Crimson Bound

by Rosamund Hodge

  She’d dropped her sword. She couldn’t see it.

  So she reached up with her free hand and slid it into the woodspawn’s eye socket. It was scalding hot, but she clenched her fist on the slimy mess and ripped it out.

  The woodspawn howled, letting go of her arm. She rolled free, found her sword, and stabbed it three times.

  Panting, she looked around. There were only two more woodspawn left. One of them was already injured and surrounded by a crowd of men with scythes; they could probably manage to kill it.

  The other one was crouched atop the roof of a cottage.

  Rachelle groaned. She could barely use her right arm, but she clambered up the side of the house and hauled herself onto the roof—just as the woodspawn sprang at her. She grabbed it by the scruff and they went over the side of the house together. Luckily she landed on top; she felt its ribs crunch underneath, and that bought her an extra moment to grab her sword and slice its head off.

  She staggered to her feet.

  The first thing she looked for was the other woodspawn. It was dead, only a puddle of dark, viscous mud left to mark its passing. The men that had been attacking it turned to face her.

  Everyone was staring at her.

  Something was wrong. She could hardly think past the pounding in her head and the pain in her arm, but something was wrong.

  She looked for Armand: he was safe, standing to one side, eyes wide. That was good. But there was still something not right about the crowd of people staring at her.

  They could see the black fleur-de-lis on her coat. They knew she was a bloodbound. People always stared at her when they realized she was bloodbound—

  And then she realized. All the people staring at her—she knew them. Claude, the baker. André, the blacksmith. Jean, the hunter.

  Her father.

  This was her village. The Wild Hunt had brought her home to face judgment.

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  When Rachelle was seven years old, she slipped into Aunt Léonie’s house while she was out. She put on her aunt’s spare cloak, got into her yarn, and pretended to weave charms. When Aunt Léonie came back early and raised her eyebrows, the shame had felt like scalding-hot water poured over every bit of her body.

  She felt that way now: like an idiotic child caught playing pretend. For one moment, all she wanted to do was drop her sword, strip off her coat, and slink back into her family’s house and scrub the floor until she was forgiven.

  Then she heard the crackle of the burning house. She remembered what people in the countryside did to bloodbound.

  She was not a child anymore. There was not going to be any forgiveness.

  And right now, she couldn’t accept judgment.

  Her head still ached. Her arm burned with pain. But the icy calm of a fight was seeping over her skin. She tightened her grip on her sword.

  “Everybody stay back,” she said. “Armand, get over here.”

  Instantly she realized that she had just told them whom to take hostage, but since none of them were Erec, maybe it wouldn’t occur to them at once.

  Armand started to step forward; she saw the people noticing him for the first time, wondering who the other stranger was.

  “Here’s what will happen,” she snapped, because she couldn’t let them pay enough attention to realize Armand was defenseless. “My friend and I will leave. You stay here. Nobody gets hurt.”

  “Who are you?” called out Claude, and for a moment Rachelle couldn’t breathe. Of course they didn’t know her, she was just another faceless bloodbound now, and if only she’d had the wit to pretend—

  “Rachelle Brinon?” said André. He was a big, bluff man and confusion looked utterly strange on his face.

  She saw the recognition ripple across the faces in the crowd, saw the shift in their stances as they realized she was dangerous. An enemy.

  She didn’t see her father; he must have fled as soon as he recognized her.

  She raised her sword. “I will kill you all if you give me any trouble,” she declared, but inside she was shaking with terror. She couldn’t hurt these people she’d known all her life.

  She couldn’t die here. She still had to find Joyeuse.

  Then suddenly Armand was between her and the crowd. “Nobody’s fighting,” he said, pressing his back against her and grabbing her arm. “Nobody is fighting anyone without going through me.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Rachelle demanded.

  She felt his back stiffen. “If they want to punish you for shedding innocent blood, they can hardly cut through me to do it.”

  “Did nobody teach you how vengeance works?”

  “Besides, I doubt I’d survive walking back through the woods on my own, so if they want you dead, then this will save time, really.”

  “Stand back!” a woman called out. A moment later, the crowd parted.

  Aunt Léonie stepped out.

  For one sick, horrifying moment, that was whom she saw. Then she realized that the woman clad in white and red was too tall to be Aunt Léonie; her hair was too light, her face too pointy. It was just another woodwife.

  “I will deal with them,” she said.

  André grabbed her by the arm. “You don’t understand, it’s—”

  She gave him a single look and he let go. “I understand perfectly,” she said. “This is the girl from your village who murdered my predecessor and became a bloodbound. Is that not so?” She looked around at the crowd. “Then I have the right, don’t I, to administer justice in this matter?”

  Silence. Nobody moved as the woman strode forward toward Rachelle.

  “Mademoiselle,” said Armand, “she just helped save your village. And she has saved a lot of other people in the last few years. It doesn’t seem right to repay her with death.”

  “She killed the previous woodwife of this village,” said the woman. “Did you know that?”

  “I knew she was bloodbound,” said Armand. “The person she murdered had to come from somewhere.”

