Rusted Memory: A Wanderer's Tale Read online

  Part of him believes it, knows in his heart it is the curse of my blood in his veins, passed from father to son, and one day his own child will wander as he did, breaking the heart and spirit of an innocent woman whose only fault was falling in love with a wanderer.

  He doesn’t want to kill me. Some part of him, the part who sat beside me in the tavern sharing piss-warm ale and talking about women actually likes me.

  We are family, in his mind, but only just, and he wants to go home to the woman waiting there. He believes it is the curse of my blood, rare as it might be that curse is true, is preventing him from reaching his destination.

  For that is it in all its glory, punishment served by an angry god I disrespected when I sought to seduce his siren with my song. And that is why I could not look upon Illavia, could not go to her because the lust that drove me to seduce an otherworldly creature into my arms disrespected more than just the god who loved the beauty of the sea. In so doing, I tarnished the love I promised to Illavia.

  In all that time there were no children from my dalliances, no offspring to share in my curse, and if there were I never knew about them. Such a punishment, however impossible this situation seems, should have stopped at the father, for there should have been no sons at all to share it.

  “Is it too much to ask? I only want to go home.”

  “No,” I say calmly, “it is not too much to ask, but killing me will not end the curse, Rust.”

  “Of course you would say that,” he sneers. “You’ll probably say just about anything right now to keep this knife in my hand and out of your heart.”

  “I could care less where you put your knife,” though that is not entirely true. “But I assure you that killing me is not the answer.”

  “How do you know?”

  I laugh at him then, and at first I don’t think I mean to, but it’s so absurd I cannot stop myself. “Do you truly think a man like me, a man as cursed as I, has never tasted death?”

  He does not answer, but I can see curiosity flashing in the narrowing depths of his warm eyes.

  “Oh, I have died,” I tell him, part of me wanting to goad him into killing me just to see if this is the instance in which I’ll actually die.

  Slain by my own blood, it could have the desired outcome in which the curse is ended. Perhaps this time I won’t wake up in a rain-soaked field, throbbing skull and muscles that burn like fire beneath the skin—which still smolders with the fires of hell that spat me back into this world, might I add.

  “I have died so many times,” I go on, “by my own hand when the grief was more than I could bear, or when the pointlessness and repetition of it all made my body feel like a crust of stale bread left out for the birds to peck at. By those who thought to teach me lesson about touching virgin daughters, or in worse cases, their precious wives. Accidents, misfortunes, murders not unlike the one you yourself aren’t sure you can commit.”

  “Do you think your flowery words make me want to kill you any less?”

  “But that’s just it, Rust, you don’t want to kill me. You just want to go home.”

  The dawning of this truth is almost more than he can stand.

  “And you are right to blame me,” I say to him, my own great-grandson, who by all rights should not even exist at all. “It is my fault you cannot go home, for it is my curse to wander, to never know the comfort of home or the love of a woman I wanted so desperately to keep, but I betrayed her…”

  “And I’m to pay the price for that?” His gruff voice doesn’t rise above a bitter whisper, but it reaches my ears just fine. “My father? His father? Why?”

  “The gods are cruel.”

  “No,” he shakes his head, the desperation momentarily faltering, as though he’s had an epiphany of sorts.

  Gone now is the man who called me friend while he laughed with me in the tavern, confessing in no small way that he is no better than me, out wandering and taking other women into his bed while the one he loves is somewhere over the horizon, fat with his child, who will no doubt grow to wander just the way his father did before him.

  He is calm, resolved to this thing he feels he must do, and perhaps I should just let him. Make this minor sacrifice to appease his conscience, even though I know the curse won’t break because I cannot die until the gods are done with me, and those bastards hold grudges.

  “It is you who are cruel.”

  “Perhaps that is true.”

  “And you deserve to die.”

  Yes, I think. Yes, I do. It has been so long since this punishment began, surely I do deserve to be free, but I have a feeling Rusten’s going to be disappointed once the knife is in me and he still can’t make his way home.

  “Tell me one thing,” I proffer. “Is she beautiful?”

  My question seems to stun him, and at first he doesn’t answer.

  Above us in the trees, nightingales trill, but it takes a long time before he finds the courage to confess, “She is everything.”

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t take other women into your bed.”

  SIX

  Death, Sweet Fleeting Mistress