Chapter Twenty-Nine. In Which the Girl Saves a Kingdom
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
In Which the Girl Saves a Kingdom
Risa’s gravest mistake had been thinking she could control her curse by not caring. She always cared, even when she shouldn’t, and there was no stopping her curse when she did.
Javi lay sprawled over Amina. Brunie pawed at him, the cat’s yowls loud in the ringing quiet. Dark crimson stained his white doublet.
All at once, chairs screeched against the marble floor as people began to scatter in every direction. Guards shouted. The Sanguines attempted to escape. General Sur roared in outrage as the guards tackled him and pinned his arms to the ground.
“Good!” General Sur bellowed above the din. He wrestled against his restraints, spit flying. He turned his cold gaze on Amina, who struggled beneath Javi’s body. “Madros will go to war, and I will find a way to rise from the ashes.”
Risa couldn’t hear him over the rush of blood in her ears. She swam against the crowd, elbowing past bodies, barely wincing as a particular shove grazed the gash at her side. She swallowed around the knot in her throat and ignored the sudden ache in her chest.
Perla reached Amina first and helped roll Javi onto his side, her hand cushioning his head. The rest of him landed on the marble tile with a sickening thud.
Amina frantically nudged the prince with her knee, arms limp at her sides. “Javi!”
Risa quickened her steps. Her rucksack bounced at her back, and she unshouldered it to hang at her side.
She’d known what her curse would do the moment she let Javi worm his way into her heart. She should have broken her own curse; no, she should have never continued on with the farce of the journey. Everyone in Barrow had been right: She was a Bad Thing.
This was all her fault.
She half expected Javi to sit up, laugh, complain about how his outfit was ruined again, and insist he couldn’t join the parade in his honor as savior of Madros while indisposed.
But he did not move. He lay still, dark hair pooling around his head like a disheveled halo. Blood smudged a corner of his lips.
Risa tripped over her own feet and went crashing inches from his supine body.
Something shattered beneath her and shot a wave of pain through her hips that felt like a thousand piercing daggers.
Hot tears flooded her vision, turning the world blurry.
Someone spoke, but the voice sounded strange and distant, fading into the background of the surrounding clamor.
With one hand pressed against her hip, the tattered remains of her canvas pack tickling the back of her hand, Risa struggled to sit up. Warm liquid soaked through her shirt and painted her fingertips red.
Finally, Amina’s face came into focus across from her. “I’m sorry,” Amina was saying through heaving sobs. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“This is my fault,” Risa said, though even her own words sounded muffled and far away.
“Risa—”
“I did this,” she admitted, scooting closer to Javi until she could gather his head in her lap. She swept his hair from his temples, wiped away the smear near his perfect mouth, and cupped his cheek in her hand. His skin was still so warm beneath her fingertips. “This is all my fault.”
Perla shook her head. “It was me. If I hadn’t—”
“I’m cursed,” she confessed in a whisper, finally telling Javi what she should have that first night in the Bosque.
If she had told him the truth from the beginning, then he could have banished her.
It would have saved his guards, would have saved everyone from this whole ordeal.
Brunhilda’s spell would have killed her, but it was much worse to sit here with Javi lying in her arms, his curls matted with the blood oozing from the wound at her side.
“What?” Amina asked, stone-gray eyes wide.
“I’m a Bad Thing.”
All Risa had been holding in spilled from her mouth like an unstoppered bottle.
“I was born on a day when the rain stops and the sun shines and the world is lit amber gold. In Barrow, that day is known as a Bad Day. Since my birth, terrible things have happened around me. Because of me.”
She hardly heard Amina speak her name. “Risa.”
“I used to think everyone was wrong. How could I be the reason a bear ran rampant around town and ate everything? We don’t even have bears in that part of the kingdom.
But now I know better. I am why the royal guard was massacred.
Why the Sanguines kept finding us. Why the airship crashed. And Javi—”
She blinked down at Javi. At the awful pool of blood growing beneath her. The mirror Linda had given her had shattered against the marble floor, and red specks now glimmered on the scattered pieces. One shard sparkled, embedded in her side.
With blood-soaked fingers acting of their own accord, she gripped the jagged edge and pulled. Pain flared through her body, though it did not compare to the hollow ache she felt at the thought of never hearing Javi speak again.
Risa couldn’t stomach her reflection looking back at her from the glass shard.
“I should have told you. I should have left when I had the chance. But I’m selfish, and Brunhilda’s spell hurt me every time I tried to leave your side.
I didn’t want to die, but I should have, because all I do is hurt the things I love.
And I know I should have said it earlier. I just don’t know how to not be Bad.”
When her tears finally broke through the dam, she did not stop them.
She folded over and sobbed into Javi’s unmoving chest. It was all she could do now. He would never make fun of her again. She’d never hear him needle her about her country upbringing or hear him triumphantly declare he’d finally gotten the backstory he’d so desperately wanted.
“This must be quite embarrassing for you,” Javi groaned.
Risa’s heart stopped.
Javi stirred, moaning in pain.
She sat up, staring down at him in shock as he wiped her cheeks with a brush of his thumb.
“Curses, I think my chest is broken.”
She worked quickly at his doublet, ripping it open.
It was only then that she noticed the lack of scarlet across his chest, though plenty of it lay on the floor around him.
His heart hammered away beneath her frantic, searching fingers.
A hint of gold around his neck caught her eye—a delicate chain—and she yanked at it until the broken remnant of a pocket watch revealed itself. A bullet was lodged in its lid.
