Crimson Bound (7 page)

“I refuse to spend the rest of my life at Château de Lune,” said Rachelle.

“Why not?” asked Erec. “Since you’ll have to actually attend court functions, you’ll see such a lot of
me
.”

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HarperCollins Publishers

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T
hat afternoon, Armand gave an audience so the people of Rocamadour could grovel at his feet. Rachelle had orders to serve as his escort, whether because the King was taking no chances or because Erec wanted to torment her, she wasn’t sure.

It was just as awful as she had expected.

They held the audience in the wide square in front of the cathedral. There wasn’t a scrap of shade; heat shimmered off the cobblestones. Armand sat on a little folding stool. To his left was an oriflamme banner, so that people wouldn’t forget his presence
was a gift from the King. To his right was a painting of the Dayspring, so that people wouldn’t forget he was holy. It was hideous. Most paintings showed the Dayspring resurrected, or at least as a not-too-bloody severed head in the arms of his weeping mother. This showed the gory jumble of limbs into which he’d been hacked by the soldiers of the Imperium.

Flies buzzed as if drawn by the painted blood, but Rachelle had to stand still and tall and menacing as a vast line of people crawled forward to see Armand. They blessed his name; they wanted him to bless them. They brought babies and lame boys and blind old women, and they begged for healing. They brought rosaries and tried to touch them to his wrists, so they would have relics to protect them against the encroaching darkness.

The nobility might pretend that the shrinking daylight hours were no more than an aberration, but the common people knew. Some of them had brought clumsy little yarn weavings for Armand to touch—the fake woodwife charms sold in the marketplace. They wouldn’t do a thing to protect anyone against the power of the Forest, but city folk didn’t know any better. And they were desperate.

That was why they thronged to meet Armand. They hoped his holiness would protect them.

And Armand used that hope against them. He squinted against the sunlight and gave them smiles that looked brave and self-mocking at once. When an old woman begged him to pray for her health, because surely God would hear the prayers of a saint, he shook his head and said, “I’m nothing. Certainly not a saint. But I will pray for you.” The old woman sobbed, and Rachelle knew she had just decided he was the greatest saint since la Madeleine.

He was playing them as expertly as a court musician played a violin. And Rachelle was helping. She was also keeping him under control so he couldn’t turn his false heroism into a crown, but she was still
helping
him.

She hoped that when Endless Night fell, the forestborn hunted him first.

The audience lasted nearly two hours. By the end, Rachelle was starting to feel dizzy from the heat. Armand didn’t look much better. So as soon as the other guards started to push the crowd away, she hauled Armand to his feet by his collar, dragged him into the nearest tavern, and demanded a private room and a pitcher of beer at once.

There were times when being one of the King’s bloodbound had its advantages. A few moments later, they were in an upstairs room that was quiet and out of the sunlight.

As soon as the door had shut behind them, Armand let out a sigh. Then in two quick,
expert movements he had hooked his metal thumbs under his cuffs and pulled them up, revealing leather straps that ran up his forearms to loop around his elbows. Large metal buckles held them together in the center; in a few moments he had unlatched them with his teeth, and the hands clattered to the ground. Underneath, his stumps were covered in two little knitted socks; he pulled them off with his teeth.

Clearly he didn’t intend to be the one who picked up his hands. Wearily, Rachelle reached for the nearest one. But when her fingers touched the metal, she flinched. The silver hand was shockingly hot.

“Imagine my surprise on the first sunny day that I wore them,” said Armand.

She remembered the blinding glitter of sunlight on his silver hands. At the time, she’d only thought of it as one more gaudy extravagance that showed his hypocrisy.

“If they hurt that much,” she said, “don’t wear them.”

Armand was by the pitcher; the loop of its handle was just wide enough that he’d managed to slide his stump inside. Rachelle watched in fascination as he tilted the pitcher to pour himself a cup of beer, then lifted the cup by wedging it between his wrists.

She’d seen people missing limbs before, but it still felt like stuttering when her eyes ran down the length of his arm to . . . nothing.

Her stomach twisted. She didn’t believe his story. She
didn’t.
But in all the times that she’d dismissed him as a liar, she’d never thought about how—whatever the truth—he had suffered
something.

He set down the cup. “If I don’t wear the hands, then they want to kiss the stumps. I’d rather burn.”

“You could just not display yourself for worship,” Rachelle snapped.

His mouth twisted. “Do you think the King would allow me to stop? If I weren’t sitting next to his banner every week, people might start to imagine that His Majesty wasn’t entirely holy.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you became a saint.”

He showed his teeth. “The way you thought things through before you became a bloodbound?”

For a moment she was back in Aunt Léonie’s house, the blood hot and sticky on her hands, and she felt sick and dirty and furious.

“Do not,” said Rachelle, “presume to tell
me
what it means to be a bloodbound. You haven’t even met a forestborn.”

He tilted his head. “You really think that?” He didn’t look like someone whose secret was threatened. He looked wary but curious.

“You really I’m fool enough to believe you?”

