A Vow So Bold and Deadly (Cursebreakers, #3)(41)

There are too many hopes. Too many fears. Too many unknowns.

The air has turned colder, bringing icy winds to cross the farmlands surrounding Ironrose, promising a bitter winter to come. The guardsmen now wear wool beneath their armor, and steel fire barrels have been placed at each of the sentry stands surrounding the castle. Heavy cloaks have been dragged out of chests, and the servants have added a feather down blanket to my bed. I remember once wishing for winter to find the castle, despairing at the end of every season that autumn would begin again. I forgot how quickly the days would turn shorter, how a chill could find every corner of my chambers.

Once we pass the solstice, snow will begin to blanket the mountains between here and Syhl Shallow, making travel difficult. It’s hard enough to feed an army when there’s a healthy harvest, and a lot more difficult to keep people motivated to fight when they’re cold and hungry. That will affect Grey’s army as well as my own.

Or maybe it won’t. Maybe he can magic food right into the mouths of his soldiers. Maybe he can drive away the snow and ice and trap Emberfall in a perpetual autumn again. Maybe he can wrap himself in magic so he’s untouchable the way Lilith was.

The thought makes something inside me clench tight, and I shiver. I don’t want to think of Grey as being like Lilith. I don’t want to think of him using magic against me.

I don’t want to think of him having magic at all.

I remember a time early in the curse when Lilith sought to punish me for refusing to love her. We stood in the courtyard where the roses and honeysuckle were in bloom, the air full of their perfume. This was only the third or fourth season, after Lilith had seen my monster destroy my family due to her enchantments, but she still held some delusional hope that I would find a place for her in my heart.

She ran a finger across my cheek, drawing blood with her touch, sending fire through my veins so quickly that I fell to my knees. Grey grabbed her wrist and tried to stop her, but she turned on him instead. The bones in his fingers snapped, one by one. When he tried to jerk back, she grabbed hold of his wrist, and the bones cracked there, too. Then something in his leg, because he collapsed. I remember bone jutting from the fabric of his trousers. The sound of bones breaking still haunts me.

“Stop!” I yelled at her, coughing on my own blood. “Stop!”

But she didn’t stop. She drew his sword and drove the weapon into his abdomen. When he hit the ground, she yanked it free, then drove it straight through his shoulder, pinning him to the turf in front of me.

His free hand was trying to draw another weapon, but she caught that wrist too and proceeded to break the rest of his fingers. I remember the sound of his breathing, fractured and panicked as he tried to free himself with hands that wouldn’t work. He was swearing at her, cursing fate, cursing magic.

But never cursing me.

I was able to drag myself to her side, and I grabbed hold of her arm. “Please,” I begged.

“Oh, now you want to beg?” she’d crooned, her voice light and sweet despite the blood on the grass around her. She reached out to cup my jaw, and I flinched, expecting pain, but her fingers were cool against my skin.

“I like it when you beg,” she whispered, leaning closer. “Do it some more.”

Then she broke my jaw, and when I cried out, she knocked me onto my back. She knelt on my chest as my ribs cracked from her magic. She proceeded to pull every tooth from my mouth with her bare fingers, letting them drop into my throat until I was choking on bone and blood and begging for death. Her skirts pooled around me in piles of silk, and a honeybee droned somewhere nearby—or maybe that was me, keening from the pain and desperation of it all.

I don’t know if she answered my prayers or if fate did, but I woke in my sitting room as if her torture had never happened, Grey at my side, the curse beginning once more. The memories weren’t gone, though. For so long, they felt like a nightmare I’d just awoken from. I’d close my eyes and hear bones breaking. I’d swallow and taste blood.

That evening, I ordered Grey not to defend me from Lilith.

“I am sworn to defend you,” he said.

“You are the only remaining guardsman,” I snapped, as if that were somehow a failing, because I somehow didn’t realize how very meaningful that was. But the curse was torment enough. I couldn’t endure the prospect of watching her destroy someone else, season after season, for her own entertainment—because of a choice I made. “If you will not obey my orders, you will leave.”

He stayed—until he didn’t.

And here we are.

Grey will bring magic back to Ironrose, and he will take something I do not want to give. And there is a tiny part of me that worries I deserve all of it.

Outside my window, swords clash, and Harper cries out. A blade rattles along the cobblestones.

I stride to the window. “Harper!”

“I’m all right. I’m all right.” She takes Zo’s outstretched hand and pulls herself to her feet. My eyes search her form, but there’s no blood, no obvious source of damage.

Harper looks up at me, and I am relieved that the ready anger that used to cloud her eyes has dissipated. Our moments together now remind me of the last weeks of the curse, when she knew the enchantress was tormenting me, night after night, so Harper would hardly leave my side, day or night.

I should be protecting her. Instead it feels as though she is always protecting me.