Crimson Bound Page 5

  The next few moments were a blur. Justine wasn’t the sort of fighter who gave up when she hit the ground; she wrenched, kicked, and slammed her elbows into Rachelle with methodical efficiency. There was no time for strategy, only instant, white-hot reactions—

  And then Justine had her arm twisted back. Rachelle bucked and managed to wrench out of her grip, but as she broke free, her arm twisted out of its socket with a pop and a searing flash of pain. Rachelle gasped, barely choking off a cry.

  Justine gasped too. She was always worried that she might be actually hurting Rachelle.

  Grimly, Rachelle rolled onto her side and slammed a kick straight into Justine’s stomach. Then she collapsed onto her back.

  For a few moments, neither of them moved. Rachelle’s shoulder throbbed with pain; her arm only tingled, but she couldn’t move it. She stared up at the golden fleurs-de-lis on the high ceiling of the sparring room and listened to the voices of the guards who had gathered to watch them fight. Normally she hated being a spectacle for anyone’s amusement. But right now—despite the exhaustion and the pain in her shoulder—the delirious song of the fight still hummed in her veins. Even the thought of the Devourer’s return didn’t feel so terrible.

  “Truce?” Justine offered rather breathlessly.

  “Truce,” said Rachelle.

  “Do you want—” Justine started.

  “Just do it,” said Rachelle, and clenched her teeth.

  With practiced ease, Justine leaned over her, grabbed her arm, and shoved it back into the socket. Rachelle choked but managed not to make any other sound, which was better than last time.

  She took a couple of slow breaths and sat up. Justine still crouched next to her. Even on the ground, she loomed: she was a tall woman, nearly six feet, with big bones and a square, big-nosed face that could not have been lovely even when she was young. Now she was nearly forty, and her dark braids were dusted with silver.

  “You’re improving,” she said. “But you still get careless when you’re angry.”

  “You still don’t expect me to grab your shoulders,” said Rachelle.

  Justine smiled faintly. “Has the Bishop spoken with you?”

  All the joy of the fight was instantly gone. She stared at Justine. “You were the one who set him after me?”

  Probably she should have expected it. Of all the bloodbound, Justine was the only one to take the name Royal Order of Penitents seriously: she lived in a garret worse than Rachelle’s, she wore a hair shirt at all times, and she was in the chapel on her knees almost every day. Naturally, as soon as Bishop Guillaume turned up saying she was damned, she had demanded to serve him. The King had given in, since the people were enraptured with their new Bishop and it was easier to deny his requests if he’d been treated generously once already. Ever since, the Bishop had flaunted his triumph by having his lone bloodbound attend him at ceremonies.

  “Yes,” Justine said quietly. “Do you really prefer d’Anjou for your keeper?”

  Rachelle surged to her feet, forgetting about all the people watching. “He’s not my keeper. And yes, I do prefer him. At least he’s not a liar.”

  Except when he was flirting, but Rachelle would take that sort of liar any day over the kind who preached that all the bloodbound should face judgment, then tried to hide them from the King’s justice.

  Justine stood, her mouth pressing into a line.

  “Ladies,” Erec called from behind them. “I hope you weren’t fighting over me.”

  Justine ignored him. “Think about it,” she said to Rachelle, and strode out of the room.

  “She didn’t even look at me,” said Erec, his voice mock sad. “I wonder what I’ve done to offend her?”

  “Breathing, I think,” said Rachelle. “But also wearing that jacket.” The black velvet construction, stiff with silver embroidery, was by no means the gaudiest thing she’d ever seen Erec wear, but it was still painful to look upon.

  “It baffles me why you don’t hate her as much as her master,” said Erec. “Or has that changed?”

  Rachelle sighed. “I can’t hate her when she’s always willing to spar.”

  More importantly, when Endless Night returned, Justine would die fighting the forestborn. She might take orders from the Bishop, but nothing would ever make her stop trying to protect people from the Great Forest.

  “You could fight me, you know,” said Erec.

