“But?”
“Some woman one day will be desperate enough to open her legs to him. I want him to be miserable to the end. Couldn’t we curse his love life somehow?” Anwen said.
“I don’t think we have many days left, but yes it’s possible. I’m not opposed to curses as you well know.” Morwen wiggled the phantom of a missing toe and finger. “You know the blood price though don’t you? A finger or a toe, or their weight in flesh, if you’ve none left to go.”
“You’ve still got eighteen. You don’t mind do you?” Anwen gave her cutest little sister smile.
“Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t. I suspect I’ll need all mine by the time I’m finished in this world. The sacrifice has to be your own.”
Anwen bit her lip and glanced at her fingers, then her toes which she couldn’t see beneath her shoes. She took a deep breath, “I’ll do it. What do you suggest, toe or finger?”
“Toe for sure, you won’t even know it’s gone.” Morwen kept a meat cleaver in a chest at the end of her bed with all her torture and maiming equipment. Szat helpfully found it for her.
Anwen perched on the edge of the bed and took the shoe off her left foot. Her eyes were wide, and she looked like she might burst into tears. “Why did you cut off your own finger?”
“To show what I’m prepared to do if somebody trifles with me.” Morwen knelt down beside Anwen’s foot. Anwen jerked it away and tucked it safely under the bed.
“Isn’t there any other way?” Anwen pleaded.
“No.” Morwen didn’t feel at all sorry for her sister. She’d warned her about Goron, and a blood price was the just the lesson she and Goron needed.
“What about the blood, shouldn’t we put down a towel and get a bandage ready?”
“Szat will clean it up.”
“I’m not so sure anymore.” Anwen let out a piercing scream and jerked her foot, minus one toe, from under the bed. Szat scrambled out wearing a coat of dust and a bloody toe clamped between his teeth. He spat it on the floor while Anwen continued to scream.
“The little toe would have been preferable.” Morwen picked up the severed digit and placed it in a stone bowl. Anwen wrapped her foot in Morwen’s blanket and rocked to and fro cradling the injury. Her skin was ashen, and her eyes were bright with tears of pain. Szat was busy taking the room apart looking for food and failed to notice the baleful looks she shot at him.
“What sort of curse do you have in mind?” Morwen sprinkled some pungent herbs on the wound and bound it with a clean bandage. Szat, having ransacked the room and not found a morsel of food, collapsed on the floor in a sulk.
“Every sexual relationship he enters into turns out to be a disaster.”
“So, just like your one?”
“Shut up.”
“Szat, will you do the honours?” The demon’s right hand blazed molten red and, as casually as if he were flicking a spit ball, he shot a mini fireball directly into the stone bowl, igniting its contents.
“Kaexo kl’t grotl aerb aerb larau dv v’tl. Maexo Gauar ag Saerkvaab’t raqo r’go ae kadobv ag ouuaut aerb vae’r.” Morwen spat the words out as if they were poison on her tongue. A shadow, its shape vaguely humanoid, appeared from the opposite wall. Anwen screamed in fright. It floated across the room, halted momentarily by the bowl to scoop up the burning toe, and disappeared.
Morwen, who’d grown visibly paler, steadied herself with a hand on the stone wall. “It’s done, from now on he’s in for a miserable time in the love department.”
Goron swam through the dull ache of sleep to wakefulness. Pain waited for him. He groaned and pressed the palms of his hands against his throbbing temples, squeezing so hard the skull of a lesser man would have popped like a ripe tomato. He rolled his tongue around and sucked at the inside of his cheeks trying to coax out some moisture, but there was none to be found. A tankard of stale ale stood nearby, and Goron drained it in a few gulps.
A high arched window showcased a grey dawn—weren’t they all now. It was as if the weather mirrored how the castle and inhabitants felt.
His stomach refused the ale. Goron managed to turn his head in time and paint the stone floor with his puke. His stomach now settled, he sat up and worked at the pain in his temples and above his eyes with strong fingers. It helped. The physical misery reduced, his mind searched for the cause of the uneasiness he felt.
Some of his guards had died, a common occurrence during a night of heavy drinking. No, that wasn’t it. Through the fogginess of his brain, a hazy memory of Anwen’s face emerged, beautiful and enraged.
She’d caught him last night with Jasin. By Murdus’s grey beard! How could he be so stupid? He’d thrown the most beautiful woman in the castle away for a quickie with one of his guards.
Maybe he was being hasty. Anwen wasn’t one to hold a grudge, and he’d been caught only the once. He was sure she’d take him back if he promised to change his ways, not drink, and stay true. Cheered up, he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. That Jasin though, she sure knew how to please a man.
He’d almost finished with his personal business when the door creaked open letting in a line of torchlight from the corridor that illuminated his erection like a beacon. Goron covered himself with a blanket and pretended to be asleep while he peeked through half closed lids to see who the visitor was.
The dark silhouette outlined in the doorway was much too shapely in all the right places to be Anwen or Jasin. The
