He looked up then. A strand of his pale brown hair had fallen between his eyes—he didn’t wear it neatly curled like so many men of the court. It made him look more real, even now, when he was wearing the bland expression that she had learned was his armor.
“Because I was reading her diary last time I was at Chateau de Lune,” he said. “Right up until I met a forestborn and got a little bit distracted.”
“You went to Chateau de Lune and spent your time in the library?”
“Nearly every day,” said Armand. “I learned pretty quickly that memorizing my mother’s library hadn’t actually taught me how to act in a court, and all the lessons she gave me were twenty years old. La Fontaine was the only person who didn’t laugh at me.”
“And then you taught them all a lesson.”
His mouth quirked. “I really don’t think anyone at court has learned anything. Are you done being suspicious now, or do you want to search me for deadly weapons?”
“You are a weapon,” Rachelle muttered, remembering the adoration of the people at his audience and the growing resentment she saw in the streets of Rocamadour every day.
“True enough.” His voice had gone colorless; he looked down at the table. After a moment, he asked, “How is finding that door going to help you? Are you having trouble getting into the Forest on your own?”
“If I asked,” she said quietly and distinctly, “the Great Forest would open up to me this instant, and I could walk into it and have the forestborn finish making me into one of them.”
“Then are you trying to escape them?”
He looked up at her again. Sunlight dappled his face, catching at his cheekbones and glowing through his eyelashes. She couldn’t read his expression, but she almost thought he looked hopeful.
“Don’t imagine,” she said, “that I am anything so kind as you pretend to be.”
If he really was a saint, if he was fool enough to have hope, then she was going to destroy it. The kind of hope that saints had didn’t exist, and she wanted to ruin him. She wanted to drag him into darkness and crush and rend and break him, until all the hope went out of his eyes and there was nothing, nothing, nothing left for anyone to hope.
The air was sweet and cold on her skin. Like the air in the Great Forest.
She turned away abruptly. “Keep reading,” she said, and strode toward the other end of the library. Her joints felt slick and shaky. The hunger for destruction was gone, but she felt hollowed out in its absence.
It was the hunger for the Great Forest. The hunger to become one of the forestborn. The hunger to become more and infinitely more like the Devourer, until there was nothing left in her that remembered being human.
Someday she would lose herself to it. She had always known this. She had mostly stopped fearing it. But now she was almost sick with fear, because she couldn’t lose herself when she was so close, when she finally had a chance to fight the Devourer and win.
Her fingernails dug into her palms. I won’t, she thought. I won’t.
She was at the door now. She leaned her head against the carved wood and sighed.
Somebody drew a breath from the other side of the door.
She didn’t think. She flung the door open—felt it bang against the person—and lunged out into the hallway, drawing her sword. But the door blocked her view for a crucial moment, so she only caught a glimpse of somebody tall—probably a man—dodging into a side passage.
She nearly ran after him, but she couldn’t very well leave Armand behind.
Armand. She whirled around, half expecting to see him surrounded by armed men, but he was still sitting at the table, looking up at her curiously.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Somebody standing outside the door to listen.” Rachelle grabbed the lamp off the table and starting inspecting the library. Her back prickled, but nobody was hiding in the shadows among the shelves.
“Oh.” Armand shrugged and looked back at the book. “Probably an assassin, or somebody who wanted to kiss my feet.” He sounded bored.
Rachelle reached the opposite side of the library and swept open the door on that end. Nobody there either.
“Have there been a lot of them?” she asked.
He didn’t look up. “You saw the crowd at my audience.”
“Assassins, I mean.”
“Five attempts. No, six, counting yesterday. My cousin Vincent really doesn’t like me.”
“How do you know he’s the one?” asked Rachelle. “Maybe it’s Raoul Courtavel.”
Armand’s mouth tightened; when he spoke again, his voice was sharp and precise. “You know quite well it can’t be Raoul.”
“Why not?” Rachelle asked curiously. She hadn’t expected him to be so offended.
He stared at her for a moment. “Raoul is the only child of the royal house who’s never hated me,” he said. “Before or after. He would never do that to me. And I would never do anything to hurt him. That’s why Vincent wants me dead. He knows that if the King died without naming an heir, I’d throw my support behind Raoul. And unlike the King, Vincent is too shortsighted to realize that killing me would cause riots.”