Page 9 of Cursed Shadows 1

Pandora huffs. Now that she’s got me to do her this favour, she can be snide again. “I’ve told you so many, Nari.” I do prefer Nari to my full name. “I only need the second to sign up, you’ll not be entered into the Sacrament.”

“Why did it have to be me?” I ask this so many times she must want to wring my neck, and maybe I get a kick out of winding her patience around my finger sometimes.

Pandora starts to roll the scrolls. Through gritted teeth, “Because,” she enunciates, “the second must be from the same bloodline. Father has already competed, so he can’t do it.”

I find enough joy in how she speaks to me—as though I’m a child, all out of her own irritation—to smile. Maybe I’ll miss her when, after the Sacrament, she’ll head off to the armies, whichever one, for whatever position she wins, and I won’t have my sister to annoy anymore.

All the generals and their seconds will be there to watch the battles of the Sacraments to pick out their favourites from those who survive. One way to get a career offer. I’d rather simply not work, myself.

Pandora adds, “You just have to come along, sign what they tell you to, then sit around, eat, dance, pretty yourself up in all the mirrors,” she says with a smile, a true one, “then watch me win.”

Win. I almost scoff at her ambitions.

Before I can think on another way to irk her, her beloved husband stalks out of the cracked glass doors at the rear of the house. Ronan comes for the metal table that Pandora and I always have breakfast at, because it’s got the best view of the willow fields.

“Nari,” he calls out to me, a swagger in the way he comes down the steps. Maybe it’s because he’s all buffed out now that he lives on base. “Your father wants to see you.”

“Of course he does,” I murmur and slam my empty chalice down hard enough to rattle the plates and bowls on the table.

Pandora looks up at me from beneath her blue-tinted lashes. “So he told you.” It’s not a question.

I stare at her as it clicks into place.

My answer is a snarl, “So you knew?”

I leave her with that, kicking back my chair, and storming up the path. I’m so mad at her, that she knew of this betrothment, and didn’t tell me. So mad that even her innocent husband gets the cold shoulder as I stalk past him.

The place to find father should be his study, the door down the end of the hall, closest to the foyer. But that room has water damage from a storm that passed some thirty years ago, and it can’t be used.

I once hid out in that room, under his desk in a game of catch-me-bite-me with Pandora, and I got sick. Healer said it was the mould and the dampness that brewed a common cold in my body—but it felt anything other than common.

Took a week before I could leave my bed, and more weeks before I was out and about again.

Now, father’s in the library, so that’s where I go. Just a short corridor away from me, where he’s set up his study and where I’m in no danger of common colds.

A sour pinch puckers my mouth as I slip through the gap in the old, termite-eaten door. I hate to push it, the hinges creak too loud, so I make myself smaller as I sneak into the wispy light. The dust that’s caked onto the long, panelled window behind father’s blackwood desk stops too much light from brightening the library, so it’s lit with lanterns instead.

We just don’t have enough servants to keep up with the chores, and bargained humans cost a lot to feed and clothe and bathe, and the price of them from the Eternal Dance is too much for our family purse.

My eyes take a single blink to adjust to the dimness. The pout is still on my face as I wander over to father, but my eyes flickerover the forgotten scrolls on the shelves. The shelves that are still standing, at least.

I wonder, fleetingly, what it once was in here, if each shelf was sturdy and clean, tended to by a houseful of servants, and that books, tomes and scrolls were packed onto them.

A time before mine, when the Elmfields had gold.

Father looks up from his letters. They are scattered all over his desk, some have mug rings staining them, but all appear on the cheap side of parchment. He’s a second to an envoy who serves the Prince of War, so most of his letters come from war camps far out on the borders, or the seas, or the Midlands.

Father gestures with a lazy lift of his hand.

Sit, it tells me.

With a huff, I fall into the creaky leathered armchair opposite him.

“Where did you disappear to last night, Nari?”

Hell, I want to say.

But I look up my lashes at him, at the ashy tint to his brown skin and the weathered look in his coffee eyes.

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