Mistwood

“I hardly think that’s likely. And even if it’s true, her plan failed, didn’t it? She poses no threat to me now.”

“You underestimate her. How can you trust someone who would betray her own brother? She’s ruthless and—”

“Ruthless and powerless. Without the dukes’ help, even I could have done nothing to regain my throne.”

“You’re not as smart as she is.”

Kaer’s lips tightened, and tension rippled through his muscles. Every one of Isabel’s defensive instincts snapped into alertness, but before she could move, Kaer relaxed against the battlement, his eyes cool again. “I disagree,” he said in a perfectly steady voice. “And I’m curious to know why she bothers you so much.”

It was a moment before Isabel could focus on what he was saying, rather than on the tension still strumming through him, and even then she didn’t know what to say. She knew why Clarisse bothered her so much. Clarisse’s presence meant that Rokan wasn’t completely gone. He would come back for his sister—he would never believe she had betrayed him. And because of that, Isabel couldn’t shut him out of her mind. She had to think about him, to prepare for his attack. It was dangerous. Even now, standing in front of her king, Isabel felt a dizzying sense of disorientation when she met Kaer’s blue eyes instead of Rokan’s brown ones.

“She bothers me,” she said finally, “because she’s a danger to you.”

Kaer hugged his knees to his chest, staring out at the pine-covered mountains. She wished he would get down from the battlements. “Her brother is the bigger danger,” he said softly. “Yet you’re doing nothing to get rid of him.”

“I told you—”

“I know what you told me. It even makes sense.” He shrugged. “I suppose I expected the Shifter to do better.”

Isabel had no reply to that. A sudden gust of wind blew past them, ruffling Kaer’s cloak and lifting the blond strands of her hair. She imagined she felt mist against her skin, though the breeze was clear.

“I want to trust you, Isabel.” He spoke with his eyes still trained on the horizon. “It’s what I’ve always wanted. When I heard you were at the imposter’s court, I waited weeks for you to realize your mistake and ride back to the Mistwood. I knew that if I could get you alone, you would remember whose side you were supposed to be on. I never stopped believing in you.”

“Then don’t stop now,” she said. “I am on your side. That’s why I’m here.”

Kaer made no reply. He turned and gazed at her wistfully, wanting something he thought she couldn’t give. Rokan had looked at her like that, too, toward the end. She hadn’t been able to give him what he wanted, either.

The stone beneath Isabel’s feet felt too thin to support her weight. She thought of half a dozen things to say, discarded them all. Kaer was right. The weeks she had spent protecting Rokan had been a fleeting mistake in the long life of the Shifter, an embarrassing deviation from centuries of loyalty. She would not fall short again. She would regain her ability to shift, she would get out of this skin with its memories of failure and confusion, and she would continue to protect the rightful rulers of Samorna. Long after Kaer was dead, long after Rokan was dead…

That thought hurt, a pain so sharp and sudden she had no defenses against it. For a crazy moment she wished Rokan was here, that she could tell him how to stay ahead of Kaer. How to stay alive. That she could explain…

Explain what? That she wished she could betray him without caring? That he had been mistaken to think of her as anything but a weapon?

Isabel walked across the rooftop toward Kaer, waiting until the last moment before veering slightly away to hop onto the battlements right next to him. She looked down at the courtyard far below, then stepped off the edge.

Air and stone whistled past her as she fell. She thought of wings, of mist, of fog that could be lifted on the wind and scattered through the trees. She fell, heavy and solid, trapped in a body that couldn’t fly or float or disappear.

She twisted at the last moment, grabbed the edge of the windowsill she had known would be there, and pulled herself through the window with hands and arms that were inhumanly strong. When she landed safely in a pages’ dining chamber, fortunately empty at this hour, she was gasping.

Once she had thought that if she saw the ground rushing toward her, she might grow wings to carry her away. Well, she knew the truth of that now.

And what difference did it make? Even if she grew wings, they wouldn’t carry her away. Nothing would carry her away. She was here, and she shouldn’t want to leave. Not anymore, now that she was protecting the right person.

She was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to do. And that was all that mattered.

Chapter Sixteen

Blood everywhere.

The girl was screaming, screaming. The boy was choking and sobbing. The room was filled with the scent of panic and failure, and the soldiers were closing in.

She could see the royal children—the boy, his eyes wide with terror but his chin fiercely determined; the girl with her wispy hair and eyes squeezed shut, clutching a scrap of blanket as she screamed. It was the middle of the day; light was flowing through the high windows, softened by spiderwebs thick as cloth. There was no blood in the room, but its dark, metallic scent clung to her. Failure, thicker than blood, choked her. She felt close to madness, and in that moment she knew why the Shifter had never simply ceased to exist. She didn’t know how to.

But the king’s children. They were her charges, too. And here they were in this room and there was no way out, no way out, and she was about to fail again….

Suddenly she saw herself from the outside: a vaguely human form, shifting faster than thought, now a cat, now a wolf, now a hawk. The changes happened so fast they weren’t completed at all: a half-girl/half-cat became a half-cat/half-eagle, which kept its feathers as it turned into a deer and only lost them when the deer’s head became a wolf’s.

