The Consort’s Curse (Twilight Mages #4)

Chapter One

If I’d had the use of my long-suppressed magic, I might’ve been able to cure the seasickness that had twisted my stomach in knots from the moment I set foot on this miserable tub of a boat.

Dawn mages tended to have a strong bent toward healing.

I’d studied every book the abbey’s library held on the subject during my six years inside its walls.

But in a horrible irony, the potion that controlled my magic and its curse caused intense nausea when combined with the roll, pause, tilt, roll of a ship.

If I only had one of those books now, but… oh, no. Reading. Tracing the lines of a book with my eyes as the boat rocked…

Roll. Pause. Tiiiilt. Oh, Ennolu, I’d lose it this time, and then I’d need to take another dose of that foul mixture to replace what had come out—but I compressed my lips, and I forced myself to keep it down.

The faint tinge of bile intensified the potion’s underlying mustiness.

Its mint overtones somehow only made it worse.

I swallowed hard and twisted my hands together in my lap so tightly my knuckles ached.

Roll. Pause.

Opening my eyes only helped when I stood by the ship’s railing and gazed out at the waves ahead of us, but standing presented its own challenges, and I’d given up and huddled by a locker near the stern.

I tried to open my eyes anyway. Blue sky and a few puffy white clouds scudding along with the winds far above us, all criss-crossed with rigging that creaked as the ship tilted and rolled yet again.

No. I squeezed my eyes shut, more firmly this time, and braced myself for another roll in the other direction.

Any moment now my escort would appear to chastise me again for the impropriety of remaining out here on the deck in full view of the crew, who he insisted would all be leering at me and thus tarnishing—not my honor, because he didn’t seem to think I had any to worry about.

But my future husband’s honor. The man who’d own me once we reached our destination. Apparently, his possible disapproval ought to matter more to me than my own health and comfort.

It didn’t bode well for my new life.

Four days ago, the abbot had summoned me to his study, where a dour, pinched-faced fellow in the sober black of a senior servant had been waiting for me, standing and sipping coffee by the abbot’s fireplace while the abbot sat frowning in a chair across from him.

The stranger looked me up and down with a curled lip and a gimlet eye.

“This is the lad I’ve been sent to fetch by my lord?” he said with a sniff. “This filthy ragamuffin?”

“I, too, labor in the abbey garden several hours a week,” Abbot Junius said in a tone that suggested he’d soon reach the end of his legendary patience.

“Plain, honest toil in the dirt feeds the soul much as the fruits of it feed the body. Remi, Ser Prendian is secretary to Lord Chancellor Zettine Ettori of Calatria.”

I blinked, trying to absorb so many grand syllables all at once.

The Lord Chancellor? I’d have bet every carrot I’d dug out of the garden that morning that he didn’t know I existed.

Finding out otherwise filled me with a slowly brewing dismay, a curdling in the pit of my stomach and a clammy dampness on my palms. The one good thing about my banishment to this place had been my distance from the politics that had destroyed my family.

And now politics had followed me all the way to the abbey’s windswept island.

“Ser Prendian has presented a letter from the Lord Chancellor and another from your lady mother,” the abbot said heavily. “You are to return to Calatria and marry his son, Lord Stefan. It has all been arranged.”

The dampness and clamminess spread up my arms, to the back of my neck, down my spine, to the soles of my feet.

“We shall sail with the morning tide,” Ser Prendian said, and his voice throbbed and stretched, distorted by the frantic beat of my heart in my ears. “Have him ready. Surely he must have something else to wear.”

“Our order dresses plainly,” the abbot said, in the world’s greatest understatement. Our order had never seen a scratchy mud-colored wool it didn’t want to swathe itself in. “He has nothing else.”

“Great gods,” Ser Prendian muttered, and at least I agreed with him on that point. He drained his coffee cup and set it on the table before the fire. “I shall retire to my chamber until dinner.”

The abbot nodded, not bothering to rise. Ser Prendian brushed by me, sniffed a third time, and stalked out the door.

The abbot sighed, loud and long, and gestured at the door. My knees wobbled as I went to close it. That blurriness in my vision had to be tears, unless it heralded something more serious, like an apoplexy. Could one have one of those at only twenty?

