Crimson Bound (3 page)

Damned if she was going to turn tail and run while he was watching.

Rachelle planted her feet a little more firmly. “I need coffee,” she said.

Abruptly an older man shoved the girl aside. He had similar lines to his face—father, maybe, or uncle—and corded muscles.

“This is a respectable coffeehouse,” he said, his voice low and rumbling.

“Good,” she said. “I would hate to ruin my reputation.”

“You don’t need to trouble us,” said the man. “For the love of the Dayspring, go somewhere else.”

He was brave, she had to give him that. Her senses had sharpened as they always did when somebody nearby was afraid; she half saw, half heard the swift, desperate pulse in his throat. But he was staring her down as if she couldn’t draw her sword, cut his neck open, and walk away. As if she didn’t know what it felt like to have blood beneath her fingernails and spattered across her face.

She forced the memories back. “I’m a servant of the King. A respectable house would be honored to serve me.”

“You know, you can threaten all you want,” Erec said from his corner, “but they’re still going to spit in your coffee.” He gave her a look of bored weariness. “Why don’t you come back when you’ve learned how to make people do what you want?”

Her throat tightened in helpless frustration. Erec always found ways to tease her when she couldn’t get back at him.

Without a word, she strode to his corner and sat herself down in his lap. “What a considerate young man you are,” she said loudly. “Tell me
all
about persuading people.”

Nobody could embarrass Erec—it was as impossible as water running uphill—but at least she could make sure that his evening of being inconspicuous was thoroughly ruined.

He slid his hand up her cheek, hooking a thumb under her jaw. “Some things are better shown than told, hm?”

Heat blossomed across her cheeks. Two years ago, he’d found it very easy to persuade her to kiss him, back before she’d learned to tell when he was joking and when he was serious. Before she’d realized his kisses were never serious.

“I don’t need to be shown anything,” she said. “I already know what
you
are.”

“Do you?” asked Erec, with that oblique tilt of his eyebrows that she knew so well, and her heart thudded.

Then she heard a soft chorus of clicks.

She looked over her shoulder and cursed herself for letting Erec distract her. Because there were twelve men now, and four of them were holding muskets, their wide brass mouths gleaming in the dim light.

“Step away from him,” said the owner of the coffeehouse.

Rachelle’s mind was whirling through cold calculations. She had thought she could kill them all. She probably still could, with Erec’s help, because while some fools thought that killing bloodbound was as simple as pointing the musket and pulling the trigger, human hands were slow and muskets had terrible aim.

But sometimes fools were lucky. And even bloodbound couldn’t survive a musket ball in the face.

“You really should have left when I told you to,” Erec murmured.

“You really should have arrested them as soon as they got muskets,” Rachelle muttered back.

“I was waiting for them to implicate all their friends.”

“I said
step away
,” the owner growled. “We’re done with bowing and scraping to murderers.”

“Well, then I should probably be leaving as well,” said Erec. “Because I’m Erec d’Anjou, captain of the King’s bloodbound, and you would not believe the blood on my hands.”

“I really think they would,” said Rachelle.

“You traitor,” snarled one of the men.

“Not to the King,” said Erec, wrapping his arms around Rachelle. She knew that he was preparing to fling her in one direction while he threw himself in the other. The real risk was in the very first moment, when they were still in front of the muskets; once moving, they would be almost safe, because muskets were only as good as the hands that held them and the eyes that guided them.

She could feel the cold-hot thrill of battle starting to hum in her veins.

If she hadn’t been readying herself to fight, she might not have noticed the flicker of movement at the edge of her vision. She looked at the mural, at the wonderfully lifelike leaves painted in the background.

Then she realized they were moving. They weren’t part of the painting, they were growing out of the wall, rippling in a breeze she couldn’t feel.

It was a glimpse of the Great Forest like she’d had in the rainswept streets. But that didn’t happen indoors. No bloodbound, no matter how strong her second sight, could see the Forest from within a human home.

Unless the Forest was beginning to actually manifest, enough of its power seeping through to take physical form in the human world.

“Erec,” she said quietly. The thrill of battle was turning into a sick expectation. “The Forest’s here.”

Now she could feel the sour, humming presence of the woodspawn. Right here in this room, surrounded by hateful and hostile and terribly fragile humans.

“Inconvenient,” said Erec.

Suddenly he threw himself to the side, dragging Rachelle along with him. She rolled free of his grasp and back onto her feet. Where they had stood a moment before crouched another spectral hound, red tongue lolling between its fangs.

The muskets went off in a deafening chorus.

“Everybody out,” Rachelle yelled, shifting her grip on her sword as she realized that she had drawn it. Then something rustled above her. She looked up.

The whole ceiling of the room was completely overgrown, and at least ten of the doglike woodspawn crouched among the branches, staring down at her with glittering eyes.

This wasn’t a chance eddy in the Forest’s power. This was a full manifestation, and she hadn’t seen one this bad since—since—

The rest of the woodspawn dropped. The humans, at last seeing them, started
screaming. Rachelle ducked one way, Erec the other, and all thought was seared away by the glorious, white-hot delirium of movement. Human words and human fears didn’t exist anymore, just simple, instinctive knowledge: lunge here, slice there. Vault the table, and there was Erec at her back as they took down another knot of the creatures.

Then, diving to avoid another woodspawn, she stumbled straight into the coffeehouse girl—why hadn’t those idiots gotten her out before attempting murder? Rachelle shoved her under the nearest table, and was turning when a woodspawn hit her in the shoulder and slammed her to the ground.

