NOW.
Fuck.
CHAPTER 4
Reshina
GrantingMister Brough the courtesy of explaining how to break his curse was considerably kind of me, and certainly not necessary. The title of Cursebringer was no longer mine, but my son’s current burden to bear, and I was no longer held to the rules of the job. I had handed that position to Korven over a decade ago, though old habits of delivering curses still got the better of me.
After I’d dragged the thief out ofThe Withering Roseand past the boundary of the nearby Heartstone Castle, I explained how he might find a way out of the harrowing future before him. He was now bound to his boots, cursed to walk over every inch of Revelry until one of two things occurred. He could walk over every rock, speck of sand, and snowy mountainside in all of Revelry without rest or he could find another soul to carry him back to the tavern without his boots ever touching the ground.
It was a particularly nasty curse to break and had come from the Veil three decades ago, meant for a young woman of barely twenty. Alas, as fate would have it, she perished before I could deliver it to her on the night of the Cursed Moon, and thus, I had kept it with me ever since.
It was rare that a curse was not delivered, but I’d seen itenough in my previous hundreds of years as Cursebringer to expect it every now and again. If the person the curse was meant for died before it could be delivered, I could easily bottle it, packing it away in a small glass vial until I saw fit to deliver to another at my whim.
Mister Brough’s speck crossed the horizon as I perched on a bare branch of a tall, withered tree. In my raven form, I could see for miles as the brilliant silver moon shone over all the land of Heartstone, illuminating the world in crisp white over the snow.
Debating whether I should fly back to my own castle in the Brackish Wood or attempt to sleep inside the noticeably abandoned Heartstone Castle, I wondered whathadhappened to the current King of Heartstone?
When I had delivered a curse to his father, the current King Arthur had not yet existed in this world. The last time I’d seen the late king of Heartstone, he’d been no more than a raging Beast, ravaging his land, bound to his castle’s boundary, searching always for the woman who could break his curse.
Whomever he did find had given him a child, but must not have given him the one thing he needed to break from the Beast; someone who loved him.
Whispers of anewBeast, far larger and monstrous than the last, had come to my ears in the Brackish Wood over the last decade. And so, as it sometimes was, the original curse had not been broken, but sent down the familial line onto his son, Arthur.
Pity.
The longer it took the curse to break, the stronger it would become.
Curiosity is a dangerously wicked thing; I’ve always cautioned my children of this. And as I descended from the hollow branch, shifting back into my Ravenfae form, I was careless to disregard my own advice.
Darkness fell upon me as I landed in the castle’s shadow,bringing something sinister to the winter air. The chill bit sharply, gnawing at my fingertips as I brushed away fresh snow atop a headstone, leaning in the frozen earth. Just below the staircase to the great castle doors, the marker had been placed at the very edge of the last stone—I imagined so a visitor could not enter without acknowledging the dead.
Marianna Dubois, Queen of Heartstone, Duchess of Riche
I dared not speak the name aloud, for I knew the Veil to be a fragile line next to the buried dead, or newly born, and I had no desire to invoke the spirit of the woman once bound to the curse of the land.
An overgrown bush of roses grew beside her grave. Its thick vines were adorned with sharp thorns, black as the gown I donned each day, and sharp as my daughter’s foul mouth.
A smile lifted my lips thinking of Morella, imagining the wild minx of a girl King Killian of the Citrine Cliffs would soon be married to in an arrangement made thirteen years past.
I carelessly swept away more of the ice frozen to the grave, chipping at the date the Queen of Heartstone had died when my sleeve brushed across a particularly sharp thorn of the rosebush. Cursing under my breath, I pulled away sharply, snagging the fine lace and ripping open the skin along my palm. Three drops of fresh blood fell from my hand before I clutched it to my chest.
Now, I’ve always prided myself in my vast memory of the curses I’ve delivered. Each one has belonged to me as its caretaker before I delivered it to its host. Each curse has varied in strength—most easy enough to live with—some a thinly veiled tragedy to those unlucky enough to receive it.
But though I’ve always remembered the bearers of the curses themselves with distinction, the details of each curse have grown foggy over my centuries of deliverance.
If I had paused just a moment to recall the finer points of the curse over Heartstone Castle, I would have been far more careful not to bleed onto the land.
In a sudden panic, the elements of the curse flooded my mind, bringing forth what I’d said to the late king all those years before.
And you shall remain a Beast until your natural death unless a maiden bleeds upon your land, becoming captive to your whims. But be warned, if she should not love you in each of your forms, the curse will remain unbroken and you will live out the rest of your days with a woman who cannot save you, lest she drive a blade into your heart, setting herself free and sending you to your grave.
With the memory of my words long since spoken into the evening air, the ground below rumbled, shaking loose the black petals of the winter blooms over the gravestone.
No. No, this couldn’t be.
I repeated the words over and over in my head even as the land split, and I fell through, tumbling over rock and dirt and stone. Like a maw of jagged teeth, I fell through the land as it scraped over my skin and cut at my gown, pulling my black feathers by their barbs.
