Warrior Witch: Malediction Trilogy Book Three (22 page)

I
opened my eyes
, blinking away the bits of frost on my lashes, droplets running in cold little rivulets down my cheeks. The night sky loomed above me, vast, unending, and empty. I frowned as I considered the last, the notion of it troubling me with its wrongness. “Where are the stars?”

“We see other worlds in a different way.”

The voice startled me, and I rolled onto my hands and knees, sinking deep into powdery snow that sucked the heat from my hands. I lifted my face. “Where am I?”

Tristan’s many times great-uncle, the King of Summer, smiled at me, but the radiance he’d exuded the first time we met was nowhere to be seen. “You know.”

I did. A blast of wind, icier than was ever felt in my world, raked at my hair. “Winter.”

He nodded once, gesturing outwards. There was no source of illumination that I could see, but everything around glowed with an unearthly and pearlescent light. Massive peaks encircled the barren plain on which we stood, their tips capped with white like a frosted crown. Snowflakes rose instead of fell, dancing upward into the void above, and as I turned my head, my stomach clenched.

Dizziness swept through me as I stared at the palace in the distance, identical to that the Queen had built in Trianon in everything but size. A river of ice flowed through its center, massive burgs rolling and smashing against each other as they traveled. It was the only sign of motion. The only sign of life.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“Because I once gave you a name.”

I flinched; and, because I was afraid of what he might demand of me, I asked instead, “Why now?”

“The opportunity presented itself.”

No answer.
I licked my lips. They were smooth and unchapped beneath my tongue, and my hair hung in a long braid over my shoulder. I tugged at its tip, choosing to focus on this insignificant detail rather than the impossible setting surrounding me.

“You are as you imagine yourself to be,” he said, answering my unspoken question.

“Because it’s a dream,” I mused. “Or am I really here?”

“Much can happen in the space between two heartbeats.” Clasping my arm, he pulled me to my feet. An orb appeared in his hand, and he held it out to me. “Look.”

The orb was warm and moist against my palm, and I cringed as a lid peeled back to reveal an eye. It blinked again, and ignoring my disgust, he guided my hand closer to my face. “Look.”

I stared into the elongated pupil, and suddenly, I was far above the ground. Soaring. Swooping. Flying. Beneath me raged a battle unlike anything I’d ever seen. A wave of gold and green crashed against a wall of frosted blackness, a chaos of creatures that defied description: man and beast, and everything in between. Fighting, warring, as far as the eye could see. It was dawn and dusk; the ebb and flow of the seasons. But as I circled above, there was no mistaking that the battle line was moving. That the dawn was being pushed back.

“Your world lured my people from me,” he said into my ear. “The iron bound them, and the witch locked them away, whole bloodlines lost. I would have them back.”

I lowered my hand, swaying as my vision was once again my own. “That’s impossible. The trolls are mortal – they cannot pass between worlds. And if there was a way to change that, they’d have found it.”

The orb disappeared, replaced by a book that was deeply familiar to me. “I lost this,” I said, letting the cover fall open. “It’s at the bottom of the lake.”

“Do you still need it?”

I didn’t. Not really. It had been in my possession long enough that I knew nearly all of the spells by heart. Well enough to know that none of them could do what he wanted.

“It will take someone or something more knowledgeable and powerful than I am to accomplish this task,” I pleaded, knowing what it meant to be dealt an impossible request. “I’m only a human witch.”

“You limit yourself,” he said. “Sometimes, one must become the unimaginable.”

I shook my head. “You ask too much.”

“Your debt has been called due, Cécile de Montigny,” he said, my name ringing in my ears like a bell. “I will have all my people back in Arcadia, and you will make it happen.”

And before I could press him as to how I might accomplish such a feat, my body was wrenched back into blackness.

“
B
reathe
, you cursed weakling of a human!”

Sunlight burned into my retinas, and I heaved a mouthful of air into my lungs before knocking Angoulême’s hands away from my chest so that I could roll over and heave my guts out onto the damp earth. Shoving aside all thought of Summer, I propped myself up on one elbow, the water soaking into my sleeve warm, mist rising up in a ghostly cloud that partially obscured the broken statues surrounding the muddy lakebed. The Duke was crouched next to me, blood still pouring from the circular wound on his neck.

“Heal this,” he snarled, “or on my last breath, I’ll command Roland to destroy the world and everyone you love.”

