Chapter Three
Chapter Three
I was born with the fever, my blood dark as night,
With magic unflinching, power and might.
My sights, they were endless, my ambition too vast,
So I asked for more blessings, for power, amassed.
The Spirit did warn me that nothing comes free,
That bargains and barters all come with a fee.
Though payment was dear, I paid what it cost.
With blood and with bones and parts of me lost.
So mind how you use them, and keep up your guard.
Twelve blessings—twelve curses.
Twelve Providence Cards.
T he messenger came while we were seated at the breakfast table. My younger cousins fought over hot biscuits while Ione and I drank our tea. When the steward entered the hall, Ione sprang from the table, her hazel eyes alight as she tore open the envelope.
“Yessssss,” she sang through the gap in her teeth.
My aunt waved her butter knife in the air. Ione handed her the letter, the apples of her cheeks rounded, a skip in her step. My aunt perused the fine lettering several moments before my uncle, impatient at the other end of the table, demanded, “Well?”
“We’ve been invited to Stone for Equinox,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
Ione let out a triumphant squeak, and my uncle’s gray whiskers twisted, his lips curling in a grin. I folded my hands in my lap, already drafting an excuse not to attend the King’s celebration.
“Don’t look so pleased,” my aunt said, handing the letter to her husband. “We’re still behind from last year’s tax, and King Rowan is after every penny he’s owed.” She wrung her hands in her skirt. “Talk in town is that this was the worst harvest the kingdom’s seen in ages.”
Across the table, my cousins fought over the last sausage, their iron cutlery weaponized into instruments of war. “Why was the harvest poor?” Lyn asked. “Because of the mist?”
“Who cares about the harvest,” Ione said. “It’s Equinox!” She turned to her father, rapturous. “Are we going, Father? Please say we’ll go.”
My uncle slathered his bread with strawberry jelly and grunted into his meal. “Yes, Ione,” he said. “We’re going.”
Ione let free a jovial cry, punctuated by my aunt, who was coughing into her tea. “We are?”
My uncle took another bite of bread and pushed from the table.
A moment later he returned, a deep burgundy light glowing from his pocket.
He reached into his jacket, retrieving a Providence Card from its fold.
His fingers traced the burgundy trim a moment, then he plunked it onto the table, shattering my morning calm.
My body went cold. I stared down at the Nightmare Card—the same one I had touched eleven years ago.
“There’s your tax,” my uncle said. “Worth more than we owe, and then some.”
The only noise in the room was the groaning of chairs as my aunt and cousins leaned toward the table for a better look. “Is that…?” Ione whispered.
“The Nightmare Card,” my aunt said. She looked back up at my uncle, the color in her cheeks gone. “Kings of Blunder have sought this Card longer than I’ve been alive, Tyrn. How on earth did you get it?”
“I pinched it off a highwayman on the forest road some years ago.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?”
My uncle cast his wife a weary look. “I’ve been saving it.” His eyes flickered to Ione. “For a rainy day.”
My uncle sat, round and gray, as he always sat at the head of the table. But there was something strange about his eyes—something about his smile that I had not seen before. Something false.
Despite my aunt’s questions, he gave no more detail of how he obtained the Nightmare Card—made no mention of the blood I had seen on his sword the day he had brought it home.
I pressed my back into my chair and watched him, chilled by the thought that I knew far less about the man at the head of the table than I thought.
“What is that thing?” my cousin Aldrich said, leaning closer, his face contorting as he squinted at the creature on the Card.
“It’s a monster,” Lyn whispered, reaching out to touch it.
“Don’t!” Aldrich cried, pulling his brother’s hand back. “It’s too old. You’ll rip it.”
My uncle snorted. “Hasn’t your mother read you The Old Book enough times?” When my cousins stayed silent, my uncle reached for the Card, pinching it between his thumbs and forefingers. When he jerked his hands to rip it in half, I heard myself gasp.
But the Card did not tear.
My uncle set it back down on the table, the parchment aged but without wrinkle. “Providence Cards cannot be destroyed,” he said to his sons. “They are woven by old magic.”
Lyn leaned forward and talked into his brother’s face. Older by only one year, Lyn liked to play the tutor, Aldrich his reluctant pupil. “He means the Shepherd King’s magic.”
Aldrich swatted him away.
My aunt’s voice rumbled, as if well used. “Magic gifted to him by the Spirit of the Wood, which he then used to create Providence Cards.”
“ Gifted ,” my uncle muttered. “Infected with it, more like.”
