Hidden Huntress

by Danielle L. Jensen

The heels of my boots thudded against the marble as I strode toward the throne, the lamps flaring up as I passed, my power looking for an outlet as it filled the room.

  He had to be mad – what else could drive him to make such a match?

  My father was alone in the room, and he did not bother to look up at my approach, which infuriated me all the more. There was a table spread in front of the throne, laden with enough food to feed two dozen men; but of him, all I could see was the top of his head as he bent over a steaming platter.

  “You great gluttonous pig.” The words were out before I could even think, the icy coldness of my voice at odds with the fire burning through my veins.

  The hand holding a leg of chicken paused in its rise, but still, he did not look up. “Have you no shame?” I hissed. “All your people suffer food rations, and here you sit, shoveling all you can fit and more down your gullet.”

  His gluttony was not what I was really angry about, but it would serve. I wasn’t ready to put words to the real reason, though it hung between us like the stench of a sewer.

  My father set the chicken leg down. And then he raised his head.

  He looked as weary as I had ever seen him, eyes drooped and shadowed, lines I had never noticed before marring his skin. “Tristan,” he said, leaning back on the throne and resting his elbows on the arms. “I have very, very few pleasures in life. I will not begrudge myself this one. Not as long as I am king.” He tilted his head slightly to one side. “Unless, of course, that is why you are here?”

  Reaching up over his head, he lifted the crown from where it was casually hooked over the back of the throne. “Finally come to take it? Here.” He tossed the golden circlet over the table. “Have it.”

  It landed with a loud clank against the stairs of the dais, bounced once, then rolled across the floor before coming to a stop at my feet. I stared at it, astonishment chasing away my anger and giving me a moment of clarity. A moment was all I needed to realize what had happened.

  I looked up. “It’s frustrating, isn’t it, when your pawns don’t play by your rules?”

  He stared silently back at me, but I needed no confirmation that he understood. I knew now what Lessa had done to provoke his wrath, the knowledge solid in my mind as only the truth was. “This is Lessa’s doing. She has her own endgame in mind.”

  Very slowly, he nodded. “How long have you known?”

  “That Anaïs was dead, or that it was my own sister who had stolen her place?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “I knew it wasn’t Anaïs within moments of speaking with her. Lessa is not so fine an actress as she thinks.”

  “Fine enough to fool the girl’s own father.”

  I laughed, the sound harsh. “Angoulême never bothered to know Anaïs. He saw her only as he imagined her to be.”

  “And now she is as he imagined her to be.”

  I grimaced. “Even so.”

  “And how did you know it was Lessa?” He sounded genuinely curious, as though this were all a game with no lives at stake.

  “There are few with power enough to manage it,” I said. “Fewer still who could go so long without their absence noted. And only one capable of this level of duplicity.”

  His eyes gleamed. “I was curious as to when you would figure out the half-bloods’ talent. Did they tell you directly, or did one of them slip up?”

  “A slip, of sorts.” I searched his face, trying to gauge him and failing. “And you? How did you discover that those with human blood can lie?”

  Emotion flashed across his face, too swift for me to identify, but enough for me to know I’d struck a nerve. The light behind him dimmed. “Lessa’s mother. She lied to me. I caught her. I killed her.”

  There was much, much more to that story than anyone knew. “What was the lie?”

  My father shook his head once. Even in this rare moment of honesty between us, some things he would not tell, so I started down another path. “What did you do with Anaïs’s… body?” It was still hard to say it, hard to relegate my friend to an inanimate corpse.

  He snorted derisively. “Of all the questions you might ask, you choose a sentimental one like that? Why do you even care?”

  I hoped all the powers in this world and the next would strike me down if I stopped caring. “Humor me.”

  Something in my voice wiped the mockery away from his. “Fire. Hot enough to burn away any trace that she ever existed.”

  I bowed my head, not bothering to hide my grief. It was part of what made me different from him, and I wanted him to see it. I thought he would say something – mock me for my sentiments. Tell me that they made me weak. He didn’t disappoint.

  He leaned back and rested his head against the gold throne.

  “Everything had come to pass as I had anticipated. You had foolishly allowed your emotions to guide you and played your hand. Attacked me when you thought I intended to harm Cécile.” He sighed. “If you thought clearly and logically, you would have known that I’d never allow harm to come to that girl. She is more precious to me than perhaps even to you, which is why I had the witch they call La Voisin brought to Trollus the moment she was injured. Once I had her assurances that Cécile could be saved, I decided to take advantage of the situation as it had presented itself. You acted predictably. Your sister did not.

  “Lessa was supposed to prevent Anaïs from interfering, but for her own reasons chose not to.” He grimaced. “Lessa came into your rooms moments after you left with Cécile. And in that moment, I thought I was done. That all my plans, and plots, and work, and hardships had been for naught. And for a moment, I wished that you…” He broke off. “But instead of killing me, she dispatched your loyal little friend. And then she offered me a bargain.”

  I didn’t care about the bargain: I cared about what he’d been about to say. That I’d… what? What had he wished I’d done?

  “The bargain was this: I let her take over Anaïs’s life in exchange for her becoming my spy in the Angoulême household.”

