But when North came into sight, it was clear we would not be traveling.
“What happened?” Lady Aphra demanded.
Supported on either side by a villager, North was barely able to keep his own head up. Several of his cloaks had nasty gashes or were missing pieces entirely. His dark pants and shirt were spotted with dirt and blood. He had a shallow cut on his face, and his dark eyes were closed.
“North…” At my touch, he blinked.
“Hullo, Syd,” he mumbled as the men lifted him up the steps of the cabin and onto the nearest pile of bedding. His breathing was low and hard—I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.
Seeing the grimace of pain on his face, I lifted the jar of pain elixir to his mouth and helped him to drink it.
“If you have something for sleep, you’d better give him that, too,” Aphra said in a low voice. I retrieved another jar from my bag, and North drank its contents just as obediently. I lowered his head back onto the bedding.
Lady Aphra rose and signaled for the other men to follow her outside.
“What happened?” I whispered. “Are you all right?”
“He got away…,” North breathed, succumbing to the sleeping draft. “He…”
I leaned back, finally releasing the anxiety and fear I had been holding inside of me all day.
“It’s all right,” I said, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. I began unlacing one of his boots. “We’ll get him. We won’t let him stop us.”
Beneath the leather were the shreds of a sock, a sock that may or may not have been red at one point in its miserable life but was now a faint pink. A sock that was gaping open at the heel and sliding down North’s ankle, completely stretched out.
“I guess I’ll have to forget about the cloak for a while,” I said, covering my mouth and nose with my free hand. “Socks it is.” In his sleep, North seemed to snort in approval. I peeled the sock away, holding it in front of me like a rotten piece of fruit. I held my breath while I used my free hand to open the window and drop the sock outside.
The other boot was laced tighter than the first, and I had a terrible time picking apart the knot with my stubby fingernails. As a weaver, I prided myself on being able to untangle the worst of knots, but this one was almost impossible. North didn’t help me much, either; he kept shifting away from my hands. I held him firmly in place, giving him a look that I wished he had been awake to see. I was practically screaming in frustration when the worn string finally gave. I ripped the boot off his foot none too gently. Another worn-out sock came with it, leaving a large, reeking, perfectly black foot in my lap.
I’m not sure how long I knelt there. My first ridiculous thought was that the foot was just black with soot and grime, but not even the water from the room’s small basin could wash the color away. The entire foot was solid black, right up to the ankle. North was practically kicking me with it now. Somehow, even in his sleep, he knew that I had unwittingly unwrapped one of his secrets. And he was powerless to stop it.
I lifted his other foot, noticing for the first time the edge of black on the two smallest toes. I pulled away his thick gloves and threw them across the room. The little finger on his left hand was black, and the next two were tinged a marble gray. His right hand was still—mercifully—his own, with spots of mud and dirt beneath his nails.
I brought his hands to my forehead and released the breath I had been holding in a low sob.
“So now you see what’s been before you this entire time.”
Lady Aphra came to kneel beside me, setting down a bowl of clean water. She took one of North’s limp hands in her own, her thumb running over his exposed skin.
“No wonder he never took those stupid boots off,” I choked out, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s a curse,” she said. “I don’t quite understand it myself, but I do know that the man I see now bears very little resemblance to the boy I knew.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“After his father died and his mother sent him to be trained by Pascal, he was sullen, as any boy ought to be after losing someone,” Aphra said. “But after a year with Pascal, he was happy, clever, a smart aleck, and a complete monster when he wanted to be. Then the curse struck him, and he’s never been the same. His old smile and humor come in flashes, but the pain he feels and his anger toward the curse steal them away more and more as the years go by. This war has put him in an even worse place than before.”
“Is there a cure?” I asked. “Some way to ease his pain at least?”
Aphra placed North’s hand in my own. “No, Miss Mirabil, there is no cure. Wayland has spent his life looking, as his father and his grandfather did. Pascal refused to take on more apprentices in order to search for a way to help him, but there was nothing to be found.”
“And so, what? He’ll suffer from it his entire life? He’ll drink his pain away, or rely on sleeping drafts?”
Lady Aphra shook her head. “He’ll die long before then.”
I gripped North’s hand. “You’re—You can’t be serious.”
“His father died at the age of thirty-five, while serving as the Sorcerer Imperial,” Aphra said. “Pascal still hasn’t recovered from the loss of him, and the thought of losing Wayland the same way has left us all helpless.”
I looked down at North’s face, still young and handsome in sleep, free of any sign of discomfort. He looked like a different person to me, and the thought alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Lady Aphra stood, her knees cracking from the effort. She smoothed the hair back from my face.
“The curse only affects the sons in the family line, probably with the intent of ending the family line entirely,” she said. “But you’ll need to get the full story from him.”
“Is there really nothing I can do for him?” I asked. “Nothing?”
Aphra turned in the doorway. “Love him,” she said. “For someone who has grown up hating himself and fearing that there’s nothing for him in this world but pain, there is no greater gift. Do you understand?”
I nodded, but I didn’t say another word. Not while I tucked the blanket up around his chin, not while I brushed his hair from his face, not while I relit the fire. Lady Aphra’s words echoed in my mind, but I forced them out and focused on nothing but the way the shadows played across North’s face.