Page 52

thirty-eight

T he room smelled of old paper and silence. One of those cavernous archival wings tucked behind reinforced glass doors and climate control, with worn velvet ropes hanging from brass stanchions like ceremonial guards.

It was after hours, and yet the lights hummed gently overhead, dimmed to preserve the materials but warm enough to feel reverent. The only illumination beyond that came from the monitor in front of us, a high-resolution scan pulled up from the university’s internal server.

Even though it had been two weeks since we’d found the journal, Gentry had gotten them to rush it. I didn’t ask how.

We sat at a long oak table, and Gentry scooted over to make more room. “This okay?” he asked gently, nodding toward the screen.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

The screen blinked as he brought up the first page.

Alban Stanton’s journal.

Brown ink bloomed across the digital parchment, elegant and slanted. The hand of a man who had once ruled something.

“I thought I’d feel excited,” I said, arms folded tight across my chest. “But it feels like reading a confession I was never meant to find.”

Gentry didn’t speak for a moment. Then, quietly, “You were always meant to find it. Or you wouldn’t be here now.”

My fingers hovered above the keyboard. “What if it confirms everything I feared? What if it’s nothing?”

“What if it sets you free?”

I turned to him. The archive light softened his features—less sharp than usual, his usual calm tinged with something else. Concern. Or maybe something deeper.

Outside, the night leaned against the windows, thick with frost. The kind of cold that came for bone and breath.

I took a breath, steady and thin. “Happy birthday to me,” I muttered.

Gentry’s eyes flicked up. He didn’t smile. He just said, “I know,” so quietly it made my throat close. He reached into his bag and slid something across the table. A single cupcake in a pink box. No candle. Just a ridiculous swirl of frosting in my favorite color.

“Archivist rules be damned,” he said, handing me a napkin. “Figured you deserved something sweet. Even in a tomb of paper.”

I laughed once, too quickly, and blinked against the sting behind my eyes. Then I turned back to the screen.

“Let’s see what the bastard wrote.”

The first page crackled slightly under the cursor as Gentry scrolled. The digital copy preserved every flaw of the original—creases, ink stains, the faint ghost of a pressed flower long rotted to shadow.

Gentry leaned back in his chair, boot crossed over his knee, fingers steepled as he watched the screen load the next set of digitized entries.

“It’s dated 1571,” he said quietly.

I nodded, heart pacing slower than it should have. My fingers itched to turn a page, though there were none—only soft clicks of the mouse as Gentry scrolled down the screen.

Alban Stanton’s handwriting was neat, if a bit stiff, the ink faded to a russet brown.

3rd March, in the Year of our Lord 1571

The air did bite bitter this morning, though spring creeps close. I met with Father at the lower fields to survey the eastern fence, and found it near half-fallen from the frost. He growls oft these days. Says I must wed before Michaelmas. My mother, God rest her, would have urged the same.

Later, at the vicar’s supper, I chanced to sit near the apothecary’s daughter—Alice. Green of eye and sharp of tongue. When I asked if she might walk with me to the green come Sunday, she said I had the look of a man who’d ask three women in one day and remember none of their names.

I snorted softly.

Gentry grinned. “Sounds like your kind of woman.”

He clicked to the next entry.

11th March, 1571

She turned me away again. I cannot say I am surprised, though I thought the violets might soften her. They did not. Instead she sent me to the Widow Bramley with a poultice for the gout, and told me to mind my pride lest I trip over it.

Margery was there, however. Fire-haired and gracious, ever ready with kind word and quiet smile. She does not unsettle me as Alice does. There is peace in her company. I think perhaps I shall speak to Father about a formal offer.

The image of him—young, proud, trying to please a stern father—settled heavily in my chest.

Gentry said nothing as we scrolled further. Only the soft clack of keys filled the archive room.

22nd May, 1571

We are wed. My father is content. Margery has been received warmly by the household, though I fear Alice’s absence from the ceremony stirred more talk than I’d like. They were friends once, I am told. But something sour has passed between them.

I hear whispers from the stable lads and kitchen maids. That the two were seen oft in the woods as girls. That Alice draws symbols in the dirt behind her shop. That Margery chants when she thinks herself alone.

I do not lend ear to such nonsense. Yet last eve, I came upon them speaking in the banned tongue.

Cymraeg, though poorly masked, and when I asked the meaning, both gave silence.

Margery laughed after, said ‘tis only a charm for sleep.

But Alice did not laugh. She looked at me as though she pitied me.

Gentry leaned closer, his voice hushed. “Cymraeg—Welsh. Very old.”

“Too old,” I murmured. “He knew something wasn’t right.”

He nodded. “But he didn’t stop it.”

We read on.

5th June, 1571

I begin to doubt. The harvest moon is yet far, but I’ve heard the milk curdle in the pitcher before the sun sets. The dog has not howled in two nights, and the babe born to Martin’s wife came with no breath.

Alice will not look me in the eye. Margery says she mourns a cousin lost to fever. I want to believe her. I do.

But I have seen Margery walk the garden by candlelight with no flame. I have seen Alice trace circles in ash. I have watched the crows gather on our roof and not move when I pass beneath.

A shiver danced along my spine.

If word of this should reach my father—or the town—there would be no trial, no mercy. The old ways are not forgiven here. Not now. Not ever. The vicar still speaks of fires. And I... I could not bear to see her burn.

The page ended there.

I sat back slowly. My birthday had passed at midnight, unnoticed in the wake of ink and ghosts. One hundred and forty-eight years, and I still hadn’t outrun what they’d started.

