A Hero's Curse Read online

  “Or missing,” I interrupt again. I’m treading on sensitive ground, bringing up the fact that king has been absent since early last year. Mom and Dad don’t talk about it. In fact, this is one subject that even the market folk tend to avoid, mostly.

  “It’s rude to interrupt, but yes, missing counts, too.” I can hear the grin back in his voice.

  I smile apologetically in his direction. “So Dad could have been king instead of Brogan last year?” I ask.

  Tig jumps into my lap. “That would have been nice,” he mutters softly. “Mmm . . . another year picking a living out of a dried up farm ooooor—” and he drags out the “or” “—infinite luxury in the palace.”

  Uncle Cagney snorts, “Brogan’s not king. He’d like to think he is, but he’s only a placeholder until the king returns. Brogan’s not even Champion—haven’t had one since your dad resigned—he’s just a district guardian. And a snotty one at that. But yes, Killian—er, your dad—would’ve filled the post if he hadn’t quit all those years ago—” Uncle Cagney hesitates and then continues, “well that’s neither here nor there,” he says briskly, although his voice tells me he thinks it’s very much somewhere.

  I bring to mind everything I can remember about Brogan. He runs the kingdom since King Mactogonii disappeared last year. Dad doesn’t like him. Dad says he threatened and intimidated to get into his position.

  Uncle Cagney continues, “It was because your dad was Champion that he was leading the scouts at Cauldron’s Crater.” I perk my ears but try not to look too interested. “Of course that ended as a mess,” Uncle Cagney sighs, unaware he has changed subjects. “We didn’t know what we were up against. The daemon, I mean. We’d heard reports of funny things happening in the swamplands of Bangular to the west of us. It’s not a part of this kingdom, but its close enough we keep an eye on goings on. Whole region being destroyed an’ some kind of portal opened from what we heard. I hate swamps, personally, though I’m not trying to say it turning into the petrified trees and ash of the Stone Forest is any better. King’s Champion is supposed to protect the realm. Look out for that kind of threat.”

  Uncle Cagney’s voice has adopted a distant quality. He sounds like his mind is a thousand miles and ten years away. “So we went. Only a squad. Found the portal. Some kind of black pool at the bottom of a great big depression. Called it ‘the Cauldron.’ Musta been quite an explosion to blast that kind of crater. We knew something evil was around because we could hear it. Laughing. Calling some of the boys by name. Then the whole area turned into some kind of illusion.

  “One minute it’s all blasted black sand and rock and mist, and the next it looked like the nicest little green hollow you’ve ever seen. Great tall grass and trees and everything, except for that black pool. That was still there. Then a black fog rolls out of the cauldron and through the valley. Couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Half the squad killed in less than a few minutes, and we can’t even see what’s hittin’ us. Got separated even. Then here comes Killian out of the darkness holding sunfire. Powerful stuff that, and just about priceless. Didn’t even know any of it still existed. Still can’t figure where he would have got it or who would have given it to him. It burned the mist away around us and showed us what was real and what wasn’t. But sunfire burns up quick when you ignite it, so we double timed out of there pretty fast. There were only five of us left. We couldn’t even go back to get the bodies. That tore your dad up pretty bad. We promised we’d come back with mages who could handle battle magic and illusion, get them then. Killian was different all the way back, though. In a hurry, like something was chasin’ us, ’cept there was nothing behind us. When your dad got back to the palace you were blind—” Uncle Cagney stops awkwardly.

  I don’t want him to stop. “I haven’t heard any of these stories,” I say quickly. “Did you go back to get the bodies? Did Dad see the daemon?”

  “We didn’t go back. Not immediately,” says Uncle Cagney.

  Because Dad resigned. I think to myself. There must have been some sort of reorganization. I hear Cagney scratch his beard and then pop something into his mouth. “He never said so to me, but I think he saw it. The daemon, that is. He never talked about it.” I hear him sawing on a plank. He stops, I can picture him examining the plank, then he says, “Did I tell you about the jewel thieves last summer?”

