Chapter 12
THE CURSE
Stars sparkled outside the windows of the cottage as I fitfully dozed by the fire. I pressed the king’s shirt to my wound, but my eyes threatened to close, pulling me down into a painful, yet drowsy oblivion.
Rafia burst through the front doors of my cottage, followed swiftly by the potion master and gardener, Jel. He wore strange glasses and carried a stack of notebooks and the black bag of a healer.
Potion master, gardener and healer?
“Oh, you poor dear!” Rafia bustled up to me. She carried a stack of warm blankets and a pillow, which she shoved beneath my head. “I should have been here. I should have—”
“No, no, Rafia.” I didn’t want Rafia to blame herself. “There was nothing any of us could have done. It just got a good slice at my leg.”
One glance at the blood soaking through the king’s once-fine shirt caused my stomach to drop.
Jel murmured something underneath his breath and knelt down to where my leg lay out on the couch. “Yarrow and witch hazel, tobacco, and my own special blend will take care of this in no time. Let’s get a closer look.”
Jel peeled back the king’s blood-crusted shirt and pulled in a sharp breath. We all did. The four cuts were puffy, red and inflamed. But beyond that, black lines twisted and fractured from the wounds as if my leg were made of fine porcelain and was starting to crack.
“What is that?” I breathed. The black lines looked familiar somehow.
“It is… the blight.” The Elf King had slipped in through the front door and now stood over the back of the couch I sat in. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and his breathing was labored.
He inspected my wound with thinly veiled loathing. “So, it can spread to humans.”
He said it as if I were no more than a scientific oddity to study, with all the warmth of his earlier distraction forgotten.
“The blight?” I asked, my throat closing up. Now I remembered where I’d seen these strange patterns before. My infection looked just like the blackness on the egg Jel had been studying a few days earlier. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’ve been infected by a shade monster,” Jel answered, rubbing at his temples. “The monsters have been plaguing our lands for centuries.”
“Centuries?” I gasped. “Why have I not heard of these before?”
But maybe I had from Sam, back home. He said a creature with eyes like the moon and teeth the size of daggers had ripped through the Bitner’s corn the night before I came here. Could it have been this same creature from Ravensong? Had it entered into the human lands?
“There was only one, in the beginning. One monster who hid in the peaks of the highest snow-covered mountains. And now, it seems, there is another. Little by little, its infection, its disease has spread until it has made its way into our lands, ruining crops and killing livestock in large swaths.” Jel sighed as he soaked cloth strips in his potion and laid them over my jagged wound. “And the monster?”
Jel directed this last question to the king who nodded solemnly. “The beast has finally been contained. It was easy to find as it tarried, injured, so close to the castle.”
Jel’s shoulders dropped and he let out a great sigh of relief. Rafia, who looked as if she’d seen a specter, regained a bit of the color that had leached from her face.
“Thank the stars,” Rafia muttered under her breath.
Everyone looked so relieved, but I was laid out here bleeding.
“What will happen to me?” If this disease killed animals and land, surely it would do the same to me.
“We have not seen what will happen to a human, you are the first to be infected.” The king’s deep voice reverberated through the cottage causing the hairs on my arms to rise. “But the few elves who have been infected inevitably pass into shadow.”
My heart stopped; my mouth grew dry. “What do you mean pass into shadow?”
The king dropped his head. “No longer alive, yet not able to pass on.”
“What, you mean like a ghost?” My throat squeezed tight.
“A shadow wraith.”
All fell silent between the four of us as I scrambled to grasp onto anything.
Each revelation was more impossible than the last. I was not ready to die, but death was better than existing in an eternal state as some shadow ghost—whatever that meant.
Would I haunt these halls forever in a state of eternal torment?
One thing was for sure, the first person I’d haunt would be the hateful king and his ridiculously beautiful face.
Though, for all his pride, he’d saved me. I looked down at the deep scratches on my leg which were halfway covered by bandages as Rafia and Jel ministered to me. The king had earned far more scratches than I had this night.
“But you jumped right in front of me. You fought it.” My voice shook, shame at my weakness flooding me. “You’re infected now, too.”
