Three - Felix
???
“Go ahead. Laugh.” I sighed.
When I first woke up after Cecily cursed me, I hadn’t understood what had happened. I couldn’t sit up; my arms and legs felt all wrong. Then I glimpsed the fur. What I could remember of her curse made me fear the worst, but the truth was even more embarrassing. I wasn’t a fearsome beast.
I was a fluffy, black cat. There were patches of white fur on my front paws and at the base of my throat. I was a tad larger than the average house cat, but nothing out of the ordinary.
“It was an exceptionally poorly worded curse,” I told Isabel, who was biting her lip, but not laughing in my face.
Under normal circumstances, I’d be distracted by watching her teeth sink into those pink lips. Isabel was pretty in the best way, all round and soft with the types of curves that starred in my dreams. Her hair was a rich chestnut brown and cut in a short style that framed her face, with none of the ridiculous pins and ribbons most women insisted on. I didn’t even mind her sharp tongue. In fact, I enjoyed it.
But circumstances were far from normal right now. Though I noticed her, I didn’t have room for thoughts about anything other than my current predicament.
“What did he intend to do?” she asked, her voice choked. “Try to make you more cuddly?”
“She,” I corrected. “She intended to turn me into a beast. Something about me being heartless and wanting outsides to match insides. I’m not sure how it resulted in this.”
“Heartless? I would have gone with amoral.”
The tip of my tail twitched. Cecily”s accusations hadn’t bothered me. Though I understood Isabel’s anger—I was even enjoying riling her to some extent—I wasn’t keen on being seen as amoral. I had crossed a line signing that contract with her father, but it had been necessary. In the two months since I was cursed, I hadn’t come close to figuring out how to reverse my condition.
Then Edwin Cardh tried to sneak into my castle. He told me a sob story about having two daughters waiting for him back home—conveniently forgetting to mention their ages—and I recognized the names. I was a duke with a blood-tie to a node locked to truth-magic. Isabel and Sofia were mages with truth powers in the closest town to my castle. I had heard about them for years. When I went to town, someone inevitably pointed the twins out to me.
Everyone assumed that any woman with truth-magic must be of interest to me. Given what had happened with Cecily, I’d rather avoid dealing with another truth-mage entirely, but I needed one.
Getting Sofia out to Rose Castle had been too great of an opportunity to miss. I couldn’t just invite her. Not without a contract already in place guaranteeing her silence. It wasn’t my transformation that needed to be kept secret, it was what that transformation portended. Cecily had used my node. Only people with Truthholder blood should have any access to the node. If the blood-lock had weakened—or even broken—then that was a much bigger issue than me spending the rest of my life as a cat.
It would be the start of a second round of node wars.
So, while I felt guilty for using a legal technicality to bring Isabel to Rose Castle, if there was any chance she could help me figure out what had happened, I had to take it. She probably wouldn’t be able to reverse the curse, since she wasn’t a truth-teller like Cecily, but she was still a mage.
“Amoral is a bit harsh,” I said, pretending her indictment didn’t really bother me. “I simply have different priorities than you.”
“Like prioritizing your life over mine. Speaking of which, I need to get back to mine as soon as possible. What exactly did my father bind me to do?”
“Everything in your power to help me until my curse is broken.”
“Please say he didn’t.” Her shoulders slumped and her voice lost its resolve. “He wouldn’t—”
She choked on the next word. The entire hillside was under a truth-telling enchantment. I was immune to the magic, but Isabel couldn’t say her father wouldn’t sign such a vague contract, exchanging his daughter for his own freedom. He would. He had.
She coughed, squaring her shoulders once more. “I want to see this contract.”
“Certainly. I’ll have Marc pull it for you tomorrow morning. For now, why don’t you get settled in your room? I can prepare a supper tray for you. I’m sure you are tired after walking all the way from Leort.”
She didn’t ask who Marc was, or how I could prepare a supper tray, and I was surprised to find I wanted her to ask. Perhaps she really was tired from her journey. Or perhaps learning just how horrible the terms of the contract were for her was one disappointment too many.
She held out a hand, palm up. “Lead the way, Your Grace.”
???
Isabel hadn’t saidanything else as I led the way upstairs and to the largest guest suite. She closed the door in my face, but I could see her shoes right on the other side of the door. She had her back pressed against it, relying on it for support as everything that had happened crashed over her.
I knew the feeling. A good meal and sleep would help, but it wouldn’t solve the problem.
Tugging on several of the threads of magic that floated all over the hillside, I summoned a tray of food—and a bottle of wine—that would appear in her sitting room. I had already eaten my supper, and it wasn’t actually that late, so I returned to my tower.
My suite connected to the northwest tower on the second floor. My bedroom filled the circular room on that level, with a staircase leading up to the third and fourth floors. No door connected the tower to the rest of the third floor, and only the towers had a fourth floor. The tower used to be my sanctuary. I’d escape for a few hours every week to read in the top level, or just work in my study on the third floor when I didn’t want to deal with interruptions.
For the past two months, interruptions hadn’t been a problem. The only other person—or, I suppose, the only human—in the castle until now had been the single secretary I kept to help me scour the archives. My tower was no longer a sanctuary but a source of frustration. It didn’t matter how many hours I spent here, reading through the journals of my ancestors, I couldn’t find any answers.
I settled into my now usual spot on top of the desk in my study and used another wisp of power to call in a journal. The first Duke of Truthhold hadn’t left any records, unless you counted the scores of contracts he passed through the node after locking it. No one really understood how he had made it so that the node magically enforced contracts. I had tried reading his son’s journals, but while they recounted several feats I could accomplish by using node power, they didn’t really explain why the Truths, as Sebastien referred to them, worked.
I knew how to make a meal appear out of thin air, summon a book from the library, and open doors without the help of hands, but reading Sebastien’s journals hadn’t helped me understand how Cecily had used the power of the node to curse me. If my family’s genealogical records were any less complete, I might suspect she had a smidgeon of Truthholder blood herself. Though she still wouldn’t have the primary tie to the node, allowing her to enforce a contract. Nor had she shown any sign of manipulating the node’s magic before she cursed me.
Still, it was worth investigating if a member of the family could be cut out of the blood-tie. I called in Duchess Maelle’s journals. Despite being a younger child and female, she had inherited the duchy in an age when the rest of the kingdom still practiced primogeniture. The heir to Truthhold had to sign a contract guaranteeing certain behaviors, otherwise he—or she—could not claim the title. Maelle’s brother had thought to ignore this law, since he only had a sister to challenge his claim.
When their father died, Maelle inherited the primary-node tie. Her brother didn’t give up without a fight, though. Hopefully her journals would confirm the story that she eventually resorted to stripping him of his tie to the node entirely. And explain how I could do the same to Cecily. It wouldn’t answer the question of how she had gained access to the node power in the first place, but it was better than nothing.
I pored over Maelle’s journals for hours, finding nothing. Mostly, she wrote about the negotiations she presided over, rarely mentioning anything about her personal life. It was a very different read than Duke Sebastien’s journals. I still had another journal to flip through when I stopped for the night. It was past midnight, and I needed to be alert tomorrow to deal with my new guest.
Instinctively, I turned my senses toward Isabel. The node power that permeated every inch of the castle allowed me to pinpoint her location. I would have noticed if she had left the castle grounds—not that the contract would allow her to—but otherwise I had to concentrate to sense her location.
She was in the bedroom I had given her, probably having nightmares about the monster who had dragged her away from her home and life.