  I sigh. The one story he will not tell—why Dad resigned. He doesn’t wait for my reply. “Several robberies. Someone saw them in the act, and I ended up chasing four of them from the city, a petty thing that time, just some jewels from Old Plaza, I think—”

  I smile inwardly. Uncle Cagney is so different from Dad. He will talk for hours on end, while Dad can go all day without saying a word. They’re both big: Dad’s legs are as big as my waist, and Uncle Cagney is even bigger than Dad. They both have long hair, but Uncle Cagney’s is on his chin. He keeps a beard braided down his front with his head shaved, while Dad always keeps his face clean. Mom says it makes them look funny when they stand next to each other. I just like that Uncle Cagney feels so normal compared to Dad—even if he does wear hoop earrings and have what Tig describes as “ridiculous pirate tattoos running up his neck and the back of his head.” Tig loves the beard though. He likes climbing it.

  “Was Dad always quiet?” I interrupt Uncle Cagney’s story again.

  Uncle Cagney seems caught off guard. “Eh, what? You’re interrupting me again. Quiet?” Uncle Cagney puts another piece of timber in place and takes the hammer from my hands where I had been holding it for him. When he speaks it sounds like he is talking around a nail in his mouth. “No. No he wasn’t.” He pauses, and I think that’s all he’s going to say, and then he continues, this time without the nail. “He loved to fish. Dry bait, flies usually. He was real good. We used to fish the Mar at the bend just below Nob. He was an artist. And laugh! He would tell a joke and then end up laughing loudest. All the girls loved him. Good lookin’ and six foot six and big as a house but graceful like. Got married to the prettiest of them all and then chosen for King’s Champion. He had it made. He led the kingdom protectors for just about six years and then—”

  He resigned. I think again. Because I went blind. Right?

  “He doesn’t fish anymore, either,” finishes Uncle Cagney. He hammers away and does not resume his stories for nearly an hour. I can feel the sun is getting ready to set when someone comes up the dirt track my parents walked yesterday.

  Tig catches the sound first this time. He hops up on my shoulders and whispers in my ear. “Somebody coming.”

  My heart jumps in my throat. Could they have already been killed in an accident? “Somebody’s coming,” I blurt to Uncle Cagney. We are on the side of the porch, facing the fields, away from the road. He’s putting new soles on my leather shoes. They wear out quickly.

  I hear Uncle Cagney’s frame jerk around, facing the road. “Sure enough,” he murmurs. “Your dad was right, you are good.”

  I blush at the compliment because it came from Dad. I can’t always tell what he notices. I also can’t really tell Uncle Cagney it was Tig this time. Tig surreptitiously bites my ear. I swat his face.

  “Who is it?” I ask. Now I, too, can hear the shuffle in the dust. Whoever it is must still be several hundred yards away.

  “Can’t tell,” says Uncle Cagney. I can hear that he is tense, too, but he doesn’t get up or change position.

  Only a couple of minutes pass before Tig whispers in my ear again. “It’s Grel Jorgenson.”

  “It might be our neighbor, Grel Jorgenson,” I say. Even though his farm is closest to ours he has never come this far up the valley, this close to the Valley of Fire.

  I can feel Uncle Cagney look at me for a long second. “That it might be. We better see what he’s about.” He sets aside his tools and my shoes and pushes up his bulky frame.

  “Evenin’,” Grel calls.

  “Evenin’,” Uncle Cagney responds.

  “They didn’t take the bait,”
Grel says.

  Uncle Cagney slaps the log pillar that supports the roof over the porch, making the whole porch shake. Tig is startled and hisses, his claws digging into my shoulders.

  “Are they coming tonight?” Uncle Cagney asks.

  “No. You won’t be seein’ them for probably two days. Too many of ’em are herdin’ folks back down the valley. They’re waitin’ for another squad from the capitol. Arrestors, out of Plen, if I heard right. Not just the usual thugs.”

  Uncle Cagney just grunts, then asks, “Can you take the animals now?”

  “Ya,” Grel says, in the same clipped tone.

  “What’s going on?” I interject.

  Uncle Cagney moves around the porch toward the pens where our mare Sassafras and the rest of our animals are kept. “We’re leaving sooner than expected is all.”

  Chapter 3

  Uncle Cagney leaves me gaping on the porch. Tig narrates as Grel hooks Sassafras to the cart and loads our chickens, pig, and two goats. Then he creaks away down the drive, and he, too, is gone. A wisp of wind blows through the emptiness left behind, and I hear the lonely sound of weeds rolling through the field. Now that the sun has set a chill has descended. Far off in the Valley of Fire some creature barks, and the sound echoes through the dry evening air.

