Crimson Bound Read online

  Armand flung himself at the other head, hitting it right where the neck began and throwing his arms around it. “Do it!” he yelled.

  Rachelle grabbed the charm, ducked as the head lunged at her, slammed her sword into the neck and down, pinning it to the floor. The lindenworm bucked and writhed beneath her, but she was pressing the charm against its neck and trying, trying, trying to awaken it—

  And the charm sang in her mind, and the lindenworm went slack beneath her. Its eyes were still open, but the glow had dimmed; when she looked closer, she saw that the pale film of its inner eyelids had slid across its eyes.

  It looked like the creature could still see her. But when she waved her hands in front of its nose, it didn’t move. She kicked it lightly in the head, and all that happened was that its scaled outer eyelids finally shut.

  Rachelle’s breath shuddered out of her. She thought, I really did it. I’m still alive.

  Then she remembered what Armand had done. She looked up.

  There was more light now, she realized: torches blazed on the walls, as if celebrating the lindenworm’s defeat. But she couldn’t see Armand anywhere, just the vast tangle of the lindenworm’s body, scales gleaming in the torchlight.

  “Armand?” she shouted, climbing over the body. “Where are you?” Her heart pounded because if he was dead—if he was dead—

  “Here.” His voice was muffled. “I’m a little tied up.”

  And then Rachelle saw a foot sticking out from under the lindenworm’s coils.

  “Buried, more like,” she said, her voice shaky with relief, and she set about untangling him. He was still gripping the lindenworm’s other head; it jiggled when she started to pull him free, and in an instant she had her sword drawn.

  “I think it’s asleep,” said Armand, letting go of the head.

  Rachelle sheathed her sword. “I know that,” she said. “But you, what were you thinking?”

  “That it was going to bite you and then we’d both be dead?”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “You are not the first to tell me that.” He smiled, and it felt like ground glass in her chest, because she was sure he had smiled like that at his forestborn, and he would smile like that every other time he tried to do the right thing. And she knew what happened to good people, from the Dayspring right on down to Aunt Léonie.

  “You’re going to die an idiot,” she snarled. “You won’t last another week, and I’ll have to watch you die.”

  And strangely, that wiped away his smile and left him looking desperately tired and sad.

  “True enough,” he said. “So I really have nothing to lose.”

  He flung an arm around her shoulders, and closed his lips over hers.

  It was nothing like Erec’s kisses. It was just Armand’s lips clumsily mashed against hers. But she felt it through her whole body like a bolt of lightning because it was Armand, warm and alive and wanting to touch her—

  It seemed like only a heartbeat later that he let go. It took her a moment to remember how to breathe and how to think and by then he was stepping back, smiling again.

  “You,” said Rachelle. “You—”

  “Really,” he said, “you have to be careful about telling people they’re doomed. It makes them crazy.”

  “You were already crazy,” said Rachelle. He couldn’t want her. He was everything that could never want her, but he had kissed her, and now her heart was starting to beat with dreadful hope.

  “So that means you need to be extra careful.” Then he was starting to climb down the coils of the lindenworm on the other side.

  She caught at his shoulder. “Armand—”

  “I know.” He pulled free and didn’t look back. “You’re not here to kiss me, you’re here to make use of me.”

  He believed it. His voice was cheerful, but she could tell he believed she had no use for him beyond opening doors, and in that moment nothing mattered except making him see that he was wrong.

  Rachelle lunged after him. Her feet hit the stone floor and she seized him by the shoulders. “You are not just useful to me,” she said. “You are . . .”

  His eyes met hers, wide and suspicious and unyielding. “What?” he asked. “What am I to you?”

  She couldn’t speak. There weren’t words for what he was. He was everything she hated, and in all the world, he was the person with the most right to hate her. But when the Forest blossomed around them in la Fontaine’s salon, he’d looked her in the eyes, denied everything she said, and understood her. He had listened to her in the garden that morning, and denied nothing she said, and still forgiven her. What could you even call that kind of person?

  Armand was the one who knew how to speak, anyway. He smiled and turned his words into knives that sliced out answers and distinctions. She was just the girl who plunged blindly ahead and doomed herself doing it.

  But she thought he might actually want that girl. So she leaned forward and kissed him. Just a tiny, hesitant kiss, and it was more terrifying than any woodspawn she had ever faced. But then his arms wrapped around her as he started to kiss her back, and she still couldn’t believe that he meant it, that this sweetness was for her—

  She pulled away. “This is all I have to give you,” she said. “I’m—I’m still bloodbound. You know what that means.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I do.”

  “But everything I have,” she said, “I want to give you. Because I love you. I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  “I don’t have anything else to give you, either,” he said. “But I think I love you too.”

  Then he kissed her again. And kissed her and kissed her, until her heartbeat was a song and her veins pulsed with honey and fire, and his arms were around her and he was not letting go. He knew what she was and he was not letting go.

  She had never understood, until now, what it would be like to kiss somebody who was not trying to use or master her. Who cleanly and simply delighted in her.

