Crimson Bound (17 page)

Her fingernails dug into her palms.
I won’t
, she thought.
I won’t.

She was at the door now. She leaned her head against the carved wood and sighed.

Somebody drew a breath from the other side of the door.

She didn’t think. She flung the door open—felt it bang against the person—and
lunged out into the hallway, drawing her sword. But the door blocked her view for a crucial moment, so she only caught a glimpse of somebody tall—probably a man—dodging into a side passage.

She nearly ran after him, but she couldn’t very well leave Armand behind.

Armand. She whirled around, half expecting to see him surrounded by armed men, but he was still sitting at the table, looking up at her curiously.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Somebody standing outside the door to listen.” Rachelle grabbed the lamp off the table and starting inspecting the library. Her back prickled, but nobody was hiding in the shadows among the shelves.

“Oh.” Armand shrugged and looked back at the book. “Probably an assassin, or somebody who wanted to kiss my feet.” He sounded bored.

Rachelle reached the opposite side of the library and swept open the door on that end. Nobody there either.

“Have there been a lot of them?” she asked.

He didn’t look up. “You saw the crowd at my audience.”

“Assassins, I mean.”

“Five attempts. No, six, counting yesterday. My cousin Vincent
really
doesn’t like me.”

“How do you know he’s the one?” asked Rachelle. “Maybe it’s Raoul Courtavel.”

Armand’s mouth tightened; when he spoke again, his voice was sharp and precise. “You know quite well it can’t be Raoul.”

“Why not?” Rachelle asked curiously. She hadn’t expected him to be so offended.

He stared at her for a moment. “Raoul is the only child of the royal house who’s never hated me,” he said. “Before or after. He would never do that to me. And I would never do anything to hurt him. That’s why Vincent wants me dead. He knows that if the King died without naming an heir, I’d throw my support behind Raoul. And unlike the King, Vincent is too shortsighted to realize that killing me would cause riots.”

“You don’t seem terribly worried,” said Rachelle.

Again he paused, looking at her as if he were trying to puzzle out a riddle. Then he smiled and said, “Well, I’m sure you won’t let anyone kill me till you have a chance to do it first.”

She smacked his head lightly. “Just keep reading.”

So he read, and she watched him. She had wondered how he could possibly turn the pages with blunt metal fingers that didn’t move. Sometimes the pages would start to drift
up on their own, and he would simply slide his fingers under to turn them. But mostly he used the little finger on his right hand—because, while the other fingers just had half-circles indented in them to look like fingernails, the little finger actually had a thin metal plate that stuck out a fraction beyond the fingertip. It was just enough for him to slide it under the corner of a page and lift it. Sometimes he caught the next five pages by accident. Then he wrinkled his nose and tried again.

He was on his third try with a page when he suddenly stopped and looked at her. “What?”

Rachelle felt vaguely embarrassed, but there wasn’t much for her to do besides stare at him.

“Why’s it on your little finger?” she asked.

“Because it was cheapest when I bribed the jeweler,” Armand said. He tried again, and this time caught the page he wanted. “And least likely to be noticed,” he went on, sounding faintly amused as he turned the page. “My father doesn’t like me having useful things.”

There was a butcher in Rocamadour who had lost his right hand—while chopping roasts for a duke, he liked to tell his customers—and had replaced it with a hook. Rachelle had seen him use the hook to tie up packages with string. She thought of that as she watched Armand laboriously turn the next page. Somehow she’d always imagined that he had demanded the silver hands out of vanity.

She had imagined a lot of things about Armand, and none of them seemed to be true now. And none of the things she had actually learned made sense.

He could see the Great Forest all the time. She had never heard of anyone who could do that, bloodbound or woodwife. To have that power, he must have been touched by the Forest somehow.

But if he really had met a forestborn, if he really had been marked, then how did he survive?

It took him over an hour, but he did find an answer. The bells had just tolled four when Armand looked up and said, “The wine cellars.”

“What?” Rachelle turned; she had been at the other side of the room, slowly weaving through a sword form.

“Listen. ‘It baffles me not that my cousin would risk her reputation in a rendezvous, but that she would attempt it in the wine cellars; for I have heard it said that the ghost of Prince Hugo still walks those corridors, searching for the way home.’”

Rachelle snorted. “Clearly the court hasn’t changed in a hundred years. But just because somebody once claimed to see his ghost there, doesn’t mean it’s where he disappeared.”

“It’s a place to start, anyway,” said Armand. “And it makes sense; those cellars are one of the oldest parts of the Château.”

He was smiling; he seemed genuinely excited about hunting for the door. Without meaning to, Rachelle found the edge of her own mouth turning up, and a tiny shiver of excitement growing in her own heart.

It might be nothing. But it was more of a clue than she’d ever had before.

She’d try anything to find Joyeuse.

“Then let’s go look,” she said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

T
he problem was not getting down to the royal wine cellars. Rachelle had the authority to go most places in the Château. All she needed to do was ask a footman, and they were shown the way.

