The Blood Curse (13 page)

Rand clambered down from the wagon, stretched stiffly, and came across to the fire.

“How is she?” Adel asked.

Rand filled a bowl with stew. “Her skull’s in one piece again. We’ve dealt with the bleeding and the worst of the swelling. There’s a lot of bruising, though. Bad bruising. And brains are just so... intricate. Delicate.” His voice was weary, almost defeated.

There was a long moment of silence, and then Adel burst out: “All Innis did was heal his wife! Why’d he try to kill her?”

“Because that’s what they do here,” Serril said.

“But she was
helping
.”

Serril shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He saw a mage, so he tried to kill her. It’s what they’ve been doing here for centuries.”

Harkeld looked down at his empty bowl. Before he’d met the mages, before he’d become one himself... he would have tried to kill Innis too.
The only good witch is a dead witch
. It was a truth. A fact. Everyone knew that spring followed winter, that the sun always rose in the east, and that witches were evil and had to die.

“But she was
helping
,” Adel persisted. “Why harm someone who’s helping you?”

“Ignorance, fear.” Serril shrugged. “They’re a dangerous combination.”

Rand nodded. “All of this...” He waved his spoon, indicating the Seven Kingdoms, the Ivek Curse. “All of this is because of those two things. Ivek was a healer. He only helped people, too. Until the purge.”

“Who is most to blame for Ivek’s curse?” Serril asked Adel. “The ignorant and fearful, who decide to hunt mages to extinction? Or the healer driven mad by the slaughter of his wife and young children?”

Harkeld put down his bowl. He’d never thought of it like that. Ivek had been a healer, a husband, a father. Victim of a terrible purge. And in revenge he’d created a purge of his own, even bloodier and more violent. It had taken three centuries for Ivek’s curse to come to fruition, but once it passed through the Seven Kingdoms, there’d be no survivors.

“The people were to blame,” Adel said.

“You won’t get folk here to agree.”

Harkeld studied his hands. The skin had grown back on his left palm, but he remembered how it had looked, remembered the blood. The blood of a Rutersvard prince, the blood of a mage.
My ancestors led the purge. Rutersvards. And now I am a mage myself.
Ivek had understood irony. It was why he’d crafted the anchor stones the way he had.

He closed his hands, clenched them, looked across the fire at Serril. “You could leave the curse to destroy the Seven Kingdoms.”

Serril shook his head. “The people here... they’re ignorant, not evil.”

“And no one knows exactly what the curse will do once it’s consumed the Seven Kingdoms,” the water mage, Malle, said. “It
should
stop advancing, but... it may not. It may poison the world.”

Rand scraped his bowl clean, put it to one side, and leaned forward. “For those of you who don’t know, the pigeon Serril caught was headed this way. Which means that somewhere between us and the anchor stone are more Fithians.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Harkeld found himself watching Adel. The journeyman water mage’s face seemed to grow paler, his eyes to get bigger.

“It’d be easy for them to pretend to be refugees,” Serril said. “They could get right up alongside us. So from now on, when we travel, we’ll have two shapeshifters guard us, plus one flying ahead, searching the road, looking at everyone, and I mean
everyone
.”

“Do we have enough shapeshifters for that?” Malle asked quietly.

Serril’s grimace said
Not really
, but what he said aloud was, “We’ll be pushed for the next day or so, but once Innis is better, we’ll have the numbers.”

R
AND DISAPPEARED BACK
into the wagon. Harkeld wanted to follow him. He wanted to push back the canvas and clamber inside and talk to Innis while she was still alive, even if she couldn’t hear him.

He stayed at the campfire until it burned down to glowing embers, then crawled into his tent. He never slept alone, always shared his tent with a shapeshifter—Cora’s rule. Tonight, it was Hedín, as lean and weather-beaten as Rand. Hedín was already asleep. Harkeld wrapped himself in his blanket, and lay staring at the dark.

The sound the stave had made echoed in his ears.
Thock
. Like an axe splitting wood.
Thock
.

H
ARKELD JERKED AWAKE.
Dawn. He flung aside his blanket, crawled out of the tent, and hurried across to the wagon. His ribcage felt as if it had shrunk overnight; tight with hope, tight with fear.
Let her be alive
.

Innis was still alive, but Rand and Nellis looked half-dead, their skin almost gray, their eyes bloodshot. Rand lurched when he climbed down from the wagon and nearly fell. “You, sleep,” Serril ordered. “And you too, Nellis. Petrus’ll take care of her.”