Brunie meowed and swatted at it.
“He’s alive,” Amina breathed, wilting into Perla’s arms.
Risa couldn’t hear her. She was too busy staring into Javi’s face, memorizing the way his brows were furrowed and pain pinched the corners of his eyes. How he managed to look so handsome while grievously injured was beyond her. She’d make fun of him about it later.
Javi tugged at one of her disheveled braids. Let his fingers trace the curve of her cheek, thumb swiping at a lingering tear.
“You’re alive,” she answered in disbelief.
“I know your confession loses a bit of its magic with this recent development.” He coughed and followed the sound with a moan. “But you need to listen to me: You’re not cursed. Bad things happen, regardless of whether you’re there or not.”
He must not have understood. She patted his cheek. “It’s okay,” she whispered in reassurance. “I won’t let you get hurt again. I’ll go back to Barrow.” Though it would hurt, she was concerned only with the fact that he had survived.
“You never listen,” Javi admonished.
Amina nudged her with the toe of her boot. “You can’t reasonably take responsibility for everything bad that happens.”
“The murder of my guards in the Bosque was definitely Van Houten’s fault,” Javi said.
“And the airship crash was the Sanguines’ fault,” Amina added helpfully.
“I don’t quite understand what’s happening,” Perla interjected, “but I think it is safe to assume that my curse was, well, my fault, not yours.”
“How about the terrible things that happen every single moment of every single day when you’re not around?” Amina wiggled her eyebrows. “Are you to blame for that, too? My family’s murder? Madros’s descent into fascism?”
“I suppose Cairn owes their murderous god to you, too, then?” Javi quipped.
“You’re not Bad,” Amina sniffled, abandoning the pretense of her stern voice. “Okay, you’re a little bad. But you’re certainly not cursed.”
And finally Risa understood.
There had never been a curse. No magic at all. Like Linda, like Javi, her misfortune was of her own making.
All those years she spent blaming herself.
Letting others blame her. For the floods and the disappearing goats.
For the mishaps and accidents and lost socks.
Things that simply happened through no fault of one’s own.
The world would continue to chug forward full of good and bad and average occurrences, regardless of whether she was cursed or not.
Life was a series of events, some fortunate, some unfortunate, and some neither.
Sometimes, the bad had to happen for the good to be better.
She knew it now. Felt it deep inside, as sure as the love that coursed through her veins for Amina, her friend. For Javi, the very bane of her existence. Even for Brunie, the cat who had been their constant companion on this harrowing journey.
Javi cupped her chin in his hand and grinned.
“You’re not a Bad Thing. You’re just Risa. And that’s a good thing.”
Risa glanced down at her hand, still holding the mirror shard. She caught glimpses of her face staring back. Her wide nose, her downturned mouth, the curve of an ear. All the parts that made her Risa Porto. Not a witch. Not a Bad Thing. Just a girl.
“No!”
The guards that had been holding General Sur must have relaxed their grips during the emotional scene, because one second he was flattened against the ground, and the next he was scrabbling to stand, a hand around a dagger at his belt. He stood over them with the blade raised and ready to strike.
Risa did not blink as she rose and lodged the mirror shard into his chest.
General Sur screamed. The dagger clattered onto the marble floor.
“Grab him!” Amina ordered.
Risa sank back down, woozy from the effort. Javi sat up and tangled his fingers with hers, letting her sag against his shoulder.
“You have never looked more beautiful than when stabbing a mad general with a mirror shard,” he confessed.
“You’ve never looked more handsome than on the brink of death.”
“Now you’re just making things up,” he said, but he was leaning in, lips parted, eyes fluttering closed.
Like all good things, however, their kiss would have to wait.
Perla helped Amina stand to address what remained of the crowd.
“Citizens, guests, and friends,” the princess began in a shaky voice. “A great evil has been vanquished. Madros is cursed no more, and the general who sought to destroy us will never hurt us again.”
Everyone held their breath.
Her voice grew stronger, surer. “I know it will take grueling work to restore our great nation, to build a better, safer kingdom, but I ask those of you here today to help me.”
A guard in an extravagant suit of armor and a large sword kneeled before Amina with his head bowed. He unsheathed his sword and placed it at her feet.
The priest, who had crawled out of wherever he’d been hiding, lifted it above Amina’s head in triumph.
“Long live the queen!”
The kneeling guard raised his head and struck his chest with a fist. “Long live the queen!”
Other guards dropped to the floor, hands at their chests. “Long live the queen!”
The crowd fell to its knees as the words echoed around the chapel.
But Risa’s attention was not on the new queen of Madros. She was aware only of Javi’s beatific smile, the crinkled corners of his eyes, the bruise that was starting to rise on his jaw as a souvenir of their misadventure.
She felt lighter than air. Everything around her melted away until it was just the two of them.
Javi traced her lips with the pad of his thumb. His warm breath fanned across her face as his thumb gripped her chin in a gentle hold. She let her fingers follow the constellation of freckles that spanned his cheeks.
“Thank you,” he whispered. It sounded like he was saying something else. It felt like coming home. “Obviously.”
He looked up at Amina, as if realizing something.
“We should sign a treaty detailing our two kingdoms’ mutual agreement to aid each other in times of turmoil and to celebrate in times of peace—”
“Now’s not the time!” said the new queen. “Kiss her!”
Javi swooped down and captured Risa’s lips. She was glad to find that her place in the universe was there, in his arms.