I find Liv and Inga again, this time sitting around the fire, and spend most of the day listening to their stories of hunts they’ve been on and playing with Inga’s adorable red-haired toddler, Skai. I feel slightly better neither of them is worried that Fox’s hunting party is taking too long.
“This always happens,” Liv says. “Dagfinn always says he’ll be back by dinner and sometimes he’s gone for a week.”
“Is Dagfinn your mate?”
She laughs bitterly. “No.”
She doesn’t elaborate and I’m too afraid of upsetting her to ask.
Later in the evening, I run into Kai on the way back to my tent after dinner. He grins and gives me a friendly wave, so I change directions, jogging over to him. “Hi. How are you feeling?”
“What?” Kai’s brow furrows, twisting the scarred and burned side of his face. “Oh, this? Fine. That side was already such a mess I hardly even notice.”
“Good. I’m glad it wasn’t the other side.”
“As am I.” He looks suddenly serious and is pensive for a moment before he smiles again. “I’m glad to have run into you. I was wondering if I could ask you something.”
“Of course.”
He glances over his shoulder, frowning. “Better take a walk if you don’t mind.”
Kai leads me away from the camp until we’re standing on the empty practice field. “I was wondering what you know about curses.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Curses? What do you mean?”
“How do they work?”
“Any particular reason?”
He shrugs, but doesn’t answer, clearly waiting for me to elaborate. The cold wind picks up and I wrap my arms around myself, wishing I’d brought my cloak.
“That’s a difficult question to answer,” I say finally. “A ‘curse’ isn’t any particular type of magic, it’s just a term for how those affected feel about the magic.”
Kai’s brow furrows. “You’ve lost me.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, not sure how best to explain. “All living beings have the ability to use magic. Some are greater than others, of course. Some creatures use it without ever practicing, but most humanoid creatures like Fae, shifters and humans would have to learn how. Fae have a stronger affinity toward magic than humans do, for instance, but we still have to be taught how to use it from a relatively young age or it’s impossible to learn later in life.”
“In Ellender there’s a lot of variation on how magic is taught, especially between the kingdoms. Usually children in Vernallis are taught will-based magic, meaning they could cause a tree to split in half just by willing it to, but they likely could not turn the tree into a boulder. For that sort of magic you’d have to find someone from Solistine. And if you wanted a second tree to grow from nothing you would need someone trained in Hydratta. Does that make sense?”
“Sort of,” Kai says, running a hand through his hair. “What type of magic do they teach the Fae in Thermia?”
“I’m not sure, I haven’t met a lot of people from Thermia. I assume they’re not teaching anything now that it’s outlawed.”
Kai strokes his beard looking pensive. “So you’re saying a curse isn’t a type of magic, anything could be a curse if its effects were negative.”
“Essentially, yes. But what is all this about?”
“I just wanted to know how a curse is usually broken.”
“That depends on the spell. There was a curse on Vernallis for over a hundred years which was tied specifically to the king. He had to give up the thing he valued most in order to break it, but it turned out that the magic was vague enough that any king of Vernallis could break it, not just the specific one originally intended.”
“Right…” Kai mutters, sounding distracted. “But is there an easier way?”
“Easier, how?”
“What would happen if you killed the person who cast it?”
I raise my eyebrows. “I don’t know. It might break the curse, but it might not. I think it might depend on if the curse was specifically tied to that person.”
