Crimson Bound (33 page)

“Maybe you’ll forget,” Armand went on. “Tonight I’ll become the Devourer, most likely, and God alone knows how much of my soul will be left. But you don’t have to lose yourself
now.
Do you think Amélie would thank you for it?”

Amélie wouldn’t thank her for becoming a forestborn either. But as soon as she imagined Amélie seeing her now, she knew what Amélie would tell her to do:
repent and confess your sins
.

She let out a rickety laugh as she imagined what they would all think if she suddenly called for a priest. And she realized that she wasn’t going to kill Erec. Not while Armand was watching her and wagering everything on her. And not while the memory of Amélie was still in her heart.

She threw aside her sword. She stood up, because a thousand leaves were rustling against her skin, and she knew that she didn’t have much longer. She wanted to say good-bye to Armand. She wanted to tell him that she loved him while it still had a chance of being true.

But she’d used up all her strength laying down the sword. The leaves on her skin caught fire, and then her legs gave out.

“Rachelle!” Armand shouted, and she thought,
I love you. I love you. I will try.

The last thing she saw was Erec leaning over her. “Sweet dreams, my lady. Your human heart has beat its last.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

R
achelle was in the dead forest, walking toward the cottage thatched with bones.

Her eyes burned and stung with tears. Her throat ached like she had been screaming. She knew there was a reason she had fought to avoid this house, but her heart was a lump of meat in her chest and her agony had all been spent.

This is all
, she thought as she stepped forward.
This is all.

She raised her hand; she saw memories peeling away from it in translucent, gauze-like little scraps that fluttered away in the breeze. She could feel them sloughing off her hands, off her face; they were fluttering in her hair and tearing free.

Her foot landed on the wooden doorstep. The wood shifted with a creak, and she knew that the sound should send a bolt of terror through her, but there were no feelings left in her.

The door handle was cold beneath her hand.

The door swung in.

Inside was a bare wooden room spattered with blood. Rachelle saw herself lying dead at the center, bleeding from wound after wound.

And she saw herself kneeling over the body with a knife.

The other Rachelle raised her head, and now at last her heart was able to thud with terror again, but it was
too late, too late, too late—

“You came home at last,” said her other self. She rose and gripped Rachelle’s wrists,
and there was nothing but her dark eyes and cold and dark and cold.

Then she woke.

And she knew her heart was gone.

Rich afternoon sunlight shone on her face. She was lying in a bed hung with lacy golden curtains.

The Great Forest whispered in her mind, an endless, susurrating song. And yet her mind felt more clear and strong than it ever had before.

She could feel the little sweet-salt absence inside her, where her heart used to be. She could feel the gap, but it wasn’t real. Nothing she had ever felt as a human, none of her guilt and grief, had ever been real. She was free of it all now, and it was wonderful.

There was nothing but the absence where her heart had been. Nothing but the tiny, beautiful,
infinite
absence that would make her weep and scream if she had any tears or screaming left.

No. It was only humans who wanted meaning and hope. She was a forestborn, and she did not need those illusions.

Rachelle got out of bed and stretched, ready to run, and dance, and kill, and sing.

Her left hand ached, and she looked at the tiny white scar. For the first time she could remember, it didn’t make her want to weep. The hurt that she felt was purely physical and completely irrelevant.

The ache turned into a stab of pain that drove her to her knees. Worse, her eyes stung with senseless tears. She scrabbled frantically for the easy despair of a moment before. This was nothing, it meant nothing—

Amélie’s brush stroking makeup onto her face. Armand with yarn woven between his silver fingers. Aunt Léonie kissing her cheek.

The memories wouldn’t stop. Her mind was like a whirling top that repeated
nothing nothing do not care
over and over, but now the top had fallen off balance and was wobbling wildly, back and forth between indifference and frenzied, grieving love.

You don’t have to feel this. You don’t have to love them.

The thought came into her head as clearly as if someone had spoken to her. Rachelle straightened up, the storm in her mind calming. She was suddenly very conscious of having one last choice.

She couldn’t feel any more longing to love the people she had known. But she remembered Armand’s voice:
Maybe it’s just that, once they’re so deep in the Forest’s power, they don’t want to remember loving anyone.

Her hand clenched around the pain of the scar.

It was like trying to swallow broken glass or make her heart beat backward. But she thought of Aunt Léonie, Amélie, Armand. She remembered smiling at them, caring for them,
what would they think of me now—

And it was over. There were tears on her face and she was gasping for breath, crouched on the floor beside Erec’s expensive bed.

I love them
, she thought, and the words felt numb but true.
I am a forestborn, and I love them.

She could still hear the Great Forest singing at the back of her mind, triumphant and hopeless and unafraid. If she listened to it, wanted it, she knew she could let it sweep away her mind again.

With a slow breath, she got to her feet. Her blood pulsed, ready for a fight.

I am Rachelle Brinon. I didn’t listen to my aunt when she told me to stay on the path and save my own life. Damned if I’ll listen to the Forest now.

She didn’t feel the slightest bit weak or unsteady as she strode to the door. Then she pushed it open and saw Erec sitting outside in his study.

He looked up. There was no time for fear. Rachelle thought of how the sunlight had poured drunkenly across her skin, and she let it give a swing to her steps as she strode out into the room.

He was on his feet in an instant. “My lady.”

She smiled back at him. “My lord.”

