Snapping the book shut, I rolled onto my back. One question remained, itching and nagging at me, demanding to be scratched. If Anushka knew who I was, who I was working with, and that I was on her trail, why hadn’t she tried to kill me yet?
The canopy of my bed seemed to swim above me, and I shut my eyes, trying desperately to think objectively about why she was keeping me alive. Was she toying with me, like a cat does with a mouse? Was she garnering some perverse sort of amusement watching me chase after her like an ignorant fool, waiting for the entertainment to play out before she ended my life? It seemed a reckless way to behave, but maybe after five hundred years of life one developed a different perspective on risk? Or was there something about me she thought was of use?
The door handle rattled. “Cécile? It’s Sabine.”
Tumbling out of bed, I hurried to the door and pulled the chair out from under the handle. “What are you doing here?”
“Helping you.” Backing me into the room, she shut the door and put the chair back under the handle. “I crossed paths with your maid on her way to the market, and she told me Genevieve has clamped down on your ‘midnight gallivanting’ and ‘scandalous behavior,’ whatever that means.” Kicking off her boots, she climbed onto my bed. “So I’m here to help you with whatever you need.”
I perched on the covers next to her, not sure what to make of what she’d said. “Sabine…”
“I know,” she said. “What’s changed?” Her fingers plucked at my bedspread, her expression contemplative. “I suppose I thought time would change things back to the way they used to be. To the way you used to be. That you’d forget about them, and… Tristan. That the trolls would cease to exist if we stopped paying them any attention. Or at the very least, that we could go back to a life where they didn’t affect us.” She winced. “Now that I’m saying it, it seems so childish.”
I pulled the covers over my feet. “Maybe. But sometimes when you want something badly enough, it doesn’t matter if it’s realistic. Or right.” She’d never been to Trollus – until I’d told Sabine the truth, the trolls were nothing more than children’s stories to her, so I could imagine how she would think shutting the book and putting it away would mean they’d cease to exist.
She nodded. “The thing was, once you told me about them, I started to see signs of them, or at least their influence, everywhere. I began to remember things that happened in the past that I found strange in the moment, but then forgot about. The way Chris’s father would buy all the excess from the farms around the Hollow to sell in the Courville markets, but never seem to know what was going on in the city. The way merchants would stop in at my parents’ inn for lunch on their way to Trianon, but then pass back through in less time than it would take to make the whole journey, wagons empty.”
She blew a breath of air through her teeth. “And since we’ve been in Trianon, it’s even more noticeable. I’ve watched merchants from the continent unload their ships’ holds into wagons, bypass the Trianon markets, and head south, but there is no market between here and Courville for a hundred bolts of silk, and if their destination was Courville, why wouldn’t they sail there directly? Obviously because it’s intended for Trollus.”
I gaped at her in astonishment. Not because what she was saying didn’t make sense, but that she’d noticed all these comings and goings and I hadn’t. I knew I wasn’t the most observant, and that I’d a tendency to walk around with my head in the clouds, but it was alarming that I’d miss something so obvious.
“All these merchants know about the trolls,” Sabine continued. “But more importantly, no one interferes with them. No one asks questions. Which means others either know about them too, or they’ve been paid off. Hundreds of people must be aware the trolls exist, but they remain a secret from most everyone on the Isle. The only way that’s possible is that they are more in control than anyone realizes.”
“You’re right,” I said, because though I may not have considered the practical aspects of trolls’ control over the Isle, I knew no one was beyond the King’s reach. “Sabine, do you know what a regent is?”
She shrugged. “Like a king?”
“It’s the title given to the individual who is temporarily head of a kingdom in place of the monarch.”
“But the Isle doesn’t have a monarch.”
I lifted one eyebrow, and watched understanding settle on her face. “I think the first regent was put in his position by the trolls after they were cursed, but only because they thought it would be temporary until Anushka was tracked down and killed.”