  “Why would she want such an existence?” I asked. “She’d be living a lie. Living every day with the fear of discovery, and knowing that if she was discovered, that her life would be forfeit.” Even as I asked the question, I knew the answer.

  My father shrugged. “She clearly thought the risks worth the reward.”

  Better to live a lie than to live a slave.

  I shifted my weight, too many thoughts filling my head. This was not the sort of conversation he and I ever had. He was treating me almost like I was his… I pushed the thought away. We were not equals. It was all tricks. Always tricks, with him. “If she killed Anaïs first, then you were released. You could have killed Lessa where she stood, but you did not. Why?”

  “Bastard half-blood or not, she is my daughter.”

  “Which makes you no less likely to kill her than anyone else who stands in your way.”

  His fingers twitched ever so slightly. “Think what you’d like. But to answer your question, I made the bargain with her because I considered it to be to my advantage. Not only would I gain a spy in the home of my greatest adversary, I would gain a most powerful ally.”

  “Because Anaïs was the heir to the Duchy of Angoulême,” I said. “Lessa could dispatch the Duke and inherit it and all of his powerful alliances.”

  “Just so.”

  I nodded slowly. “It was a good plan.”

  “Indeed.”

  I shifted my weight to my other leg. I didn’t feel well. “Lessa was the cause of what happened with Mother, wasn’t she?”

  This time it was my father’s turn not to hide his emotions. His fingers clenched on the arms of the throne, and I could see a vein rise in his forehead. “Wretched creature wasn’t satisfied with becoming a duchesse, she wanted to be a princess.”

  “She wants to be Queen.” My father met my gaze, and for a heartbeat, we were in perfect understanding. “Does Angoulême know Roland’s name?” I asked, knowing in my heart already that it was the case, but want
ing confirmation from my father’s lips. Wanting, though I hated to admit it, some reassurance that he had a plan that would fix things.

  “I have strong reason to believe that is the case.”

  I expected his anger to rise at the admission, but the throbbing vein in his forehead disappeared, and he averted his gaze, looking over my shoulder at the door. Was it possible that he was upset about what was happening to my brother? Was it possible that he cared?

  My heart thudded loud in my ears. Dare I say it? Was it the correct move? “You could undo all these troubles,” I said, my desire to keep the hope from my voice making it sound toneless. “You could reinstate me as heir.”

  A smile grew on his lips, growing wider and wider. But it wasn’t an expression of happiness or pleasure, and I knew nothing had changed. I became painfully aware that I was dressed only in shirtsleeves, dusty and sweaty, that my coat and hat were still hanging on the back of Pierre’s chair. And my gloves still sat on the wall next to the tree, leaving my weakened state glaringly obvious.

  His eyes met mine. “They say nothing worth having comes easily, Tristan. If you want the crown, you’re going to have to take it.”

  The golden circlet still lay at my feet.

  I wanted to snatch it up.

  I wanted to run as far away from it as possible.

  Swallowing the burn in my throat, I reached down, forcing my numb fingers to pick up the symbol of my father’s power. The weight of it made my wrist scream, but I had a lot of practice in keeping pain from showing. In one, two, three steps, I was up on the dais, and I slammed the crown against his chest. “I’ll take it when I’m good and ready, and that’s a promise.” The weight of my word sank into me, horrible, wonderful, and binding.

  Letting go of the crown, I spun on my heel and started down the steps toward the door, and not once did I look back.

  The antechamber was full of my father’s guardsmen and women, and they all tensed when I swung the doors open, a few peering past me to see if my father had survived our encounter. None of them looked as though they had put any great effort into trying to get past my wards, which led me to believe that my father had forewarned them not to interfere. Which led me to believe that he had predicted my arrival after his announcement. I wondered if his seeming ability to see the future would ever stop amazing me.

  The guards parted to let me pass, and I stalked through their midst, eager to be away, when a scent that didn’t belong caught my attention.

  Horses.

  I stopped in my tracks and took one step backwards. If not for the smell, I might not have noticed the man leaning against the wall, his dark cloak blending into the shadows. A guard stepped between us.

  “Move,” I said.

  The guard licked his lips nervously, staring at my feet. “The King has ordered that he not speak to anyone while in Trollus, my lord.”

  I didn’t respond, only stood silently, waiting. The guard moved out of my way.

  The human didn’t straighten from his slouch against the wall at my approach, only watched me with the interest of someone who has nothing better to look at. He was somewhat shorter than me, but something about him made him seem larger than he was. A certain mien that made me suspect that he was someone of importance in the human world.

  His clothes confirmed my suspicion, his fur-lined cloak of the finest wool and boots polished to a high shine. A sword hung from his waist, and I did not fail to notice the corner of the emblem stitched onto his breast. An officer in the Regent’s army, and unless I missed my mark, part of the Regent’s court as well. But I didn’t really care about any of that. He was human and he was here, which meant that he was working for my father.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He straightened out of his slouch. “I might ask you the same question.”

  “You’d be the first.”

  He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I suppose it’s difficult to maintain anonymity when one is trapped in a cage.”

  My smile was all teeth. “For some more than others.”

