Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 10 of 44

The horned man ducked under the low opening and dragged his chains inside. Iron manacles bit his wrists. Bailey knew him by reputation. Bram Mosswick, the blacksmith Malachar had cursed with a bull's horns and irons he could never remove. He had waited a lifetime for someone to break it. Now the emperor was bound, and Bram had come to collect. "You bound Vex," Bram said. "So you can unbind me." He lifted his wrists. The chains rattled. "These don't come off. I've broken every hammer I own trying." Bailey looked at the irons. He could feel the curse in them, an old chain like his own. "I can read the words that made them," he said. "But if I use my own magic to break a curse, it might pull on my debt." He touched his chest. "A hundred years live in here. If I crack the wrong thing, they spill out and I die." Bram's face hardened. "Then it's no to me." "I didn't say no." Bailey opened the old book. He turned to Cora, who still held the two halves of her broken totem. "I can't be the one to speak it. But I can teach someone who can." Cora pulled back. "My wand's cracked. I've never broken a real curse." "You don't need power," Bailey said. "You need the right words and the right place." He remembered the floating altar he had passed once in the deep swamp. Runes ringed its face. Old magic held it in the air. "There's an altar out there. It holds a spell steady so the caster doesn't carry the weight. You speak through it. The stone takes the strain, not you." They went out together. The altar hovered over black water, roots trailing beneath it like wet rope. Moss dripped from its edges. Bailey climbed onto the flat center and pressed his hands to the carved runes. The old tongue rose in him. He read the shape of Bram's curse in the stone's light. "Kneel here," he told Bram. The blacksmith knelt and set his wrists on the altar. Bailey found the freeing line in the book, the same kind he had used on Cora's totem. He turned the page to Cora. "Read it into the stone. Not into him. The altar holds the debt." Cora's hands shook. She raised her cracked wand and read the old words slowly. The runes flared green. The altar groaned and took the weight. Bailey felt nothing pull at his own chest. The stone drank it all. The manacles snapped open. They fell into the water and sank. Bram stared at his bare wrists, then rubbed them. "Gone," he said. "After all these years." The horns stayed, but the irons were dead. Bailey climbed down, sweating. He had done it. He had broken a curse without touching his own debt. And now he knew how. The altar could hold what his body could not. Maybe, one day, it could hold a hundred years. “Thank you cousin,” Bram said to Bailey as he remembered slowly how he become king in the first place. An unfortunate death of two children. “I must return home, I have a kingdom to run after all.”