Warrior Witch: Malediction Trilogy Book Three (2 page)

M
y first instinct
was to dive out into the corridor, but sensing my intentions, Julian’s finger tightened on the trigger and I froze. No amount of luck would allow me to dodge a bullet at this range: I was no troll.

“Julian, don’t.” I forced as much power as I could into the command, but he only sneered and flicked the sprig of rowan pinned to his collar, the expression grotesque on his tear-stained face.

“Do you think I’d leave myself vulnerable to your tricks?”

I swallowed the bile rising from my stomach. “I’m sorry, Julian. If you knew the truth then you’d understand that I–”

“Shut. Up.” The words were barely louder than a whisper, but they silenced me more thoroughly than any shout.

“I know everything,” he continued, voice shaking but pistol steady. “You might be little more than a back-country twit, but you were right when you said she trusted me more than you with her secrets. Her greatest secret. I know who she was, who you are, what he is, and more about
them
than you could even dream of.” He wiped his face with his free hand. “Most of all, I know that you are the one who was supposed to die, but instead…” His eyes flickered down to my mother’s corpse, then back to me. “All I have left is revenge.”

He gripped the pistol with both hands, leveling it at my face.
It couldn’t end now. Not after everything. Not like this.
“Please.”

He bared his teeth. “Not so brave without your troll to protect you?”

“She doesn’t need a troll for protection from the likes of you.” Sabine stepped out of the bedroom and pressed my mother’s gun against the back of his head. “A human is plenty good enough.”

Julian was quiet for one heartbeat. Two. Three. Then he smiled. “When you’ve lost your reason for living, much becomes worth dying for.”

The retort of the pistol shattered my ears, and pain sliced across my face. I staggered sideways, my head ringing and hot trickles of blood coating my fingers as I pressed them to my cheek. But it was nothing in comparison to the gore pooling at Sabine’s feet.

“Idiot,” she said, lowering the still smoking gun. “What good is dying for the dead? They are past caring.”

Lifting her head, Sabine’s eyes landed on me. She dropped the gun and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, Cécile. Your face!”

“It’s fine,” I said, even though my cheek burned, the line the bullet had scored across my skin deep enough to mark me permanently. A fraction of an inch closer, and I would’ve been dead, and no amount of vanity could undermine that fact.

We both stumbled forward, collapsing into each other’s arms. “I knew he would do it,” she said. “I knew from the moment you came in that I was going to have to kill him. He was never one to think beyond the moment.”

Much the same could be said about me. The world still shook from what
I
had decided in a moment. The implications of my actions had begun to descend with leaden wings the moment that dragon’s scream had shattered the night air, filtering through the rush of adrenaline-fueled fear to brush against me in the courtyard when Tristan had left me alone in the snow. Now they settled their full weight upon my shoulders, and I found I could not think. I could barely breathe.

“She’s dead? Your mother, I mean, Anushka?”

I squeezed my fingers together. They were tacky with my blood.
Her blood.

“And the trolls? They’re free?”

And what power in this world could stop them?

“Where’s Tristan?”

He walked away.

“Cécile? Cécile!”

My head snapped sideways with the force of her slap. I stared at her, and she shook her head. “I’m sorry for that, but this is the wrong time for you to lose your nerve.”

Taking in a few shaking breaths, I squared my shoulders. “You’re right.”

Letting Sabine lead me into the other room, I let the story spill out while she examined my cheek, finishing with, “I was so consumed with finding Anushka and breaking the curse that I never stopped to think about what we’d do if we succeeded.” I pressed a handkerchief to my injury, using the pain to clear my head. “They could be here right now.”

My skin prickled as I imagined Lessa or Roland creeping through the streets of Trianon. Now that the trolls were free, there was nothing to stop them from coming after Tristan. Or me.

“I’m not sure that’s the case.” Sabine walked to the window, and gestured to the faintly glowing dome encasing the city. “I saw it form while I was hiding from Julian. It’s Tristan’s doing, isn’t it? He’s keeping them out?”