  She rolled her eyes. “And listen to your epigrams about my every mistake? I think not.”

  That was why she sparred only with Justine. She didn’t care about demonstrating that she was more elegant or clever than Rachelle. She didn’t even really care about demonstrating that she was the better fighter. She understood that sometimes fighting in a white-hot blur was the only way to make the memories stop.

  “Well, don’t get too attached to her.” Erec draped a hand easily over her shoulder and drew her out one of the side doors into a paved courtyard. “We need to talk about your charge.”

  For a wonderful hour, Rachelle had forgotten that she had a charge. At least she wouldn’t have him after tonight, when she vanished into the city for her last attempt to find Joyeuse.

  Right now she needed to pretend to care about him. “What is it?” she asked. “Do you know who sent the assassins?”

  “Oh, that isn’t so important. One of the other possible heirs, I’m sure. Probably Vincent Angevin—he’s stupid enough.” Erec sighed. “It’s a pity that I got all the cleverness in the family.”

  “You’d hardly like it if he were better at something than you,” said Rachelle. Erec was an illegitimate son of the Angevin family, and he never lost an opportunity to mention how much he outclassed his second cousin Vincent. And all the rest his family. And the whole world.

  “It’s a pity for them, just not for me. Anyway, I doubt Vincent will suffer for this escapade, since you know how much our King likes him.”

  “You do realize,” said Rachelle, “that most of these problems would go away if the King would just name an heir?”

  The death of King Auguste-Philippe’s one legitimate son had left him without a clear successor. Several generations of peculiar treaties and marriage-contracts meant that among his nearest five nephews and cousins, none was unambiguously next in line. And there was also precedent for legitimizing a bastard as heir—and the King had eight. Needless to say, all the possible heirs were ready to cut one another’s throats. The rumors of the King’s ailing health had only made the conflict worse.

  “Yes, but that would entail admitting that he’s not immortal.” Erec’s mouth quirked. “What I have to tell you is far more important. You have already realized, I hope, that your true mission is not to protect Armand Vareilles.”

  Rachelle had realized no such thing, but she was long used to pretending that she had kept up with Erec’s labyrinthine thoughts. “You mean our King would lie to us? How shocking.”

  “Your mission is to contain him,” said Erec. “Somebody is fomenting a rebellion, and that somebody will probably attempt to recruit Monsieur Vareilles soon, at which point he goes from annoyance to danger. You know the people will riot for him.”

  Her chest tightened with frustration. The Devourer was returning soon—before summer’s end, which could conceivably mean today. And yet she had to stand here in the sunlit courtyard, discussing politics with Erec and pretending to care, because nobody believed in the Devourer and she had to avoid getting arrested before she found Joyeuse.

  “Why don’t you just throw that somebody in the dungeons,” she asked, “along with everyone else you don’t like?”

  “Because that somebody is good enough that we’re still trying to work out who he is.”

  “Well,” said Rachelle, “I know one man who would like to see the whole court burn. In this life and the next.”

  “And much we’d all love to see him burn instead,” said Erec. “Unfortunately, harming a bishop would also provoke riots. Unless we really did have proof that he wa
s helping fugitive bloodbound. And we don’t. So instead of leading a raid on the Bishop’s residence, you’re going to accompany Monsieur Vareilles to Château de Lune, where he won’t have access to the mob every day, and you’re going to ensure that he remains a court fixture until he is a harmless joke.”

  “I refuse to spend the rest of my life at Château de Lune,” said Rachelle.

  “Why not?” asked Erec. “Since you’ll have to actually attend court functions, you’ll see such a lot of me.”

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  That afternoon, Armand gave an audience so the people of Rocamadour could grovel at his feet. Rachelle had orders to serve as his escort, whether because the King was taking no chances or because Erec wanted to torment her, she wasn’t sure.

  It was just as awful as she had expected.

