Snippet – Cat’s Tale
Note – this story is set midway through Cursed, just after Cat leaves Emily …
Prologue
Jacqui awoke, in pain.
Her memories were a jumbled mess. It was hard to think clearly, hard to think through the haze that had settled over her brain. Her thoughts ran in circles, howling laughter echoing through her head as she tried to focus her mind, tried to draw on her magic to re-centre her thoughts and calm herself. It was impossible, the effort bringing her nothing but another stab of pain, needles driving deep into her mind and making her whimper in agony. Her eyes were closed, her eyelids squeezed tightly shut, and yet she could see things in the corner of her eye, visions of mocking faces … no, one face. A very familiar and deeply unwelcome face.
Emily.
The recognition brought a surge of memories, and a wave of pure hatred. Emily had been a nightmare, right from the very moment they’d first met. Emily had stolen her friend, her position, her reputation … and the hell of it was, Jacqui conceded grimly, was that she’d never meant to cause her harm. Jacqui was just collateral damage, a victim who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time … repeatedly. She had grown to hate, to loathe, the wretched girl who had torn her life to shreds and yet, the one time she had tried to fight – to take advantage of Emily’s powerlessness – it had ended in pain. Jacqui had had every advantage, from enough magic to do anything she liked to living in her place of power, and it hadn’t been enough. Emily had escaped, and shot her, and …
Ice ran down Jacqui’s spine, jarring her out of her daze. She had underestimated Emily – again – and she’d underestimated the pistol she’d carried, dismissing it as a silly little toy for silly little mundanes who thought they could stand against a magician, instead of realising it was a serious threat. She should have destroyed it on the spot … no, she should have killed Emily the moment the other girl had fallen into her power. She’d wanted to rub Emily’s nose in her defeat, to drive home the simple fact that she was now completely at Jacqui’s mercy, and instead Emily had turned the tables and shot her. The healer had told her she’d been lucky the ball hadn’t struck a few centimetres to the left, where it would have punctured a lung and probably killed her. As it was, it would take weeks to heal … weeks she didn’t have. Emily might be powerless – Jacqui was sure of that, if nothing else – but she had friends. And those friends would be after her shortly. If they weren’t already.
Tears prickled at the corner of her closed eyes. She’d hated Emily, but Emily had never paid her any heed. She was nothing more than an unknown rival, a figure so pathetic she simply didn’t register …she was so insignificant, in hindsight, that Emily hadn’t bothered to take any precautions against her. It wasn’t as if she’d needed to bother. Jacqui had had every advantage – her mind insisted on repeating the same point time and time again, ramming it home – and she’d still lost. And now she was on the run. She’d fled to the healer, paid through the nose for the older man to fix her up as quickly as possible, then ran to the docks and paid – again – for a ship to carry her far from home. She had no idea where she was going, but she really didn’t care. She had been in de facto exile after last year’s disaster, and her family would disown her when they realised how many powerful figures she’d pissed off, and as long as she had her magic she could make a living somewhere – anywhere – far from the world she’d known. It was shameful, but there was no other choice. There was nothing for her back home.
The boat shifted, the sudden motion making her retch. A nasty taste billowed up in her mouth, a taste she loathed and yet knew all too well. Durian. Sudden panic shot through her as she realised she’d been drugged, the last of the memories falling into place. The captain had wined her and dined her and perhaps she’d said a little too much, before going to bed and waking up … drugged. Her eyes snapped open, revealing a tiny little cabin with a tiny little bed, barely large enough for a grown woman. The air stank of salt water, of sea life mingled with something that nagged at her mind. The only source of light was a lone porthole, covered with iron railings. She sat uptight and realised, to her horror, that her ankle was manacled to the deck.
She couldn’t help herself. She screamed.
The hatch opened, revealing the captain …Rackham, if she recalled correctly. She hadn’t thought to ask many questions, once she’d ascertained his ship was leaving within the hour. She’d just shoved money into his hand and allowed him to welcome her onto his ship and she’d missed the gleam in his eye, the way his gaze had crawled up and down her body in a decidedly sinister manner. She’d thought her magic would protect her, but … she met his eyes and saw nothing beyond cold calculation. He was handsome enough, in a dark and rakish sort of way, yet … she shivered helplessly, remembering how such men had once seemed darkly attractive, to a young woman who could protect herself. She couldn’t protect herself now. She reached for a spell, in desperation, and nothing happened. Of course not. She’d been drugged.