  “That’ll be enough for one day,” Uncle Cagney says. He is quiet all evening, ignoring all my attempts to pry information from him. I finally get frustrated and go to my room, leaving him to smoke his pipe in front of the fire.

  I get up the next morning to hear Uncle Cagney announce we will be going on his courier route for the kingdom. “Got to get things delivered, you know,” he says in an overly cheerful voice. He takes my arm and leads me to the wash basin. He must be preoccupied because he usually leaves me on my own. I wish I could tell him how much I hate being pampered. I want every bit of independence I can manage, and I feel people rob me of that precious freedom by pampering. I can’t think of a nice way to say it, though, and I want him to tell me what’s going on, so I wash my face instead of lashing out. I would have snapped at Mom, and of course Dad would never have tried to baby me.

  Uncle Cagney moves away to look into breakfast. When I come back into the kitchen I move around the table toward my place and walk into a chair that Uncle Cagney must have pulled out. It falls over, and I blush. Not because I don’t knock things over—it happens all the time—it just goes back to the pampering thing. This time though Uncle Cagney lets me put the chair right and doesn’t fuss over me at all. I appreciate that.

  I am excited to be getting out. I’ve always begged to go with Uncle Cagney on his courier routes, at least the close ones. I just wish it could be under better circumstances. Even so, I’m looking forward to places I’ve never been—feeling the urgency of business, smelling the sea, listening to people. I just hope they’re nice. Uncle Cagney packs a large leather bag he has brought and secures several great logs across the front door as we leave. We’re walking, so I don’t even ask to bring Tig. I assume bringing him along will be fine.

  “Now what have we here?” says Uncle Cagney as we start. “He can’t come all over the kingdom with us. He should have gone with Grel yesterday.”

  “He helps me to see,” I say. I think Uncle Cagney will scoff or ask what I mean.

  Instead he says, “Oh. Okay then.” Tig jumps up on my shoulders, which is not a small deal. He’s heavy, and I already have a small pack of my own.

  “Well, he’s not all bad, I guess,” says Uncle Cagney, “although, if he tries to climb the beard again . . .” he leaves the threat unfinished. Tig snorts in my ear, and I know Tig will egg him on at the first opportunity. They pretend to have issues with each other, but I know Uncle Cagney slips Tig meat scraps at every meal.

  “You big hypocrite,” I tease, and Uncle Cagney laughs.

  I like Tig on my shoulders; it’s easy for him to describe things for me without drawing attention to the fact that he is a talking cat. I also know he will only ride for a few minutes before he’ll be down and walking again. He’s too restless on a trip to stay on my shoulders for long.

  “I reckon you two are the cheeriest fellows I know,” says Uncle Cagney. “What with him feeding your eyes and you feeding his stomach.” That makes me smile, but Uncle Cagney doesn’t know the half of it. Of course, neither he nor anyone else knows Tig can speak.

  Tig saved my neck when I was eight. We were in the fields doing nothing in particular when a pack of arcus vultures came out of the Valley of Fire. Dad says they’re like coyotes with wings. They’re scavengers, but if they see something small or alone they don’t think twice about trying to kill it. A couple of things make arcus vultures dangerous besides razor sharp talons and a six-foot wingspan. They travel in packs so they can take down a horse if they want to. They carry so much disease that tangling with one almost always results in immediate infection.

  Tig screamed at me to run, but I don’t run, so I tripped and scrambled instead. There was an upside-down feed barrel near us. Tig told me where to go. While I wiggled underneath I heard Tig’s battle screech. A few seconds later Dad came pounding across the field, and I heard the dull thud of something heavy hitting feathers and the hollow screech of the vultures. It was all over in a few seconds. Usually I touch everything—to let my hands see what it looked like and how it was killed. But not the arcus vultures. Dad didn’t let me near them. Too much infection. Tig killed two full-grown arcus vultures in the time it took me to scramble under the barrel, but one caught his front leg. He was sick for two weeks, but Dad knows about healing. Things he learned when he was serving as Champion, I suppose.

