Page 4

THE MALEDICTION

T he door opened before Gisele could knock a second time. A fae man stood a pace inside. He looked extremely surprised to see her.

See? Hideous. Although I suppose he’s not as hideous as you. At least he has proper ears and a tail , Zingiber said, sliding into the house past the Malediction’s legs and disappearing without a backwards glance.

She was going to strangle that cat, but that was a distant thought, far less important than the man standing slack-jawed before her.

He looked more like a gentleman poet than a dread sorcerer.

Rumpled red curls, embroidered waistcoat, complicated neckcloth, and enough jewellery to stir envy in a court dandy.

Except no court dandy she knew had furry cat ears or a tufted tail twitching behind him. She stared.

It was a shock, although simultaneously also much less of a shock than the damn cat had prepared her to face. She’d expected grotesque. This was simply peculiar.

This couldn’t possibly be her Malediction, could it, with a gold loop hanging jauntily from one cat-ear? Nightmarish sorcerers shouldn’t have freckles scattered across their cheekbones, nor bright red hair.

But it was him, nonetheless. Recognition crackled through her, and the charm on her wrist tugged insistently towards him, the cord digging into her skin.

Her body wanted to do the same, and she had to brace a hand on the doorframe to stop from throwing herself bodily at him like a lunatic.

What was happening ? The curse had never done anything like this before.

You’ve never been this close to him before, though.

That was when she noticed his eyes, and her stomach dropped. Our Lady save me . She saw those same eyes reflected in her mirror each morning, a reverse mismatch of her own. Blue for one and bright, unnatural gold for the other. Except in his face, it was the human-blue eye that looked out of place.

“You!” he said in astonishment. He seemed even more taken aback by her appearance than she was by his. Uncalled for—she was not nearly as disconcerting as a terrible fae sorcerer dressed as a dandy.

She pulled herself straight. “I am Princess Gisele, the firstborn child of Queen Bianka that you claimed,” she told him icily, slipping a hand into her pocket where her dagger was hidden. Should she try to strike him now? What was the rest of the script again? “You will?—”

“I know who you are,” he said distractedly. “But how…? You’re grown! How can you be grown? It can’t have been that long, can it?”

She stared at him. He couldn’t seriously be suggesting?—

He began silently counting his fingers with an air of faintly aggrieved confusion. “No, there must be some mistake…”

She took a step forward, hand clenching her dagger hilt. “It’s been decades ! Do you mean to tell me you lost track of time and forgot to collect the firstborn you claimed?”

“Oh no, I don’t want— I never wanted—” he said, backing away. His tail switched behind him in agitation. “You can’t be here. Go away!” His torso jerked oddly towards her even as he took another step back.

“Go away? Go away!?” she repeated incredulously.

She took another step forward, the humming pull of connection making it as easy as swimming downstream.

Distantly, she noticed that the inside of the house was pleasantly cool.

“You ruin my life, and you tell me to go away? I’m not going away until you fix this!

If you don’t want me, then release the debt between us! Take the curse away!”

He was still backing away unsteadily, his movements uneven and lurching, as if he was fighting his own body. “I can’t!”

“You can and you will! Tell me your name!” She pulled out her dagger, determined to get this script back on track, though this was all happening rather faster and less subtly than she’d anticipated.

Except, no subtlety whatsoever was necessary, because he lurched towards her. She raised the dagger in automatic defence, and the blade bit into his flesh, as perfectly as if she had planned it that way.

He yelped and stumbled back; she did roughly the same thing, her legs wobbling as she retreated.

Nausea threatened. She’d done it; she’d poisoned him.

More than poisoned him. His sleeve ran wet with blood, spreading all over his beautiful shirt.

The same blood marred her dagger, dripping slowly down the blade.

Right. Right. That was the important step one completed. What was step two, again?

Were her legs getting wobblier? She tried to regain her balance, but it wasn’t her legs. The whole floor was moving, as if a giant caterpillar lay beneath it, wriggling with increasing violence. Flailing towards the wall for support, she lost her grip on the dagger.

The floor simply dropped.

She fell with a shriek. The impact jarred her whole body, but there wasn’t time to recover, because the floor kept moving, forming a twisting funnel.

Was he doing this? Where had her dagger gone? But the Malediction was shouting angrily as he fell equally victim to the heaving floor, which tossed them together like stones in a polisher’s barrel.

Strange sensations shot through her as they touched, further disorienting her: the bright light of heated metal and the smell of paper.

Her whole body vibrated with it, overwhelming every other sense, and for a moment she had no awareness of where she was.

The world was nothing but fire licking at ancient parchment.

The bizarre sensation finally ebbed, leaving her head ringing.

At least the floor had stopped moving and returned to a civilised horizontal position.

She’d come to rest in the farthest corner of the entry hall, but she couldn’t convince her body to get up.

What if the world went sideways again as soon as she did?

She didn’t want to leave her little island of solidity, which was surprisingly soft and also smelled nice, sort of vanilla-y.

She was lying on top of the Malediction.

She scrambled off him, appalled. Getting to her feet, she waited to see if there was going to be any further shaking, but the floor remained stable. If that had been an earthquake, it had been a remarkably personal one.

The room appeared entirely undamaged. None of the books in the gilded shelf beneath the stairs had fallen.

The golden ornaments on the side table hadn’t even tipped over.

She recoiled instinctively from both, even though the gold was all the way across the room from her and therefore unlikely to cause problems. Really, the only mess in the room was her charm, which now lay in scattered pieces across the floor.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“That was the house. Skymallow,” the Malediction answered, sitting up. The fall had left him with rumpled hair and blood splattered over his clothing. His ears were half-flattened, like a cat in a mood. “It’s protective of me. You stabbed me!” he said, a bit sulkily.