“Welcome, Your Ladyship,” Rackham said. “I do trust you are enjoying your accommodation?”
Jacqui tried to come up with a snappy response, but there was nothing. She had never had the sheer presence that could compensate for a lack of magic, or the connections that would bring a hundred trained combat magicians to her defence. Emily would crack a witty one-liner, she was sure, then pull the manacle from the deck and use it to beat Rackham to death. Jacqui didn’t even have the strength to swat a fly, thanks to the drugs working their way through her body, and even without them she’d never been the strongest of young women. Rackham could overwhelm her with one hand tied behind his back. She told herself to be patient, to hope he’d make a mistake and forget to keep her drugged. If she got her powers back, she could turn him into a frog and blast her way out of his ship.
Rackham’s voice dripped sarcasm. “You were very talkative, last night,” he said. “No one is going to pay a ransom for you, or am I wrong?”
“No,” Jacqui managed. How much had she drunk last night? There was a reason magicians were supposed to avoid alcohol, certainly not more than a glass or two. She’d heard enough horror stories to know the dangers, mostly involving drunken magicians casting spells they couldn’t undo when the alcohol wore off. “You won’t get anything for me.”
“Oh, yes we will,” Rackham said. He leered at her. “What do you think this ship is?”
Jacqui swallowed. She hadn’t paid much attention to that either, in her haste to get out of the city before the hammer came down. The only thing that had mattered was getting out as quickly as possible … she tried to recall what she’d seen, but there was nothing. She wouldn’t know a clipper ship from a brigantine, which probably made her unique in a city completely dependent on waterborne trade. But she hadn’t been born in Beneficence …
“We’re slavers,” Rackham said. “And you’re our prize catch.”
“But …” Jacqui started to point out that slavery was illegal in Beneficence, then caught herself. A great many things were illegal, right across the Allied Lands, but there were always people who wanted them and had the money and connections to get them. Her fingers touched her neck, half-expecting to feel a charmed collar around her throat. “You can’t …”
“You’re a graduate from Whitehall,” Rackham pointed out. “Do you know how many people would pay, for a prize like you?”
Jacqui didn’t want to think about it. The magical community disliked the idea of magically-bound slaves, but it had never bothered to do anything about it. They did nothing beyond shunning the slaveowners, angering the bastards and making them more determined to keep their slaves. She had heard that certain slaves really were valuable, and she knew her education would make her one of them, but …
“You have a choice,” Rackham said. “If you behave yourself, you’ll be sold to someone who will appreciate you. If not … you’ll be sold to the brothel. Choose wisely.”
He took a canteen from his belt and held it out to her. “Drink.”
Jacqui smelt the durian on the air and pulled back. “Drink,” Rackham repeated. His tone hardened. “Or do I have to force it down your throat?”
“No.” Jacqui forced herself to drink, trying not to throw up at the ghastly taste. Rackham watched her with beady eyes, making sure she actually drank enough of the potion to keep her powerless for a few hours more. “I … please …”
“You’re a slave, and you will be sold,” Rackham told her. He stepped back and tapped on the hatch. It opened, to reveal a young man who passed his captain a tray of food and then retreated as silently as he’d come. “Eat. Drink. If you do manage to free yourself, stay in this cabin. My crew will not treat you kindly, if they find you outside your quarters.”
He bowed, so deeply it was clear there was no sincerity in the movement, and left the cabin. The hatch closed behind him, the lock clicking into place so loudly Jacqui knew there was no point in trying to escape. She swallowed hard, feeling her stomach growl, and pulled on the chain. It was too firmly embedded in the wooden deck for her to pull free, and the manacle itself was locked around her ankle. A simple spell could have easily freed her, but she had no magic. And she would never be allowed to regain her powers, not until it was far too late. Rackham was no fool. He knew what she’d do if she had even a spark of magic left to her.
Tears prickled in her eyes as the reality of her situation sank in. She was a slave, en route to an unknown destination where she would be sold to her new master … and she was trapped. There was no way out, no clever trick she could pull … her teachers had told her she was a capable student, but she was a plodder. She had no spark of genius, nothing that would let her tear through all barriers and make a name for herself. Emily would probably find a way out, but she was no Emily …
And she was going to end her days helpless, alone, and enslaved.
Chapter One
The funny thing was, the first time I met Emily I disliked her.
I hid it well – I don’t think she ever picked up on it – but I disliked her.
