Curses and Will Chapter 11: Chapter 5: What the Fire Left Behind

Read chapter 11 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

A few nights after Annya left my room with the lantern still warm in her hands, a different knock came at my door, later, heavier, the kind of knock that announces someone has decided something and is following through on it. "Come in," I called, not entirely sure I wanted to know who it was. The door opened. Jonathan stood there, still in his black coat despite the hour, not a wrinkle anywhere on him, like the day hadn't touched him at all. He crossed the room without a word, pulled the chair from beside the window over to my bed, and sat. He didn't speak for a long moment. The quiet stretched out long enough that I started to wonder if he'd come simply to sit there. Then, finally, in a voice that sounded like something he'd been carrying carefully for a long time and was only now setting down, he spoke. "You've seen it. The shadow behind the princess." "Yes." "Then I think it's time you understood what it actually is. Not the simplified version I gave you the first day. The truth." He folded his hands in his lap. Moonlight came through the window at an angle that caught the side of his face, and for the first time since I'd met him, the weight he usually kept hidden behind that composed surface showed through, just slightly, just enough to notice. "She wasn't always like this," he said. "There was a time when Princess Annya was the light of this entire kingdom. Adored, and not only for her appearance. For her kindness. Her laughter used to fill these halls in a way that's difficult to imagine now, looking at her." I tried to picture it and couldn't quite manage it, not against the quiet, careful version of her I'd come to know. "One day she visited a remote village to the east," Jonathan continued. "A small place with strange old legends attached to it. I warned her against going. She insisted, the way she always insisted on things she'd decided mattered. She came back different." He looked away from me, toward the window, and something in his expression cracked, just barely, like a seam giving under pressure it had held for years. "She grew sick. Pale. Fevered. The nightmares started not long after. And then the curse showed itself for the first time." My hands had started trembling without my noticing when it began. "Her family didn't abandon her," he said. "Not at first. They tried everything available to them. Rituals. Mages brought from three kingdoms. Exorcists who claimed expertise they didn't actually possess. None of it worked. And then, one night..." His voice dropped low enough that I had to lean in slightly to follow it. "I was outside, training what little healing magic I had at the time. I was young then, barely more than a servant myself. The king and queen had taken me in when no one else would have me, raised me closer to a son than staff." His hands tightened in his lap, knuckles going pale. "I felt the heat first, before I understood what it meant. I ran back to find the palace burning. Screaming. Flames climbing higher than anything I'd seen. The guards, gone. Everything the fire could reach, devoured." My chest tightened with each word, the shape of it landing somewhere I recognized too well. He swallowed before continuing. "And at the center of it, untouched by any of the flame around her, was Annya. Standing alone. Hollow-eyed. Not a single mark on her skin." Silence sat between us a moment. "They blamed her," he said. "Of course they did. The girl they had adored became, in the space of one burning night, a monster in their eyes. Whispers became shouting. The court that had once competed for her attention started competing instead to see who could put the most distance between themselves and her." I couldn't breathe properly for a moment. "I never believed it," Jonathan said. "Not for a single second. Not then, not in all the years since." He looked at me then, really looked, the way he hadn't quite looked at me before. "I stayed," he said. "Raised her myself, in whatever way I was capable of. Trained