Hidden Huntress

by Danielle L. Jensen

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Tips muttered.

  “Think of it this way,” I said. “He knows you can lie to him, but you don’t know that he knows. Not only can he use it against you, he can use you against his enemies by taking advantage of the fact that they don’t know either.”

  Tips raised both eyebrows, giving me a dour look. “This is why I hate dealing with the aristocracy – you’re all mad.”

  I grinned. “It’s brilliant.”

  “Right.”

  I leaned forward. “Have you told anyone I caught you out?”

  Tips winced. “Not yet. Haven’t found the courage to tell them I slipped up.”

  “Excellent.” I would’ve clapped my hands together if they didn’t hurt so much. “I’ve an idea. It’s more than a bit mad, and if it goes poorly, we might both lose our heads. But I think it’ll work.”

  “And I must be mad to listen to you, but I’m going to anyway.” Tips leaned on the table, his eyes bright. “Tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

  Twenty-One

  Cécile

  My mother wandered past me to look out the window, leaving a cloud of perfume in her wake. “You will stay in tonight, I trust,” she said, letting the drapes fall back into place.

  “I will,” I said. “I think a cup of tea and a book are what I need.” I coughed quietly. “My throat has been a bit sore, and I don’t care to overdo it.”

  She frowned at me. “I hope you aren’t coming down with something – you’ve seen how much work the Regent’s masque will be.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing.” I glanced at the clock. I’d told Chris to come to the back door at seven, but hopefully he’d be wise enough to ensure my mother was actually gone before he knocked. “Where did you say you were going?” I asked, looking blindly at the book in my lap.

  “The Marquis is accompanying me to the palace for my performance. After that, we’ll have to see. It seems anyone who is anyone is having a party tonight.”

  “Seems like poor planning on their parts,” I muttered. I really didn’t care about my mother’s social schedule – what I cared about was her leaving so I’d have the privacy to try this spell.

  A knock sounded at the door. “That will be my carriage.” She picked up her thick velvet cloak. “I hope you enjoy your rest, darling. I will be late, if I’m home at all.” Bending down she kissed my forehead, then stroked my cheek. “There is no one more important to me than you, Cécile. I hope you know that.”

  My traitorous heart warmed, then I squashed the feeling away, reminding myself that the last time she’d expressed herself this way, she’d been in the process of drugging me. “Good luck tonight, mother.”

  I waited until I was certain she was gone, then I threw off the robe covering my dress and hurried to the back door. Chris was waiting, a roll of parchment in one hand and a caged chicken in the other. “She’s gone?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Come in before the neighbors see you.”

  Once he was inside, we set to hurrying about the house closing all the curtains. I was taking no chances that someone might see us – at best, I’d be exiled from the city. And at worst… the smoke coming from the fireplace took on an ominous feel.

  “Where do you want to do this?” Chris asked, holding up the cage and eyeing the chicken. “It will be messy.”

  I grimaced. “The kitchen would be the best, I suppose.”

  Following my terse instructions, we set up all of my supplies on the kitchen floor, along with a bucket and rags to clean up what would be a large amount of blood. I took the map Chris had brought and laid it out flat, then carefully began committing it to memory as well as I could.

  “What are you doing?” Chris whispered.

  “The map needs to be reflected in my mind’s eye,” I said. “Otherwise this won’t work.”

  Catherine had devised the spell I intended to use to find missing loved ones. It was a noble cause, unlike my own, but cause meant little when it came to the effectiveness of the spell. All I really needed was a possession belonging to the missing, in this case, Anushka’s grimoire, a map, and the raw power of a death. So little, and yet, so much.

  When I was comfortable I could accurately visualize the map, I set a basin between it and me. Then I opened the chicken’s cage and pulled her out. She clucked quietly in my arms, used to being handled. Chris handed me a knife, and I swallowed a wave of nausea. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

  “You’ve killed chickens before, Cécile. Lots of them.” Chris’s words were steady, but his face was ghostly pale.

