Page 5 of The Captive's Curse
Enzo slowly raked me over with his gaze, from my flushed, gaping-mouthed face all the way down, lingering below the waist, and then back up again. He met my eyes without any apparent shame. The silence between us stretched despite the continued hubbub from the hall behind me.
“As you said?” he prompted me. “Before I so rudely interrupted you? I’m all ears, Lord Pantsless.”
That took a moment to sink in. Even Rivina would never have stooped to a childish insult like that—she preferred language that a brothel madam might consider a little beyond the pale, honestly.
“You,” I gritted out through my teeth, “were the one who took my pants.”
He scoffed, rolled his eyes, and said, “You think I didn’t have anything better to do than stuff you into bed to sleep it off? We have a healer here, and since she’s getting up in years, she has an assistant. I assume he did the heavy lifting and she checked you over to make sure you weren’t really hurt. But I had nothing to do with it.”
Nothing to do with— “You knocked me off my horse! You bloody well kidnapped me! I hold you directly responsible for all of this,” I hissed. “My lack of pants. The onions.”
His eyebrows rose and he mouthed,The onions?
I chose to ignore him.
“The fact that I’m a starving, maltreated prisoner!” I finished, rising to a self-righteous crescendo.
“You—it’s been a few hours!” His lips twitched, as if he were trying not to laugh again. Bastard. “How hungry can you possibly be? And if you are, there’s a whole supper right there through that doorway. Help yourself. To the supper, or these mysterious onions you keep whining about.” He waved a genial hand. “Everything that’s fit to eat is all yours for the taking, Your Very High and Unnamed Lordship.”
High and Unnamed…and here I stood in just this awful shirt, goosebumps rising on my bare legs, feet going numb against the flagstones.
The tips of my ears burned. My cheeks were on fire. Nudity in and of itself didn’t bother me in the slightest, even though my point about his not deserving to see my lovely skin remained valid; it was being on the defensive. If I’d been bathed and perfumed and wearing my favorite gold chain earring, I’d have strutted about this place as naked as a jaybird and twice as cocky.
So to speak.
Well, fuck it. Why not do my best with what I had, with or without a worthy audience?
My magic had serious limitations, even more than typical for weak, modern mages. We didn’t have the power of the sorcerers of legend who’d been personally chosen by the god Dromos to carry out his work on earth. Born at dawn with the spark of magic in me, I also bore the god Ennolu’s curse: that I’d have to take another man inside me at regular intervals, using the force of his life and body to control my magic. Mages were always born at night, under Ennolu’s brother Dromos’s aegis. But at twilight, dawn or dusk, Ennolu was able to exert his power and taint Dromos’s gift.
It had always seemed stupidly unfair to me that Ennolu took his anger out on Dromos’s chosen humans, who had no choice in the matter, rather than on Dromos himself.
After all, even little human children knew it wasn’t sporting to pick a fight with someone weaker than you.
Ennolu’s flaws aside, I’d learned to compensate somewhat for my own and employ tricks to make my magic look more impressive than it really was. For one thing, I used magic mostly for music, and I had plenty of natural talent in that area…not to mention grueling hours of practice that no one would believe the fickle, frivolous Lord Cyril capable of. For another, my threats to Agnethe and Enzo aside, I knew better than to try to mess with living things, which included any kind of healing. The transformation and transmutation of inanimate objects was more than complicated enough for the likes of me.
Unless I wanted someone to die horribly, of course, in which case I could be counted on to deliver results merely by attempting to do something like soothe their indigestion. Many twilight mages were very strong by modern standards, and excellent healers to boot. Not me. I was defective even for cursed mages. I liked to think it made me doubly special.
Luckily for everyone, in this case I simply needed to take an old, thin blanket and a homespun shirt and turn them into something attractive but as analogous as possible. Worst-case scenario, I still looked like shit wearing them, and no one would die.
Probably.
The blanket lay in a crumpled heap around my feet. I gazed down at it, reaching out with my magic to trace its contours, the texture of its fibers, the structure of it underlying what the mundane eye could see. I needed it to reflect light, rather than sucking it in. And reflect more of a certain type of light, the vibration of which I could feel in my magical soul, as unique as a single plucked lute string standing out from the others.
“I can pick it up for you if you don’t want to bend over and show everyone in the dining hall your ass,” Enzo said, startling me out of my focus. Glancing up sharply, I found him grinning in a lopsided, shit-eating way that made me want to rearrange his face. “You know, you’re not wearing anything under that shirt. I’m not sure how it’s too short for you, given that you’re pint-sized yourself. I’ll have to ask if they borrowed it from a stunted child.”
Damn it, I’d almost had it! The blanket, the shirt, the pattern of what I needed to make out of them. His habit of interrupting me needed to be dealt with, but I’d already tried glaring, complaining, and making him feel guilty. I blinked at him, my body vibrating slightly, so far beyond indignation and fury that I’d reached some odd plateau of calm. His mock-helpful tone had probably done it.
“No,” I said coldly, lifting my chin. “No help necessary. I can spare the dining hall’s charming denizens the sight of my ass in another way.”
I spun gracefully on my toes, hopefully doing my old dancing master proud, and put my back to him.
That gave me an excellent view through the arch to the hall, where we’d finally attracted some attention. I tried not to resent it too much that no one had looked until Enzo joined me, but I still stared down my nose at the three or four men who were craning their necks to see into the corridor. They were about to get a bit of a show, but perhaps it would teach them the same lesson I was about to impart to their leader: Lord Cyril of Montefime Castle could not be mocked, shamed, or humiliated.
My family had often told me I had no shame, in fact. And while they were wrong, I certainly didn’t havethiskind of shame.
Without even attempting to crouch down or otherwise hide what the shirt barely covered, I bent slowly at the waist, my long, long legs—for my very moderate, not at all stunted-child height, thank you—as straight as I could keep them and my feet a little wider than they strictly needed to be, my ass pointing up at an angle guaranteed to show him…everything.
And then I paused there, slowly gathering up the blanket, taking my time. I glanced through my lashes at the men who’d been watching from the hall. Their mouths had dropped open and their eyes were practically bugging out, although that could’ve been as much for the spectacle of someone sticking his ass in the infamous “Ser” Enzo’s face as for their appreciation of my gorgeous body. But I didn’t care—it was gratifying either way. I shot them a saucy wink and had the satisfaction of seeing their faces go as red as tomatoes.
