The Swan Maiden (28 page)

Doucette drew back. “How so, Sieur Nicolau?”

Still holding her hand, the nobleman sank gracefully to one knee. “Lady Doucette, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

“What?” Doucette stared at him.

“No, don't answer immediately. I've startled you, I see. Only consider, dear lady, what we might accomplish, between my connections and your Arts. Why should you languish in the wilderness, when you could ornament the entire realm as comtesse or duchess—nay, as a queen!”

“But, Sieur Nicolau, I don't trust—I don't
know
you,” Doucette stammered, surprised into speaking the awkward truth.

“Know me? Trust me?” He laughed gently. “Your pardon, Lady Doucette. Such charming frankness deserves an honest response. You may trust me to further both our interests, far better than, shall we say, a shepherd ever could?” He winked at her alarm.

“Your little adventure is the talk of Donsatrelle. But now that your former swain is to marry a Vent'roux girl—”

“What?” Doucette said again, even more stupidly than she had the first time.

“I thought,” Sieur Nicolau squeezed her palm, “that you might welcome a suitor who could restore you to the world's admiration and your family's esteem.”

Though Sieur Nicolau blathered on, Doucette didn't hear the rest of it.

Jaume was to wed?

A cold fog filled her chest; she couldn't breathe. Her hands tightened over Sieur Nicolau's until he winced. She wrenched away from him and jumped up from her bench to pace back and forth between the fire and the door. She hoped the motion would hide the trembling that had started in her stomach and spread to her arms and legs.

After the shock, anger swelled inside her. Potent as magic, it coursed through her body and stopped the shaking.

The spirit Lavena had said that Doucette lacked pride, but she could summon enough to hide her true feelings from this titled opportunist, this—this—velvet vulture who hovered at her hearth. If Sieur Nicolau thought to wound her with his sly announcement and then sway her will with his fine manners and easy compliments, he was mistaken.

“You have me at a disadvantage, Sieur Nicolau,” Doucette said. Her voice sounded calm, as if it came from a woman standing outside the inferno of Doucette's heart and mind, speaking the words good manners required. “As you say, your suit is unexpected. Perhaps we could talk more in the morning?”

“Certainly.” Sieur Nicolau's smirk broadened, fanning the flames of Doucette's silent rage.

He dared imagine he could twist her to his will, but he would repent his presumption! A sorceress was nobody's toy, least of all this pompous courtier's, with his pretty clothes and his silky condescension.

Doucette paused, her hand by the door, and bent her head.

Bolt, strong bolt,

stick fast to his hand,

lock and unlock

until I release thee.

The surge of magic made her clutch the doorframe for balance, but Doucette felt a savage delight in the strength of the spell streaming through her.

Haughty Sieur Nicolau might not enjoy experiencing a sorceress's true power as much as he imagined.

“Your pardon, Lady Doucette?”

“This bolt is stuck,” she said. “Would you be so kind as to pull it closed?”

“As you wish, dear lady,” he answered.

But the moment he shot the bolt home, the iron bar reversed course. Sieur Nicolau closed it. Again it opened, dragging his arm to one side. He chuckled uneasily. “Ahem. This bolt seems to possess a mind of its own.”

“As do I,” Doucette purred.

The nobleman's face changed as he realized that he could neither remove his hand from the bolt, nor still its motion. He tried, but the bolt jerked his unwilling arm from side to side. “Lady Doucette,” he said sternly, “it is ill done, to tease me.”

The hauteur that glazed Sieur Nicolau's features would have been more convincing, Doucette thought, without the sweat beads dotting his brow. The pompous lordling imagined it his duty to instruct her in manners?

She curtsied with an elaborate flourish. “Good night,” she replied, and left him before a worse punishment occurred to her.

The tide of anger and magic swept her down the corridor to her bedchamber. Blinded by the tears that burned her lashes, Doucette didn't see candles slumping into wax puddles as she brushed past the wall sconces.

Her head was ringing with remembered voices. Na Claro's quavered with emotion. “Our sweetness has found a husband to treasure her.”

“Their promises are not to be trusted,” Tante Mahalt said, low and urgent, while Jaume's voice held tender laughter.

