Everyone was staring at her.
Something was wrong. She could hardly think past the pounding in her head and the pain in her arm, but something was wrong.
She looked for Armand: he was safe, standing to one side, eyes wide. That was good. But there was still something not right about the crowd of people staring at her.
They could see the black fleur-de-lis on her coat. They knew she was a bloodbound. People always stared at her when they realized she was bloodbound—
And then she realized. All the people staring at her—she knew them. Claude, the baker. André, the blacksmith. Jean, the hunter.
Her father.
This was her village. The Wild Hunt had brought her home to face judgment.
18
When Rachelle was seven years old, she slipped into Aunt Léonie’s house while she was out. She put on her aunt’s spare cloak, got into her yarn, and pretended to weave charms. When Aunt Léonie came back early and raised her eyebrows, the shame had felt like scalding-hot water poured over every bit of her body.
She felt that way now: like an idiotic child caught playing pretend. For one moment, all she wanted to do was drop her sword, strip off her coat, and slink back into her family’s house and scrub the floor until she was forgiven.
Then she heard the crackle of the burning house. She remembered what people in the countryside did to bloodbound.
She was not a child anymore. There was not going to be any forgiveness.
And right now, she couldn’t accept judgment.
Her head still ached. Her arm burned with pain. But she tightened her grip on her sword.
“Everybody stay back,” she said. “Armand, get over here.”
Instantly she realized that she had just told them whom to take hostage, but since none of them were Erec, maybe it wouldn’t occur to them at once.
Armand started to step forward; she saw the people noticing him for the first time, wondering who the other stranger was.
“Here’s what will happen,” she snapped, because she couldn’t let them pay enough attention to realize Armand was defenseless. “My friend and I will leave. You stay here. Nobody gets hurt.”
“Who are you?” called out Claude, and for a moment Rachelle couldn’t breathe. Of course they didn’t know her, she was just another faceless bloodbound now, and if only she’d had the wit to pretend—
“Rachelle Brinon?” said André. He was a big, bluff man and confusion looked utterly strange on his face.
She saw the recognition ripple across the faces in the crowd, saw the shift in their stances as they realized she was dangerous. An enemy.
She didn’t see her father anymore; he must have fled as soon as he recognized her.
She raised her sword. “I will kill you all if you give me any trouble,” she declared, but inside she was shaking with terror. She couldn’t hurt these people she’d known all her life.
She couldn’t die here. She still had to find Joyeuse.
Then suddenly Armand was between her and the crowd. “Nobody’s fighting,” he said, pressing his back against her and grabbing her arm. “Nobody is fighting anyone without going through me.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Rachelle demanded.
She felt his back stiffen. “If they want to punish you for shedding innocent blood, they can hardly cut through me to do it.”
“Did nobody teach you how vengeance works?”
“Besides, I doubt I’d survive walking back through the woods on my own, so if they want you dead, then this will save time, really.”
“Stand back!” a woman called out. A moment later, the crowd parted.
Aunt Léonie stepped out.
For one sick, horrifying moment, that was whom she saw. Then she realized that the woman clad in white and red was too tall to be Aunt Léonie; her hair was too light, her face too pointy. It was just another woodwife.
“I will deal with them,” she said.
André grabbed her by the arm. “You don’t understand, it’s—”
She gave him a single look and he let go. “I understand perfectly,” she said. “This is the girl from your village who murdered my predecessor and became a bloodbound. Is that not so?” She looked around at the crowd. “Then I have the right, don’t I, to administer justice in this matter?”
Silence. Nobody moved as the woman strode forward toward Rachelle.
“Mademoiselle,” said Armand, “she just helped save your village. And she has saved a lot of other people in the last few years. It doesn’t seem right to repay her with death.”
“She killed the previous woodwife of this village,” said the woman. “Did you know that?”
“I knew she was bloodbound,” said Armand. “The person she murdered had to come from somewhere.”
“You have the right to kill me,” said Rachelle. Her voice felt like a great length of rusty iron chains. “But I can’t die right now. So I will fight my way out if I must.”
The woman looked her up and down. “I don’t intend to kill you,” she said. “I know what would happen to this village if we killed the King’s bloodbound. But you will come to my house and speak with me before you leave.”
“I won’t go back to that house,” said Rachelle.
“We burned that house,” said the woodwife. “Did you think anything human could bear to live in it again? They built me a new one when I came here.”
The new house was closer than Aunt Léonie’s had been, just on the other side of the village wall. “It’s too dangerous, now, to live farther away,” Aunt Léonie had said.
Rachelle was hardly paying attention at that point. Between exhaustion and the still-bleeding wound in her arm, she could barely see straight.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said, and then lay down on the floor without waiting for an answer. Nobody kicked her, so she supposed it must be all right. She fell asleep almost instantly.
When she awoke the next morning, the woodwife was sitting beside her, watching her with a narrow, unyielding gaze. Behind her was the normal clutter of a woodwife’s house: spindles and baskets of wool. Bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling, and in between them many-colored charms, like woolen snowflakes. It was so comfortingly familiar that for a moment she almost felt safe.
Then she realized who was missing.
She bolted up. “Where’s Armand?”
The woodwife waved a hand. “Your friend? Safe. Outside. I didn’t want him hearing us.”