The Captive’s Curse

Riding in the rain lowered my mood faster than any other activity. Humans had invented shelter and then occupied it because having water dripping down your neck and dampening your trouser seat felt utterly dreadful.

When that trouser seat also rubbed and chafed against a leather saddle, the experience rose far above—or below—demoralizing and landed somewhere adjacent to utter misery.

Gods, I wanted to go home and get warm and dry.

Instead, I was here in the cold flying in the face of thousands of years of common sense, because Rivina, my harridan of a cousin, also lived under the only roof I had available to me. And listening to her scream and wail at me, and trying to dodge thrown fruit and books and bottles of wine and anything else she could get her heavily beringed fingers on, would be even less pleasant than forcing my cranky mount down this muddy track through the gloomy woods. I’d had a taste of it before I fled for the stables. Rivina’s shrieks still echoed in my ears.

Not to mention, I had an apple-sized bruise on my shoulder and my best sky-blue tunic bore spatters of southern red.

With a shudder, I urged my mare on with my heels and a flick of the reins. She simply flicked her ear back at me in response. If anything, she moved more slowly. Agnethe could be such a bitch. Of course, that was why I’d named her after my mother. Fuck, all the women in my life, including the horses, were such pains in my ass.

In all likelihood each one of them—including the horses—would’ve said that I was the problem. Hardly. I was the innocent party here.

Mostly, anyway.

“Will you move, for the love of the gods,” I hissed. “Trot. Trot, damn you! I could turn you into a goat.” That was highly unlikely. My magic manifested almost entirely in my music. But you had to keep people on their toes. Hooves. Whatever. “Probably. And if it goes wrong, that’ll be even worse for you! So fucking move!”

“I don’t generally trot on command,” someone said, and I yelped, jumped, and slid halfway off Agnethe’s back, hanging there precariously, my damp pants sticking me to the saddle. I whipped my head around and found him: a tall, looming, ominous figure in a long black cloak with the hood up, in the act of stepping out onto the path from behind a grove of pines. “Not that I’m eager to be turned into a goat, although I don’t think they trot on command, either.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I snarled, my voice shaking a little bit from the force of my suddenly racing heartbeat. No one with good intentions lurked in this part of the forest. No one with good intentions lurked behind trees at all. The last time I’d done it, I’d been lying in wait to try to seduce my brother’s valet. “Piss off!”

Even though I was hanging halfway off, I tried again to nudge Agnethe, and she took three steps—and then promptly stopped dead, damn her, right when I needed her to move the most. She was smart enough to know she’d be home all warm and dry having supper if it wasn’t for me. And she could hold a grudge.

I slid a little further. The stranger stepped into the middle of the path in front of Agnethe. Fuck, he was big up close, tall and broad-shouldered, and a very long sword hung at his belt with a knife on the other side. I had a sword of my own, of course, but I wasn’t any great expert with it.

Something told me this man was.

He reached out and caught a fistful of Agnethe’s reins. Finally she balked—and reared up, tossing me neatly the rest of the way out of the saddle and flinging me across the path.

Everything flipped and whirled around me, and I had a dizzy, sickening instant to try to summon my magic, out of reach and thin like gossamer, fuck, glimmering and taunting me—and then I splatted into the mud, flat on my back, the air whooshing out of my lungs in a sharply painful rush.

Oh, gods, my back was broken. Or my neck. Everything. I blinked up at the darkening sky through the black branches, my eyelashes hazing everything further, my focus going in and out. My body had gone numb. Could I heal myself? Rivina would gloat so unbearably.

Freezing-cold mud soaked through my clothes, finally reaching my skin and chilling and sliming me horribly.

A huge dark shape loomed and then leaned down over me.

My lips moved, but I couldn’t get any words out, just pitiful puffs of air. “Uhh,” I managed.

At least he’d feel properly guilty for murdering me, cutting me down in my gorgeous prime. Gods, someone had better write a song about it, at least. One that rhymed, and had a wrenchingly tearful chorus. Something heartbreaking about youth in full flower, and maybe that could rhyme with power, as in my magic…

Another blink, and my attacker threw his hood back. All thought of rhymes fled my mind.

In the drawing the constable had commissioned of him, he hadn’t been frowning, more sort of moodily staring out of the parchment. But I couldn’t mistake the straight, thick brows, or the firm mouth, or the bold nose and strong jaw.

The artist had gotten the eyes wrong, though. Dark and uncompromising, yes, but they held a subtle gleam that would’ve taken a much cleverer pencil to capture. His brown hair was shorter now than it had been in the picture, too.

But it was definitely the highwayman whose stranglehold on the foothills leading into the mountain pass had driven all the local authorities to frothing rage over the last few years.

And he’d killed me.

Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. My throat worked, and at last I drew in enough breath to speak.

“Tell my mother to burn my lyre with my body,” I rasped. “A lyre pyre, as it were. I don’t want anyone else to play her.”

He stared at me, eyebrows slowly raising, rain beginning to drip down off his nose and trickle over his cheekbones. The bastard didn’t even seem to notice or care. Oh, my back was so cold, and—wait, would I be able to feel that if it were broken? With my luck, probably yes.

“Burn your—a lyre pyre? You must be joking. I hope you’re joking. And you’re not dying. I assume you mean you don’t want anyone else to play your instrument, not play your mother? That was a bit ambiguous.”

Indignation choked me nearly as much as the lingering effects of flying off a horse to my inevitable death.

“Ambig—is this really the moment for a grammar lesson?” I demanded. “How dare you mock my last words!”

In the drawing he’d been striking, eye-catching, harsh-featured and intimidating. And frowning in person he’d been even more so. When that frown melted into a wicked, crooked grin, his eyes glinting with laughter, he became…well, I couldn’t really feel much below the waist. But there was a flutter.

“Last words?” he repeated. “Are your last-last words about me mocking you, or do you want to try for a third round about the lyre again, only with more rhymes? To really get it right. How about a lyre fire pyre, or is that redundant as well as stupid?”

“Oh,” I gasped, and my heart pounded, everything going blurry again. “You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”

My surroundings started to fade into a gray mist, leaving nothing but that white, offensive grin.

“You wouldn’t be the first to make those your last words to me,” he said. “But don’t worry. You’re going to be fine. Held for ransom, but absolutely fine.”

I desperately tried to summon up the strength to tell him to fuck off, or ideally to turn him into a strange, half-formed goat.

Instead, I passed out, dying in the icy mud and rain, my fine wool and velvet cloak no doubt completely ruined.