Crimson Bound

by Rosamund Hodge

  Except he was still looking at her with that simple, open gaze. His head had tilted a little to the side, and his lips were slightly parted. He looked like she was a code he was trying to decipher.

  He wasn’t mocking her. He cared about this question. Out of everyone in the room, he was the only one who cared.

  “I think sometimes there is no right thing,” said Rachelle. “What should Zisa have done? Left her brother a captive waiting to be killed and left all mankind enslaved to the forestborn, just so she could pride herself on her clean hands? Or do you think Tyr would have been saved by a miracle?”

  “No,” said Armand.

  “Then what should she have done?”

  His mouth scrunched unhappily, but he didn’t look away. Didn’t laugh. Did not pretend that anything was all right.

  She realized that she actually wanted to know his answer.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted softly.

  She felt like she had just flung herself off a roof and was pitching downward through the air. “So you know what’s wrong but you don’t know what’s right? What use is that?”

  “Well,” said Armand, “it narrows down the options, anyway.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “And at least I know there is an answer, even if I’m going to die without finding it.”

  “You’re a saint. Isn’t God supposed to tell you these things?”

  And then he gave her the familiar, razor-gleam smile that he used to defy her. “Yes. Right after he grows my hands back.”

  They stared at each other a moment longer, and Rachelle realized that her mouth was inexorably twisting into a smile.

  She wished, suddenly and with her whole heart, that she could make him want to help her. But whether he was a saint or a fraud, what could she ever have to offer him?

  IN A CERTAIN VALLEY, BETWEEN THREE LOW hills, there was a marsh. Nothing lived or grew there: no rushes, no moss, no fish, no birds. There was only soft, dark clay, and pale tendrils of mist, and a multitude of cold little pools.

  And bones. A hundred thousand bones and more. For here was where the forestborn threw the spent husks of the Devourer’s vessels.

  Zisa walked among the pools, bones rustling beneath her bare feet. She picked one up, and asked it, “Who are you?”

  The bone sang to her:

  “My mother, she killed me,

  My father, he ate me.

  I once had a name,

  But now I have none.”

  And so sang every bone she asked.

  Back and forth Zisa wandered the marsh, sliding into pools, clawing through the mud, and asking every bone its name. Until at last, near the very center, she found a bone that sang,

  “My sister, she killed me,

  My sister, she ate me.

  My sister, I loved her,

  And her I remember.”

  “Tell me,” said Zisa, “what was your sister’s name?”

  “She was Joyeuse,” said the bone. “But she offered me to the Devourer, and I do not know what happened to her after.”

  Then Zisa cried out, “Tell me, bones. Which one of you was named Joyeuse?”

  But there was no answer.

  Again, Zisa cried, “I command you, bones, to tell me: which one of you offered your brother as a sacrifice?”

  From the farthest edge of the marsh, a tiny, dry voice sang out:

  “My brother, I killed him,

  My brother, I ate him.

  My brother, he loved me,

  Too late have I loved him.”

  Zisa found the other bone and kissed it. “Tell me, Joyeuse,” she said. “What was your brother’s name?”

  “His name was Durendal,” said the bone.

  “Tell me, bones,” said Zisa. “Would you like to destroy the Devourer?”

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

  Near the end of the salon, one of Erec’s lackeys turned up to whisper a message that made him rise swiftly, kiss Rachelle’s hand, bow to the entire company, and leave. Doubtless it was time for him to arrest someone, or else meet a particularly beautiful lady.

  So Rachelle and Armand were able to walk back by themselves, and as soon as they were away from the biggest crowds, Armand drew her into a small alcove.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said softly, so that the servants standing near couldn’t hear them. “Why do you want to find that door?”

  He was a liar. She knew he was a liar, but right now he looked as simply and wholeheartedly earnest as he had in the salon, arguing about when it was all right to stab your sister through the heart.

  So she decided to tell him a bit of the truth.

  “To protect Amélie,” she said. His eyebrows drew together. “My friend,” she added hastily. “The girl who applies my cosmetics.”

  “I know her name,” said Armand. “But that’s not an answer.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what you’re getting. Help me, and you’ll find out the rest.”

  They regarded each other silently for a few moments.

  “Why haven’t you threatened Raoul?” he asked.

  “What?” asked Rachelle.

  “Raoul Courtavel. The only member of the royal house I care about.” He was almost whispering, to keep from being overheard; in the small alcove, they were standing practically shoulder to shoulder. “Why haven’t you threatened him to make me cooperate?”

  He was looking at her directly, defiantly, but his body was tense, as if he were bracing himself for when she attacked.

  Rachelle felt suddenly sick.

  “I’m a monster and murderer,” she said quietly, “but I’m not going to kill your half brother to make you help me. I don’t want to kill anyone. I never wanted to be a monster either. That is the last thing I ever wanted. But we don’t always get what we want, and—and—” She managed to choke back the flow of words. She was humiliatingly certain that she had been about to beg him, to say please, please, just help me.

  “All right,” said Armand. “I’ll help you.”

  Rachelle stared at him. She had been concentrating so hard on not pleading with him that it took her a moment to understand what he’d said.

  “You will?” she finally said, and hoped she didn’t sound too relieved.

  He grinned. “I suppose I’ve got nothing to lose. And I don’t believe I’m supposed to be anywhere else this afternoon.”

  Rachelle nodded, feeling dizzy. “As soon as I change out of this dress.”

  Half an hour later, Rachelle was back in her normal hunting clothes and they were striding down the hallway together.

  “I wish the story was a little more exact than ‘above the sun, below the moon,’” said Rachelle. “Every surface in this place is covered in the sun and moon. It’s not helpful.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Armand. “Looking at the decoration’s useless because every room in the Château’s been redecorated, oh, at least twice in the last hundred years.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Everybody knows that,” Armand said easily, then looked at her. “At least, everybody whose mother was banished from the court and comforted herself with creating doll-sized models of the Château,” he amended. “So I can assure you that while parts of the building are quite old, none of the rooms look the same as they did in Prince Hugo’s day.”