“You could’ve asked nicely,” I whispered, my throat raw. Before he could respond, I slapped my hand against the wound, took hold of his magic, and bent it to my will. It was formidable, greater than all I’d used save that of Anaïs and Tristan, but it struggled at the task. Halting. Fluttering. Resisting. But slowly the injury closed beneath my hand.

He slumped, taking several measured breaths before fumbling about in the mud for his cane. What for a troll of his power should have been nothing had drained him to exhaustion. On what must have been sheer willpower alone, he rose to his feet, then reached down and jerked me up. “We’re going.”

“I don’t think so.”

Angoulême turned, and Tristan’s fist caught him square in the face, sending him sprawling back to land unconscious in a puddle.

Tristan lowered his arm, his breath coming in swift pants as though he’d been running hard. He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, they were gleaming liquid bright. I stumbled the few paces between us, collapsing into his arms. We stood there in silence, the mist collecting in little beads on our faces, the weight of what we’d accomplished rendering us speechless. We’d caught Angoulême. But now…

“Roland’s in either Trianon or Courville, I don’t know which.” Tristan turned his head in the direction of the coast, though it was impossible to see anything from where we stood. The cities were in opposite directions, and if we chose wrong, the chances of us making it to the other in time to save it were slim.
Stones and sky,
I thought,
there’s little enough hope of us making it in time if we choose right.

My sense of accomplishment fell away as I turned back to the already stirring Duke. Even lying there in the mud, bound with Tristan’s magic and cut off from his power, he still had the upper hand. And as his silver eyes flickered open and met mine, I knew he knew it.

“Did you know,” Angoulême said, “that Roland wept when I told him you would have to die for him to be king? The same when I told him he would have to kill your father, which is why I sent him after Matilde instead. Too much of a chance he’d hesitate and Thibault would finally grow the stones to put an end to him.” A cruel smile grew on his face. “For all that he knows I cannot lie, he refuses to believe you’ll hurt him. The innocence of childhood, I suppose.”

It was the worst thing he could have said. His jaw bulged as Tristan jammed magic between his teeth to shut him up before encasing him in a black box, probably as much to protect him as to closet him away. Then he twisted away from me and strode over to one of the broken statues. He took one deep breath, then another. Then in a blur of motion, he punched the stone, a piece breaking off even as he swore and doubled over.

I watched in silence, knowing what it felt like to prefer the rush of physical pain to the relentless and inescapable press of emotional anguish.

“This is why, Cécile,” he shouted, rounding on me. “This is why I didn’t want the curse broken. Because this is my life now – running up and down this blasted Isle trying to keep my people from harming yours. Roland will be the first I have to put down, but not the last. He probably won’t even be the last child I have to kill. How long until it drives me mad; or worse, how long until I start to like it?”

Grabbing both sides of his head, he howled, the frustration and torment in it making me step back a pace. “Tell me the solution, Cécile. Give me a solution that doesn’t see half my people dead at my hand.”

I licked my dry and split lips, praying it hadn’t been a dream. Praying that it was possible, and that I’d find a way, and that this wasn’t just another false hope. And when I was done with praying, I met Tristan’s desperate gaze, and said, “We send them back where they belong. Back to Arcadia.”

“
H
ow
?” I demanded, the audacity of Cécile’s suggestion temporarily cooling my temper. “Do you not think if such a thing were possible, someone would have figured it out in the thousands of years we’ve been trapped here?”

Cécile shrugged. “You spent five hundred years searching for Anushka, and I was the one who found her.”

“Technically, she found you,” I pointed out. “And what, pray tell, has motivated this particular notion?”

Cécile paled slightly, and my skin prickled with apprehension. But before she could explain, the twins walked out of the shattered doors of the tombs. Their faces were drawn, Vincent’s hair matted with blood and Victoria’s trousers soaked with it.

“Are you all right?” I asked. I’d felt the pull on my magic while I’d been scrambling around the mountain and suspected what Cécile had done.

“We’re alive,” Victoria responded. “That Angoulême?”

I nodded, more interested in my friend’s demeanor than my prisoner. I opened my mouth to press her further, but she gave me a slight shake of her head.
Later.

“He can’t hear us, can he?” Cécile was chewing on the edge of her thumb, then remembered what her hands were coated in, made a face and spit into the dirt.

“No.” But the Duke was very much awake, and there was no way to know what he was ordering my brother to do. Nor any way of stopping him, short of knocking him out again. Which I was sorely tempted to do.

“The Summer King called my debt.”

All thought of the Roland and the Duke fell away, and I rounded on Cécile. “What?”

