The Malediction: Hidden Huntress Part 19

Cecile

"Under no circ.u.mstances is she to leave the house today, do you understand? She has no rehearsals or performances or appointments, so don't believe any lies she might spin."

"Yes, Madame."

My mother repeated her instructions to the cook and maid, albeit with different phrasing. But the message was the same: short of the house burning down and perhaps not even then I was not to cross the threshold. Scowling, I rolled onto my back and stared up at the canopy of my bed.

It wasn't as though I couldn't sneak out. It would be easy enough to compel both women not to interfere, but both of them would lose their jobs if my mother discovered they'd let me go without a fight. Better to use a non-magical route. I was an experienced tree climber, and the st.u.r.dy trellis running down the house would not trouble me in the least.

But not getting caught was quite another matter. I'd ignored my mother's orders and today's internment was my punishment. But if I did it again, I knew she would and could do much worse to me. Chain my feet together, or hire guards to stand outside my door, or drug me to sleep every night. Her creativity knew no bounds.

The maid had been in a quarter-hour past to bring me a tray of breakfast, and sunlight beamed in between the drapes she had tossed open. The food was slowly growing cold, but the smell of it made my stomach roil, and the thought of eating was more than I could bear. My head throbbed unbearably and my whole body ached from riding around in the freezing cold. I felt like I was falling sick, but I knew better. Even without the message left on my mirror, I would have felt the urgency. Something had happened. Something had changed. The troll king was no longer content to wait. If he ever had been.

Tick, tock, Princess.

Rolling over, I buried my face in the pillow. When I'd first seen the red writing, I'd thought it was blood. It had turned out to be only my own lip stain. But while the medium of the message was more innocuous than I'd originally thought, its meaning was no less nefarious. Not only was I running out of time, the placement of the message and the casual use of my own cosmetics slapped me in the face with the knowledge that the King could reach me anytime and anywhere. I might be free of Trollus, but I was not free from danger. I wondered if anywhere was safe.

My thoughts swiftly returned to the results of my spell the prior night. And the spell itself. It had been so easy no worrying about whether the nature and balance of the ingredients was correct, or if I was using the elements best suited to the task. No fear the power that manifested would be insufficient.

And it had felt good.

I shivered, worming my way deeper under the covers. Certainly, it had been hard to kill the chicken, but more than that, I remembered the euphoric influx of power. Power that had lingered in me long enough to shout my mother into submission when I'd returned home, hours after casting the spell. It had been a revolting act. But it had also been intoxicating. Addicting. Digging my bitten fingernails ineffectually into my palms, I mumbled, "Don't think about it."

Better to think of the results.

All but two of the burn marks on the map we'd proven to be deceased women. The one mark within Trianon we couldn't find had been located in the Regent's castle, and I knew for certain that Marie had been there last night, and I was certain a.n.u.shka had been in her company. My own blasted mother had performed for her. Chris would argue that it was still no proof. That we needed to investigate the mark outside the city. Yet even before I'd heard his argument, I was already dismissing it. It would only be another grave out in the middle of a field or a forest.

She could have left Trianon, Chris's phantom voice echoed in my head. If she knows you're after her, perhaps she has fled. I brushed the voice of my friend aside my gut told me that a.n.u.shka would not flee from me.

But what about the trolls?

"b.l.o.o.d.y stones, shut up!" I swore.

"Mademoiselle?"

Tipping my head, I peered out of the depths of my covers with one eye. The maid stood in the doorway, one eyebrow arched. "Not you," I said. "The... the neighbors are being loud."

"It is quite late in the morning," she said pointedly, her gaze flicking to my untouched tray.

"I'm sorry," I said, eyeing its contents again. My stomach did flip-flops. "I'm feeling under the weather. I don't think I can eat a thing."

A soft little sniff told me exactly what she thought of my malaise. "Will you be wanting lunch?"

"I'll let you know," I said, still eyeing the wasted food. "For now, I'll rest."