You have to realise, the idea of a first-year student joining Martial Magic was just unbelievable. I don’t care who raised you, or who taught you; it should have been hard, near impossible, for a first-year student, with only a year or two of magic under her belt, to meet the basic requirements for the course. Aloha was the youngest student to qualify in decades and everyone knew she had spent the last year working her ass off, mastering spells that were normally taught to fourth-years and studying tactics that were never covered in basic Defensive Magic classes. No one, myself included, doubted that she had earned her place in the class. But Emily …?
My first assumption was that Void had spent the year since she came into her magic teaching her everything she needed to know, drilling her until she met the class requirements. It wasn’t an unfounded assumption – he had a reputation as a harsh taskmaster – and it might have been enough to get her into the class. My second was that she was deliberately concealing her own prowess, pretending to be ignorant and incapable for some reason of her own. It was rare for magicians to be modest – most of us have a high opinion of ourselves, with good reason – but it wasn’t completely unknown. And my third – which turned out to be accurate – was that someone had pulled strings to get her into the class.
I was not pleased. I was not the only one. I might have said something nasty and unforgivable, right at the start, if Jade hadn’t taken such an instant shine to her. He saw something in Emily that no one else, not even I, saw at the time, recognised that beneath the scrawny young girl with almost no grounding in magic was a genuine cleverness, mingled with vast potential and determination. She got knocked down a lot, in those early days, but she always got up again. I was starting to respect her, even to like her, before she saved our lives and then the school. And after that, no one questioned her right to be in the class.
It was funny, in hindsight, how I hadn’t realised she was growing into an attractive young woman until years later, after I’d graduated and she’d left the school. The young Emily was thin and pale, and it took years for her body to grow out a little, for her hair to shine and her face to take on a healthy pallor, but when she did I noticed her. I flirted a little and then, in the midst of our mission to rescue Princess Alassa, I kissed her. She kissed me back and we became lovers and …
And then she lost her magic.
It was not easy for her to cope, and our relationship ran into trouble. I had been attracted to the daring adventurer side of her, to the person who had put herself at risk, time and time again, doing what she thought right and proper … and that part of her was gone, crushed by the sudden loss of her powers. She had fallen from the most promising young magician of our age to a common mundane and it nearly broke her. I did what I could, but emotional support was a skill I had never bothered to master. What could I say to her, what could I promise, that would make up for what she’d lost? And then …
Jacqui kidnapped her, humiliated her, nearly killed her … and she’d escaped, and she’d gone to Caleb, and he’d brought her back to me, and … we’d broken up. I ran. I told myself I was going to kill Jacqui, and I meant it, but the truth was that I just couldn’t look at her any longer, not without recalling the young woman I’d fallen for, the young woman who had been a spark of life in an uncaring world, but who was now crushed and broken. I couldn’t bear it and I ran.
And Jacqui was going to pay.
The thought drove me onwards as I strode through Beneficence, the people spotting my dark face and darker clothes and giving me a wide berth. The air stank of dead fish and salt water … I gritted my teeth as I neared Jacqui’s home, surprisingly far from the magical quarter. She had made a fool of herself, only a few short months ago, and her family – from what I’d heard – had turned her into a remittance woman, paying her way as long as she stayed well clear of her ancestral home. I doubted they’d be inviting her home anytime soon, after they realised what she’d done. Queen Alassa of Zangaria and Jade, her husband, would be putting a bounty on her head, as would many others. The odds were good she’d be disowned, if she lived long enough for the bounty to be publicised. I had no intention of letting her live that long, after what she’d done. I didn’t care about the money. I just wanted her dead.
I slowed as the house loomed up in front of me, a simple two-story structure that – in a cramped city – spoke of money or connections or both. Jacqui had probably been given the task of representing her family in the city, a post that was largely meaningless in any real sense and generally only offered to family members who were too highly-ranked to be ignored and yet too stupid to be trusted with anything important. There were at least two or three people like that in every major family, aristocratic or magical, and they tended to cause problems if they couldn’t be given a sinecure quickly enough to quell their demands for real power. Jacqui certainly qualified, I noted as I scanned the wards surrounding her home. Emily might have lost her magic, but she had friends who would avenge her and enough money – in her own right – to make Jacqui very miserable indeed. What had Jacqui been thinking? Did she think she could hide her involvement forever?
