The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 1: The Cursewright and the Boy, Part 1

The boy had never witnessed an exorcism before, and it took all his courage not to run screaming from the house.

Lena was not his mother, and so the old man Orson was not his grandfather, but like most of the other whores at the Prideful Lioness, Lena treated the boy with great affection. He had been born to a dark skinned beauty who worked at the brothel after being expelled from a cloister in the Chalk Hills. Her name was Pethronne, and she had left him behind along with the lifestyle when a petty lord from the Azure Sea departed Munazyr with her as a new consort. The boy had not been a year old at the time. 

Any memories of his mother were hazy at best, but he loved Lena and Yula and Selene and all the others. They shielded him from the nastier realities of life as a prostitute in Munazyr and kept him fed.  They protected him from the drunken patrons who occasionally tried to cuff him on the side of the head for looking at them askance . . . or who were tempted to sample boy-flesh instead of the women on the brothel's menu. So because he loved Lena, and because he respected Lena's poor possessed father, he stayed in the cramped house that creaked and groaned between the fish-stinking warehouses along the east shore of Brightmoon Bay.

But oh by the gods he was frightened.

He didn't know what was worse: the horrible things streaming from Orson's mouth as the old man writhed and twisted and arched in a way no human spine was ever meant to bend, his wrists and ankles straining at the leather straps that bound him to the narrow bed; or the woebegone look on Lena's face as she tried to soothe her father. Her fingers lightly caressed the misshapen claw that had been his left hand, the delicate pale skin of her own hand marred with angry red welts and scratches where her father had raked his filthy nails across her flesh. 

Lena was one of the older girls at the Lioness, having just passed her twenty-eighth year this autumn. Kneeling by her father's narrow bed, her long yellow hair pulled back into a tight but disheveled knot, the strain of the last forty hours weighing in fleshy pouches under her eyes, she looked like a woman three times her age. Privately the boy wondered if she would ever recover from this, even if the cursewright was successful. He could scarcely reconcile the harrowed old woman whispering pointless comfort to her shrieking father with the laughing, flirtatious young woman who had once sneaked him a half-pint of Barthim the Beast's evening ale with a wink and a kiss on his temple. 

On the bed, the old man responded to his daughter's attempt at a soothing touch like a cat struck with a hot brand. His crooked hand twisted against hers, his eyes rolling madly in their sockets. With a scream his lower body surged upward, the tattered rags on his belly shifting to reveal blotchy red scars on his stomach. Those scars formed and pulsed and bled before the boy's very eyes; they took the shape of hideous letters in a tongue the boy did not understand. The cursewright had understood the words when they had appeared before, but he hadn't deigned to translate them. Unfortunately, the words spilling from his mouth needed no such interpretation. 

"Give me your cunt, Lena -- it's for sale, isn't it? Your cunt, your mouth, everything I gave you, sold for a copper a tumble! Give it to your father, and you can have me back!" Laughter bubbled from the old man's throat, accompanied by a thick black tar that oozed from the corner of his mouth. It reeked of rotten fruit, of mold, of corruption.

Lena drew back from the bed, nursing her hand with a damp cloth the cursewright had suffused with healing ointments. "Be a good boy, would you?" she said, imploring him with the saddest eyes the boy had ever seen. "Draw some fresh water for my father? And . . . and see if he's ready?"

The boy knew both that water wouldn't help the old man any more than throwing a knife to a fish would help it escape a net, and that the cursewright would come in his own good time and not a moment before, but he understood that Lena didn't want him to hear any more than he already had. He didn't like to leave her alone with the possessed old man, but the cursewright had assured them that so long as no one undid his bonds or disturbed the network of glittering charms arranged in an arcane pattern over the bed, then he couldn't actually hurt them. Except for the words the demon inside him uttered, of course, which the boy supposed were as sharp as any blade. The boy grabbed an empty bucket and scrambled out of the narrow old house into the afternoon sunlight of Hawser Street.

The well, and the surrounding square where the cursewright was preparing himself, was not far away. Before the boy set off down the street he took a moment to lean against the wall of the old man's house, shuddering, taking in great gulping breaths of the outside air. It stank of fish and salt and all the aromas of a densely populated city the imagination could muster, but this air was infinitely better than the reek that infested the house. The boy could almost feel it clinging to him as a physical thing, like thick strands of cobwebs one might blunder into while plumbing an abandoned cellar. At the back of his throat the boy could feel tears and sobs aching to form, but he swallowed them down. He didn't want to show fresh tears to Lena, and he wanted to show them even less to the cursewright.

The boy was afraid of him. Lena knew it; most of the girls in the Lioness knew it, or else none of them would take such pains to tell him there was nothing to be afraid of. (The boy didn't understand the way women behaved much of the time, but even he knew enough to realize that most of the Lioness girls were quite taken with the cursewright.) Barthim the Beast played cards with him most every night. The cursewright never partook of the Lioness girls, nor had he ever demonstrated any untoward interest in the boy, but he frequently called for wine, matching Barthim drink for drink as they played Knights' Bluff or Whistling Jack into the small hours of the morning. The boy had even served him a few times, and on those occasions the cursewright had thanked him politely and tipped him a generous silver. The Lioness never charged him for his drinks -- those orders came straight from Madame Laurette -- but the cursewright tipped him anyway. Still, the boy was afraid.

He didn't understand how the Lioness girls couldn't be afraid. Afraid of the jingling silver charms that adorned the cursewright's hat and cloak; afraid of the strange musty books he often carried under one arm; afraid of the sulfurous aromas that usually accompanied him; afraid of the dilapidated temple where he plied his trade and the awful sounds that came from it on a regular basis. The boy was grateful that the cursewright had opted to treat Lena's father in the old man's home. If he'd had to venture inside the ruined temple just to be at Lena's side as the exorcism progressed, he wasn't at all sure he'd have been able to endure it.

Once he'd gotten himself accustomed to the comparatively fresh air and considerably brighter light of Hawser Street, the boy set off at a rapid pace, fearing the cursewright and having to speak to him, but more afraid of what might happen if he got back to the old man's house too late. 

Hawser Street ran on a faint slant from northeast to southwest, curving toward the far end as it followed the contours of Brightmoon Bay and led down to the network of docks and shipwrights' coves that crowded the waters. The boy was headed in the other direction, toward the little square formed by the intersection of Hawser with Anchor Street and Boatswain's Way, the three streets merging in a clumsy triangle adorned with a few stone benches and watering troughs. 

At the center stood a public well, shaded under a gazebo that had once been quite elaborate and refined. Now it was flaking and weatherbeaten, though it still saw daily use. At the moment, only one person was there: the cursewright, seated close to the well, his charm-bedecked hat beside him on the bench, his attention focused on the small book in his left hand.