  They held the audience in the wide square in front of the cathedral. There wasn’t a scrap of shade; heat shimmered off the cobblestones. Armand sat on a little folding stool. To his left was an oriflamme banner, so that people wouldn’t forget his presence was a gift from the King. To his right was a painting of the Dayspring, so that people wouldn’t forget he was holy. It was hideous. Most paintings showed the Dayspring resurrected, or at least as a not-too-bloody severed head in the arms of his weeping mother. This showed the gory jumble of limbs into which he’d been hacked by the soldiers of the Imperium.

  Flies buzzed as if drawn by the painted blood, but Rachelle had to stand still and tall and menacing as a vast line of people crawled forward to see Armand. They blessed his name; they wanted him to bless them. They brought babies and lame boys and blind old women, and they begged for healing. They brought rosaries and tried to touch them to his wrists, so they would have relics to protect them against the encroaching darkness.

  The nobility might pretend that the shrinking daylight hours were no more than an aberration, but the common people knew. Some of them had brought clumsy little yarn weavings for Armand to touch—the fake woodwife charms sold in the marketplace. They wouldn’t do a thing to protect anyone against the power of the Forest, but city folk didn’t know any better. And they were desperate.

  That was why they thronged to meet Armand. They hoped his holiness would protect them.

  And Armand used that hope against them. He squinted against the sunlight and gave them smiles that looked brave and self-mocking at once. When an old woman begged him to pray for her health, because surely God would hear the prayers of a saint, he shook his head and said, “I’m nothing. Certainly not a saint. But I will pray for you.” The old woman sobbed, and Rachelle knew she had just decided he was the greatest saint since la Madeleine.

  He was playing them as expertly as a court musician played a violin. And Rachelle was helping. She was also keeping him under control so he couldn’t turn his false heroism into a crown, but she was still helping him.

  She hoped that when Endless Night fell, the forestborn hunted him first.

  The audience lasted nearly two hours. By the end, Rachelle was starting to feel dizzy from the heat. Armand didn’t look much better. So as soon as the other guards started to push the crowd away, she hauled Armand to his feet by his collar, dragged him into the nearest tavern, and demanded a private room and a pitcher of beer at once.

  There were times when being one of the King’s bloodbound had its advantages. A few moments later, they were in an upstairs room that was quiet and out of the sunlight.

  As soon as the door had shut behind them, Armand let out a sigh. Then in two quick, expert movements he had hooked his metal thumbs under his cuffs and pulled them up, revealing leather straps that ran up his forearms to loop around his elbows. Large metal buckles held them together in the center; in a few moments he had unlatched them with his teeth, and the hands clattered to the ground. Underneath, his stumps were covered in two little knitted socks; he pulled them off with his teeth.

  Clearly he didn’t intend to be the one who picked up his hands. Wearily, Rachelle reached for the nearest one. But when her fingers touched the metal, she flinched. The silver hand was shockingly hot.

  “Imagine my surprise on the first sunny day that I wore them,” said Armand.

  She remembered the blinding glitter of sunlight on his silver hands. At the time, she’d only thought of it as one more gaudy extravagance that showed his hypocrisy.

  “If they hurt that much,” she said, “don’t wear them.”

  Armand was by the pitcher; the loop of its handle was just wide enough that he’d managed to slide his stump inside. Rachelle watched in fascination as he tilted the pitcher to pour himself a cup of beer, then lifted the cup by wedging it between his wrists.

  She’d seen people missing limbs before, but it still felt like stuttering when her eyes ran down the length of his arm to . . . nothing.

  Her stomach twisted. She didn’t believe his story. She didn’t. But in all the times that she’d dismissed him as a liar, she’d never thought about how—whatever the truth—he had suffered something.

  He set down the cup. “If I don’t wear the hands, then they want to kiss the stumps. I’d rather burn.”

  “You could just not display yourself for worship,” Rachelle snapped.

  His mouth twisted. “Do you think the King would allow me to stop? If I weren’t sitting next to his banner every week, people might start to imagine that His Majesty wasn’t entirely holy.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you became a saint.”

  He showed his teeth. “The way you thought things through before you became a bloodbound?”

