The Malediction Novels Boxed Set

DANIELLE L JENSEN

The Malediction Novels

Stolen Songbird

Hidden Huntress

Warrior Witch

The Broken Ones

I

Stolen Songbird

For MB, who started me down this path.

Chapter 1

Cécile

My voice rose an octave, resonating through the Goshawk’s Hollow marketplace, drowning out the bleating sheep and the hammer of the blacksmith down the way. Dozens of familiar faces abandoned their business, expressions uniform in their nervousness as they anticipated the note I had dreaded daily for the past month. She liked an audience for my failures.

A tremor raced through my body, my palms slicking with sweat. Madame Delacourte’s gaze burned between my shoulder blades, her low expectations only fueling my resolve. I would not break.

Resisting the urge to ball my hands into fists, I pushed my last breath into the crescendo of the piece. Almost there. Several people stepped forward, the words of encouragement on their lips drowned by the enormity of my song. This was when my voice broke. Always, always.

But not today.

The market erupted with cheers as I finished. “Well done, Cécile!” someone shouted, and I bobbed a little curtsey, my cheeks flushed with a sweet combination of embarrassment and delight. The echo of my song drifted off through fields and valleys tinted green with spring, and everyone went back to their business.

“Don’t go getting all puffed up in the head,” Madame Delacourte sniffed from behind me. “Impressing that lot of backwards country folk is no great feat.”

My back stiffened, and I turned to meet her wrinkled glare.

“You’re good,” she said, lips drawn tight to the point of invisibility. “But not as good as her.”

Her. My mother.

For most of my childhood, I knew almost nothing of her – the woman my father spoke of with such reverence that one would have thought her a queen. Knew only that my father had run off to Trianon in his youth, fallen in love, and married a young stage soprano named Genevieve. But when my grandfather died and my father inherited the farm, she’d refused to return with him.

“City girl who couldn’t stomach the thought of country living,” Gran always grumbled when asked about my mother. “Though what kind of woman abandons her husband and three children is beyond my reckoning.”

Abandoned was a strong word. She did visit. Occasionally. I thought for a long time she’d neglected us because she didn’t love us enough, but now I understood the decision my mother had made. A farmer’s wife had no respite from work – up at dawn and last to bed. Tending animals, making meals, churning butter, doing laundry, cleaning house, raising children… the list was endless. The wives in Goshawk’s Hollow all looked old before their time, with chapped hands, weathered faces, and permanent frowns, whereas my mother remained beautiful: a star of the stage. She looked more like my older sister than my mother.