“What’s the point?” she asked. “I told your brother, and look how well it served me.”
Fred knew? And hadn’t told me? “I’m not my brother,” I said, irritated that he’d be so petty.
“No,” she agreed, her voice soft. “You’ve always been the most loyal of my children. My favorite.”
I watched her elbow move as she lifted the glass to her mouth, but the only sound was the crackling of the fire. I felt tense with anticipation, perhaps more than the situation warranted. What would she say? Would her story paint a different picture of our lives? Would it change the way I felt about her?
“I was sixteen and a fool when I met your father.” She set the glass down but didn’t remove her hand from it. “He’d left Goshawk’s Hollow, gone to the continent for a time, then returned to Trianon.” She turned around, and I did not fail to notice the streaks of damp on her face or the redness of her cheeks. “He was looking for a bit of excitement.” She gestured at herself, flicking her hand up and down. “He found it at the opera house.”
I winced, discomforted about thinking of my parents that way.
“I was certain I was in love. Thought the sun rose and set on him, and that we’d be together forever.” She drained her glass. “My mother warned me otherwise, but I wouldn’t listen. And by seventeen, I was married and pregnant with your brother.” Her lip trembled, and she bit it furiously, trying to keep her emotions under control.
“It was fine, at first. Your father worked in the city, and I worked for the opera company when I wasn’t too big with child.” Her shoulders twitched. “He knew how much I loved singing onstage, and he promised never to keep me from my passion.” One fat tear ran down her face.
“But after your sister arrived, we received word that your grandfather was ill. Your father went back to be with him when he died, and when he returned, everything was different. All he talked about, all he cared about, was that farm. What I wanted wasn’t important anymore.” She shook her head sharply. “He insisted we move to the Hollow, but I refused. I’d grown up in the city. Everyone I knew and cared about was in the city. The thought of leaving made me miserable. I thought he’d come around, that he loved me enough to stay.” She drew in a ragged breath. “I was wrong.”
She was crying now. My mother, who never cried, was snuffling and sobbing. “I wanted to keep you three, but he wouldn’t let me. He convinced me that I couldn’t do it, that we’d be destitute, that my babies would starve.” The words came out between gulps of air, and she wiped a hand under her nose. “My own mother went missing when this was all happening, and everything was madness and misery, and I… I let him take you.”
An oppressive weariness fell upon me, and my mind struggled with how the same story could paint an entirely different picture when told from another point of view. She wasn’t denying that she’d chosen herself and her career over being with us, but now I could see it from her perspective. Could understand how difficult it had been for her.
“It was so hard after you left. My heart was broken, and I had no money. I could barely afford to feed myself, and eventually, I came to believe your father was right. I couldn’t take care of my babies, and you three were better off with him. Better off without me.” A fresh swell of tears stormed down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Cécile. You deserved a better mother.” Her eyes met mine. “I do love you, and I always have. I hope you know that.”
I wasn’t blind: I knew she was selfish, but no one was perfect. Everyone had flaws. She’d been put in a situation where there were no easy choices. I well knew how that felt. What it was like knowing there would be horrible consequences no matter what path I took.
“I love you too, Mama.” Rising, I swayed wearily, my feet feeling like lead as I walked over to wrap my arms around her. I was so tired. She guided me back to the settee, and I settled down, feet tucked up and my head on her lap. Her hands gently stroked my hair, and she sang, her voice hitching and catching a bit from crying.
My head was fuzzy and numb, my tongue thick in my mouth. So tired, so tired.
“Where were you, Cécile?” Her voice was soft. “Where were you all those months?”
I wanted to tell her, to trust her, but Tristan’s emotions were growing again in the back of my head. Unease. Everything merged, and I couldn’t tell if he was worried, or whether I was. I shifted, tried to rise, but my limbs felt weak. My mother smoothed my hair down my back and I settled.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she said. “I thought you were dead, or that maybe you’d hated the idea of coming to stay with me so much that you’d run away.”
“No.” The word was muddled, but I needed her to know that wasn’t it. That I had wanted to be with her. “Didn’t… didn’t go by choice.”
“Who took you?”
My teeth clenched together, the fire in the hearth seeming to blaze brighter than the sun. It hurt my eyes. “A boy from the Hollow.”
“Where did he take you?”
I squeezed them shut. “Under the mountain.”
“For what purpose?”
Everything was fading into black, a darkness foreign and stained with uncertainty. I fought it, trying to stay awake, to feel the heat on my face, and my mother’s touch. “He sold me to them. To the trolls.”
She stiffened, but I hardly felt it. My senses were numb. Everything was slipping.
“What did they want from you?” The question, insistent, buzzing and loud. Demanding to be answered. I was falling, falling, falling, but the words still slipped from my mouth.
“To set them free.”
Six
Tristan
I carefully tightened the handkerchiefs I’d tied around the manacles on my wrists, in a likely futile attempt to keep blood from soaking into the cuffs of my shirt. I had an extensive wardrobe, but eventually, I was going to have to undertake the process of laundering my clothes, and I had read somewhere that bloodstains were challenging to remove.
