House of Curses, page 4
A hand clamped onto March’s shoulder and wrenched him away.
“Excuse me,” March snarled. He whirled around, prepared to argue.
And he was met with her father—Kivrin Argon, First of the House of Cruse.
“Lord Argon.” March’s throat bobbed.
“Unhand my daughter, if you will,” Kivrin said, deathly quiet.
March’s hands were clenched into fists. All she wanted to do was land one in his stupid face.
“I’ll remind you that you are not yet married to my daughter,” Kivrin said. “And you would remember that such pleasures should be reserved for the wedding night.”
March stammered out something like an apology, but Kivrin turned his back and ushered Kerrigan away.
“Thank the gods,” she whispered.
“Next time he puts a hand on you, remind him that you are my daughter,” he said with a wry smile. His gaze met hers. “And knee him in the balls.”
Kerrigan snorted. “I’ll remember that.”
A year earlier, Kivrin would have been the last person she wanted to see. He’d secreted her to the House of Dragons, and she’d lost her family, friends, and title in one fell swoop. She assumed he was embarrassed of her half-Fae heritage. Only to discover that he had done it to protect her. Her mother had been married to Vulsan, a savage man, who would rather kill Kerrigan than allow a bastard to run wild. When he’d come looking for her, Kivrin had hidden her away.
Their new relationship was rocky but promising. She’d never had real family before, only her found family.
“I’m glad that I located you when I did,” he said.
“As am I.”
He shot her a shrewd look. “I’m certain that is true.”
“Why did you seek me out?”
“Your eighteenth name day is approaching. You have returned to Bryonica and taken the name of House of Cruse. I never expected that to happen.”
“My name day isn’t for almost two months.”
“I’m aware of the day that you celebrate, but your actual name day is sooner. Only three weeks or so from now.”
She wrenched him to a stop. “What?”
“It was your mother’s request to hide your official name day to protect you.”
“My … mother’s request,” she whispered. “What else don’t I know about my mother? I thought she died in childbirth.”
His handsome face was like stone, but his eyes were sad. “I won’t discuss Keres with you. I … I can’t.”
Kerrigan softened at the words. “She’s my mother.”
“I know, Kerrigan. I know.”
She had so many questions but asking them now seemed wrong. “What does my name day have to do with this?”
Kivrin pushed open the door and gestured for her to enter. She sighed but did as he’d requested and entered the study. He waved a hand, applying a magical repulsion spell to the room to prevent eavesdropping.
“Kivrin?” she asked.
“I never thought that I would have this moment with you. I didn’t prepare,” he admitted. “I only realized it when the post arrived proclaiming that you had taken up the Bryonican mantle.”
“So?”
He went to the desk and leaned against it. None of the playboy prince was in his features. The weight of the world was on his shoulders. “The House of Cruse has been in decline for many years. Mistress Enara was a formidable woman, revered by all, a Society member. As all the heads of the House of Cruse have been for over a thousand years.”
He never spoke about the grandmother she had never met, but Kerrigan knew enough to be wary of this line of conversation.
“Ever since my mother perished, the other houses have turned against us. Our army has disappeared, which is why you are in this position with March. The fields aren’t producing as they once were. Waisley is practically abandoned. The other houses have jokingly called us the House of Curses.”
Kerrigan had never heard that term before. “We can bring the house back to repute.”
“Not we,” he said solemnly. “You.”
“What does that mean?”
“That they’re not wrong. Our house is cursed. My mother lay a magical geas upon the line to prevent me from taking over after her. She claimed the House of Cruse would crumble unless someone from the Society ruled it.”
Kerrigan sank into the nearest chair at those words. “How could she do that to you?”
“We … didn’t exactly see eye to eye. Everything she claimed has come to pass. I am the ruin of my house,” he said stiffly. His gaze dropped to his hands, and for the first time, she realized they were shaking. He clenched them into fists and then met her eyes. “I have accepted my fate. I accepted that the House of Cruse would forever be fallow. I refused to marry. I promised to never love. To never have children. Then, I met Keres, and nine months later … you.” He choked on the word. “I was going to give you everything my mother never gave me, and I never was able to do that.”
“Dad?” she whispered.
“But now, you’re a Society member. You’re Bryonican. You’re the heiress for house. On your eighteenth name day, I will bestow the house to you.”
Kerrigan’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
This didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be reality. She was going to be eighteen and the head of her entire house?
“With you as the head of House of Cruse, it will fulfill my mother’s requirements. The house will flourish again. The people will be safe. They’ll be … better without me.”
“What if I don’t want the weight of the entire house?”
“I will still be there to take care of day-to-day things, but it will be yours to run as you see fit. It might even be enough to get you out of your wedding.”
Kerrigan jumped back to her feet. “I have been Bryonican again for two weeks. I can’t … I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I didn’t even want to return to the tribe to begin with.”
Kivrin looked pained. “I know, Kerrigan. I do apologize. I wish there were another way.”
“I know we’ve recently reconciled,” she said with a shake of her head, “but I’m getting fed up with having to clean up your messes.”
