Time and death you’ll surely resist.
The hunger of a hundred plagues your soul,
Blood you will crave, its taste most foul.
Every thirty-three years, the village you’ll tread,
Among the living, still undead.
While his bloodline survives, so will your curse,
Ravens will watch, shadows will lurk," he recited.
A sudden wind picked up, swirling the loose snow and sending it like needles into their skin.
“Why thirty-three years?” Corabeth asked, brows furrowed, shielding herself against the snow pelting her.
“They say it takes a year to get over someone’s death,” Rooke said, his tone somewhat somber. “A year for every soul my father allowed to die of hunger.”
Corabeth turned the words of the curse over and over in her mind like they were a riddle waiting to be solved.
“How do you know all this?” she asked. Rooke’s knowledge of the curse seemed to go deep, as if he had examined it from all angles. Even those he shouldn’t have been privy to.
“I heard it from the witch herself,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching up in a somewhat wistful smile. “Many years passed before she came to see her handiwork. We went on a nice walk and she told me everything.”
Corabeth’s brows shot up as she considered his light tone. There was no animosity, no anger when Rooke spoke of the witch. “You let her live?”
“I did,” he said. “She was already dying. I could smell the sickness in her blood. Besides, she was nothing but a tool.”
Corabeth shuddered at it all, the rhymes of the curse still echoing in her mind. “While his bloodline survives…” she murmured. “Do you know whose bloodline the curse is talking about?”
The wind died down again, but Rooke had already steered them towards the house.
“The Fabels,” Rooke said. Corabeth nearly stumbled as though the words had fallen at her feet and tripped her.
“Are you alright?” Rooke asked, side-eyeing Corabeth as he took her cloak and shook the snow off it, letting it fall to the floor in the entranceway.
“Yes,” Corabeth did her best to assure him. The truth was, hearing their name from Rooke had stunned her so badly, her thoughts were in a wild spiral. Over the past weeks, she had managed to pack the unpleasantness of her past away. Now, it threatened to spill over once more.
Rooke’s expression remained troubled until it cleared suddenly. “Of course,” he said, “You must know them.”
“I know them as my tormentors,” was all Corabeth said before she excused herself, seeking the solitude of her room.
She left behind Rooke and the possibility of his prying questions, though he had never been intrusive. If he had asked, perhaps she would have been forced to face the fact that imagining all of the Fabels dead wasn’t as horrifying to her as it should have been. Perhaps she would have had to admit that she had already imagined it.
It was like holding two puzzle pieces, their jagged edges aligning in an unsettling manner. She knew that once she fit them together, the picture they revealed would be too gruesome to bear. Yet the true terror lay in the possibility that she might like it too much.
Sixteen
Rooke
Rooke felt it again. The involuntary twitching in his muscles. The inability to focus. The painful twisting in his stomach.
Each day, he spent hours tracking animals in the forest. Every now and then, he would come across hoof prints—a sign that a deer had crossed through, but they never ventured deep into his woods anymore. His woods were all but dead.
The few mouthfuls of blood he got from a hare did barely anything at all. But it did appease the pain momentarily and buy him some precious time—time he could spend in Corabeth’s company without the dread he might hurt her.
A quiet crunching pricked Rooke’s ears, and his head whipped to the right. Through the mist, he could see a scrawny deer, barely grown, hungrily chewing on the bark of a tree.