I nodded, feeling only a modicum of relief, because the dome was only a stopgap measure. Tristan couldn’t take the crown from his father or put an end to Angoulême by hiding behind walls, and I knew he couldn’t protect the whole city from an outright attack. And the dome did nothing to help those outside of Trianon. “Our families are out there,” I said. “The trolls know who they are. They know where to find them.”

Sabine pressed a hand against the bloody shoulder of her gown, rubbing it as one does an old injury. “Tristan sent Chris back to the Hollow with instructions. They won’t be caught unaware.” But the expression on her face told me we were of a like mind, both wondering what possible preparations they could undertake to protect themselves.

I blew a breath out, watching it mist against the glass. “We can’t afford to wait around to see what they intend to do. We need to act first. Find out what they’re up to.”

“How?” Sabine asked. “I’m not guessing they’ll make it easy to spy on them, and if whoever we sent got caught–”

“The trolls will kill them,” I finished. But the Regent and Tristan would send them anyway, because what other option was there? The trouble was, I didn’t think that even if the spies made it there and back that they’d have anything useful to tell us. Counting numbers and establishing positions as one might do in a battle between human armies would do us no good, because the trolls wouldn’t fight that way. What we needed was to learn where allegiances lay amongst the trolls and the half-bloods, where the balance of power sat between the Duke and the King, and above all, what was going on in the mind of Thibault himself.

I exhaled another breath against the glass, watching as the mist formed into an elaborate pattern of frost even as a plan began to form in my mind. We needed to
see
, and for that, we needed the help of someone who saw
all.
“I have an idea,” I said. “But to put it into play, we’re going to have to go into the city.”

T
he wave
of relief I felt from Cécile was little comfort; the distraction had been momentary, but it had certainly been damning. I forced her out of my thoughts, taking in the scene before me.

The Regent was dead.

Aiden stood frozen, sword slipping from his fingers to clatter against the stone floor. “What have I done?” he whispered. “What have I done?”

What he’d promised my father he’d do.

I slammed him to the floor with more force than was necessary, knocking him out. Then I blocked the doors and, most importantly, muffled the sounds of Lady Marie’s wails. Already, her dress was soaked with her husband’s blood, and she rocked back and forth, his corpse clutched to her chest.

“How is this possible?” the advisor asked, his eyes going back and forth between the unconscious Aiden and Fred wearing his Aiden mask. “What devilry is this?” He pulled a sword that appeared more decorative than useful, but before he could decide which man to attack, Marie wrenched it out of his hands.

“Monster,” she screamed, jabbing the point at the prone Aiden. “Take off my son’s face, you wretch.”

The tip of the blade thudded against my magic, and she screamed, attacking it over and over as though by sheer strength of will she could force the weapon through. I let her do it, taking the moment to come to grip with how quickly circumstances had devolved. How quickly I’d lost control.

Aiden was regaining consciousness, his face wet with tears. His stifled sobs tickled at my magic, and I had to curb the urge to grind his bones to dust for what he’d done. For whatever weakness that had caused him to make a deal with my father, and for the lack of strength that saw him caving in the space of an hour to the will of the troll Cécile had resisted for weeks.

The Regent had been a capable ruler, well liked by the people. I didn’t have time to win the islanders over, if such a thing was even possible. I’d needed him, because the humans would have followed him. And now I was left with this: a man who had committed patricide and regicide, and in doing so, had ensured no one in their right mind would follow him.

“Do something.” Marie’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. She’d dropped the sword and was crawling through the pooled blood toward Fred, her hand outstretched. “Aiden, do something. Avenge your father.”

Fred took a step back, eyes going to mine for directive. “Tristan?”

Marie froze. “You are not my son.”

Someone pounded on the door. I had only minutes to decide what to do, how to salvage the situation. I removed the magic disguising Fred. “No, he isn’t.”

