Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 16 of 16

Aldric left the council hall with the trial still unsettled. Corwin waited in the shadow of a garden wall, gold eyes bright. The vampire held out one pale hand. He wanted the ledger of favors Aldric had promised to find. Aldric had searched the councilor's rooms. He had found no ledger. He shook his head. Corwin's fangs showed. "Then our deal is broken," he said. "And a broken deal with me does not end quietly." Aldric raised one hand and mouthed a single word. Wait. He needed a voice to bargain, and he had none. He turned and walked into the night before Corwin could strike. Wanda caught up with him on the road. "He'll come for you," she said. "You can't talk your way out of it mute." Aldric already knew where to go. Lyra had once spoken of the astronomer who read the sky for old, buried things. If anyone could break the curse the council laid on his voice, it lived in that tower. The tower hung in the air, ringed with bands of loose color. An old telescope stuck out from its face. Aldric climbed the crooked stair. At the top stood a figure with a burning star for a head, blue and pink flame licking upward. Stellan Vega did not turn from the eyepiece. "You make no sound," they said. "Most who climb here are loud. Sit." Aldric wrote on a scrap of paper. The council cursed my voice. Can you lift it? Stellan read it in the starlight, then studied Aldric's throat the way they studied the sky. "A curse is a knot," they said. "Bound to a name they took from you. To cut it, you feed it something the sky remembers." They pointed to a shelf. On it sat a pink rabbit with feral teeth, frozen mid-grin. "Your old voice screamed into that once. A thread of it clings still." Wanda lifted the rabbit and held it to Aldric's chest. Stellan turned the telescope down toward him. Rosy light poured from the lens, the same glow as a star-crowned lamp. The light struck the rabbit. It screamed, and the scream was Aldric's own—the voice he had lost in the woods. The sound sank into his throat and burned there. Stellan stepped back. "The knot is cut. Speak." Aldric opened his mouth. A word came out, rough and cracked, but his own. "Mine," he said. He laughed, and the laugh had a voice inside it. Wanda almost smiled. "Now you can finish it." But the voice cost him. Corwin still wanted his ledger, and Aldric had none to give. He had traded his hunt for the vampire's help, and the debt stood unpaid. Now he had a voice to bargain with. He would need every word of it before Corwin found him again.