Page 18 of Cursed Shadows 1

This path is my enemy. Always, it’s seemed too long—but now, as we reach the steep decline down the hill that leads into the village, I realize it’s suddenly quite short.

We stand there at the cusp of the hill.

I look down on the village and smoke.

My father’s home looms dark and dank at the far end, tucked into overgrown gardens and poorly kept barns. Bigger than the other houses but falling into disrepair as generational wealth trickled away like beads of blood from a festering wound.

The dark one traces my gaze there.

“Ordinary,” I speak softly.

His brow pinches as he turns to face me. The question in his gaze is gone in a heartbeat.

What would your ballad be?

Ordinary.

He says nothing, but accepts the rolled stalk that I pinch between my fingers and offer to him. He takes it, but he doesn’t smoke it. He only watches me, a slight tilt to his head.

I take a step back towards the hill. “I’m Narcissa.”

My face is blank. His expression is stony with the faintest hint of curiosity, like he’s thinking abouthowto know more about me, like he’s considering cracking me open, peeling me apart and looking inside, a wonder at what he might find.

Another step back. “Everyone calls me Nari.”

Then I throw him a tight smile, because of course I would never thank him for escorting me—and he doesn’t ask me to.

I take the rest of the path alone, leaving him at the cusp of the hill.

I walk home.

†††

DAXEEL

Daxeel stands there at the top of the grassy hill, shrouded in the darkness of the night, hidden in the shade of the thick trees.

His eyes pierce through the shadows, blue blades aimed at the halfling that moves around puddles of mud on the road that cuts through the rotten village. She skips over smaller puddles, side-steps larger ones, and keeps her sandalled feet as clean as she can on foot.

Her brown hair is light enough to bring autumn leaves to mind; he watches some waves fall out of her loose braids. A spear of anger, like an ice-dagger, cuts through him as he wonders…Did her fiancé do that? Did he rip at her braids?

Maybe that’s why he stands there, stays there, and watches her until she’s safely through the gates of the dark home that he can smell from over here… the home that smells damp.

Still, he doesn’t leave. He waits.

Just as he did then in the gardens of the High Court.

“Wait,” she had whispered, and he’d doubted she even knew her voice cracked when she had said it; that when she’d held out her hand for him to take, as though he should fall to his knees for the privilege of touching her, that he didn’t see her fingers tremble; that he didn’t smell the fear on her.

Her snooty mask was all that had kept her together.

So he waited then, and he waits now.

Wolves will sometimes watch rabbits. Watch them hop and bounce their way back to their hovels, down which all their young survive, unwittingly leading a predator right to them.

He frowns at the dark house with the dark windows.

He isn’t the wolf. Not tonight. Not to her. But nature demands that he is what he is, and that is a predator.

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