Crimson Bound (25 page)

It would have to be a sleep charm. Margot had said,
The most terrible charms or the most simple
, and sleep charms were the only simple charms she knew that seemed like
they might be at all helpful even if they did work. Yet one of the little snowflake-shaped sleep charms she used to hang over baby beds could not possibly be enough, or nobody would have ever feared lindenworms.

She decided to try weaving multiple sleep charms together, and she spent the rest of the day working out the pattern. Luckily Amélie already had a ball of yarn that she could use.

“You’re going to help,” Rachelle told Armand that evening.

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you planning to clamp knitting needles onto my hands? Because I don’t think that will work as well as it does with forks. And it doesn’t work all that well with forks either, though apparently it looks quite impressive. Several ladies have assured me that I’m very brave for managing to eat by myself.”

“Well,” said Rachelle, “I certainly won’t tell you that.”

He laughed.

“And luckily,” she went on, “I don’t need you to tie knots. I just need you to stay still. Here.” She sat him down in a chair and had him hold up his hands. She looped the yarn through his silver fingers and started weaving it together.

It was awkward sitting so close to him—their knees were almost touching, she could hear every breath he took, and the strange desire for him was seeping back into her. She tried to concentrate on the pattern, looking frequently at her sketches and weaving in quick, short motions.

The problem was, she hadn’t woven in three years. Very soon, the pattern started bunching. She had woven it too tight. So she pulled it out, and starting whirling through the pattern again with less tension—only now ungainly loops were dropping from it, because she was making it too loose. Again she pulled it out. This time it seemed to go better, but slowly the shape got more and more wrong, until at last she realized that she had left out two steps when she started the pattern. Her breath hissed out between her teeth in frustration.

“Now you know how I feel with forks,” said Armand.

She looked up at him, tensing. She expected to see mockery—Erec would have said the words with a sly grin and then winked—but Armand just looked at her with a wry half smile. Come to think of it, Erec would never have mentioned that he was bad at anything.

Rachelle laughed shakily and started to unwind again. “I have bloodbound grace and speed,” she said. “But it’s all for fighting.”

“You seemed to dance pretty well.”

“That was with Erec. That counts as fighting.” Her voice was rougher than she meant it to be, and she didn’t meet his eyes.

“I think everything at court counts,” he said.

She started weaving the pattern again, slowly and carefully. “I don’t think there’s enough chance of bloodshed.”

He paused. “There’s chance of bloodshed in dancing?”

“I repeat: with Erec d’Anjou.”

He laughed, and it shouldn’t have made any difference. But it did. The memory of the duel was no longer crawling right beneath her skin; it had still happened, but it felt like a much smaller and sillier thing.

For a few moments she wove in silence. Then Armand said, “I’ve been wondering about something. The way you fight—it’s incredible. Not just your speed, but your technique. I’ve seen men trained all their lives who weren’t that good. But you can’t have been trained before you came to Rocamadour.”

“No,” Rachelle agreed.

“Did you . . . learn it from the mark?”

“Not exactly.” Rachelle paused, finishing a particularly tricky bit of the pattern before continuing, “It’s . . . an instinct. For any sort of fighting. It’s like reading a book, I suppose. You don’t know the words until you see them, but you have them as soon as you do.” She remembered Amélie reading aloud a cosmetics recipe to her. “Erec trained me when I came to the city. In two weeks, I could nearly keep up with him.”

“Hm.”

Armand sounded pensive; she looked up. “Do you feel it?” she asked. “That instinct?”

His mouth puckered. “Sometimes. Maybe. I really hope not.” He paused. “Is that how it feels to have the Forest’s power growing inside you?”

“It’s not . . . just that.”

“What is it?”

She couldn’t tell him about the strange fury that sometimes came over her, the desire to crush and destroy. Sitting here with him in quiet peace, knowing she had felt that fury toward him, however briefly—the thought was just obscene.

So she told him about the other way that the Forest crawled into her mind.

“All of us bloodbound,” she said. “There’s a dream we all have. You’re standing on a path in the woods—barren woods, with snow on the ground—and at the end of the path,
there’s a house. It’s made of wood, but thatched with bones. There’s blood seeping between the wooden boards. And you have to walk toward it. You can slow yourself down, but you can’t stop. I can’t . . . I can’t tell you how terrifying it is.”

“And what happens when you reach it?” asked Armand.

“Nobody that I’ve ever talked to has reached it yet. But I think—we all think—when you open the door, that’s when you become a forestborn.”

Armand was silent.

“Do you dream it?” she asked finally.

“No,” he said distantly. “No, I don’t.”

“So you have the healing and the speed, but not the dreams? That’s convenient.”

“I also have visions of the Great Forest all the time,” he said. “Trust me, that’s not convenient.”

And Rachelle went back to weaving. Armand didn’t speak again—unlike Erec, who could never stop talking—he seemed content to just watch her and the pattern she was weaving. When she looked up and caught his eye, he didn’t feel the need to wink or smirk, he just smiled faintly and went on watching her.

She began to remember how weaving charms had always soothed her: the soft slide of the yarn against her fingers. The quick, repetitive motions. The slowly building pattern. Her hands found their rhythm, dancing through the pattern, looping the yarn in and out and around his fingers, and slowly the woven pattern grew between them.

Something else was growing too. She felt every breath that Armand took and every breath that she took. She felt the tiny space of air between their knees. She felt the way his head tilted, the way light glanced off his jaw, the way his eyelids flickered as he looked down at the yarn, and up at her face.

