Chương 8: Chapter 260 - Malediction

Siobhan Month 4, Day 11, Friday 10: 50 a. m. Siobhan's emotions were as confused and jumbled as her thoughts. She and Rory continued spying on Grandfather and Claudio for a while longer, but both of them grew bored when nothing interesting happened, and it didn't seem like the two thaumaturges would be finished with whatever they were doing anytime soon. In the end, they left the old, rusted horn behind and made their way into the village.

People were gathered around in a big group right on Main Street, and it quickly became apparent why. The villagers who had seen the treehouse were gossiping.

"It looked like an entire swarm of bugs had eaten the tree and built their nest in its place," the older man said for the benefit of his rapt audience.

"Tons of little holes running through everything, and I swear I couldn't stop imagining all the eggs laid inside. Whatever it is, it leaves webbing behind, too." Siobhan and Rory moved to the porch of a nearby building, where she overturned a bucket and stood on it so that she could see past the adults' heads. The villager's son shook his head.

"Sorcerer Kalvidasan said it was mold, remember?"" Contagious, magical mold," the villager's wife said.

"And did you feel that aura of foreboding just wafting off it? I swear I could sense it. My ma always said we had a touch o' prognos in the blood, a few generations back." Her husband smiled at her.

"That's why your eyes are so pretty." The woman swatted at his arm, but her smile seemed quite pleased as she turned back to the crowd.

"That foreigner, Aimee, works for them. If anyone knows what's going on up in that house, it should be her, and she thinks it's a curse." She crossed her arms, opened her eyes wide, and said dramatically, "But me? I say it's a malediction." Several people gasped as if she'd just said a particularly scandalous curse word. Beside Siobhan, Rory rose up onto his tiptoes ineffectually.

"What's a malediction?" Siobhan remained silent. She didn't know, either. A couple of people turned, saw Siobhan, and then looked away awkwardly or nudged their neighbors to try and keep them silent, but the crowd was too big for all of them to notice her presence.

"A malediction? Isn't that a curse carried on the last breath of a dying person?" someone asked.

"Not exactly," the woman who supposedly carried a couple drops of prognos blood said.

"My ma said it's a plea for fate to judge fairly, against the dying person's accused. I don't think that's a curse, exactly. It causes bad luck in a lot of different ways, whereas curses are more specific." She paused, then added, "I think." Siobhan shuddered, remembering what Mom was like before the end: anxious, jittery, and her gaze so distant it seemed as if she were looking past the reality in front of her to some place Siobhan could never see.

Mom had kept casting magic without her Conduit, at even the tiniest excuse. Grandfather had tried to stop her, and she had acted as if she were trying to stop, too, but it was as if her Will was broken, and she had no real desire to stop herself. Siobhan shuddered as she remembered the look of blind rapture on Mom's face as she cast a spell to weave herself a dress out of the air. Her pleasure had looked identical to torturous pain, and it had frightened Siobhan.

Grandfather had done his best to keep them separated, afraid that Miakoda would harm Siobhan in her carelessness. As the days went on and Mom spent more and more of her time casting magic, Siobhan saw her less frequently. When she did, she could tell that Mom barely had the patience to endure their visits. Siobhan had been asleep when Mom died, but she swore she had felt the moment in her dreams. She'd woken in the middle of the night, panting and gasping with panic and a deep sense of existential dread.

At the time, she had assumed it was simply a nightmare—which she could only vaguely remember as desperately searching for something —and so she lulled herself back to sleep. In the morning, she learned her mother was dead. It was only then that Siobhan had wondered if it was perhaps the very moment of her mother's death that she had sensed in her sleep. What if what Siobhan had felt was a malediction, one final act of desperate, powerful magic?

Mom wouldn't have done something so malicious to Siobhan, even if she was under the effects of some curse that weakened her strength of mind. Not even when she was so unlike herself, near the end. Of the people Mom could have been angry enough at to target with a malediction, there was only Father or Grandfather. Siobhan glared at the ground. It still didn't really make sense. Mom might argue with them, but this kind of malicious magic was on an entirely different level.