She headed for the door. Her head was full of everything that her father had just said. A curse … another curse. And she couldn’t break this one. She could only step into the mantle that had been reserved for her father if he had only won his place in the Society. She didn’t want the responsibility. She had too much else to deal with right now.
“Kerrigan, please, let me explain,” he called behind her.
“Don’t bother.”
Then, she was out of the study and dashing away from the Row mansion, the responsibilities that kept piling up, and the weight of everything she had to survive this summer.
She ripped at the ribbons at her back, giving her ribs room to expand and fill her lungs. Stepping out on the empty garden pathways cleared her head.
“There you are,” a shadowy figure said behind her.
Kerrigan drew her magic close to her and whirled, prepared to take on whoever had followed her out of the party.
“I was looking all over for you.”
She sighed with relief when she saw Valia, a steward of the Society and her mole inside the Red Masks. “What are you doing here?”
“Last-minute news.” She tossed a heavy black cloak and a red mask at her. “Still want to stop the Red Masks?”
“Hell yes.”
5
The Artifact
Kerrigan tugged the black cloak over her frame, hiding her recognizable red curls under the hood. She traced the lines of the red mask in her hand. She had only seen one of these when someone was trying to destroy her life. Holding one in her hand felt wrong.
“Ready to go?” Valia asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Valia nodded in understanding. “Let’s go.”
Kerrigan fell into step beside the spy and assassin. During the tournament, she had thought that she was going to be just like Valia. A steward of the Society—someone tapped to work for the Society but never quite one of them. It’d turned out that was Valia’s cover to get inside the mountain. She had been sent to kill Kerrigan and made another call. They were working together to take down the organization.
“Where exactly are we going?” she asked as they stalked through the shadows of the Row and toward Central.
“There’s a Red Masks meeting tonight. I only got wind of it about an hour ago. We’re notorious for short notice. The less time anyone is told about them, the less likely there’s a leak.”
We. Kerrigan sometimes forgot that Valia was a Red Mask. She had been her friend first. If innocent little Valia could be one of them, then anyone could.
“You don’t think it will be suspicious that you’re bringing me?”
“We won’t go in together. I’ll report to the Father.”
Kerrigan shivered. Valia was a daughter to the Father of the Red Masks. Just like Isa, another one of his assassins that he’d sent to kill her. Isa hadn’t decided to pardon her. She just had never gotten lucky enough to finish the job.
“Okay. How big is this meeting? Because I am rather recognizable. If anyone makes me take my hood down …”
“The last one I went to had a few hundred Fae,” she said, casually upturning Kerrigan’s life.
“A few hundred?”
Valia frowned. “Minimum.”
“So many.”
“Not everyone is doing as well as those Fae on the Row. They might not be in the Dregs, like humans and half-Fae, but they feel as if they deserve more than they are getting. They idolize those on top and punch down to those on the bottom because that is what they are most afraid of.” Valia sighed heavily. “They might look like a group of hardened killers, but they’re not. They’ve been told that they are exceptional and if they work hard enough, then they can have the dream of the rich. When they don’t achieve what is nearly impossible to achieve, then they look for someone to blame.”
“And it’s easier to blame us than to look at themselves,” Kerrigan said.
Valia nodded. “Or the system that created these divides between us. It might look like an accident that half-Fae and humans are put at the bottom of the system and treated this way, but the system is working the way it was designed.”
“That’s depressing.”
“I’ve been doing research in the library about the foundations of the Society. Humans were in Alandria first. They were in this valley before the Fae ever arrived, before Irena ever made her bargain to partner with the dragons, before all of it. They slaughtered most of the humans and enslaved the rest. When Fae and humans began to interbreed, the half-Fae were seen as chattel. Any drop of human in them was a mark against them. And the Guard,” she said with distaste, “began as human and half-Fae slave traffickers. They were never there to protect all the people. Just the Fae.”
“And the records say this? If it’s all readily available, then why doesn’t anyone believe me when I speak out?”
“No one wants to look at themselves, Kerrigan. No one wants to do any work or see how they’re part of the problem. They’re too busy claiming not to be prejudice against anyone to see that they already are.”
It was a sobering thought. An upward battle that made Kerrigan feel like the tiniest cog in the machine. Clearing out one problem was going to cascade a whole new world of them. This would be her life’s work—to correct even an ounce of the pain done upon those the Fae deemed lesser.
“One step at a time,” Valia said, touching her shoulder. “It took a deep dive into the mountain for me to realize that I was a product of what the Father had made me. But I can be so much more and do so much better. You taught me that. And it all starts with one person.”
It would be so easy to get bogged down in the immensity of what she was trying to accomplish. But Valia was right. One person at a time. If Valia could turn, then anyone could.
“This way,” Valia said as they headed north out of the main body of Central and toward the Dregs.
