“Father, wait! Won’t you talk to me?”
Her father’s heated voice cut through the darkness like a knife. “You forfeited your right to talk when you betrayed us.”
Another rock soared through the air. Briar rolled sideways, feeling the breath of its passing on her cheek. It crashed down, shards of rock scattering like stardust.
“I didn’t mean to.” Briar scrambled to her feet. She still couldn’t see where he was hiding. “I just wanted to leave. I didn’t know breaking the curses on the house would bring the voice mages down on us.”
“And when you attacked your mother, what excuse have you for that?”
“She would have killed me!”
“I wish she had.”
Whether her father’s words were true or not, they did their job. Briar froze, her limbs refusing to obey, and the next attack scored a direct hit. A cursed stone crashed into her, and her arm cracked at the impact.
Pain screamed through her, but that mattered little compared to what her father had said. She had spent a year hiding from her parents, but she didn’t want them dead, and until then she hadn’t thought they truly wanted her dead either—only back in their power. She remembered how they’d leapt forward to scrub her cheeks clean when she’d painted stars and moons on herself as a little girl. She’d thought they cared for her in their own way. She had underestimated the extent of their anger.
Another stone punched into Briar’s thigh, and she collapsed to the ground. That time the pain was enough to provoke her into action, to awaken her self-preservation instincts. Her paints had spilled from her satchel and scattered across the ground. She stretched for anything she could use, fingers twitching, fighting through a haze of agony.
But then despair filled her up like water in a glass.
Her family hated her. They wouldn’t forgive her betrayal. No matter how many little acts of goodness she performed, she had already hurt too many people. She would never make up for what she had done. Why was she even trying?
Vaguely, Briar recognized the effects of a psychological curse. Anxiety. Despair. She couldn’t fight it. Her father must have something of hers, something with enough resonance left to affect her. She remembered how the people of New Chester had stared into their drinks, unable to pull themselves out of their spiraling gloom.
She felt utterly isolated. She deserved it. She destroyed everything.
Tears blurred her vision and raindrops fell onto her spilled paints. The colors smeared, slipping away from her. She couldn’t fight it. The anxiety of the curse smothered her, cutting much deeper than the physical pain. Briar curled into a ball, unable to counter the terrible power of her father’s curse.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Archer raising his head. Despite his injuries, he was still trying to fight, trying to reach her. He had something in his hand. Something that shone purple inside a glass jar. He rolled it toward her across the damp, cracked earth.
Briar reached for the jar with her unbroken arm, summoning the last of her strength. It spun toward her, a slow wheel, her final hope. Her fingers closed on the jar. She had no paintbrush, no tools of the trade she had learned from her parents, from the mother she had attacked and the father who was trying to suffocate her with despair.
She cracked the jar open on the stone and dipped her fingers in the rare purple hue. She remembered the stars and moons on her cheeks, her parents ordering her never to curse her own skin. But as her father’s curse deepened her despair, she had to try something, anything, to fight him off. So she began to paint an unravelling curse on her own body. She looped the design around the eyes she shared with her father, beneath her mother’s nose, across her own sunburnt cheeks. She spread patterns down her neck, her broken arm, her chest.
The anxiety and despair receded a little, allowing the physical pain to return in earnest.
Nearly delirious with agony, Briar continued scrawling the curse onto her skin, using every drop of the precious pigment. She painted by instinct, the creative rush hot in her hands. Mages never cursed their own bodies, but what else could she do when it was her own flesh and blood causing such pain?
The painting taking shape on her skin was different from a typical unravelling curse. It was a new creation. She couldn’t see it, but she imagined it looked like waves curling across a beach, spreading sea foam, fragmenting the sand. She swirled the paint, following the contours of her skin as if it were a shoreline.
She sensed the design nearing completion. Just before she smeared the final stroke, she looked at Archer, his broken form splayed on the ground. Though it must hurt him to move, he lifted his head and held her gaze for a blazing moment. He nodded, giving her one last burst of strength.
She closed her eyes and completed the final stroke, dabbing a line of rare purple across both eyelids. The despair shattered, releasing a rush of pure liquid hope. The curse was broken.
Briar opened her eyes. A dog-sized stone was flying toward her, about to deliver her father’s final blow. She flung up her purple-coated hands to protect her face—and the stone stopped at her palms. It hovered for a moment, cursed rock brushing oil paint–slicked skin. Then it fell.
Briar drew in a shocked breath. The ambulatory curse must have broken the instant it touched her skin. The unravelling curse was still working.
Another stone flew out of the darkness. She raised her hands, and that one stopped too. Wonder filled her. She’d never seen anything like it.
Her father began to hurl stone after stone at her. As the cursed rocks reached her cursed skin, they fell to the ground, cracking open at her feet. Droplets of purple paint mixed with the sparse rain and the
