Stolen Songbird (The Malediction Trilogy, #1)(72)

His fingers made small shadows on the wall as he unbuttoned his shirt, pulling it off and laying it across the back of a chair for one of the girls to launder. I stared at his naked back, the hard contours of muscle rippling as he reached into the closet for a clean shirt. A slow-burning warmth filled me that had nothing to do with the extra blankets he’d given me. He froze, sensing the direction my mind was going. Squeezing my eyes shut, I waited for him to make some snide comment that would make me look like a silly fool for admiring him.

He was silent and seconds later, his light winked out. Instead of confidence and conceit, I felt discomfort and a hint of embarrassment. I heard the faint rustle of fabric and the closet doors clicked shut. I tried to think about worms, sluag, even chamber pots, anything to distract me from the thought that the most handsome boy I’d ever met was undressing across the room from me. I was the one that was supposed to be seducing him, not the other way around.

There was a thud that sounded unmistakably like a collision between troll and furniture. “Bloody hell,” he swore under his breath.

“Tristan?”

I could hear him breathing; feel the soft edge of apprehension. “Yes?”

“Can you see in the dark?”

He laughed softly. “Given I just walked into a table, I would suggest not. I’m not a bat, you know.” His light winked back on.

I buried my face in a pillow, embarrassed. “Forget I said anything,” I mumbled. He walked by the bed on his way to the door. “Wait. Where are you going?”

“I’ve things to see to.”

“The tree?”

He was quiet for a moment. “What do you know about the tree?”

“That it’s a magic version of what you plan to…” I broke off at the warning expression on his face. But if I was going to get him to trust me, I needed to spend time with him. “Will you show it to me?”

He bit his bottom lip and eyed me thoughtfully. “I suppose we would only be following His Majesty’s orders.”

“Only a fool would dare not to.” Scrambling out of bed, I snatched up the altered gown and wriggled into it. “Let’s go.”





“So where is it?” I asked, peering down the cobbled lane while I hurried to keep up with his long stride. The dawn shone through the small hole above, but even the faint light was strangely comforting. It drove away the sense of never ending night that had afflicted me since my arrival.



“I’ll show you soon enough, but first we must consult with Pierre.” He hesitated, then reached down and fastened up my cloak. “You’ll catch a chill showing that much skin.”

Sighing, I followed him up a set of stairs and into a small home that was cluttered and in need of a good dusting.

“Morning, Pierre!” Tristan shouted as we entered. “Any movement since yesterday?”

“Quiet as a grave,” a high-pitched voice shouted back, and moments later, a badly crippled troll flew into the room, seated on what appeared to be a stool with wheels. He was very small, his back contorted in a strange s-shape, but worst of all, he appeared to have no legs. Without the stool and his magic, I doubted he would have the ability to move very far at all.

“Or would have been,” he continued, rolling to a stop, “if the Barons Dense and Denser hadn’t gotten it into their skulls to have a rock-throwing contest outside my house last night.”

Tristan sighed and looked at me as if it was my fault. “I’ll speak to them about it later.”

“Bah!” The troll threw up his hands. “They’ll just think of another way to disturb the peace. Perhaps next time one of them will do us all a favor and drop a rock on the other’s head. But who is this that you have with you?”

“This is the… I mean, this is my… Cécile.”

“You mean, your lady wife, the Princess Cécile?” The odd-looking troll tsked and shook his head. His wire-rimmed glasses slid down his nose, and he absently pushed them up again as he inspected me. “And even lovelier than I had heard. The poets will write songs about her beauty that will be sung for generations.”

Feeling strangely shy, I let him take my hand, which he kissed and then patted warmly with his gnarled and bent one. “The young ones have no sense of romance,” he said and winked. I giggled, despite myself.

Tristan coughed. “Pierre monitors the motions of the earth.” He gestured around the room, and his orb brightened, revealing tables of equipment and charts.

“I didn’t realize it moved,” I said, walking over to examine a chart hanging on the wall. A list of dates ran across the bottom, with an erratic line running horizontally above them. There were numbers and notations written all over it, and I tried to puzzle it out with little success.

“Ah, but the earth, she is always moving,” Pierre said, and with a theatrical gesture of his hand, dozens of glowing glass balls of various colors lifted into the air and began to rotate around the large yellow one at the center.

“The sun,” Pierre said, and the yellow ball blazed brightly. “The planets and their moons.” I watched with fascination as each glass ball lit up as he named it. “And here, this is us. Earth.” The blue orb brightened. “Always moving, always moving. But what young Tristan here is concerned with is the times it moves like this.” The blue ball shuddered violently.