“You're the only one I'm kissing.”

The only one.
The only one.
The lie echoed behind her eyes.

“No!” Doucette said aloud and pushed aside the bed curtains. At her touch, a silk panel smoldered, then sparked like the green branch of feather-pine it had once been.

Doucette threw up her hands in surprise.

Overhead, the bed's canopy rippled into a sheet of fire. Doucette jumped back to avoid the burning clumps of blackened needles that dropped to the coverlet. In an instant, the rest of the linens, too, were burning.

Entranced, Doucette watched the flames consume her bed.

She spun to the left and her hand stabbed out, dashing scent bottles and jeweled gloves and colored ribbons to the floor. Flames leaped, emerald and apricot at their heart. The ghostly fragrance of lilies touched the air before it was suffocated by the scent of burning cedar.

Doucette sobbed a laugh, partly in surprise, but more with a kind of angry satisfaction.

Why not let it burn?

Let it all burn!

From the ashes of her swan skin, she had found the courage to dare the Rassemblement. What phoenix might arise out of the destruction of everything her magic had wrought since then?

Deliberately, Doucette gestured at the chests, the benches, the lovely rugs and gowns and hangings her imagination had called forth. Spells hissed over her tongue and set the furnishings alight.

When the quick, bright crackle of twigs and grass failed to satisfy, Doucette turned her attention to the wooden shutters. A stroke of her hand, and they flared into blue flames. She basked in the glow, though the smoke made her retreat into the corridor. Wind sighed through the window and stirred ash into a glittering cloud.

Doucette craved more.

One man had betrayed her; another sought to use her. Hurt and outrage demanded release. Like a moth pushing free of its cocoon, Doucette stretched her arms over her head. Power burst from her hands as she chanted destruction into the thick air.

The roof exploded outward in a clap of heat and light. It sucked Doucette's hair straight up from her head and then knocked her flat onto her back. She shrieked, clapping her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to shut out the thundering roar.

When she brought her hands down, the sight of the blood trickling over her fingers shocked Doucette out of the mindless passion that had possessed her. But it was too late to call back the magic she had unleashed.

Majestic as a summer sunset, molten radiance washed down the walls. Unlike wood and straw, the stone was slow to react. It groaned and sagged, crumbling away from her like a wall of wet sand.

Doucette realized her own danger at the same time she heard a loud yell.

Sieur Nicolau!

She pushed herself to her feet and ran to the front of the castle.

“Help!” The nobleman stood at the door, his face contorted in the fire's glow. Soot from the burning shutters dusted his shoulders, and his hand jerked back and forth as the enchanted bolt continued to close and open, dragging him with it. “Please,” he choked, “help me!”

With a muttered word, Doucette released him. The two of them stumbled across the drawbridge and chased their shadows down to the pond. As Doucette beat out the sparks that had fallen onto Sieur Nicolau's tunic, he coughed smoke from his lungs. Behind them, the castle burned like a beacon in the night.

Doucette splashed water over her face and arms until the front of her amethyst gown was sopping. She glanced up and met Sieur Nicolau's frightened gaze.

The nobleman scuttled away from her, as if he would throw himself into the pond to escape her clutches. “Your pardon, Lady Doucette,” he rasped. “No wish to offend. I'll be off with the dawn and trouble you no more.”

“It's I who must beg your forgiveness, Sieur Nicolau,” Doucette said, but he did not stay to hear her apology. Bowing and gabbling in a frenzy of politeness, the scorched nobleman pushed his way through the reeds toward the far side of the pond and was soon lost in misty darkness.

Heavy as a fur robe, exhaustion dropped over Doucette's shoulders. Shivering in her wet, queenly dress and pearl earrings, she sat on the muddy bank and watched the pool of glowing stone, once her home, subside into the earth. It reminded her a little of the night of the Rassemblement, when she had bathed in liquid magic and floated alone in the dark.

But unlike that time, when her body and mind had been strangely divorced, now she felt her various pains far too acutely. The palms of her hands throbbed from the magic that had ripped through them, uncontrolled. Her chin and arms smarted from the touch of flying embers. One ankle ached—she had twisted it hurrying over the rough ground.