The sound of the Nightmare’s teeth echoed through my mind as he clenched and unclenched his jaw. A heart of gold can still turn to rot. What he wrote, what he did, was all done for naught. His Cards are but weapons, his kingdom now cruel. Shepherd of folly, King of the fools.
Ione traced the burgundy velvet at the edge of the Nightmare Card. I flinched, remembering the feel of that same velvet beneath my skin. “It must be worth a great deal to King Rowan,” she said.
My uncle turned his gaze to his daughter. “It is, my girl,” he said, his smile no longer false, but just as unnerving. “I’m counting on it.”
My aunt’s copy of The Old Book of Alders , the one she had shared with my mother, lay in a heap on the sitting room floor.
I picked it up with both hands, its faded cover familiar to the touch.
The book smelled of old leather, its binding feeble, cracked with use and time.
On the inside cover was my aunt’s inscription, written in the name she had once shared with my mother—the name she bore before her father had signed a marriage contract with Tyrn Hawthorn.
Opal Whitebeam. And next to it, scribed in my mother’s swooping letters, was my mother’s name. Iris Whitebeam.
I thumbed through the yellowing pages. Like my cousins, I, too, had been curious about Providence Cards as a child—about magic.
My mother would let me crawl into her lap as she read to me from her copy of The Old Book of Alders .
She had drawn pictures into the book’s margins in green ink, swirling images of trees, maidens, monsters.
When she read to me, her black hair would fall over her shoulder and I would twist the tips of it around my little finger, lost to the lull of the book’s strange, eerie language.
One spring Equinox, my mother and I had come to visit with Aunt Opal. Curled up on a sheepskin rug like kittens, Ione and I had sat, wide-eyed, my mother and aunt answering our questions about the Shepherd King’s strange book.
“Why did the Shepherd King make Providence Cards?” I’d asked. “How did he fashion them?”
My aunt had lowered her reading spectacles, eyeing me with a solemnity she rarely employed. “To answer that,” she’d said, “we must first look to the Spirit of the Wood.”
I’d shivered despite the crackling fire. The Shepherd King’s description of the Spirit of the Wood was the sort of thing that made my childish imagination run wild with terror. An ageless deity, smelling of magic—of salt—that lurked, invisible, in the mist.
“Long ago,” my aunt had said, “before Providence Cards, the Spirit of the Wood was our divinity. Folk of Blunder sought her out, combing the woods for the smell of salt. They asked her for blessings and gifts. They honored her woods and took the names of the trees as their own. This was old magic—old religion.” Her brow had darkened.
“For his reverence, the Spirit of the Wood granted the Shepherd King strange, powerful magic. He wanted to share his magic with his kingdom, and so he made the twelve Providence Cards.” Her voice had grown solemn.
“But everything has a price. For each Card, the Shepherd King gave something up to the Spirit of the Wood.”
“Like his soul?” Ione had asked, gnawing at her fingernails.
My aunt had nodded. “But it was the Spirit of the Wood, in the end, who would pay. With the Shepherd King’s Providence Cards, people had magic at their fingertips.
They did not have to go to the wood and beg her blessings.
No longer venerated, the Spirit grew vengeful, treacherous.
” She’d paused, her lips pursed. “She created the mist, to lure people back to the wood.”
I was young. But even then, I’d known to be wary of the mist. “Those who came upon it lost their way, and often their minds,” my mother had said.
“The mist spread, isolating us from neighboring kingdoms. Worse, children who tarried in it grew sick with fever, their veins darkening. Those who survived the fever often carried magical gifts like those the Spirit used to bestow, only more unruly—more dangerous.” When her voice shook, she’d held a hand to her throat.
“But these children degenerated over time. Some grew twisted in their bodies, others in their minds. Few survived to adulthood.”
Ione and I had gone still, absorbed by the tale, too young to fully comprehend the dangers of the world we so innocently occupied.
“To lift the mist,” my aunt had said, “the Shepherd King went deep into the wood to barter once more with the Spirit. When he returned, he penned this,” she’d said, tapping The Old Book of Alders on her lap.
“He wrote about the dangers of magic, and how to safeguard oneself in the mist with a charm.” My aunt had paused for effect.
“On the final page, the Shepherd King wrote how to destroy the mist.”
“Read it!” Ione and I had called in unison.
My aunt had cleared her throat, raising her spectacles to her eyes.
The twelve call for each other when the shadows grow long—
When the days are cut short and the Spirit is strong.