by Jordan Rivet
“This is all very enlightening,” Esteban said, “but it doesn’t get us any closer to achieving our goal of extracting the lady from Narrowmar.”
“True,” Archer said. “But now you all know what we’re dealing with and why it’s so important that we get there before the baby is born. Also, the lady herself might not be able to leap from rooftop to rooftop during the escape.”
“Lord Larke will stop at nothing to prevent her from being taken,” Jemma said. “He believes that baby belongs to him, regardless of the mother’s wishes.”
“And he knows we’re coming.” Lew gave the woods a dark glance. “We don’t operate in this county enough to justify a wanted poster in every town.”
“About that,” Briar said. “Why isn’t your face on the poster, Archer?”
Archer shrugged. “Yours isn’t either.”
“I haven’t been with you for long, but if Larke knows your team is here, he must be aware you are too.”
“Perhaps,” Archer said lightly.
Briar clearly wasn’t the only member of the team who didn’t know how Archer had gotten tangled up with Larke and Barden and their offspring. Nat squinted contemplatively into the middle distance, picking at a loose thread on his patchwork coat. Lew was scanning the woods as if expecting another attack. Esteban looked as if he were regretting signing up for their mission. Briar was beginning to think there weren’t nearly enough of them to pull off the job, even with her cleverest curses.
Archer rubbed his hands together briskly and nodded at the prisoner. “That’s enough storytelling for one night. Shall we wake this fellow up and see if he knows anything about our target?”
Esteban removed the curse stone from the prisoner’s skin, and the young man came to again, blinking at his captors as if unaware he’d been unconscious for the past few minutes.
“What’s going on?” he asked blearily.
“You were going to tell us about Narrowmar,” Esteban said.
“Oh.” The prisoner took a deep breath. “That’s a real story.” He looked around at them, perhaps assessing his chances of ever walking away from their campsite alive. They weren’t good. “If I tell you everything, will you let me join your gang? I reckon being an outlaw would be better than going back after that.”
Esteban snorted. “Why don’t you impress us with something useful, and we’ll consider your application?”
“All right.” The prisoner sat up straighter, looking less afraid already. “Narrowmar. Where do I start?”
The answer turned out to be nowhere. As he began to speak, his eyes suddenly bulged, and his face darkened. A horrible gurgling sound came from his throat. He reached for his neck, spasming like a grotesque puppet. Esteban jerked back in surprise.
“What’s happening?” Nat asked.
“He’s cursed.” Briar dropped to her knees at his side, searching his clothing for any sign of the offending painting. The boy reached for her with his bound hands, his eyes wide and rolling. “Hold still,” she ordered him. “I’m trying to help.”
She pulled back his collar and caught a glimpse of lead-tin yellow and bone black. The colors of illness and death formed a picture of a locked box—a curse to protect Narrowmar’s secrets. Briar tried to unbutton the prisoner’s coat, but the curse was too quick. He stiffened, and a final choking sound escaped his swollen lips. Then his eyes glazed over, and he fell straight backward onto the campfire.
The others leapt forward to grab him, shouting, and sparks filled the air. Briar dropped back, reaching reflexively for her satchel.
Archer drew his bow, training the arrow on the darkness. “Is there a curse painter out there?”
“I don’t think so,” Briar said. The smell of meat and burned fabric made her nauseous. “That curse prevents betrayal. If I had some purple I might have unraveled it in time.” She couldn’t look at the young soldier she’d been too slow to save.
Lew tried to revive the fellow, pumping his chest and listening for his breath, but it was no use. He sat back, shaking his head. A few sparks from the disturbed fire caught in his beard. “Poor lad. He was going to help us.”
“Why did they do that to one of their own men?” Nat asked nervously.
“Larke views his men as expendable. He always has.” Archer sounded angry, as angry as he’d been when they’d discovered the curse on New Chester. His knuckles whitened on his bow as he surveyed the darkness. The other members of the Larke patrol formed lumpy shapes in the firelight. At least they’d fallen in honest combat.
