I stared silently at her. Did she know that I was aware of her true identity? Or was she still going to attempt to pretend to be Anaïs? “What do you want from me?”
Lessa smiled, the curve of her lips familiar in a way that made me want to tear the magic off her face. “We’ll get to that.” She closed the distance between us so that we were only inches apart. My skin crawled, but I refused to give her the satisfaction of driving me back.
“You’re in quite a predicament. One that might very well send you to your death if I don’t help you.”
“I don’t want your help.”
She tilted her head back and laughed. “But you might need it. Cécile made a promise to the King to find Anushka. There is nothing he desires more, and his obsession will force her to the grave if she does not succeed. You promised the half-bloods you’d build a stone tree for them, which frankly, requires you to be alive. Except that you know Cécile’s time is short, which means your time is short, and you are driven to work day and night without rest, which is driving you to the point where you’ll burn out your power. Especially given the iron rot that is consuming you. Such a sordid circle of things: the King’s desire creates Cécile’s obsession, which drives your addiction to your work. Work that the King does not care to see completed, which makes him want the curse broken all the more. Around and around we go.” She walked in a slow rotation behind me and back to where she had started. “Spiraling down until someone dies.”
“Make your point.”
“It doesn’t have to be you and Cécile who die.” She tilted her head. “It could be him. He is, after all, the instigator.”
As if I hadn’t thought of that every waking minute for days. “Wonderfully traitorous solution, but unfortunately, killing my father would only delay the inevitable. As I’m sure you’re well aware, my brother is heir to the throne, and I cannot imagine he’ll suffer me to live long after he is crowned. Any fool could see your little ploy is self-serving.”
“It could serve us both.” Her voice was soft, persuasive. “No one wants Roland to be king, least of all me.”
“Yet you are betrothed to him.” Just saying the words made me feel sick. “And I think you are wrong to say that no one wants him to be king. I believe the Duke wants that very much indeed.”
“Betrothals can be broken, alliances reforged. He might be persuaded to see you as king if”—she traced a finger down my chest—“you could be persuaded to take a new wife.”
Revulsion held me frozen in place even as my mind recoiled from what she was suggesting. She had to be sick, her brain warped by iron-madness or worse. No amount of ambition could drive anyone toward this. “You are insane.” I choked the words out before stepping out of reach. “What sort of twisted creature are you to want such a match?”
The smile slowly melted from her face. “You were not opposed to it so very long ago.”
Enough of this. “With Anaïs, perhaps, but not with you.” With clawed fingers of magic, I tore the mask off her face, sending her staggering. “Never with you.”
Regaining her balance, she snapped her head up to look at me, teeth bared with the fury of a rabid animal. The air in the room went searing hot, the vases and lamps shattering under the pressure. The whole wing of the palace shook and trembled beneath my feet, sending books toppling off their shelves and knocking paintings from the walls.
Instead of trying to stop her, I laughed in my sister’s face. “What do you suppose Father will do to you if you kill me?”
The shaking stopped and Lessa’s face resumed a false expression of composure. “I don’t want you dead.”
“Liar.”
She huffed out a breath and rolled her eyes. “Is that how it’s to be? Because I can lie you’ll not believe a single word I say?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll not believe a thing you say because I don’t trust you.”
The room began to cool before she answered.
“Believe me or not, it’s the truth. I don’t want you dead, I want you to see reason.” She lifted a foot as though she intended to walk closer, then wisely lowered it again. “Don’t you see? United, we could have everything. Together, we could kill Father, and believing his daughter would become queen, Angoulême would support you over Roland. And if he doesn’t?” She shrugged one slender shoulder. “We kill him. Kill Roland, too, because of a certainty, Trollus is better off without our younger brother. Together, no one would be able to stand against us. No one would dare contest our power.”
“You are my sister!” And no logic, or reason, or promise of power could undo that fact.
“No one need ever know that.”
My whole body went rigid, the warmth of the room doing nothing to chase away the icy prickles of revulsion sweeping my skin. “I’d know!” I screamed the words into her face. “You’d know!”
She didn’t even flinch. “If this is about Cécile, be assured that I wouldn’t care if you brought her back to Trollus and kept her as your mistress. You’d still be bonded to her, after all. Ours would be primarily a political arrangement.”
I could see in her eyes that she didn’t care. Even if such a match did disgust her, Lessa was more than capable of pushing such feelings aside in her pursuit of power. Or worse, maybe she wasn’t even disgusted by the idea at all. All she wanted was to be queen. It was the only thing that mattered.
“Why do you want this so much?” I wasn’t sure why I asked the question. Maybe it was because standing face to face with her, I realized that this was the first time I’d spoken to Lessa as herself. The resemblance between us was undeniable, which made perfect sense, given we shared half the same blood.
She was my sister, and I had always known that, yet rarely had I spoken to her. Never once had I sought her out or tried to learn more about her, because even as a child, I’d known she was seen as an embarrassment to our family. Someone to be ignored. And by the time I’d grown brave enough for defiance, I’d been in the throes of pretending I considered half-bloods unworthy of my conversation.
It hadn’t been only my father who’d cast her aside, it had been her whole family. She, perhaps more than anyone, understood the cost of having human blood in Trollus. For that, did I not owe her at least the chance to prove that there was something good, some pure reason behind her sordid plan to become queen?
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said, quiet enough that I almost couldn’t hear her. “I was cast aside, sold into slavery, all because my mother had a fractional amount of human blood running through her veins. The fact that half my blood was Montigny counted for nothing. I was a bastard. An embarrassment. I should have been a princess, but instead I have served.” Her voice shook with emotion. “As myself, I will always be denied, but as Anaïs, nothing will be kept from me. Make me your queen, and you will have no fiercer ally in this world.”
She was my father’s daughter. Any doubt that might have existed in my mind about that was gone after hearing those words. There was no desire to do good pushing her toward the crown. No thought that she might change Trollus so that what had happened to her would never happen to another child. No hope that she might prove that half-bloods were worth as much as any full-blooded troll. Because I saw now that she hated the human part of her more than my father, than Angoulême, than me. Blamed it for all that she had suffered. She’d stolen Anaïs’s face to fool everyone else, but more than that, she’d taken it because she well and truly wanted to become the other girl.