Dropping my fingers from the handkerchief, I scowled at the paving stones as I meandered through the nearly empty streets of the Elysium quarter, the massive homes brilliantly lit but quiet compared to the rest of Trollus. I’d been inside most of them at one time or another, but their doorways now seemed foreign and unwelcoming, and I found myself clinging to the shadows, glancing over my shoulder like an intruder up to no good.
Though our connection was muted by distance, Cécile’s mind had practically sung with tension since the moment she’d awoken. It was the feeling of someone crossing a precariously narrow bridge: unwavering focus mixed with a hint of fear, and above all, the incredible need to reach the other side. The sensation was not unfamiliar – it was much like what I, or any troll, felt after making a promise. But it felt utterly alien coming from her, as did the aggressive impatience that flared within her with increasing frequency. She seemed… changed.
The arched entrance to the Angoulême manor appeared as I rounded the corner. There were two women standing guard, and I retreated back down the street before they could see me, leaning against a wall to wait. Anaïs would have to pass by this way eventually.
The true power of a promise was not something humans gave entirely enough thought to. Those who knew of us seemed to consider the binding nature of our word a weakness only partially tempered by our ability to twist speech to suit our purposes.
What they did not understand, at least not until it was far too late, was that there was a certain reciprocity to the magic. If a human made a promise to a troll, the troll was quite capable of binding the human to her word, should he feel inclined. If the troll was willing enough to make the effort, and the promise impossible enough to fulfill, the human could be driven to the point where she would not sleep or eat – to the point where her mind cracked or her heart stopped beating over the stress of her continued failure. And I had no doubt my father was willing to make the effort in order to reach his goal.
I considered how he would use the leverage he had gained over my
human wife. He would not drive her so hard as to kill her, not yet, anyway. He was patient – he’d keep pressure on her for months, slowly stripping away her mind until all that would be left was a shell with one purpose: to break the curse. Even if she survived it, she would no longer be the Cécile I knew and loved. I had to keep that from happening, but the only sure way to stop it was to kill my father, and that solution was fraught with more complications than I cared to count. Which was half the reason I was standing here in the shadows.
The other half was something else entirely.
I waited a long time until I was almost sure I’d missed her, when suddenly a familiar form came around the bend and started up the set of stairs I lurked next to. “Anaïs,” I breathed. She hadn’t noticed me, so I watched her walk, shoulders back and head high, like the princess she had almost been. She was beautiful, there was no denying that. But it was a loveliness that came from flawlessness, every feature perfect in a way that made her seem almost created by design. It was the beauty of the fey. A face echoing all those who had come before, much as was my own.
Anaïs froze mid-step, eyes scanning the shadows until they latched on to me. Lowering her foot, she stared, face expressionless.
Until recently, I’d barely gone a day without spending time in her presence. With the exception of Marc, she was my oldest and closest friend. And without a doubt, she was my most loyal accomplice. Her history was my history, our lives interwoven as only those who were childhood friends could be. I knew everything about her, all her stories and secrets, and she knew me equally as well.
As our eyes locked, I remembered what I had told Cécile before the sluag attack – that Anaïs and I had never been more than friends. Technically, that was true. But it was also a lie. Anaïs was the first girl I’d lusted after, the first I’d ever kissed, the first of many things. But I’d never loved her, not like that.
Almost as though she could sense my thoughts, Anaïs bolted up the last few steps and started down the street toward her home.
“Anaïs,” I called, hurrying after her. “Anaïs, wait!”
She ignored me, and in another few steps, she would be in sight of the guards at the gate.
“Anaïs, please.” I broke into a run. “I need to talk to you.”
She slid to a stop and rounded on me. “I suppose that’s the key word, isn’t it? Need? Did you ever talk to me because you wanted to?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but she raised a hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Tristan. I don’t want to hear you. I don’t ever want to see your face again. I’m tired of you using me.”
“Anaïs.” I closed the distance between us, my pleasure at seeing her alive tempered by the fury in her eyes. She had never looked at me like that before. “We’ve been friends our whole lives; how can you say these things?”
“Friends?” she scoffed. “Friend is just a label you give your favorite tools. I see that now. You only pretended to care so we’d assist with your plans.”
“You know that isn’t true.” I searched her face, looking for a trace of something that wasn’t anger. “I care about you. I…”
“Right.” She rolled her eyes, but I could see her hands were clenching her skirts. “The only person you care about, the only person you love, is her. And sometimes I wonder if that isn’t just out of some sense of self-preservation on your part.” She laughed wildly, and it sounded strange and off-key in my ears. Not a laugh I’d heard before. “Except that can’t be right,” she said, her shoulders shaking. “Because you loathe yourself, don’t you? You despise your very nature.” The corner of her mouth turned up. “Well, now you are in good company, because with the exception of that imbecile, Marc, there isn’t a soul in Trollus who does not hate you.”
She was the last person I’d ever expected to turn on me. Had I not known her as well as I thought? Or was what I’d done worse than I believed? “If I don’t care about you, then why was I so happy to learn you had survived? Why am I here now?”
