Void-Born: The Knight Who Devours Curses

The Second Heartbeat

Cael woke to the sound of something dying.

It was a small sound, a thin scrabbling from the corner of the room, and he lay still for a moment with his eyes closed, trying to decide whether it was real. Grey light leaked through the shutters. His mouth tasted of pennies and old ale. His head throbbed in slow, sullen pulses.

The scrabbling stopped.

He opened his eyes.

A rat lay on the floorboards near the washbasin, curled on its side, its tiny paws drawn up against its chest. Its fur was dull, as though the life had been wrung out of it from the inside. It had been alive when he woke. He was certain of that. He had heard it.

"Hells," Cael whispered, and sat up too fast.

The room tilted. He gripped the edge of the cot and waited for it to settle, and while he waited, he became aware of the thing in his chest.

It was no longer sleeping.

It sat beneath his breastbone like a held breath, vast and patient and perfectly still, and when he turned his attention toward it, it turned back. There was no other way to describe it. He felt a shape inside him that was not his own: long, spiraling, intricate as a cathedral window, built of a hundred interlocking hooks. The shape had a name, though he had never learned it. The knowledge simply sat in him like a stone he'd always carried.

*Ashen Verdict,* something whispered, not in words. *Third-circle death curse. Forbidden under the Treaty of Solmere. Caster signature: female, left-handed, rage-bound, thirty-one years old, trained in the northern cloisters.*

Cael stared at the dead rat.

"No," he said aloud. "No, no, no."

He swung his legs off the cot and stood, then immediately sat back down because his knees had stopped working. His hands were trembling. He pressed them between his thighs to still them, but the tremor only climbed his wrists.

"It was a hex. It hit me, it should have killed me, and it didn't. That's all. It's a lucky survival. There's no reason the rat—"

He looked at the rat again.

Something deep and cold moved in him, like a fish turning in black water. He hadn't touched the animal. He hadn't spoken to it or struck it or even stood close. But he had looked at it, and some part of him had reached across the room as easily as a hand reaches for a cup.

"Gods," he breathed. "I did that."

The cold fish turned again, and this time it felt unmistakably pleased.

He spent the next hour trying very hard not to be afraid.

He washed his face. He changed his shirt. He sat on the floor with his back against the bed and made himself breathe slowly, the way Brannoc had taught him when he was fifteen and still having nightmares about the academy. In through the nose, out through the mouth, count to four, count to four again.

It didn't help.

Because when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the curse as a presence, folded neatly into the hollow beneath his heart like a letter in a drawer. He could feel every thread of it. He could feel how it was meant to unravel a man: first the breath, then the blood, then the mind. He could feel the precise place where the original caster had made a small, clumsy mistake in the third knot, a flaw that had cost the spell a tenth of its strength.

*I could fix that,* he thought.

He opened his eyes at once.

"No. Absolutely not. I'm not doing that."

But the thought stayed, and it was worse than the fear. Because he understood, in some quiet corner of himself, that it was true. If he reached into the curse and mended the flaw in the third knot, it would be stronger than the woman on the rooftop had ever managed. It would kill faster. It would kill cleaner.

And he would be the one casting it.

His stomach lurched. He lunged for the basin and retched into it, once, twice, until there was nothing left but a thin sour burn in his throat. Then he knelt there with his forehead against the cold lip of the bowl and said, in a small cracked voice:

"I don't want this."

The knock came a little after midday.

Cael was sitting on the bed with his sword across his knees, staring at the wall, when three slow raps sounded on the door. He knew the rhythm. He had heard it a thousand times, usually followed by *kid, are you decent.*

"It's open," he said.

Brannoc came in and shut the door behind him with unusual care. He looked as if he hadn't slept. The lines around his good eye had deepened into trenches, and his big hands, which never shook, were wrapped around the brim of his hat like a man holding on to a rail in a storm.

"You didn't come home," he said.

"No."

"I said you were to run to me."

"I know."

"I stood in the yard until dawn." The old knight's voice was very quiet. "Half the town has been talking about it since last night. The hunters who were at the gate say a curse went into you and you didn't fall. Some say you're a saint. Some say you're a devil. The inquisitors," he paused, and the word came out like a bad taste, "have already posted a notice at the cathedral asking witnesses to come forward."

Cael closed his eyes. "Of course they have."

"Kid. Look at me."

He did. Brannoc's one good eye was wet.

"Tell me what happened."

"I don't know." It was the truth, and it came out sounding like a lie. "A curse hit me. It should have killed me. It didn't. I woke up this morning and there was a rat dead in my room and I don't," his voice cracked, "I don't know how."

"Did you touch it?"

"No."

"Did you want it dead?"

"No." The word tore out of him. "I looked at it, Brannoc. That's all. I just looked."

Brannoc crossed the room in three strides and crouched in front of him, big hands closing gently around Cael's shoulders. The old knight smelled of woodsmoke and stale ale, the smell of a hundred winters in the tavern, and for one absurd second Cael wanted to lean into him and be fourteen again.

"Listen to me," Brannoc said. "Very carefully."

"I'm listening."

"What you've got inside you is old. Older than the crystals, older than the Radiant Order, older than this empire. There are people who have spent three hundred years looking for a man like you. And there are people who have spent just as long making sure none of you ever grew up." His grip tightened. "I thought your family had hidden it. I thought maybe you'd be spared."

"Hidden what?"

"I can't say it. Not here. Not now." Brannoc's jaw worked. "But I swear on my other eye, kid, you're not empty. You never were. You were full, and they didn't have a crystal big enough to measure it."

The words landed in Cael's chest like a thrown stone.

"Full," he repeated numbly.

"Full." Brannoc's thumb brushed his shoulder, once, a clumsy gesture of comfort. "Which is why you have to leave. Today. Before the inquisitors finish canvassing the hunters' quarter. Take what you can carry and go north, to the border pass, and don't stop until—"

A bell began to toll in the street below.

Not the cathedral's slow, heavy chime. This was a thin, rapid, urgent ringing, the kind the watch used for fires and riots. Under it came the sound of boots on cobblestone, many boots, marching in step.

Brannoc went rigid.

"They're early," he whispered.

Cael stood. His legs held this time. He crossed to the window and eased the shutter open a finger's width, and below, in the grey afternoon light, he saw them: a column of white-cloaked figures moving up the lane, each with a silver sunburst stitched on the breast, each carrying a sealed iron lantern that gave off no flame.

At their head walked a tall man with a shaved scalp and a face like a closed door. Cael had never seen him before. But the thing in his chest rolled over and went quiet in a way that felt like recognition, and a single word rose up in his mind, unbidden.

*Hunter.*

"Inquisitors," Brannoc breathed behind him. "The Radiant Order's own."

Cael let the shutter fall shut.

"How long?" he asked.

"A few minutes. Maybe less." Brannoc was already moving, tearing open the chest at the foot of the cot and shoving clothes into a satchel with the fierce efficiency of an old soldier. "There's a trapdoor behind the cobbler's stockroom. It opens into the drainage tunnels. Follow the left branch to the river and don't stop until you smell the water."

"What about you?"

"I'll stall them."

"Brannoc—"

"Don't." The old knight shoved the satchel into his arms. His face was grim and strangely peaceful. "Not one word, kid. I should have told you everything seven years ago. I'm going to make it right now, the only way I can."

Boots hit the stairs below.

Cael's throat closed. He couldn't speak. He could only look at the broad, familiar face, the one-eyed squint, the gap in the left side of the gray beard where a blade had once nicked him, and memorize it, because some animal part of him already knew he wouldn't see it again.

"Go," Brannoc said, and pushed him toward the window.