Warrior Witch (The Malediction Trilogy #3)(43)

Roland leapt to his feet, spittle flying from his mouth. “You do not touch my brother!”

The offending troll exploded into bloody mist, and I recoiled, unable to separate the remembered screams from the screams happening outside my shuttered eyes. Angoulême.

The Duke appeared, cane balanced between both hands. “Those who serve our cause will be rewarded. Lands, titles, power – it will all be yours. Will you swear?”

“Yes.”

I pulled away from the thought, afraid of triggering one of the Duke’s oaths. Where is he?

Ana?s. Lessa appeared, dressed in her armor, arms crossed. “All contact with my father will happen through me, do you understand?”

I pressed harder. Where is he?

Mountains flashed across my vision, their white peaks glittering in the sun.

“Cécile, stop!” Someone was shaking me, but I ignored them. I had to find where the Duke was hiding. Lives depended on it.

What are his plans?

The light of the mountainscape turned to darkness. But I could hear the Duke’s voice, “Thibault dies first, then…”

Pain lanced through my skull and I severed the connection, falling back into Victoria’s arms. “What happened?”

“He’s dead.”

“How?” I struggled forward, taking in the dead troll and Vincent sitting on the ground next to him, hair drenched with sweat and face drawn.

“Burned out his light trying to get free,” he responded. “Stones and sky, what did you do?”

“I dug through his thoughts to find Angoulême,” I said. “He’s in the mountains.” I rubbed my temples, the pain in my head fierce. “Lessa knows where he is. I think she might be the only one who does.”

No one responded, and when I lifted my face, everyone had drawn away, leaving me alone in a circle of space. “What?”

Chris twisted his horse’s reins, jaw working back and forth. “Did you learn anything else?”

“That Roland doesn’t want anyone to harm Tristan – he must want to do the deed himself,” I said, the boy’s rage briefly filling my vision. “And that Angoulême intends to go after Thibault first.”

“I suppose that’s one less troll for us to kill,” Victoria said, but when I turned her direction, she was staring at the snow, and I found I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to be ruthless, to pretend that I didn’t care that I’d caused the death of the troll on the ground in front of us. But I did. Just because he was caught up in the Duke’s schemes didn’t mean he’d deserved this fate.

“This is why we need to find Angoulême and stop him,” I said. “He doesn’t even care about the lives of his own followers.”

They all made sounds of agreement, but I could feel their judgment. And I deserved it. With one swift motion, I reached down to close the lids of the troll’s unseeing eyes. “Where is our next target?”





Chapter Twenty-Five





Tristan





The only thing I cared about, the only thing I thought about, was discovering what Winter wanted and how to thwart her.

Nothing else mattered.

I surrounded myself with the pieces of the puzzle. What I could accomplish for Winter that she couldn’t do herself. How Cécile’s powers might be manipulated. What I knew of the fey and what I knew of the conflict between courts, because that would be the heart of her motivation. All the foretellings given my aunt over the years, their phrasing, and how we’d benefited. How Summer had benefited. The moves Winter had made since her return; the words she’d said. All these things turned and twisted around me as I contemplated how they fit together.

I spoke to no one but Souris, who was the ideal companion, as he listened well and said nothing at all, his only demand the scraps from the plates of food Sabine brought at regular intervals.

They all came and went, talking at me or to each other, and I stored the things they said in the back of my mind in case I required them later.

Marc returned to Trianon.

“All he does is play with his imaginary games and jabber at the dog,” Sabine said, slamming my dinner down on the table in front of me. “We don’t even know what he’s doing other than abandoning us.”

“He’s thinking,” Marc said, wandering through my puzzle while I picked at the roast chicken, setting the greens on the floor for the dog. He didn’t want them either. “And he hasn’t abandoned us – he’s merely focused on the most central problem.”

“You’ll excuse me if I see it differently,” she said. “He’s left us undefended, and even from here, we can see his cursed brother burning his way through the countryside. There’s nothing to stop Roland from attacking Trianon at his leisure. Pigalle was destroyed when the waves swamped the harbor, plus we have hundreds of refugees who fled Roland’s attack looking for succor. We have to feed them, keep them warm, and he won’t so much as stir from this room.”

“The situation is dire,” Marc agreed. “But we cannot reasonably expect him to be a solution to every problem.”

“So what do you suggest? That we leave him to sit here and do nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Marc said, “if he comes up with a solution. But in the meantime, we must hold up our end until he is himself again.”