Page 2 of The Summer War

He had two swords on his belt, one on either side, which Celia had half noticed.

He took one off, the sword Father had given him when he’d ridden away to war, in its sheath of leather and silver, and he laid it on the table.

The other one he wore had a narrow hilt made all of metal, three bands that gleamed in different colors of gold and steel and silver, woven together like a braid.

“And I will go now, away beyond the border of your lands, and never return again. Farewell, Your Grace.”

He turned and walked out of the library, and left the door open behind him. Father still didn’t say anything. He didn’t tell Argent to stop or to wait, and didn’t tell him he was sorry. He only stood behind the table, looking down at the sword, and his face was as blank as an unwritten page.

But Celia crept along the mezzanine back to the hall, and then as fast as she could, she ran down the stair and through the inner court, bare feet slapping on the stones and the wind biting through her shift.

She just made it out into the stable yard as Argent reached his horse, tied up and waiting, and she called out desperately, “Argent!”

He stopped. His hands were on his saddle, and for a moment she almost thought he would just finish mounting and go, that he wouldn’t even answer.

Then he did turn to look at her, slowly.

But his face was still so hard and strange, and she halted in the middle of the yard halfway to him, forlorn.

He stared at her almost as if he didn’t know her.

“Celia,” he said slowly, and it was— polite; he might as well have said Lady Celia instead, the way the guests and the servants did.

She couldn’t say anything back to that. She only stood and stared at him dumbly, and the prickling tears started out of her eyes and came down her face.

But he moved a little when he saw them, a small jerking that made him look more like himself.

“Celie,” he said again, a little wavering, and then he was Argent again, not just a stranger with his face.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come home,” she said, half pleading, half accusatory. “I’ve been waiting all summer.”

He said slowly, “I’m sorry,” but she knew at once, with a terrible hollowness like someone had scooped out a space under her ribs, that it was just more politeness. He didn’t mean it truly.

“No, you’re not,” she said, barely above a whisper, her throat tight.

“It doesn’t really matter to you. I don’t.

If I mattered, you couldn’t go away forever, without even saying anything.

” It was horrible to know that she didn’t matter to him, but she saw it too clearly not to know.

He hadn’t given her a single thought. He’d only come to take revenge on Father and go away again.

The only reason she even knew he’d come at all was because she’d been up.

Waiting. She asked helplessly, even knowing it was stupid and would only make it worse, “ Why don’t I matter? ”

“You do, ” he said, and she wanted to believe him, but then he said, “Celie, I can’t stay, it’s his castle—” and she lost her temper and ran at him and hit him with both her fists, high on his chest.

“Shut up!” she said. “Shut up, you liar.” He caught her wrists, holding her hands away from him so she wouldn’t bruise them on his armor, but she glared up at him past them.

“Do you think I’m stupid? What if I say I want to go too?

What if I ask you to take me away with you, so I don’t have to marry that fat old duke?

” He stared back, caught without an answer.

“I’m not stupid. Now that you’ve cast off your name, you don’t owe anything to Father, to anyone.

You’re going to take your magic sword and go have adventures, and all the boys you like, and you’re casting me off, too, because I’d only get in your way,” she said, savagely, and was glad to see Argent flinch, the same way that Father had flinched.

She was burning with anger, more because he’d tried to lie to her than anything else.

It was bad enough that he was casting her off; it was bad enough that he didn’t care.

He didn’t need to tell her insultingly stupid lies on top of it.

“Celie,” he said, his voice cracking. “No—that’s not—” But that was it, no matter how hard he pretended it wasn’t, and when she stared at him and refused to go along with the lie, he sputtered to a halt.

But then he tried again, like a mouse scurrying desperately in another direction, trying to find another hole.

He said, “I’m not going to be safe. I’m going to the Summer Lands—”

“Stop it!” she said. “If you won’t even be honest to me, if you won’t let me matter even that littlest bit, just go !

” She jerked her hands free and stepped back and away from him.

“Go to the Summer Lands! Go ride a shaihul, fight a dragon, be the greatest knight who ever lived. Just see if it makes you happy! I hope you meet a hundred beautiful summerling boys and none of them love you. I hope no one else is ever stupid enough to love you again!”

She ran away from him and back inside the stable door, so he wouldn’t see her crying, but as soon as she was over the threshold and out of sight, she burst into a huge sob that shook her whole body when she gulped it down painfully to keep the sound in, and another one wanted to come right after it.

She bent over her aching belly and then just sank down on her knees in the dirty corridor and crawled herself over to huddle against the wall next to the mucking shovels and pitchforks.

She pressed her head against her knees and her mouth against her folded arms to keep quiet, listening as hard as she could until she heard the horrible sound of the horse’s hooves clattering as Argent rode away forever, and then she could let the rage and misery come burning out of her in tears.

She wanted to believe, afterwards, that she wouldn’t have said the curse if she’d known that it would work.

She loved Argent more than she hated him, even in the moment.

But oh—she wanted so much for the words to hurt him a little, to stick in his head like a pebble in his shoe, so he would have to take her, some part of her, away with him for just a little while, until he cast even that off and found himself some summer lord to fall in love with, in their courts of endless green, and lived happily ever after for a hundred years, likely forgetting the whole mortal world and her along with it.

Celia had been taught over and over not to ill-wish.

Father reminded her often, to make her proud, that she was of the bloodline of the great Witch-Queen Selina, who had founded Prosper’s line of kings.

His third wife, her mother, had been the bastard sister of the king, and the great tapestry in their dining hall, which Father had commissioned after her birth, showed Selina’s Seventh Wyrd: Queen Selina standing stern and beautiful on a mountaintop, looking down on the army of the shadowlords, and the summerlings and the mortal armies of Prosper united behind her, about to be drowned in darkness.

And Celia also had a book that showed Selina’s First Wyrd: the illustration of Selina holding her hands out to her parents, her mouth open in a wail of horror and grief, while they stretched their own out to her in return, with stone twining itself up around their bodies like a winding sheet.

Celia had read it over and over; she’d played private games in the gardens, whispering pretend spells, imagining that when she became a woman, she would be the one, the next sorceress of Prosper.

But more than sixty girls descended of Witch-Queen Selina had been born over the long years since her death without another sorceress flowering in the line, and Celia didn’t feel anything like a woman at the moment.

She felt like the opposite—a stupid angry little child, deceived and hurt and crying in a corner, trying to nurse her wounded heart and pride.

Even after Argent rode away, Celia still didn’t know that she’d cursed him.

She didn’t even know that her courses had started.

She sat in the dark weeping with her head against her knees, thinking the cold and wet and pain were only sorrow, until one of the grooms came yawning on his way to the stables and thought he saw a servant girl in a shift crying and said in rough kindness, “Here, lambkin, what’s the blubbing for? Someone’s hurt ye?”

She jerked her head up and stared at him as he came closer with his candle, and he went pale as a bleached sheet and said, “Gods, milady!” and turned and shouted down the hall, “Here! Here’s milady hurt!

Rouse up the house, come quick, go tell the duke!

” and he ran to her even as a bell started clanging.

He knelt and put the candle down and reached halfway out with his hands, not quite daring to touch her, full of worry.

“Where is’t, milady, where are you hurt?

” he asked, and she looked down at herself and in the candlelight she saw the blood, bright crimson spreading like a terrible flower through the soft white linen of her shift, and felt the dreadful chill of power spreading through her body with it.

She stared at it, and then she realized what she’d done.

She screamed just as three guards came running from the gate, and they all fell down and covered their heads in terror as their swords turned to glass and shattered in their hands.