Mistwood (10 page)

Isabel pressed back against the battlements, feeling the firm stone against her shoulder blades and struggling to regain her composure. She almost took a deep breath, then remembered that she didn’t have to and instead shifted her breathing steady. After a moment she forced herself to meet Ven’s eyes.

“It’s not all right,” she said. “Rokan was wrong to come for me, wrong to trust me.” She pushed upright, trying to think clearly and coldly. “What possessed him to take such a risk in the first place? Other kings in other lands survive their reigns without the aid of supernatural beings.”

Ven dropped his hand back to his side, his cheekbones stained red. He was as embarrassed by her outburst as she was. “The kings of Samorna have grown used to having a bit more security.”

“His father didn’t have it.”

“Rokan is not his father.”

“
That
’s perfectly clear. But he could have managed without me. He had Clarisse, and the guards, and he thought he had Albin….” Ven’s fists were clenched at his sides, the color gone from his face. Isabel narrowed her eyes at him.

He took two steps back, but she leaned forward menacingly, pinning him with a predator’s glare. A fierce, sweet thrill coursed through her. She was a wolf about to go for the throat. “
Tell me
. Why was he so desperate?”

Ven drew in a quick, sharp breath. “Because of you,” he said. “He needed you because he was afraid of you. Because—” He stopped, eyes darting suddenly from side to side, his jaw working silently.

“What?” Isabel snapped.

“Something’s wrong.” Ven backed away—from her, she thought at first; then she realized he was moving in tiny circles, like a frantic trapped bird. “Someone just broke through my wards.”

If someone was watching them with magic, she couldn’t feel it; but she couldn’t detect spells that didn’t manifest in ways perceptible to her animal senses. Isabel’s skin tingled as she reached out with every nonhuman sense she had; she closed her eyes and knew, by the way the air moved around their bodies, that she and Ven were alone. She sensed nothing.

Until, all at once, she did.

It was the wrench of something breaking. Not a ward. Something within Ven.

She snapped her eyes open in time to see Ven’s widen. He gasped and flung his arms up. Rainbow colors shimmered for a moment in the air around his outstretched hands. Then they exploded into nothingness and were gone. Ven’s hands closed on empty air, and he fell.

He pitched forward to his knees, his eyes still fixed on her, then fell flat on his face. Isabel leaped forward, but not in time to catch him, and he landed hard on the rough stone of the rooftop. She grabbed his shoulders, rolled him over, and lowered her head to listen for breathing. There was nothing but silence.

“Ven,” she whispered, but the name died only half out of her mouth. She knew there was no one to hear her.

She was the Shifter. She knew what death looked like.

She stared for a moment at his face, at the open blue eyes and slack mouth, and something very human rose within her. She made a halfhearted attempt to block it, but the effort had no will behind it.

Two fat wet drops splattered onto Ven’s shoulder, spreading tiny moist circles on the silk of his tunic. Isabel blinked, and the next few drops curved down her cheek instead of falling. She lifted her hand automatically to wipe them dry, then stared at the streaks on her fingers in horror.

Carefully she shifted her cheeks dry, and her eyes. Then she reached within herself and did the same to that treacherous, unwanted part of her that was causing her pain. By the time she rose to her feet and slowly backed away from the body, the pain was gone and buried, and her mind was working with crisp clarity. The girl who stood gazing down at Ven’s body was the Shifter. Nothing else.

Isabel concentrated fiercely on what she had learned about sorcery in hundreds of years of defending the royal family. The knowledge came in a flood, interspersed with fragments of memory. Herself as a cat, watching a wizard at work…deflecting a spell…approaching a sorceress…coolly pushing a knife through magic wards and into flesh. At any other time the memories would have interested her most. But now she didn’t need memories. She needed information.

She had to find out who had killed Ven, because…

Grief floated at the edge of her feelings, burrowing around the defenses she had just set up; a loneliness that would overwhelm her if she let it. For a moment she stood perfectly still, barely daring to breathe. And then the grief receded and was gone, and she breathed in once.

She had to find out who had killed Ven, because he might try to kill Rokan next.

The Shifter took one last look at the body lying on the weatherworn stone. Then she turned and walked to the edge of the rooftop, making no sound as she lowered herself down the side of the wall, her movements as tight and controlled as those of an animal on the hunt.

Isabel
found Rokan in the stable yard preparing for a ceremonial ride through the capital city. It wasn’t the ideal place for any type of conversation; he was surrounded by guards and nobles and looked distinctly unhappy. But when he saw her, his face lightened, and he gestured to a stable hand to bring another horse.

“
Thank
you,” he said fervently when she had mounted and brought her horse up next to his. “Lady Zabia was going to ride next to me, and I couldn’t think of a way to get out of it without starting a minor war. Which I might have been willing to risk, except I’m not sure I would win it. Try to act like we’re conferring about terribly important and serious matters.”

