The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 6: Taking the Cure, Part 1

 The cup of seretto tea sat at Ammas's fingertips, undrunk and stone cold. Carala had wept during the course of her tale, though she had never fallen into sobs, and now her face was red and faintly swollen, her hazel eyes glassy with tears and distressingly vulnerable. Against his will Ammas felt admiration for her strength in relating this story to a man some considered to be one of her father's deadliest enemies without breaking down entirely. She had not told him everything, of course, particularly the details of what she and Tacen had done together on those moonlit nights in the Judge's Conservatory (and oh how his own father would have hated that), but the cursewright had enough experience with werewolves and their hungers to guess most of it. When she had begun telling him about her first visit to the Three Harts, Ammas had instructed Casimir to return to the Othillic Libraries to complete his assignment on his missing Academy. He had known at once where this story was going, and whatever he had seen in the Prideful Lioness, the boy was too young to hear such details.

However, she had not told him how she even knew he was alive, much less how to find him, and this he could not guess. Ammas supposed there must be rumors about him drifting around the Chalcedony Palace, and cursed himself for settling in Munazyr. Anyone who knew his history might guess he'd return here. But that hadn't troubled him, for he had the Argent Council to protect him. It had been his service to this city as a boy that had partly inspired that protection in the first place. Whether that protection would extend to him speaking to the Emperor's missing daughter, much less illegally treating her, he could not imagine.

Lightly Princess Carala, the sister of the man who had butchered his aunt, uncle, and cousin; the daughter of the man who had personally overseen the deaths of his parents, the destruction of his house, and the murder of almost every friend and colleague he had ever known, touched her fingers to her throat, again flashing the priceless bangle that had given away her station. "I am quite parched. Might I have a glass of water?"

"Of course," Ammas replied neutrally, trying with all his might to master the nausea that had roiled his belly once he realized who had strolled into the abandoned temple. It had subsided while he had listened to her tale -- he was too proficient in his craft to forget how to listen to a potential client and catalogue every detail as he did -- but now that she was asking something of him, it returned full force.

For two decades, for all of this girl's life, he had entertained idle fantasies of what he might do if Somilius Deyn III ever appeared before him. He dreamed of it as he lay sleepless in vermin-eaten beds that reeked of old sweat. Images came to him while he hid in haylofts, disguising himself as a common laborer. Such thoughts kept him warm during icy nights during the two years he'd spent on the edge of the Scorched Desert. In most of them he unleashed the full force of his abilities against the Emperor even though such a thing would probably kill him as well; watched the forces from the worlds beyond tear him to pieces as the fat shit shrieked in terror until his divine voice was a croaking rasp hideous enough to match the rest of him. But such things were a childish waste of time and energy. In the last five years, when he finally began to practice his trade again in this abandoned temple in the Munazyr slums, he put them away, even if they were never quite forgotten.

Now that man's daughter, frightened, achingly beautiful, and infected with the wolf's blood, had come to him for help.

"Casimir, would you fetch a ewer of water and some cups for us?" he called out. Carala blinked at him, perplexed, and after a moment he realized why. A thin smile he didn't feel curled his lips. "Forgive me, your highness. One gets used to having an apprentice so quickly. If you'll excuse me for a moment?"

He rose from the table without waiting for a response and swiftly strode behind the altar to the discreet postern door that led to the little plot of land behind the temple. There was solitude there, and just now he needed it like a man in the desert needed water. The princess might simply up and leave as she waited for him -- she had seemed skeptical of him to begin with, and he could only imagine what tales she had heard about him from her father and his sycophants -- but that didn't concern him. Undoubtedly he was the only cursewright she knew of, or she'd have gone elsewhere for assistance.