She thought it was just the same curious peace she felt when Amélie did her makeup, because like then, the world had narrowed down to her and Armand and tiny scraps of sensation. Then her hands overshot the pattern, and she nearly jerked the yarn out of alignment. She caught herself, but her wrist brushed against his, and a tiny shiver went up her arm.

Their eyes met. Her face felt hot. Her hands, though gripping the yarn, felt empty.

She thought,
This is not the way I feel about Erec.

She thought,
I think I love him.

The words slid into her head between one breath and the next, and she couldn’t deny them any more than she could pretend she wasn’t breathing.

She loved Armand. It was a simple, absolute feeling, as if her heart had turned into a compass that pointed toward him. Suddenly it didn’t matter that she was dying, that she didn’t get to keep him, that she didn’t get to have him in the first place because he would never feel about her the same way.

He was here. She stared at the line of his jaw, listened to his breathing, and wrapped yarn around his glittering fingers. He was here, and she could drink in his presence like cool water and fresh air. For this one moment, just seeing him was a miracle, and it was enough.

“It’s pretty,” said Amélie.

Rachelle flinched and turned. Amélie stood behind her, next to one of the little tables, on which rested a tray bearing a silver pitcher and three cups. The warm, rich smell of hot chocolate wafted up from them.

“That’s the first time you didn’t notice me walking into the room,” said Amélie.

“I was busy,” Rachelle said stiffly. Her fingers shook as she wound the last few loops in the pattern. Then she ripped the yarn from its skein, tied it off, and pulled the piece loose from Armand’s fingers. “There. All done.”

“Pretty,” said Armand, looking at the floor.

Amélie leaned in closer to look. “What’s it for?”

Rachelle’s heart thumped. “To keep Monsieur Vareilles safe,” she said, because if she told Amélie about the lindenworm then she’d have to tell her about the door and Joyeuse and the Devourer—and she wanted to keep her friend free of that darkness for just a little longer.

“It’s awfully big,” said Amélie. “Is he that much trouble?”

“You have no idea,” said Rachelle, and Amélie’s grin made the lie completely worth it.

“Well, then you deserve chocolate,” said Amélie, and handed her a cup.

“Do I deserve any?” asked Armand. “Even though I’m trouble?”

“I don’t know, does he?” Amélie looked at Rachelle.

Rachelle looked at him as she took a deep breath of the steam from her cup.

“Yes,” she said. “This time he deserves it. Yes.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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T
he next day, Rachelle woke up and thought,
Tonight we get Joyeuse. Or die.

The morning was busy with attending the King, and Rachelle found it harder than usual to pretend to be respectful. Armand, too, seemed tense. Finally, when the bells were tolling two o’clock, Rachelle turned to Armand and said, “I don’t care if we get in trouble. I can’t stand this a moment longer. If there’s a place you like in the gardens, tell me now, or I’ll just drag you out any which way.”

Armand smiled and said, “There is a spot, actually.”

Fifteen minutes later, she was following him on a narrow ghost of a path between hedges, wondering if this was an elaborate joke. Except Armand—unlike Erec—did not seem particularly interested in teasing her.

They rounded two little hills and went through a gate in a hedge—and then Rachelle stopped. Before them was a miniature lake, studded with lily pads; on the other side was a small country cottage, red tiles on the roof and dark wooden beams crisscrossing its white plaster walls. Roses cascaded over one side of the building; on the other was a low, open stable that housed no horses—but chickens wandered clucking in and out among the piles of straw. It looked like a house from her own village as described by la Fontaine; any moment, flounces would start to appear on Rachelle’s coat.

“What
is
that?” asked Rachelle.

“The Trebuchet,” said Armand. “Built by the King’s late father for his mistress Marie d’Astoir.”

“Why did he name it after a siege weapon?” she asked.

“He didn’t. But Marie d’Astoir only accepted him after he built it, and the Queen retaliated with an epic poem of rhymed couplets, describing the siege of Marie’s virtue and calling this cottage the trebuchet that brought down her walls. Marie was humiliated and swore never to associate with the Queen again. It was the great scandal of the day.”

“I can’t see why that would be scandalous,” said Rachelle. “Since apparently
everyone
does it.”

“Oh, it wasn’t her sleeping with the King that was a scandal, it was her fighting with the Queen. And yes, that doesn’t make a bit of sense, and no, the court hasn’t changed. Guess what the Bishop talked about in his sermon last Sunday.”

“Everyone in this court is mad,” Rachelle said, trying not to think about what else the Bishop might have said, or what Armand might have thought of it. But then she realized with a sudden, sick clarity that she did want to know. She was desperate to know what Armand was thinking.

They had come to the stable—if it could be called that, since on closer inspection it was clear that it had never been meant to house horses, but simply to have the same vague outline as a stable and provide a resting place for all the hay bales that were now infested with chickens. The cottage, too, was subtly different from the ones Rachelle had known—windows too large, hall too long. It was like the entire building had been sketched from somebody’s nostalgic, drunken memory of a farmhouse.

“What else did the Bishop talk about?” she asked.

“Oh, you know, the sins of the court and so forth.” Armand’s voice was light, his face slightly angled away so she couldn’t quite read his expression. “There has not been such hypocrisy since the Imperium, when they fed men to lions for amusement, yet called themselves righteous because of the sin-eaters they kept chained at their doors.”

“And let me guess,” Rachelle bit out, “I’m one of the sin-eaters.”

“You’ve said so yourself, haven’t you?” Without waiting for a reply, Armand strode forward into the shade of the not-stable and seated himself in a pile of straw.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Sitting down.” He poked at the straw and slid his silver hand under an egg, cradling it neatly. “Catch.”

Rachelle’s hand snapped out. She caught the egg easily, but too hard; it crunched in her hands, yolk running out between her fingers.