Page 17 of The Royal Curse

He was still only inches from me. I had to brace my hands on the edge of the table behind me and tip my chin up to meet his dark, troubled gaze.

“You don’t think that you trying to swim a horse through a flooded fucking river would worry me, Andreas? You wouldn’t send a man to do what you wouldn’t do yourself. Now it’s my turn. I won’t allow it, and I don’t give a fuck who’s nominally in charge of this expedition.”

A smile lit his eyes and teased at the corners of his mouth. He leaned down, a shuffle of his boots bringing him impossibly closer. “Nominally,” he repeated. “No. Your Highness. I’m factually in charge, and if I want to swim a flooded fucking river I damn well will, especially if it—if it’s for you. Are we clear? I—gave my oath to the queen, that I’d bring you home safely.”

“Oh,” I gasped, as all the air left my lungs in a rush. His oath. To my mother. For a moment, I’d almost thought—but of course that was why he’d gone down the cliff, and of course that was why he’d swim a river. I closed my eyes for a moment and gathered my wits, opening them to say, “I’ll write home when the road’s clear. To suggest you receive a commendation.”

For a moment he went very still. And then, at last, he stepped back, clasping his hands behind him. “I’d be honored, Your Highness,” he said. “In the meantime, I need to earn it. I’ll ask our landlady first, and I’ll go and make other inquiries here first, of course. But I’ll go farther afield in the morning if I must.”

Andreas wouldn’t be swayed by attempts to pull rank on him, obviously. And so long as he considered himself honor-bound to die for me in order to keep his vow to my mother, asking him to reconsider wouldn’t work either.

But I couldn’t allow it.

Which meant I had to tell him the degrading truth, no matter how it scraped my throat raw to choke it out.

“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t take the risk. Because it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Days before you return, if you return at all, I’ll either be dead of an apoplexy from the strain of my symptoms or I’ll be climbing onto a stranger’s cock.” Andreas’s mouth dropped open. He shut it again. I smiled sourly, the twist of my lips feeling like the precursor to tears. “Unless there’s someone with the necessary skills and ingredients here, I’m—”Fucked. I swallowed the word down along with a mouthful of bile, my esophagus spasming painfully. It applied both figuratively and all too literally.

Andreas’s face had set into hard lines, a granite carving of a soldier rather than the man who’d smiled and joked with me all the way over the mountains.

“Then I’d best be about it,” he said. “Please, I hate to belabor the point, but will you please care for yourself in the meantime? Get warm. Eat. Rest, Your Highness. Promise me.”

“I’m fine,” I protested—and then shuddered with cold, a full-body tremor.

“Obviously,” he said dryly. “Promise. Or I’ll—I’ll send that landlady up here with instructions to chivvy you into bed with a hot brick.”

That startled a laugh out of me despite everything. “Gods forbid. I promise, Andreas. Just chivvy her into getting me that hot water. And—thank you. You need to warm up and eat and rest too, you know.”

“Plenty of time for that when you’re safe,” he said offhandedly as he turned for the door. He opened it, stepped through, and then paused. “Don’t drink any wine, please.”

Before I could do more than gasp in indignation, he was gone.

And with his confident, bracing presence went any of the hope that I’d tried to nurture. I looked around the tidy little room, taking in the simple table and chair, the narrow rope-frame bed with its mattress full of straw, the rag rug on the plank floor. Andreas had traveled this way before, and he’d led us to this inn specifically, saying that it was the best of the four in town.

Which didn’t really give me a lot of faith that specialized potions for mages who made up only a small percentage of magically-born people, not to mention the population at large, would be easily available.

Or available at all.

Gennaro and my mother’s court physician made my potion together, from rare components sourced from all over the place. It wasn’t an easy thing to compound even if you knew how and had everything to hand.

A knock at the door spurred me into action, but no amount of hustle and bustle of maids and the landlady, of food and tea laid on the table and hot water poured into a basin, of that heated brick Andreas had joked about being put into my bed, could distract me from the clock ticking away in the back of my mind.

One hour until I was due for my regular dose. I had half of that. If I waited a little, took it late…but that wouldn’t help me either. Some dawn mages had a much more gradual onset of symptoms when they neglected our gods-inflicted necessity, either to “receive the proxy of the god Ennolu’s blessing and possession,” as the ancient text the priests used so inaccurately described it, or to take the potion that stunted our magic and prevented it from attacking us from the inside. They might have hours, or even a few days, from the beginning of their pains to a point of complete incapacitation.

For me, it took minutes, half an hour at most. And I cycled more quickly than most, too. My research had spanned every written account of twilight mages and their lives I could get my hands on, and as far as I could tell, the range was anywhere from a day and a half to ten days or so. I barely made it over the minimum.

I tossed my wet clothes out the door into the hall, where a maid called out her assurance that they’d be clean and dry in the morning, and stood before the fire to scrub myself down.

The potion would be best taken with my supper. Forty-two hours with a normal dose. Twenty-one, perhaps, with this. By early evening tomorrow I’d be in agony.

I’d be begging someone, anyone, to fuck me and come inside me and end the pain.

Fresh clothes and a glass of wine, with a mental not-terribly-polite salute to Andreas, didn’t help much. My supper stuck in my throat like sawdust and the wine was thin. The potion tasted like it always did, heavily herbal and with a bitter tang that set my teeth on edge. I tipped my head back and held the bottle over my mouth for ages, letting every last possible drop slide onto my tongue.

And then I had nothing to do but wait, watching the fire dance and listening to the rain pattering steadily on the roof. A few stray drops made their way down the chimney and hissed in the flames like tiny snakes. Someone laughed in the corridor, and a door slammed in the distance.

And I waited. Twenty hours to go. And then nineteen. And then…I poured another glass of wine, put another log on the fire, and settled in for the night.

Andreas might have told me to rest, but I knew I wouldn’t close my eyes for a moment until he returned.

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