Her skin went deathly pale, eyes going back to Aiden. The realization that her own son had killed his father marched across her face, and as angry as I was with Aiden, it struck a chord in my heart. Would I see the same expression on my own mother’s face when the time came? Would my justifications matter to her, or would she only see a cold-blooded killer who’d murdered his own father?

“He’s not in control of his own mind,” I said, not sure how much of a difference knowing would make. “He’s made some sort of promise to cede the Isle to my father, and he’s under compulsion to fulfill his word.”

“Why would you do such a thing?” Her voice shook.

For a moment, I didn’t think Aiden would answer, wondered if he even
could
. Then he said, “I never thought it would come to this. I never believed they’d be freed.”

It was an excuse, not an answer, and to her credit, Marie understood that as well. “Why agree to it at all?”

Before Aiden could speak, something heavy hit the door. They were trying to break in, no doubt believing I’d dispatched their entire ruling family. And when they saw the bloody scene in the council chambers, it wouldn’t be Aiden they turned on first.

I dropped to one knee in front of Marie and caught hold of her shoulders. “There isn’t time for explanations. We’ve only a matter of hours to prepare our defense against my father, and I do not think your soldiers will follow Aiden after what he has done.” I glanced at the weeping lord. “And even if they will, we can’t risk it while he remains under compulsion.”

Crack!
The wood of the door splintered. They wouldn’t be able to break through my magic, but as soon as they were through the door, they’d know it was me keeping them out. I gave Marie’s shoulders a little shake. “Will your soldiers follow your orders?”

“You can’t be serious?” The lord whose weapon Marie had taken had been inching toward the door through our exchange, but my words had stopped him in his tracks. “She’s a woman!”

Marie ignored him. “How do I get my son free of this compulsion?”

Crack!
I grimaced. “The only way is to kill my father.”

“And then Aiden will be himself once again?”

There was no way to predict how Aiden would fare, whether his sanity would survive, whether he’d revert to man he was before. “He will control his own will, his own self.”

She went very still.

“Marie, there is no time for this.” My heart threatened to beat out of my chest, and it was all I could do to keep from looking toward the shattering door. “Will they follow you?”

“Get your hands off me, troll,” she whispered.

I exhaled, letting my hands drop to my sides as the awareness that I was going to have to take control of Trianon by force settled onto my mind.

“Step back,” she said, reaching for the sword next to her.

I did what she asked.

Her eyes went to the lord who was now clawing futilely at my magic. “My Lord Lachance, attend to me. Help me away from this creature.” She held out a beseeching hand.

Lachance stiffened, and with palpable reluctance, edged his way toward Marie. “Stay back, fiend,” he said, and under other circumstances, I might have laughed.

“My lady.” He reached a hand to her without removing his eyes from me.

She stabbed the point of the sword through his throat.

I gaped as the dying man collapsed, entirely unsure of what I was witnessing.

Marie placed the hilt of the sword next to his hand, then climbed to her feet. “Lachance was a traitor,” she said. “A spy and assassin in the employ of the troll king. He killed my husband, and would’ve killed me if not for the quick actions of my son.” Walking to Fred, she extracted the blade from his hand, dipped it in the pool of blood, then replaced it. “Put his disguise back in place.”

I complied, seeing the beginnings of her plan.

“If anyone learns what Aiden’s done,” she said, “they’ll see him hanged. I’ve already lost my husband to you creatures – I’ll not lose my son. We’ll keep him hidden away until we’ve won this war, and then you–” she leveled a finger at Aiden, “–you will spend the rest of your life atoning.”

She turned to me. “Bind him. Hide him. And then let them in.”

“
I
’ve never known
such cold,” Sabine said, wrapping her cloak more snugly around her shoulders only to have it torn open again by the freezing wind as we crossed the bridge. “And this snow… It’s not natural.”

Given I was wading through white powder well above my knees and couldn’t see more than a few paces in either direction, I was inclined to agree.

“It’s the fairies,” I shouted over the gale. “This is their doing.” Or, at the very least,
her
doing. In my opinion, one did not claim to be the queen of a season without having a certain degree of power over the weather.

