Rachelle had always thought Erec understood her. No matter how she hated him, she had always loved him a little too, because he knew what she was in the darkest part of her soul. And yet now he really thought that she was speechless with desire for him. He really thought that she did not regret what she had done.
“Too bad for you,” she said, “I’m not a lady.”
He chuckled, clearly thinking that this was only another step in their dance together.
It was the most exquisite kind of freedom to realize that he could be wrong. It was terrifying too.
21
Talking with Erec had made everything more clear. She did regret. She was willing to die. And that meant there was only one path for her to take: weave a charm and try her best against the lindenworm.
It would have to be a sleep charm. Margot had said, The most terrible charms or the most simple, and sleep charms were the only simple charms she knew that seemed like they might be at all helpful. Yet one of the little snowflake-shaped sleep charms she used to hang over baby beds could not possibly be enough, or nobody would have ever feared lindenworms.
She decided to try weaving multiple sleep charms together, and she spent the rest of the day working out the pattern. Luckily Amélie already had a ball of yarn that she could use.
“You’re going to help,” Rachelle told Armand that evening.
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you planning to clamp knitting needles onto my hands? Because I don’t think that will work as well as it does with forks. And it doesn’t work all that well with forks either, though apparently it looks quite impressive. Several ladies have assured me that I’m very brave for managing to eat by myself.”
“Well,” said Rachelle, “I certainly won’t tell you that.”
He laughed.
“And luckily,” she went on, “I don’t need you to tie knots. I just need you to stay still. Here.” She sat him down in a chair and had him hold up his hands. She looped the yarn through his silver fingers and started weaving it together.
It was awkward sitting so close to him—their knees were almost touching, she could hear every breath he took, and the strange desire for him was seeping back into her. She tried to concentrate on the pattern, looking frequently at her sketches and weaving in quick, short motions.
The problem was, she hadn’t woven in three years. Very soon, the pattern started bunching. She had woven it too tight. So she pulled it out, and starting whirling through the pattern again with less tension—only now ungainly loops were dropping from it, because she was making it too loose. Again she pulled it out. This time it seemed to go better, but slowly the shape got more and more wrong, until at last she realized that she had left out two steps when she started the pattern. Her breath hissed out between her teeth in frustration.
“Now you know how I feel with forks,” said Armand.
She looked up at him, tensing. She expected to see mockery—Erec would have said the words with a sly grin and then winked—but Armand just looked at her with a wry half smile. Come to think of it, Erec would never have mentioned that he was bad at anything.
Rachelle laughed shakily and started to unwind again. “I have bloodbound grace and speed,” she said. “But it’s all for fighting.”
“You seemed to dance pretty well.”
“That was with Erec. That counts as fighting.” Her voice was rougher than she meant it to be, and she didn’t meet his eyes.
“I think everything at court counts,” he said.
She started weaving the pattern again, slowly and carefully. “I don’t think there’s enough chance of bloodshed.”
He paused. “There’s chance of bloodshed in dancing?”
“I repeat: with Erec d’Anjou.”
He laughed, and it shouldn’t have made any difference. But it did. The memory of the duel was no longer crawling right beneath her skin; it had still happened, but it felt like a much smaller and sillier thing.
For a few moments she wove in silence. Then Armand said, “I’ve been wondering about something. The way you fight—it’s incredible. Not just your speed, but your technique. I’ve seen men trained all their lives who weren’t that good. But you couldn’t have been trained before you came to Rocamadour.”
“No,” Rachelle agreed.
“Did you . . . learn it from the mark?”
“Not exactly.” Rachelle paused, finishing a particularly tricky bit of the pattern before continuing, “It’s . . . an instinct. For any sort of fighting. It’s like reading a book, I suppose. You don’t know the words until you see them, but you have them as soon as you do.” She remembered Amélie reading aloud a cosmetics recipe to her. “Erec trained me when I came to the city. In two weeks, I could nearly keep up with him.”
“Hm.”
Armand sounded pensive; she looked up. “Do you feel it?” she asked. “That instinct?”
His mouth puckered. “Sometimes. Maybe. I really hope not.” He paused. “Is that how it feels to have the Forest’s power growing inside you?”
“It’s not . . . just that.”
“What is it?”
She couldn’t tell him about the strange fury that sometimes came over her, the desire to crush and destroy. Sitting here with him in quiet peace, knowing she had felt that fury toward him, however briefly—the thought was just obscene.
So she told him about the other way that the Forest crawled into her mind.
“All of us bloodbound,” she said. “There’s a dream we have. You’re standing on a path in the woods—barren woods, with snow on the ground—and at the end of the path, there’s a house. It’s made of wood, but thatched with bones. There’s blood seeping between the wooden boards. And you have to walk toward it. You can slow yourself down, but you can’t stop. I can’t . . . I can’t tell you how terrifying it is.”
“And what happens when you reach it?” asked Armand.
“Nobody that I’ve ever talked to has reached it yet. But I think—we all think—when you open the door, that’s when you become a forestborn.”
Armand was silent.
“Do you dream it?” she asked finally.
“No,” he said distantly. “No, I don’t.”
“So you have the healing, but not the dreams? That’s convenient.”
“I also have visions of the Great Forest all the time,” he said. “Trust me, that’s not convenient.”