A Vow So Bold and Deadly (Cursebreakers, #3)(2)

“Do you remember me saying I was cold?” I say.

He smiles and lets the wind swirl out to nothing.

In the sudden absence of his magic, my flame surges high for a moment, sending wax coursing down the sides of the candle, and I let go.

“Maybe it would be good to show Lia Mara’s people how magic can be useful,” he says.

I think of the people who’ve been healed by my magic. The way I’ve been able to keep enemies away from me, and, more slowly, away from anyone fighting alongside me. “I already have,” I say.

“I don’t mean you should simply strengthen your military force.”

I study him. “You mean I should use magic against Rhen.” I pause. “It’s exactly what he fears.”

“You told him you’re sending an army. He’ll be prepared to retaliate. He’ll be prepared to fight from a distance, the way kings do.”

But he’ll be powerless against magic.

I know he will. He already was.

“Rhen knows you,” says Iisak. “He expects violence. He expects an armed assault. He expects an efficiently brutal attack not unlike the one Karis Luran herself sent. You’ve assembled an army, and you may as well have made a vow.”

“Don’t underestimate him.” I think of the whip scars on my back. On Tycho’s back. “When he’s cornered, Rhen can be efficiently brutal himself.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” Iisak makes the flame flicker again, and it glints off his black eyes. “So can you.”





CHAPTER TWO

RHEN

Once again, it is autumn at Ironrose Castle. The first cool wind of the season drifts through my windows and I shiver. I haven’t needed a fire in the morning in months, but today there’s a bite to the air that has me wanting to call for a servant to light the hearth.

I don’t.

For a near eternity, I used to dread the beginning of the season because it signaled that the curse had begun again. I would be newly eighteen, trapped in a never-ending repetition of autumn. I would be alone with Grey, my former guard commander, trying to find a girl to help me break the curse that tormented me and all of Emberfall.

This autumn, Grey is gone.

This autumn, I have a girl to stand at my side.

This autumn, I suppose, I am nineteen for the first time.

The curse is broken.

It doesn’t feel like it.

Lilith, the enchantress who once trapped me in the curse, now traps me in another way.

Harper, the first girl to break the curse, the “Princess of Disi” who swore to help my people, is in the courtyard below my window, swinging swords with Zo, her closest friend. Zo was once her guard, too, until she helped lead Grey to escape. I won’t take away Harper’s best friend, but I can’t have a sworn guard displaying divided loyalties.

Tensions are already too high.

Harper and Zo break apart, breathing heavily, but Harper almost immediately reclaims her stance.

It makes me smile. Cerebral palsy makes swordplay challenging—some would say impossible—but Harper is more determined than anyone I know.

A light voice speaks from behind me. “Ah, Your Highness. It is so adorable how Princess Harper believes she can excel at this.”

I lose the smile, but I don’t move from the window. “Lady Lilith.”

“Forgive me for interrupting your ponderings,” she says.

I say nothing. I don’t forgive her for anything.

“I wonder how she will fare back in the streets of her Disi, if you fail to win against these invaders from Syhl Shallow.”

I freeze. She issues this threat often, that she will take Harper back to Washington, DC, where I would have no hope of reaching her. Where Harper would have nothing and no one to rely on, and no way to get back to Emberfall.

Lilith ignores my silence. “Should you not be preparing for war?”

Yes. I very likely should. Grey gave me sixty days to surrender control of Emberfall before he will help Lia Mara take it by force. He is in Syhl Shallow now, preparing to lead an army against me. I’m never sure whether his motivation is for resources—because I know the country is desperate for access to trade—or whether his motivation is to claim a throne he once said he did not want.

Either way, he will attack Emberfall. He will attack me.

“I am prepared,” I say.

“I see no armies assembling. No generals plotting in your war rooms. No—”

“Are you a military strategist now, Lilith?”

“I know what a war looks like.”

I want to beg her to leave, but it will only make her linger. When Grey was trapped here with me, I took solace in the fact that I never suffered alone.

Now I do, and it’s … agonizing.

In the courtyard below, Harper and Zo are matching blades again.

“Do not chase her blade, my lady,” I call.

They break apart, and Harper turns to look up at me in surprise. Her brown curls are twisted into an unruly braid that hangs over one shoulder, and she’s wearing leather bracers and a gilded breastplate like she was born to royalty and weaponry. A far cry from the tired, dusty girl whom Grey dragged from the streets of Washington, DC, so many months ago. Now she’s a warrior princess, complete with a long scar across one cheek and another across her waist, both courtesy of the horrible enchantress behind me.