She knew she was dreaming, was even somehow aware of the blanket twisted between her legs, of the way she was tossing in her sleep, but the thought of waking up did not occur to her. She was trapped. Trapped—she who could turn into fog and drift out through the cracks under the door. But the screaming held her. She couldn’t leave.

Isabel bolted upright, barely breathing, and stared wildly around the room. It was too small, and her door was closed. For a moment she heard the soldiers pounding on it, battering it down, and felt the pain in her side where she had wrenched the arrow out.

She shivered and twisted her hand in a fold of the blanket. She knew now why she had fled to her woods, why she had never intended to come back. She could not be trapped like that again. No matter how small the chances were, it wasn’t worth the risk.

And the chances weren’t so small anymore. She couldn’t turn into fog. She couldn’t turn into anything. She could be caged as easily as a human being.

She left her room and made her way through the halls, down a side corridor, to a corner door most courtiers barely noticed. It led down to the cellars of the castle, the only area she hadn’t yet explored. She knew what lay down there—the wine cellar, the laundry room, and storage areas—places not likely to be of interest. But with the screams from the dream still echoing in her mind, she yanked the door open.

A dizzying spiral of wooden stairs wound its way downward, curving around a narrow pillar of close-set bricks. A window cut high in the wall let the faintest tinge of moonlight flow down a narrow passageway in the stone, light a human wouldn’t have noticed. It took her a few moments to adjust—long enough for panic to surge through her—but then her cat’s eyes caught that light and drank it in. She gasped with relief but still didn’t want to put her foot on the next step. She snorted. The Shifter, afraid of the dark?

At the bottom of the stairs the air was dank and chill, and it sat heavily on her skin. There were more windows set high up, but underbrush had grown over many of them, leaving narrow stone corridors that were completely black even to her.

She turned right into a room where rows of vast dark barrels lay on their sides. The wine cellar. Beyond that was the laundry. Isabel hesitated at that door, knowing there was no exit at the other end. The dank air weighed down her lungs, and she wondered why they didn’t shift in response.

The windows in the laundry were clear of foliage, making the room bright as day to her. It was long and narrow, nearly bare but for the white pillars supporting the low roof. She paced across the stone floor and peered up at a window opening. Each window was formed of two arced rectangles, with iron bars laid across them; but even without the bars, the window was too small to fit a child through….

Her heart pounded. She whirled, fully expecting an attack, but the room was empty. The chill seeped into her bones. She tried to shift it away, but she was having a hard time concentrating. There was a thin sheen of cold sweat on her forehead, and her muscles were clenched so tightly they ached.

This is where it happened.

A brilliant deduction. No wonder the Shifter was famed for her wisdom.

A sudden jumble of memories welled up in her mind. A child screaming. Outside, a steady series of thuds as the soldiers battered down the door. Now there was color, now there wasn’t; now there was depth, now the room was flat; now she saw the room as a whole, now in a shimmering mosaic of dozens of identical images. In many shapes, she could smell more strongly than she could see, and the strongest scent in the room was panic. And the strongest panic was her own.

There was nothing she could do. She would have given her life to save them that day—would have ended centuries of existence for the sake of the two squalling children trapped in that room.

But she had no life to give.

Intense as the flood of memory was, it lasted for less than a second. Isabel caught her breath and turned to go, and that was when she became aware that she was no longer alone.

“Trying to figure out how you failed?” a voice sneered behind her. “To make sure it won’t happen again?”

The dagger was out of her sleeve before he had finished talking, flying across the room in the direction of the voice. She knew exactly where his throat would be, and her aim was unerring. But instead of steel sliding through flesh, she heard a muted pop; and when Albin stepped away from the wall, his fleshy throat was unmarked.

Isabel coiled like a spring. I should kill him, she thought. If I can.

Of course she could. She was the Shifter. But she hadn’t sensed him until he spoke; and she should have been able to throw that knife so fast even a ward couldn’t stop it. She had thought she was killing him when she threw it.

She hissed, hoping her cat’s eyes glowed in the darkness. She couldn’t attack him, not if she might lose. But he didn’t have to know that. “That was a stupid thing to do, sorcerer.”

“Why? Are you going to kill a man who protects your king?” Albin stroked the side of his beard. “I don’t think Kaer would be happy with you if you did.”

Isabel stood perfectly still. “That’s assuming I believe you’re protecting him.”

The high sorcerer took another step out of the darkness, revealing the shimmering rainbow colors of the ward around him. “I think he’s more suspicious of you than of me right now. Why else would he have asked me to keep track of your whereabouts, just in case you tried to leave?”

That rankled, more than she had expected. Because Kaer had assigned her a guardian? Or because she would leave, if only it were possible for her?

“Well,” she snarled, “as you can see, I’m doing nothing of the sort. So why don’t you pull one of your famous vanishing acts? I’m not in the mood for you right now.”

“Shifters have moods?” The corners of Albin’s lips lifted in a snide smile. “Of course, it seems Shifters have a number of things the legends don’t mention. Like divided loyalties.”