“Why?” she demanded. “If they can go to worlds beyond number, what makes ours so special? What do they want?”

Something.
The foretelling had come from the fey, which meant they had wanted the curse broken. I sincerely doubted it was for the freedom of coming and going from this particular world, and it hadn’t been for the sake of the trolls. The fey didn’t do favors. The Summer King, at any rate, had something to gain from their freedom, but what, I couldn’t say.

“Maybe we should go back.” Sabine stopped in her tracks, dropping the skirts of her elaborate gown so that it pooled around her knees. “Tristan said the fairies cannot pass the steel in the walls encircling the castle – that we’d be safe within them.”

I shoved my hands into my armpits, eyeing the grey haze blocking the Regent’s castle from our view. I didn’t want to go much further into the city in case we needed to make a hasty retreat. “Well, clearly they don’t keep trolls out, so
safe
is a relative term. The trolls are the immediate threat, and if we are to have any hope of winning this war, we need to know their plans. And we can’t talk to the fairies unless we’re somewhere they can reach us.” I started walking again, forcing her to follow. “We’re doing the right thing.”

“Which is why you
didn’t
tell Tristan where we were going?”

I stumbled over something hidden beneath the snow and fell, swearing as my borrowed skirts caught and tore. “He’s got his hands full with the Regent.” And judging from the emotions coming from him, it wasn’t going well.

“Time is of the essence,” I said, thrashing around in the snow in an attempt to free myself. “We can’t be sitting around waiting for Tristan’s
permission
for every move we make.”

“For goodness sake, what are you doing?” Sabine grabbed me under the armpits and heaved.

“My skirt is stuck on something,” I said, kicking my feet.

She pulled harder, and both of us inhaled sharply as a frozen corpse appeared from beneath the snow. Half of a corpse.

“The dragon,” I said, tugging my skirt free from where it was caught on the shattered ribcage, my plan suddenly seeming far more risky as we glanced skyward.

What felt like icy fingers brushed my brow and the world seemed to shudder. The sensation faded in an instant, but Sabine was also shaking her head as though to clear it. My spine prickled with unease. “Maybe we should go back.”

Sabine’s fingers tightened on my arms. “I’m not sure we can.”

I looked back and my stomach tightened. Shadows dragged themselves out from under the bridge, consuming the light from the gas lamps on either side of it until the route back to the castle became a yawning mouth of blackness. And over the wind, the skittering sound of things with claws filled the night.

“We’ll go into the city. Someone will give us shelter.” Sabine grabbed my hand and hauled me toward a café, but before we’d gone more than a pace, a gale-force wind blasted from above, driving the snow into drifts that blocked all the doors and windows from sight, leaving the center of the street bare. A pathway.

“I should never be allowed to come up with plans,” I breathed, trying to keep my fear in check.

“Maybe you should summon Tristan?” Sabine was digging at the snow bank, but the wind only pushed her efforts back in place, seeming to mock her with its little teasing gusts.

“No.” I needed to prove that my worth hadn’t ended the moment Anushka drew her last breath. Not to Tristan, but to myself. I’d unleashed the trolls, which meant I was responsible for everything that happened as a result. “If they’d wanted to harm us, they would have. This is… This is something else.”

Holding tight to each other’s hands, we followed the path through the streets, Trianon growing steadily less recognizable as we progressed. The drifts of snow blocking the buildings rose higher, turning to walls of transparent ice, swirling whorls and patterns forming before our eyes as though an invisible hand were scoring whimsical designs.

“It’s leading me home,” I said, averting my eyes from a woman standing utterly still behind the wall, her mouth open and fixed mid-sentence. There were dozens of others like her – men and women who appeared to have been frozen in place.

“Look.”

