Warrior Witch (The Malediction Trilogy #3)(77)

Chapter Forty-Three





Tristan





“How?” I demanded, the audacity of Cécile’s suggestion temporarily cooling my temper. “Do you not think if such a thing were possible, someone would have figured it out in the thousands of years we’ve been trapped here?”

Cécile shrugged. “You spent five hundred years searching for Anushka, and I was the one who found her.”

“Technically, she found you,” I pointed out. “And what, pray tell, has motivated this particular notion?”

Cécile paled slightly, and my skin prickled with apprehension. But before she could explain, the twins walked out of the shattered doors of the tombs. Their faces were drawn, Vincent’s hair matted with blood and Victoria’s trousers soaked with it.

“Are you all right?” I asked. I’d felt the pull on my magic while I’d been scrambling around the mountain and suspected what Cécile had done.

“We’re alive,” Victoria responded. “That Angoulême?”

I nodded, more interested in my friend’s demeanor than my prisoner. I opened my mouth to press her further, but she gave me a slight shake of her head. Later.

“He can’t hear us, can he?” Cécile was chewing on the edge of her thumb, then remembered what her hands were coated in, made a face and spit into the dirt.

“No.” But the Duke was very much awake, and there was no way to know what he was ordering my brother to do. Nor any way of stopping him, short of knocking him out again. Which I was sorely tempted to do.

“The Summer King called my debt.”

All thought of the Roland and the Duke fell away, and I rounded on Cécile. “What?”

“I was there, in the in-between-space – Arcadia,” she said. “He told me that Winter has been slowly gaining territory, and he blames it on so many of his people being trapped in this world. A loss of lines he called it.” She shrugged one shoulder, but it made sense to me. A good many powerful fey had been trapped along with my many-times great-grandfather, and the loss would have compounded over the centuries. It also explained Winter’s actions: why she’d believed we were a threat and why she had been so desperate to destroy my people. She’d known exactly what my uncle had been up to.

“He told me he wants his people back, and that I’m the one who is going to make that happen.” She started to chew on her thumb again, and I recognized it as a tick she’d adopted when under my father’s compulsion.

“Did he tell you how?” I asked, wary of pushing her.

“No, I came back before he could,” she said, and I saw a fresh droplet of crimson appear where she’d bitten through her skin. I caught hold of her hands, holding them away from her mouth.

“But he wouldn’t have asked me to do it if it weren’t possible, right?” Her blue eyes were wide, bright, and I felt the edge of fear slicing at both our minds. She remembered what it was like to be under compulsion, and with Aiden, she’d seen what it meant to fail.

If my uncle were truly desperate to bolster his host, potentially sacrificing the life of a human girl would mean little to him. Would mean nothing to him. “He’s not one to squander a debt,” I said, and any guilt I felt at the half-truth was vanquished by the relieved slump of her shoulders. Yet still, I couldn’t help but ask, “Do you have an idea of how you might proceed? Or how long it will take?”

She shook her head, then met my gaze. “I’m not sure I’ll figure it out in time to save Roland.”

It had been foolish to hope, even for a minute. And even with this great revelation, this great possibly that Cécile had unearthed, nothing had changed. I had to kill my brother. A child, who, though he might be a monster, was also very much a victim of his family’s failure to protect him. How different would he have been if we had kept him, if I’d made more of an effort to see him, to teach him to control his proclivities? Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. But maybe it would’ve changed everything.

I scrubbed a hand through my hair, thinking. Our plan to capture Angoulême and use him to lure Roland to a place of our choosing had been predicated upon Roland being in Trollus, which I was certain neither of them had any desire to destroy. But if we pushed the Duke too hard with Roland in one of the human cities, he might have the boy raze it out of spite.

Think.

Think.

But as hard as I bent my mind to a strategy that would stop Roland with the fewest casualties, it kept twisting its way back to finding a way to subdue him. If I could just keep him in check long enough for Cécile to find a way to send him back to Arcadia…

You don’t even know if there is such a way.

How many lives will you risk to keep your conscience clear?

I swore, curbing the desire to drop the magic around the Duke and beat him to death just to ease some of the tension singing through me. “If Roland had attacked either Trianon or Courville, Marc would have signaled for assistance.”

“You think he was bluffing?” Cécile asked.

I shook my head. “No, of a certainty, Roland is in one of the cities. But I do not think Angoulême’s ordered him to attack just yet.”

Cécile’s brow furrowed, but then she nodded. “He’s keeping that card up his sleeve; we harm him, he sends Roland on a killing spree.”