Let me help
. Harkeld bit back the words. He knew the answer: not without training. He peered into the wagon and saw Innis, saw her curling black hair, her pale face. He recognized that she was deeply unconscious.

“There’s not much left to do,” Rand told Petrus, rubbing his face, yawning. “Keep an eye on her right forebrain. There’s a chance it might hemorrhage again.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

W
HEN
P
OX BROUGHT
her food that morning, Britta hid some bread in her pockets. What else could be useful when she escaped? She scanned the ground where she’d lain. Stubbly grass, stones, twigs.

A short, snapped-off twig about six inches long caught her eye. One end was as sharp as a spear. She picked it up, tested its strength. Would it pierce skin if she stabbed hard enough?

Perhaps.

Britta slipped the twig into a pocket.

Plain came for her. Britta clung to his arm, stumbling as they walked to the horses.
Weak and exhausted, that’s what I am
.

Plain boosted her up into the saddle, then mounted himself and came up alongside her, taking the mare’s reins.

Leader swung up onto his horse and headed for the road. Plain tugged the reins. The piebald mare obediently fell into a trot. Britta sat drooping, her eyes half-closed, her mind racing. She had a weapon in her pocket. She had food. Today, she’d escape.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

K
AREL HEARD THE
same story in each village. Seven riders, one mounted on a piebald mare, had passed through the previous day. “A young woman?” he’d asked in the first village.

This question was met with a blank look and a headshake. “Woman? Ain’t no woman with ’em. They was all men.”

Have I made another mistake?
“Can you describe the piebald mare’s rider?”

A shrug was his answer. “Small lad. Short yeller hair. Looked a bit wean.”

“Wean?” Prince Tomas asked.

“Sickly.”

“When did you see them?”

Another shrug. “Mornin’, it were. Near on a day ago.”

After that, Karel stopped asking for a young woman. “A lad with yellow hair? Riding a piebald mare? Passed through here in the last day?” And in each village the answer was the same: yes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

T
HE MAGES PUSHED
their way through the tide of refugees, moving slowly. Sometimes it seemed to Harkeld that the press of people even pushed them backwards.

Sounds filled his head—tread of feet and clatter of hooves, rattle of cart wheels, voices—and beneath all those things was the sound of Innis’s skull breaking.
Thock
. It was imbedded in his memory. It wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t leave him alone.

The road climbed steadily. No rain fell, but a wintry wind blew from the south. The grass became sparser, the trees smaller and more gnarled, but the refugees kept coming. A few called out warnings, urging them to turn back, but most were silent. Harkeld saw emotions on their faces: fear, desperation, grief. Rarely did anyone look at them with curiosity. These people were focused on fleeing.

Mid-afternoon, they halted briefly at a crossroad. Harkeld dismounted, jogged across to the wagon, and pushed aside the canvas covering. “Innis?”

Nellis was asleep, but Rand was awake, crouched alongside Petrus, holding Innis’s head, his gaze unfocused.

Harkeld glanced at Petrus, alarmed. “Is she hemorrhaging again?”

Petrus shook his head.

Rand’s eyes refocused. He released Innis, smoothed her hair, sat back on his heels. “Well done, Petrus.”

“She’s all right?” Harkeld asked.

Rand tilted his head, a half-nod. “No bleeding, no bruising, no swelling.”

“The gland in her brain, the one that gives her magic...?”

“Wasn’t damaged.” Rand smoothed Innis’s hair again. “Now, we just need her to wake.”

“She will, won’t she? If everything’s healed?”

“Brains are tricky things. Trauma this bad... Even once it’s healed, some people never wake.”

Harkeld glanced at Petrus again. The shapeshifter’s face was somber.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

L
ATE IN THE
day, they came to a town. Britta tried to ride as if she was exhausted, barely awake in the saddle, head nodding on her neck, but every muscle in her body was tense with a painful mixture of anticipation and fear. This could be her opportunity.

They passed through the town gate and rode down a street of wooden buildings. Plain moved closer to her on one side, Curly on the other, hemming her in, their knees touching hers. Plain held her reins tightly in one hand.

Britta’s gaze darted left and right. What if she stabbed Plain’s hand, wrenched the reins free, and plunged down that alley? What if she threw herself from the piebald mare and ran into the crowded market square, hid beneath one of the stalls?

No. They’d be seconds behind her. Her escape would last less than a minute. And people would be killed. Innocent townspeople. Children.

She scanned the town desperately, her gaze jerking from one object to the next: the tall houses with wooden galleries jutting over the market square; the songbirds in cages hanging from the upper windows; the farmers haggling over flocks of geese; the covered well at the center of the square.