A courtier stammered a joke, and the King let out one of his famous booming laughs. Everyone pretended not to notice when it turned into a cough. Rachelle sighed and looked up at the ceiling.
The royal chambers here at the Chateau were just as elaborate as those of the Palais du Soleil back in Rocamadour. But here, instead of the gold curlicues splattered across the ceiling, there was a huge painting of the moon, decorated with gold-and-silver traceries. It was an oddly stylized painting, and as Rachelle stared at it, she realized it wasn’t much like any of the other portraits that hung framed all over the Chateau. It was old. She knew very little about art, but she was sure that it was much older than any of the other decorations.
Her heart started beating faster, but she didn’t let herself think what she was hoping until Erec’s laugh rang out above the babble of the crowd, and she glanced at him. He sat, again, at the King’s feet, glorying in his position. He was dressed all in black velvet today, with black leather boots, and the tesserae of the mosaic floor glittered around him. Gold tesserae. The pattern was huge; she couldn’t quite make out what it was, besides golden and swirling.
Rachelle looked down at her feet. She saw wavy golden rays against dark blue.
It was the sun. The entire floor of the King’s apartments was covered in a mosaic of the sun. Below a giant moon painted on the ceiling.
She was careful to keep her body still, her face smooth, but under her skin, her blood was pulsing with excitement, because what if the door was right here?
It seemed like a stupid thought. Mad King Louis had nearly torn the kingdom apart when he tried to burn all the woodwives and melt down Joyeuse. Surely anyone seeking to save the ancient sword would want it as far away from him as possible. Surely, if the door were here, someone of the royal line besides Prince Hugo would have opened it already.
But it made a curious sort of sense. If the nameless woodwife had hidden Joyeuse anywhere at the Chateau, that meant hiding it under the king’s nose. Perhaps she had simply decided to go all the way and hide the sword in the one place that King Louis would never expect a woodwife to dare go. And there were some woodwife charms, Rachelle knew, that only operated in response to the will of the one holding them. The door might open only for somebody who already knew it was there.
It was worth trying.
But she would have to wait until there were not a hundred people crowded into the room.
Late that night, when the Chateau had finally begun to still, Rachelle slipped into the King’s chambers.
There were guards standing outside the doors, but they weren’t bloodbound—or even that well trained, in Rachelle’s opinion. They didn’t hear a thing when she slipped in through the windows that nobody had bothered to lock.
Of course, nobody expected a bloodbound to be sneaking into the King’s chamber to look for an ancient sword hidden behind a magic door.
That morning, the King’s sitting room had felt like a tiny glittering cage. Now—empty of the crowd and filled with shadows—it seemed much larger. A hidden doorway felt actually possible in this silent, dreaming room.
Rachelle turned around slowly in a circle, looking up at the painted moon, down at the mosaic sun. It looked like the perfect spot, but the only doors she could see were the solid, normal doors into the bedchamber and out into the hall.
She had been thinking about the door all day. If it had remained hidden from the kings of Gévaudan for three hundred years, it had to be concealed with a woodwife charm. It probably was a woodwife charm, and that meant she ought to be able to sense it. But she didn’t feel anything.
Wind stirred against her neck.
The windows were shut.
Rachelle went still, heart thudding. And then she saw it: shadows on the wall, in the shape of leaves rustling in the wind, even though there were no branches outside the window to cast them.
A cold breeze traced her cheek and then was still. The shadow leaves faded into simple, normal shadows. The Forest was gone—but it had been here, just for a moment. She was sure she hadn’t imagined it this time. The Forest had manifested in Chateau de Lune, where any trace of its power should be impossible.
Perhaps the Forest was simply getting too strong for the protections on the Chateau. Or perhaps she was standing right next to the door into the Forest.
She still didn’t sense anything. But she knew how well hidden some woodwife charms could be until they were awakened.
Rachelle stepped to the nearest wall and laid her hand against it. It was simple wood covered in paint and gilt, but she closed her eyes and reached.
Awakening charms had never been one of her strengths. It was a strange, sideways movement that used none of her body. For the first six months of her training, all that had happened when she tried was that she wiggled her ears. Even after she learned how to do it right, the skin on her scalp still twitched whenever she woke a charm.