Isabel didn’t match his smile. She waited until the procession left the castle gates and started through the steep, narrow cobblestone streets, where the clatter of hooves provided cover for her words. Then she said, “Ven is dead.”

Rokan turned his horse a bit too sharply, and the gelding snorted and tossed its head reproachfully. The prince took a deep breath, and Isabel saw how deliberately he relaxed his grip on the reins.

He was silent for a long moment, which she spent scanning the narrow alleys and the other members of the procession with equal vigilance. She found that she could focus separately with each eye, allowing her to survey their surroundings for danger while simultaneously watching Rokan’s face. She was fairly sure she couldn’t have done that two weeks ago. Her stay in the Mistwood had made her stronger.

For all the good it had done her.

“I’m sorry,” Rokan said finally. It was not what she had expected him to say.

“I don’t know who killed him,” she said, answering the question he should have asked. They had reached the main boulevard of the city now, and people were cheering from the rooftops. “But there was magic involved.”

Rokan matched his horse’s pace to hers so that he could turn and watch her face. “Albin?”

“Not directly, though I’m sure he was behind it.” Seeing two things at once was giving her a headache. Isabel reverted to human sight. “The spell that killed Ven couldn’t be used from far away. It was someone in the castle.”

Rokan shivered and pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “Why would anyone want to kill Ven?”

Isabel knew the answer to that: he had been about to tell her something important. But she had no intention of letting Rokan know that she had been there, had seen a man die and been unable to stop it. “Probably,” she said, “because Ven was protecting you.”

Rokan nodded. He rubbed his thumb back and forth across his lower lip, then said, “But that doesn’t really matter, does it? I don’t need sorcerers. I have you.”

The question dropped like a stone, for all that he tried to make it sound casual. He watched her as if he was trying to piece together a puzzle, waiting for…what?

“Of course you do,” she said coldly.

The rest of the ride was silent and uncomfortable. Rokan kept glancing at her sideways, but every time he opened his mouth to speak he changed his mind. By the time they clattered back into the castle courtyard, Isabel was sure he was wishing he had ridden with Lady Zabia instead.

She spent the next few days searching every guest room in the castle, but found nothing to hint that any of the occupants was a sorcerer. She was caught twice, despite all her efforts, but the ones who caught her—a serving maid and a cook—just turned and left her to continue with her work. Which, at least, settled the question of whether
everyone
in the castle knew she was the Shifter.

She finished the last room late at night and stood for a moment seething in frustration. She glared at the empty bed of a visiting baron who was spending the night in someone else’s, trying not to think about what she had to do next.

Rokan depended on her. He would be left with nothing to rely on after she told him.

Better he find out now than later.

She started to turn, but she had waited too long to make the decision, and the pause had stripped away some of her certainty. The Shifter would have gone to him right away. The Shifter would have done it weeks ago. The Shifter had no pride, no need to prove who she was.

“I’m not the Shifter.” She said it out loud, surprising herself, testing how it would sound when she said it to Rokan. It sounded like a lie.

She forced herself to think of Rokan dead. Even holding the image in her mind was difficult; her whole being recoiled from the thought, from a hurt so raw it was painful just to imagine it. What would it be like if Rokan, not Ven, had fallen while she watched? All his wit and enthusiasm and dreams gone in a moment of careless inattention. Her throat tightened until she couldn’t breathe.

She knew what death looked like, felt like, smelled like. She even knew what a dead king—

A flash of memory, almost. It didn’t last long enough for her to grasp it, but on its tail came anguish so sharp she gasped out loud. A faint hint of what it felt like, for a Shifter, when a king was killed.

Not again, she thought, and managed to leave the room with almost no effort at all.

The guards let her pass, watching her but making no move to stop her. She felt them turn to stare at her as she entered Rokan’s room and closed the door behind her.

The room was dimly lit, making the foam in the tapestry of the sea look starkly white. She shifted her eyes as she started toward the bed. She saw that it was empty, stopped, sniffed the air, and turned toward him. He was standing by the window at the end of his room, his back to her, staring out into the darkness. She had not been quiet when she closed the door, but he didn’t turn.

“Your Highness,” Isabel said, not sure why she was suddenly so formal. She tugged at the edges of her sleeves. “It’s Isabel.”

“I know.” There was an undertone of bitterness to his voice. “Who else could it be?”

A moment passed before she grasped that. It made her angry, and she took two quick steps toward him. “If I was the one you were thinking of, I would probably be coming with a knife.”

“No. She wouldn’t have had the courage for a knife.”

Isabel stopped halfway between the door and the bed. Rokan said, in a voice so quiet she barely heard it, “I know that, yet I still miss her.”

He didn’t look at her, just kept staring out the window. All but one candelabra had been put out, casting his face in shadows so deep that even her cat’s eyes could barely make out his features. But something about the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders beneath the black silk tunic, stirred instant empathy in her. She wondered why. Could the Shifter ever be lonely?