Perhaps some unknown third person had cursed Mom. Curses didn't have to come from someone you were actively fighting face to face. According to the stories, those kinds of evil spells—blood magic—could be cast from afar with a piece of hair or blood, or even tied to an object that spread the curse to the victim when they interacted with it. Even if Mom had known she was cursed, she might not have had any idea who did it. But maybe a malediction wouldn't care about that?

Of course, all of this was supposing that Mom really had been cursed. Either that or a malediction might be behind the strange phenomena. But while Siobhan wasn't entirely one hundred percent sure what had happened, it was obvious that something magical had gone seriously wrong. The kind of wrong that Grandfather told stories about. Siobhan clenched a fist and pressed it to her stomach. This needed to be investigated.

She hopped off of the bucket and turned back down the road leading up to her house, but paused as Rory immediately fell into step beside her.

"Don't you have chores to do?" Rory shrugged.

"Not if my mom doesn't catch me." As if he'd frightened himself by saying that aloud, he hunched his shoulders, ducked down, and looked around for the woman. When he didn't see her, he relaxed.

"Are you going back to the treehouse?" Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"How did you know?"

"You've got that look about you, the one you wear every time before you get into huge trouble."

"That look?" Siobhan asked.

"Like you're going to face a dragon." Siobhan touched her face, wondering what this supposed expression looked like.

"I want to get a sample," she said simply. She also still wanted to get into Grandfather's tower, but with Claudio around, that would be even harder than usual.

"We should get food first?" Rory said, rubbing his stomach like it hurt. It was a statement, but he had posed it as a question. Siobhan sighed and looked up at the sky.

"And of course you don't have any money?" Rory sniffled and stared at her silently, though he did have the grace to blush slightly.

"Fine. But I'm not spending any more than three copper on you." Rory grinned and skipped ahead to the tavern, which had the cheapest food in town, on account of the fact that most people spent more coin on the drinks. Siobhan was surprised that she still had an appetite, but as soon as the food came, her stomach roared to life.

Everyone in the tavern was talking about her treehouse, and several villagers had the gumption to ask Rory and her about it, but Rory deferred all questions to Siobhan, and she kept her face impassive and the details sparse. This was why living in a small town was so unbearable. When she grew up, maybe she would go somewhere where no one knew her name. When they arrived back at her house, Grandfather and Claudio were nowhere to be seen. Siobhan and Rory stopped and stared at the treehouse in shock.

The strange growths, sand, and gauzy cloth were all gone. The treehouse almost looked as if it had never been touched—except that a lot of the wood looked squeaky clean and brand new. It had never looked like this in real life. These patches starkly contrasted the weathered, greying sections of the original that still remained, like new pink skin growing in after a wound. The phantom sensation of bugs crawling up her arms and back made Siobhan shudder.

The new patches looked inherently out of place and were screaming their wrongness to every sense she had. She forced herself to approach and examine the fixes more closely but knew that her plan to collect samples was ruined. This stumped her for only a moment before she turned her gaze to the tower. She pressed her lips together thoughtfully, whispered, "Wait here," to Rory, and hurried around and into the house with loping, tip-toeing strides meant to combine speed and stealth.

The cold lead door was closed, and when she pressed her fingertips to it, they buzzed uncomfortably. The air smelled of the charged potential that built up and stretched taut before a lightning storm. The wards were up, as they always were lately. She knocked, and while she waited, ran her tongue across the back of her teeth. Her tongue picked up the phantom taste of copper, a reaction of her confused brain to the sheer concentration of magic bleeding off of the door. No one answered, so she knocked again, louder.

When the door remained closed, she nodded determinedly and hurried back outside.

"Come with me," she told Rory. They headed back down to the beach, where she had stashed the harpoon and rope from her first heist attempt under a slanted, jagged boulder. Rory stared at it, then at her, as she wound the heavy coil of knotted old rope around her arm and shoulder.

"Well? Pick it up," she said impatiently, pointing her chin toward the harpoon. He did, though he still seemed hesitant.

