Curses and Will Chapter 29: Chapter 2: The Man Who Came Before

Read chapter 29 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sleep didn't come easily that night. I lay on the thin inn mattress staring at the ceiling, listening to the village settle into its particular brand of quiet, the kind that feels less like rest and more like everyone holding their breath in unison. Annya's room was across the narrow corridor, and I could hear nothing from behind her door, which probably meant she wasn't sleeping either. Around midnight I gave up on it entirely, dressed quietly, and slipped out the back of the inn into the alley behind it. The air outside was cold and sharp, carrying the smell of turned earth from the fields. The village sat still under a half moon, every door shut, every light extinguished except the one that never seemed to go out in the manor house across the way. I sat on a low wall behind the inn and let my eyes adjust to the dark, feeling the presence I'd noticed earlier still pressing steadily against my chest like a thumb on a bruise. Then a sound from further down the alley. Soft. Deliberate. Someone who didn't want to be heard but was letting me hear them anyway. I had my hand on Shinjitsu no Itami's hilt before I'd consciously decided to move it. A figure stepped out of the shadow between two buildings, hands raised slightly to show they were empty. Tall, lean, wearing a traveling cloak that had seen considerably better days. A scar ran from below his left eye to the corner of his jaw, old enough to have faded to silver. He looked at me for a moment, then at the sword at my hip, then back at my face. "You're not from this village," he said. Not a question. "Neither are you," I said. He lowered his hands slowly and leaned against the wall a short distance from me, far enough to be unthreatening, close enough to talk without raising his voice. He had the particular stillness of someone who'd spent a long time learning how to take up as little space as possible. "How long have you been watching this place," I asked. "Long enough," he said. "Since before the Headman consolidated whatever hold he's got on these people. I was here before him, actually. Passing through, same as you probably are." "And you stayed." "Something kept me." His jaw tightened slightly. "Something I'm still trying to finish." I studied him in the low light, trying to get a read on what I was actually looking at. Whatever he was carrying, it wasn't simple. It sat behind his eyes the way grief that's curdled into something harder tends to sit, like stone that used to be water. "What's his name," I asked. "The Headman." "Gavren," he said. "No family name anyone's been able to find. He arrived roughly fourteen months ago, and within six weeks he'd effectively replaced the existing leadership without anyone clearly understanding how or when they'd agreed to it. He has a talent for making people feel like their own thoughts are leading them somewhere when really he's been steering the whole time." "Mind control." "Something close to it. Not crude, not the blunt kind you see from lower-tier mages. Finer than that. He plants the direction and lets people walk there themselves, so by the time they've arrived they genuinely believe they chose the destination freely." He paused. "It makes him very difficult to resist. You can't fight the feeling that the thought was yours all along." "But you're still here," I said. "And you don't seem controlled." Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "Strong Yuta has a way of insulating the mind. Apparently his reach has limits." I filed that away. "What do you know about the families who've been disappearing." His expression went flat immediately, all the careful composure draining out at once, replaced by something colder and more honest underneath it. "Everything," he said. "I've been documenting it since the third family. I know where they go." He looked away, toward the manor house, the light still burning steady in its upper window. "There are records, hidden inside that building. Lists. Names. Dates. What th