“I really don’t know, Tristan.” Her eyes filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. I hadn’t seen her cry like this since Pénélope died – she always said she hated public displays of emotion. “You left me there to die. Left me there even though you knew…” Her voice cracked, and she wiped the dampness from her face.
“Even though I knew what?” I asked, though the answer had already oozed up from the depths of my subconscious.
She swallowed hard before answering. “Even though you knew I could be saved. You knew that witches could heal trolls from iron wounds, because Cécile healed you.” She sniffed, squeezing her eyes shut. “Your father had a witch in Trollus, but you didn’t stop to think of me. You just took her and left.” Her eyes snapped back open. “After everything I’d done for you, you left me to die. If not for your father, I would be rotting in a tomb. He only stabbed me out of desperation – he never had any intention of harming me.”
The moment replayed through my mind. She was right – I hadn’t even stopped to consider that her life could be saved. My one and only concern had been getting Cécile safely away from Trollus.
“I didn’t know where he was keeping the witch,” I said. “If I had known…”
“If you had known, you still would have chosen Cécile over me.”
Denying it was impossible.
“I’m sorry,” I said, searching her face for some sign that this was an act. A strategy she’d employed while I was in prison to protect herself from punishment. But there was nothing. “I have no right to even ask for your forgiveness.”
“Then spare me and don’t,” she hissed, wiping her hands on her dress. I fixed on those hands, her usually perfectly manicured nails bitten down to the quick. “If you want to make it up to me, stay far away.”
Words were incapable of undoing what I had done to her. What I hadn’t done for her. But part of me couldn’t reconcile the Anaïs standing before me with the girl who had calmly ordered me to take Cécile and go. Anaïstromeria, no more tears. My last command to her echoed through my mind, and I fixed on the damp streaks marring her face.
“If that’s what you want.” My voice sounded strange and distant.
“It is.” She spun around, lavender skirts lifting enough for me to see her matching flat shoes. A sense of wrongness shot through me, slicing through the fog of guilt. Something was amiss, something about her wasn’t right. I watched her stride away, the ghostly echo in my memory of clicking high heels drowned out by the slapping of flat soles.
“Anaïstromeria,” I said under my breath. “Stop.”
She kept walking.
“Anaïstromeria, turn around.” My fingers dug into the stones of the wall I leaned against, mortar crumbling. “Anaïstromeria, come back to me.” If she’d been half a world away, she would have heard. Such was the power of a true name.
It was only the dead who could not hear.
Seven
Tristan
“What are you doing?”
I did not let my attention waver from the five white shapes bobbing about in the basin full of bubbling water. “Making lunch.”
“Boiled eggs?”
I slowly lifted my gaze to meet Marc’s, all but daring him to make a comment, but he wisely refrained.
“Did you see Anaïs? Would she speak to you?”
I snorted softly, and the water in the basin went nearly all to steam in an instant. “She isn’t Anaïs.” I poured cold water over my eggs to cool them, then set the basin aside.
“I know she seems different,” Marc started to say, but I interrupted him.
“Someone is posing as her, but Anaïs is dead.”
My cousin sat down heavily on a chair. With one hand, he pushed back his hood, his light extinguishing as he did. “How is that… Are you certain?”
“She was wearing flat shoes,” I said, as though that would explain everything.
Marc lifted his head. “Tristan…”
There was concern in his voice, so
I quickly added, “Her nails were bitten, and her laugh was off key. She isn’t our Anaïs.” I picked up an egg and stared at it. “Whoever she is, she’s my father’s accomplice, and the plot was planned well. She claimed he saved her life, which means that he must have arranged to somehow do so. With a witch.” I set the egg down. “He had a witch in Trollus the entire time.” He had planned everything.
I looked up at his sharp intake of breath, certain he was about to accuse me of having lost my mind to be making such accusations. “I called her by name, and she did not answer, so I know it isn’t her. Anaïs is dead.”
Marc slumped forward, burying his face in one hand. His shoulders twitched once, then again.
You inconsiderate bastard. I directed a few more choice words at myself for realizing too late that while I had months to come to terms with my grief, Marc had not. His relationship with Anaïs had been tense since Pénélope had died, but they were still close, in their own way. Family too, if by marriage and not by blood.
“Victoria will be devastated.”
His words were thick with emotion, and they sparked multiple realizations within me. No one, with the exception of Cécile, my father, me, and now Marc, knew that Anaïs was dead. No one grieved for her. None of the death rituals of our people had been given to her, none of the words spoken, none of the songs sung. Much had been done to our friend, and much was still being done to her memory, and my father was the cause of all of it.
But the sight of Marc’s stifled grief kept me silent. Anaïs’s death was as much my fault as my father’s. I might not have put the spear through her chest, but the impostor hadn’t been wrong when she said I’d done nothing to save her. She might still be alive if only I’d tried harder, if only I’d tried bringing a witch to Trollus, if only…
Hidden Huntress Page 5