"We don't have a boat…? And I don't think beast hunting is really safe to do alone…"

"What are you talking about?" Siobhan started walking back toward the house, and he hurried to keep up.

"We're not going beast hunting. We're going to climb the tower and break in through the window." Rory's eyes went wide and his face pale.

"Umm… Is that better?" She thought for a moment and then amended her statement." I'm going to climb the tower. You're just going to help me and keep a lookout." She'd thought Rory might be disappointed, but instead he said "Oh," with a relieved exhale. With an irritated, judgmental glance, she added, "And I'll take the blame if my grandfather catches us." Rory winced.

"Thanks. It's not that I'm scared, exactly. It's just that I really don't want to die. I have a lot of unfinished business." Siobhan rolled her eyes.

"Grandfather wouldn't kill you. He'd just snap you with a few stinging jinxes and drag you off to confess to your mom." The boy winced again, this time even harder, but at least he didn't back out and make Siobhan carry everything by herself. Grandfather and Claudio were still gone when they arrived. Siobhan dropped the rope, put her hands on her hips, and gave a sharp, confident nod.

"Okay. It's important that we get the throw exactly right. We wouldn't want to accidentally break the window or something stupid like that." Rory stared skeptically up at the tower window. She held her hand out in front of her face, her fingers in the shape of an L.

"I know there's math you can do to figure out exactly how tall something is with angles and stuff, but I haven't learned that yet. We'll have to estimate the distance from the top of the tree to the tower's lightning rod. And then we'll practice making an equivalent throw from the ground a few times. Once we're consistently successful, we'll act."

Fifteen minutes later, they were practicing throws from two of the tree's lower branches—as Rory had reasonably pointed out that things would feel different when they were balancing on a swaying branch rather than the ground—when Claudio came out of the woods to the east. Siobhan and Rory were in the middle of a test throw, and when she saw Claudio out of the corner of her eye, she froze. The harpoon arced wildly off-target, and Rory let out an embarrassingly high-pitched squeak as he almost lost his balance.

It flew sideways and slammed into the dirt with a thud that made Siobhan's heart flinch. Claudio walked calmly to the base of the tree and looked up at them.

"What are you doing?" Rory clamped his lips together tighter than a tax-man grasping a copper crown. Siobhan scowled down at Claudio belligerently. He knew too much, so there was no point trying to bluff now.

"We're investigating, because you and Grandfather are keeping secrets."

"Ah." Claudio's mouth opened in surprise, and he pointed meaningfully at the treehouse, his eyebrows raised in a silent question.

"Yes! About that!" Siobhan exclaimed with exasperation.

"Also, were you too lazy to make it look right when you fixed it? My treehouse looks like some kind of, of…" Claudio crossed his arms, frowned thoughtfully, and then nodded.

"I agree."

"What? You agree it looks bad? I think that's obvious. Very slapdash, inferior work." Rory cleared his throat and elbowed her in the side. Claudio looked at the treehouse for a moment, and then back at her.

"The treehouse looks bad. You should complain to Raaz. But I meant that I agree that you should investigate." Siobhan had been about to argue with him and barely stopped herself.

"What?" she repeated.

"You should investigate." She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

"What are you and Grandfather doing?" Claudio held up his hands helplessly.

"I cannot tell you."

"Cannot, or will not?" Instead of answering, he turned to look at the tower window, then nudged the rope leading to the harpoon with his foot.

"This method is very unlikely to yield the results you want. What if… What if I let you into the workshop?" Siobhan opened her mouth, closed it again, and then massaged one ear to ensure she had heard correctly.

"That would be great," Rory said on a huge exhale of relief. Without waiting for her, he began to climb back down.

"I have a key to pass the wards," Claudio added, stepping closer. He reached up to grab the toe of one of her dangling feet and, with a small smile, shook her leg slightly—as if she were some kind of doll! Siobhan kicked at his hand, failed to do any damage, and reluctantly climbed back down from the lower branch she had been straddling.

"You won't tell anyone?" she asked, her hands fisted against her hips as she glowered up at him.

"No. And you cannot tell anyone either." Claudio paused, looked between the two of them, and added, " Especially not Raaz."