Briar glanced at the would-be outlaw and shuddered. No one deserved to perish like that. Worse, the curse that had taken his life had almost certainly been painted by her parents. She had hoped New Chester had been a one-time commission. Apparently, she was wrong. Cold dread crept through her body.
Archer released the tension on his bowstring and lowered the weapon. “We’re moving camp.”
Lew got to his feet. “I’ll fetch the horses.”
“We can’t go to Narrowmar now,” Briar said. “Whoever is guarding the place might know we’re here after this.” She had thought their mission stood a chance of succeeding when her parents didn’t know they were coming, but if any of the patrol had escaped …
“We are not giving up,” Archer said.
Briar faced him, trying not to say too much in front of the others. “I told you it would be impossible if anyone knows we’re here.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Archer—”
He cut her off harshly. “I am going into that fortress whether you come with me or not. You claimed you were up for the challenge. You claimed you wanted to help the weak. If you’re going to leave that pregnant girl at the hands of anyone who tries to hurt her, then you’re not who I thought you were.”
Briar’s mouth tightened, and the old destructive urge rose up to batter against the seawall of his anger. He might be upset and desperate, but that didn’t give him the right to fling what she’d told him back in her face. Her fingers twitched, wishing for a paintbrush. Her father had warned her that personal crusades were messy. “You can’t let your clients’ passions interfere with your work.”
“And who are you, Archer?” she shot back. “Or are you going to keep denying that this quest is personal?”
Archer stared at her, chest heaving as if he was trying to master his anger. None of the others so much as breathed.
“I’m nobody,” he said. “At least not anymore. Regardless of my personal history with the Larkes, I am not going to let them and their allies win. If you’re going to leave, do it now.”
He marched over to the horses and began saddling the bay. His tall shape looked even larger in the shadows cast by the scattered coals, almost menacing. Tension showed in the lines of his body and the jerky movements of his hands.
The urge to run roiled in Briar’s chest. She’d spent the past year trying to avoid her parents’ notice, hiding in the outer counties, changing her name. Leaving would be the logical thing to do, but it was spineless too. She had taken the coward’s way out when she left High Lure. Breaking her parents’ magical defenses and slinking out of the city wasn’t the way to show them her strength. And you thought you were so talented.
Briar had thought she could live a better and more ethical life away from them, but she’d failed at that too. Instead of using curse magic for good, she’d added evil to the world, bit by tiny bit. She didn’t know how to turn it into anything else.
Then Archer looked up from his saddlebags, his eyes finding hers. There was a challenge in them but also a hint of compassion, of understanding, of a desire to fix something in the world despite what he’d become.
She remembered what he’d said to her in the moonlight. “Your soul matters.” She might have failed in her bid for goodness, but she was trying. She was struggling against her parents’ legacy every day. That mattered. And even though they frightened her, maybe it was time to stand up and fight her parents directly. Thwarti
ng them and their clients’ schemes might be the only good she had to offer the world.
“I’m still in,” she said at last. “No matter who is guarding Narrowmar.”
“Good.” Archer gave a grim nod, as if he could read her thoughts in the blaze of her eyes. “What do you say we go peel that place open like an orange?”
Chapter 18
As Archer marshalled his companions in the woods near New Chester, the captain of the Narrowmar garrison marched down the stronghold’s central corridor. His boots thudded on the stone floor, and his sword swung at his hip, the leather sheath creaking with each step. Now in his seventies, the captain had had command of the stronghold for thirty-eight years, each quieter and dustier than the last. His bones ached often, and he’d begun to wonder if it was time to resign his post.
No one had attempted an assault on the fortress in his lifetime. Narrowmar was so remote that it no longer made a viable target in wartime. In ancient days, it had been the heart and fist of another realm, but the centers of power had moved on, leaving a relic in the form of an impenetrable keep.