I cast a charm around myself to conceal my presence from prying eyes, then stepped up to the wards and started to work my way through them. Jacqui had never been a particularly innovative magician and her wards were bland and boring, lacking any individuality or hidden surprises buried under well-known charms. They would have kept out any footpad, but to a trained and experienced magician like me they were about as effective as a complete lack of wards. That would have been a little more disturbing, in a way. I would have spent hours poking gingerly through the walls, wondering what I was missing. I kept alert as I reached the inner wards – a more careful magician would leave a twist here, to annoy me – but there was nothing. I was almost disappointed. Jacqui had spent six years in Whitehall for this?
The door was hanging open. I shaped a spell and held it at my fingertips as I pushed the door all the way open and peered inside. The inner chamber was a mess, pieces of debris lying on the ground and blood staining the floor. I knelt down and touched it with my fingertips, wary of any spells that might have been worked into the liquid. Blood-based magic was incredibly dangerous, and I doubted Jacqui had the nerve to take the risk, but I had been wrong before. It was still liquid, suggesting it hadn’t been that long since it had been shed. I hoped it wasn’t Emily’s blood, although it was hard to be sure. I didn’t think she’d been bleeding when Caleb brought her home.
I straightened, and walked into the next room. A body lay on the ground, a nasty wound clearly visible in their chest. Her chest. I feared it might be Jacqui for a nasty moment, before I looked closer and realised the dead woman had clearly been an older servant. Jacqui’s family might have loaned her an old retainer, with orders to keep an eye on Jacqui as much as support her, or she might have been hired in the city. Probably the latter, I suspected, judging by her hard-worn appearance. She had been old enough to be Jacqui’s mother, before she’d been shot. I didn’t think the wound had been caused by magic.
The corpse gazed at me accusingly as I looked the body up and down, then headed onwards. Jacqui had had a laboratory in the rear of her house, a chamber that looked as if it had been hit by a series of whirlwind spells. Someone had torn open the cupboards and swept bottles off the shelves, dozens of ingredients – some magic, some mundane – pooling on the floor, some already sparking with magic as they mixed together in ways that would have given my old alchemical tutor a heart attack. It was a minor miracle they hadn’t already caught fire. My eyes swept the chamber, looking for something I could use to neutralise the ingredients before the reaction billowed out of control and exploded, but saw nothing. Jacqui had either removed it or she’d never had it. I mentally bet on the latter. If she’d wanted to blow up the house to hide her tracks, she had more than enough magic to do it.
Foolish, I thought. The wards were strong, but there were limits. She could have blown herself up and taken a chunk of the city with her.
I turned and walked up a flight of stairs into a bedroom, telling myself to hurry. It was clearly Jacqui’s, judging from the sheer size; someone had been through the chamber like a tornado, opening and ransacking drawers, dumping their contents on the floor without bothering to pick up afterwards. I felt a twinge of guilt as I looked around – you did not go into a magician’s bedroom without permission – and ruthlessly suppressed it. Jacqui had scooped up a handful of clothes, from the evidence, and left the rest behind to burn in the coming fire. She’d been in a hurry, I noted. The dresses might not be the kind of thing one might want to wear on the run – I had a mental image of a woman riding a horse while wearing a ballroom gown and snickered – but they’d fetch a pretty crown at the local market, where the buyers wouldn’t ask too many questions about how she’d obtained them. Jacqui hadn’t had a contingency plan for going on the run, clearly. She’d certainly not bothered to take any basic precautions.
“And she’s not here,” I noted, as I went through the rest of the house. The kitchen had been left alone, as far as I could tell. I guessed Jacqui had stayed out of the kitchen, to the point she didn’t have the wit to wonder where her meals came from, or even to make herself a bunch of sandwiches before she fled. “Where is she?”
I closed my eyes for a long moment, thinking hard. Jacqui wasn’t the cleverest person in the world – her plot to kidnap Emily had been mind-bogglingly insane, and so poorly carried out I couldn’t help wondering if someone had sabotaged it – but she wasn’t completely stupid. She couldn’t stay in the city, which meant she had to get out … and the nearest portal was on the other side of the bridge, in Zangaria. I didn’t think she could teleport without assistance and I doubted she’d take the risk of hiring a teleporter, which meant … she’d need to take a ship if she wanted to leave in a hurry. And that meant …
The blood was lying where I’d seen it, splattering the floor. I touched it again, trying a detection spell. It didn’t work perfectly – whoever had bled had tried to cut the bloodlink, which was proof the blood wasn’t Emily’s – but it pulled me towards the docks. I dipped my handkerchief in the blood, then made my way out of the house, altering the wards to contain the explosion if – when – the reaction finally got out of control. There was no point in letting it take out the entire block.