  “You have the right to kill me,” said Rachelle. Her voice felt like a great length of rusty iron chains. “But I can’t die right now. So I will fight my way out if I must.”

  The woman looked her up and down. “I don’t intend to kill you,” she said. “I know what would happen to this village if we killed the King’s bloodbound. But you will come to my house and speak with me before you leave.”

  “I won’t go back to that house,” said Rachelle.

  “We burned that house,” said the woodwife. “Did you think anything human could bear to live in it again? They built me a new one when I came here.”

  The new house was closer than Aunt Léonie’s had been, just on the other side of the village wall. “It’s too dangerous, now, to live further away,” Aunt Léonie had said.

  Rachelle was hardly paying attention at that point. Between exhaustion and the still-bleeding wound in her arm, she could barely see straight.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said, and then lay down on the floor without waiting for an answer. Nobody kicked her, so she supposed it must be all right. She fell asleep almost instantly.

  When she awoke the next morning, the woodwife was sitting beside her, watching her with a narrow, unyielding gaze. Behind her was the normal clutter of a woodwife’s house: spindles and baskets of wool. Bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling, and in between them many-colored charms, like woolen snowflakes. It was so comfortingly familiar that for a moment she almost felt safe.

  Then she realized who was missing.

  She bolted up. “Where’s Armand?”

  The woodwife waved a hand. “Your friend? Safe. Outside. I didn’t want him hearing us.”

  “I remember, you said you wanted to speak with me.” Rachelle paused. “Thank you for last night.”

  “It wasn’t for you.”

&nb
sp; “Who are you?” asked Rachelle.

  The woodwife handed her a bowl of porridge and a spoon. “My name is Margot Dumont,” she said. “I apprenticed beside Léonie and I do not intend to forgive you for her death.”

  Rachelle’s hand clenched on the spoon. “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “No.” Margot nodded in acknowledgment. “I need to know, and on whatever honor you have left, I charge you not to lie: What did she tell you about Durendal?”

  “Nothing,” said Rachelle, and took a bite of the porridge. It tasted like her childhood, and her throat ached with tears.

  “Nothing?”

  “Just what everyone knows. That it was Zisa’s sword, forged from the bones of the Devourer’s victims. That it was lost. That’s all.” One spoonful had made her hungry; Rachelle gulped down the rest of the porridge.

  Margot watched her eat. When Rachelle had finished, she said, “Léonie knew where it was.”

  “What?”

  “It was her duty to know where it was. She was entrusted with it by the woodwife who trained us. You were her apprentice; she must have told you.”

  “She never told me anything,” said Rachelle. “She never did anything, just—”

  Just, she realized, guarded Durendal. Rachelle had despised her aunt for doing nothing when she was protecting a weapon that could kill the Devourer.

  The porridge turned to stone in her stomach.

  Margot sighed through her nose. “Then I will continue searching,” she said. “And you—what brings you back here? An errand for the King? Or did you just need to look at the sight of your triumph?”

  Rachelle set the bowl down. “No,” she said flatly, “I was looking for Joyeuse. You don’t happen to know anything about it?”

  They stared at each other for a few moments. Then Margot snorted and looked away. “No more than anyone else. Behind a door above the sun, below the moon.”

  “I know,” said Rachelle. “I found the door. There’s a lindenworm on the other side.”

  Margot raised her eyebrows. “Indeed.”

  “Do you know how to kill one?”

  “I have heard it said that the blood of an innocent virgin could lull them to sleep,” Margot said musingly. “But you might find that hard to obtain, and I doubt that tale anyway.”

  Rachelle strangled the sudden fury in her throat and said quietly, “Try to remember that killing that lindenworm could save us from the Devourer.”

  “No human hands can kill a lindenworm,” said Margot, as placidly as if they were discussing the best way to stitch a hem.

  “I thought la Pucelle killed one?” Rachelle demanded.

  “I believe she had angels helping her. You do not.” Margot paused, pursing her lips. “Perhaps you never learned this rule: the most powerful creatures can only be touched by the most terrible charms—or the most simple. I don’t believe there is a woodwife alive who could weave a charm strong enough to stop a lindenworm, but I suppose a simple charm might beguile it for a little while.”

  “Do you think that could work?” asked Rachelle.

  “No,” Margot said coolly. “I think if you try to fight that lindenworm, it will swallow you whole, and you will feel the flesh melt off your bones as you die. But you deserve as much and more besides, so I will not try to dissuade you from trying.”

  Rachelle stared at her. She thought, Armand would probably laugh at that, and then she had to smother her own urge to laugh wildly.

  Margot took the bowl and rose. “I won’t let the village burn you, but you’d better be off now before it gets difficult.”

  Rachelle nodded and rose to her feet. She went to the door, opened it, and couldn’t move.

  Her mother stood on the front step.

  How had she changed so much? Rachelle remembered her mother as a towering, imperious figure—not this slight woman with a sagging face.

  “So,” said her mother.