“This is insane. I will not marry a man I’ve never met. Your Reverence, surely there’s been some terrible mistake.” My voice shook as much as my knees, but I turned and faced him, meeting his steady gaze. “My mother would never agree to this, and it hardly matters if she has. I’m of age.”

“I’ve read her letter, and she has agreed to it, and may I point out, being of age doesn’t mean you have any experience at all, or that you’ve grown up, Ennolu help us.

Nineteen might as well be nine for all you know about anything,” the abbot said, his tone grim.

I bit my lip to keep in a protest that would’ve been childish and petulant enough to prove his point.

“And while she has too much sense to be explicit in a letter that could be opened by anyone, it’s clear she thinks you have no choice.

The Lord Chancellor is a powerful man. And your lady mother sounds as if she’s afraid, Remi. You must go. Now sit—”

“But afraid of what?” I demanded. The throbbing in my skull ratcheted up, a pressure that threatened to explode my temples.

“Afraid—has she been threatened? With what? He can hardly just throw her in prison or hold a knife to her throat, Calatria’s under an actual rule of law now that Duke Treviso’s dead!

And why would they even want me as a consort for this Lord Stefan? What does—”

“Be silent and sit down!”

The habit of years of obedience took over, and I dropped into the chair opposite him, face on fire and hands clenched in my cassock—but silent and sitting. More questions bubbled up, and I choked them down as Abbot Junius frowned at me.

After a moment, his face softened, and he sighed and sat back in his chair.

“Remi, I don’t like this, either,” he said.

“I wish I could answer your questions. The Lord Chancellor’s letter is dry to the point of being insulting, and it doesn’t give me much to go on.

But he’s the third most powerful man in Calatria, after Duke Lucian himself and his consort, and he’s also clever and ruthless.

Lucian may be infinitely saner than his father and not allow Lord Ettori as much leeway as Treviso did, but that doesn’t mean he can’t find a way to get what he wants.

You will go. You will do as you’re told, and you will keep your wits about you, and there’s nothing else for it.

Your mother requests it of you. Do you understand? ”

“Yes,” I said shortly. I ought to be in charge of my own destiny by now, but I wasn’t—and no matter how much I chafed under that fact, I loved my mother. If she’d been frightened, then I really didn’t have a choice.

“Good.” Abbot Junius gave me a short nod, his version of approval. “Now listen closely, because we have very little time, and someone must tell you what to expect from being married to a man with Lord Stefan’s extensive experience and dubious reputation…”

What followed was the most mortifying hour of my life thus far, and I did my best to absorb only one word out of three.

“…demand that you pleasure him with your hands and mouth as well as coupling with you in the more expected manner that will also relieve your curse,” Abbot Junius droned on, accompanying the words with a gesture that I could’ve gone my whole life without. “In that case, I recommend—”

No. I simply couldn’t. “I will surely allow my husband to guide me, but I won’t allow him to make demands that will cause me unhappiness,” I ventured, hoping it would stem the abbot’s flow.

A cock in my mouth? I wasn’t sure if that would cause me unhappiness or not. Probably. I’d tried to suck my fingers once to see what it might be like, and I’d gagged, nearly thrown up my supper, and been put rather off the whole idea.

“You will be obliged to obey him whether it makes you unhappy or not, as we’ve discussed,” the abbot said.

“If you displease Lord Stefan, then Lord Stefan will be displeased with his father for choosing you, and that will annoy them both—and they’ll blame you, despite your having had no say in the matter.

It’ll end poorly for you, Remi. Great and powerful men never allow themselves to be wrong, which means everyone else must take the blame. ”

And after he added a few more equally encouraging remarks, thankfully without any further hand gestures, he allowed me to flee at last, sending me off to pack my very few possessions and say my hasty farewells.

Before even the faintest gray of dawn had crept through the narrow window of my tiny room, the door opened to admit another novice sent to wake me—unnecessarily, to my gritty-eyed, heavy-headed regret—and bring me down to the refectory to break my fast.

Even in the ascetic atmosphere of the abbey, only a few of the brothers had risen this early.

I took my bread and cup of black tea in near silence.

Abbot Junius joined me as I choked down the last few crumbs, and he silently escorted me out the side door.

A wagon stood waiting with my small trunk already loaded into the back.

Ser Prendian was in the act of climbing stiffly onto the box.