I waited for her to leave, then I dragged a chair under the door's handle so she wouldn't be able to sneak up on me again. Retrieving a pencil and a piece of stationery from my desk, I went back to my bed and got under the covers again. From under my pillow, I extracted the blood-smeared map with its hastily scrawled list of names and dates, and I carefully began to copy them out in order.

They spanned the past five centuries; the oldest tomb had been so weatherworn that we'd barely been able to make out the names and dates. Chewing on my fingernail, I carefully calculated the age of each woman at her death. No pattern. I calculated the years between their births. No pattern. I began calculating the years between their deaths. Eleven years. Nineteen years. Thirty-eight years. I flung my pencil down with annoyance, not bothering with the rest.

The dead women were connected to how a.n.u.shka was managing immortality, I was sure of it. But how? Killing them would certainly give her a glut of power, but it wouldn't last more than a few days, and nothing I'd read suggested that such behavior would prolong life. If that were the case, other witches would have discovered it and capitalized upon it. She had to be doing something with the power, but no matter how far I stretched my mind, I couldn't think what. A witch couldn't heal herself, and what was immortality if not a cure for old age? It didn't make sense. She had to be doing it another way.

I picked up the grimoire Chris had stolen and began going through the pages. Flip, flip, flip. The pages rasped against my blanket as I turned them, and then I stopped.

The grimoire was full of spells combining regular magic and blood magic to manage certain afflictions of the body, but only now was I noticing a theme among many of them. Potions to keep hair dark, creams to wipe away wrinkles, and tonics to keep skin firm. While the spells would do nothing for the subject's longevity, a combination of them would certainly replicate the appearance of immortality the individual using them might well drop dead of old age, while appearing to all who looked on as though they were in the bloom of youth.

I rested my chin on my wrists. Catherine had been Lady Marie's maid. I suspected Marie was helping a.n.u.shka, so wasn't it possible she had enlisted Catherine, and maybe others before her, to help maintain her immortality? If one could use magic to combat the exterior signs of age, couldn't one do the same for the interior degeneration? It would be complicated, and the spells would need continual renewal, but it might be possible. The only certain thing was that she'd need the help of other witches to do it.

My heart started to beat a little faster. Maybe that had been the reason for Catherine's fall from grace that she'd refused to help a.n.u.shka with her foul magic any longer.

I wondered how much Catherine knew. Whether Marie and a.n.u.shka had entrusted her with their secrets, or whether they'd only used her for her skills. Catherine had said Marie dismissed her for meddling in business she shouldn't have, which could well be a.n.u.shka's relationship with the trolls.

Snapping the book shut, I rolled onto my back. One question remained, itching and nagging at me, demanding to be scratched. If a.n.u.shka knew who I was, who I was working with, and that I was on her trail, why hadn't she tried to kill me yet?

The canopy of my bed seemed to swim above me, and I shut my eyes, trying desperately to think objectively about why she was keeping me alive. Was she toying with me, like a cat does with a mouse? Was she garnering some perverse sort of amus.e.m.e.nt watching me chase after her like an ignorant fool, waiting for the entertainment to play out before she ended my life? It seemed a reckless way to behave, but maybe after five hundred years of life one developed a different perspective on risk? Or was there something about me she thought was of use?

The door handle rattled. "Cecile? It's Sabine."

Tumbling out of bed, I hurried to the door and pulled the chair out from under the handle. "What are you doing here?"

"Helping you." Backing me into the room, she shut the door and put the chair back under the handle. "I crossed paths with your maid on her way to the market, and she told me Genevieve has clamped down on your 'midnight gallivanting' and 'scandalous behavior,' whatever that means." Kicking off her boots, she climbed onto my bed. "So I'm here to help you with whatever you need."

I perched on the covers next to her, not sure what to make of what she'd said. "Sabine..."

"I know," she said. "What's changed?" Her fingers plucked at my bedspread, her expression contemplative. "I suppose I thought time would change things back to the way they used to be. To the way you used to be. That you'd forget about them, and... Tristan. That the trolls would cease to exist if we stopped paying them any attention. Or at the very least, that we could go back to a life where they didn't affect us." She winced. "Now that I'm saying it, it seems so childish."

