She let herself follow that river of thought. Let herself believe in destiny and inevitability, that she was following a path forged by fate instead of making one on her own.
How can you trust someone who would betray her own brother? she had said.
Isabel closed her eyes and believed it. She spoke without letting herself think, because once she spoke it would be over. “He’ll come for Clarisse.”
“Clarisse?” Daria sneered, her voice still choked with tears. “He left her behind.”
“He loves her. She’s his sister.” Isabel looked only at Kaer, who was still crouched near Daria. “He would come for her.”
“Even though she betrayed him?” Owain said.
“At least she didn’t try to kill him,” Kaer pointed out, keeping his arms around Daria’s shoulder but his eyes on Isabel’s face. “Are you sure?”
Isabel closed her eyes briefly. There was no agonized decision-making left, no conflict. Just dull numbness. “Yes. I’m sure.”
Chapter Eighteen
Two nights later Isabel found herself in Clarisse’s room, waiting for Rokan to come so she could kill him.
She spent those two days in a daze, following instructions. She no longer made suggestions, or gave advice—she wasn’t the Shifter, after all, just a human girl with a few odd powers.
I’m human, she thought every once in a while—not for any particular reason, just at random. I’m human. And she would stare down at her thin, pale hands that would never be anything else, never stretch into wings or curve into claws. She would feel her body, both more solid and more weak than it should have been, and know it was a trap. A trap she could never get out of, because it was a trap she had been born into.
She was trapped in her body and now in this room. The lamps had all been put out, and the delicate wood furniture and chests had been moved to the wall near the bed, leaving a large clear space for whatever was going to come. Clarisse’s room was surprisingly large, once the clutter had been cleared away. There was nothing in the center of the room but a single plush chair, where Clarisse sat with her arms tied to the armrests and her legs bound to the chair legs. Isabel had tied the cords herself. Much to her disgust, Clarisse had agreed to their plan without a murmur.
Standing in the far corner of the room, she kept her eyes human, but her hearing was a cat’s. She could hear Kaer in the corner to her right, his breathing fast and loud. The high sorcerer’s breathing was slightly calmer, as were those of the two soldiers whom Kaer had decided could be trusted. But calmest of all was Clarisse.
She wondered how much longer she would be able to do this. If she returned to the Mistwood frequently, she might be able to keep her minor powers for a while, but she suspected that eventually they would drain away completely. She had been growing more human day by day. Eventually she would be all human, and the Shifter would be just a memory. And then not even that.
What would Kaer do with her, once she was no longer useful?
We’d probably be better off if she was dead. The phrase had been ringing in her head for two days. He had said it thinking she really was dead, of course; it didn’t mean he meant it.
If he felt no loyalty for his sister, why should his sister feel loyalty for him?
The thought made her feel as if she had stepped off a high ledge. Then she realized there was someone else in the room.
He was breathing fast and deep, afraid but trying not to be. There was nothing else to indicate that he had arrived—no light, no sound, no sense of magic. It was a very good spell.
Nobody else knew he was there. She should tell them. She should grab him before he could move. Her hand touched the hilt of the dagger at her waist.
She concentrated and shifted her eyes.
He looked tired. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes underlined by dark shadows. His hair was neatly combed, though, and he was wearing black velvet. He stood tense and poised, peering around carefully, even though there was no way he could see anything in this darkness.
And still Isabel didn’t move. She could see Clarisse, sitting in a chair in the center of the room, as still as Daria had sat when she was bait. Several paces behind the chair, Kaer stared straight ahead into the darkness. The high sorcerer’s eyes were closed. One of the soldiers was fidgeting.
Rokan whispered, “Clarisse?”
Everything happened at once. Albin opened his eyes, and the room was full of light. Rokan squinted, momentarily blinded. The two soldiers drew their swords and stepped forward.
Clarisse turned in her chair and made a sharp, abrupt motion with her arm. The knife shot from her hand and imbedded itself into the chest of the soldier to her left. She was instantly on her feet with another knife. The second soldier dodged, and her knife sliced through a frayed tapestry before hitting the floor.
The rope Isabel had so carefully pulled around Clarisse’s limbs lay slashed on the floor. Isabel didn’t know where the knives had come from and had no time to figure it out. The first soldier was sprawled across the floor, blood spreading in a slow circle from underneath him. The second soldier whirled on Clarisse, who shouted, “I can take care of him! You take Albin!”
Rokan was already halfway across the room. The high sorcerer raised his hand. A flash of sizzling light hit Rokan in the chest and vanished. Rokan drew his sword and kept coming.
He aimed straight for the sorcerer’s heart. Albin muttered something under his breath, and Rokan’s blade vanished. Rokan grunted in shock, and—unable to stop his momentum—stumbled into the high sorcerer’s arms. Albin lifted him and threw him, harder than humanly possible, at the far wall.
Isabel didn’t think. She sprang and collided with Rokan in midair, seconds before he would have hit the stone wall. They fell in a tangle, her briefly stone legs hitting the ground first, breaking their fall.
She heard Kaer yell something, and rolled to her feet. The true king, her brother, was running across the room at them, sword drawn. Isabel heard a hiss of power beside her as Rokan raised his hand. She leaned down and struck his wrist. A bolt of green fire missed Kaer by several yards.