  For a moment she was back in Aunt Léonie’s house, the blood hot and sticky on her hands, and she felt sick and dirty and furious.

  “Do not,” said Rachelle, “presume to tell me what it means to be a bloodbound. You haven’t even met a forestborn.”

  He tilted his head. “You really think that?” He didn’t look like someone whose secret was threatened. He looked wary but curious.

  “You really I’m fool enough to believe you?”

  His mouth curved up. “You were fool enough to say yes to a forestborn.”

  The next thing she knew, she had slammed him against the wall. “Don’t try me.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked. “You can’t kill me, and I’m running out of limbs to cut off.”

  “I don’t have to kill you to make you sorry” Rachelle snapped, and then her throat closed up as she realized what she’d said.

  Her forestborn hadn’t had to kill Aunt Léonie either.

  She let go of him and stumbled back a step. She knew there wasn’t any blood pooled across the floor, but she could still smell it. The scar on her right hand ached.

  Armand was still watching her. He had to see how off balance she was, but he didn’t mock her. Instead, he went on, musingly, “If you can wait until Château de Lune, you could always have a try at losing me above the sun, below the moon. Though the King and d’Anjou might have something to say about that.”

  Her whole body sparked with cold white fire. “What did you say?”

  “Well, it’s still—”

  She whirled back on him. “‘Above the sun, below the moon.’ Why did you say that?”

  He looked at her as if she were babbling nonsense. “Because it would be a way to get rid of me. Only nobody really believes that story, so I wouldn’t actually advise you to mention it after you hide my body.”

  “What story?”

  “The story of Prince Hugo and the missing door,” he said. “You don’t know it?”

  “Of course I know that story,” said Rachelle. “He found a way into the Forest from the Château and it ate him, and that’s when they put so many protections on the spot.”

  Supposedly, those protections hadn’t extended far enough into the gardens of the Château to keep Armand from meeting a forestborn. Act
ually, he was a liar, so it was probably stupid of her to listen to anything he said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Is that how they tell it where you come from?”

  “Yes, Monsieur Most Educated, that’s how they tell it. Now tell me your version.”

  “Well,” he said, drawing out the word as he gave her a dubious look, “long ago, the king of Gévaudan had a son named Hugo, who could never be content unless he was adventuring. He spent so much time wandering the forest that his father began to fear that he would become a bloodbound. Finally the king forbade him to leave Château de Lune for a month. At first Prince Hugo was much upset, but then he seemed to grow content. And then he started to vanish for days at a time. The king thought he had broken the ban, but when he questioned his son, Prince Hugo laughed and said that he had found his own forest within the Château’s walls. He said it lay beyond a door above the sun and below the moon that would open only to his hands, and it would make him the greatest hunter the world had ever known. After that night, no one ever saw him again.”

  “Did they find where he had gone?” asked Rachelle.

  “No,” said Armand. “But the next year, in my mother’s province out west—this is why I know the story—they found a skeleton with his signet ring upon its finger. If it was him, and how he came to be there, nobody knows.”

  When Rachelle looked at him, he met her eyes. He seemed more curious than anything, as if he genuinely didn’t know why she was so interested in a single turn of phrase.

  It was too convenient. The moment she was assigned to watch over him—the moment she needed Joyeuse more than anything—he dangled her lost hope in front of her? It had to be a trick.

  But nobody among the bloodbound or the court had ever heard her question people about the door—she knew that, because if somebody had, Erec would have heard about it and teased her. Armand couldn’t possibly know what this story meant to her.

  And it actually seemed plausible. She had never been to Château de Lune, the country palace that lay twenty miles outside Rocamadour. But while now it was a glittering garden of delights for the nobility, once it had been a hunting lodge from which the kings of old would ride out to destroy woodspawn. Ancient charms protected the spot, but it was not impossible that the Château might also have a hidden door into the Forest. And it made sense that such a door would only open to members of the royal house, who had inherited Tyr’s power against the Great Forest.