She caught at his shoulder. “Armand—”
“I know.” He pulled free and didn’t look back. “You’re not here to kiss me, you’re here to make use of me.”
He believed it. His voice was cheerful, but she could tell he believed she had no use for him beyond opening doors, and in that moment nothing mattered except making him see that he was wrong.
Rachelle lunged after him. Her feet hit the stone floor and she seized him by the shoulders. “You are not just useful to me,” she said. “You are . . .”
His eyes met hers, wide and suspicious and unyielding. “What?” he asked. “What am I to you?”
She couldn’t speak. There weren’t words for what he was. He was everything she hated, and in all the world, he was the person with the most right to hate her. But when the Forest blossomed around them in la Fontaine’s salon, he’d looked her in the eyes, denied everything she said, and understood her. He had listened to her in the garden that morning, and denied nothing she said, and still forgiven her. What could you even call that kind of person?
Armand was the one who knew how to speak, anyway. He smiled and turned his words into knives that sliced out answers and distinctions. She was just the girl who plunged blindly ahead and doomed herself doing it.
But she thought he might actually want that girl. So she leaned forward and kissed him. Just a tiny, hesitant kiss, and it was more terrifying than any woodspawn she had ever faced. But then his arms wrapped around her as he started to kiss her back, and she still couldn’t believe that he meant it, that this sweetness was for her—
She pulled away. “This is all I have to give you,” she said. “I’m—I’m still bloodbound. You know what that means.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I do.”
“But everything I have,” she said, “I want to give you. Because I love you. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
“I don’t have anything else to give you, either,” he said. “But I think I love you too.”
Then he kissed her again. And kissed her and kissed her, until her heartbeat was a song and her veins pulsed with honey and fire, and his arms were around her and he was not letting go. He knew what she was and he was not letting go.
She had never understood, until now, what it would be like to kiss somebody who was not trying to use or master her. Who cleanly and simply delighted in her.
Finally he stopped and whispered, “Rachelle—”
“Don’t say it,” she said. “Whatever you’re going to say. Don’t. You know what I am. What I’m going to be. Not even you can change that.”
“I was going to say, ‘I think the lindenworm might be waking up.’”
In an instant she was out of his arms with her sword drawn. One of the lindenworm’s heads lay near her; its eyes had started to open, though the pale film of the inner eyelids was still drawn shut.
Her first panicked impulse was to hack at it with her sword. Then she remembered the charm. She could just barely see one end of it, hanging off the pile of the lindenworm’s coils.
She let herself panic for one stomach-churning moment. Then she dropped the sword and scaled the lindenworm in two leaps. She dropped to her knees, pressed shaking hands to the charm, and thought, Sleep, sleep, sleep.
She thought it wasn’t working, but then it did. The lindenworm shuddered and grew still underneath her. In the silence after, Rachelle could hear her own heartbeat, her ragged breaths.
That had been too close. She should never have let herself get distracted.
After gulping a few more breaths, she slid down off the lindenworm, back to where Armand waited.
“Come on,” she said. “We need Joyeuse. Now.”
“Is that why you dragged me here?”
He didn’t sound surprised, and Rachelle stared at him. “You knew?”
“I guessed. There are only so many lost things that a bloodbound might be desperate to recover. I think it’s right there.” He pointed.
They were on the far side of the lindenworm now, and here the room was not a perfect replica of the Hall of Mirrors: there was a statue the like of which Rachelle had never seen in the Chateau. It was Zisa, but unlike every other statue of Zisa that Rachelle had ever seen, she was not identified by the sun or moon in her hand. Instead, she stood over the prone body of Tyr, a moment after cutting off his right hand.
She was carved of the same sandstone as the rest of the hall. But she held a sword made out of bone.
It was all bone, blade and hilt. Runes were carved up the blade; the pommel and cross-guard were delicate filigree that looked like tiny branches. She couldn’t see what the grip was like because Zisa’s stone fingers were wrapped firmly around it.
That was a problem. Rachelle tried to push the statue over so it would break, but it was immovable.
“There must be a trick,” said Armand, poking at the statue with his silver hand.