The problem was in getting there without attracting an entourage of onlookers. They got enough attention just walking through the public areas of the Château; once they stepped into the servants’ corridors, nobody could look away.

Rachelle knew that they could just wait until the middle of the night, and sneak down under cover of darkness. But she didn’t want to wait. Now that she finally had a hope of finding Joyeuse, she couldn’t stand to wait another hour.

So instead, she resorted to telling the truth. Almost.

“Please keep everyone out of the cellars,” she said to the gaping majordomo. “In
order to secure the safety of the Château, I must perform an inspection.”

“Of course,” he said dazedly, and then seemed to notice the sword hanging at her side. “But—but why are you bringing Monsieur Vareilles?”

Armand smiled self-deprecatingly. “I promised I’d go with her, to lend whatever help I can.”

There was going to be gossip. Erec would hear and doubtless tease her. But if she had Joyeuse in her hand, she wouldn’t much care what happened after.

The wine cellars were long, low tunnels, their sloping walls paved in the same cobblestones as their floors. The air was cold and still, with an absolute, muffled quiet; even Rachelle’s boots hardly made any noise against the floors.

“I’m surprised they obeyed so easily,” said Rachelle.

“You offered to protect them from the Forest,” said Armand. “Everyone’s afraid of it except the nobility. And some of them are too, they just won’t admit it.”

“So instead they turn to treason,” she said.

“Or saints. I’m sure the King will find a way to outlaw that as well, soon.”

Rachelle snorted. “That was a nice little lie you spun for them. Do many people think you can bless the Great Forest away with a wave of your hand?”

“That was a nice little lie
you
spun for them,” said Armand. “A pity you aren’t actually trying to protect them.”

She caught her breath in anger, then remembered that she had not actually ever told him that she was trying to find Joyeuse and save the world from the Devourer.

“How do you know I’m not?” she said.

“I don’t know, are you?” He was turned away from her, so she couldn’t see his face, but his voice was light and teasing. It shouldn’t have felt like a fishhook between her ribs.

For one moment, she wanted to tell him the truth. She also wanted to slam him against the wall and scream at him to be silent. Instead, she asked him evenly, “Do you see anything?”

“Moss.” The light, easy tone of his voice didn’t waver. “And flowers with teeth.”

“Well, the moss isn’t real.” She peered at the stone walls. “Maybe a little of it’s real.”

He laughed. “Be careful of the flowers, then.”

A chamber split off from the main tunnel; they looked inside and saw the racks of wine bottles gleaming in the lantern light.

“Anything?” she asked.

Armand strode forward into the chamber and looked around. He was truly
looking
, she realized: he scrutinized the room in every direction, and his shoulders slumped slightly before he turned back to her and said, “Nothing.”

No matter what he thought of her, he was trying to help her. Maybe he was trying to help her.

She hadn’t met anyone that foolish since Amélie.

“Did you really mean that?” she asked. “About supporting Raoul Courtavel?”

“Are you shocked that I’d imagine there could be a king after my beloved father, or that I’d want someone on the throne besides myself?”

“I’m curious,” said Rachelle, “why you even care.”

Armand laughed then: sudden, wild snickers that made his shoulders hunch and shake. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

“Whatever it is,” Rachelle said after a few moments, “can’t be that amusing.”

He had leaned against the wall now, and he looked back at her with a grin. “Believe me, it is exactly that amusing. However you interpret it.” Then he licked his lips and straightened up, composing his face. “If you want to know why I’d like to see Raoul on the throne, it’s because he’s the only possible heir that doesn’t hate me.”

“The rest didn’t like being related to a saint?” asked Rachelle.

“I mean when we were young,” he said, turning away from her. “When I was nothing. My mother was exiled from the court, you know, but she would visit other nobles at their estates sometimes. She particularly liked to visit relatives of the King. Raoul was the only one who didn’t hate me, and he was also the only one who spent more time reading the chronicles of past kings than chasing after scullery maids. And since then, he’s become the only one to drive the pirates back into the Mare Nostrum. So yes, I would rather see him king than anyone else alive today. But none of that’s going to matter, is it?”

“No,” said Rachelle, because as much as the common folk might hope or Vincent Angevin might fear, Armand would never get any say in the next king. Not unless he raised a peasant army in bloody rebellion, and she realized—with a sudden, hollow shiver—that she didn’t believe he would do that.

And the succession wouldn’t matter at all if the Devourer returned to eat the sun and moon.

They went on. They kept looking. And finally they got to the end of the wine cellar.

They found nothing.

“I’m sorry,” said Armand, when they stood in the last corner of the cellar, yet another rack of wine gleaming before them. “I don’t see anything.”

“That’s not possible,” said Rachelle. “There
has
to be something.” But she was already remembering how fragile their suppositions had been to begin with. Because somebody a hundred years ago said that Prince Hugo’s ghost might haunt the cellar, he must have found the door and died down here? It was absurd.

She didn’t give up right away, of course. They went over the cellars again and again. Rachelle pressed her hands to the walls and reached for any hidden charms a hundred times.

None of it made a difference. They found nothing at all.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................