  “For eating,” I muttered. “Not for… this.” I petted the hen on her head and she clucked at me. No amount of farm living could prepare me for this.

  “I could pluck her after and we could, umm, roast her up?”

  I gagged and shook my head. The idea of eating my ritual sacrifice was too much.

  “Or, or, I could pluck her, and give her to someone who needs the food.” He nodded encouragingly at me.

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing down what had threatened to rise up. “We can do that.”

  My grip on the knife was slick with sweat. The chicken started to struggle in my grip, as though sensing my tension. “I can’t hold her steady,” I muttered, the knife and the chicken sliding in my grasp.

  “Just get it over with,” Chris said. “Do it now.”

  “I can’t, I can’t,” I said, struggling to get the angle right. My hands knew what they were doing, but my mind was at war with itself. Walking down this path would change everything for me. It would change who I was.

  Do it! The voice in my head was full of wicked glee. Was it me, or was it the King?

  “I’m sorry.” The words came out in a rush as I sliced the knife across the chicken’s neck. Blood splattered everywhere, adding to the wetness of tears already dripping down my cheeks. I held the dying creature over the basin with shaking hands, letting the blood flow even as power flooded into me, then handed her to Chris.

  Retrieving the candle, I held the flame to the crimson contents of the basin, part of me praying that it would go out and the spell would fail, even as I knew it wouldn’t. Fire leapt up in the bowl and we both jerked back. I could feel magic rising all around us, but it had a dark, malignant edge to it. What I was doing was a corruption of the earth’s power. What I was doing was evil.

  “I can’t go back,” I whispered. And before I could lose my nerve, I plunged my hand into the flaming mixture. It was hot, but it didn’t burn. Slowly, I lifted my hand from the basin, flames licking out from my fingers. With the grimoire in my free hand, I held my bloody hand over the map and closed my eyes, visualizing the city.

  “Tell me where Anushka is,” I said loudly, and focused my thoughts. I felt power gush from my fingers, filling the air with heat. The blood splattered loudly against the paper, but I kept my focus. “Tell me where Anushka is.” The magic surged, and I smelled a faint hint of smoke, then it was over.

  I opened my eyes. Chris was on the far side of the kitchen, his back against a cupboard. He stared at me with wild eyes, the dead chicken clutched to his chest. “Did it work?” His words were shaky, and I could tell he didn’t want to come closer. He was afraid of me. I was afraid of myself.

  Wiping my hand on my stained dress, I picked up the candle and leaned over to look at the map.

  There were tiny burn marks on the parchment, barely more than pinpricks. But where I had expected one, there were nineteen. “I don’t think it worked,” I said, my breath coming in escalating pants as I stared at the blood-spattered map. “It didn’t work.” I slammed my fist into the floor, skinning my knuckles. “How could it not have worked?”

  Chris was at my side in an instant, his eyes raking over the results of the spell. “Bloody stones and sky,” he swore. “All that for nothing!”

  “What am I doing? What have I become?” I sobbed, unable to contain the flood of disappointment and disgust I felt toward myself. “How did I become a chicken-kil
ling practitioner of the dark arts? An agent for a king set on conquering the whole world? How did I get here? How did I become so evil?” The questions poured out of my mouth until the need to breathe silenced them.

  “You’re not evil, Cécile,” Chris said softly, patting me on the shoulder.

  “Then why am I doing this?” I demanded.

  “Because you love Tristan,” he said. “And you couldn’t stand to see him hurt.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “No.” He sighed heavily. “It doesn’t make it right, but I’m not sure that it’s entirely wrong either.” He moved in front of me so that we could see each other’s faces. “I’m just a farmer with a good eye for horses. I’m not a scholar or a philosopher, or any of those sorts, but if you ask me, most people aren’t tough enough to put a bunch of strangers ahead of their loved ones. And quite frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to know the sort of person who would.”

  “Tristan would,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “It’s what he wanted me to do.”

