Prologue
Jack
“Don’t you just want to kiss the ground right now?” I pant at Torin. He strides up the steep, winding hill ahead of me with lungs that apparently don’t need oxygen and thighs that aren’t currently screaming at him to slow down.
“Only if you like the taste of rat piss on your lips,” he replies without missing a beat.
“You have to admit, a month at sea without docking is too long,” I continue before gesturing around. “And I doubt there are many rats around here.”
The town is too quaint for that. There’s a single pub on the corner and a coffee shop down the street, along with the usual butchers and bakery.
In other words, it’s mind-numbingly mundane.
I have no idea how Kit stomachs living here without dying of boredom.
“Doesn’t matter what the place looks like, there are always rats somewhere,” he replies.
“So wise.”
I charge on with a Torin-like grunt and elbow him, earning myself a tingling funny bone for the pleasure, since the man is built like a marble statue.
“Shit, did you get bigger?”
He ignores me, so I continue panting alongside him, flapping my shirt collar like it’s my wings to send some air circulating to my chest. “You think we’ll persuade Kit to stay on the ship for longer this time?”
The wind takes that moment to shift direction, hitting me in the face with freezing drizzle, and I groan as it hits my overheated skin.
“He’ll manage a couple of days at most,” Torin replies. “As long as it takes for him to remove the curse, and then he’ll be on his way. Remind me to head to the apothecary on the way out too, I’ll grab some potions to stop him from throwing his guts up the entire time.”
That’s Torin for you, always with a plan of how to take care of everyone. He’s like a clucking mother hen with a fearsome glare and biceps made of stone.
“I hope so. The crew are going to lose their minds if they’re stuck on the ship for much longer.”
That’s where our man Kit comes in. Not only is he an expert cursebreaker, despite being Captain Finch’s brother, he’s also somehow the most level-headed bloke in all the six kingdoms.
We could do with his calming energy on the ship right now. Something about him always calms the frenetic buzzing of our captain, and we’re hoping that’ll extend to the rest of our cursed crew.
It’s too bad Kit’s terrible on water, so much so, he probably gets motion sick in the bath. We’ve tried everything: potions, spells, even a ritual performed by the famous Ballylach witches, but nothing’s worked.
Kit can barely stomach a day at sea, and Cap’s refused to step onto land in over a decade. So the two of them are at an impasse, which sucks for two brothers as close as the two of them.
But, as per usual, I digress. My mind’s working a mile a minute as I scan the street and the handful of people making their way along with their heads ducked to avoid getting a faceful of drizzle.
“You think he’ll have any more of those little cakes he had last time?”
Torin snorts and shoots me his favourite judgemental look. “Is that the real reason you agreed to come to pick him up?”
I shrug. It’s that and the fact my legs felt more jelly than flesh over the past couple of days. And since Tor and I are the only crew able to move freely, I wasn’t going to miss my opportunity to feel solid ground beneath my feet.
“You can fly whenever you want, so why not do it more often?” Torin mutters. I hear the silent ‘so you don’t keep complaining at me’behind his words and snort a laugh.
It’s true I could switch into my raven form whenever I choose. But since I’m not exactly a seabird, I struggle with the high winds and the distance when we’re miles from land.
Not to mention that I’m stark naked whenever I shift back. And while I might not mind the attention, us folk with animal forms aren’t exactly popular in these parts.
I’m not what they call ‘beast-borne’, which is someone born with the ability to shift into an animal. Instead, I am a half-baked, low-powered sorcerer who has tried a whole bunch of magic over the years and whose only consistent form of magic is to turn myself into a bird.
But angry mobs don’t tend to listen to semantics when they see you transform from bird to person. Not when they’ve decided that beast-borne people are a scourge on society, classless and barely intelligent enough to hold down a job.
