Page 54 of The Royal Curse

No, it wouldn’t take long at all. It was my heart that wouldn’t recover.

My boots squelched into the soggy ground, and I bent down, trying to see if there was anywhere to step where I wouldn’t sink in even deeper. The hell? There was almost no grass at all, only churned-up earth with a few bits of green mushed in, hoof marks and boot marks and…far too many hoof marks and boot marks for one man.

“It looks to be a popular spot for watering horses,” I said, and looked up at Dario, who stood still beside me and didn’t answer. His face shone pale in the moonlight. The hair rose on the back of my neck. “Either direction they went, we’d have seen them at the inn, wouldn’t we? In the village.” Something was wrong, I could feel it, and I needed… “Andreas!”

“Sir?” Salvius cried from behind me, drowning me out. I spun on my heel and found Andreas on foot leading his horse, turned away from me to look at Salvius. “Sir! I thought I saw—”

Salvius broke off in a cry as a torrent of mounted men burst out of the forest around us in a sudden pounding of hooves and loud whinnies, shouts of challenge and the flash of swords. Andreas already had his own sword drawn, and he spun and ran for me. I caught a glimpse of his glittering eyes and bared teeth, and I took one stumbling step toward him—but something caught me around the middle and jerked me off the ground, knocking the wind out of me, and I shouted and struggled and fought, dizzy and disoriented, as I was flung face-first over the back of a horse. The saddle’s pommel gouged into my stomach. I shoved an elbow up and into my captor’s torso, and he grunted and cuffed me hard in the back of the head. Stars exploded in my vision. My magic, I had to—but it wouldn’t come, I was a heavy lump with no power in me at all, spreading my fingers and nothing, nothing!

Everything was chaos, too fast and too loud, the horse spun, my head spun an instant later and snapped back and my neck radiated agony, I couldn’t see—

“Andreas!” I shouted, and twisted around, scrabbling at the horse’s tack for any leverage I could get, desperate to find him, for him to find me. “Andreas!”

I thought I heard my name in reply, and then the legs under my torso kicked the horse into a gallop, and I lurched and slid, only held on by a hand around my belt. The hard tug of the belt against my gut made me gasp and gag, eyes watering—and through the blur I glimpsed him, only for an instant, fighting two mounted assailants at once with a crowd of others circling and fighting my guards. Moonlight flashed on their mail and swords—and on Andreas’s sword, slipping through the air like water, like the moonlight itself. One of the enemy shrieked and toppled from his horse, and another spurred forward in his place.

Everything went silent and still as my eyes met Andreas’s, bright with fury and agony and desperation. I thought I saw his mouth shape my name again. And then he went down, a sword flashing over him.

A jolt, and I was slamming up and down against the side of a horse and choking back bile, arms and legs bouncing and flailing.

Andreas. They were killing Andreas and all my men. I’d chosen the potion over trusting him to take care of me, and If I’d had my magic I might have been able to save him. Or more likely die with him, but at least I wouldn’t be a helpless prisoner, tears whipping away unheeded with the wind.

Oh, gods, I’d probably seen Andreas dying. He’d said my name, and then he’d been—cut down quickly, if they were merciful, stabbed through the heart or with his throat cut, glassy eyes reflecting the moon as he bled out into the muck.

Or face down, drowning in it, gasping in mouthfuls of the same mud the horses were kicking up into my face and my eyes and into my nose—and I did vomit then, retching and spasming upside-down and barely able to breathe, until I hung there limp and sobbing and half-conscious, my eyes opening on the horse’s heaving flanks and mud and more mud and the horse’s sweat and the pounding pounding pounding of hooves…

Andreas. I couldn’t even whisper his name through my raw throat. Andreas.

I never lost consciousness. That would’ve been a mercy, and the gods were clearly not inclined to be merciful. But at last, at long last, when I thought the heavy throbbing in my head and the cracking of my neck and the pain in every limb and the pressure on my lungs would kill me, there was an authoritative shout, and then my captor reined his horse in.

“Get him down,” a familiar male voice said, and I struggled again, completely uselessly, as I was dragged off the horse and slung onto the ground, landing hard on my hands and knees. My head hung down as I gasped and retched again. Mud. Under my palms, between my fingers, under my shins, seeping into my boots. Frigidly cold and squishy. Andreas had to be dead, in mud like this.

Someone else’s filthy boots appeared a few inches from my nose. “Get up, if you please, Your Highness,” their owner said.

Dario. That was Dario’s voice.

And suddenly I understood, the events of the past days and weeks twisting, resettling, and taking on a new shape, like an optical illusion resolving into a recognizable object.

The traveler he’d found who had recent knowledge of the bridge hadn’t been misinformed, he’d been paid to lie. Dario had taken employment with Surbino’s royal guards for this purpose, probably, part of a long-planned plot to…I didn’t know what yet, but someone who wanted the best for me wouldn’t have murdered my escort, kidnapped me, and tossed me on the ground like refuse. My saddlebags on the pass through the mountains, the way the strap had torn. As if it’d been sabotaged. A bid to make me more vulnerable? To force us to turn back? Or simply delay us?

And the ferry…if there even was a ferryman, Dario had certainly never bothered to speak to him. It had been a ploy to lure us into an ambush.

It hardly mattered. Andreas and all my men had died for nothing, with Carlo the first victim of Dario’s betrayal, his letter forged—Andreas and I would have no way of knowing his handwriting from anyone else’s.

Carlo’s family and friends would never see him again. None of my men’s families would ever see them again. And it was all because of me. Nothing else mattered but that.

I lifted my head and shoved up off the ground, rising to my feet.

No, one thing mattered, and it burned in me, deep down, stinging and searing and agonizing, giving me the strength to move.

I swayed, caught myself, and looked into Dario’s eyes. “I’m going to kill you,” I said. “Not an execution. Not a trial before Surbino’s judges. I’ll kill you myself.”

His teeth gleamed white in the moonlight. “Go ahead, Your Highness. By all means. Kill me with your mighty magic.”

A red flash obscured my vision for a moment, all my muscles going rigid, hands clenching. Gods, I’d never understood what hatred meant before this moment. The urge to fling myself on him and choke the life out of him, gouge out his eyes, make him scream…but there were several men behind me, another three behind Dario. A whole troop. And even if it had been just the two of us here alone I’d have been outmatched.

I quivered with frustrated fury, but I kept myself still. “Perhaps I will,” I ground out. “When the moment’s right.”

The bastard actually threw his head back and laughed, and several of the men around us chuckled. My skin burned, my fists shook, I’d kill them all, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t, and I reached deep inside where my magic lived and tried to pry it out, but there was only a void.

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