His mouth curved up. “You were fool enough to say yes to a forestborn.”

The next thing she knew, she had slammed him against the wall. “Don’t try me.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “You can’t kill me, and I’m running out of limbs to cut off.”

“I don’t have to kill you to make you sorry” Rachelle snapped, and then her throat closed up as she realized what she’d said.

Her forestborn hadn’t had to kill Aunt Léonie either.

She let go of him and stumbled back a step. She knew there wasn’t any blood pooled across the floor, but she could still smell it. The scar on her right hand ached.

Armand was still watching her. He had to see how off balance she was, but he didn’t mock her. Instead, he went on, musingly, “If you can wait until Château de Lune, you could always have a try at losing me above the sun, below the moon. Though the King and d’Anjou might have something to say about that.”

Her whole body sparked with cold white fire. “What did you say?”

“Well, it’s still—”

She whirled back on him. “‘Above the sun, below the moon.’
Why did you say that?
”

He looked at her as if she were babbling nonsense. “Because it would be a way to get rid of me. Only nobody really believes that story, so I wouldn’t actually advise you to mention it after you hide my body.”

“What story?”

“The story of Prince Hugo and the missing door,” he said. “You don’t know it?”

“Of course I know that story,” said Rachelle. “He found a way into the Forest from the Château and it ate him, and that’s when they put so many protections on the spot.”

Supposedly, those protections hadn’t extended far enough into the gardens of the Château to keep Armand from meeting a forestborn. Actually, he was a liar, so it was probably stupid of her to listen to anything he said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Is that how they tell it where you come from?”

“Yes, Monsieur Most Educated, that’s how they tell it. Now tell me your version.”

“Well,” he said, drawing out the word as he gave her a dubious look, “long ago, the king of Gévaudan had a son named Hugo, who could never be content unless he was adventuring. He spent so much time wandering the forest that his father began to fear
that he would become a bloodbound. Finally the king forbade him to leave Château de Lune for a month. At first Prince Hugo was much upset, but then he seemed to grow content. And then he started to vanish for days at a time. The king thought he had broken the ban, but when he questioned his son, Prince Hugo laughed and said that he had found his own forest within the Château’s walls. He said it lay beyond a door above the sun and below the moon that would open only to his hands, and it would make him the greatest hunter the world had ever known. After that night, no one ever saw him again.”

“Did they find where he had gone?” asked Rachelle.

“No,” said Armand. “But the next year, in my mother’s province out west—this is why I know the story—they found a skeleton with his signet ring upon its finger. If it was him, and how he came to be there, nobody knows.”

When Rachelle looked at him, he met her eyes. He seemed more curious than anything, as if he genuinely didn’t know why she was so interested in a single turn of phrase.

It was too convenient. The moment she was assigned to watch over him—the moment she needed Joyeuse more than anything—he dangled her lost hope in front of her? It had to be a trick.

But nobody among the bloodbound or the court had ever heard her question people about the door—she knew that, because if somebody had, Erec would have heard about it and teased her. Armand couldn’t possibly know what this story meant to her.

And it actually seemed plausible. She had never been to Château de Lune, the country palace that lay twenty miles outside Rocamadour. But while now it was a glittering garden of delights for the nobility, once it had been a hunting lodge from which the kings of old would ride out to destroy woodspawn. Ancient charms protected the spot, but it was not impossible that the Château might also have a hidden door into the Forest. And it made sense that such a door would only open to members of the royal house, who had inherited Tyr’s power against the Great Forest.

It didn’t sound much like the door that Aunt Léonie had described. But even that made a sort of sense. Suppose the door didn’t open directly on the Forest, but had some sort of . . . entryway. The power of the Forest would hide the power of Joyeuse from the ability of woodwives to sense it. That was
exactly
what someone hiding the sword from Mad King Louis would want, because he had used captive woodwives to hunt down and destroy charms and magical artifacts.

It was a wild guess, a slim chance. But with the Devourer’s return so close, any chance was worth taking.

“Why do you care?” asked Armand, something shifting in his voice. He sounded almost suspicious.

“Because I like stories about fools who get eaten by the Great Forest,” she said.

She needed someone of the royal line to open the door. But the less she told Armand, the less chance he’d have to scheme.

“And mysterious doors,” said Armand.

She grinned. “Maybe I’ll find it and throw you in.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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T
he apothecary’s shop always made Rachelle feel like a great lumbering wild animal. The walls were lined with shelves and cupboards full of tiny, gleaming jars. Little sprays of dried herbs hung by ribbons and swayed in the draft. Everywhere were tiny white labels written in Madame Guignon’s minuscule hand. Sometimes Rachelle felt that it would all shatter if she breathed.

If she didn’t find Joyeuse, it would shatter before the year was out.

“Good morning,” said Madame Guignon, barely looking up from the herbs that she was sorting into piles with swift, sure movements. She was a short, gaunt woman, but somehow she still managed to seem like the tower of a castle.

“Good morning,” said Rachelle. “Is Amélie here?”