The Dragon's Curse (A Transference Novel)

by Bethany Wiggins

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I say. Behind him, Treyose shifts, and all the warmth and joy at finding Golmarr are squelched. I look at my feet as a familiar hollowness consumes my chest. Seeing Golmarr again made me temporarily forget that I have been wed to another, and I do not have the heart to tell him.

  Treyose clears his throat. Together Golmarr and I look at the Trevonan prince—my husband—and sorrow washes through me. “I brought her like you asked,” Treyose says to Golmarr.

  I turn on Golmarr. “You? You are the Antharian prince Treyose has been working with? You are the brother who has betrayed me?” He nods, and my throat tightens as I fight to keep my despair and fury from consuming me. “How could you?” The words barely squeak out.

  Golmarr opens his mouth to answer, but Treyose cuts him off. “There is one aspect of this arrangement we didn’t foresee in the beginning. There is a problem,” he says.

  Golmarr’s eyes turn guarded. “We plotted this out for weeks before you left for Faodara. How can there have been an unforeseen problem?”

  Treyose clears his throat again and lifts his hand to the back of his neck. “After her reputation was sullied by a certain Antharian prince, Lord Damar blatantly refused to put her in my care if I did not marry her first.”

  Golmarr jerks as if he’s been slapped. “She would never agree to that,” he states, but then he turns to me and asks, “You aren’t wed to him, are you?”

  I swallow against the lump in my throat and try to explain that it was a proxy wedding, but I cannot find my voice. It has been overridden by the desire to cry, and I know if I speak, the tears will start to flow.

  “Are you Treyose’s wife?” His voice is as sharp as daggers.

  Still unable to find my voice, I shake my head, and then close my eyes and nod.

  Golmarr presses on his chest, and his face hardens into a mask of fury. “You married him?”

  “I did not marry him. It was a proxy wedding,” I say.

  Anger darkens his face and he reaches for his sword, but his hand comes up empty. Almost faster than I can follow, Golmarr darts behind Treyose and pulls my stone knife from the Trevonan prince’s belt. I open my mouth to warn Treyose, but Golmarr leaps past the man and thrusts the blade at my throat. The sharp edge presses against my skin and I stop breathing as I stare into Golmarr’s feverish eyes, eyes I hardly recognize. “You are married to him?” he snarls again. The same hatred from the day he tried to kill me darkens his face.

  “What are you doing, man?” Treyose asks, drawing his sword. “I thought this was the woman you loved more than life itself!”

  “It is!” The knife blade starts to tremble as Golmarr’s entire body grows so taut it shakes with effort. Sweat breaks out on his forehead. With a great groan, he pulls the knife from my throat and flings it across the room. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, and then turns his fury and hatred on Treyose.

  Treyose quickly sets the lamp on the floor and places the tip of his sword at Golmarr’s chest. “I do not wish to fight with you, Prince Golmarr.”

  “But you married her!” he growls.

  “It was a proxy wedding,” Treyose calmly explains, keeping his sword point on Golmarr’s chest. “Princess Diamanta stood in for Sorrowlynn. Sorrowlynn was not even present for the ceremony. I—”

  Golmarr slams his forearm against the blunt side of Treyose’s blade, knocking it from his chest, and leaps at the Trevonan prince. They fall to the ground beside the lamp and crash into a bookshelf. Ancient dust and books rain down on them. Golmarr wraps his hands around Treyose’s throat, squeezing, and shouts, “How could you do that to me?”

  Treyose slams his fist into Golmarr’s face, but Golmarr doesn’t loosen his hold.

  “Stop it!” I shout. “Golmarr, stop it!”

  Treyose punches again, and Golmarr topples sideways, sprawling on the ground at my feet. There is blood on his chin. Treyose lunges for him and pins him down with a knee to his chest. Golmarr fights, thrashing and roiling beneath Treyose so ferociously the floor beneath them groans and the cobwebs on the ceiling swing. Golmarr swings his leg up and slams his foot into Treyose’s head, and they roll sideways. In his struggle to wrap his hands around Treyose’s throat again, Golmarr kicks the lamp. Glass shatters. Oil splatters the wooden floor, the spilled books, the nearest bookshelf, and in one audible whoosh, fire erupts on every drop of oil and starts consuming it. The flames rapidly grow and spread, feasting on brittle, ancient parchment and antique wood as they climb up the bookshelf.