I scowled as I made my way down to the docks, passing through crowds of sailors heading to the pubs before returning to their families, and looked around. The basin was crammed with fishing boats making their way into the harbour, as the sun started to drop beneath the horizon, and it was easy to imagine Jacqui convincing a fisherman to take her to the Zangarian coastline and drop her off somewhere out of sight. Or maybe even taking her further away. Jacqui might not be a great magician, by any reasonable standard, but she could certainly cast a compulsion spell. Or simply offer a great deal of money.
The stench of rotting fish grew stronger. I looked around, hunting for someone who might have noticed her when she passed through the docks. There was always someone who paid close attention to the hustle and bustle, either because they worked for information brokers or because they simply didn’t have anywhere else to go. I smiled grimly as I spotted an older man sitting on a stone bench, his hands resting on a cane. A former sailor, probably, watching the youngsters plying his old trade. I walked over to him, careful to let him see me coming. His face was so gnarled I wondered if he’d been cursed, but his eyes were bright. I suspected he missed very little, as he sat on the docks. I knew the type very well.
He spoke with an odd accent, one I didn’t recognise. “Yes?”
“I’m looking for a fugitive,” I said, warily. There was no way to tell which way he’d jump, if he thought I had bad intentions. Runaway young women – or men – weren’t that uncommon and not everyone thought their families had the right to drag them home. It was quite possible he would try to mislead me, or simply refuse to answer my questions. “She kidnapped a young woman and then ran from justice.”
“A lot of people come here to hide from justice,” the man said. There was a faint hint of amusement in his tone. “Which person are you looking for?”
I held out my hand, casting an illusion spell. I hadn’t known Jacqui very well – we hadn’t shared any classes, and the age gap made it impossible for us to have any relationship as long as we’d both been in the school – but I remembered her. The image was as precise as I could make it … I hoped, thinking about it, that she hadn’t tried to disguise herself. A magician wearing a glamour could walk right past the most observant old man and go unnoticed. The thought of her getting away like that was infuriating. Given time, the bloodstained handkerchief would lose its value and leave me short of any way to track her.
“I recall her,” the man said. He shot me a look that might have been intended to be a leer. It was hard to tell, on his craggy face. “She ran down the steps and took passage with Rackham.”
He snickered. “She must have been desperate. What was she running from?”
“Justice, like I said,” I snapped. The old man was perceptive enough to realise that Jacqui – and I – were both from the magical aristocracy. He might assume she was running from me … technically true, I supposed, if for quite the wrong reasons. “Who is Rackham?”
“A tramp freighter with a bad reputation,” the old man told me. “He’ll be back shortly, if he isn’t delayed by the wind. Or the rain. Or …”
I reached into my pocket and offered him a crown. “Thank you for your help,” I told him. I was fairly sure the old man had been telling the truth, if only because he had enough stubborn pride not to like. I knew the type. “I’ll wait for him to return.”
The old man nodded, making the coin vanish with practiced ease. I turned away and walked to the harbourmaster’s office, where a small bribe convinced the clerk to tell me, completely off the record, that Rackham was a smuggler … and, officially, nothing more than a tramp freighter captain picking up random cargos and putting them down again somewhere else. Good cover for a smuggler, I noted as I found lodgings in a seaside inn. The man hadn’t left any sort of schedule, nothing to say when and where he’d be heading before he made his way back to the city, and no one would think anything of it. I hated the idea of waiting for a man I knew might not be back in a hurry – or at all, if Jacqui decided to cover her tracks by killing him – but there was no other choice. Jacqui had fled so quickly I doubted she’d had time to leave a false trail. Nor would she go back to her house.
I spent the next two days asking around, trying to learn more about the mysterious Rackham. Everyone agreed he was a smuggler, but no one was quite clear on what he smuggled. I wasn’t sure what the point was, in smuggling anything into the city. Goods that would earn a smuggler a life sentence in Zangaria passed unnoticed in Beneficence, a city where few things were forbidden. There were certainly no kings passing silly laws against wearing purple. And yet, there were a few things that were, by common agreement, forbidden.
I knew what that meant. Someone would want them, just because they were forbidden.
And by the time Rackham returned to the city, I had a plan.
