The Broken Ones (The Malediction Trilogy 0.6)(16)

I was on my feet in a flash. “Is she hurt?”

“She’ll recover.”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“No, you’re not,” Tristan said, and not for the first time, I considered taking a swing at him.

“I intervened,” Ana?s said. “And if he doubted my power exceeded his own, he does no longer. I threatened him if any harm should come to her, but…”

“You think he’ll call your bluff?” Tristan asked.

She nodded. “Obviously it’s a circumstance I wish to avoid.”

“Why?” I spat, furious that despite being wholly innocent and uninvolved with our machinations, Pénélope’s life should be twisted up in them. “Because killing him doesn’t align with our plans?”

“I was thinking that killing him won’t bring her back from the dead,” Ana?s said. “But there is that as well.”

“We have to do something, Tristan,” I said. “We can’t just leave her in this situation.”

Tristan exhaled a long breath. “If she was anyone other than who she is, my father could make her a ward of the state. But to do so would be a slap to Angoulême’s face – practically a declaration of war, for which he’d gain nothing.”

“Pénélope is not nothing.”

Tristan scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Don’t twist my words, Marc. You know what I mean: to my father, she isn’t a powerful enough asset to interest him. That doesn’t mean she means nothing to me. Far from it. This is exactly what I’m fighting against, and you know it.”

“And yet you have no intention of doing anything to help her.”

“When did I say that?”

Pulling back my hood, I glared at him, feeling a strange twist of satisfaction and disappointment when he looked away.

“If I make my move against my father now, I’ll very likely lose,” he said. “Then I’ll either be dead or disinherited, and Angoulême will get exactly what he wants, with Pénélope no better off. And what sort of ruler can I claim to be if I sacrifice the welfare of thousands for the slim chance of saving one?”

“Then kill Angoulême.”

Ana?s shifted uneasily next to me, but I ignored her.

“And how is that any better? Awful as he might be, he hasn’t done anything. I can’t go around killing trolls because of what they might do.”

“Then let her bond someone.” The words were out before I had a chance to think them through, and I instantly regretted them, because I was going to get an answer to my request, and it wouldn’t be the one I wanted.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

Tristan’s eyes shifted once to Ana?s before going back to me. “Fine. Make me the ass for saying what we all know: no one – at least no one Pénélope would want – would agree to that sort of risk. And even if someone would, my father would never give his permission.”

“You could.”

“But I won’t. I’m not sentencing someone to a short life for the sake of giving her a few more years.”

I punched him in the face.

“Have you lost your damned mind?” he snarled, wiping the blood from his already healing lip.

It felt like it. “Maybe I have lost my mind given I’ve been trying to put a heartless bastard like you on the throne.”

He lunged at me and we both went down, fists flying while furniture toppled and broke around us. Then magic had me around the waist, slamming me against the wall hard enough that the room shuddered. “You would resort to magic,” I started to shout, then saw Tristan pressed against the opposite wall. And Ana?s standing between us, arms crossed.

“Are you two about finished?” She glared at both of us, then her magic relaxed, dropping Tristan and me to the floor.

“There is another way to keep her safe,” she said, “and that’s to make my father believe she’s more useful alive than dead.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” Tristan asked, straightening his coat and giving me a malevolent look before righting one of the chairs and taking a seat.

“I’ve already done it,” she said, turning her eyes on me in a way that made my skin prickle with apprehension, because whatever solution she’d come up with, it wouldn’t be one I liked.





Chapter Seven





Marc





It was strange to both dread and anticipate something so much.

I could count on my hand the number of times I’d been alone in Pénélope’s presence; those quiet, charged moments where I’d wished for the nerve to take her hand, to tell her she was beautiful, to explain to her how I felt. But always my fear had ruled me. Fear that she’d reject me or that the Duke would learn I’d been too forward and take her away. That all of Trollus would laugh at my presumption – for daring to believe that I had a chance with Angoulême’s eldest daughter, the sister of the girl favored to become Queen.

But now everything had changed.

To Trollus society, she was no longer out of my reach, but me out of hers. The Duke himself was pushing us together, as were Ana?s and Tristan, and I could have no fear of rejection given it was now Pénélope in pursuit of me. I could have nearly everything I wanted, and all that was required of me was to feed her bits of information that she could then take back to her father to exchange like currency for another day of life.