The Captive's Curse (Twilight Mages Book 2), page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Eliot Grayson
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Fiona Jayde
Proofreading by Lori Parks
smokingteacupbooks@gmail.com
eliotgrayson.com
Contents
About The Captive’s Curse
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Get in Touch
Also by Eliot Grayson
About The Captive’s Curse
Unwanted. Unloved. Unransomed. And unable to control his dawn magic by any other means…
At odds with his family and on the run, Lord Cyril is taken prisoner and held in a gloomy mountain fortress—which he brightens up quite a bit, thank you. His captor wants him to be quiet and not cause any trouble, but who cares? Cyril may need the mysterious highwayman to quell his dawn magic and keep him sane, but he’s overbearing, sardonic, and unpleasant.
Mostly. Except when Cyril can’t live without his touch, or his voice, or his rare smile…
Ser Enzo, a robber and (not quite) a gentleman, desperately wants his obnoxious, adorable, irritating, irresistible captive off his hands…and other parts. Lord Cyril’s wanton, irrepressible, and worst of all—his family won’t take him back. Enzo can’t release him without being paid. It’s against his principles.
But so is keeping his bewitching captive forever. Cyril may be his prisoner, but Enzo’s dangerously close to losing his own freedom by falling under the mage’s spell…
The Captive’s Curse is the second book in the Twilight Mages series, but it takes place concurrently with book one and can be read as a standalone. Contains wildly inappropriate discussions of vegetables (no vegetables were actually harmed in the making of this book), the mad ghost of an evil lord (the Mad Lord is harmed, to no one’s regret), and the overcoming of fears, family quarrels, and scheming villains to reach a guaranteed HEA.
Chapter One
Riding in the rain had to be the most mood-lowering activity on earth. After all, 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 freezing my ass off and 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, 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.
No, I’d find somewhere to wait out the rain, give her a few hours to wear herself down, and then go home and sneak in through a side door.
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. 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.
The much less guilty party, anyway. I hadn’t known whose cock I was sucking, for fuck’s sake. If I’d so much as suspected who he was under that mask, I’d have found some other amusement.
“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.
When I whipped my head around, I found him behind me: 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.
He continued with, “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 here at the edge of my brother’s lands where they abutted the wild forest. No one whose intentions were entirely pure lurked behind trees at all. The last time I’d done it, I’d been about to dump a bucket of water over my brother’s head.
But these were very different circumstances. For one thing, this fellow looked quite a bit older than nine.
“Piss off! I’m a powerful mage. Leave me alone.”
Even though I was hanging halfway off her back, 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 owned a sword of my own, of course, but I wasn’t any great expert with it…even if I’d remembered to bring it with me.
Well, damn it all to hell.
“If you were a powerful mage, you wouldn’t be as wet as a drowned rat,” he said, and 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, 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.
Icy-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.
Hopefully he’d be racked with guilt 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 commissioned by the local Lord Constable—also known to me as my horrid cousin’s horrid fiancé Hans—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 jet-black 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 couple of 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 lute with my body,” I rasped. “With my death, my lute should lie mute, as it were. I don’t want anyone else to play her.”
He stared at me, eyebrows slowly rising, 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
“Burn your—a mute lute? 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!”
That mediocre artist had made him striking, eye-catching, harsh-featured and intimidating. Frowning and in person, he was even more so. But 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. There was a definite flutter, though.
“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 lute again, only with a real rhyme instead of a near-rhyme? To really get it right. How about a moot lute, or is that simply too 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.
The bastard turned out to be right about one thing, at least. I didn’t die.
It was worse than that: I woke up in a lumpy bed covered in a scratchy blanket, in a dark and gloomy room that desperately needed better ventilation in the chimney. The miserable smolder in the fireplace produced more smoke than warmth.
And a housemaid would’ve been nice. The soot-stained ceiling bore the torn webs of a thousand spiders of days of yore. Probably their modern descendants, too, and I squinted, trying to see if anything was about to land on my face.
I turned my head. Oh, gods above. This place needed a whole bevy of housemaids. And kitchen maids, because were those…I’d been put in a bedroom with crates of onions.
Onions!
My feet had hit the floor before I even thought to wonder if my legs would ever work again, or if I’d have to drag myself along, an object of pity to all.
My bare feet. That stopped me, and I looked down. Bare legs, long and slim and lightly dusted with golden hair. Pale thighs. And between them, beneath the hem of the rough homespun shirt that had rucked up around my waist, my bare cock and balls were nestled, unimpressively soft in the cold.
Someone—my kidnapper?—had undressed me and ogled my naked body.