I pulled the covers over my feet. "Maybe. But sometimes when you want something badly enough, it doesn't matter if it's realistic. Or right." She'd never been to Trollus until I'd told Sabine the truth, the trolls were nothing more than children's stories to her, so I could imagine how she would think shutting the book and putting it away would mean they'd cease to exist.

She nodded. "The thing was, once you told me about them, I started to see signs of them, or at least their influence, everywhere. I began to remember things that happened in the past that I found strange in the moment, but then forgot about. The way Chris's father would buy all the excess from the farms around the Hollow to sell in the Courville markets, but never seem to know what was going on in the city. The way merchants would stop in at my parents' inn for lunch on their way to Trianon, but then pa.s.s back through in less time than it would take to make the whole journey, wagons empty."

She blew a breath of air through her teeth. "And since we've been in Trianon, it's even more noticeable. I've watched merchants from the continent unload their ships' holds into wagons, bypa.s.s the Trianon markets, and head south, but there is no market between here and Courville for a hundred bolts of silk, and if their destination was Courville, why wouldn't they sail there directly? Obviously because it's intended for Trollus."

I gaped at her in astonishment. Not because what she was saying didn't make sense, but that she'd noticed all these comings and goings and I hadn't. I knew I wasn't the most observant, and that I'd a tendency to walk around with my head in the clouds, but it was alarming that I'd miss something so obvious.

"All these merchants know about the trolls," Sabine continued. "But more importantly, no one interferes with them. No one asks questions. Which means others either know about them too, or they've been paid off. Hundreds of people must be aware the trolls exist, but they remain a secret from most everyone on the Isle. The only way that's possible is that they are more in control than anyone realizes."

"You're right," I said, because though I may not have considered the practical aspects of trolls' control over the Isle, I knew no one was beyond the King's reach. "Sabine, do you know what a regent is?"

She shrugged. "Like a king?"

"It's the t.i.tle given to the individual who is temporarily head of a kingdom in place of the monarch."

"But the Isle doesn't have a monarch."

I lifted one eyebrow, and watched understanding settle on her face. "I think the first regent was put in his position by the trolls after they were cursed, but only because they thought it would be temporary until a.n.u.shka was tracked down and killed."

A crease formed between Sabine's eyebrows. "But then... wouldn't it be in the best interest of the Regent not to find her? To keep the trolls contained, and thus keep control of the Isle?"

I nodded. "That's exactly what I think the Regency has been doing throughout history. On the surface, they've made it look like they are helping search by legalizing the witch-hunts, but in reality, they've been harboring the one witch who mattered most. I don't have any proof, but I think that might have something to do with Catherine's fall from grace that she got too close to the truth."

"Catherine?"

"La Voisin," I clarified, so used to her knowing everything that I'd forgotten she didn't know the outcome of my meeting with the witch she'd discovered.

Sabine's frown stayed in place as I explained Catherine's connection to the Regency and the reasons for my speculations, growing deeper when I told her about the spell I'd done with Chris the prior night. "So even though she might not understand how important a.n.u.shka is, Catherine might still know her ident.i.ty?"

"Not that she's likely to tell me anything," I said with a grimace. "She's terrified of the Regency."

"Too bad none of your books has a spell for plucking knowledge from someone's head," she said, giving a.n.u.shka's grimoire a poke.

An idea burst in my mind like a firecracker. "Sabine," I said. "You're a genius."

The cook had given me a strange look when I'd appeared downstairs in my dressing gown, but she hadn't interfered when I'd gone into the pantry to retrieve a sprig of rosemary. Back in my bedroom with the drapes drawn and my door jammed, I'd carefully torn the page containing the spell for the skin cream out of the grimoire. After I'd copied the contents of the page out on a piece of stationery under Sabine's watchful eye, I carefully rolled up the original, wrapped a strand of the hair Chris had stolen and the sprig of rosemary around it, and held the package over my washbasin full of water.

I understood better now than I had before why the spell worked as it did: the piece of paper with the spell on it focused on the memory I wished to extract, and the hair acted as a link to Catherine, while the rosemary improved and strengthened the clarity. Water was the element of choice because memory and thought were fluid and transitory, ever changing.

