“It will do nothing to me, as you did nothing to earn it. I spent years trying to blame you for it, and should have blamed Sorcha—or more, her grief. She harmed you—she broke our most sacred oath, and harmed you, and many before you. Innocents. I’d take it from you if I could.”
“You can’t. Do you think I haven’t tried?” He yanked on his sweater again. “Witchcraft, priests, wise women, holy men, magicks black and white. Nothing touches it. I’ve been to every corner of the world where there was so much of a whisper of a rumor the curse could be broken.”
His rambles, she realized. This was their basis. “You never said—”
“What could I say?” he countered. “This visible symbol of what runs inside me can’t be changed, it can’t be removed by any means I’ve tried. No spell, no ritual can break the curse she cast with her dying breaths. It can’t be burned off, cut off or out of me. Considered lopping my arm off, but feared it would just sear in on another part of me.”
“You— Good God, Fin.”
He hadn’t meant to say so much, but couldn’t take back the words. “Well, I was more than a bit drunk at the time, fortunately, as cursed is cursed, two-armed or one, despite what seemed desperately heroic at two and twenty, when shattered on the best part of a bottle of Jameson.”
“You won’t harm yourself,” she said, shaken to the core. “You won’t think of it.”
“No point in it, as I’ve been told time and again when all attempts failed. The curse of a dying witch—and one who’d sacrificed herself for her children, to protect them from the darkest of purposes?—it’s powerful.”
“When this is done, I would help you find a way—all of us—”
“It’s for me, if there is a way, and I won’t ever stop looking, as because of this you can’t give me tomorrows. I can’t ask for them or give them to you. We could never have children.” He nodded. “I see you know that, too. Neither of us would bring a child into the world knowing he would carry this burden.”
“No.” Despair, and brutal acceptance, twisted her heart. “And when this is done... you’ll go again.”
“When this is done, could either of us be together as we are, knowing we’d never have the life we once imagined? Knowing this”—he touched his shoulder—“stands between us even after Cabhan’s end? As long as I wear it, he doesn’t truly end, and Sorcha’s curse goes on, in me. So I’ll never stop looking for a way.”
“So her curse comes back threefold. You, me, and the life we might have had.”
“We have today. It’s more than I believed I’d have with you again.”
“I thought it would be enough.” She walked into his arms, held tight.
“We’d best not waste it.”
“No, we won’t waste it.” She lifted her face, lifted her lips to his. “If I could wish it, we’d be ordinary.”
He could smile. “You could never be ordinary.”
“Just a woman who makes soaps and candles, and has a pretty shop in the village. And you just a man who has the stables and the falconry. If I could wish it. But...”
As she did, he looked at the counter, with the spell books, the jars. “If we were ordinary, we couldn’t do what has to be done. Best try the spell or you’ll be bleeding me again saying the blood’s not fresh enough.”
Duty, she thought, and destiny. Neither could be shirked.
She got the cauldron, lit its fire low.
The long, painstaking process took precision and power—step by careful step. Branna ordered herself to put all the previous failures aside, to treat this as the first attempt. The toxic brew bubbled and smoked as both she and Fin held their hands over the cauldron to slowly, slowly stir.
She drew a breath as they approached the final step.
“Blacken, thicken under my hands,” she said.
Fin followed. “To make this poison for the damned.”
“Power of me,” they said together as with the words the brew bubbled forcibly. “Power of three, here fulfill our destiny. As we will, so mote it be.”
She felt the change, the spread of power and will, from her, from Fin. They reached for each other, linking that power and that will, letting it merge and, merging, increase.
Blocking all else, she focused only on that merging, that purpose, while her heart began a hard, quick tattoo in her breast, while the warmth and scents of her workshop faded away.
All light, bright and brilliant, rising in her, flowing from her. Blooming with what rose and flowed from him.
