Somebody drew a breath from the other side of the door.
She didn’t think. She flung the door open—felt it bang against the person—and lunged out into the hallway, drawing her sword. But the door blocked her view for a crucial moment, so she only caught a glimpse of somebody tall—probably a man—dodging into a side passage.
She nearly ran after him, but she couldn’t very well leave Armand behind.
Armand. She whirled around, half expecting to see him surrounded by armed men, but he was still sitting at the table, looking up at her curiously.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Somebody standing outside the door to listen.” Rachelle grabbed the lamp off the table and starting inspecting the library. Her back prickled, but nobody was hiding in the shadows among the shelves.
“Oh.” Armand shrugged and looked back at the book. “Probably an assassin, or somebody who wanted to kiss my feet.” He sounded bored.
Rachelle reached the opposite side of the library and swept open the door on that end. Nobody there either.
“Have there been a lot of them?” she asked.
He didn’t look up. “You saw the crowd at my audience.”
“Assassins, I mean.”
“Five attempts. No, six, counting yesterday. My cousin Vincent really doesn’t like me.”
“How do you know he’s the one?” asked Rachelle. “Maybe it’s Raoul Courtavel.”
Armand’s mouth tightened; when he spoke again, his voice was sharp and precise. “You know quite well it can’t be Raoul.”
“Why not?” Rachelle asked curiously. She hadn’t expected him to be so offended.
He stared at her for a moment. “Raoul is the only child of the royal house who’s never hated me,” he said. “Before or after. He would never do that to me. And I would never do anything to hurt him. That’s why Vincent wants me dead. He knows that if the King died without naming an heir, I’d throw my support behind Raoul. And unlike the King, Vincent is too shortsighted to realize that killing me would cause riots.”
“You don’t seem terribly worried,” said Rachelle.
Again he paused, looking at her as if he were trying to puzzle out a riddle. Then he smiled and said, “Well, I’m sure you won’t let anyone kill me till you have a chance to do it first.”
She smacked his head lightly. “Just keep reading.”
So he read, and she watched him. She had wondered how he could possibly turn the pages with blunt metal fingers that didn’t move. Sometimes the pages would start to drift up on their own, and he would simply slide his fingers under to turn them. But mostly he used the little finger on his right hand—because, while the other fingers just had half-circles indented in them to look like fingernails, the little finger actually had a thin metal plate that stuck out a fraction beyond the fingertip. It was just enough for him to slide it under the corner of a page and lift it. Sometimes he caught the next five pages by accident. Then he wrinkled his nose and tried again.
He was on his third try with a page when he suddenly stopped and looked at her. “What?”
Rachelle felt vaguely embarrassed, but there wasn’t much for her to do besides stare at him.
“Why’s it on your little finger?” she asked.
“Because it was cheapest when I bribed the jeweler,” Armand said. He tried again, and this time caught the page he wanted. “And least likely to be noticed,” he went on, sounding faintly amused as he turned the page. “My father doesn’t like me having useful things.”
There was a butcher in Rocamadour who had lost his right hand—while chopping roasts for a duke, he liked to tell his customers—and had replaced it with a hook. Rachelle had seen him use the hook to tie up packages with string. She thought of that as she watched Armand laboriously turn the next page. Somehow she’d always imagined that he had demanded the silver hands out of vanity.
She had imagined a lot of things about Armand, and none of them seemed to be true now. And none of the things she had actually learned made sense.
He could see the Great Forest all the time. She had never heard of anyone who could do that, bloodbound or woodwife. To have that power, he must have been touched by the Forest somehow.
But if he really had met a forestborn, if he really had been marked, then how did he survive?
It took him over an hour, but he did find an answer. The bells had just tolled four when Armand looked up and said, “The wine cellars.”
“What?” Rachelle turned; she had been at the other side of the room, slowly weaving through a sword form.
“Listen. ‘It baffles me not that my cousin would risk her reputation in a rendezvous, but that she would attempt it in the wine cellars; for I have heard it said that the ghost of Prince Hugo still walks those corridors, searching for the way home.’”
Rachelle snorted. “Clearly the court hasn’t changed in a hundred years. But just because somebody once claimed to see his ghost there, doesn’t mean it’s where he disappeared.”
“It’s a place to start, anyway,” said Armand. “And it makes sense; those cellars are one of the oldest parts of the Château.”
He was smiling; he seemed genuinely excited about hunting for the door. Without meaning to, Rachelle found the edge of her own mouth turning up, and a tiny shiver of excitement growing in her own heart.
It might be nothing. But it was more of a clue than she’d ever had before.
She’d try anything to find Joyeuse.
“Then let’s go look,” she said.
14
The problem was not getting down to the royal wine cellars. Rachelle had the authority to go most places in the Château. All she needed to do was ask a footman, and they were shown the way.
The problem was getting there without an entourage of onlookers. They got enough attention just walking through the public areas of the Château; once they stepped into the servants’ corridors, nobody could look away.
Rachelle knew that they could just wait until the middle of the night, and sneak down under cover of darkness. But she didn’t want to wait. Now that she finally had a hope of finding Joyeuse, she couldn’t stand to wait another hour.
So instead, she resorted to telling the truth. Almost.
“Please keep everyone out of the cellars,” she said to the gaping majordomo. “In order to secure the safety of the Château, I must perform an inspection.”
“Of course,” he said dazedly, and then seemed to notice the sword hanging at her side. “But—but why are you bringing Monsieur Vareilles?”