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“Feeding from you?”
“Yeah, well, think about it. Why wouldn’t the spell just kill me? What’s the point of hurting everyone around me? Unless the fact that I’m living, experiencing this pain, experiencing the awful guilt, and dedicating so much thought and energy to the curse is the whole point.”
“That makes a certain sense from my uneducated point of view, but I’m not exactly an expert. When we get to Verdana, there may be someone more knowledgeable who you can talk to. Aodin’s magic seems different than a lot of what I’ve seen here in Camdaria.”
“Yeah, I think that’s a possibility. I must admit, I’m fascinated by their magic.”
“I figured you would be.” Kai pressed a weary but affectionate kiss to my forehead. It wasn’t like him to sleep as much as he had since we’d escaped, but between his silver wound and the injury from his father, his body was really going through it. I wished I had my healer’s bag, or even access to the gardens back at Fort Canid, because I was certain I’d have had him already back to one hundred percent.
We could only use my magic, which was still weak, as well as his latent shifter healing ability. I knew that if his injuries were serious, I’d be able to put myself in the same state I’d been in with Mad Dog, driven past my limits to save someone I loved. But his injuries had long moved past serious and were mostly just uncomfortable. As much as I wanted to ease Kai’s situation, him being a wee bit tired and sore didn’t cause the same adrenaline surge or magical response within me.
“You know, if your curse was some physical presence, I’d beat the absolute shit out of it. Just sink my teeth into its throat and pull. Wouldn’t be a scrap left.”
I chuckled at that and pressed my own chaste kiss to his lips. “Thank you, Kai. But even if it is some actual being, it wouldn’t work like that.”
“Nonsense. Me, the non-expert, is sure I could protect you from it like I would anything else. Hell, I’ll fight it if I have to.”
My first impulse was to laugh again, but for some reason, something in his words stirred a thought within, and of course, Kai felt a ripple of blooming shock and hope.
“You all right, Ayla? What are you thinking?”
“Something stupid,” I said, unable to stop a grin from spreading across my face, but the more seconds that passed, the more the idea grew legs.
“Hey, sometimes the stupidest things end up working far more than we ever give them credit for.”
I nodded, looking up into his face and wondering if I was crazy or onto something miraculous. “If the curse is more of a living thing than just a spell, then what if…”
“Yeah?”
“What if I cursed my curse?”
Chapter 10
Kai
Despite our rocky start, the rest of the voyage went both quickly and smoothly. I tried to relax while I could, to fully recover before I had to throw myself into the political scene of a country I knew precious little about, but there was only so much I could do.
At least there was the growing hope I felt in Ayla as a constant balm anytime my anxiety began to rise. She wasn’t ready to talk that much about her theory, but when she occasionally did, it seemed like she was growing increasingly confident by the day.
“Here we are!” Aodin said, making a grand gesture as the boat pulled up to a dock that was smaller than I expected.
In fact, the island hadn’t looked all that large. Could it be he was from the sticks, comparatively speaking? It was amusing to think of Aodin as Verdana’s version of a country bumpkin. Not that I would say that to his face, of course.
“It’s beautiful,” Ayla said, taking it all in with wide eyes, and that’s when I realized with everything I knew about my mate that she’d never seen a sandy, semi-tropical beach in person, only in pictures or books. “The water is so blue.”
“Ah, yes, the warm oceans are quite superior, I must admit. I’ve been all around Camdaria, and the colder, rockier ones just don’t measure up.” That was Aodin, naturally, beaming with pride. “Perhaps when things cool down, I could take you to some of my favorite swimming spots, and we can make a day of it. Really show you the spirit of Blath.”
His words made my mind flash back to the moment I’d first consciously met Ayla, and how I’d been about to dive into a pool of water to have my own little moonlight swim, only for her to come out and save my modesty. It was so strange to look back on that now, as I’d had such a hard time remembering anything about her beyond brief little tidbits, like the whole of her was an afterimage. A blurry photo that was taken too fast.
That had been the curse she’d put on me, I understood that now, but I’d never really had the wherewithal to re-think our experiences pre-curse and see if there was a difference. I could say that there was a marked one, like my memory went from a pinhole to full technicolor.
I’d love to just stand there and access every single one of my altered memories, refreshing them with my current clarity, but then we were docking.
“Sergeant Khan,” I said, taking Darla aside just before we disembarked.
“Pretty sure it’s just Darla now,” she answered wryly. “I’d be surprised if we hadn’t all been dishonorably discharged.”
I grimaced at that. She most certainly had a point. So many years, so much work carefully earning my way through the ranks while also protecting my identity as the crown prince so no one could claim I’d curried power in my favor, were suddenly all gone. Quite literally vanished overnight. I was likely never going to see Fort Canid again.