“I was there, in the in-between-space – Arcadia,” she said. “He told me that Winter has been slowly gaining territory, and he blames it on so many of his people being trapped in this world. A loss of lines he called it.” She shrugged one shoulder, but it made sense to me. A good many powerful fey had been trapped along with my many-times great-grandfather, and the loss would have compounded over the centuries. It also explained Winter’s actions: why she’d believed we were a threat and why she had been so desperate to destroy my people. She’d known exactly what my uncle had been up to.

“He told me he wants his people back, and that I’m the one who is going to make that happen.” She started to chew on her thumb again, and I recognized it as a tick she’d adopted when under my father’s compulsion.

“Did he tell you how?” I asked, wary of pushing her.

“No, I came back before he could,” she said, and I saw a fresh droplet of crimson appear where she’d bitten through her skin. I caught hold of her hands, holding them away from her mouth.

“But he wouldn’t have asked me to do it if it weren’t possible, right?” Her blue eyes were wide, bright, and I felt the edge of fear slicing at both our minds. She remembered what it was like to be under compulsion, and with Aiden, she’d seen what it meant to fail.

If my uncle were truly desperate to bolster his host, potentially sacrificing the life of a human girl would mean little to him. Would mean nothing to him. “He’s not one to squander a debt,” I said, and any guilt I felt at the half-truth was vanquished by the relieved slump of her shoulders. Yet still, I couldn’t help but ask, “Do you have an idea of how you might proceed? Or how long it will take?”

She shook her head, then met my gaze. “I’m not sure I’ll figure it out in time to save Roland.”

It had been foolish to hope, even for a minute. And even with this great revelation, this great possibly that Cécile had unearthed, nothing had changed. I had to kill my brother. A child, who, though he might be a monster, was also very much a victim of his family’s failure to protect him. How different would he have been if we had kept him, if I’d made more of an effort to see him, to teach him to control his proclivities? Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. But maybe it would’ve changed everything.

I scrubbed a hand through my hair, thinking. Our plan to capture Angoulême and use him to lure Roland to a place of our choosing had been predicated upon Roland being in Trollus, which I was certain neither of them had any desire to destroy. But if we pushed the Duke too hard with Roland in one of the human cities, he might have the boy raze it out of spite.

Think.

Think.

But as hard as I bent my mind to a strategy that would stop Roland with the fewest casualties, it kept twisting its way back to finding a way to subdue him. If I could just keep him in check long enough for Cécile to find a way to send him back to Arcadia…

You don’t even know if there is such a way.

How many lives will you risk to keep your conscience clear?

I swore, curbing the desire to drop the magic around the Duke and beat him to death just to ease some of the tension singing through me. “If Roland had attacked either Trianon or Courville, Marc would have signaled for assistance.”

“You think he was bluffing?” Cécile asked.

I shook my head. “No, of a certainty, Roland is in one of the cities. But I do not think Angoulême’s ordered him to attack just yet.”

Cécile’s brow furrowed, but then she nodded. “He’s keeping that card up his sleeve; we harm him, he sends Roland on a killing spree.”

“Likely,” I agreed. “But also, all setting Roland loose on one of the cities would accomplish is drawing me out to confront my brother, which would put his puppet king at risk. I think he’s keeping to his original plan.”

“Building an army,” Cécile said. “Stacking his cards, so that when it comes time for him to make his move, he can be assured of victory.”

“Which we are going to let him do,” I said, watching as Cécile’s eyes widened. “As it buys us time.” My attention drifted to the twins, neither of whom seemed to be listening. Vincent was staring off into the distance, and Victoria was watching her brother with a jaw so tight her teeth were likely in danger of cracking.

“What’s wrong?” I demanded. “Victoria?”

Her shoulders twitched. “Noth–” The lie stuck in her throat.

Cécile came around me, arm outstretched. “Vincent?”

“Leave him be!” Victoria knocked her hand away, and Cécile gasped, more in surprise than in pain. “But he’s better,” she whispered. “I used Tristan’s magic. The wound healed.”

“Vincent?” I felt Victoria’s magic burning with the heat of her distress, and I pushed Cécile behind me. “Vincent, answer me.”

He didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to hear. Brushing aside Victoria’s hand, I stepped in front of the friend who’d been like a brother to me. Who’d guarded my back, supported my plans, and made me laugh even in the moments when all seemed lost. “Look at me,” I said, and when he did not, I forced his chin down until his eyes met mine.

There was nothing in them.

Vincent was gone.