Page 13 of The Rat King
He ran his hands across his rat hair. “What do you want me to say, Avery? Do you think I want to force you to be my wife?”
My brow wrinkled. “I don’t know. Apparently, me and seventeen other witches were brought here because of an almost twenty-year-old blood deal that I know nothing about. Whose blood, by the way?”
“Not mine. Nighval’s and my father. And it wasn’t a blood deal exactly. The witch responsible for all this harnessed the power in his blood as he died to enact the curse. Together with the power she’d been saving and stealing, what ran in his veins was the only way she was strong enough to do what she did,” Xavier said, flinching as if the memory were too painful to speak of. “Never mind. Here we are, and we have a chance to affect the lives of a lot of people who have had a curse placed upon them by a madwoman.” He gave me what I interpreted as an earnest, pleading expression.
I bristled at him calling one of my fellow witches, who I knew spelled the curse, a madwoman. “And how do we do that?” I asked, ignoring the slight. Better to find out now so we could do it and get the curse over with. Then at least I wouldn’t be stuck married to a half-rat-half-human. Or better yet, maybe I could go home, and this could all be over. I usually wasn’t the type to give up so easily, but this castle sucked. This king sucked. And the rainy seaside air sucked, though apparently it was warmer before the curse. Screw being queen. At least back home I felt like I had some control over my life. Becoming queen, in theory, should have given me more, not less.
“Do we have a deal? Next full moon you’ll willingly become my wife?” he asked, burying his face in his hands.
“Yes,” I said, a little too eagerly. It was what I’d already planned to do, so why not let him think he was winning something, too. The next full moon was a month away. Surely by then Xavier would grow on me. Knowing that the information I’d been seeking was moments away had an immensely calming effect. Perhaps I’d been a little overzealous in my frustration ready to throw this all away. I could still be queen, but now that my thoughts were flowing more freely, it occurred to me I should have included a few more conditions. Namely, that Xavier gave me his blessing to be the type of queen I wanted to be and not the sheltered dove I was getting the impression he had hoped for. Oh well, he’d come to terms with who I was eventually.
“Okay, Avery.” He closed his eyes for a long moment before opening them to land their heavy weight upon me. “My people expect our marriage, but that isn’t what it will take to end the curse,” he said, and I leaned forward. “It’s only a step.” Xavier in rat-man form was horrible to look at, but I could hold his gaze without visibly cringing now.
My anticipation had me wringing my hands in the blankets. Were we supposed to produce an heir? A shiver raced down my spine. That was about the worst thing I could think of, but I had been willing to come here and marry the man to save my people from the warlock’s wrath. I just hadn’t understood fully what that entailed. The thought that the matron of my coven knew and had kept it from me and my aunt made bitterness take root in my mind.
And there were ways to get pregnant without having to bed the man. Surely, they had those here. If not, I could close my eyes and he could wear mitts or something. Horrible, awful, disgusting, but if that is what it took, I would do it. No, that couldn’t be it. The conflicted expression on his face had my curiosity rising. “If I’m going to marry you, I want to know all of it.”
Xavier nodded and spoke. “Our father was a latent warlock, but he didn’t know it. Have you heard the name Samara Wrede?” I shook my head, and he continued. “She is an immensely powerful witch who can cross both planes. Like my brother, one of the few who can. Samara came to ours, searching for a man just like our father, who was ignorant of the blood he carried. She seduced him, married him, and had two sons, which, as you know, is highly unusual for a witch to bear. It was the impact of my father’s blood mingling with hers. They discovered soon after his birth, their first son, Nighval, was a warlock.”
“It devastated our father when Samara confessed the secrets she’d been keeping from him. See, she’d fallen in love with our father and he her, but when he discovered the betrayal, it changed everything. He saw her as a monster for what she’d done, how she’d used and manipulated him. By then they learned she was carrying me. Eventually, after I was born, and Nighval and I were growing up in his care, he found a willing warlock, and they tried to banish her back to your plane, but it backfired, and she was cursed to stay here in ours.”
“Is she still here?” I asked, reeling. I knew a ton of witches, and I couldn’t imagine one of them doing such a thing. Coming to this plane to trick a latent warlock into having children with her. I was unfathomable.
