Chapter 2
Briar’s heart drummed a frantic beat as she raced through Mere Woods, avoiding the village proper. The forest seemed bent on delaying her. She snagged her skirt in blackberry patches and tumbled over roots snaking across the path. By the time she reached the Brittlewyn River, sweat dampened her collar, and brambles filled her frizzy hair.
She nearly ran straight into the county sheriff and a pair of Lord Barden’s retainers on the bridge. They had stopped for a smoke and were jawing about some tavern wench or other, blocking the only route across the Brittlewyn. Briar dove behind an abandoned cart before the men looked her way. Hopefully they couldn’t hear her gasps for breath after her mad dash through the woods.
The leisurely murmur of their voices mixed with the babble of the river. Smoke curled above their heads, taunting her with its slow drift. Why weren’t those three at the summer fair? Sheriff Flynn never missed a chance to preen for a crowd, and the local baron’s retainers were almost as bad, strutting about in their ugly mustard-brown surcoats.
“Come on now,” Briar muttered, worrying at her paint-smudged shirt. “Move along.” Sweat crawled down her scalp, and her injured wrist throbbed plaintively. Every minute, she expected an uproar from the mess she’d left behind. She needed to keep moving.
When the trio finally knocked the ashes from their pipes and ambled toward the village, Briar tore across the bridge and up the road on the other side of the river. She didn’t dare look back until she reached the little cottage in the woods she’d been renting for the past few months. She paused at the garden gate to listen for signs of pursuit. The road behind her remained vacant—no angry merchants, no villagers with pitchforks. A breeze shivered through the trees and lifted thin curls of sawdust from the woodpile. She was safe for now.
Briar crossed the garden to the cottage, a snug dwelling of roughhewn logs with a thatched roof. She unlocked the door, and the familiar aromas of oil paint, wood smoke, and dry thatch welcomed her home. The tension in her body eased a little. Briar loved her cottage. It only had one room, which was sparsely furnished and rough by most standards, but it filled her with a sense of warmth and well-being, unlike the finer chambers she’d occupied growing up. The cottage was the first place where she’d felt she had a chance—not just at a good life but at being a good person. She was heartsick that she might have to abandon it.
Alert for the sound of hoofbeats, Briar hid the broken paint jars and ruined satchel under her bed and stripped off her paint-splattered shirt. Wincing at the pain in her wrist, she bundled the old shirt into the rag basket by the cottage’s only chair and pulled on a crisp white blouse, as if to prove she definitely hadn’t been wielding destructive paints that afternoon. She wrapped extra rags around her injured wrist and knotted them with her teeth.
Next, she checked her defenses: small jars of paint and finger-sized brushes carefully concealed around the cottage for emergencies—under her lumpy pillow, inside the fireplace, above the lintel. She tugged a few rungs out of the ladderback chair and hid them too. According to the Law of Wholes, the first of the three laws of curse painting, a curse applied to an object would affect that object in its entirety, regardless of whether the pieces were intact at the time of painting. Just as a curse painted on a few siding boards could destroy a whole house, a curse on a detached piece of a chair could affect the chair from a distance, providing the pieces weren’t apart long enough to be considered separate wholes. Briar switched out the rungs on her chair regularly, just in case she needed to hurl the whole thing at someone.
She peeked through the curtained window next to the door. The road to the cottage was empty, and the setting sun bathed the forest in red and gold and deep blue. Soon the shadows would blend into the full dark of night.
Could she have escaped the blame for what had happened somehow? Luck rarely worked in her favor, but the stranger in indigo hadn’t confronted her, and the authorities wouldn’t necessarily connect her to Master Winton or the collapsed house. As long as the blacksmith didn’t talk, they might not even think of her. She hadn’t destroyed anything bigger than an ale cart within the boundaries of Barden County, and she wasn’t the only curse painter powerful enough to bring down a house. Few mages of any kind could do it so efficiently, though. If it hadn’t been a complete accident, she would be proud of her work.
Briar dropped the curtain and dragged an easel and a half-finished canvas to the center of the room. She occasionally created benign paintings to give away so no one would question why she bought so much pigment and always had colorful splatters on her sleeves. Some people in Sparrow Village knew what she was by now, but she tried to make it easier for them to pretend otherwise. She wanted so badly to stay in her little cottage, to finally stop running.
Curse painting as a profession wasn’t completely illegal, but like all forms of magic, it was carefully regulated. Mages were required to study in expensive schools and register with the Hall of Cloaks in faraway High Lure. If they passed their studies, licensed art mages received tattoos to track every jinx and spell they performed. Curse painters were usually employed for demolition, mining, and warfare. Ambulatory curses and sleep curses could also bring in a respectable income, providing they weren’t used to break other laws—which were numerous. With so many restrictions, most mages—curse painters, voice mages, fortune scribes, even the rare stone crafters—preferred to work directly for the crown and the lords of the peerage.
Unlicensed mages of all types still cropped up, performing illegal magic on the cheap and risking prosecution with every job. Voice mages could avoid notice by peddling healing spells and garden-variety transformations, and no one worried too much about fortune-tellers, but curses were negative by nature. Whether reducing a house to splinters or maiming a romantic rival, it was all too easy for painters to push the boundaries of legality. Even unlicensed curse painters could avoid notice in the outer counties, though, which was why Briar had gone there to start over—and to hide.
She checked outside again. Twilight was falling fast. A large dog loped through the fading light and sniffed around her woodpile. It was as big as a wolf, with meaty shoulders and deep wrinkles enveloping a squashed-looking face. No owner joined the dog, and it soon trotted off into the distance.
Briar dropped the curtain and went to hang the kettle over the low-burning coals in her fireplace. A pot of tea would calm her nerves so she could figure out her next steps. Master Winton would give Sheriff Flynn a list of anyone who might wish him ill. She would have to warn the blacksmith in the morning. She couldn’t risk crossing the village tonight.
As she stoked the fire, she imagined the din that must surround the place by now. She should have made the curse smaller so botching it wouldn’t have done so much damage. She’d felt the magic in her fingertips, the hot urgency of creation, and she’d gotten carried away. Briar had an almost compulsive need to destroy, something that worried her even more than getting caught. She had walked away from her old life, but she carried part of it with her still.
The kettle sang, and she removed it from the flames. Before she could pour her tea, a knock sounded at the door.
Archer tapped his boot on the flagstone step outside the curse painter’s cottage. It didn’t look like the type of place to house an illegal curse business. It was little more than a hovel. The green-curtained windows on either side of the door looked like two wide eyes, and the thatched roof drooped a bit above the door, a lock of hair falling in front of a squat troll’s face.