Page 57 of Heir to a Curse

Chapter 22

We napped again. What else did people do when stuck in a cursed fantasy world? I read to him. We wandered the garden, kissed like teenagers, and drank tea. To say the hunger didn’t bother me, would be lying. It came and went a few times, with me ignoring it as best as I could with my stomach rumbling.

He taught me how to make tea, explaining very seriously about how important it was to let it brew the right amount of time. I listened intently, studying his expressions more than his words, though the sound of his voice was soothing.

“You’ve had a long time to perfect tea,” I told him, finding I enjoyed the fruitier blends rather than the floral ones.

“Some herbs calm, some comfort.”

I understood what he was saying. Some of them were more medicinal, others were more mood. “Do they come from other places?”

“I mix,” he said and waved at the door to the outside garden, “with things from here. Last longer.”

That made sense. I hoped he wasn’t burning through his small supply in the short time I was here. I worked on repairing a small chair, using very basic tools to put the piece back together, and watched him stitch up a small fabric section to sit in the middle of it. When we were finished, he set up the chair and waved at me to sit, while he pulled out a small table and set up his instrument.

“You’re going to put on a show for me?” I said.

He nodded, as he sat down and played theguzhengfor a while. The melody of it slow but not sad. It soothed something in my gut, making me feel like curling up for a nap in the warm sun. His hands moved over the strings with a delicate elegance I could never hope to master. Even when I moved to sit beside him, and he tried to show me how to play.

The sounds that came from the instrument at my touch, were anything but beautiful. “How about I stick to building,” I teased him. “And making tea,” I added, returning to the teapot and refilling his cup.

The tiny smile he gave me warmed my heart in ways I didn’t know possible. How I could know him for so short a time, but feel as connected as I did? It made little sense to me. But I knew everything about him. Well, most everything. I studied the way he moved and realized I had a lot of that already memorized. The way he walked, or measured tea, or even played theguzheng, it felt like I’d watched him do it all a million times.

The tugging at my senses reminded me I’d lived many lifetimes in which I’d abandoned him. I hated my former selves a thousand times over for failing him, for always having to leave, and never finding a way to break the curse. It was at the forefront of my brain, a constant roll of if/then statements. Ideas to break the curse, and what would happen on the follow-through. I could easily have written down a dozen or so plans, none of which I thought had a chance of working. I didn’t share them, didn’t want to give him false hope.

In reality, the self-hatred was unearned. Obviously my former selves had left because we had to. And I couldn’t list the number of things that had been tried to break the curse. Though when some ideas popped into my head, alongside it often came the result from that, as though it had been done before. It was beyond frustrating. But I couldn’t slow the process of my brain’s problem-solving mode. I fixed things. It’s what I did for a living, it was what I enjoyed even in my time off, though at different levels. I just needed to find a solution.

I stared at him, looking for twinges of familiarity, and the few bits that had changed, because no one stayed the same forever. The world had a bad habit of doing that to people. I could only imagine the pressure a couple centuries would have on a person to change, adapt, and conform.

Xiang’s changes were small, like how long it took for him to allow emotion to peek through. Where I expected smiles, instead he was guarded, tired, in part I realized. Not just from an endless existence of dealing with my dumbass, but from the renewal of the wards.

I spent a lot of time listening to him play, and running my hands through his hair, marveling at the small changes in his face, even if they were the barest hints of crow’s feet near his eyes. I had plenty of those myself. The mask came down a little more, guard lowered but not gone. He liked my touch, and I would have given anything to see the unguarded smile my memory of past lives told me used to be his natural state.

Had I done that to him? Or the curse? Probably a combination of both.

“Did renewing the wards drain your energy?” I asked him once while we snuggled and read in his little cubby area of blankets.

He nodded. “Must renew each time I leave and return.”

“So if we hadn’t gone to see where the door to my world was, you wouldn’t have had to renew the wards?” It was my fault he was so tired. I couldn’t even give him real food to help ease his exhaustion. Wasn’t certain it was a physical exhaustion rather than some spiritual energy I couldn’t really define.

He shrugged. “Sometimes must renew. Time weakens them.”

“But opening and closing them means you have to renew sooner.”

“Yes.”

I traced the lines of his face, wishing he wasn’t so closed off to me. It was unfair to say that was unfamiliar. My memory tugged at other lives, in which his expressions weren’t so guarded, how the years had changed that. Like long ago when he wasn’t keeping a barrier between us because he was waiting for me to leave.

I sucked in a breath at the realization that he was waiting for exactly that. It would happen. It would have to. And that was part of the curse too, wasn’t it? Him finding me, and me leaving him again and again.

“I’m horrible for you,” I whispered to him. “Useless.”

He gave me a small smile. “Worth comes in many forms.” He waved at his instrument, still set on a small table a few feet away. “I play beautiful things, but it does not add value to a place that cannot hear me.”

“True,” I said. “But if you play for yourself, don’t you find it beautiful?”

He nodded. “Soothing.” He put his hand to my chest, resting it over my heart. “Do not define your worth by who finds you useful.”