Kaer flinched and slowed down. Rokan leaped to his feet, glaring. Not at Kaer. At her.
Isabel didn’t need more than a glance to know that all her agonizing, all her thoughts and struggles about Kaer, had been wasted. This had never been about Kaer.
It was like the time in the woods when Rokan hadn’t seen the knife coming. And she hadn’t been thinking, in that split second, about what the Shifter would do or how the Shifter would feel. She had just acted.
Clarisse screamed. Rokan turned, away from both Isabel and Kaer, and Kaer leaped forward. Isabel shifted her hand to stone and grabbed Kaer’s sword by the blade.
“Shifter!” Kaer shouted, as if to remind her of what she was. “I trusted you!”
No, you didn’t, Isabel thought. But that was irrelevant. She pulled the sword out of his hand and looked at Clarisse. Clarisse was on the floor with blood all over her gown, but from the way she was screaming, it couldn’t be fatal. The soldier sprawled next to her wasn’t screaming at all.
Kaer followed her gaze. “Traitor,” he snarled. “She’ll get what you get.”
Isabel remembered a much younger boy, with the same black hair and the same determined eyes, yelling at her. She had been older, but he had always taken the lead, and she had wanted his approval so desperately. She had followed him everywhere, and sometimes he had relented and they had laughed together and played tricks on their nurse. And he had always protected her. No matter how angry he was.
He didn’t know who she was now, though. And suddenly she didn’t want him to know. Let him think she had betrayed a prince, not a brother.
Rokan leaped to his feet, and there was a sword in his hand. It hadn’t been there a second ago. Kaer lunged past her for his own sword, which she had thrown to the floor, but there was no way he could get to it in time. The air in the room was taut with power. Across the room, Albin sizzled with magic. For a moment Isabel saw his eyes glow.
She was shaking so hard it was distracting, but she didn’t have the focus to shift her muscles steady, not when her weak human heart was being torn in half. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Albin stretch out his hand.
And she killed her brother.
She killed him as surely as if it was she, and not Rokan, who plunged the sword into his chest. For one last blinding moment everything the Shifter had given her was hers again. She was across the room faster than humanly possible, faster than possible for any animal she knew of. For a split second she was the wind. And then she was solid again, and the hand that had slammed the dagger into Albin’s throat was shaking.
And covered with blood. The blood was warm. Something unseen sizzled and crackled inches from Albin’s palm but got no farther. There was nothing to stop Rokan’s sword from sliding between Kaer’s ribs.
Kaer screamed, in fury and pain but mostly fury, and fell to his knees. The high sorcerer didn’t scream. He made a gurgling sound and started to turn his head toward her. He didn’t finish the motion.
Isabel stepped back and let go of the dagger, watching him drop, glad he hadn’t met her eyes. A globule of blood pooled between her thumb and finger and dropped all the way to the floor.
Blood. On her hands, dripping to the floor as she ran out of the room.
She made one last effort to remember, in detail, everything that had happened that day long ago. How she had tried to kill Rokan’s father. How she had succeeded in killing someone else—anyone else. She was the Shifter; she must have killed people. She wouldn’t have cared.
She tried to remember what it felt like not to care.
But she couldn’t find the Shifter inside herself. She was nothing but a small, confused girl crouching on the floor and crying and holding her brother’s hand.
“It was my throne,” Kaer gasped. Blood bubbled from his lips with the words. “Mine, and you stole it from me.”
“I’m sorry,” Isabel whispered, even though he was talking to Rokan. She squeezed his hand tight, but he didn’t look at her. “I’m so sorry.”
Clarisse managed to raise her head and stare at her, eyes narrowed with pain and suspicion. But Rokan kept his eyes on the face of the man he had just killed.
“You would have destroyed it,” he said.
Kaer opened his mouth, but this time only blood came out. His head fell back.
Rokan raised his eyes to Isabel then. For a moment she was afraid he would smile, or glare, or—worst of all—thank her. Instead he said, “I’m sorry.”
“He was my brother,” Isabel said numbly, and didn’t gauge anyone’s reaction to that. Suddenly it didn’t matter what they had known, what anyone had known, or how things should have happened. Nothing made sense. Kaer’s hand was limp in hers, the bottom half of his face splattered with blood, obscuring the features that had always been so hauntingly familiar. As the Shifter, she was his. As a human, she was his, too, his blood, his family. It shouldn’t have made a difference. Her actions should have been the same.
Except she was human, and she had a choice. So what she should have done, and what she did, were two different things entirely.
Rokan dropped the sword and went toward her, hesitantly, one hand out. His sleeve was soaked with blood. Isabel turned away and made one final, frantic effort to shift—into anything, anything at all. A wolf, a bird, a gust of air. She wanted to be mist, drifting through her forest, as cold and insubstantial as clouds.
Instead she was heavy and hot, and sobbing so hard her throat felt ready to burst. Rokan didn’t try to touch her again. She heard him go and murmur to his sister and drape something over the bodies and say things about arrangements and coronations and the populace. She heard him say no sharply, and realized that Clarisse was suggesting they imprison her, the Shifter who was no longer trustworthy, who never had been trustworthy. And Rokan was saying, “No. She stays.”