Page 31 of The Wand of Lore

“You will address me as ‘Mother.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mother.”

The woman nodded and waited patiently as Gwenneth rose to her feet.

“Now, tell me. How did you come to be in this wretched place? Did the witch hunters find you in your home, or perhaps they saved you from a burning stake?”

“No, Mother. I was betrayed. I willingly rode my captive’s horse from my village to here, and willingly walked into Gorenth and into the grounds of the castle on my own two feet. The king’s son was sent to bring me in, but I thought he cared about me. It was a stupid girlish fantasy. The mistake in judgment appears to have cost me my freedom.”

“Perhaps so,” said the woman quietly.

They walked wordlessly along the corridor until they reached a stairway lit with torches on either side. The light burned Gwenneth’s eyes, and she shielded her face with her hands. The old woman stopped and faced Gwenneth, clutching her arm abruptly with her cold, dry hands. Her eyes widened and sparkled in a way that Gwenneth hadn’t seen before.

“I would give anything in the world to have spent even a day entertaining a girlish fantasy. The king’s son is a captive himself; he has endured a lifetime of cruelty and neglect after his poor queen mother died in childbirth, and nobody will ever forgive him for that. The truth is that I would walk across the entire kingdom in bare feet for a chance to even believe in love for a moment. Some things are worth the risk. You’re about to lose any vestige of hope you may have lingering in your foolish body, but if he loved you even for a day, you hold that close to your heart. It may just keep you alive.”

Gwenneth stared at the witch’s wide, earnest eyes. She seemed like a different person, suddenly alive and alert.

“Please, you have to help me escape. If they know where my sister is, they’ll get her, I’m certain of it,” Gwenneth pleaded, hoping this new woman would be more sympathetic to her plight.

The woman’s eyes darkened and she turned back to the doorway abruptly.

“That is the last time you will speak to me of escape without severe punishment, and the last time you fail to address me as ‘Mother.’ Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Mother,” said Gwenneth, and she silently trailed her up the stairs.

Gwenneth had no desire to confide in the old woman any more than she had to, but the woman’s words had left her more confused than ever. The woman had suggested that Gwenneth evaluate whether Marvin—no, Vaylor—had loved her even for a day, when Gwenneth couldn’t possibly know what was in his heart, except that he had betrayed her. Yet as angry as she was about his betrayal, she longed to sit in his arms and feel his chest behind her, protecting her from all the cruelty that lay ahead.

Chapter Twenty: Vaylor

Vaylor spent many days locked in his childhood room without any of his weapons, mostly sitting on a bed that had been unused for years. His body throbbed as the curse continued to expand, but nobody came to help him. The door was bolted and there were armed guards waiting outside, which he knew because Steffan had told him so, baring his white teeth in a grin. Once a day or so, they would enter with a plate of food and remove his chamber pot. Every time they entered, he tried to engage them.

“What have you done with Gwenneth?” he had demanded on the first day, but the guard ignored him.

On the second day, he waited behind the door for the guard for hours. When it finally opened, he attempted to draw the guard’s sword, but the guard was quick to land a fist in his stomach, sending him reeling against the wall. After that, he stuck to verbal attempts at gaining information, all of which were unsuccessful, but he never stopped asking.

He had been confined to this time capsule for weeks, spending his long days with the ghosts of his childhood. He had already gone through his bookshelf, where his brother had torn out the best pages of his favorite books and reshelved them. In his armoire was a box of treasures he had saved when hewas very young. There was a pinecone he had found when he was only four years old that he had presented to his father on a rare visit with the king. His father had thrown the pinecone at him and scolded him for bringing dirt inside the house. There was a small doll, no bigger than the palm of his hand, that a chambermaid had surreptitiously left in his room. When he was feeling particularly abused, he would take the doll out and scold her for her transgressions, sometimes beating her and sometimes forcing her to go without food. Other times, he would hold the doll tenderly and stroke her face and pretend he understood love. His most valuable possessions lived in that box and included old wax stubs he had used to color, a wishbone smuggled from a long-ago meal, and dried crumbles of flower petals he had once found particularly lovely as they twirled through the air and landed at his feet.

He spent many days with the boy ghost and could not help but feel tenderness toward the child, despite how the kid would one day grow up to ruin his life. When the child hid in a corner of the room, listening anxiously for Greyson’s steps coming up the stairs, Vaylor sat with him and rubbed his back.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered into the phantom’s ear. “Greyson is dead. I killed him myself and he’ll never hurt you again.”

When the ghost shivered under his covers aching with an unanswered hunger, Vaylor lay in the bed beside him and held his skinny body. “This hunger won’t kill you, child. You’re going to be okay, and one day you’ll taste freedom.” Then he dropped his voice to a whisper, as if afraid of who might hear him. “For a moment, you’ll even know love,” he confided.

The boy ghost was his only companion, and they spent the long days sharing stories and entertaining each other. One day the boy ghost asked him the questions he dared not ask himself.

“Why are you here? I thought you said we escape this life and find something better.”

Vaylor’s eyes welled with tears. He didn’t have the courage to destroy this boy’s hope in a better future. “We do,” he said finally, avoiding the child’s familiar eyes. “But we squander it. There is a woman with purple eyes whose skin is so soft and perfect that you’ll want to touch it forever. Her body will melt into yours and you’ll think it’s all okay, and then your penchant for self-immolation will overtake you and you’ll hand her over to the very people who least deserve her presence. In doing so, I doom myself to a cursed death, and doom her to a cursed life.”

“Where is she now? Does she love us?”

“She is likely caged and collared with the rest of the king’s witches. She will spend her days locked up, ruing the day we met, if she thinks of me at all.”

“You’re giving up on her,” the boy accused Vaylor.

“I’m giving up on us, child,” said Vaylor, and rubbed the boy’s hair in a pathetic attempt at an apology.

“That’s not my future. I am strong and good. When my turn comes to meet her, I will protect her and fight for her with my dying breath. I am not a lazy, good-for-nothing waif like our brother says. Like you!”

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