Briar pulled her blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes, but sleep eluded her. She couldn’t help thinking about the life she’d left behind—not the one in the cottage, always too idyllic to last, but the one she had escaped. Tired and drained as she was, it was difficult to keep the memories at bay.
So much pain had flowed from her brushes. So much evil coated in pretty colors. The faces of the people she had harmed swirled around her, drenched in paint and blood. She had been seven years old the first time she’d cursed another human being. She’d barely understood what she was doing, but the sound of her victim’s leg snapping and the scream that followed were all too clear. That snap had reverberated through her memories for a decade, the rhythm for all her regret-filled nightmares.
In their studio by the sea, her parents had taught her to think of the people she cursed as subjects not victims. Curse painting was a calling, a vocation. They were artists, talented at finding new and creative ways to add evil to the world. Her mother, Saoirse, was explosive, with a gift for incendiary curses and destruction. Her father Donovan’s work was subtler, emphasizing illusions and nightmares and psychological terror. The pair had no equals—something they told her regularly—and they wanted Briar to be even better than they were.
But she didn’t want to be better. She wanted to be good. Briar had asked why she couldn’t learn kinder spells as a child, when she realized the beautiful paintings her parents taught her to make, the ones that made their eyes shine with pride, always seemed to result in other people’s tears.
“I want to make something nice,” she’d said to her parents once as she ground precious lapis lazuli to make ultramarine blue in their studio. “Like the voice mages who make roses for the queen’s garden in winter.”
“Your paintings are more beautiful than the queen’s roses.” Her father had looked out from behind a large canvas, his eyes as large and owlish as her own. He was a handsome man, as handsome as her mother was beautiful. “They are far more than nice.”
“But they always do bad things,” Briar said. “They hurt people and break things.”
“They are exquisite,” her mother said. She twisted back Briar’s frizzy hair to keep it out of the paints and wrapped her favorite emerald-green scarf around her temples. “And one day, you will make true art.”
Briar blushed as her mother knotted the silk scarf with her paint-smudged hands. Her parents knew no higher compliment than to call something art, but she had seen art cause pain. She didn’t understand how it could be so good and important when it did that. She wanted to heal and build and strengthen, not destroy. But no matter how hard she studied, how hard she tried, curses were the only tools her parents gave her.
It would be a while yet before Briar understood that art wasn’t inherently good at all—and longer still before she realized her parents didn’t care about good and evil. For them, it was about the creative act, the hot rush of producing unique works more beautiful and complex than any other artists could. If they had been anything but curse painters, they might not have traveled such a dark path. For them, pain and death were byproducts of their calling not the ends.
As she witnessed more snapping bones and tear-filled eyes, Briar had tried to assert her burgeoning sense of morality, though she lacked a model for it in the closed world of their studio. By age twelve, she was going out of her way to avoid hurting people with the curses her parents assigned her. After one such incident, the two of them cornered her on their flat rooftop, where she often retreated for a view of the sea.
“Did you warn Lord Randall’s carriage driver?” her father demanded.
“That curse you had me paint on the carriage would have hurt him.” Briar avoided her father’s gaze. “I just told the driver not to sit on that tall seat for a few hours. The curse worked.”
The fine carriage had exploded in a shower of splinters and ripped silk in the king’s courtyard, her paint on the footboard, the driver nowhere in sight. Briar had enjoyed the blast all the more because no one had been hurt.
“You ruined a carefully laid plan,” her mother said.
“The driver was supposed to get hurt? I thought you just wanted to break the carriage.”
“And cause Lord Randall a minor inconvenience?” Her father raised an eyebrow. “Of course the driver was supposed to get hurt.”
“You are old enough to know better by now,” her mother said irritably.
At the time, Briar hadn’t admitted that she knew her parents had intended the driver to die when the carriage collapsed, though she didn’t understand the reason. The driver was kind, and his young wife had recently given birth to a baby boy. Briar had watched from the hayloft in the castle stables when the young couple had brought the baby to pass among their friends, all taking care to support his little pink head. Briar had wanted to hold him, too, but her fingers had been stained with paint. She couldn’t touch the innocent little thing with hands that had caused such pain.
Even as she’d begun to resist her parents’ instructions, she’d struggled to admit they were bad people. It had taken her far too long to leave them. The day she’d finally broken away, the result had been as bad as anything else they’d made her do. She could run from them, but she couldn’t outrun her destructive power.
After fleeing to the outer counties, she’d tried to