He crooked his finger, and she felt the compulsion he sent along the string that bound them, but she walked forward of her own will into his arms.

“Are you reconciled to your fate?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and it was not a lie. She knew what her fate was and how she was going to use it, and not one part of her rebelled against it.

“You led me a merry chase.” His fingers traced over her face. She could still feel her old lust for him. She could feel, also, the draw of the bond between them. Now that she could tell the difference, it was less terrifying.

“Would you be satisfied with less?” she asked. “What do you need me to do?”

“Kiss me,” he said, and she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

He laughed. “I’m glad you haven’t lost your defiance.”

“I’ll make you gladder still tonight,” she said. “Right now, I’m going to run through the gardens.”

She expected him to object. To demand further submission out of her first. But he only smiled and said, “As you wish,” and a moment later she was running lightly down the hallway.

Of course she didn’t head for the gardens. She went straight for the Lady Chapel, which was dedicated to the Holy Virgin. It had been built in fulfillment of some king’s vow a few hundred years ago, but since then it had become not just a chapel but also the repository of sundry royal treasures. So unlike the main chapel, there were guards.

Rachelle walked up to them without fear; they knew her, so they wouldn’t attack until she gave them cause.

Sleep
, she thought.
Darkness.
And power blossomed in her palms, forming great night-black flowers that nobody but she could see. “Good afternoon,” she said as they drew to attention.

“Good afternoon, mademoiselle,” one of them said, and then Rachelle struck, her hands whipping out to slam the invisible flowers over their faces. They dropped instantly, and she stepped over their bodies and strode inside.

The Lady Chapel had no gaudy excesses of gold leaf and writhing cherubs: only white marble pillars, and slender silver traceries inlaid on the marble floor. It was a place of silence and blue shadows, which made the painting over the altar all the more jarring. It was like the gory portrait of the Dayspring that had been hung over Armand’s audience, but even worse. Not only did it show the Dayspring as a hacked-apart pile of limbs; the limbs were bleeding, twisted, deformed. The hands writhed, tendons bulging. The face was twisted in agony. The pieces were laid out in a spiral, like a scream given shape.

But Rachelle had a different goal. She turned to the side altar, where sat the statue of the Holy Virgin. Here she was depicted as the Lady of Snows, dressed all in white, with the great eagle wings she had been given to fly to the mountains and hide from the Imperium’s soldiers while she gave birth to the Dayspring. At her feet sat a multitude of candles, along with flowers, gold chains, bracelets, and earrings—whatever people saw fit to leave as offerings.

There was no sword.

Rachelle wasted several minutes looking in all the corners and crannies nearby and in trying to pry up paving stones. Then she remembered how Joyeuse had shifted and changed shape to let Armand hold it.

In the stories, Joyeuse had been made from a single bone.

She bent closer to the pile of offerings, squinting at the candlelight. And then she saw it: a little white finger bone, wedged in between two candles. She put on her leather gloves and reached for it.

Even through the glove, it was like touching hot iron. Her hand sprang away before she had even fully realized what she was feeling. It occurred to her that if she hadn’t knocked the guards unconscious, perhaps she could have bullied or bluffed them into moving the bone for her. But she supposed she would have had to touch it sooner or later.

She held her hands out over Joyeuse for a long moment—hesitated—and then seized it.

It shifted in her grasp, turning back into the sword. Red-hot agony seared up her arms. Still she turned and managed to walk halfway to the door before her hands simply wouldn’t grasp anymore. Joyeuse clattered to the ground, and after a moment of wavering, Rachelle fell to her knees.

She realized there were tears trickling down her face—tears of pain, but also frustration. She had, against all odds, survived the transformation into a forestborn with her mind and heart intact. She had fooled Erec and gotten to Joyeuse. And now she was going to fail and all the world would fall to darkness, just because she wasn’t strong enough.

She thought of Armand six months ago, bleeding alone and still able to hold back the Devourer, and she reached again for Joyeuse.

Bishop Guillaume’s voice rang out: “What business does a bloodbound have in the house of God?”

In an instant, she was on her feet. For there in the doorway stood the Bishop and Justine.

“Not a bloodbound,” said Justine, her face pinched with loathing. “A forestborn.”

Everything she had felt for him before, she felt ten times more now: the bone-deep revulsion and mistrust. Her fingers tensed with the desire to kill.

As if in answer, Justine’s hand went to her sword.

And Rachelle remembered why she was there, and that if she fought them, Erec and the other forestborn would probably notice. They would wonder what she was doing in the chapel, and that would be the end of everything.

The problem was that the Bishop and Justine were surely going to fight
her.
She was a forestborn in the house of God. Who wouldn’t try to stop her?

The Bishop took a step forward, and Rachelle did the only thing she could think of. She dropped to her knees and said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three years since my last shriving.”

There was a short, brittle silence. She saw the horror flicker across his grim face.
I think he just got more than he asked for
, she thought with bleak humor.
I suppose now I find out if he really believes what he preaches.

Her stomach curled. What had she been thinking? She was on her knees before the man who hated her and whom she had always hated. She was going to
die
on her knees, because who would believe a monster? And who would refuse to strike it down?

Erec would laugh.

Then the Bishop exchanged a look with Justine. She nodded and stepped back, out of the chapel. And he took the last step forward and dropped his hand on the top of Rachelle’s head.