  Finally he stopped and whispered, “Rachelle—”

  “Don’t say it,” she said. “Whatever you’re going to say. Don’t. You know what I am. What I’m going to be. Not even you can change that.”

  “I was going to say, ‘I think the lindenworm might be waking up.’”

  In an instant she was out of his arms with her sword drawn. One of the lindenworm’s heads lay near her; its eyes had started to open, though the pale film of the inner eyelids was still drawn shut.

  Her first panicked impulse was to hack at it with her sword. Then she remembered the charm. She could just barely see one end of it, hanging off the pile of the lindenworm’s coils.

  She let herself panic for one stomach-churning moment. Then she dropped the sword and scaled the lindenworm in two leaps. She dropped to her knees, pressed shaking hands to the charm, and thought, Sleep, sleep, sleep.

  She thought it wasn’t working, but then it did. The lindenworm shuddered and grew still underneath her. In the silence after, Rachelle could hear her own heartbeat, her ragged breaths.

  That had been too close. She should never have let herself get distracted.

  After gulping a few more breaths, she slid down off the lindenworm, back to where Armand waited.

  “Come on,” she said. “We need Joyeuse. Now.”

  “Is that why you dragged me here?”

  He didn’t sound surprised, and Rachelle stared at him. “You knew?”

  “I guessed. There are only so many lost things that a bloodbound might be desperate to recover. I think it’s right there.” He pointed.

  They were on the far side of the lindenworm now, and here the room was not a perfect replica of the Hall of Mirrors: there was a statue the like of which Rachelle had never seen in the Château. It was Zisa, but unlike every other statue of Zisa that Rachelle had ever seen, she was not identified by the sun or moon in her hand. Instead, she stood over the prone body of Tyr, a moment after cutting off his right hand.

  She was
carved of the same sandstone as the rest of the hall. But she held a sword made out of bone.

  It was all bone, blade and hilt. Runes were carved up the blade; the pommel and cross-guard were delicate filigree that looked like tiny branches. She couldn’t see what the grip was like because Zisa’s stone fingers were wrapped firmly around it.

  That was a problem. Rachelle tried to push the statue over so it would break, but it was immovable.

  “There must be a trick,” said Armand, poking at the statue with his silver hand.

  Where he touched it, the statue started to crumble. In moments, it was no more than pile of dust on the floor, Joyeuse lying free at the center.

  “Lovely,” said Rachelle, reaching down to grab the sword—only to drop it again with a hiss of pain. The sword burned. She shook her hand; it wasn’t bleeding, but it was flushed and swollen where she had touched the hilt.

  “What?” asked Armand, bending down to nudge the sword with his silver hand.

  The hilt moved. It grew and stretched and wrapped like ivy around his hand, until it looked like he was holding it, though Rachelle supposed that in a way, the sword was holding him.

  Darkness fell around them. The lindenworm was gone, and the strange hallway with it.

  A moment later, they were in the west gardens with the moon overhead.

  They were alive. Against all odds, they were alive, and Armand was holding Joyeuse. It felt like the sun in her mind, and without meaning to, she reached for it.

  As soon as her finger touched the bone, she felt the burn again, and her hand snapped back.

  “I don’t pretend to know your plans,” said Armand, “but it’s going to be a problem if you can’t hold Joyeuse.”

  “It hurts,” said Rachelle, “but I can hold it if I have to.”

  “So you’re planning to wield it?”

  Rachelle looked at him: his rumpled hair, his weary, affectionate eyes. He had helped her. Against all reason, he loved her.

  But it was one thing to love a bloodbound. It was another to believe that the Devourer—the ancient heathen terror denied by priest and bishop—could rise again, and in such power as to destroy the world. And Armand had lost too much for his beliefs to ever question them.

  “I’m not going to hurt you with it,” she said. “The rest is not your business.”

  “I see,” he said quietly, and he sounded disappointed.

  Rachelle’s throat tightned, and she almost told him then and there. But she couldn’t stand to find the limits of his trust. And whether he knew or not—whether he trusted her or not—wouldn’t make any difference in the end.

  “I told you,” she said roughly, “that you couldn’t change me.”

  He laughed softly. “That you did.” He paused. “But even if you don’t—”

  “Please. Don’t ask.” The words came out more desperate than she had meant them to. If he asked her, really asked, then she wasn’t sure.

  Armand looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he glanced down Joyeuse. The bone tendrils unwrapped from his wrist, and the sword fell to the ground. He knelt, awkwardly scooped up the sword with his silver hands, and held it out to her.

  “Wrap it in your coat,” he said. “You can carry it that way.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  The next day, Rachelle didn’t know which was stranger: that she had Joyeuse itself hidden underneath her bed—or that she was happy.

  She didn’t have much time left. If she was right about the solstice, she only had three days. Then the Devourer would return, and she would fight him, and one way or another, she would die. But until then—for those precious few days, however many they were—she had nothing to fight and nothing to fear, and nothing to do but spend time with Armand and Amélie.

  Something was wrong, though. Armand was quiet and grim at breakfast; Amélie chattered with a rapid brightness that didn’t seem quite real. Throughout the day, as Rachelle escorted Armand from one court function to the next, she noticed him examining each room as they entered it. It was as if he was waiting for an attack.