I followed Sabine’s pointed finger and gasped. Faintly illuminated by Tristan’s dome of magic, a palace of ice was rising up from the earth. Tower after tower materialized, each decorated with elaborate frozen cornices, delicate balconies, and transparent spires. And inside the frozen rooms, winged creatures danced, their motions jerking and strange. The walled street rounded a bend to where my mother’s townhouse was.

Or used to be.

The whole block formed the base of the palace, the row of stone townhouses coated in a thick layer of ice, doors and windows frozen shut. All except the door to my home, which was flung wide, barely recognizable beneath the icy ornamentation. I navigated my way around the fountains that formed out of nothingness, snow spewing from the mouths of fanged creatures whose frosted eyes seemed to follow us as we walked.

Sabine broke away from me, going up the steps to one of the doorways. The entrance was covered with a wall of transparent ice, but beyond, one of my neighbors appeared to have been frozen on her way out the door. “She looks alive,” Sabine said, resting a hand against the ice.

I peered through, watching the woman’s chest intently. “She’s not breathing.”

“You can’t tell that for sure.” Sabine picked up a brick and smashed it against the ice. Cracks radiated out from the impact, but seconds later, they retreated as though the ice were healing itself. She hit it again and again, but the result was the same. I caught her wrist and shook my head.

From our position on the steps, we could see that the ice walls filled with darkness snaked through Trianon to the castle, but that was not the limit of the city’s transformation. It was now a fantasyland of glittering towers and spires that defied logic and the laws of nature in their height and design. It was beautiful, but utterly horrifying, because it was entirely devoid of life.

“Everyone in the castle was alive when we left.” As always, Tristan was present in my mind, but as I concentrated on him, I noticed a strangeness to his emotions. They seemed static… Frozen.

“If he was frozen, he’d be dead and you’d know it,” I muttered at myself, and then to Sabine, “If we’re alive, then there’s no reason to believe others aren’t, too.” I shook my head. “Either way, we’ve come this far…” I didn’t finish the statement, because if everyone on the Isle was dead, hadn’t we already lost?

Hand in hand, we made our way down the steps and over to those leading up to the open door of my home. “Hello?” My breath made little misty clouds as I stepped inside. “Is anyone here?”

Brushing snow off the lamp that mysteriously still burned on the front table, I tried to turn up the flame, but my efforts were ineffective. It remained static. Unchanged. Strange. “Hello?”

We inched our way into the great room, both of us instinctively going to the fireplace where the banked coals glowed cherry red. Sabine held her hands out to them, then jerked her fingers back. “No heat,” she said, bending and blowing on the charred wood in a failed attempt to draw up the flames. “Something about this isn’t right.” She reached a gloved hand for an iron poker, seeming intent on rectifying this one trivial thing in the face of all the many things that
weren’t right.
I turned my back on the process and called out again. “Hello?”

No response. Nothing but silence.

I shouted, “Well? We’re here. And given you owe your freedom to me, perhaps you might show somewhat more courtesy.”

An unearthly chuckle filled the room, and I stumbled into Sabine as the air in front of me tore like a panel of silk. The opening spread wide, revealing a throne carved of solid ice, which would’ve been unremarkable if not for countless eyes of all shapes and colors frozen into its depths. Eyes, which judging from the bloody veins and tissue tangling from them, had been torn from their owners’ heads by force. To either side of the throne sat two immense lupine creatures, fangs as long as my hand protruding from black lips. But it was the creature sitting on the throne that stole my attention.

I’d seen her before.

“Owe?” The sound of her voice made my head ache, and I pressed a gloved hand to my temple, trying and failing to relieve the pressure. “I recall making no deals with
you
, human. Nor do I recall you doing me any
favors.
”

“Maybe not,” I conceded, dropping my hand from my head. “But you’ve benefited from my actions.” She was the woman – fairy – that I’d seen in my dream. The one the Summer King had called wife; and sure enough, there were bonding marks across one of her hands. Only in my dream, in that land of endless summer, she’d seemed… passive. And what sat before me was anything but. This was the Winter Queen.

“Have I? Are you so sure about that?”