  So now Tig reminds me that I owe him my life, and I remind him back that he owes me his. I found him, after all. Still, I look for every opportunity to save his hide again so that we’re not tied. It’s a terrible thing to be one to one with a snarky cat.

  The road we are traveling to the valley market of Nob isn’t as familiar as my trails to the River Mar, so I put a hand up on Uncle Cagney’s pack to guide me. It doesn’t make me less independent, I tell myself. It’s just practical. I have my stick, but I don’t like using it in town. I use little tricks, and Tig, to make people think I can see. It’s not exactly lying, but I do fool them a lot. Even if I have to sacrifice some independence in town, at least I fit in a little better. For that, it’s worth it. Uncle Cagney’s pack is large and bulky, but in between the lumps I feel something hard and thin—a sword.

  I wonder what Uncle Cagney is up to. Brogan outlawed swords months ago. Perhaps a courier is allowed to have a sword. So much has changed in the past year. No weapons in the kingdom. Taxes, mercenaries, informants, Hasarrii, camps. Despite all this there are only a few feeble whispers of resentment and mild indignation. People are hungry and scared, and Brogan promised food.

  I push those thoughts and thoughts of my parents in the camps away and try to enjoy a new sense of adventure as we travel the road toward the rest of the kingdom, with the smell of dust and a faint tinge of the sea in my nose. “Will we be near my parents?” I ask half hopefully, half afraid of being near the camps.

  “We may,” he says, and then the next couple of hours are taken up with him recounting adventures that have occurred in the timbered forests on either side of the valley, including robbers and thieves that have tried to hide among the tall trees.

  “Tell me about being a pirate,” I say as we continue past one of the farms a few miles below our own.

  “Merchant trader,” Uncle Cagney says passionately. “You stop listening so much to your dad.” He harrumphs, and we walk in silence for a few steps. “Well, since you brought it up,” he says, and I can tell he’s grinning, “there were a few things that might have looked a little shady if you didn’t know the whole story . . .”

  I try to let Uncle Cagney’s stories wash over me, but being on the road toward the market village of Nob distracts me. I’ve said before that I want to move to town, but there’s a lot I don’t say. Tig has bluntly tol
d me that in the wrong light my blue eyes can sometimes appear completely black, and it makes people uncomfortable. I can’t play the games that most kids play. Even grownups are awkward around me, and some are just plain rude.

  I want to be around other people, I tell myself. I want to go to school with the kids of Nob instead of trying to learn scraps at home. But I know I’m trying to convince myself now. You can do a lot of great things, I tell myself, balling my free hand into a fist. It’s not the doing that terrifies you, whispers a corner of my mind, it’s the people.

  It’s true. I feel a rock the size of a melon drop into my stomach. I love being active—especially if I’m trying things that Mom and Dad didn’t think I could do, especially Mom. But interacting with people and their opinions of me while not being able to see their expressions—when I talk about going to school and playing games, I leave a lot unsaid. Others usually say too much. “Magic gone bad,” some say in a whisper that they don’t think I can hear. There are even folks in Nob like Tanya Midge who equate blindness with deafness and talk as if I can’t hear at all. I listen a lot and keep my eyes a secret when I can.

  Like when I’m in the Nob’s busy and noisy market where Dad trades cabbages for leather, greens for nails, and straw stubble for coarse sacks. I sit under a table at the butcher’s stall and let the market life swirl by. Of course I hear Tanya Midge—everyone does with her high, obnoxious voice that carries gossip through the whole kingdom. She has a way of making everything she says into a question with a little laugh at the end, which makes all the horrible things she says even worse in my opinion.

  I like Regun, the butcher. His hands are huge and scarred, and he lets me stay under his table. He knows I’m blind, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He has a guttural Eastern accent so he is hard to understand. His meat is fresh, and he keeps it covered with sacks to keep flies off. He always has a bone for Tig to gnaw on. No one can see me in the shadowy corner under the butcher’s table, but I hear the town’s chief lawkeeper’s wife with her gaggle of friends. They complain that it’s harder to keep things clean lately because of water rationing. Even though the mill is half a mile away on the river, I used to hear the creak of the giant waterwheel. Now that the wheel has stopped I only hear the sound of flies circling the raw meat, horses grinding their teeth, and Linan Garrig hawking “magic” trinkets that cure bad water or an occasional sneeze.