"You've done this before?" Sabine asked.

"A variation of it," I replied, examining my work. "Magic doesn't work on trolls, but it does work on half-bloods." The spell had been intended to find lost items, but I'd adapted it before when I'd used it on elise in order to extract the memory of when she'd last seen the clove oil I'd needed for the injury I'd sustained during the earthshake. Catherine had told me that the incantation used was merely a way to focus on the desired outcome, so I was sure it was possible to change the spell again to suit my purposes.

"But if magic doesn't work on them, why does a curse?"

I bit my lip. Her question was one I'd pondered at length before. "I don't know. But hush now, I need quiet for this."

Staring at the rolled-up paper, I focused my thoughts. I wanted the strongest memory a.s.sociated with the spell, but more than that, I wanted to know whom it had been for.

"When did you cast this spell?" I whispered, then dropped the package into the water. "And for whom did you cast it?"

Touching the surface of the water, I felt power surge through me while the roaring sound of a river flowed out of the basin. The paper spun round and round, then as though it had suddenly tripled in weight, it plunged to the bottom.

Sabine gasped, and I almost did, too. That hadn't happened before.

My pulse fluttered in my neck, and it was a struggle to maintain my concentration as the water turned dark and murky. There was movement, but I felt as though I were spying on a scene taking place in the darkest of nights. Whispers of sound teased my ears, but I couldn't decipher what they were. Leaning closer to the water, I peered into the basin, trying to pick out something familiar.

"What's going to happen?" Sabine asked.

"Watch."

Crimson splattered up from the depths, and we both jerked back. The surface of the water caught and held the red liquid like a pane of gla.s.s, but I knew what it was. Blood, but from who or what, I could not say.

"Eternal youth, eternal youth, eternal youth." The words started quiet as a thought, but then grew louder and louder until I was sure everyone in the house could hear the voice. Catherine's voice.

Then abruptly as it had begun, the voice went silent. The bowl of water turned pristine white.

But the memory wasn't over.

Slowly, the whiteness faded like clouds clearing on a summer sky, and an image appeared. A woman Catherine was walking through the corridors of the castle, the skirt she was kicking out in front of her infinitely finer than what she wore now. I could hear her heels against the stone, the swish of the fabric of her dress, although the quality of the sound was strange. She paused in front of a door, looked both ways, then entered into the room.

"I have it." Catherine spoke, the words echoing as though she stood at the end of a long corridor.

"It took you long enough." The voice of the woman who spoke was distorted, and Catherine was staring at her feet, so I couldn't see who it was.

"This is the last batch." Catherine's voice shook. "I can't keep doing this what if I get caught?"

"Be more afraid of what will happen to you if you stop!" There was a flurry of motion, and the other woman s.n.a.t.c.hed up the jar Catherine was holding and spun away. She finally looked up, but the other woman was wearing a hooded cloak.

"Turn around," I breathed at the image. "Who are you?"

"It's getting harder and harder to hide the bodies," Catherine pleaded. "This is dark magic, mistress. There is always a cost."

"I don't care." The woman whirled around, revealing the cruel beaked mask she wore. It concealed all her features, making it impossible to tell what she looked like or even how old she was. "There is no cost too great. Not for this. I must endure."

The image vanished, and the basin was once again filled with ordinary water and the sodden bundle of paper, hair, and herb, the magic fading away. Sabine met my eyes. "Do you think that was her?"

I nodded slowly. "The way she said the last bit, I must endure, there was something about her phrasing. Not that her beauty or youth must endure, but that she herself must."

"It could mean nothing. She could just be a woman desperate to maintain her youth."

"Or it could mean everything." Pushing the basin back, I got to my feet. "I need to see Catherine and convince her to tell me what she knows."

"She's no more likely to tell you anything now than she was before, Cecile."

"I'm not so sure about that," I said. "The desire for revenge is a powerful motivator, and I think I can appeal to that."

"All right, but there's still one problem."

"I know," I said. "I need to find a way to get past my mother."