The Cursed Queen

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I don’t know how long I sleep, but when I awake, my hair is a soft fuzz over the top of my head, already starting to grow back after being burned away by the hateful magic. Halina sits next to my bed, her face drawn, dark circles under her eyes. She’s probably been acting as translator in addition to being my attendant, and looks like she hasn’t slept for days.

  I suddenly wonder if she’s seen her little boy. If he wonders where his mother has gone. If he cries for her at night.

  “Evening, little red. Welcome back.”

  I look up at the ceiling. I’m in the tiny stone chamber where I spent most of the last month. “Am I a prisoner again?”

  She shakes her head. “But this room does not have a wooden floor or ceiling. It seemed safer. Come. Now I take you to old Nisse. He got himself a Kupari priest somehow.” She shudders. “And a ghost of an apprentice.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see.” She gives me a tight smile. “I’m glad you didn’t die.”

  “Really?”

  Her eyes narrow. “Mostly.”

  She helps me get dressed and joins me in the hallway as the guards gather around us. Sander smiles when he sees me and runs his hand over my fuzzy head. I blink at him—he doesn’t usually touch me unless we’re sparring. He leans in and whispers, “I didn’t like watching you burn to death, all right?”

  I smile. “Thank heaven for that.” Because if he and Jaspar hadn’t burst in and tried to help me, I might have been a pile of ash before the stubbly priest even reached me.

  We march up to Nisse’s council room, and this time, Thyra is present, as is Jaspar. The elder sits at the painted table. Another man, this one young and pale, with black-brown eyes and a short fuzz of hair the color of winter sunlight, haunts the corner. Kauko sees me looking at him and smiles, speaking once again in the trilling Kupari language. “That’s his apprentice,” Halina says. “His name is Sig. Apparently he’s been through a terrible ordeal and you should forgive him.”

  “For what?”

  Halina rolls her eyes. “Chances are you’re about to find out.” She mutters something under her breath in Vasterutian but clamps her mouth shut when Nisse gives her a cold glare.

  Sig is staring at me with a blank, blunt sort of look. His face looks as if it has been carved from stone, sharp cheekbones and jaw, straight nose. He would be frankly handsome, except there is a swirl of burn scars across his brow and along his cheeks. He’s clad in a tunic and breeches that don’t quite fit—on his lean frame they hang loose, clearly not his own. Sweat beads on his brow even though this room is barely warm, with only torches and the fire in the hearth to chase away the dead winter chill.

  “Hello,” I say.

  He tilts his head and speaks in Kupari, his voice shaky. Halina sighs. “He wants to know if it hurt, when you caught fire.”

  My gaze traces the line of scarring down his throat. “Looks like he would know.”

  “Please sit down, Ansa,” says Nisse, drawing my attention back to the players at the table. Thyra is on one side, opposite Jaspar, who sits next to Kauko. Nisse sits at the head.

  I sit at the opposite end of the table, not wanting to take a place next to Thyra. Jaspar’s words ring too readily in my head for that. He gives me a reassuring nod as I settle myself in the chair, and Thyra clears her throat and looks away. Halina remains standing at Nisse’s side, quietly translating what is said into Kupari for Kauko’s benefit.

  “We have had quite an adventure,” Nisse says, scratching his face. I peer at the blackened stubble on the right side of his jaw, and he chuckles. “My beard was almost a casualty.”

  “You’re lucky any part of you survived,” Thyra says. “We both were.” She gives me a hollow-eyed look. “Two of the warriors who went with us did not live through the experience.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “We rode into the city to see the coronation of the new queen—the Valtia. Or, at least, that’s what we thought we were seeing.”

  Kauko sighs and shifts uncomfortably, as if the bench is too hard for his soft bottom. Thyra turns to me. “They had us on the steps leading up to a platform. First they brought in the little princess. The Sabkella—”

  “Saadella,” says Kauko.

  “Right. She’s the heir to the Valtia’s magic,” says Thyra. “She was a tiny thing. Only four or five at the most.” She looks like she finds the whole idea disgusting. “She sat on a little throne and wore a little crown—”

  Kauko begins to babble. “He says it’s an important symbol,” Halina interprets.

