Armand smiled self-deprecatingly. “I promised I’d go with her, to lend whatever help I can.”
There was going to be gossip. Erec would hear and doubtless tease her. But if she had Joyeuse in her hand, she wouldn’t much care what happened after.
The wine cellars were long, low tunnels, their sloping walls paved in the same cobblestones as their floors. The air was cold and still, with an absolute, muffled quiet; even Rachelle’s boots hardly made any noise against the floors.
“I’m surprised they obeyed so easily,” said Rachelle.
“You offered to protect them from the Forest,” said Armand. “Everyone’s afraid of it except the nobility. And some of them are too, they just won’t admit it.”
“So instead they turn to treason,” she said.
“Or saints. I’m sure the King will find a way to outlaw that as well, soon.”
Rachelle snorted. “That was a nice little lie you spun for them. Do many people think you can bless the Great Forest away with a wave of your hand?”
“That was a nice little lie you spun for them,” said Armand. “A pity you aren’t actually trying to protect them.”
She caught her breath in anger, then remembered that she had not actually ever told him that she was trying to find Joyeuse and save the world from the Devourer.
“How do you know I’m not?” she said.
“I don’t know, are you?” He was turned away from her, so she couldn’t see his face, but his voice was light and teasing. It shouldn’t have felt like a fishhook between her ribs.
For one moment, she wanted to tell him the truth. She also wanted to slam him against the wall and scream at him to be silent. Instead, she asked him evenly, “Do you see anything?”
“Moss.” The light, easy tone of his voice didn’t waver. “And flowers with teeth.”
“Well, the moss isn’t real.” She peered at the stone walls. “Maybe a little of it’s real.”
He laughed. “Be careful of the flowers, then.”
A chamber split off from the main tunnel; they looked inside and saw the racks of wine bottles gleaming in the lantern light.
“Anything?” she asked.
Armand strode forward into the chamber and looked around. He was truly looking, she realized: he scrutinized the room in every direction, and his shoulders slumped slightly before he turned back to her and said, “Nothing.”
No matter what he thought of her, he was trying to help her.
She hadn’t met anyone that foolish since Amélie.
“Did you really mean that?” she asked. “About supporting Raoul Courtavel?”
“Are you shocked that I’d imagine there could be a king after my beloved father, or that I’d want someone on the throne besides myself?”
“I’m curious,” said Rachelle, “why you even care.”
Armand laughed then: sudden, wild snickers that made his shoulders hunch and shake. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
“Whatever it is,” Rachelle said after a few moments, “can’t be that amusing.”
He had leaned against the wall now, and he looked back at her with a grin. “Believe me, it is exactly that amusing. However you interpret it.” Then he licked his lips and straightened up, composing his face. “If you want to know why I’d like to see Raoul on the throne, it’s because he’s the only possible heir that doesn’t hate me.”
“The rest didn’t like being related to a saint?” asked Rachelle.
“I mean when we were young,” he said, turning away from her. “When I was nothing. My mother was exiled from the court, you know, but she would visit other nobles at their estates sometimes. She particularly liked to visit relatives of the King. Raoul was the only one who didn’t hate me, and he was also the only one who spent more time reading the chronicles of past kings than chasing after scullery maids. And since then, he’s become the only one to drive the pirates back into the Mare Nostrum. So yes, I would rather see him king than anyone else alive today. But none of that’s going to matter, is it?”
“No,” said Rachelle, because as much as the common folk might hope or Vincent Angevin might fear, Armand would never get any say in the next king. Not unless he raised a peasant army in bloody rebellion, and she realized—with a sudden, hollow shiver—that she didn’t believe he would do that.
And the succession wouldn’t matter at all if the Devourer returned to eat the sun and moon.
They went on. They kept looking. And finally they got to the end of the wine cellar.
They found nothing.
“I’m sorry,” said Armand, when they stood in the last corner of the cellar, yet another rack of wine gleaming before them. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s not possible,” said Rachelle. “There has to be something.” But she was already remembering how fragile their suppositions had been to begin with. Because somebody a hundred years ago said that Prince Hugo’s ghost might haunt the cellar, he must have found the door and died down here? It was absurd.
She didn’t give up right away, of course. They went over the cellars again and again. Rachelle pressed her hands to the walls and reached for any hidden charms a hundred times.
None of it made a difference. They found nothing at all.
15
The next day, the King decided that he wanted to go hunting, and he must have all his favorite people with him, including his beloved son Armand. So they had to get up barely past dawn and join a seething crowd of people, horses, and dogs that spent most of the morning ranging through the grounds.
Rachelle hated every moment of it. The evening before, Erec had come to tease her and ask why she had needed to take a saint into a wine cellar, followed by a torrent of clever insinuations that she couldn’t even decipher, so all she could do was glare at him in silence. Afterward, once the hallways were dark and empty, she had dragged Armand out to explore the Château again. But they had no direction, so they wandered for hours without learning anything. When Armand started leaning against the wall and dozing off whenever she stopped to examine a room, she had to give up for the night.
Now she was trapped again, playing the court’s wearisome game. And she hated it. She hated the sunlight pounding into her eyes. She hated the laughing, chattering nobles who thought the sunlight would last forever. She hated Erec, who kept smirking at her.
Most of all, she hated Armand, because she had really believed that his idea about the library and the wine cellar might work.