Also unlike her time at Lavena's Cauldron, in this dreadful hour no spirit but Doucette's own rifled through her memories, judging action and intention, reason and result. Fatigue formed a thin crust over darker, bleaker emotions.

She had been selfish, she realized.

The desire to work magic had pushed aside both her good judgment and her love. She had taken such of Tante Mahalt's advice as suited her—beware of men—and ignored the remainder: that her gift could be corrupted. Lady Sarpine had said so, too, though it hardly excused her cruelty.

When the thrill of practicing magic had consumed her, Doucette had not sought to curb it. Her single-mindedness had led to the mistreatment of others and the destruction of her castle.

She didn't regret beating back her mother and the armsmen, or defending herself against the trapper, but Om Garmel … Doucette's lips tightened in shame. Even Sieur Nicolau, scheming busily for his own gain, had offered her no real harm. She could have sent him on his way without injury.

Little wonder Jaume's countrymen distrusted the High Arts.

When Doucette considered the ruin her magic had caused, she understood in her bones why it had worried Jaume. After the Rassemblement, the pleasure of each Transformation had fed into the next. The more spells she had cast, the more she wanted to do, to the exclusion of all else. Since she had completed her castle, Doucette realized, she hadn't gone a day without changing into bird or beast. Like a drunkard swilling wine, a miser counting coins, she had lost herself in magic.

Eyeing the smoking remains of her home, she kneaded her sore hands together. What would Jaume say if he knew?

As if her thought had shaped it, an eddy shifted the drifting smoke into a well-remembered likeness. Wrapped in a sheepskin, Jaume sat by the embers of a dying campfire. A brown-and-white shape stirred at his side. Fidele's ears pricked, her head turned.

Doucette ached anew to see the sadness in Jaume's dark eyes. Her hand lifted as if to smooth the weary lines that marked his face.

He looked up, surprised, then intent. His lips rounded in her name, and his hand rose to meet hers. But before their seeking hands could touch, a breeze disturbed the smoke. The shepherd's likeness shredded into wisps of mist.

Doucette curled over her knees and cried.

If the strength of her previous anger was any measure, she had never really stopped loving Jaume. Too much bound them together for the tie to be lightly broken. During the Rassemblement, she had trusted him with her life, as he had placed his faith in her through the magic-working of the comte's three trials and then the perilous flight from Beloc. Even Jaume's caution about her sorcery had stemmed from his urge to protect her.

So why hadn't she discussed it with him like the loving partner she claimed to be? As Azelais and Cecilia toyed with, then discarded, their many suitors, Doucette had repaid Jaume's devotion with indifference. Then, like Tante Mahalt, she had fled the company of men, only to enclose herself in a prison of her own making.

Why had she cast his love aside? Why had she closed off her own heart? Woman or swan, wife or witch—was there no other way a sorceress could live? The question tormented her, until Doucette wiped her eyes and turned her face to the sky.

Why not both? Who had decreed she must lose her love to magic or deny her magic for love?

“Other people aren't us,” Jaume had said.

If Doucette believed him, she could learn from her mistakes, work to balance the two sides of her nature. How would she know, unless she tried? Didn't she owe Jaume—didn't she owe
herself
—a second chance?

In word and deed, Jaume had demonstrated his devotion. If Doucette was to have any hope of reclaiming him, she must do likewise.

But no one else need know. Perhaps it was her Aigleron pride, but Doucette didn't want his family's pity. She would find some way only Jaume would understand to convey that she had changed. If Jaume truly loved her, he would accept her apology and take her hand again. Doucette would have to show him that she had stopped running. That she, too, was bold enough, honorable enough, to claim the one she loved.

Alone in the smoky night, Doucette hoped she hadn't waited too long.

Chapter Thirty-one

With a sweep of gray-tipped wings, a swan landed in the back garden of the house with the blue door.

Drawn by the unexpected noise, a curly-haired man opened an upstairs window. “Jaume, come here,” Eri called over his shoulder. “It's the strangest thing.”