“I don’t know. It could be…” he trailed off and shook his head. “All I know is that I’m the only troll no longer bound by the curse.”
Could I have asked for more? It was a circumstance so perfect, yet so improbable that I’d never even dreamed of it. Tristan free, and all the trolls I despised and feared still caged by the curse. The dilemma I’d grappled with for so long seemed solved – I was sacrificing nothing and no one to be with Tristan. Our lives were safe without me unleashing the likes of Roland upon the world. I should feel giddy, euphoric, even. But I didn’t. Instead I felt the sense that we stood in the eye of the storm, and that a step in any direction would plunge us back into chaos.
A door slammed, and we both jumped. “We can’t stay here,” I said. “They know I have escaped and they’ll be after me.”
“Who?”
“Lord Aiden du Chastelier. He’s been running messages for your father.” I motioned for him to follow me backstage, noting the way his eyes jumped from lamp to painting to ladder, trying to see everything and yet focusing on nothing.
“The Regent’s son.” Tristan’s voice was toneless, but I felt the dull force of his shock. “Did he relay my message?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said with a shaky laugh. “Though he intended to use it to his own advantage, not mine. And he enlisted my brother to help him.”
Leading him up the stairs to one of the windowless rooms where the dancers practiced, I explained Aiden and Catherine’s plan. My words were jumbled, and perhaps only half of what I said made any sense, but he did not interrupt. Tristan was tense beyond measure, but you’d never know it to look at him. His face was smooth with composure as he wandered the room, examining the sparse furnishings. It was not comfortable between us and our reunion was not going as I’d imagined, but to focus on such things now would be foolish. He was rattled, that was all. What I’d done must have come as quite a shock.
Retrieving some toweling from a shelf and soaking one of them with the water can in the corner that the girls drank from, I turned back to him. “Sit,” I said. “I’m taking those things off you, since you seem unlikely to remove them yourself.”
“I can’t…” he started to argue, but I interrupted him.
“Your father isn’t here. He can’t come anywhere near you now, and there isn’t anyone he could send capable of making you put them back on. I haven’t survived this long only to have you kill us both out of foolishness.”
His jaw tightened, and the reluctance I felt sparked anger in my heart. “Unless you have a very good and very logical reason why they should remain in place, you will sit down and allow me to remove those things.”
Tristan stared over my shoulder at the plain wall and its barre. “It’s unpleasant,” he finally said. “I don’t want you to see.”
“Not good enough,” I said, settling down on the floor and arraying my supplies around me. “Now sit down.”
“Fine.”
He eased out of his coat, and although I could feel the pain ricocheting through him, he did not flinch. Hiding his weakness from me. He sat down cross-legged, and rested his elbows on his knees. The motion pulled the cuffs of his black shirt back, revealing the steel manacles. Black fabric wrapped around his wrists and halfway up his forearm, but it was damp with blood, the smell of it thick in my nose. Gloves concealed his hands, and my pulse sped as I considered what might lay beneath.
“Lift your elbows,” I said, hoping my voice was steadier than I felt. Not that it mattered – he could feel my emotions as much as I felt his. It crossed my mind how foolish it was that we ever tried to hide them from each other.
Spreading a towel across both our knees to catch the mess, I carefully slid his sleeves up to his elbows, then started to work unfastening the knot holding the fabric in place. My fingers brushed the warm skin of the inside of his arm, and he made a soft noise. When I looked up, his eyes were closed. Clenching my teeth together, I started to unravel the fabric. Slowly, I told myself, because I didn’t want to hurt him. But in reality, I knew it was because I was afraid.
I was right to be.
The skin beneath grew icy the closer I got to the manacle, the pale luster of his skin turning the grey color of death, the veins beneath black as though they ran with ink, not blood. Sweat broke out on my forehead as I peeled away the sticky fabric to reveal the blackened wound beneath. The only thing I had ever seen like it was severe frostbite, and this was different and worse.
It took every ounce of control I had not to react, not to weep for the horror of what had been done to him, because I knew he would not appreciate it. Pain and shame built in the back of my head as I peeled off his glove, revealing a hand that was dark and immobile. Barely recognizable as the hand that had once made me burn with the slightest touch.