With a wet thud, Erec’s dagger plunged into the woodspawn’s head.

“Watch yourself!” he snapped, already turning away.

Rachelle sat up, pulled the blade out of the writhing creature’s head, and threw it to land between the eyes of the woodspawn closest to him. She grabbed her sword and gave the twitching woodspawn beside her a final, fatal slash across the middle. It shivered and dissolved into mud.

She realized that only two of the woodspawn were left alive, and Erec was fighting both of them with a lethal grace that promised the hounds didn’t have long left.

“You saved me.”

The girl’s voice was quiet, trembling. Rachelle looked back under the table: she was very pale. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted in fear.

No.

That was
hope
in the girl’s face, and it was hope that made her voice tremble as she said, “You’re not really a monster, are you? People like you—they can still be saved.”

Rachelle bolted to her feet, ice running through her veins. Because she knew why this girl was agonized with hope. She knew why the Forest had manifested this way.

And she knew what was waiting for them upstairs.

“Erec,” she said, “finish them,” and bolted up the steps. Ivy grew down the walls of the stairway and little red birds flashed among the leaves.

The door at the top was bolted shut. Rachelle kicked it once, twice, and then it gave way.

Inside was the Great Forest.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

T
he Forest was just like her dreams. The dark, tangled growth of trees, branches, and roots woven together. The cold air, pulsing with half-heard laughter, that tasted of blood and smoke. The glint of a bonfire in the distance.

This was the Great Forest, the Forest of Dreams and Dreadful Night: the dark, primeval wood that had once covered all the world in the days before the sun and moon. She’d seen its phantom shadow a thousand times, haunting the streets of Rocamadour, blossoming around her when she met the forestborn in the wood near Aunt Léonie’s cottage. She’d dreamed of it night after night.

She had never imagined that when she finally walked all the way inside, it would feel like home.

Rachelle stepped over the threshold. The cold darkness rippled over her skin, kissed her eyes, and unfurled her hair.

The longing hit her like a kick to the stomach. For just one moment, she was convinced that the distant bonfire was the only light in all the world—that the sun was a dream and the moon a delirium—and she wanted nothing but to drop her sword and run for that fire. She wanted to forget her foolish human name, relinquish it to the sweet, secret darkness, and run to that fire-lit world of dancing.

Then the mark burned on her neck, flaring to life in response to the Forest’s power, and she remembered the price of that darkness and that dancing.

Around her little finger, she felt an answering burn. She looked down.

No one but Rachelle could see the phantom red string that the forestborn had tied to her finger. Even she couldn’t feel it. But here, though it had no physical presence, it burned cold against her finger.

After she had . . .
after
, the forestborn had congratulated her on joining the lords of the Forest in time to rule with them. She’d dropped the knife and bolted. He had caught her and thrown her to the ground, and she’d wondered if he was going to use her the way
people said forestborn used innocent maidens. But she wasn’t innocent anymore and she didn’t have enough strength left to fight back. So she had lain still, but he’d only tied the red string around her finger, saying,
Leave me all you want. You’re still mine.

She had never seen him since, but he had been right. She had never again been anything but what he made her, and someday she would lose herself completely to the call of the Great Forest.

But not today.

Not like the other poor, mad bloodbound she had followed here.

She listened carefully, and there it was to her left: the soft, harsh breathing of a human driven almost past endurance. She followed the sound, picking her way through the trees.

The breathing grew louder. Rachelle moved softly and silently as smoke.

A lean, middle-aged woman crouched in the hollow of a tree. Her clothes were in rags; deep scratches scored her arms. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her hands were pressed over her ears. On her forehead was the mark, an eight-pointed star, no bigger than a thumbnail, exactly the same color as fresh blood.

It was the same mark that burned on Rachelle’s neck.

Because this woman was exactly like Rachelle. A forestborn marked her and left her with a choice: die in three days, or kill somebody and live as a bloodbound, heir to the power of the Forest.

Like Rachelle, she had chosen to kill and live.

Now the power of the Great Forest had almost finished growing in her. She had fought it. She had fought until it broke her mind, until the Great Forest grew up around her because she would not run to it. But this was the end. In another moment the last scraps of her humanity would be washed away, leaving her with nothing but a senseless desire to hunt and kill.

The woman’s eyes opened. Rachelle’s hand tightened on her sword hilt, but the woman remained still, watching with blind wariness. Was she still human, or had the change fully overtaken her now?

She was a bloodbound and therefore a murderer; like Rachelle, she deserved to die.

She was helpless and in pain. Like Aunt Léonie.

The woman’s hands dropped from her ears. Her lips curled back, and a little whining snarl escaped between her teeth.

She isn’t human
, thought Rachelle.
She isn’t human anymore.

The woman sprang.

Rachelle’s body had no doubts. Quicker than thought, she swung her sword and sliced the woman’s throat open; blood sprayed as the woman sank to the ground.

Rachelle stumbled back a step. Now that it was over, she was shaking and panting like she had run up a mountain. She could see the crumpled body at the edge of her vision, but she couldn’t look at it now.

She didn’t need to. She knew what a human body looked like, ripped open and stripped of life. What it looked like, dead by her hands. She
knew.

Her throat burned with the need to scream or weep.

But this time, at least, she had also saved lives. There would not be a new forestborn to plague the world. This manifestation of the Forest would end without spilling more chaos into Rocamadour.