flynn could even now be scouring Mud Market for her, if his search had brought him that far. She couldn’t just wander around out there.
Although she had only known Archer for a few days, Briar felt rudderless without him. Archer had the vision, as Nat said, and since joining his scheme, she’d felt as if her life was actually going somewhere—though the direction was unexpected. She wanted to see where the path led.
“If he ever comes back,” she muttered. “What is taking so long?”
The light was fading fast outside. Briar couldn’t afford to wait any longer. She stuffed the remaining rags and Archer’s muddy farmer shirt under her dress, attempting to make her belly the same size as before, and snuck out through the common room. The innkeeper was snoozing at her desk. Briar nicked the woman’s inkwell as she passed. Curses made with coal ink like that would be rough, but it was better than nothing. She needed magic in her hands again.
The bustle of activity in Mud Market had changed from industrious to celebratory while Briar had waited at the Dandelion. Their shopping done for the day, the out-of-towners sought drinks and entertainment in the taverns surrounding the market proper. Spirits high and arms overflowing with packages, they laughed and called to each other as they tramped through the streets. Briar watched out for members of Archer’s band, though she wasn’t sure she would recognize their disguises.
Her own disguise drew more attention than she liked, with well-meaning people stopping to wish her good health and inquire when her child was due. Next time, she would try an eyepatch and a hat. With luck, Sheriff Flynn hadn’t distributed Briar’s description so far from Sparrow Village anyway.
The market wasn’t hard to find. Once stretching from the town square to the muddy banks of the Sweetwater’s southern fork, the market had grown over time, and the stalls sprawled all the way across the square and squeezed amongst the bordering houses. So many burlap awnings stretched between the stalls and the rooftops that they formed a single canopy blocking out sun and rain, encompassing nearly a third of the town.
The venders were already packing up their merchandise for the evening when Briar walked beneath the patchwork canopy. The stifling air within the market smelled of sweat, cut wood, and a multitude of spices. Anything could be purchased in Mud Market, from farm tools to textiles to metal works to herbs and edible delicacies. A few mages even set up shop peddling healing spells, fortunes, and minor curses. Most were unlicensed, and they had to be ready to disappear at a moment’s notice in case of a raid.
The paint seller’s wares were technically benign, and his stall was in the same place Briar had last seen it. She approached cautiously, relieved he hadn’t yet gone home for the night. The other vendors were too focused on their work to pay her much heed.
Briar paused in a narrow aisle to allow a woman with an armful of pale linens to totter across her path. Still twenty paces from the paint stall, she was about to continue onward when a shock of blond hair and a familiar face caught her eye.
So that’s where Archer has been all day.
Briar turned aside and headed down another cramped aisle toward the town square, located entirely within the sprawling market. Archer knelt at its center, his neck and arms clamped into wooden stocks. He still wore his fine silk shirt, but bits of rotten vegetables smeared his hair, and he had the makings of a rather impressive black eye. A town watchman sat on a stool beside the stocks, whittling a stick into splinters.
Briar hid behind a large stack of barrels smelling of brandy and watched Archer for a moment. A group of children with dirty feet darted up to spit at him then dashed away, cackling madly. Until then, Briar had wondered if Archer’s absence had been a test to see what she would do when left to her own devices. The others could be watching her, ready to stab her in the gut if she tried to give away their plans, but Archer looked like he was really in trouble.
Another passerby spit at the shackled outlaw, and he gave a forlorn sigh. Briar couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She scanned the market for familiar faces once more then marched toward the center of the square.
“Well, this is undignified,” Archer said a
s she approached.
“What happened to you?”
“I cheated someone at cards last time I was here,” Archer said. “Turns out Mud Market folk hold grudges.”
“Is that right?” Briar sensed a lie—or at least a half truth. She checked for signs of an ambush, but the watchman was still whittling away. He looked her over then returned to his stick, clearly not worried the young pregnant woman would either endanger or liberate his prisoner.
Archer lowered his voice. “Any chance you could curse this thing off me?”
“I’m sure I could.”
“Will you?”
“That depends.” Briar moved closer so the watchman couldn’t overhear. “This seems like a good opportunity to ask for something. You’d probably give me whatever I want if I help.”
“I get it.” Archer sighed theatrically. “You want me to promise you the, uh, pleasures of my company if you free me.”
Briar blinked. “That isn’t even remotely what I meant.”
“Are you sure? Because if you’re interested …”
Briar gaped at him. “Excuse me?”
“I am joking, of course,” Archer said quickly, his cheeks going red. “Nat might tear me limb from limb. I wouldn’t do that to the lad.”
“Sure you wouldn’t.”
“I happen to be a gentleman.”
Briar folded her arms and quirked an eyebrow, imitating Archer’s typical expression. “A gentleman in the stocks in the middle of Mud Market. Never thought I’d see the day.”
Despite her breezy tone, Briar felt wrong-footed. She was supposed to be the one with the power. What did he mean about not doing that to Nat? And why did the statement leave her with a vague feeling of disappointment?
Archer cleared his throat and jiggled his hands. “Are you going to let me out or not?” His wrists were raw and bleeding from the rough wooden stocks, and his neck looked almost as bad, even without the smudges of rotten tomato and carrot marring his skin.