Amélie turned to her with a smile. “I hope you think God wants something more out of you than sitting still while I paint.”
The problem was that Rachelle knew exactly what God wanted her to do. He wanted her to die. Three years ago, she should have died rather than kill, and every breath she took since had been stolen. Maybe that was why she couldn’t find any way to defeat the lindenworm: because she was supposed to die fighting.
But she couldn’t tell Amélie that.
Instead, she asked, “So painting cosmetics is what you want the most?”
“Well,” said Amélie, “I’m giving it up to help my mother make medicines. So I suppose it’s not.”
They sat in silence for a while longer. At last Amélie said quietly, “I know . . . something’s going on in this palace. If you ever want to tell me, I’ll listen.”
Rachelle looked at her. She noticed the careful way that Amélie leaned toward her, closing the distance between them but not ever touching. She noticed that Amélie was biting her lip, the way she always did when she was nervous. She noticed that this was, in fact, her only friend.
She still couldn’t tell her anything. Maybe it was foolish, but she had spent three years trying to shelter Amélie. She couldn’t bear to undo that now.
But she couldn’t let Amélie’s concern go unanswered, either.
So for the first time since she had pulled a bloodstained, crying Amélie off the street, wrapped her in a coat, and taken her home, Rachelle put an arm over her shoulders.
“Thank you,” she said.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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The next day was Sunday. All the court was expected to accompany the King to the palace chapel, where every Sunday he demonstrated his devotion to appearances, if not to God.
Rachelle had not attended mass since she became bloodbound, and she hadn’t expected to start now. For the past two weeks, she had gotten Erec to watch Armand while he was in the chapel. But this morning she couldn’t find him, so she had to follow Armand inside.
She knew that the stories about bloodbound screaming and bursting into flame on consecrated ground were false. Justine was proof enough of that. But the last time she’d walked into a church, she hadn’t been bloodbound. She’d been the good little daughter of Marie and Barthélemy Brinon, training to become a woodwife and dreaming of saving the world. She’d still believed that she loved God. That chapel was everything she had lost and renounced and spat upon.
But when she actually walked inside, it wasn’t so bad. The church she had grown up with was a little stone building, the walls plastered and painted with fading, clumsy portraits of the saints. The windows were narrow slits paned with cloudy, pale glass. The altar was a simple square stone with only the jawbone of a nameless martyr sitting upon it.
The royal chapel was a jewel box of a room: the floor was pure, shimmering white marble, while the walls and pillars were coated with a vast tracery of gold leaf. Between the gem-like stained glass windows hung tall paintings in equally glowing colors. Before the marble altar lay the skeleton of le Montjoie, patron saint of the royal line. Every one of his bones was completely gilded, enameled eyes set into his sockets, jeweled rings on his fingers and jeweled chains about his neck. It didn’t feel a thing like the place Rachelle had worshipped as a child, and filing into it with a mass of richly arrayed courtiers didn’t feel much different from filing into the Salon du Mars.
Rachelle and Armand were seated in the lower section. That was the other thing that was different: in Rachelle’s church, the people had all sat watching the priest as he stood at the altar. Here, every seat faced the back of the building, so they could spend the entire time looking up at the King sitting in his elevated red-velvet box with his chosen few. Today that chosen few did not include Rachelle and Armand, so they got the full view of the royal presence.
As the choir began to sing, Armand’s jaw tightened, and then he turned around to stare at the altar.
“I think that’s an insult to the King,” Rachelle muttered under her breath.
“Forgive me if I don’t feel like worshipping him today,” Armand muttered back.
“I don’t think anyone’s worshipping anything in here,” said Rachelle. Certainly the ladies next to them seemed a great deal more absorbed in whispering to each other and playing with a tiny dog than in paying due reverence to their King or deity. For a brief moment, she felt very sorry for whatever priest would be called upon to minister to such a blatantly impious congregation.
Then she realized who was leading the crowd of acolytes: Bishop Guillaume.