And then, rather than recognizing that a delicate and beautiful creature like me needed a soft bed in a warm room that didn’t reek of fucking onions, he’d dumped me here, wearing a shirt I’d have been ashamed to hand off to a starving peasant. (If I’d ever encountered one, anyway. My brother Bruno might be a pig in the body of an orangutan, but at least he made sure no one on his lands ever went hungry.)
Generally speaking, I got better responses than this to men ogling my naked body. Wide-eyed admiration and stammered poetry. Jewelry. Proposals of marriage. Offers of sex, at the very least.
No one seemed to be lying in wait with jewels, poetry, or a nice thick cock.
And no clothes, either, besides this horrendous shirt.
Only onions.
For lack of any other option, I tugged the moth-eaten wool blanket off the bed and wrapped it around my hips, letting it hang down to my calves like a skirt, and edged my way around the crates to the door.
To my surprise, the door latch lifted without any resistance, and the door swung open. He hadn’t locked me in. Hadn’t he said something about holding me for ransom? Weren’t you supposed to secure valuable prisoners? Not to mention my magic, which made me dangerous—theoretically, anyway. How offensive.
I stepped out into a corridor that perfectly matched the room I’d been confined in: shabby, grubby, and smelling of vegetables, only overcooked rather than raw. A worn flagstone floor stretched in both directions, uneven and pitted, with heavy wooden doors set at intervals. Some hung open. Maybe they’d given up.
Down one way, I heard a low hubbub of voices. With the noise came scents of what could be charitably called cookery: roasting meats and more singed something-or-other. It was enough to make my stomach rumble and twist despite the dubious appeal of the smells.
A frigid draft swept down the corridor from the other direction.
Almost certainly, that way lay freedom. For a moment I was tempted to run for it. But I’d have to find the stables and avoid recapture, and resaddle Agnethe if she’d been properly cared for, and anyway, I didn’t have any boots or trousers.
Besides, Rivina would still be on the rampage, and she’d no doubt whipped my mother and brother into a fury on her behalf by now, too. My attempts to explain my side of what had happened had been entirely ignored. Going home might not be worth the trouble of stealing my own horse.
Well, fuck.
Anger and resentment rose up so strongly they nearly choked me. Driven out of my own home with fruit, of all things. Knocked off my horse and nearly killed. Kidnapped! Undressed by someone who didn’t appreciate how lucky he’d been to do so, stuck in a thing that barely qualified as a bed, and simply left there alone, with no one paying any attention to me whatsoever!
The whisper of my bare feet on the stones didn’t satisfy me at all as I charged down the passage. I wanted to stomp and clatter. The end of the corridor had a tall arched doorway with no door in it, and I did my very best to storm through it with nothing to fling open or slam shut, skidding to a halt at the top of a short set of stairs that led down into, apparently, the main hall of whatever miserable fortress I’d been brought to.
The high-ceilinged space before me didn’t have the cavernous grandeur of the hall at home, but it easily held four or five very long trestle tables, benches to match, and a low dais at the far end of the room. A high table fit for ten or twelve diners, empty at the moment, occupied the dais. Tall, narrow windows ran the length of the place, though most had shutters over them at present to keep out the freezing late-autumn rain—and the ones that didn’t showed nothing but blackness.
Night had fallen while I lay in my onion-infused bedchamber.
The unclothed, rough-hewn tables were about half full of people eating from wooden bowls, with communal platters of meat and bread and potatoes between them.
Most of the diners were men, and while some of them wore the plain clothing of commoners or tradesmen, many had heavy dark green wool tunics, brown trousers, and sturdy boots, and some even wore studded leather armor, as if they’d just come in from some kind of training. They looked like an army, albeit a small one, not a motley band of thieving ruffians.
There were even three or four women sitting and eating and seeming perfectly content to be there, none of them appearing to be held against their will.
In fact, no one seemed afraid or distressed, or even inappropriate in their behavior. They were a lot quieter than such a gathering would’ve been even at home in a respectable castle full of respectable people. Downright dull, now that I had a second to observe them.
And I had many seconds to observe them.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty, which crept by like as many years as I stood there on display, nasty old blanket around my waist, my usually sleek and lavender-scented pale blond hair probably dark and crusty with drying mud. It’d have been horrifically embarrassing if they’d all turned to stare.
Why the hell weren’t they turning to stare, gods damn it?
Another glance around the room confirmed that my captor wasn’t here. Good. That rude, condescending bastard didn’t need to see me standing here being completely ignored by an entire hall full of strong, lusty men.
Too bad I didn’t have Rivina here. Her screams and flung objects would’ve done the trick.
“Hello?” I said, my voice coming out thin and rusty. I cleared my throat. “Prisoner here? Shouldn’t you be keeping me from escaping?” Nothing. “Or feeding me some of that very mediocre-looking supper?”
