Wicked is the Curse.

39 | Red

Chapter 39| Red.

"She is drinking the Bloodbound's blood." Aire whispered, sickened. "I can smell the Eoban in it."

Ferdia looked grey. Nyeth muttered a curse in Knechru and stepped away, casting a condemning look over the room. There were more shelves, but only one was filled with cups slotted together. There were also small wooden boxes. Gaela stood before them, staring at them.

"Gaela?" Aire turned away from the blood, tasting bile on her tongue. Her stomach was strong, but drinking blood was beyond her. She had seen the desperate measures people had gone to in order to stave off hunger, but the Pretender had full dinners. She was not starving.

Aire whistled a breath and Gaela solidified. Reaching forward, she scraped her finger into the heavy dust on the shelf. Aire leaned past her, reading the Ogham script. "Gaela."

When Aire finished reading, Gaela pointed to the boxes. Her mind dinning, Aire reached forward and pulled on one of the boxes. It was heavy and the edges were dark with dried blood. She cracked it open and stared down.

Gaela tapped her name drawn in the dust.

Gaela.

It looked to be slices of cured meat. It was well preserved. Still edible. Gaela tapped her name again. Aire was gone still, unable to look away from the meat. "You told me, Gaela. You told me and I did not listen."

It had seemed so long ago. Gaela's first few words written into the snow. She ate my Wield. Blood.

"What are you looking at Aire?" Nyeth asked.

"She has been...eating cured slices of Gaela's body," Aire set the box down gently, facing Nyeth numbly. "She has been..."

Aire heaved and puked onto the ground.

Again, she had seen the depths of desperation people faced when hungry. She had chewed on tree-bark, chewed on grass, and shoved clods of earth into her mouth as she crossed Kaelara before reaching the orphanage just to ease the horrible hunger cramps that bowed her over. The Pretender was not in the depths of crippling starvation.

She wiped her mouth and faced them again. It took her a second to gather herself, to remind herself of who she was. This was beyond a lie and a stolen identity. She was drinking blood and eating flesh. Why?

"What was Eimile's Wield when she arrived?" She asked Ferdia.

"She never revealed it. The Wield of the Aryshalins were closely kept secrets until they took the throne."

Aire hummed. "It was to keep the cutthroats from our doors. My grandmother's brother was kidnapped and slaughtered for his Wield."

It had been a story told every year before her grandmother had died. As a reminder of the power of a Wield and a reminder of those who would use it for malice. She had lived a long and golden life, but High-Queen Éalaire Aryshalin never let anyone forget her brother who had been killed in his tenth year. A boy, soft and gentle, who could find and form gold. A boy whose eyes were as bright as his gold; his paintings were immortalised in the great halls of the palace.

He had been there in the bustling city, eating a sliver of roasted duck and was gone. Aire always saw the guilt on her grandmother's face when she spoke of his vanishing.

Taken.

They had intended to use him to make gold, but the boy had refused again and again, no matter how they had beat him. His corpse was returned, left for the crown princess to find. Aire could remember how her grandmother's voice cracked as she described the two golden coins they had left in her brother's eye-sockets. How she had hunted them down alongside the Aether and plunged them all into a vat of molten gold. Aire's twin brothers had liked to scare the youngest two saying that in the darkest corner of the palace, their screaming gold statues could still be found. Aire had scoured that palace many times and never found them. Her grandmother had worn two golden coins around her neck until the day she died.