Page 55 of The Royal Curse

“No, you’d have used it already if you could,” he said. “To save your precious Andreas, hmm? That fucking traitor,” he snarled, and spat on the ground, his eyes glittering with hatred that almost equaled mine. “He should’ve died on the pass. That would’ve been a fitting end for him, crushed on the rocks. Not killed in an honorable fight.”

“Honorable—you—it was an ambush, you coward, and if you had any honor you’d have fought him yourse—” Dario struck like an adder, my ears ringing as I tripped and fell to the ground again, mud squishing under my arm and hip, only understanding he’d backhanded me across the face when I tasted blood and reached up to feel the imprint of his knuckles on my cheek.

This time I couldn’t get up again. Not right away. Through the buzzing thump of my own blood I could distantly hear Dario’s men talking in low voices, the jingle of the horses’ tack, the stamping of their hooves.

His voice cut through clearly, though. “I wouldn’t dirty my sword with him,” Dario said, and I laughed, because I knew damn well that in a fair fight it’d have been Andreas’s sword, not Dario’s, that came away needing to be cleaned.

A boot struck my thigh, pain blooming into agony, and I curled in and cried out, not bravely at all. At least Andreas wasn’t there to see me cringing and crawling. I’d have hated that. My head dropped into the mud, cheek wet and cold, and I squeezed my eyes shut and whimpered. Maybe Dario would kill me. But then I couldn’t kill him. Coherent thoughts took so much more effort than they should have.

Dario left me there, walking away to give orders that I vaguely heard and comprehended. The mountains. A pass through the mountains…not the one we’d taken from Surbino. The northern pass the landlord at the inn had thought we were making for in the first place.

The pain in my leg subsided enough that I could gasp half a full breath and force my mind to work. The first mountain pass, where that fucking son of a bitch thought Andreas should have died, although it didn’t matter, because Andreas was…my chest spasmed with unbearable anguish, and I turned my face down and got a mouthful of slimy grass and filth for my trouble. I spat it out, choking. The mountain pass. The rope. That hadn’t been an accident either. Carlo had blamed himself for it, but it had been Dario all along.

Traitor, he’d called Andreas a traitor, when he was the one who—no, he wasn’t a traitor, was he? He was a spy. A foreign agent. He’d claimed to be from the east, but his total lack of an accent should’ve made that suspicious from the beginning. And now that he didn’t need to hide anymore, he sounded northern. All of his men did.

Northern. He had to be. Andreas had served Duke Treviso in Calatria, hadn’t he? And then left the service of his heir, Duke Lucian, to join Surbino’s army. And it seemed that Dario hated him for it.

We had to be on our way to the Duchy of Calatria through the northern pass. Nothing else made sense. I would be a hostage, a political prisoner. Locked up in a gilded cage if I were lucky, held to ensure my mother’s compliance with—what, though? We didn’t have any ongoing disputes with Calatria. Not for decades.

And anyway, if that had been the plan, Lucian’s men probably wouldn’t have been beating me or leaving me to shiver on the ground. They’d have been treating me like a royal prisoner and not…this.

I knew where we were going and who had abducted me, at least. But the rest of it remained opaque. Andreas would’ve been able to figure it out. If he were here, he’d have been defiant, bold, strong and sure. Biding his time.

Not groveling in the mud.

But everythinghurt, and I was racked with shivers, and I hated Dario so much that my teeth ached, but my head spun too much to do anything at all and I hadn’t slept or eaten or drunk.

I’d stay alive. I could do that much. I’d stay alive until Dario was dead.

I clung to that thought as I lay there, icy cold and horribly alone. For Andreas, I’d stay alive until Dario was dead.

Chapter Twenty

The second day of my captivity found me curled in a shivering ball on the rocky ground, aching in every limb, in a low-ceilinged cave halfway to the summit of the pass. My captors huddled around a fire a few feet away. A brutal wind howled through the boulders, and eddies of snow twirled frantically in hypnotic patterns outside the cave mouth. We hadn’t stopped moving at all the first night, and we’d pushed on throughout most of the following day, taking a couple of hours of rest here and there. Dario had called a halt here in the evening as the weather closed in ominously.

Now it was morning again. I watched in grim satisfaction as Dario and one of his men, apparently his next in command, argued with low voices but sharp gestures near the cave mouth. Dario wanted to go on. The other thought it would be suicide to try to make it to the top of the mountain in what could become a real blizzard.

Since their troubles were my only source of satisfaction, I savored it as much as I could. Hopefully they’d all fall off a cliff and be smashed to bits and turned into chunks of bloody ice.

I cared very little if I met the same fate as long as I knew they suffered. Andreas was dead. The thought occurred to me every ten seconds or so, a new and piercing grief each time. When I remembered the heat of his mouth on my skin, the rough clasp of his hands around my hips, the timbre of his voice and his laughter, I could sink into it for a moment. And then the pain hit again, and again, like lashes, and I shook with sobs until my ribs ached and my eyes swelled shut.

At least I could pretend I had Andreas for a few minutes first.

When I returned to reality, prickly ropes dug into my wrists, not so tight as to numb my hands, but tight enough that my elbows and shoulders ached constantly. My arms were in front of me so I could scratch my nose and drink water when it was offered to me, a small mercy. Although Dario had a habit of lifting me by my arms, using his height to pull me all the way up to my toes, something he couldn’t have done with my arms behind my back. Both of my cheekbones throbbed now, since I’d spat in his face the first time he’d done it.

In between bouts of weeping and half-consciousness, I’d nearly given myself a stroke straining to reach my magic, closing my eyes and holding my breath until my lungs burned. It should’ve been long enough for some of it to have returned, given what I’d experienced at the inn—and the horrible thought that it had been my proximity to Andreas rather than any weakness in the potion that had allowed my magic to return more quickly had started to worm its way into my brain.

But Andreas wasn’t here now.

Only once, about an hour before, I’d felt a twitch of…something. A spark. But it had vanished as I tried to grasp it, and I’d slumped back against the rough cave wall, panting and drenched in sweat.

Now the sweat had cooled. My teeth chattered as I tucked myself as best I could under the thin blanket one of Dario’s slightly kinder men had tossed over me when he dropped me on the ground like a sack of potatoes.

The men seemed hungry, actually. I didn’t think Dario had planned for such an arduous trip through the mountains, and they were grumbling. So no, not like a sack of potatoes. They’d have treated that with care.

Moldy potatoes, maybe. All bruised and withered and useless, destined for the garbage heap.

I still didn’t know what they wanted with me, precisely. One of the men had said the nameTavius, but while that name rang a very faint bell in the back of my mind, I couldn’t pull it to the surface. Some agent of Duke Lucian’s, perhaps?

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