Part I
Curses
Chapter One
Festering Secrets
With heavy eyes and weary bones, Yzabel walked past the castle walls and into the narrow streets of Terra da Moura. At her order, her Além-Tejo mastiff, Lucas, took off, checking the cobblestones ahead for any little threat.
“This is ill-advised,” Vasco said to her right, his vigilant hand on the pommel of his sheathed sword. “Going to the lower side of town with just myself and your lady’s maid. We should at least bring a full squad for your protection.”
“Senhor Davide was brave enough to reach out to Brites about the missing supplies.” Yzabel cringed as she spoke, leg muscles shuddering against the never-ending chafe of the cilice. With a deep breath, she used that pain to center herself and put one foot in front of the other. “I don’t want to scare him away with twelve armed soldiers.”
“Why would he fear them unless he wasn’t telling the truth?”
“Oh, give her a rest, will you?” On Yzabel’s left, Brites adjusted her grip on the wooden box, tins and jars of herbal remedies rattling with the motion. “I know Davide. He wouldn’t have come to me unless the situation was truly dire. Plus, you’re built like the Man in the Iron Hat. Your scowl alone is enough to detract anyone from attacking the princess.”
Yzabel snorted the giggle that sneaked past her lips while Vasco’s mouth and nose puckered with a grunt. He turned a narrowed gaze to Brites, asking, “Remind me again, how is it that the lady’s maid to an Aragonian princess seems to know everyone between Sicillia and Lishbuna?”
Brites rolled her eyes and scoffed. “If you listened to me when I talk, you’d have heard that I spent some time in this town.”
“Yes, when you were a nun. How a convent ever accepted you is beyond me—”
Yzabel gave a pointed sigh, hoping they’d take the cue, but Brites and Vasco seemed to enjoy reenacting the same argument in thousands of different ways. They’d been with her since she’d turned twelve, and after five years, she’d long realized that for some reason trading insults was how they showed friendship.
Both their voices faded to the back of her attention, and Yzabel readjusted her cowl, hiking the collar of her fur mantle to protect her nose from the crisp bite of autumn’s air. She blinked away the stars burning across her vision as her eyes darted around the town. Close to the castle, the houses were painted with whitewash, the streets neat—here and there, she could spy children running and playing while their grandmothers sowed nearby, ears alert even if their eyes weren’t. With the sun a couple of hours away from setting, most people would still be at work in the fields, but that wouldn’t explain the almost-emptiness of the plaza, or why there wasn’t a single person lingering around the tavern.
No place was so tapestry-perfect, and as sheltered as Yzabel had been, she knew better than to take appearances at their face value. No place was absent of poverty, and Terra da Moura should be no exception.
All the more reason why she had to speak to Senhor Davide. When he’d approached Brites after mass, the local prelates had looked from afar, scoffing and dismissing him as a drunk.
“Ah, the town’s drunk has come to pester the princess’s lady’s maid,” Baron de Seabra had said then, a slick smirk twisting his mouth. “Don’t believe a word he says, Your Highness. I’m sure he’s heard the tales of your good nature and is looking to exploit them.”
At the time, Yzabel had nodded and assured him she wouldn’t believe unfounded gossip. Yet, as she sat next to the king, her future husband, surrounded by nobles of good flesh wrapped in fine leather and expensive silks, the bright glint of gold and jewels peeking between luxurious furs, and rings shining like shackles on their fingers…she saw the baron’s words for what they truly were. Brushstrokes made of insults, meant to paint over the image of the man who dared to come to the Carmo Church and to a service reserved only for the nobility, meant to manipulate feelings, to incite prejudice, to foster disgust.
He’d wanted her to see the image of a mean drunk, a selfish man who put his vices before anything else.
Yzabel had seen nothing but a downtrodden man driven to despair by the same beast roaring inside her, with its manic talons clawing at her bowels, her womb, her stomach. It climbed to her head, stabbed shiny stars into her vision and agony into her temples.
Hunger.
The kind of hunger that festered not because of choice, but because of a lack of it. This man couldn’t eat because he had nothing to eat; Yzabel couldn’t eat because she was cursed. They weren’t the same, and yet, they were.
Just as she was absently crossing from the cobbled roads and into the beaten dirt of the low part of town, the afternoon sun stabbed at Yzabel’s eyes and pierced straight through her skull. With a wince, she swayed in her steps, and just when she thought her knees would give away, a heavy hand caught her arm.
“That’s it,” Vasco said while he helped her regain her balance. “We’re coming back after you eat. Shouldn’t have let you leave in the first place—”
“I’ll eat later…when I have to. I’m still fasting, remember?” They both knew she wasn’t fasting, not of her own choice. It was the convenient excuse she gave everyone when she sat at meals without touching her food, out of fear she’d turn her meal into a bouquet. That it made everyone think her extra pious was an added benefit she gladly reaped, even if it sat as well in her stomach as the flowers did.
It had been the same with her great-aunt Erzsébet of Ungarie. She, too, had possessed a touch that turned food into flowers, and died young for it. With her marriage to a foreign king, and his qualms against charity, Yzabel’s life was unfolding in the very same way as her aunt’s had; with a similar curse and engaged to a man of the same kind. At this rate, she too would die soon after her upcoming eighteenth birthday in Januarius. All without even being able to perform a miracle as Erzsébet had; Yzabel could barely eat, let alone hand out food from her own hand. Holding back the curse long enough to pass it as a divine act? Impossible.
Lucas’s barking return to Yzabel’s side brought her back to the present. A group of five children, all young but not fresh-faced, ran toward them in bare feet.
“The princess came to see us!” one of them said, with a grin that immediately faded when Vasco stepped in front of her.
“It’s all right,” Yzabel said, attempting to skirt around him.
“I hate to add wood to Vasco’s fire, but…” Brites tossed a look to the houses ahead. Squat, little more than four walls of brick held together with lime mortar, dwellings rested in clusters along the dirt road. Their backyards were shared, with a handful of chickens clucking in the communal pen.