Where he touched it, the statue started to crumble. In moments, it was no more than pile of dust on the floor, Joyeuse lying free at the center.
“Lovely,” said Rachelle, reaching down to grab the sword—only to drop it again with a hiss of pain. The sword burned. She shook her hand; it wasn’t bleeding, but it was flushed and swollen where she had touched the hilt.
“What?” asked Armand, bending down to nudge the sword with his silver hand.
The hilt moved. It grew and stretched and wrapped like ivy around his hand, until it looked like he was holding it, though Rachelle supposed that in a way, the sword was holding him.
Darkness fell around them. The lindenworm was gone, and the strange hallway with it.
A moment later, they were in the west gardens with the moon overhead.
They were alive. Against all odds, they were alive, and Armand was holding Joyeuse. It felt like the sun in her mind, and without meaning to, she reached for it.
As soon as her finger touched the bone, she felt the burn again, and her hand snapped back.
“I don’t pretend to know your plans,” said Armand, “but it’s going to be a problem if you can’t hold Joyeuse.”
“It hurts,” said Rachelle, “but I can hold it if I have to.”
“So you’re planning to wield it?”
Rachelle looked at him: his rumpled hair, his weary, affectionate eyes. He had helped her. Against all reason, he loved her.
But it was one thing to love a bloodbound. It was another to believe that the Devourer—the ancient heathen terror denied by priest and bishop—could rise again, and in such power as to destroy the world. And Armand had lost too much for his beliefs to ever question them.
“I’m not going to hurt you with it,” she said. “The rest is not your business.”
“I see,” he said quietly, and he sounded disappointed.
Rachelle’s throat tightned, and she almost told him then and there. But she couldn’t stand to find the limits of his trust. And whether he knew or not—whether he trusted her or not—wouldn’t make any difference in the end.
“I told you,” she said roughly, “that you couldn’t change me.”
He laughed softly. “That you did.” He paused. “But even if you don’t—”
“Please. Don’t ask.” The words came out more desperate than she had meant them to. If he asked her, really asked, then she wasn’t sure.
Armand looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he glanced down Joyeuse. The bone tendrils unwrapped from his wrist, and the sword fell to the ground. He knelt, awkwardly scooped up the sword with his silver hands, and held it out to her.
“Wrap it in your coat,” he said. “You can carry it that way.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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The next day, Rachelle didn’t know which was stranger: that she had Joyeuse itself hidden underneath her bed—or that she was happy.
She didn’t have much time left. If she was right about the solstice, she only had three days. Then the Devourer would return, and she would fight him, and one way or another, she would die. But until then—for those precious few days, however many they were—she had nothing to fight and nothing to fear, and nothing to do but spend time with Armand and Amélie.
Something was wrong, though. Armand was quiet and grim at breakfast; Amélie chattered with a rapid brightness that didn’t seem quite real. Throughout the day, as Rachelle escorted Armand from one court function to the next, she noticed him examining each room as they entered it. It was as if he was waiting for an attack.
She was going to ask him about it. But when they finally got back to their rooms at the end of the day, he smiled at her and kissed her, and she forgot everything except this one moment of feeling safe and loved. They drank hot chocolate together, and it was the most perfect evening Rachelle could remember.
Then one of Armand’s valets entered the room. He handed her a note written in the messy scrawl that Erec liked to use and that Rachelle found completely unreadable.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Monsieur d’Anjou wants to speak with you,” said the valet.
That was just like Erec, to summon her imperiously with a note she couldn’t read. But for once it didn’t make her too angry, because for now she had her peace with Amélie and Armand. And soon she would have a chance to fight the Devourer. There was nothing Erec could do to take either joy away from her.
“All right,” she said, and went to find Erec.
Erec’s rooms were not close to Armand’s; it took her a while to get there, and when she did, his valet told her that he’d gone out for a few minutes. So she had to wait in his study for nearly half an hour before he arrived.
“Finally,” she said when he walked into the room.
He raised his eyebrows. “Hardly courteous. I came as fast as I could.”