The question released a flood of memory. Not of her past lives as Shifter, of the castle and the court, but of her woods. She had never thought much about the time before Rokan came to find her; she hadn’t been human for most of it, and animals didn’t remember the way humans did. A vague blur of images, of hunting and running and flying, had been enough. But suddenly she knew that, through it all, she had been desperately alone. And lonely.

She had spent a summer with a pack of wolves but had never really been one of them; they had known what she was. She had circled above the trees with a flock of birds, but when they headed south, she stayed behind. She had passed other deer in sunlit meadows, but they had watched her warily, sensing the wolf she had been.

And suddenly she knew why she had allowed Rokan to catch her. It hadn’t been her ankle. She could have shifted her ankle whole.

The room had been silent for a long time. Rokan turned from the window. Now she could see his face, save for a wedge of darkness that arced around the side of his chin and the corner of his eye. Behind him the sky was as black as his eyes.

She shouldn’t be here. She couldn’t help him with his grief. She had already started toward the door when Rokan said, so quietly a human might not have heard, “Please talk to me.”

She stopped in mid-turn, surprised. “About what?”

“Just—talk to me. About anything.”

She searched for something to say. She couldn’t come up with a single thing.

After an awkward silence, Rokan sighed. “I’m sorry. I know you’re not…” He stopped. “Sometimes I forget what you’re not. What you are.” He half-smiled, a bitter, self-contemptuous smile, and turned to the window again. “I can be an idiot that way. I’m truly sorry.”

Isabel stood there, not sure what to do. She could hear him breathing: slow, unnaturally even breaths that went in and out with great care.

Rokan stepped away from the window to his neatly made bed. He threw himself backward on the maroon bedspread and stared up at the canopy. “My father once said that being alone is the price of greatness. But it was easy for him to believe that. He liked being alone. My mother was lonely all her life, and she hated it.”

“Didn’t she die when you were very young?”

“Yes. But I remember her.”

Something in his voice woke a memory in her. This was ridiculous—the Shifter didn’t have parents. She was imagining it, wanting to understand her prince. Ven had been right. She wanted to be human.

She wanted to be human because Rokan was human.

“She didn’t even have us.” He sat up. “My father didn’t want me to become weak. Feminine. He was ambitious for me, even before—” He stopped short, shook his head. “By the time Will was born, it was clear I was healthy, so Will wasn’t so important to him. She was so happy then, because she had someone to take care of.”

“How did she die?” Isabel asked.

“She got sick and she died. The whole thing took two weeks.” A muscle twitched along Rokan’s jaw. “My father gave me one day to cry. The next day I had to start fencing lessons.”

Isabel walked forward soundlessly until she stood at the foot of the bed. She put both hands on the polished wooden bed rail, leaning forward so her eyes were level with his. “You hated him.”

Rokan shook his head, lines of shadow cutting through his face. “I loved him. I thought he knew best. He wanted me to be strong.”

“But—”

“It didn’t matter. A week later I found out the truth about—” Rokan stopped short again and turned his head slightly so that his eyes were in shadow again. Isabel saw his throat convulse as he swallowed.

About how he became king. She knew what he had been going to say. She waited.

“About—” Rokan said, and stopped again.

Isabel’s heart pounded. A part of her longed for him to confide in her, to rely on her for protection even from this. But he was incredibly stupid if he did. He was foolhardy for even thinking about it.

“About his mistresses,” Rokan finished. “I never felt the same way about him afterward.”

Isabel let go of the bed rail. “How did you find out?”

Rokan’s chest heaved—with relief or regret, Isabel couldn’t tell. “Clarisse told me.”

“Sweet.”

“She didn’t realize how upset I would get. She didn’t care that much.” He traced a line of embroidery along the fabric of the bedspread. “I still don’t know how she found out, but she was always better at seeing reality than I was. She never trusted Daria.”

So the conversation had come full circle. “Does she trust anyone?”

“No. But she doesn’t
dis
trust everyone, and she warned me about Daria. We had a screaming fight. I said things…and she was right. I should have listened to her.”

“Clarisse told you not to come get me,” Isabel pointed out. “You would be dead now if you had listened to her.”

Rokan smiled. It was slow and peaceful, a smile she hadn’t seen on his face since Daria’s betrayal. “Yes, she was wrong about you. Good to know.”

The silence that followed felt almost companionable except for the hot lump at the back of Isabel’s throat.

Finally Rokan stirred. “I’m sorry, Isabel. I never asked what you came here to tell me.”

She didn’t even think about it. “Nothing in particular. I was just—nervous. Shifter instinct.” Was there such a thing? “But you seem safe.”

“With you around, always.”

She turned smoothly, not wanting him to see her face, and left the room without another word.