  Chris gave me a little shake. “He put your life ahead of everything and everyone – I know for a fact that he sent lots of those half-bloods to their deaths in order to get you out of Trollus alive. And rightly or wrongly, he did it because he loved you too much to let you die.”

  Pulling a slightly grimy handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped my face. It came away bloody. “It seems to me, that no matter what we do, no matter what choices we make, there isn’t a happy ending waiting for us at the end of the long road.” He squared his shoulders and pushed me upright. “But that doesn’t mean we give up. It doesn’t mean we stop fighting.”

  He got to his feet. “I’m going to take this chicken down the road to a family I know could use it. Why don’t you start cleaning up in here?”

  I clung to Chris’s optimism as I set to wiping away the blood splattered across the kitchen, but my heart wasn’t in it. I hated what I was becoming. Every day, I lied and deceived those closest to me. Every time I practiced magic, I broke the law. I was attempting to find a way to unleash a terrifying force onto the world. And for what? To save the life of the one I loved? I cringed at how selfish it seemed, but no matter how many times I played the events at the mouth of the River Road over in my mind, I could not fathom doing anything different.

  Gathering up the bloody rags, I tossed them into the fire. Pulling off my ruined dress, I tossed that in too, before donning my discarded dressing gown. Then I stood in front of the fire, my focus all on Tristan while I watched my dress burn into ash.

  He was excited, which wasn’t an emotion I’d felt from him in a long time. What was he up to? What was he planning? What would he think of what I had just done?

  “You doing all right?”

  I jumped. Chris had come back into the house without me even noticing. “No. I don’t know,” I said.

  He gave me a sympathetic look, then picked up the discarded map.

  “Just burn it,” I said, turning back to the fire. “It’s useless.”

  Chris made a noncommittal grunt. “That’s interesting,” he said.

  “What?” The brightness of the fire was making my eyes sting, but I refused to blink.

  “One of these burns is marking the castle.”

  My heart skipped, my thoughts instantly going to my theory about an alliance between Marie and Anushka.

  “What about the others?” I asked, coming around to look over his shoulder. “Do you recognize any of the other locations?”

  His finger trailed over the surface of the map. “I’m not sure about all of them, but at least ten of these marks are in cemeteries.”

  I met his gaze. “She’s been staying alive all these long years. Maybe this is how.”

  “I think we should go look,” Chris said. “After everything we went through tonight, it seems stupid not go check out what the map is showing us.”

  Anticipation prickled my skin. “You’re right.”

  “Go put on something warm,” Chris said, his cheeks reddening with excitement. “I’ll get our horses – we have a lot of ground to cover tonight.”

  * * *

  The wind blasted bits of snow and sleet against my cheeks as we trotted through the quiet streets, the gas lamps dripping melted snow into their pools of light. Those few who were out kept their heads down and hoods up – their pace that of someone intent on putting a roof over their head and hands before a hearth. I could not recall a time when I’d felt the wind so frigid, the air biting gleefully at any skin that happened to be exposed. I pitied the poor folk in Pigalle who had no homes to flee to, and prayed that the cold snap would end swiftly.

  My mind swirled as I tried to come up with justification for the nineteen marks on the map, but barring me having messed up the spell, there was no explanation other than that there were nineteen other lives tied to hers. Maybe nineteen victims.

  Chris reined his horse in at the gates to the Montmartre cemetery. “What do you think we’ll find?” he asked, dismounting.

  “I have no idea.” But I did know something was here; the earth was drawing me forward, leading me toward one of the spots my filthy bit of spell casting had revealed. Reins in one hand, I pushed open the iron gates and winced at the loud squeal of rusted hinges. “This way.”

  The Montmartre cemetery was below street level, giving the impression it was sunken into the earth. Leaving the horses tethered near the entrance, I led Chris down a set of steps and began to weave my way through the tombs, the statues gracing many of them casting eerie shadows in the light of our lantern. The narrow pathways were slick with ice, and twice I nearly fell, catching myself with the wing of an angel once, and on a marble epitaph the second. Both times I jerked my hand away, feeling as though I’d somehow desecrated the memory of those entombed within.

