Page 10 of The Captive's Curse
But he rallied, saying, “Well, it won’t be quite as easy as all that. They’ve been after us for two years, ever since that Lord Constable arrived, and they haven’t found us yet, have they?”
“No, because the castle’s said to have magic on it that prevents anyone from finding it.” Perhaps if I treated it as a given that this was the Mad Lord’s castle, he’d fall into the trap of admitting it. “How did Enzo find it, anyway? When no one else has been able to for hundreds of years?”
Leander leaned forward, glancing about him as if he meant to tell me a secret, and I found myself matching his posture. Gods, how irritating. Was this how normal people felt when dealing with me? He tapped the side of his nose and gave me an exaggerated wink.
“Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” he whispered.
“Yes, it would, which is what I asked you to do,” I snapped. “How did he?”
Even more infuriatingly, he raised one arched eyebrow at me. “That would be tellingis an expression that means I’m not going to tell you,” he said calmly.
The table was a touch too wide for me to punch him. Bad planning on someone’s part. Or maybe good planning, considering who usually sat here. I was almost certainly one of the least violent, and I’d already contemplated dishing out grievous bodily harm several times since sitting down to breakfast.
“I’m well aware—”
“I’m afraid I need to go get to work, as Enzo said.” He climbed off his bench and stood by the stairs. “Are you two coming?”
Seriously? Did Enzo only allow men to join his outlaw band if they demonstrated proficiency in interrupting people and then walking away?
As I sputtered in impotent annoyance, Finn and the silent mountain beside me both got up, rattling the bench and nearly tipping me onto the floor, and tromped around the head of the table. The three of them went the same way Enzo had gone.
I opened my mouth to muster up some parting shot or other, and then I heard Leander say to the others, “Do you smell onions? We didn’t even have any onions with breakfast. So strange.”
That hit me like a blow to the gut and took the fight right out of me. I slumped down, leaning my forehead in my hands and squeezing my eyes shut. At least Enzo hadn’t been here for that. I glanced over one shoulder and then the other, just in case. No one was paying me the slightest attention, and there were no snickers or mocking smiles.
With a deep sigh, I lifted my head and surveyed the table. They might not have left me any dignity, but at least they’d left me half a platter of bacon, and the bread was surprisingly good.A passing serving lad set down a half-full coffee pot, and even lukewarm it was better than nothing.
Food. Coffee. And at least I’d probably have the time to explore the castle before my ransom arrived and try to gather some information of my own. There, I’d managed to look on the bright side of things again.
With a little more cheer—and carefully, manfully resisting the paranoiac urge to sniff myself—I finished my breakfast and drained my twice-refilled cup of coffee.
I’d take a walk, avoid Enzo, and be ransomed before I had to endure one more meal in this dreadful place.
Chapter Four
The full legend of the Mad Lord told how Vincenzo, the last scion of a noble family, had suddenly lost his mind and his health while in his prime. He’d screamed and raved throughout the night and fallen into a nearly unresponsive stupor by day, refusing to eat, wasting away, until he lay skeletal and grotesque on his filthy bed.
His servants had abandoned him one by one, terrified by his nighttime rages and by the gruesome state of his body. A curse, they’d whispered, placed on him by a witch whom he’d betrayed—though depending on the source, Vincenzo had either raped her, taken her as his mistress and then failed to marry her, or refused to recognize the son she’d borne him.
That had been two hundred years ago or so, which meant that the legend had undergone some transformations, additions, and redactions since, especially given the demands of poetic license.
But when I finally navigated the warren of doors and corridors and little courtyards that comprised the south wing of the fortress, found a staircase, and emerged onto the battlements, the breathtaking view was consistent with all of the versions of the story.
The kingdom of Rabbion, where I’d spent my entire life, lay on the eastern side of the mountain range that ran like a spine down the center of an enormous peninsula extending from the northern continent. A broad river wound through Rabbionand then south, and from my current vantage point I overlooked miles of patchy gray and green and black, foothills and forests and rocky outcroppings, all tumbling down to the faraway river valley.
My family’s lands were somewhere off to the left, I was fairly sure, although I couldn’t pick out any landmarks through the overcast haze that spread over it all. And my sense of direction, if you could call it that, depended mostly on guesswork and using a trick my childhood nurse had taught me for using my fingers to find my left and right.
The stories said that the castle had been built up in the mountains, on a defensible crag only reachable on horseback via a winding path through rough rocks and dense woods. I peered through a crenellation in the wall to see what was immediately below, and stumbled back, closing my eyes against a wave of dizziness. The cliff fell away almost sheer, with a nauseating series of switchbacks cutting their way up the final approach to the gate.
Fuck, that couldn’t possibly be the only way up here, because if Enzo had, what, tied me over Agnethe’s back to bring me along that hideously steep and dangerous death-trap of a road? Oh, I was going to be sick just thinking about it.
It took a couple of minutes of breathing deeply while sitting on the floor with my back to the wall—on the opposite side of the walkway, thank you very much, because what if the wall gave way?—to rid myself of the sparkling black spots that filled my vision every time I tried to open my eyes.
At last the ground stopped undulating beneath me, and I was able to dry my sweaty palms on the thighs of my trousers and tip my head back, blowing out a long, cleansing sigh.
All right. I wouldn’t risk putting any weight on my watery knees quite yet, but my brain had started to work again.
What I’d seen matched the tales perfectly, hadn’t it? Gods. I’d really been brought to the legendary site of his curse itself. Ihad. I knew it, down to my bones. My heart beat faster, and not with a panicked dread of heights this time.