  I grab my skirt in my fists and leap away. Golmarr and Treyose jump apart from each other and start working together to stomp out the flames, but they are spreading too quickly. Thick black smoke is billowing around the flames and filling the air. Golmarr slams the sole of his boot atop the biggest flames, but instead of being extinguished, the fire jumps onto his fitted Trevonan leggings—to the spots of oil darkening the fabric. And then I see the dark splotches on his tunic. The fire curls up his legs and latches on to his tunic.

  “Golmarr, your chest!” I yell. Treyose starts slapping his bare hands on the bright flames burning Golmarr’s clothing.

  Golmarr lets out a howl of pain, his eyes grow tight with anguish, and something happens to me. The thoughts and memories stored in my brain take control of my body and mind. I know fire. I can control it—I have done it before, though never in such high quantities. I hold my hands out, palms forward, and draw the heat and light and power of the fire to me. It is like watching water rush down a riverbed, how the fire condenses to one thick stream and flows to my hands. Every flame in the library simply lifts off whatever it is burning and joins the flow of light. All of the fire pours into my outstretched hands and shrinks until it is the size of my head.

  Even though the fire has shrunken, the energy of it is massive. It fills me up and feeds me, and erases every ache in my body, every weariness left from the journey to Arkhavan, and the last lingering residue of Lord Damar’s poison. It fills me too much. The energy is burning so intensely inside of me, I feel made of wax on the brink of melting, not flesh and bone. “I need somewhere to put it,” I say. “Quickly!”

  Treyose stares at me dumbfounded, but Golmarr holds out his hand. “Take my hand. Magic can be shared from one person to another.”

  I study his hand but do not take it. “How do you know?” I ask, horrified that I will burn him if I touch him.

  “I have read an entire library of books on magic. You have to trust me.” Still I hesitate, so he grabs my hand. His skin feels like ice against mine, and some of the excess energy surging through me passes from my palm to his. He jolts as the energy enters him, and the heat flaring beneath my skin cools a bit, but not to the point of comfort. I release Golmarr’s hand and take Treyose’s, and this time purposely pass energy to him. His body leaches it away from mine, as if he is riddled with cold, and my skin cools. I sigh and my shoulders sag. With the release of energy, the fire has shrunken to the size of a candle flame. Not knowing what to do with it, I balance it on the tip of my middle finger.

  “You just healed me,” Golmarr says, his voice a deep, close rumble. He wiggles his jaw back and forth and wipes the blood from his chin. Leaning down, he examines the skin peeking through the holes that have been burned into his leggings.

  “What in the world was that?” Treyose asks, pressing against his chest. “My heart feels better than it has in years.” He closes his eyes and shudders.

  “How did you know I could share the fire’s power with you?” I ask Golmarr.

  “I have read hundreds of books and scrolls about magic in the last months. I probably know more about magic than any living person, save Nayadi.” He looks at my hand holding the fire. It has started shaking. “Are you all right?”

  Physically, I feel fantastic. I feel like I have wings, and I am about to take flight. But I am trembling with the shock of what I just d
id and the realization I might have melted myself if I didn’t have an outlet for the fire. “Yes. I am…fine,” I say, but my voice is unsteady. Golmarr studies me, and I know he can tell I am lying. He opens his mouth to speak, but Treyose speaks first.

  “Golmarr, you need to listen to me.”

  At the sound of Treyose’s voice, Golmarr’s jaw clenches. Slowly, he turns and faces the Trevonan prince. “I’m listening.”

  “Sorrowlynn was not present at her wedding ceremony. She didn’t know she had been wed to me until her father informed her of the arrangement, four days after the ceremony took place. She had no choice in the matter.”