Kinkadia was divided into six main districts with Draco Mountain and the Row along the eastern bowl of the valley. Central made up the majority of the center of the bowl, including the Square and much of the commerce. Directly south of Central was Artisan Village with its little Painter’s Row, the Opera house, local bookstores, and Parris’ dress shop. Along the South River was Riverfront, a wealthy district full of people who couldn’t afford property on the Row. And the rest of Kinkadia, nearly everything to the west and north, was the Dregs, where humans and half-Fae lived like ants.
Kerrigan couldn’t imagine the Red Masks having a presence in the Dregs. That was the wrong clientele for their propaganda. But they stopped right before they reached the unofficial dividing line. A large huddle of people stood before the entrance to a ballroom in a mismatch of workers’ attire and cloaks. Kerrigan didn’t see a single person in nice clothing. She understood why Valia had given her a plain cloak.
As they approached, Kerrigan saw that they were handing red masks out at the door for those who didn’t already have them. Kerrigan felt dirty, but she put her mask on and double-checked that her hair was hidden in her hood.
“I’m going to go inside and open a side door for you. Head to the western side of the building and wait for me.”
“Wait,” she said, grabbing Valia’s arm. “Why can’t I go in with everyone else?”
Valia shook her head. “Look. Tell me what you see.”
Kerrigan followed her gaze back to the entrance. She’d been preoccupied by everyone’s clothing and the red masks that were being handed out. Somehow, she had missed there was another barrier for entrance. She narrowed her eyes and tried to make out what she was seeing.
A woman at the entrance was holding what looked like a large coin. It was roughly an inch thick and apparently solid gold. The reason there was a crowd was because every person entering had to put their thumb against the center of the coin before they were ever handed a mask. But as far as she could tell, it didn’t seem to be doing anything to them. She doubted it was entirely innocuous.
“What’s with the coin?”
Valia nodded approvingly. “Father calls it the Collector. It’s a magical artifact that takes a magical fingerprint of everyone who touches it.”
Kerrigan blinked. “A magical fingerprint? For what purpose?”
“It catalogs the person’s magical abilities. Every person has to touch the Collector to prove their worth to the Red Masks.”
“So, you’re telling me, it has a full list of every Red Mask?”
She shrugged. “It’s not really a list. And I don’t know how it can be accessed, but yes. Everyone touches it to get inside. Which is why we aren’t taking you through the front.”
“And you’ve touched it?”
Valia nodded once solemnly. “Now, I’m going.”
It was only a matter of minutes before the side door discreetly opened and Kerrigan was inside the Red Masks meeting. Valia had already disappeared as Kerrigan stepped farther into the ballroom. It was a sterile space with no ornamentation or frivolity. The opposite of the ballroom she had just been in on the Row. The room was positively packed with Fae. Their identities hidden behind masks as they waited anxiously before a sturdy wooden stage.
Kerrigan kept to the shadows of the room, leaning her shoulder against a wooden beam with her back to the door she had come through. The press of bodies continued until a solid clunk told everyone that the doors had been closed. The volume increased as excitement grew, like a hurricane gathering steam before crashing into the coast.
After a moment of tittering, a figure stepped onto the stage, and everyone cheered. It was a slight woman with olive-toned skin and a drape of waist-length black curls. She approached the podium and projected her voice through a magic charm.
“Welcome, Red Masks!”
Another roar of approval filtered through the audience. Kerrigan clapped with them to ensure she fit in. Though truly just being in a room with this many Red Masks made her feel queasy.
Six years earlier, when a human, Cyrene, had won the dragon tournament, the Red Masks had boldly walked the streets of Kinkadia. Kerrigan had been young and wild with excitement over the win. In an empty alleyway, a group of Red Masks had cornered and brutally assaulted her. She would have died that night if not for Dozan Rook.
For years after that, her nightmares had been full of Red Masks, circling ever closer. She had found out that her spirit magic had saved her that night. That Dozan had just found her and nursed her back to health. But none of the facts stopped the fear rippling through her.
“We’re at the dawn of a new age. Males and females alike are here to see the birth of that era, to see Fae once more on top.” She raised her hand into a fist. “We’ve had to share the valley with the humans and half-Fae. They’ve taken jobs and money and magic from us. And now, they have the audacity to rise up beyond their position. You know who I speak of.”
The audience booed, and Kerrigan shrank further back into her hood. She knew who they were talking about too.
“A half-Fae has joined the Society. A half-Fae is a noble in tribe Bryonica and will marry a Fae prince. A half-Fae has been nominated for the Society council.”
Kerrigan gulped as everyone sneered and yelled their distaste.
“And just as the House of Shadows was opened and our allies were released from their unjust prison, she is there to put them back into their isolation. And worse, she released all the human and half-Fae and brought them to our city. The streets are full of refugees. More flies on the wall, more mouths to feed, and not enough room for them all.”
Kerrigan forced a calm. She wanted to rush the stage and put her fist through this woman’s mouth. Releasing slaves was a good thing. But she hadn’t been the one to bring the refugees into the city or to isolate the House of Shadows. In fact, she’d argued against the forced isolation. Not that anyone would believe her.
