He stared at me, then his face softened. He sat down hard on the edge of the bed, as if some of the brittle strings holding him together had just snapped.
“All right,” he said softly. “All right. I’ll tell you what I did.”
He picked up his fiddle absently. “I put an enchantment on Alina that allows me to feel what she’s feeling. I’ve been a little bit afraid to play it and find out, afraid she was dead or in pain or grieving me… or not.”
He shook his head at his admission, then went on. “Joachim forbade our relationship. He wanted to see Alina married to Jaik. We decided to run away together, but I knew if we were caught, he’d kill her. So while she was sleeping, I enchanted her with a rare spell they wouldn’t easily understand. As long as she carried some kind of enchantment, I could take the blame.”
“Where’d you find the spell?”
“It’s a very old bit of magic that I found in a music book. Something the old king didn’t manage to destroy when he erased so much magic.”
I’d thought that it was the Olds who burned the magic books. He started to play the fiddle, and a shiver ran down his spine visibly. “Alina seems… sad. Broken.”
“She’s never given up on you. You shouldn’t give up on her either. That means fighting for yourself right now.”
“I’m just afraid of what happens to her, if we try to escape and I manage to get her killed.”
“You can trust me,” I said.
He gave me a long look as if it were far more complicated than trusting my good intentions. But what he said finally was, “All right, I’ll tell you how to break the enchantment.”
Chapter
Forty-Four
Honor
The next morning, Jaik reluctantly kissed me goodbye. He looked as if it were hard for him to pull away from me, and I gave him a gentle push out the door. Then I went for my daily visit with the healer.
“I think I’m about done here,” he said. “It looks like it’s healed. You could give shifting a try soon.”
My heart pounded at the thought, but I just flashed him a smile
.“Ready to leave the madness behind and go back to your family?” I thought of Alina’s servants, trapped in that tower with her. The royals didn’t care what they took from other people in the pursuit of their own desires.
“Very much so,” he said, then fixed me with a smile. “I’ll tell Prince Jaik tonight and hopefully I’ll be back with my grandchildren by tomorrow. But I am glad that I had the chance to help you, Honor.”
I jumped up and gave him a hug. He still seemed nervous around me—a sure sign that I was valuable to the royals—but he hugged me back.
“Thank you,” I told him.
“Not a problem at all.” He had never asked about what happened, but now he gave me a smile. “Please feel free to call on me the next time you’re grievously wounded. Or, perhaps, try to avoid being wounded.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
I didn’t feel terribly optimistic.
I sat with my back against the wall opposite Lucien, writing out the ingredients for the spell he’d used on Alina. He kept changing the amount of the ingredients, and I groaned, lining out the number of hairs we’d need from Alina’s head. “You know the Spellbane won’t work if any part of this recipe is wrong.”
“I’m keenly aware,” he said. “It was a year ago, Honor. What do you want from me?”
I shook the page at him. “A decent spell! Where’d you find the damned thing? Maybe I can find the original.”
“I bought it off a fortune-teller who said he’d been to the Old Lands.”
“They all say that. I’m pretty sure none of them have ever been in a boat.”
“Well, the spell should still be in my room at Landsdowne.”
“Your old family estate.” I flashed him a smile. “Now my old family estate.”
“You’re welcome to it. It needs more repairs than it’s worth and it costs me a small fortune in taxes.”
“Which you’ve never paid.”
He ignored that.
“Joachim’s taken the estate over, so I’d have to get past him,” I muttered. “But it’s not the only bit of stealing I plan to do from Lord Joachim.”
Suddenly the whole house shook.
Lucien and I exchanged horrified glances.
“Run,” he said. “You have to run!”
“What’s going on? I can’t just leave you.” But I had to figure out what was happening if I had any chance of helping us both. I promised him, “I’ll come back for you. I won’t leave you here alone.”
“Just go,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good if you get buried down here with me.”
A second rumbling blast deafened me. I couldn’t hear what Lucien was saying anymore, but his mouth moved as he tried to wave me out of the dungeon. The noise was overwhelming.
As the house seemed to shake apart around us, I ran toward the narrow stairs. When I cast one glimpse back at Lucien, the look on his face was haunting. He looked resigned as if he knew he’d be trapped down there. I’d crumpled his recipe in my hand absently, but I jammed it into my pocket.
It seemed as though he were more afraid of being alone than of dying. Maybe being alone is the scariest thing for humans. Maybe the thing we really dread about death is the fear of being wrong, of being alone in the dark forever.
I reached the basement and had to dive and weave to avoid the boxes tumbling off the shelves toward me. I ducked a trunk that fell from a shelf and landed in front of me, bursting open; colorful glass shattered all across the floor. I ran for the stairs and climbed up them with my heart in my throat, afraid of what I’d find when I stepped out into the hall.
But when I reached the first floor, I couldn’t even get the door open. It was jammed. I threw my weight into it over and over again. The only way to get out would have to be to transform into a dragon. My fingers rubbed over the brand as I braced myself on the stairs. It was almost gone now, nothing but a faint ache. Maybe I could change back into a dragon again. I had to try.
Time to wake up. I told my dragon, reaching deep inside myself and trying to visualize her. I’d never been able to see myself as a dragon. I was curious how much I looked like the other dragon royals.
I’d caught glimpses of red tipped wings. Maybe it’d be easier if I could visualize myself. I reached deep inside and imagined the sleeping dragon within curled into a ball, sleeping on her pile of treasure. A jolt of familiarity startled me; she slept on a pile of golden coins and treasure, the one I’d glimpsed in my dream, where I’d slept as a child.
She groaned and put one arm over her eyes.
Come on now, girl. I urged, bracing myself on the stairs with my hands pressed to the walls on either side. A dragon sized hole was going to be hard to explain to the dragon royals but it was better than being trapped down here and leaving Lucien Finn down here too.
The world seemed to tilt as I grew. My head slammed into the ceiling, and my body slammed into the sides of the narrow stone stairway, cracking it. The ceiling yawned dangerously low as if the floor were about to collapse in on me.