  “Our only symbols of power are our broadswords,” says Jaspar.

  Kauko smiles when she translates, nodding at Jaspar as if he’s made a joke.

  “Anyway,” Thyra continues. “Then they trotted out their queen, lifted high on a throne they carried through the streets. She had on a gown that seemed to be made entirely of copper, a copper cuff—”

  “With red marks on it,” I murmur.

  “What?” asks Nisse.

  “I saw it,” I say, feeling hollow. “When she called down the storm on us.”

  Thyra’s expression has softened. “I saw it too. And she had a blood-red mouth, and a face painted white like the snow.”

  I wince at the sudden, stabbing memory of the witch queen’s cracked face. “It was paint?” I suppose that makes sense, but it was thick as a mask.

  Kauko nods and speaks to Halina, who grunts. “He says the Kupari people expect such things. It comforts them.”

  “Then they are comforted by the oddest things,” I blurt out. Was I really one of them, at one time?

  “Kauko speaks of them as if they were children,” Thyra says. “And they looked so desperate in that square.”

  Nisse chuckles. “And perhaps they are, Niece. Sheep in need of shepherds. And now that we’ve established that, let’s continue to tell Ansa what happened, maybe?”

  Thyra’s cheeks flush. “So they brought this queen out and set her on the platform, and a bunch of black-robed priests”—she waves her hand at Kauko’s round belly—“put a big crown on her head.”

  Nisse lets out a huff of amusement. “And that’s when the show began. The fire in the torches around the square rose and twisted and entwined until they caged us in.”

  I glance at the torch bracketed to the wall. “It can do that?”

  Thyra arches an eyebrow. “You’ve done something very similar, Ansa. Just not as . . . big.”

  From the corner of my eye, I see Sig tilt his head as Halina translates, and I turn to see that a cold curiosity has stripped the blankness from his stare. He whispers something, his voice just a hiss. Halina swallows. “He says he’d like to see that.”

  The flames of the torch nearest to him flare.

  “Sig,” barks Kauko.

  Sig’s mouth snaps shut and the flames bank, but I’m left staring at them, my heart pounding. “How did you escape, if the flames trapped you? Is that how you were burned?” I ask Nisse.

  “No. For a short while the Valtia seemed to be controlling it,” says Thyra. “She raised her arms and the flames went higher. But then . . .” She stares down at her hands and shakes her head.

  “The fire turned on her, Ansa,” Nisse says. “It arched over the platform and slammed down upon her, devouring her. We ran for our lives.” He touches his singed beard. “It nearly ate us, too.”

  Sig chuckles softly from his corner. Nearly everyone at the table looks at him with wary dislike as he laughs at the thought of their peril, but Kauko merely gives him a chiding glance before launching into a speech. “Kauko says he has been in the service of the magic of the Valtia for longer than he can remember,” Halina translates. “And—”

  Sig begins to giggle, his whole body shaking with mirth. A tear runs down the side of his scarred face. He mutters a question, a strange light flickering in his brown eyes. “He wants Kauko to tell us exactly how long it’s been,” Halina says with a frown.
br />   Kauko rises slowly from his chair, addressing Nisse while Halina renders his words understandable. “And now he’s saying, ‘I am afraid my apprentice has been undone by what happened.’ He wonders if you could summon your guards to bring him to his room. Preferably one made only of stone. Apparently he’s a danger to himself.”

  Kauko walks over to Sig as the torches in the room flare and takes the young man by the arms. Through gritted teeth, he mutters to his apprentice, round trilling words that sound wrong when uttered in such a low, menacing tone.

  Halina’s eyebrows shoot up, but she doesn’t translate as Kauko releases his apprentice and gives him a little shove toward the door. Sig skulks away, stopping only to give me one final, curious glance over his shoulder before disappearing into the corridor, surrounded by warriors with drawn blades.

  Thyra looks worried as she stares at the place he had been standing. “He seems troubled. And dangerous to more than just himself.”

  “Kauko here reassures me he’ll be kept under control,” Nisse says.

  Jaspar arches an eyebrow. “I guess they don’t have the same rule we do about banishing unstable warriors.”