The stronghold was no traditional fort with turrets and towers and moats filled with sludge. Narrowmar was a natural wonder, a series of caves and tunnels cut deep into a mountainside. A spring burbled from its roots, and a great stone door guarded its only entrance. The formation was so perfectly suited for defense that some said the gods of the higher realms had built it to hold their darkest secrets. Whoever had won it from the gods must have been powerful, but these days, the fortress passed from father to son like a locked box.
The House of Larke had controlled the keep for generations but saw little need to maintain a large garrison. They’d built a grand castle near a major trade route and resented paying soldiers to sit in safety at the remote stronghold. The Larkes had stopped assigning recruits to Narrowmar nearly twenty years ago. The rooms had fallen into disrepair, and the vaulted ceilings sagged with the weight of years. Eventually, the remaining soldiers had moved into a single section of the underground barracks, giving the rest over to dust and spiders.
The old captain ran a hand through his thinning white hair, remembering the young wife who’d kept him company there for a time. Her laughter had filled the underground passageways, and the captain had been certain they were destined to stay forever, the unofficial lord and lady of the ancient hall. They would fill their domain with children, who would inherit the stewardship of the keep like the scions of ancient kings.
But the captain’s young wife hadn’t cared for Narrowmar as he did. She wasn’t content to live beneath the mountain. One day she had gone out to pick wildflowers and met a young soldier from the king’s army. He’d offered her a life where their children could live in the sunshine, not rule over corridors of dust. Within a fortnight of their meeting, she had gone. And the captain had settled deeper into the fortress, clinging like grime to its ancient stones.
Other soldiers accepted the same fate, living out their days in a deployment devoid of bloodshed and action. The captain oversaw those men faithfully, putting them through rigorous daily exercises. A handful could hold Narrowmar against whole armies, and the old soldiers stood ready. The captain had never held the great stone door against an enemy, foreign or domestic, but Narrowmar was his dominion, and he kept it well.
Then one day, Jasper Larke, the faraway liege lord of the forgotten fortress, had ordered a company of reinforcements to Narrowmar to prepare for the arrival of one Lady Mae Barden. It was the second time Narrowmar had hosted such a guest.
The old captain hardly knew what to do with the lively young men who suddenly occupied his barracks, filling the underground passages with clamor and warmth. When the daily exercises weren’t enough to sap their youthful energy, he set them to cleaning up the fortress, sweeping dust from its corridors and repairing the ancient adornments—the statues and fountains and elaborate stone pillars, artifacts of a forgotten age. He began to feel that the old place still needed him after all.
Then came a summer evening when a well-dressed couple—he with luminous eyes and a haughty aspect, she with frizzy hair and fire in her gaze—arrived on horseback and informed him they were taking over the stronghold’s defenses. The couple carried orders direct from the hand of Lord Larke himself, yet they spoke like people from High Lure, more suited to the luxuries of the king’s city than the peace of the outer counties.
Unlike the young soldiers, the two strangers were not armed with bluster and fresh-forged steel. They carried boxes full of pigments, horsehair paintbrushes, and linseed oil. They set up their supplies in Lord Larke’s chamber off the fortress’s main corridor, and they set to painting.
The old captain knew little of mages and less of art, so he paid them no heed—until he saw their curses at work. It happened during the lunch hour. One of the newer soldiers was caught stealing decrepit sculptures from a little-used banquet hall to sell in the antique market back home. The captain would have docked his pay and been done with it, but the curse painters insisted on having him dragged before them in chains in the middle of the soldiers’ mess hall.
The captain would have stopped them if he’d known what they had planned. He told himself so often.
The woman had taken the lead, standing over the young soldier, wild hair cascading around her shoulders like a queen’s mantle. “Narrowmar is one of the finest examples of the ancient stone arts left in the kingdom of Lure,” she said, her voice ringing as loud and clear as a struck anvil. “Such destruction cannot be tolerated.”
“It was just a bit of a statue.” The soldier looked embarrassed at being caught, but he wasn’t wise enough to be afraid.
