The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 16: Daybreak, Part 1

 Ammas loved his bedroom at Shattercrown. The view here was so much nicer than the dingy streets of Gallowsport and the dirty gray waters of Hangman's Harbor. Here he could see the Azure Sea, as dreamily blue as its name. Every morning he awoke to glorious sunrises. Uncle Gratham and Aunt Hyrsith insisted on maintaining the best guest quarters here for Senrich and his family, and Ammas suspected either his aunt or his uncle or both were responsible for the new toys and -- when he was older -- fascinating books he found tucked into the strangest places here. 

But this wasn't so pleasant a visit; he had just finished his first year of study at Sailor's Crown and he was due to be sent off to a short apprenticeship. Only a week before he was set to meet his new master he had come down with a terrible fever; something he had eaten, Uncle Gratham thought. He felt guilty; his mother rarely got to visit Losris Nadak, and here she was sponging his forehead off as he lay stricken in bed instead of enjoying the hiking paths and mountain vistas and wondrous views of the sea.

He opened his eyes, blinking. No room in Shattercrown was this dark, and the sunrise outside his window was no seaborne beauty. And he never remembered his mother being this young, or her hair being anywhere near so dark. Come to think of it, he could never recollect his mother wearing any perfume at all, certainly not the strangely pleasant forest scent that drifted toward his nostrils now.

After a moment, those wisps of half-memories began to dissolve, replaced by a colder reality. The anxious face at his bedside belonged not to his mother, but to the Princess Carala Deyn.

"Thank the gods," she breathed. "You're awake."

"I am," he said, agreeably if thickly. "Did everyone make it out? Where is Casimir?"

Carala tilted her head toward a corner of the room, which Ammas slowly realized he had never seen before. Somewhere in the abandoned monastery, he supposed. In the corner Casimir was curled up on a bedroll, fast asleep. The cursewright's hat rested on his head. "He insisted on wearing it," Carala said apologetically.

But Ammas was smiling softly. "It can't hurt him, at least. There are worse things for him to be meddling with." Slowly he began to sit up, before realizing two things. First, the hand that Carala had clawed when nearly in her wolfshape was well-bandaged. Second, under the thin blankets he was, amazingly, unclad. Raising an eyebrow he peered at Carala, who blushed. There was a pile of black fabric in her lap he recognized as his own robes. A bundle sat at the foot of the narrow bed, which he guessed held the work clothing he wore beneath the robes. "I suppose this makes us even," he said archly, drawing the blankets up a little higher.

Carala was as red as he'd yet seen her. "Everyone's clothes stank of sulfur." She pointed to her own robes, which he saw now were a different shade of blue than the ones she had found at the Lioness. Presumably Barthim had helped her pick out a few changes of clothes for the journey. "Sulfur and other things. We thought it might be dangerous not to launder them. And yours were torn from those things. I thought I might mend them."

Ammas stared at her blankly. Her blush deepened even further but she did not drop her eyes. "No one's darned my clothing other than me in years," he said at last with a smile. "I just hope Barthim was here to guard my propriety."

"You've nothing I haven't seen before, Master Cursewright," Amazingly she laughed. He wondered if she had ever laughed at any memory connected to Tacen, however tenuously. The laughter faded after a moment. "Are you ill? No one knew what happened to you. Casimir was frantic."

He sighed and laid back, rubbing his hands over his eyes. The spirit salve had faded of its own accord, as it tended to do over time. "When I must, I can summon up certain entities for aid. But it's very draining, and I've had to do it twice in a short time. And I had to call a great many of them under the city." Ammas rose to his elbows, mindful of the blanket, and peered out the window. Beyond its unglazed arch he could make out the grove of trees they had seen upon exiting the crypt and the low, humped waves of the Chalk Hills. "How much time has passed?"