  She was going to ask him about it. But when they finally got back to their rooms at the end of the day, he smiled at her and kissed her, and she forgot everything except this one moment of feeling safe and loved. They drank hot chocolate together, and it was the most perfect evening Rachelle could remember.

  Then one of Armand’s valets entered the room. He handed her a note written in the messy scrawl that Erec liked to use and that Rachelle found completely unreadable.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Monsieur d’Anjou wants to speak with you,” said the valet.

  That was just like Erec, to summon her imperiously with a note she couldn’t read. But for once it didn’t make her too angry, because for now she had her peace with Amélie and Armand. And soon she would have a chance to fight the Devourer. There was nothing Erec could do to take either joy away from her.

  “All right,” she said, and went to find Erec.

  Erec’s rooms were not close to Armand’s; it took her a while to get there, and when she did, his valet told her that he’d gone out for a few minutes. So she had to wait in his study for nearly half an hour before he arrived.

  “Finally,” she said when he walked into the room.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Hardly courteous. I came as fast as I could.”

  “You could have waited for me to get here,” said Rachelle. “Did you leave the room as soon as you sent the note?”

  She saw his body tense with readiness. “I didn’t send a note. I came here because I got a message from you.”

  And that was when the soldiers kicked the door in.

  The next thing Rachelle knew, her sword was drawn and she was lunging toward the nearest soldier. There was a brief, timeless chaos. Fighting humans was not as dizzily blissful as fighting woodspawn. It was partly because her gifts did not manifest as strongly when she was facing mortal enemies instead of Forest creatures. And it was partly because she knew she was hacking at human limbs and stopping human hearts.

  When they were finished, she was gasping for breath. She tried not to look at the bodies that lay on the floor.

  “We have to run,” she said. “The King—”

  Erec shook his head. “They aren’t from the King,” he said, wiping his sword.

  “The rebels,” she said, and her heart lurched. Somebody was organizing a palace coup; that was why they had lured her and Erec together, so that they could be taken out together.

  “Armand,” she said, and realized this was the first time she had call Armand by his first name in front of Erec.

  “Yes,” said Erec, “secure him before he gets to the throne room.”

  She didn’t bother explaining as she bolted out of the room. Armand wouldn’t start a bloody revolution. He wouldn’t, and that meant that anybody doing it would have to take him prisoner, and that meant—

  And then she saw Armand at the end of the corridor, surrounded by armed men.

  She didn’t think about odds or tactics. Her mind flashed white fire, and then she was upon them.

  She cut down two of them before they realized how dangerous she was and started to fall back. Then somebody lunged forward, and she nearly stabbed him before she realized it was Armand.

  “Stop,” he said. “Rachelle, stop. It’s all right. They aren’t hurting me.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, “they’re attacking us—”

  “They’re with me,” he said quietly. “They follow me.”

  She could see Armand’s face quite clearly in the lamplight, his gray eyes and the flat line of his mouth. She could feel the hilt of her sword gripped in her hand, and she could hear the soft moaning from one of the men she had stabbed. But she felt like she had stepped out of her body and to the side, like some important part of her just wasn�
��t there anymore.

  “What . . . what do you mean?”

  “These are my men,” Armand said steadily. “They follow me. They are going to help me take the King off the throne and—”

  “You lied to me.”

  “No.” Armand shook his head, actually looking distressed. “I’ve never—”

  “You lied to me,” she said, and her voice sounded like a pathetic, lost little thing. “All this time, you pretended to hate being a saint, when you were really plotting to get yourself on the throne.”

  “No,” he said desperately, “I’m trying to put Raoul on the throne. You can help. Please, Rachelle—”

  She raised her voice. “Anyone who wants to live had better start running.”

  Armand must have sent the message to get her in the same room as Erec. So that his men could kill them both at once.

  The men with him in the hall now wanted to kill her as well. When they lunged, it was a relief. She knew how to fight. She knew how to survive fighting. Her sword sliced and whirled. Blood spattered across her face. She didn’t care.

  Then she turned back to Armand, and with one hand she easily gripped his collar and slammed him against the wall.

  “What made you think it was a good idea to lie to me?”

  He was afraid. She could see it in the way his eyes widened, his breath quickened. She could feel it with the hot, deadly instinct that throbbed in her veins. He was prey and he knew it. She was a monster, and he knew it.

  “Rachelle,” he said quietly, gently. As if he had ever really loved her. As if he thought he could keep on making a fool of her.

  “Where is Joyeuse?” she demanded. She didn’t need to ask if he had taken it: she knew he must have.

  He met her eyes, his face bloodless and resolute. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Don’t imagine I won’t hurt you. Don’t imagine for a moment that all your pretty kisses are going to make me spare you.” She raised her bloody sword and pressed the blade against his throat. “You’re only alive because the King has use for you. When the time comes, I will help him destroy you.”

  Whatever hope he’d had of beguiling her seemed to go out of him. “You were always loyal to them, weren’t you?” he asked, his voice lifeless.