The Curse of Forbande

In Sammenbrud, family was blood, and blood was everything. The blacksmith’s shop passed down through four generations. The seamstress’ daughter? She wielded her mother’s needle. Karina, though, knew too well that no bond was fashioned in kin’s forge or held together by knotted thread.

Family was racing fresh water, the safe embrace of a dark cave, the warmth of a fire. Blood was a death sentence, wind-whispered to bears and vultures. Karina spent too much of her life as prey.

She remembered enough of the life she might have led. Karina’s mother kept a garden and sold produce in town. Her father was a pastor. Her brother… she did not let herself think of Kel. 

Eight years ago, Karina believed she knew misery. It was the mundanity of tilling soil and planting seeds. It was hours sitting on a rigid oak pew. At ten years old, she packed a small satchel with sweets and the wooden doll her father carved for her, and she ran. 

She was never supposed to wander into the woods, but no one ever told her why. ‘Do as I tell you, Karina,’ they said, but her father traipsed through the trees and, when he turned eight, Kel did too. Why couldn’t she see what was beyond the boundaries of the village? It had to be better than life within them. 

That life had not prepared her for the night’s icy fingers that scraped down her flesh, or the harrowing sounds of creatures tearing each other apart. 

It took two days for Karina to return to Forbande, dirty and shivering. Mother will be upset, she thought as she approached the village. Father will be cross. The acrid tang of smoke quickly overtook her contemplation of Kel’s potential teasing. She ran, tripping over roots, and then she saw it.  

Blinding plumes of gray and black wafted from dying flames. Forbande was gone, overtaken by charred devastation. She ran through the fire’s remains, searching for any sign of survival. Her feet burned as she raced through the streets toward her family’s cottage. 

“Mother? Father? Kel?” she shouted, choking on the thick smoke as it forced itself into her lungs. There was no reply. She searched the house, then the exterior. 

Karina thought she knew suffering. Ten agonizing minutes was all it took to teach her true misery. It was the sight of her mother, carved up nearly beyond recognition. It was her father’s cold hand stretched out toward her body, too far to reach. 

She collapsed in the space between them. “Mother?” Karina’s small, quaking hand brushed a strand of hair from her mother’s face. Her usual tidy blonde locks were tangled and blood-stained. Karina touched her own red curls. How dare death make her more of her mother’s daughter?

The thought brought Karina to her feet. She had to go. Whoever killed them could still be nearby. She cast one last look at her parents, then fled into the woods. Her breath was a thundering storm, her tears a torrent of rain.

Karina ran until she slipped on a slick rock. She tried to push herself up, but her eye caught a tuft of white fur. She should not approach it, but something in her forced her feet forward. As she turned past a broad tree, she realized the white fur was part of a cloak, her little brother’s cloak. He laid there, too still, on the muddy soil. Kel was never so quiet. 

Karina dropped to her knees. “Kel?” She shook him. “Kel! Wake up!” He didn’t move, but… he had made it this far. He had to be okay. She picked him up with an unfamiliar strength and ran toward the nearest town. Father once told her that the trip between Forbande and Igen was half a day. It might as well have been minutes.

“Help! Help him, please!” She screamed at the first sight of humanity. Igenian strangers surrounded her quickly and took Kel from her shaking arms. There were so many voices, all saying things like ‘raiders’ and ‘vikings’—words she knew, but could not place in her mind’s swirling haze. 

Hours later, the town’s healer told her Kel had been dead for at least a day. She carried his lifeless body from Forbande for nothing. 

They gave her Kel’s cloak. It was too small for her, but Karina cut the white pelt from its hood and sewed it onto her own. She did the same when she grew out of that cloak, and the one after that. 

✴✴✴

Karina was only in Igen a week when she smelled smoke again. She ran from the cottage she had been sharing with a kind older woman and saw them–the vikings. A hoard of them marched through the streets with torches, setting fire to anything they couldn’t sell or steal. 

She watched, frozen, as one intruder slice off a man’s arm. Was this the fear her family felt? Was that the same blade that took her mother? 

In their effort to escape, someone bumped her so hard she nearly toppled over. It was enough to get her moving. Karina bolted, weaving her way through the shadows until she reached the forest again. She slept in a cave that night, and in the many that followed. 

In the subsequent months, three more towns faced the same fate as Forbande, and Karina had been in each of them when the raiders came. Though survivors were rare, enough lived to spread the word of an unlucky girl with blood red hair and a white pelt on her cloak. 

✴✴✴

Eighteen-year-old Karina tugged up the graying pelt on her hood and wandered back into Sammenbrud. No town let her stay long. Most of the time, she joined the forest creatures in their game of survival, but she needed a new cloak again. 

Karina walked past a series of food stalls and forced herself not to linger. How long had it been since acquiring a meal was that simple? 

“It’s her,” a little boy whispered. His mother grabbed his hand and dragged him away. 

“Don’t talk to her. She’ll curse you too.” Karina shoved her hands into the fur-lined pocket of her cloak. No one knew her name anymore. She was The Curse of Forbande. 

She entered the seamstress’ shop and ignored the eyes boring into her back. “A cloak for four pelts.” Karina threw the cleaned furs down onto the table and stared at the woman sat behind it. 

“Take it,” the woman said, shoving the garment into Karina’s arms. “Now, leave.” She did. Karina was halfway to her cave when the smell of smoke hit her. Slowly, she turned back to look at the air above Sammenbrud. Fire. Again.

Karina ran like she always had. 

Her legs gave out at the edge of a yawning lake. Fog covered it like a down blanket she slept under a lifetime ago. She slapped through its cover and pounded at the earth by the water’s edge. 

“Why? Why am I living damnation?” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed herself breathless. The water bubbled violently, then, like a cauldron above a fire, and the murky blue water turned a familiar shade of red. They were all there, pale silhouettes in the water. Her parents, Kel, the people of Forbande, of Igen, and all the others who died because of her. The next time she found water, the dead of Sammenbrud would be there, too.

“Let me go,” she cried. “Please let me go!” 

The ghost of her mother knelt before Karina’s reflection and tucked her hair behind her ear. Karina thought she knew suffering. She had let misery chase her out of Forbande, but its pursuit had not stopped. It never would.