“It was your own fault for moving like that! Did nobody ever teach you basic weapon safety? Don’t leap at people who have a knife pointed at you!”

His ears flattened further. “I didn’t—” He cut himself off. “The house shouldn’t have let you in in the first place. Why did you do that?” He addressed this last question to the room at large, sounding annoyed.

“The house can hear us? It’s alive?” She looked around wildly. Nearly every surface glimmered with gold touches, laid atop wood that had been carved into fantastical designs, but nothing seemed alive. She edged further away from the gold.

“Yes. Sort of. It must have let you in because of the connection between us,” he said, half to himself, then raised his voice to address the room again. “That’s not a good enough reason! You shouldn’t have let her in!”

Gisele couldn’t believe she was being ignored in favour of a house. She was the one with the dagger! Had been the one with the dagger. She’d dropped it, and it wasn’t anywhere in sight now. Had the house stolen it?

She crossed her arms, to reassure herself she wasn’t going to accidentally touch one of the room’s far-too-many golden objects.

“This seems easily solved. If you want me to go, simply relinquish the debt between us. Which you could have done forty years ago if you never actually intended to claim it.”

She sounded angry because she was , even though she ought to be thankful that the Malediction was turning out to be a lot less dreadful than she’d feared. This, this criminally irresponsible fairy had ruined her life whilst caring about it so little that he’d lost track of time .

He didn’t meet her eyes. “Has it really been that many years?”

“Yes,” she said. Hurt spiked in her chest. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to be claimed by an evil fairy, but the fact that he not only didn’t want her here but apparently hadn’t given her a second’s thought before today, that he’d forgotten her, was humiliatingly horrible.

How dare he? And, more trivial but nonetheless provoking, how dare he also look like a handsome gentleman crossed with a woebegone cat?

At least not finding him at all frightening made it easy to take charge. “Are you going to release the debt now, then?” she asked, her voice hard.

He grimaced. “Ah. Well. About that. It’s not that simple.”

She glared down at him and in no way felt guilty about how much he was bleeding.

He was bleeding rather a lot. How deep was the wound?

She hadn’t meant to do more than graze him.

But he seemed surprisingly unbothered, ignoring his injuries in favour of frowning up at her like a puzzle he couldn’t solve.

Maybe that meant his injuries weren’t so bad.

Although, the fact that he remained propped up against the wall suggested they probably were.

Stop fretting about YOUR MALEDICTION’s well-being! Of all the people in the world! she chided herself. Had she learned nothing?

She took a deep breath, hardened her heart. “If you don’t release me, I won’t give you the antidote to the poison that was on my blade.”

The change in his attitude was so immediate it was as if the temperature in the room had chilled by several degrees. Bemusement disappeared, his mouth hardening into a grim line. “You poisoned me!” he said, with an entirely unwarranted degree of condemnation.

“Of course I did! You’re a terrible fae sorcerer and I’m just a human,” she said, exasperated. “It’s called leverage. Now be levered, and I’ll give you the antidote, all right?”

A crack appeared in the ice, the faintest crows-feet flickering at the corners of his eyes as he struggled not to smile. “Be levered?”

“Threatened, then! It doesn’t matter.” The whole situation had thrown her off-balance. Literally . “It’s a slow-acting poison, but it will kill you if you don’t do as I ask.”

He glared up at her, drawing his haughtiness around him like armour. It might have been more convincing if his tail hadn’t given the game away, lashing restlessly against the rug.

“Well?” she pressed.

“I can’t,” he said abruptly. “It will be better for us both if you abandon your dreams of blackmail, accept that there is nothing I can do, and lea— Aargh.” He gave a hiss of pain as his whole body jerked towards her. His hands dug into the rug, halting the movement. Were those claws ?

She refused to be distracted. “What do you mean you can’t? It’s your spell, your bargain. Gold in exchange for your name. Who else could undo it?”

Colour flushed his cheekbones, but he spoke dispassionately. “I mean that certain conditions of the original bargain weren’t met.”

“You mean my mother couldn’t guess your true name. You’re going to stick to that? Why? You don’t want me anyway! Why not simply tell me your name, if we must go through this charade? I’ll bargain the antidote for it.” Practically every piece of folklore about fairies mentioned bargains.

His eyes flashed. “Do you think I want to prolong my time in your company after such a salubrious introduction? I told you: I can’t help you.”

They glared at each other, at an impasse. The crimson flower on his sleeve was spreading ever further, staining his embroidered waistcoat and the cushions he lay upon. He made absolutely no movement to stem the bleeding.

“Are you going to do anything about that?” she asked, greatly annoyed with herself and him both.

He glanced down at himself in vague surprise. “Oh. I suppose? Though there seems little point if I’m dying anyway. What did you poison me with?”

“That’s for me to know and you to not know until you tell me your name. Get up. Which way is your kitchen?”

“Why?” he got to his feet, wincing dramatically.

“It will be difficult to continue interrogating you if you lose consciousness.” Right. That was the pragmatic way to think about this.

His eyebrows went up. “Is that what’s happening here?

” He was watching her as if she were one of those fireworks with long fuses and he wasn’t entirely sure when to expect the explosion.

It made her feel oddly invigorated. Normally nobody paid much attention to her, their glances sliding awkwardly off her, discounting her presence as uncomfortable but ultimately unimportant.

“Yes. Which way, My Malediction?”

He blinked at her. “My what?”

“If you’re not going to give me a name, I have to call you something, don’t I? And that’s what you are, after all: my curse. Feel free to tell me your actual name instead.”

His expression shuttered, and he led the way out of the entrance room with his tail lashing.