Gentry looked over at me. “You okay?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t.

Not yet.

“Let’s keep going,” I whispered. This time there was no date.

There hath been an ill occurrence this day.

Word travels fast in a village such as ours, but never swifter than when it is laced with fear.

Alice and Margery were overheard by townsfolk in heated discourse—too loud, too public.

Their voices carried, and with them, suspicions long whispered behind closed doors.

I have long endeavored to quiet the rumors that shadow the sisters. Yet now I cannot but wonder if there be truth in them, though it pains me to confess it. My father hath caught wind of the matter, and he wastes no breath in prayer or patience. He hath called for a hunt.

Alice stands accused, and those who show her favor now find themselves under the same watchful eye. Already, some among them begin to turn away, offering silence where there was once friendship.

Margery speaks not of it, but I see the dread in her countenance. I know she fears what Alice might say, if pressed. Sisters they may be, but fear makes strangers of us all.

The trials are set to begin ere the week is out. My father will see it through. He shall not suffer the stain of pagan rites upon our name—not while there is breath in his body.

As for me, I do not know where I stand. Between blood and belief. Between love… and the law.

There was another note, scribbled in the margin.

Margery cannot speak. For her voice has been destroyed. Alice took it from her, I am certain.

Gentry sucked in a sharp breath and hastened to turn the page, but the parchment was half consumed by rot and time. The faded ink barely clung to the surface:

It is done. My Maggie hath stained her hands with the blood of her own sister. Alice lay cold and broken in the root cellar, her life fleeing in a crimson pool, my wife’s hand still clutching the cruel knife.

She hath bid me silence those who would speak against her — to cut the tongues of the accused so no whisper may reach ears that could bring harm to Margery.

Yet I tremble not for their fate, but for my father’s fury, which I know to be merciless. Maggie is with child, and I am bound to protect my family, whatever the price. Such is the bitter burden of the Tempests.

The room fell deathly silent.

Gentry clicked through the next few pages, landing on a page that looked different from the rest of his writing.

“Dudley found this when he was scanning in the pages. It’s not Alban’s handwriting, and was folded and tucked inside the journal. I think…”

I scanned the screen, eyes frantic and heart thudding.

There on the screen, written in looping scrawl, my curse taunted me.

At twenty-two, the clock will freeze, but blessings turn with bitter teeth. No joy, no peace, no love shall last. All sweetness curdles into past. Each daughter born shall wear my scorn, till Death himself their fate is torn.

Standing abruptly, my chair fell behind me clattering to the floor in a haunting echo.

My lungs tightened. The room closed in around me.

Gentry was moving—maybe speaking—but his words were swallowed by the thunder pounding in my ears.

My vision blurred, a tremor shaking my hands as the truth settled in my bones.

Even if Alice had whispered that dark spell, she was silenced—murdered by her own sister. Over what? Pride? Fear of ruin? Betrayal of heart and blood? The weight of it crushed me.

A panic clawed at my chest, breath coming too fast, too shallow. I couldn’t breathe. The curse wasn’t just some distant story, it was etched into my veins.

But then—

In the stillness, I felt it: a presence beside me, cold and inevitable. Death, in his quiet certainty. He was there, always watching, always waiting.

And something fierce ignited inside me.

No. Not this time.

I refused to be the sum of their sins. The product of their blood-soaked betrayals.

I would not be the vessel for their pain. My breath hitched as the final truth settled in my chest. The story wasn’t about curses whispered by some shadowy other, it was blood, betrayal, and secrets buried too deep to breathe.

“It wasn’t Alice who cursed us. It was Maggie. And the lies… our silence kept it alive. ” The words fell heavy in the silence, more powerful than any spell. The air thickened, then shifted, as if something unseen loosened its grip.

And maybe that was the curse all along. Not magic. Not fate. Just pain passed from mother to daughter like a poisonous heirloom.

But I had named it. And I had chosen to live anyway.

My heart pounded, and the tight coil of pain that had nested in my ribs began to unwind. I felt the cold edges of fear and grief soften, the shadows receding.

No longer would I carry the weight of generations of silence, secrets, and fear.

I met Gentry’s steady gaze, finding not pity, but a shared strength. I let the truth out. And in that moment, something inside me shifted. Silent and invisible, yet undeniable.

Gentry wrapped me in his arms, pulling me to his lap as he settled on the floor against the wall. Tears streamed from my cheeks as everything I’d ever carried bled from my heart, until the rotten core of it was no longer smudged black.

“I think this is it…” he whispered. “Sometimes, to banish the dark, all we really need is to give it a name and tell it to flee.”

The weight in my chest loosened, as if the shadows that had clung to me for centuries finally pulled away. Gentry’s arms were steady, grounding me, but it was something else that shifted inside.

I swallowed hard, voice barely more than a whisper.

“It wasn’t me. Not truly. Every time I brought someone back, someone else had to go…

but it wasn’t my curse. It was Death’s bargain.

The balance he kept.” My fingers trembled against his shirt.

“He let me believe I was the monster, the curse itself…to help me break free.”

Gentry’s gaze didn’t waver, full of quiet understanding. “Because he loves you.”

A sob caught in my throat, raw and unfiltered. The truth settled in, not as a burden, but a gift. “I don’t have to carry it anymore. I can live. Love. Be human.”

I closed my eyes and breathed in the stillness, feeling the curse shatter with a soft crack like breaking glass.

“I choose life,” I said. “Not guilt. Not fear.”