  “You give them too much credit,” Nisse says. “But let’s allow the priest to tell us his story.” He smiles and speaks loudly. “Please. Tell us what happened after the fire destroyed your Valtia.”

  “He can hear just fine,” Halina says quietly, before translating Nisse’s words. Kauko nods and begins to speak, and Halina reveals the story:

  “Our true queen perished in the storm she created to defeat your navy. And after her death, her heir, the Saadella, was supposed to inherit her magic. But the Saadella could not wield the magic at all, and she ran from the castle before we could help extract it from her.”

  Thyra shudders. “Do I even want to know how they were going to do that?”

  “Quiet,” Nisse says. He looks rapt as Halina translates the elder’s words:

  “We searched the whole of our kingdom for the new Valtia, but the girl had gone into hiding—with a band of criminals, some of whom were outlaws who wield magic to hurt and terrorize innocent citizens. Without a queen to provide for them, the Kupari people were in a bad state. Starving. Freezing. They needed their queen. And when the elders received the message from the Krigere inquiring about the Valtia, we felt we had no choice but to assemble a ruse to protect the kingdom. We dressed a servant girl as the Valtia and used our own magic to create the illusion of her power. But someone . . .” Halina trails off as rage distorts the elder’s voice. He takes a deep breath and loosens his clenched fists. “Someone sabotaged it and caused the tragedy that nearly killed you honorable warriors. The next day, the criminals stormed the temple and took it over, chasing away or brutally killing all the loyal elders, priests, apprentices, and acolytes, some of whom were mere children. The survivors have scattered into the Loputon Forest. My apprentice was gravely injured in the attack, and I only barely escaped with him, on a boat.”

  Nisse looks delighted. “And we found them on the shore at the edge of the Kupari kingdom. The apprentice was as badly burned as you were, Ansa. We couldn’t understand what they were saying, but we could see they had magic. The apprentice was dying from his burns, and Kauko begged us to allow him to heal the boy.”

  “So we let him do it, and then began our journey back,” Thyra says. “It seemed like they might be able to help you.” She narrows her eyes. “Or kill us all.”

  Nisse laughs. “Always focused on the bad things, Niece. I feel so sad for you.”

  Jaspar gives me a meaningful look. “Obviously he helped Ansa,” he says. “Looks like she fared better than that apprentice, at least.”

  I think back to the silver swirls of scarring on Sig’s cheeks and the fire in his eyes, and can’t help but be curious. “I’m glad you brought them,” I say, smiling at Kauko. “I owe you my life.”

  He grins when Halina translates my words, and then gestures at my hair and face. “He says you have lovely copper hair and ice-blue eyes,” Halina says.

  “Er . . . thanks,” I say as Thyra stares at the round-bellied elder with distaste.

  “So!” Nisse raises his hands. “I think the big question is—where is the true queen? Halina, ask him where she might be. Could she be dead?”

  “That would be good,” says Jaspar. “Nothing stopping us from taking the kingdom, then.”

  Halina asks Kauko the question, and he smiles, his eyes glinting with intrigue as he stares at my newly sprouted hair. I was burned and bald the first time he met me, but now he seems particularly fascinated by it. Halina frowns as she translates for him. “He says the Valtia has worn many different faces throughout the years, but some things are always the same, and those are the features they look for when they find the Saadella among the little girls of the kingdom.” She points at my head. “She always has copper-colored hair and pale blue eyes.”

  Nisse’s eyebrows rise as he looks at me, and my heart pounds. You could be Saadella, Hulda said. “But surely those things aren’t that uncommon,” I say. “Hulda the Kupari slave had hair this same color.” I point at Thyra. “Thyra has eyes of the color he describes.”

  Kauko listens to Halina translate and nods before replying, all the while eyeing me as if I were a succulent roast pig.

  “He says there is one more feature that helps identify the Saadella, who becomes the Valtia when the current queen dies—when the magic leaves the dying queen and enters the body of the new one,” Halina says. “She has a—” She presses her lips together, her nostrils flaring.

  “Speak, Halina,” Nisse says, his voice a warning.

  She gives me a bright, scared look. “He—he says she always has a mark. A red mark. Sh-shaped like a flame.”