The Elf King nodded, our eyes meeting for one long moment.
My heart pounded in my ears as I looked into the king’s cold eyes, though now they seemed…
warmer. “This was not the first night I have fought this beast. It tarried on the outskirts of the wood before this night. It grows bolder with every passing moon. I have been battling this infection for a year now.”
“But humans are weaker than elves.” Jel pulled out a small journal and jotted some information down in elvish runes. “I imagine Noelle’s infection will grow at a faster rate.”
“It will not happen.” The Elf King’s golden eyes had not left my face. “I will not allow this disease to spread. I will not let it fester. I know of a cure, if only—”
“We have been working on a cure for a year now, Your Majesty.” Jel’s shoulder’s fell as he jotted some numbers in his journal that I did not understand.
“I might be able to study the beast in custody, but the truth remains—I can only delay the transformation. It’s only a matter of time before the curse takes you both. ”
“How long do we have?” I asked through a tremor in my throat.
Rafia tore cotton strips and dipped them in the potion, ministering to my wounds, which stung like a burning flame with every touch.
I hissed, but bit my tongue. Jel continued to calculate in his journal, blue eyebrows knit in concentration.
Rafia squeezed my knee, tears brimming in her magenta eyes.
“How long?” I repeated.
“A few weeks.” Jel paused his writing.
The pronouncement fell upon me like a blow to the head.
Jel took my hand in his. “You will need to take the same tonic the king takes every day to keep the disease at bay, but my best guess is that you both only have until the end of the year. A few days after the winter solstice.”
I had until Christmas.
Not only would I miss my first Christmas away from my family, I would be fighting a shadow blight. Any hope of ever seeing home again crumpled to ash.
I had to stay. I had to work to find the cure before the curse took me over. Before I turned into a wraith.
I looked up to the king. “You said you know of a cure.”
“I have read countless tomes about the shade monsters. I have also been reading about a curse on the house of the elves. On the Undying Lands themselves,” the king pursed his full lips, stepped around the couch, and stood before the fire.
The orange flames caressed his face, his strong body, as a lover.
“Myths, legends.” Jel dismissed the words. “What we need is sound science and more research.”
“I thought you worked in magic?” I asked.
“Magic is one word for what I do, but it all follows a system of rules and checks and balances. Everything has to make sense, be researched, and studied. It will take time to study the beast, but I can’t just snap my finger and make a cure out of nothing.”
Bile rose in my throat and I fought it back.
I would not be sick. I pulled in breath after deep breath praying to calm my heart.
But then the king was there, kneeling by the couch where I sat.
He gripped my hands in his large, warm hands.
Calluses snagged as a new warmth filled me like melted butter.
How did a pampered king get calluses like that?
“Sometimes magic cannot be explained with science. Sometimes it has a will of its own.” The king’s deep voice, so close to my ear from where he knelt, sent shivers through my body. He was talking about…me. “I will find a cure. I will end this.”
The king’s nearness pulled my mind like spun sugar, all jagged and messy. Though he knelt beside the couch, my hands in his, he still managed to tower over me. I took in a deep breath and allowed the king’s warm hands to calm me, though my heart skittered wildly.
I would not allow this blight or these strange new interactions with the king to control me.
I would go back to what I knew, and work from there, step by step, like baking.
Some things took time to proof. I needed to gather the right ingredients to solve this curse, but first I needed to find the right cookbook.
The right tomes and legends, the right science and numbers and magic to solve this riddle.
This was something I was good at. I had a talent for finding patterns and chasing out different outcomes until I found the one that fit. That was how I’d gotten my peanut butter fudge to work out as well as it had.
“I will work with you, King.” I bowed my head to the Elf King who knelt before me like a knight to a princess in one of my mother’s fairytales. “Maybe together we can find a cure before…”
I didn’t need to finish my sentence because the silence that fell over the small cottage said it all.
The king stood, then crossed his large arms across his broad chest, cocking his head. “What would a human know of a shadow blight?”
He didn’t say it in a rude manner, but curiously. As if he truly wished to know.