  Rachelle couldn’t speak. It used to be that one glance from her mother would make her stammer and confess what she’d done wrong. Now her very existence was the confession. There would be no forgiving hug after her punishment, because there was nothing left of her but the sin.

  “Your father was weeping in the loft all night,” said her mother. “On and on about his darling precious daughter. He never believed you’d done it, you know; he swore the forestborn must have kidnapped you, and that was why you never came back.”

  After all the nights she’d spent agonizing over what her father would think, it should have been a comfort that he still loved her. It wasn’t.

  “You believed,” Rachelle whispered.

  Her mother smiled mirthlessly, her gaze drifting away. “I know quite well what daughters will do when they must.” Then she looked back at Rachelle. “When he wakes, he won’t believe this happened. He’ll swear it was only a lying forestborn who looked like his daughter. You won’t ever come back so he won’t ever have to learn the truth. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Rachelle said numbly. She couldn’t tell what she was feeling. She had imagined a thousand nightmare situations that might happen if she ever went back to her village. But she had never imagined anything like this.

  Neither one of her parents hated her the way that Margot did, the way the rest of the villagers did. They simply didn’t want her to exist.

  “You won’t come back?”

  “Never,” said Rachelle. “I will die first. I promise.”

  “Good.” Her mother opened her mouth, then shut it, and turned to stride away.

  Rachelle’s chest hurt. She took a step after her.

  “Mother,” she called out.

  Her mother stopped. Without looking back, she said, “Yes?”

  Rachelle didn’t know what she was going to say until the words formed in her mouth. “Thank you. For asking me to help.”

  “I knew you lived,” her mother said after a moment. “Any daughter of mine would be ruthless enough.”

  She found Armand sitting in the herb garden. The morning sunlight glowed through his hair; he looked at peace in a way she didn’t think he had anywhere in the Château.

  “I like it here,” he said. “It’s quiet. Nobody knows who I am.”

  And then she felt it again: the sudden, sharp awareness of wanting to touch him, of the space between them as an open wound, of her own body being jumbled and awkward and far too separate when she could be pressed against him, waist to waist and chin to shoulder and her fingers sliding into that pale brown hair—

  Her face was hot. She took a step back, thinking, He isn’t yours. He will never be yours. He will never, ever want you.

  “Even they will figure it out sooner or later,” she said. “When they get a look at you in daylight, for instance. Get up. We’re going.”

  He stood. “Mademoiselle Dumont—what did she want to talk about?”

  Aunt Léonie could have stopped the Devourer, and Rachelle had killed her, and now nobody would ever find Durendal.

  Or maybe her forestborn had already found it and destroyed it. That must have been why he was sniffing around the village to begin with. Maybe if Rachelle had told Aunt Léonie when she first met him, they could have stopped him. They could have saved Durendal. They could have saved the world.

  “Nothing important,” she said, and grabbed his arm. “Come on.” She started to drag him toward the edge of the trees.

  “Is your family here?” asked Armand. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to them?”

  She didn’t know if the ache in her chest was grief or freedom. Maybe they were the same.

  “I did,” said Rachelle.

  ZISA CARRIED THE BONES TO A GREAT YEW TREE. Beneath its roots there was a cave, and in the cave there was a forge, and chained to the forge was a man with a smile like dried blood and glowing embers.

  This was Volund, the crippled smith. He had once loved a forestborn maiden, and so much did he delight her that for seven years she stayed beside him. But one night she heard the hun
ting horns of her people and rose to follow them. Before she had taken three steps, he struck her dead.

  In recompense, the forestborn hamstrung him, chained him, and made him undying as themselves, an everlasting slave to craft their swords and spears and arrows.

  “Old man,” said Zisa, “I must have two swords made out of these bones.”

  “Little girl,” said Volund, “I must obey the forestborn, but not you.”

  “And when I am one of them, I will remember you said that,” she replied.

  He laughed like a rusty hinge. “And much I have left for anyone to take from me. But you, I think, have the whole world to lose.” He looked her up and down. “I will make you a bargain. Give me the delights of your proud body twice, and I will make you two swords such as the world will never see again.”

  There was nothing she would not do for her brother.

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  “Do you have a plan?” asked Armand as they walked into the woods. They were not in the Great Forest yet, but the shadows cast by the trees were a little longer and darker than they should be in the daytime.

  “Yes,” said Rachelle.

  Like a trickle of blood, the thread lay on the ground before her. If she followed it, then she should find her forestborn at the other end.

  He wanted her to live. So if she gave him a choice between leading her back to the Château and watching her perish in the Great Forest, surely he would help her.

  But if she told Armand that, he might ask her why she was so sure that her forestborn wanted her to live.

  “Is the plan ‘walk into the Forest and hope to meet the Wild Hunt again’?” asked Armand. “Because I’m not sure how likely that is to work.”

  “Well,” said Rachelle, thinking of the lindenworm, “maybe there will be a miracle to save us. Since those always happen for people who deserve them.”

  “I already told you,” Armand said mildly, “I don’t believe that.”