  “In a cage and in the world, Your Highness.” He bowed, but it was sardonic. For a second, I thought he was mocking my fall from grace, but I quickly realized it was more than that. He was mocking our claim to any sort of authority. It wasn’t just me being censured, it was my father. Who was he to be so bold?

  “You seem to manage,” I said, taking a jab at his sense of self-importance to see if he would bite and reveal his identity.

  He only inclined his head. “We all have our talents. Now if you’d please excuse me, I have important matters requiring my attention, and I do not care to linger in this hole longer than I must.” He started to brush by me, but I caught him before he could go more than a pace. Not with my hand, as I might otherwise, but with magic.

  I all but felt his skin crawl, his shudder visible to the eye. “How is she?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

  He turned his head, looking me up and down before snorting softly. “Better than you, it would seem,” he said. “And yet worse. The woman I have watching her says she has turned to the dark arts.”

  Blood magic. My stomach tightened at the idea of Cécile killing anything, and I almost regretted handing my father back the crown when I might have murdered him where he sat.

  “I know what it is she seeks and how,” he said. “And as much as I know it is against her will, if I were master of my own, I would see her dead before I would see her succeed.”

  Like a giant fist, my power contracted, forcing a wheeze of pain from the man. Only the small thread of control I had left kept me from squeezing the life out of him. From his own lips he’d admitted he could not harm her. My father owned his will, and this man hated him for it. Which meant there was a chance he’d help Cécile if he thought it in his best interests. Or he might be so bound by oath that he’d turn around and deliver the information back to my father. Did I risk giving him knowledge that might help her? It might be her only chance. Drawing in a ragged breath, I released him.

  He staggered back and away from me, colliding with the guards. “You and yours are a scourge on this earth,” he hissed. “If Cécile falls like so many before her, it will not be because of anything I have done. Her death will be on your hands.”

  Shoving the guards aside, I leaned close so that we were eye to eye. “I think that if you let her die because of what you have not done, you will find that guilt is not such an easy thing to escape.” Hands were snatching at me, pulling me back and away. And I could feel my father coming in our direction; this man of enough importance to him that he’d interfere himself. I had only a second. Jerking out of their grip, I whispered, “There is a loophole in the promise she made. Tell her to think on it.”

  The human’s eyes widened, but there was no time to say more. I could only pray that I’d delivered Cécile an ally, not an enemy.

  Twenty-Seven

  Cécile

  I spent the entire night sitting in front of the fire, hoping Catherine would contact me through the flames and tell me that she’d help; but all I’d got for my efforts were bloodshot eyes, smoky hair, and the realization that the other witch might be too afraid to provide me with assistance. If I hadn’t heard from her by tonight, my plan was to try the map spell again to see if the mark at the castle moved. It was a sure way to prove that it was Anushka, but I’d been avoiding using it again mostly because I so badly wanted to. The need to feel that flood of power lurked inside me, and I was afraid of how much worse the feeling would be if I gave in to the temptation.

  Although I might not have a choice.

  We were rehearsing in the foyer de la danse, because the stage in the room was much closer in size to the one we’d perform on at the castle than the massive one in the main theatre. A dozen young girls from the dance school played the roles belonging to the ladies of the court, their tarlatan skirts jutting out from their hips to reveal legs muscled from hours of training. The steps were no challenge to them, but their eye
s gleamed with the excitement of holding the attention, however briefly, of the most influential members of the company.

  I watched dubiously while crewmembers rigged a swing that would suspend me above the rest of the cast through the second half of the masque.

  “And you will swing gently back and forth,” Monsieur Johnson explained to me. “The Queen of Virtue, smiling down upon her beautiful subjects.”

  “I can’t smile while I sing,” I said, giving the swing a hard jerk with one hand to ensure it was secure.

  “Smile with your eyes,” he exclaimed. “With your posture. With your very soul!”

  From behind him, my mother rolled her eyes, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I was back in her good graces after my venture out with Julian, who had dutifully returned me home before midnight, and, to the best of my knowledge, not breathed a word about where we had gone. “My soul will be beaming, monsieur,” I said. “I will not disappoint.”

  He clapped his hands together, then ran off to herd the rest of the cast into the wings.

  “What a silly little man,” my mother murmured, yanking on the ropes. Seeming unsatisfied, she took hold of the swing with both hands and lifted her feet so that she was suspended off the ground. “If it holds my weight, it will hold yours,” she said. “Although maybe we should attach a wire to you just in case.”

  “It will be fine,” I said, sitting down on the plank.

  “Please hold on tightly.” She pulled my hair out from where it was tucked behind my ears. “If you were to fall and injure yourself, it would be a disaster.”

  “I won’t fall,” I assured her.

  She did not look convinced.

  “How do you feel about tomorrow?” I asked. Tomorrow was closing night for this particular production run, and Genevieve’s final public performance.

  “It matters less than you might think,” she said, bending down to kiss me on the forehead. “I’ll be living through you every time you step onstage.”

  Pulleys creaked, and I lifted up into the air until I was at the same level as the massive crystal chandelier hanging in the center of the room. Kicking my feet, I began to swing back and forth.