  “Here,” I said. “It’s this one.” My feet, of their own accord, had led us to a plain tomb that time had worn smooth. I carefully brushed the snow away from the faded etchings and held the light up to reveal a name and two dates. “Estelle Perrot,” I murmured.

  “Do you recognize it?” Chris asked, leaning over my shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. But there are two other locations in this cemetery.”

  Ignoring the icy cold of the wind, I let my feet take me on to a newer section of the yard. The tombs here were more ornate and the writing clearer. I stopped in front of a statue of a hooded woman sitting on the marble top, her head bent. “ ‘Ila Laval. Your sun set far too early,’” I read from the engraving, then reached up to brush some snow from the statue’s arm. “I have no idea what this means.”

  “Is there really a body in there?” Chris asked, resting a hand on the top of the tomb. “Couldn’t it be a false grave? A way of her changing lives without anyone the wiser.”

  “There’s something in there,” I said, not because I thought he was wrong, but because I could sense it in my bones that the tomb contained more than just empty space. “But I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”

  We both stared at the statue for a long moment, then Chris set down the lantern. Bracing his feet against the granite of the next tomb, he shoved against the lid. It didn’t budge. Digging the heels of my boots into the slippery ground, I threw my weight against the slab as Chris pushed. Stone ground against stone, loud even over the wind, but the top of the tomb inched sideways, then it stuck. No amount of pushing moved it any further.

  Panting hard, I retrieved the lantern and tried to angle the light into the narrow crack, but I couldn’t see anything. “Hold this,” I said, passing it to Chris. Then I took a deep breath, and slowly eased my hand into the narrow gap. My pulse throbbed loud in my ears, my breath coming faster and faster as I eased my arm deeper into the tomb.

  “Anything?”

  I shook my head. The stone scraped tight against my skin, but I pressed my weight down and my arm abruptly slid in another few inches, my fingers punching through ancient fabric and into a ribcage.
>
  A shriek forced itself from my lips, and I tried to jerk back, but I was stuck. Chris grabbed me around the waist and heaved me up, but the fabric of my dress bunched and caught. I tried to pull my fingers from the skeleton, but my wrist wouldn’t bend enough, and the body shifted and moved with my jerky motions. “Get me out!”

  He lifted me clear off the ground and pulled. Fabric tore and pain lanced through my arm, but then we were both tumbling back into the snow.

  “What was it?” he demanded, eyes on the gap as though he expected a creature to rise up through it.

  “A body.” My voice was shaking, and I rubbed my sore arm with my other hand.

  Chris’s eyes shifted to me, and he was quiet for a long moment before saying, “City living has changed you.”

  I flushed at his sarcasm, climbing to my feet.

  “Write the names and dates down,” Chris said, going to the far side of the tomb to push the lid back into place. “Maybe once we find them all, we’ll see a pattern.”

  I nodded uncertainly as I scribbled the names and dates on the back of the map with a pencil. “Let’s go find the rest.”

  * * *

  As the night progressed, we found tombs or graves matching all but two of the markings. One lay far to the south of the city, and the other was the location within the castle walls.

  It was nearing the stroke of midnight when we pulled our horses up outside the Regent’s castle. Or at least as near to the castle as we could get. The Indre River roared its way down to the ocean, the bridge leading over it to the island gated, and the walls on the far side guarded by men, marked by the glowing braziers they used to keep themselves warm.

  I’d gained entrance so easily yesterday, but tonight the castle’s fortifications did their duty. “She has to be here,” I said through chattering teeth. “Every other location has been a corpse – it has to be her.”

  “It’s not proof,” Chris said, shaking the map in my face. “There’s the mark located outside the city that we need to investigate, and besides, for all we know, there could be another corpse hidden somewhere in the castle.”