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 can’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 all 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 and the speed, 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.”
And Rachelle went back to weaving. Armand didn’t speak again—unlike Erec, who could never stop talking—he seemed content to just watch her and the pattern she was weaving. When she looked up and caught his eye, he didn’t feel the need to wink or smirk, he just smiled faintly and went on watching her.
She began to remember how weaving charms had always soothed her: the soft slide of the yarn against her fingers. The quick, repetitive motions. The slowly building pattern. Her hands found their rhythm, dancing through the pattern, looping the yarn in and out and around his fingers, and slowly the woven pattern grew between them.
Something else was growing too. She felt every breath that Armand took and every breath that she took. She felt the tiny space of air between their knees. She felt the way his head tilted, the way light glanced off his jaw, the way his eyelids flickered as he looked down at the yarn, and up at her face.
She thought it was just the same curious peace she felt when Amélie did her makeup, because like then, the world had narrowed down to her and Armand and tiny scraps of sensation. Then her hands overshot the pattern, and she nearly jerked the yarn out of alignment. She caught herself, but her wrist brushed against his, and a tiny shiver went up her arm.
Their eyes met. Her face felt hot. Her hands, though gripping the yarn, felt empty.
She thought, This is not the way I feel about Erec.
She thought, I think I love him.
The words slid into her head between one breath and the next, and she couldn’t deny them any more than she could pretend she wasn’t breathing.
She loved Armand. It was a simple, absolute feeling, as if her heart had turned into a compass that pointed toward him. Suddenly it didn’t matter that she was dying, that she didn’t get to keep him, that she didn’t get to have him in the first place because he would never feel about her the same way.
He was here. She stared at the line of his jaw, listened to his breathing, and wrapped yarn around his glittering fingers. He was here, and she could drink in his presence like cool water and fresh air. For this one moment, just seeing him was a miracle, and it was enough.
“It’s pretty,” said Amélie.
Rachelle flinched and turned. Amélie stood behind her, next to one of the little tables, on which rested a tray bearing a silver pitcher and three cups. The warm, rich smell of hot chocolate wafted up from them.