  Golmarr freezes, his only movement the rise and fall of his chest.

  “I had no choice in the matter, either, if I was to fulfill my part of our bargain. I do not want to be wed to her,” Treyose says. He hastily looks at me. “No offense meant, Princess.”

  “None taken,” I assure him.

  He looks at Golmarr again, his eyes guarded. His stance changes the slightest bit, and I know he is preparing for a possible attack. “I have completed my part of our bargain by bringing her here. I will annul my marriage to Sorrowlynn when you have completed your portion of the bargain.”

  Annul. The relief that single word brings makes my knees weak, and the flame on the tip of my finger flickers.

  Golmarr clasps his hands behind his back, and I wonder if he is doing it to keep himself from punching Treyose. “Why not annul it now?” he asks, his voice hard. “I will complete my part of our bargain no matter what. You do not need to hold being wed to her over my head to get what you want.”

  Treyose leans closer to Golmarr and whispers, “I cannot dissolve the marriage until our arrangement is settled and I am king of Trevon. While many have the power to wed two people, none but a king of Trevon has the power to break such a union with a single word.”

  Golmarr curses and runs his hand through his hair. “Fine. As long as you promise not to touch her. No kissing, no consummating the marriage.” Golmarr peers sideways at me. “Unless, of course, you would prefer being wed to him?”

  I shudder at the thought and shake my head.

  Treyose laughs. “She would attempt to kill me with her bare hands—again—if I tried to touch her. I agree, gladly, to your terms.”

  Golmarr raises one eyebrow. “You tried to kill him with your bare hands?”

  “Not kill him, just knock him unconscious,” I explain.

  Golmarr laughs and looks past me, to the dark rows of shelves Treyose and I came through. “Is Enzio here?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “He needs to always be between you and me, Sorrowlynn. I do not trust myself to stand within arm’s reach of you. Corritha’s treasure is a cruel thing. Any negative emotion I have, whether fear, self-loathing, guilt—even anger—it is as if the hatred I inherited finds them in me and feasts on them, eventually transforming them all into hatred. It finds my weaknesses and twists them into animosity. If I feel fear, it gets twisted until I hate the thing I fear. When I experience sorrow, the hatred latches on to that emotion and I find myself hating whatever is causing me sorrow. Rationally, I can see it, but hatred is not rational.” He takes a step closer to me, so he is barely an arm’s reach away, and quietly says, “Sometimes I hate how much I love you almost as much as I love you. I live with this constant inner battle, and it is tearing me apart.” He takes one tiny step toward me and gives my hair another gentle tug and then walks to the table and picks up his lamp. When he returns, he holds the dark lamp out and opens the glass door. “For your fire, Princess,” he says, and his thoughtfulness makes me weak in the knees. I have missed everything about Golmarr so much. Reaching my finger into the lamp, I transfer the flame I’ve been holding onto the lamp’s wick. Golmarr’s eyes grow wistful. “You are amazing. We need to figure out how to break the glass dragon’s curse.”

  “Curse?” Treyose looks from Golmarr to me, his pale eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “When we made our agreement, you said nothing about a curse.”

  “The curse won’t affect our agreement. I will still help you overthrow—”

  Treyose sucks his breath in through gritted teeth and presses a hand over Golmarr’s mouth. His pale eyes dart around the silent library, prying into the darkest corners. “Beware of what you speak when there may be others who will overhear,” he whispers. “The king has ears everywhere.” Golmarr nods and Treyose steps away, picking up my stone blade. “If I give this back to you, do you swear not to use it against me?” he asks.

  I nod and snatch the weapon from him before he can change his mind about returning it.

  Golmarr eyes the knife as if it is a snake about to strike. “We need to break the curse quickly,” he says. “I have been studying historical documents and texts about magic day and night. Only, the closer I get to finding anything about the dragons, the harder it becomes. It is as if whole chunks of history have been removed or destroyed, or the information is unreadable.”

