When she hit the ground, she rolled. White-hot pain seared up her shoulder, and for a few moments, the world went away. After a while, the pain faded into a steady burn that allowed her to breathe and think. She was flat on the ground; she could see nothing, but her shoulder burned with pain.
And then it healed. With each breath she drew of the cold, sweet air, the pain grew less. She knew that the muscles and skin were knitting themselves back together; when she sat up, she knew that her wound was gone. She saw the flicker of a far-off bonfire, she saw the starlight through the weaving net of tree branches overhead. They were in the Great Forest.
A curious peace descended on her. Everything before this moment had been an illusion. There was nothing but the cold darkness around her, the swift, warm pulse of blood inside her. She felt nothing but the empty, echoing darkness in her heart. That was all she was: a shell filled with the same darkness that surrounded her.
“Rachelle?” whispered Armand in his weak human voice, and the name felt useless, irrelevant, almost obscene beside the holy strength flowing into her body with every breath.
She was swiftly adjusting to the dim light; she could see Armand now, could see the pale, resolute set of his face. He was afraid, but he wasn’t going to run.
He should be weeping with fear. He was weak. Prey. Captive. She should kill him, crush him, master him. She thought this quite calmly, with an icy relish as she imagined his blood seeping between her fingers.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The cold in her shattered like glass, and she realized what she had been thinking. She slammed a fist into the nearest tree.
I am not a forestborn, she thought. I will not be a forestborn. Not yet.
The scar on her right hand ached. She was so nearly a forestborn already.
“Rachelle?” Armand sounded truly worried.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m already healed.”
“Good,” said Armand after a moment. “But you have a grudge against that tree?”
“I don’t like this place,” she said.
“I thought it was your home.”
“That’s why I don’t like it.” She drew a breath. “We have to leave. Now.”
“Lead the way.”
But of course, there was no trace left of the stone hall they had fled. They were somewhere in the vast expanse of the Great Forest—though “somewhere” might not even be the right word, not in this ever-shifting, infinitely unmappable maze of trees.
The string on her finger glowed bright red as it flowed into the undergrowth. If she followed it, would it lead her back to her forestborn? He wanted her to stay alive until the Devourer returned; he might help her, if not Armand.
Then she heard the horns.
No.
She didn’t “hear” them; the horns sounded, and they devoured her. Her blood pulsed in time to their call, and she wanted nothing except to run after them, ride after them, to join the hunt and run their foolish mortal prey to death.
Then she glanced at Armand. He had planted himself with his chin at a stubborn angle, but she could see the fear in his rigid shoulders.
Foolish mortal prey.
They would hunt him. They would run him to death in the woods, and then they would tear him limb from limb. But they might let her live, because she was bloodbound and destined to become one of them.
She felt like a rabbit bolting across the fields with foxes at its heels. Nobody escaped the Forest. Nobody could fight the Wild Hunt. If she tried to help Armand, she would die as well. And she had a reason to live now, as she hadn’t when she lifted the knife over Aunt Léonie. There were other men with royal blood who could open the labyrinth for her, but no one else knew how to find Joyeuse and stop the Devourer.
Armand looked at her with a sort of resigned fear, as if he knew it was inevitable that she would betray him and he would die tonight.
The horns sounded again, louder, closer. Rachelle shuddered and gripped his arm.
Nobody could fight the Wild Hunt. So she would just have to cheat them.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “Just do as I say.”
And then the Wild Hunt was upon them.
First came the spectral hounds, their crimson muzzles dripping with blood. Then came the hunters themselves, riding horses and stags and tigers. Light clung to every member of the hunt; they were riotously arrayed in silks and jewels and silver and gold. Their faces shimmered with impossible light and their eyes were dark with unknowable dread.
Their gazes made her feel like a small, frightened animal. But she was one of them. She had to be one of them, so she remembered Erec’s arrogance and her own anger and the chill, sweet bloodlust of the Forest wind, and she stood up straight.
The hunt swirled around them, parting to either side, and drew into a ring. One hunter halted before them: a tall man, clad in rags and golden chains, riding a great black stag.