Page 1 of The Captive's Curse
Chapter One
Riding in the rain had to be the most mood-lowering activity on earth. After all, humans had invented shelter and then occupied it because having water dripping down your neck and dampening your trouser seat felt utterly dreadful.
When that trouser seat also rubbed and chafed against a leather saddle, the experience rose far above—or below—demoralizing and landed somewhere adjacent to utter misery.
Gods, I wanted to go home and get warm and dry.
Instead, I was freezing my ass off and flying in the face of thousands of years of common sense because Rivina, my harridan of a cousin, also lived under the only roof I had available to me. And listening to her scream and wail, and trying to dodge thrown fruit and books and bottles of wine and anything else she could get her heavily beringed fingers on, would be even less pleasant than forcing my cranky mount down this muddy track through the gloomy woods. I’d had a taste of it before I fled for the stables. Rivina’s shrieks still echoed in my ears.
Not to mention, I had an apple-sized bruise on my shoulder, and my best sky-blue tunic bore spatters of southern red.
No, I’d find somewhere to wait out the rain, give her a few hours to wear herself down, and then go home and sneak in through a side door.
With a shudder, I urged my mare on with my heels and a flick of the reins. She simply flicked her ear back at me in response. If anything, she moved more slowly. Agnethe could be such a bitch. Of course, that was why I’d named her after my mother. All the women in my life, including the horses, were such pains in my ass.
In all likelihood each one of them—including the horses—would’ve said that I was the problem. Hardly. I was the innocent party here.
The much less guilty party, anyway. I hadn’t known whose cock I was sucking, for fuck’s sake. If I’d so much as suspected who he was under that mask, I’d have found some other amusement.
“Will you move, for the love of the gods,” I hissed. “Trot. Trot, damn you! I could turn you into a goat.” That was highly unlikely. My magic manifested almost entirely in my music. But you had to keep people on their toes. Hooves. Whatever. “Probably. And if it goes wrong, that’ll be even worse for you! So fucking move!”
“I don’t generally trot on command,” someone said, and I yelped, jumped, and slid halfway off Agnethe’s back, hanging there precariously, my damp pants sticking me to the saddle.
When I whipped my head around, I found him behind me: a tall, looming, ominous figure in a long black cloak with the hood up, in the act of stepping out onto the path from behind a grove of pines.
He continued with, “Not that I’m eager to be turned into a goat, although I don’t think they trot on command, either.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I snarled, my voice shaking a little bit from the force of my suddenly racing heartbeat.
No one with good intentions lurked here at the edge of my brother’s lands where they abutted the wild forest. No one whose intentions were entirely pure lurked behind trees at all. The lasttime I’d done it, I’d been about to dump a bucket of water over my brother’s head.
But these were very different circumstances. For one thing, this fellow looked quite a bit older than nine.
“Piss off! I’m a powerful mage. Leave me alone.”
Even though I was hanging halfway off her back, I tried again to nudge Agnethe, and she took three steps—and then promptly stopped dead, damn her, right when I needed her to move the most. She was smart enough to know she’d be home all warm and dry having supper if it wasn’t for me. And she could hold a grudge.
I slid a little further. The stranger stepped into the middle of the path in front of Agnethe. Fuck, he was big up close, tall and broad-shouldered, and a very long sword hung at his belt with a knife on the other side. I owned a sword of my own, of course, but I wasn’t any great expert with it…even if I’d remembered to bring it with me.
Well, damn it all to hell.
“If you were a powerful mage, you wouldn’t be as wet as a drowned rat,” he said, and reached out and caught a fistful of Agnethe’s reins. Finally she balked—and reared up, tossing me neatly the rest of the way out of the saddle and flinging me across the path.
Everything flipped and whirled around me, and I had a dizzy, sickening instant to try to summon my magic, out of reach and thin like gossamer, glimmering and taunting me—and then I splatted into the mud, flat on my back, the air whooshing out of my lungs in a sharply painful rush.
Oh, gods, my back was broken. Or my neck. Everything. I blinked up at the darkening sky through the black branches, my eyelashes hazing everything further, my focus going in and out. My body had gone numb. Could I heal myself? Rivina would gloat so unbearably.
Icy-cold mud soaked through my clothes, finally reaching my skin and chilling and sliming me horribly.
A huge dark shape loomed and then leaned down over me.
My lips moved, but I couldn’t get any words out, just pitiful puffs of air. “Uhh,” I managed.
Hopefully he’d be racked with guilt for murdering me, cutting me down in my gorgeous prime. Gods, someone had better write a song about it, at least. One that rhymed, and had a wrenchingly tearful chorus. Something heartbreaking about youth in full flower, and maybe that could rhyme with power, as in my magic…
Another blink, and my attacker threw his hood back. All thought of rhymes fled my mind.
In the drawing commissioned by the local Lord Constable—also known to me as my horrid cousin’s horrid fiancé Hans—he hadn’t been frowning, more sort of moodily staring out of the parchment. But I couldn’t mistake the straight, thick brows, or the firm mouth, or the bold nose and strong jaw.
