“No buts.” Her voice was sharp. “You will do as I say, or you will find yourself back on the farm.”
Gooseflesh prickled across my skin, and the idea of disobeying her abruptly felt like an especially bad idea. She did not make idle threats. “I’ll be ready.”
The chill didn’t abandon me until I was up in my room, ensconced in front of the fire and a thick blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I stared into the flames, trying to put my thoughts in order.
The moment felt surreal, which was strange, given that sitting on the floor of my bedroom wrapped up in my own thoughts was the most normal thing I’d done in recent days. I’d ridden out into the dark of night with a stranger. Made a bargain with the king of the trolls. Tracked down a witch in the most dangerous quarter of Trianon. Confronted the city guard. In all of those moments, I’d felt so present and alive, but now, sitting alone in front of the fire, I barely felt like myself.
Maybe because I wasn’t. Maybe because I’d changed.
Covering my eyes with my hands, I mumbled, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“You are Cécile de Troyes, star of the opera stage and Trianon’s new favorite ingénue.”
Every muscle in my body jerked at the sarcastic voice. It was one thing talking to myself, quite another to have myself answer back. Spreading my fingers ever so slightly, I peered through the narrow cracks between them. Eyes stared out at me from the flames.
Squeaking, I fell backwards, tangling in my blanket.
“Oh, stop that.”
The voice was familiar. Cautiously, I crawled on hands and knees back toward the fire, my body tense and ready to bound away again at the slightest hint of a threat. “La Voisin? Is that you?”
“Please call me Catherine.” Disembodied though it was, her voice seemed calm.
I was anything but. I’d seen so many incredible things, but this… If she could do this spell, that meant I could learn to as well. A thousand possibilities blossomed in my mind of the ways I could make use of it. Maybe it meant I could talk to some of my half-blood friends in Trollus. Maybe it meant I could see Tristan. “How is this possible?”
“Magic, obviously.” The eyes in the flames blinked at me. “You’ve very distinctive hair, and you lost a few strands in my shop today. You should be careful about leaving behind pieces of yourself—they can be used.”
The eyes disappeared and reappeared with an eerie blink.
“You did me a good turn today, getting me out of that spot of trouble with the guard,” she continued, not waiting for me to answer. “Come by the shop tomorrow, and I’ll help you as best I can.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but the flames flared up high, and as suddenly as they had arrived, the witch’s eyes were gone.
13
Tristan
I left the manacles on. Not because I was afraid of the punishment for removing them, though I was. And not because I was cocky enough to believe I could easily best him. The reason I left them on was that I refused to believe that even in these dark hours I had any need to defend myself from my cousin. Which perhaps made me a fool, because just as only my father’s death would release Cécile from her promise, only my death would set Marc free.
I followed him through the mines, every blast of the miners’ magic making me jump as I struggled to come up with a solution for what I had done. For the unintended consequences.
But there was none.
Before long, Marc’s swift walk turned into a run, and even though his crooked legs made his stride uneven and strange, it still took everything I had to keep up with him. He was taller and faster, and the distance between us began to grow. Scenario after scenario ran through my head, each worse than the last. I’d only seen him like this once, and I’d fixed him before I’d had the chance to see how far madness would drive him. I didn’t know Marc like this. I could not guess what he was capable of.
“Marc, stop!” I shouted between gulps of breath.
He ran faster.
“Marc! Marc, listen to me!”
I might as well have been howling into the wind. We were very nearly at the base of the shaft where the lift would be waiting to take us up. I had to stop him, speak to him, try to contain him, because fixing him was no longer within my power. Desperate, I flung out a rope of magic, catching him around the ankle seconds before he rounded a bend. I heard a thud and a string of curses, then silence. Sliding to a halt, I walked cautiously around the bend.
Marc stood in the middle of the tunnel, sword drawn. “What makes you think I want to listen to a word you say?”
I stopped, keeping a wary eye on his sword. My fingers itched to draw my own blade, but my gut stayed my hand.
“Why did you do it?” he demanded.
“As a show of trust,” I said. “And to put everyone on equal footing.”
“As if any of us could ever be your equals.” He spat the words, the tip of his sword shaking. “And you know that isn’t what I meant.”
“I know.” I inhaled deeply, trying to find some measure of calm. This had little to do with my choice to relinquish power over names and everything to do with the choices I’d made two years ago. “There is no grand explanation. I didn’t want Pénélope’s death to kill you. So I did the only thing I could think of to keep it from happening.” I pressed a weary hand to my face, blocking out the light of the girders lining the walls and remembering the black day when Pénélope had died.
“Whether I lived or died wasn’t your choice to make.” He lifted his sword, tensing as he readied to strike. “It wasn’t your choice!” His voice echoed, repeating over and over as though the tunnels themselves desired to have their point made. He looked feral, eyes red and muscles pulling his deformed face into the mask of madness that I remembered so well because I had been its instigator. Forcing a promise from him that set his mind to battling itself, half desperate to die and the other compelled to live.
“I know,” I said. “I didn’t understand then what forcing you to make the promise to live would do.”
At least not until it was too late. And then it had been a wild scramble to correct what I’d done, ordering him by name not to think of his loss, of his pain, or his misery. It took days to carefully craft the layers of commands needed to maintain his sanity without being so cruel as to eliminate Pénélope from his thoughts entirely. Orders that had remained in place until I’d relinquished control over the names of him and the half-bloods. And now all that remained was that ill-thought promise that could not be undone by anything but death and a mind once again at war with itself.
“I do not know myself.” He flung his sword against the ground and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, squeezing hard. “Two years I’ve lived under your control. Two years I’ve been not who I am, but who you wanted me to be. I should have died with her. I should have died with her.” He kept repeating himself, and his words made me shake with sudden fury.
Heedless of the spikes skewering my wrists, I swung hard, catching him in the jaw. He stumbled back, and I bent double, swearing as blood splattered the floor. “Why should you have died?” I shouted through the pain. “To prove that you loved her? Because you thought you’d betray her by living? Because you thought that was what she wanted?” I straightened slowly, the stench of blood and iron thick in the air. “She wanted you to survive her death—I know that, because she told me herself!”