  Nisse looks puzzled, but Thyra gasps. Like Halina, she has seen my bare legs on more than one occasion. “Ansa,” Nisse says, glancing at the two women with dawning realization. “You have such a mark?”

  My entire body is shaking. “This cannot be true. It doesn’t make sense.” My skin has turned icy and my teeth chatter.

  “Show it to us,” Nisse commands, rising from his chair as I shrink into mine.

  There is no hiding this. There is no escaping it. All of them are staring. Jaspar’s green eyes are so wide and shocked that I have to look away from them. With shaking fingers, I push the edge of my boot down my calf. Kauko blinks and shuffles over, his mouth dropping open. For a long moment, he stares at it, and in that space I plead with the heavens—Let this be wrong. Let this be wrong.

  He falls to his knees before me, trilling words exploding from his fat lips. His hands clamp over my knees and he looks up at me with tears in his eyes. “Valtia,” he whispers. “Valtia.”

  “Oh, heaven,” whispers Thyra as her eyes meet mine. And in them, I see the truth.

  I was not cursed by the witch queen that day on the Torden.

  I became the witch queen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I stand up so suddenly that my chair overturns, and then I stumble over its legs and end up on the ground, frost spreading across the wooden floor. The torches in the room flare as the flames begin to grow.

  “I’m . . . I’m not . . . ,” I stammer, backing away as Kauko comes toward me. I seek Nisse’s muted green eyes, because I can’t even look at Thyra now. “Please. I’m not . . .” I’m not the enemy.

  Jaspar pulls his father away to the far side of the room, his jaw rigid as he watches the frost crawl across the planks toward them. “Ansa, stay calm. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Kauko is talking to me in that stupid, weak, trilling language that wrenches up memories faster than I can push them down. “Shut him up!” I shriek, covering my ears, but my hands are dripping fire, and I scream again as the flames lick my scalp. Tears turn to steam as they escape my eyes, then become flakes of frost that fall through the air around me.

  “He’s trying to help you,” Halina says loudly from across the room, her voice high and terrified. “
Please, little red. Let him help before you hurt yourself.”

  Kauko is the only person here who does not seem terrified. He kneels next to me, his brow furrowed with gentle concern. He looks over his shoulder and asks Halina a question. “Breathe,” she replies.

  He looks down at me again. “Breathe,” he says. “Breathe.” He presses his lips together and his nostrils flare as he draws in an exaggerated breath, then blows it out through his mouth, then gestures for me to do the same as he asks Halina for more Krigere words.

  “Not afraid,” he says as I let out a shaky, frosty breath. “Not afraid.”

  “Very afraid,” I whisper, laying my head on the floor as the storm inside me rages. This is no curse. This is who I am now, who I’ll be until I die. The knowledge is too painful to accept.

  Kauko spreads his fingers, and the frost around my body melts. When it tries to reform, it turns to water again, then steam. He points to the torches, and their flames shrink, becoming docile once again. I stare with envy and awe as he controls the things that so easily control me. “Teach you,” he says, nodding in thanks at Halina for giving him words. “Teach you. Not be afraid.”

  Halina speaks in low tones with Nisse, who is nodding. Thyra has her back against the wall and her arms folded over her chest, her mouth set with tension. She doesn’t look happy that I’m not burning to death in front of her, and it resurrects my resentment. Nisse blocks my view of her a moment later, though. “Ansa, Elder Kauko has taught many Valtias how to use the magic.”

  “I’m not the Valtia,” I plead. “I’m Krigere. I’m a warrior.”

  “Of course you are,” he says. “You are part of my tribe, no matter where you came from. But you must learn to control this gift you’ve been given, so you can use it on behalf of your people. Will you obey me in this? Will you let this priest instruct you?”

  I glance at the others, at Jaspar, who looks resolute and hopeful, at Halina, who wears her stark wariness like a veil, and at Thyra, who is biting her lip and staring at the ground. She doesn’t speak up, doesn’t insist I am hers, not Nisse’s. This must have been the final crack in the ice for her. Not only am I not her love, not her wolf, I am not even her people. Defiance rises in me, brittle but bracing. “Yes,” I say to Nisse. “I’ll do my best to learn quickly.”