“She is, but she hardly ever leaves the home she’s built for herself. When she learned what our father had done, she confronted him. Our father spent years convincing us of what an abomination our mother was, so we refused to see her. We were young boys then, but we chose to live with him, to love him and shun her. She’d lost everything.” Xavier paused for a moment, like he was reliving a memory. “I was fifteen when she finally snapped. She showed up to Ravsted on a dreary day and murdered our father right in front of our eyes with a bolt of lightning she tore down from the sky. It was like she’d been storing up the power for years, meditating his murder and how she’d use the power she stole from his blood for what came next. While my father’s flesh singed at our feet, she gave Nighval and me a choice. Reconcile with her or she would make us as unlovable as we believed her to be.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
Xavier chuckled. “You see us. Not only did she curse Nighval and me, but she cursed our people. See, my father had been king of this land, Ras alhague.”
“Goddess,” I said. “That’s how he was able to raise you and keep you away from her.”
“Yes, that and the Council of Warlocks all the kings keep,” he said.
“And what breaks her curse?” I asked as a sickening foreboding feeling sucked me deeper in the bed. I shook my head as my suspicions rose. “No.”
Xavier nodded. “A woman, more specifically a witch, must find it in herself to fall in love with either Nighval or I. And you’ve met Nighval. He was king for years after my father died, but none of the women the witches sent us lasted. The first one came exactly a year later, the day he turned twenty.”
Geez, that meant his father had been killed on his nineteenth birthday. “What happened to them?” I asked, the name Madeline bouncing around in my mind. I ran through the women of my coven and the name wasn’t familiar. The witches must have come from different covens from around the globe considering this was the first I’d heard of this. Somehow ours had been the last in line for the job which now fell upon my shoulders.
“A few never recovered from the initial shock of what we are now, and we still take care of them in a village not far from here. One woman ended her life, more went missing, ran away and are living somewhere in this plane still, likely aided by our mother. There was no way for them to return home. She wouldn’t allow it and no warlocks were willing to offer any of their power to send a failed curse breaker to another plane, including my brother who’s become bitter from years of rejection. It all circles back to us. If we’d only accepted her, but we were young and our father had poisoned our minds against her. Eventually, the people tired of Nighval’s failed attempts, and it became my turn. They made me king and now, Avery, you’re our last chance.”
“No way,” I stuttered. On one hand it was almost romantic, but on the other… An image of Nighval the first moment I’d seen him appeared in my mind, but I shoved it away as quickly as it’d come. Xavier was my intended, soft hands and all. “What happens if I can’t fall in love with you?”
“Then you will be queen of a permanent race of rat people, and I will rule by your side as king,” he said, eyebrows knitting together. The same gravity I imagined he felt came to rest on my shoulders as well. Perhaps we could bond over that. “Now do you see why I didn’t want to tell you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. Suddenly everything seemed so dire. As I studied Xavier trying to absorb what he’d told me, he seemed to focus on everything in the room except me. He was hiding something still. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
His beady rat-eyes narrowed in a pained way, then he shook his head burying it in his hands. His breath was muffled when he said, “Nighval made a vow to destroy the witches if the curse became permanent.”
My mouth became dry, and I swallowed. “What?”
“I’m sorry Avery. The warlocks’ dealings can be very private, but what I know is he went to your realm and threatened the covens. Whatever he did is why they started sending witches. Now you’re the last one.”
Shit, that was a lot of pressure. But that was all the more motivation to figure this out. There had to be some way to fix this without the warlocks hurting anyone I cared about or these people getting stuck this way.
It was true I was getting used to them, but to spend the rest of my life as the only human amongst a race of cursed rat beings made my stomach clench. I could totally see why seventeen women couldn’t deal and bailed. This was like some sort of parallel fun house gone wrong and the monsters around every corner were these cursed rat beings. Transformed creatures who were hard to even look at without cringing, much less having to wed one or touch their furry skin. Prickles erupted across my skin at the thought, and I had to hold back a shiver. And everything came down to me and my ability to find love with one of them. No pressure or anything. “But why am I the last chance?”
“She gave us a full nineteen years.” He rolled his eyes. “You know how the witches are with the moon. To her I supposed it meant something, or maybe she needed it for the spell to work, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s arbitrary.”