  “That’s why you’re going to use your gift,” said Rachelle.

  “Yes,” said Armand, “but first we’re going to the library.”

  “Why?” she asked. “You think the door is in there?”

  “No,” he said calmly, “but there are books in there, and a lot of them are chronicles or memoirs. There might be something that could help.”

  “I thought you could see the Forest.”

  He sighed. “Yes, but it’s not hung with signs saying, ‘This way to the
secret door.’ I would probably see something if we walked right past the door, but as you might have noticed, this is a rather large Château and it would take us a while to walk through all the rooms.”

  “As if reading all the books would be any faster,” Rachelle muttered. Just the thought of trying to puzzle through book after book made her head hurt. Aunt Léonie had taught her to read when she became her apprentice, but she had never been very good at it. “Don’t you think that if the door’s location were written down, somebody else would have found it already?”

  “I don’t think it’s written down,” said Armand. “I think maybe some hints are written down, which nobody would have paid any attention to because nobody is interested in Prince Hugo except the people on my mother’s estate. And you.”

  His words made sense. But in the end, they weren’t what made her give in. It was the memory of Armand leaning forward as he argued about Tyr and Zisa. Everything he said had been foolish and sanctimonious and wrong, but he had been the only person in that room who cared.

  “All right,” she said. “If you think you can find it that way, then try. But you’re doing the reading.”

  The library was probably the most modest room in the entire Château, or at least the most modest room that any of the nobility would be caught dead in. There were murals on the ceiling, but the bookshelves lining the walls were made of plain wood. Spurs of lower bookshelves ran out from the walls, dividing the room into seven bays on each side. Afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows.

  Armand strode halfway down the room, stopped, and peered intently at the shelves. He traced his hand along the spines of the books, fingers glinting in the sunlight, and then came to a stop at a fat red book. Rachelle stepped forward to pull it off the shelf for him, but before she could, he had tipped it back with his finger and caught it—awkwardly but securely—between his forearms.

  “What’s that?” asked Rachelle.

  “It’s the diary of a lady who lived at the court a hundred years ago,” said Armand. “Madame du Choissy. She was the niece of the king, but she later married a minor nobleman and disappeared into the countryside.”

  There was a table in the center of the room; he set the book down with a thump, and Rachelle stepped closer with the lamp.

  “And how does that help us?” she asked.

  “She was obsessed with legends of the Great Forest.” Armand flipped the cover of the book open. “And legends surrounding the royal line. If there were any more tales about Prince Hugo in those days, she would know them.”

  His eyes were already tracing the text of the book; his voice had gone vague and distracted. He looked and sounded exactly like he was absorbed in looking for an answer, and the very innocence in the set of his shoulders made suspicion worm through Rachelle’s stomach.

  The book was handwritten in old, elaborate letters. He could claim the pages said anything he chose, and she’d never know the difference.

  She leaned closer. “How convenient that you knew about that specific book just as soon as we needed help.”

  “Mm,” said Armand.

  Her hands slammed down on the table beside him. “How did you know about it?”

  He looked up then. A strand of his pale brown hair had fallen between his eyes—he didn’t wear it neatly curled like so many men of the court. It made him look more real, even now, when he was wearing the bland expression that she had learned was his armor.

  “Because I was reading her diary last time I was at Château de Lune,” he said. “Right up until I met a forestborn and got a little bit distracted.”

  “You went to Château de Lune and spent your time in the library?”

  “Nearly every day,” said Armand. “I learned pretty quickly that memorizing my mother’s library hadn’t actually taught me how to act in a court, and all the lessons she gave me were twenty years old. La Fontaine was the only person who didn’t laugh at me.”

  “And then you taught them all a lesson.”

  His mouth quirked. “I really don’t think anyone at court has learned anything. Are you done being suspicious now, or do you want to search me for deadly weapons?”

  “You are a weapon,” Rachelle muttered, remembering the adoration of the people at his audience and the growing resentment she saw in the streets of Rocamadour every day.

  “True enough.” His voice had gone colorless; he looked down at the table. After a moment, he asked, “How is finding that door going to help you? Are you having trouble getting into the Forest on your own?”

  “If I asked,” she said quietly and distinctly, “the Great Forest would open up to me this instant, and I could walk into it and have the forestborn finish making me into one of them.”

  “Then are you trying to escape them?”

  He looked up at her again. Sunlight dappled his face, catching at his cheekbones and glowing through his eyelashes. She couldn’t read his expression, but she almost thought he looked hopeful.

  “Don’t imagine,” she said, “that I am anything so kind as you pretend to be.”

  If he really was a saint, if he was fool enough to have hope, then she was going to destroy it. The kind of hope that saints had didn’t exist, and she wanted to ruin him. She wanted to drag him into darkness and crush and rend and break him, until all the hope went out of his eyes and there was nothing, nothing, nothing left for anyone to hope.

  The air was sweet and cold on her skin. Like the air in the Great Forest.

  She turned away abruptly. “Keep reading,” she said, and strode toward the other end of the library. Her joints felt slick and shaky. The hunger for destruction was gone, but she felt hollowed out in its absence.

  It was the hunger for the Great Forest. The hunger to become one of the forestborn. The hunger to become more and infinitely more like the Devourer, until there was nothing left in her that remembered being human.

  Someday she would lose herself to it. She had always known this. She had mostly stopped fearing it. But now she was almost sick with fear, because she couldn’t lose herself when she was so close, when she finally had a chance to fight the Devourer and win.

  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 mo
ment. “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.