Nettle & Bone(60)

Her step was light as they went down the stairs, almost dancing. Marra’s head throbbed and everything seemed very bright. She tried not to be curt. “Did we learn anything?”

“Oh yes, a great deal,” said Agnes. “For one thing, she’s not blessing those babies. She’s cursing them. And has been for centuries now.”





Chapter 16


“A curse?” asked the dust-wife, sitting in the little parlor room in Miss Margaret’s house. The innkeeper brought them a pot of tea and the curse-child stared balefully over her shoulder. “A protection from malign magic. How is it a curse?”

“Because we’re listening to the wrong part,” said Agnes. She waited until landlady and puppet had left the room and dolloped honey into her tea. “We all were obsessing about the foreign magic and enemies taking the throne. That bit’s mostly theater. But the actual curse is that she will serve them as she served the family, her life bound to theirs, as long the godmother still draws breath.” She beamed at the other three people at the table.

“… I don’t get it,” said Fenris. Underneath the table, Bonedog gnawed happily on a soup bone, which felt vaguely like cannibalism to Marra.

“She’ll serve them as she served the rest of their family, and she bound their life to hers. How do we know that’s a good thing?”

The dust-wife sat back, suddenly thoughtful. Marra frowned. “Do you mean she’s hurting them?”

“The royal family of the Northern Kingdom has been dying young for centuries, haven’t they?” Agnes tapped the tabletop. “It’s not even gossip anymore. Everybody just knows.”

“A maid told me there was a curse on the kingdom and the kings burned out from it,” said Marra slowly. “And it was the godmother who protected them from it.”

“It’s the godmother who’s doing it,” said Agnes. “She got immortality from somewhere, and that’s how. Their life is bound to hers. She’s pulling it out of them to keep herself alive.” She paused. “You know, I don’t think she likes it at all. One of the kings—the very old kings, way back when, the one who built the first palace, I think—bound her to the royal family. She has to serve them. It’s not something she chose to do. But she has to stay alive to serve them, so she’s draining the life out of them. It’s awful for everybody, when you think about it.”

A terrible thought struck Marra. “Is that why my niece died? Did the godmother kill her?” Fenris inhaled sharply.

“No, no.” Agnes waved her hands. “Probably not. Not when she’s got Vorling, and the king was still alive to work on then, too. But she’s also keeping any magic from helping them. That means that if I went in and tried to give a baby a blessing of health, it’d fall right off. The royal family can’t so much as get a wart removed by a witch. Magic can’t touch them. Which means magic can’t break the spell, either.”

The dust-wife grunted. After a moment she said, “But that doesn’t help us, does it? It’s the same as it ever was. We can’t enchant Vorling.”

“Not while the godmother draws breath,” said Agnes. “That’s the other half.” She looked up at the trio of puzzled faces. “Oh dear. Look, it’s like Finder, right?”

Marra rubbed her forehead. The chick was currently snuggled under the brown hen’s body. The hen didn’t look terribly happy about it. “What about Finder?”

“The spell—” Agnes caught the dust-wife’s eyes. “Fine, the curse on Finder was that he’d find us a safe place to stay or … well, it’d be bad,” said Agnes. “Most curses are like that. They come in two halves. This curse is that the royal family is bound to her, isn’t touched by any other magic as long as they live, and as long as the godmother draws breath.”

“That’s not promising,” said Fenris. “Do we have to kill her?”

Agnes’s eyes went round. “I don’t think we could. I mean, she might want to let us, but if she could die that easily, she would have just done it already. I don’t think she can be killed in the normal sense.”

“This is getting worse and worse,” muttered Marra. Agnes had seemed so excited earlier, but when she tried to explain things, they sounded terrible to Marra. What happened to the next of Kania’s children? She was probably due to give birth soon—she’d already been round at the funeral … What if they did kill Vorling somehow and the child grew up and was drained of life to fuel a curse?

“But she’s only doing this because she has to!”

“Does she resent them?” asked Fenris.

Agnes gnawed on her lower lip. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think maybe she would have, a long time ago. I’m sure she hated them once. But now she just doesn’t care. She’s been alive too long. She outlived any real feelings. She can’t die. She just goes and curses a child and then she goes away and sits in her temple and just … exists.”

“What a dreadful fate,” said Fenris.

“She should at least keep chickens,” said the dust-wife. “Or take up gardening. Immortality is wretched, but you can always make the best of it.”

“Do you think she’ll help us?” asked Marra.