Void-Born: The Knight Who Devours Curses

The Ledger

Cael walked north for two days and spoke to no one.

He kept to the river road at night and the tree line by day, sleeping in hollow logs and abandoned shepherd huts with the satchel under his head. He ate what Brannoc had packed: hard cheese, black bread, a twist of dried apple. Each bite tasted like the old knight's kitchen, and by the second evening he couldn't swallow without his throat closing.

On the second night he finally opened the bottom of the satchel.

Under the spare shirts lay a folded oilcloth. Inside it were forty silver marks, a whetstone, and a small book with a cracked leather cover. A sheet of paper was tucked into the front, covered in Brannoc's heavy, slanting hand.

Cael unfolded it by the light of a dying fire.

*Kid,*

*If you're reading this, I didn't get to say it to your face, and I'm sorry for that. I'm a coward about some things. Always was.*

*Go to Wrenhollow, three weeks north by the river road. Find a woman named Mira Castellane. She copied records for the Order for nine years before they threw her out, and she knows what the crystals were really built to do. Tell her Brannoc Hale sent you and that I kept my promise. She'll know what it means.*

*The book is blank. I bought it years ago, meant to give it to you when you made your first hundred contracts. Never found the right day. Write in it. Whatever you become, don't let it get away from you without a record.*

*You were never empty. You were the best thing that ever walked through my door.*

*Brannoc*

Cael read it three times. Then he folded it very small and put it inside his shirt, over his heart, where the second heartbeat sat.

"You stubborn old bastard," he said, and his voice broke on the last word.

The fire popped. He opened the blank book to its first page and sat with a stub of charcoal in his hand for a long time before he wrote anything.

At last, in clumsy letters, he put down:

*1. Brannoc Hale. Killed at the Rusted Hound. I was not there.*

He looked at it. Then, below it:

*2. Ashen Verdict. Death curse. Taken at the east gate.*

*3. Seeker's Light. Taken in the tunnel.*

*4. The inquisitor. Name unknown.*

He stopped. He hadn't known the inquisitor's name. But as he stared at the page, the thing in his chest stirred and offered it, as easily as a servant offering a cup.

*Marek Thane. Forty-four years old. Seven children by a wife in Calvarre.*

Cael dropped the charcoal.

"I didn't need to know that," he whispered.

The thing in him did not apologize. It simply waited, patient as stone, and after a while he picked the charcoal up again and wrote the name down, *Marek Thane,* and beneath it, in smaller letters, *seven children.*

It seemed the least he could do.

On the fourth morning he came to a crossroads where someone had nailed a notice to a post.

The paper was fresh. A crude woodcut showed a young man with a scar through one eyebrow and a sword on his back. Below it, in plain black type:

WANTED BY THE RADIANT ORDER. CAEL RHENSWORTH. HERETIC AND VOID-TAINTED. FIVE HUNDRED CROWNS ALIVE, TWO HUNDRED DEAD.

Cael touched the scar on his eyebrow. He had gotten it from a ghoul when he was seventeen. Whoever had drawn the picture had gotten it right, which meant someone in Harrowmere had sat down and described him carefully.

"Five hundred crowns," he muttered. "I was never worth five silver to the guild."

"Funny how that works," said a voice behind him.

Cael didn't turn. His hand drifted to his sword hilt. "I didn't hear you."

"I'm very good." Boots crunched on gravel, unhurried. "Garrick Voss. Bounty man, out of Calvarre. I'd shake your hand, but I think we both know how this goes."

Cael turned slowly.

The man was thirty or so, lean and sun-browned, with a leather coat studded in brass and a long-barreled crossbow slung across his back. He held a small iron rod in his left hand, carved with spirals, and his smile was almost friendly.

"A void-born," Voss said. "I've hunted a lot of things, but never one of you. My employer says your kind goes down easy if you hit them from behind and cut the heart out quick."

"Your employer sounds optimistic."

"My employer pays well." The iron rod began to glow a sickly yellow-green. "And I brought something special. Bone-rot. Takes a man's marrow in about a minute and a half. Even high-ranking mages scream."

"Please don't."

"Oh, I'm afraid I'll have to."

Cael drew his sword. "I don't want to hurt you."

"That's what makes this fun." Voss thrust the rod forward. "Marrow, wither, rot and rend—"

The curse hit Cael in the stomach.

It felt like swallowing a handful of broken glass. His bones burned. His knees buckled. For a second he thought, with perfect clarity, *this one is different, this one will actually kill me,* and he tasted copper on the back of his tongue.

Then the hollow beneath his heart opened wide and drew the curse in, and the pain simply stopped.

Cael straightened up. His bones were intact. His marrow was warm. The thing in his chest had taken the bone-rot and was already studying it, turning the shape over and over like a jeweler with a gem.

*Marrow-Wither, second-circle, reagent-fed. Efficient. Crude in the final binding.*

Voss stared at him. The yellow-green glow on the rod flickered and died.

"No," the bounty man whispered. "That's not possible. That curse has killed a baron."

"I'm sure it has." Cael's voice came out flat and strange. "Put the rod down, Garrick."

"You, you ate it—"

"Put it down. Walk away. I'll let you."

Voss's hand trembled. For a moment Cael thought he would obey. Then something hard flashed in the man's eyes, greed or terror or both, and he swung the crossbow off his back and fired point-blank.

The bolt stopped an inch from Cael's chest.

It hung in the air. Black threads of nothing curled around it, and slowly, delicately, the bolt began to fall apart, rust crawling along the shaft and the head crumbling to powder.

"I told you," Cael said softly, "to walk away."

He didn't raise his hand. He didn't speak a word. He only looked at the man, and the thing in his chest, which had never learned to be merciful, reached out with the bone-rot Voss had given him and returned it, perfectly, exactly, a hundred times stronger than the original.

Voss screamed for a minute and a half.

When it was over, the crossroads was very quiet. The bounty man lay in the dust, curled around himself, his leather coat suddenly too big for the body inside it. The iron rod had rolled into the ditch.

Cael stood over him with his sword hanging from his fingers.

"I'm sorry," he said, and found that he meant it. "I told you to go."

No one answered. A crow settled on the notice post and began picking at the corner of the paper.

That night, camped in a ruined mill with the roof half collapsed, Cael opened the ledger again.

*5. Marrow-Wither. Bone-rot curse. Taken at the crossroads.*

*6. Garrick Voss. Bounty hunter. Thirty-one. A sister in Calvarre who sells ribbons.*

He wrote the second line slowly. His handwriting was getting steadier. That frightened him more than anything.

He closed the book and sat with it in his lap, listening to the wind move through the broken rafters. The thing in his chest was quiet and content, the way a cat is quiet after a meal.

"I'm not going to become what they say I am," he told it.

The thing did not reply. But after a long moment, from somewhere very deep, he felt a slow warm pressure, almost like a hand laid on his shoulder.

*You already are,* it seemed to say. *The only choice left is what you do with it.*

Cael lay down on the dusty floor, pulled Brannoc's letter out of his shirt, and held it against his chest until the stars wheeled past the gap in the roof and the dark carried him under.