I hesitated. “You’re here, aren’t you? A day ago, that wasn’t possible.”

She shrugged one elegant shoulder, long black hair brushing against a gown made of mist and stars that shifted and moved in a way that made it dizzying to look upon. “Do not look for gratitude from me, mortal. I’ve walked through worlds beyond number; what does the loss or gain of one filthy bit of earth matter to me?”

I opened my mouth to retort that it mattered enough for her to turn it into her own winter palace, but then clamped my lips shut. Not
listening
had caught me more times than I cared to count with the trolls and, immortal or not, she was of the same ilk. There was a reason why she was bothering with this “filthy bit of earth”, and it would be something worth knowing. “You tell me.”

She smiled, pale pink lips pulling back to reveal a mouthful of fangs. My heart skipped and I blinked. The fangs were gone, replaced by pearly white human teeth. “You wished to ask a favor of me, Cécile de Troyes.” She tapped a long fingernail against her throne, and I swallowed hard as the eye beneath twitched, rolling to look up at her.

I remembered her words to the Summer King.
A favor given is a favor owed
… “No,” I said. “But I do wish to bargain.”

Her verdelite eyes narrowed. “What makes you believe
you
have anything
I
want?”

I thought about the massive ice walls that had formed for the express purpose of herding us toward this meeting; the grandstanding and showmanship that was obviously intended to intimidate and impress. “I do not think,” I murmured, dropping into a deep curtsey, “that the Queen of all of Winter would condescend to meet with a mortal such as I if there were nothing I could do for her.”

Her laughter sounded like the shattering of glass, and I fought the urge to clap my hands over my ears. “Perhaps it is only that an
immortal such as I
,” she said the words in a perfect mimicry of my voice, “becomes easily bored.”

She rose to her feet, and two winged creatures scuttled over to the dais to offer their hands as she walked down the steps. It made me wonder who – and what – else was present in her icy throne room. As if in answer to my question, clawed hands folded around the tear between our worlds, drawing the edges back.

“And besides–” she stopped just before the tear “–you are no mere mortal, but one who is bonded to the prince of the trolls.” She cocked her head to one side and peered through the opening. “He is not with you.”

Her voice was toneless, nothing in her expression telling me whether she considered Tristan’s absence a good or bad thing, or whether she cared at all. And before I could so much as blink, she had stepped into our world. Although
stepped
wasn’t the right word – one moment she was
there
and the next moment
here
. And while
there
she’d seemed as solid as Sabine or me,
here
she appeared like a mist that had coalesced into the shape of a woman, fluid, shifting, and changing. Her eyes met mine, and I swore they delved into the depths of my soul, flipping through my memories like pages of a book. Tristan had told me that the trolls’ magic had been corrupted by iron and mortality, that it was nothing like that of their immortal ancestors. But he’d never told me what they
could
do, and I was starting to fear what it would mean to find out.

“What is it you want, Princess?” The Queen’s voice was mocking, but that concerned me far less than my growing suspicion that she had plans for me. Plans that I wouldn’t like. That she’d ask me for something I didn’t want to give. But I’d come too far to come away with nothing.

“You can
see
anywhere you want?” I asked. “Anyone?”

“What will you give me for the answer?” The settee was coated with ice, but it gave beneath her as she settled as though it were stuffed with down.

I nibbled on my lip. “Nothing. I already know you can. What I want is to see… and hear what our enemy is up to. What they’re planning. Where they are now.”

She tapped a claw – no, a fingernail – against one tooth. “What will you give me in return?”

“What do you want?” I countered.

Her lips pursed, and she drifted one hand through the air as though conducting an orchestra. “A song.”

I blinked, more stunned by the odd request than I would have been if she’d asked for my life. “A song?”

She held up one finger. “Your
favorite
song.”

I glanced sideways at Sabine, who had been silent through the exchange thus far. Her back was pressed against the wall. Despite the chill, her cheeks were leached of color, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the lamplight. Without taking her gaze off the fairy, she shook her head.