“No wonder they curse your name. You should have handed them over as a show of good faith.”
“I didn’t trust them,” I muttered, remembering the moment as vividly as though it were yesterday. I’d collected as many names as I could before Cécile’s terror had driven me back to the palace. Just before I’d reached the gates, Anaïs had found me and told me my father was alone with Cécile. I’d given her my plans and told her to hide them, then I’d gone inside to duel with my father. Anaïs would only have had a few minutes to hide the documents before she came through my window to fight. Which meant she’d hidden them nearby.
Retreating back inside, I went to the glass doors Anaïs had broken through. Below lay my private courtyard and the wall she would have come over to get inside. Opening the doors, I hurried down the steps, barely noticing Marc trailing along after me.
Cécile’s piano still stood in the middle of the space, but it was covered in a layer of dust. I walked in a slow circle around it, then came to a halt at the bench. Stacks of music covered the seat, the paper as dusty as the piano. Wiping my hands on my trousers to remove the blood dripping down from my wrists, I began to sort through them, quickly coming up with what I’d been looking for. “Hidden in plain sight,” I said, holding them up.
“Then what are the half-bloods constructing?” Marc asked, his expression grim.
“Were you present when he told them to build?”
Marc nodded, his eyes growing distant as he remembered. “His speech was long, but he concluded by lifting a roll of parchment into the air and shouting, ‘Behold the plans for a stone tree.’”
I shook my head slowly, admiring his genius. “He gave them drawings of the tree as it is now. They’re building something that is doomed to fail—and he knows it. And by keeping the Builders’ Guild focused entirely on maintaining the magic version, he ensures none of them will have the time to do the calculations to determine that while the existing structure works for magic, it won’t work for stone.”
Marc blinked.
“You didn’t think it took me two years to come up with plans identical to something I looked at every day, did you?” I asked, shaking my head. “I assure you, these plans”—I shook the parchment—“are drastically different for a reason. The question is, why would my father let me out, knowing that I would see through his deception?”
Marc shook his head slightly.
Turning round, I pressed a piano key, the note echoing out around us. “He wants me to do something.” I pressed another key. “What does he think I’m going to do?”
“I thought you weren’t going to do anything but wait to die?”
I shot him a dark look. “I haven’t said I’m going to do anything.”
“Of course not.” Marc kept a straight face. “This is all just speculation.”
“Indeed. Something to pass the time while I wait.”
“To die.”
“Or not.” I scratched the skin around one puncture in my arm—it had finally scabbed over, but the healing itched terribly. “What does he want from me?” I murmured to myself.
“Perhaps he wanted you to lead him to where your plans were hidden,” Marc said. “Maybe we’ve just given him what he wanted.” We both looked around, but we were alone, and Marc’s magic kept our conversation private.
“Perhaps,” I replied, but I was not convinced. There was no evidence he’d even gone looking for them. “If that’s the case, he lucked out, because I didn’t know where they were.”
Marc’s brow furrowed. “Then who hid them here?”
“Anaïs,” I said. “She hid them before she came to help me fight my father.” I swallowed hard, remembering the sight of my friend impaled on the sluag spear. “She gave up everything for me,” I said, closing my eyes. “She died for me.”
I jerked them open again at Marc’s sharp intake of breath. He stood rigid in front of me, unease on his face. “Tristan,” he said. “Anaïs isn’t dead.”
“That’s impossible.” But even as I said the words, hope rose in my heart. Anaïs, alive?
“And not only is she alive,” Marc continued, “she claims your father saved her life.”
5
Cécile
I jerked upright, my heart racing and skin damp with sweat. Shadows swam and loomed in the darkness of my room, and my eyes leapt between them, searching for the source of my fear. The only time I’d felt anything close to this was when I’d fallen and broken my light in the labyrinth. This was worse. In those twisting tunnels, I’d known why I was afraid, but now the danger was insidious and unknown. My senses tried to reconcile the terror with a threat, eyes twitching around the room of their own accord, spine stiffening with each gust of wind or creak in the floorboards.
The sheer curtains surrounding the bed blew inward, brushing against my face. I flinched, batting them away with one hand while pulling up my blankets to ward away the chill from the open window.
Nightmare.
Taking deep measured breaths, I clambered out of bed, dragging my blankets with me. Slamming the window shut, I flipped the latch. With trembling fingers, I turned up the lamp, but while the light drove away the shadows, the panic scorching through my veins only worsened. Because it hadn’t been a nightmare. Everything that had happened was real, and with every blink of my eyelids, I saw the whip crack through the air, the blood splatter against the curse, the look in Tristan’s eyes as he turned away from me. And echoing in my head, ceaseless and unending, were his screams.
“Tristan.” His name came out as a gasp, and I dropped to my knees. My hands twisted like claws, nails clutching and snagging the fabric of my bedding, a scream threatening to rise in my throat. I clapped my hands over my ears and buried my face in my knees, trying to drown out the sound and failing because it came from inside my own head. The voice of reason shouted warning after warning at me, and I clenched my teeth and held my breath until my chest burned. What was done was done, and I would not improve either of our circumstances by panicking.
“Get up,” I snapped as though my body was some sort of separate entity that I could order about. “Move.” My knees cracked loudly as I straightened, my numb feet hardly feeling the floor beneath me as I paced shakily up and down the room. My mind raced, coming up with increasingly elaborate waking nightmares of what was happening to him now. Should I go? Should I take Fleur, gallop through the night, and try to sneak into Trollus? But even if I didn’t get caught, what help would I be?
“Stop it,” I said. “Quit thinking.” As if such a thing were possible.
Stumbling over to my desk, I snatched up a page of lyrics. Eyes jumping from line to line, I softly sang, my voice breathless and terrible. “Again!” I said, trying to mimic my mother’s voice. “That was dreadful.”
Starting again, I sang louder, pushing everything into my voice. It was raw and wild, but like a hammer to a blade, I used it to temper my emotion into something useful, something I could control.