“That statue has graced these halls for hundreds of years,” the woman said. “This fortress is wasted on Lord Larke, but he has asked us to protect it. That includes every cornice, every moldy tapestry, every marble bust, no matter how ugly. We will not allow a treasure such as this to be plundered.”
“No one uses this pit,” the soldier said. “And the decorations—”
“Art,” the woman cut in, “does not need to be used.”
“Yes,” her husband said, his voice giving the impression of a cookpot bubbling inside him. “And it should not be commodified by a lowlife soldier with no inkling of Narrowmar’s significance.”
The old captain bristled at that. He might not be highborn, but he resented his men being called lowlifes by strangers from the city.
The woman bent closer to the soldier. “You will be punished for your lack of reverence.”
“Now look here, sir, madam,” the captain cut in. “We have a protocol to address—”
The woman raised a slim, paint-spattered hand, proffering the letter from Lord Larke granting her authority. “We shall handle any disciplinary actions from now on.”
The captain scowled. “As the commanding—”
“What do you say, darling?” the woman asked her husband. “The incendiary?”
He inclined his head. “I think that’s the right choice, given the damages done.”
She smiled. “It’s one of my favorites.” She flicked her fingers at the old captain as if he were the lowliest servant. “I need an item of clothing from the culprit, preferably one he wears often.”
The captain didn’t move. He was not accustomed to taking orders in his own fortress. Then the woman turned to face him, and he recoiled. Her eyes were worse than cruel, seeming to contain every dark desire that had spilled forth from the captain’s soul in his worst moments—the silent profanities he had slung at his wife as she left him, the verbal ones he had shouted to the mountain after she was gone. He saw the same darkness and anger concentrated in the curse painter’s eyes—and he was afraid.
“A jacket or hat will do,” she whispered.
The captain turned stiffly. “Your cap, soldier.”
The young statue thief handed over his woolen cap, more confused than nervous. The woman plucked it from his hand without making eye contact with either the
soldier or the captain. Her husband nodded, his large eyes mirroring her intensity. They moved as a unit, sharing a single purpose.
The woman knelt on the floor to paint an image of a cauldron hung over a blazing fire on the hat. The captain didn’t claim to know much about art, but it was prettily done. He nearly offered her a compliment.
Then the soldier who had stolen the statue began to wail. The captain wouldn’t soon forget that sound. It keened in his nightmares for weeks afterward, even though he heard worse cries later. That was the first, the moment he should have stopped it all, but he hadn’t. He feared the curse painters, as anyone who looked into their eyes would, and he let them do as they pleased.
He picked up his pace, though his feet felt heavy and his bones ached worse than ever. Maybe stopping that first punishment wouldn’t have done any good. Maybe the curse painters would have turned their fell magic on him, but that was the moment when he should have tried. Everything that had happened after was his responsibility.
It was that thought that tumbled around and around the old captain’s mind as he marched down the corridor and listened to the pregnant girl screaming.
This is a story about villains—and those who choose whether or not to stand against them.
Chapter 19
Archer and the team reached the shallow ravine leading to Narrowmar at midday. Clouds tempered the brightness of the noon sun, and the autumn air had a crisp edge so close to the mountains. Archer had allowed a brief rest in the small hours of the morning, needing the team sharp for what was to come.
His anger had distilled throughout the long night, ever since their prisoner had confirmed that Mae had asked for help in New Chester. No matter what she’d been thinking when she left her father’s house, she’d known by then that she wasn’t safe with Tomas Larke.
Archer’s hands shook at the thought of Tomas, with his stupid face—just handsome enough to tempt an impressionable girl—and his utter selfishness. Archer should never have introduced them. He was the one who’d gotten Mae mixed up with the Larkes, handing Jasper Larke a weapon in his never-ending battle with Lord Barden. Archer had cursed her as surely as if he’d held a paintbrush. He reined in his anger, purifying it into a singular focus. He had to undo the damage he’d inflicted. Rescuing Mae was the first step.