  “Unreadable?” I ask, unable to take my eyes off Golmarr as he speaks. He looks older than he did six months ago, as if the burden of hatred has turned him from a young man into an adult; the planes and angles of his face are sharper, his shoulders appear more square, and his eyes—a swirl of green and gold and brown—are guarded. He might even be a little taller. I stare at his lips, at the way they form words as he talks, and remember them against mine. His lips are incredibly soft and supple despite all his hard angles. My heart accelerates and my cheeks grow warm at the thought.

  Golmarr’s mouth stops moving, and I shift my attention back to his eyes. “Sorrowlynn? Have you heard anything I’ve said?” he asks.

  I blink and clear my throat, and search my memory for what we were talking about. “Uh, yes. You were saying the information is unreadable?”

  Golmarr’s eyebrows slowly rise. “And after I said that, I explained how the oldest scrolls are written in a different language even the Trevonan scholars have forgotten.” He tilts his head to the side and his eyes narrow. “Did you hear any of that?”

  I shake my head and then blurt, “I mean, yes.”

  Golmarr grins like a rogue. “Oh, good. For a minute I thought you might have been distracted by something.” He rubs his hand across his lips.

  Heat creeps up my neck and burns my cheeks. “What is the language?” I ask.

  “Vinti,” Treyose answers.

  Golmarr nods. “I have learned some Vinti; we use it when we are trained to fight in the antediluvian, Vintian style, but most Vinti is beyond my comprehension.”

  “None of the scholars I sent were able to help you?” Treyose asks.

  Golmarr shakes his head. “They hardly know more than I. The answers are there, I know it, but they are out of my reach. We need someone who can decipher Vintian.”

  Heart pounding, I say, “Let me see the scrolls.” I take the lamp and follow two steps behind Golmarr, Treyose at my side, to the table with Golmarr’s weapons and the scrolls. Golmarr stands on the opposite side of the table, arms behind his back, and watches me with so much excitement, the smoky air quivers with it.

  Moving the reforged sword aside, I place my hand on the curled edge of the parchment to keep it from rolling closed. It is as thin and fragile as butterfly wings, and has turned light brown with age. I lean close to the faded writing and squint.

  Never have I seen letters and figures like the ones before me, but as I stare at them, I start to remember the sound each individual letter makes, and then, sound by sound, a single word forms. I place my finger on the next word and quietly say each letter sound until the word has meaning. I do it with the next word, and then the next, and my head starts throbbing, and my eyes hurt, but I am eventually able to read an entire sentence.

  When I start on the next sentence, Golmarr says, “I should have known you would be able to read this. What does
it say?”

  “Give me a few more minutes.” I sit down in the chair and lean even closer to the parchment. The reading is painfully slow, but I eventually read half of the text. “This is an account of a war.” I move my finger to the next line, then the next. “It was fought between two men: King Relkinn and Prince Zhun.” I look up. “Prince Zhun? They must have named him after the fire dragon.”

  “The Great War,” Golmarr muses, bringing my focus back to the parchment beneath my finger.

  I continue reading and then paraphrase what I’ve read. “Prince Zhun beat King Relkinn, and then became the new king. When the war was over, the male population had been depleted to such an extent that most of the women had to take care of themselves. Many of the women who survived starved to death that winter because there weren’t enough people to harvest the crops that endured the war, and most women didn’t know how to hunt for food.” A sudden, overwhelming sadness pierces my heart as the memory of this very event feels trapped within my body. “The women gave what food they had to…” My throat tightens, and I find it hard to continue. “They gave the food to their children. Only the children survived…and the two kings, with their handful of men.”

  At the bottom of the scroll is a signature. I have seen it before, with my own eyes, and then I see the young, strong hand as it signs this very parchment. Melchior. A shiver runs down my spine. “Melchior the wizard wrote this.” And now I know from whom I inherited the ability to speak and read Vinti.

  “Melchior couldn’t have written that,” Treyose says. “That parchment is probably more than a thousand years old. Melchior didn’t look over sixty years old.”

  “You’re right. He didn’t look a millennium old, but he was ancient,” I say.

  “And the Great War?” Treyose asks, uncertain. “I thought the Great War was a legend.”