“He’s not getting any better.”
Ana?s sat across the bed from me, dressed in black, the lace across her throat eerily similar to the bonding marks on Marc’s fingers. She was different already, I could tell. A ruthlessness simmering around her that hadn’t been there before.
“I know.”
“Everyone thinks you should let him go. That to keep him alive like this is cruel.”
“No.”
She nodded slowly, then said, “I want to hate him. To blame him for taking her away from me. For killing her.”
“He didn’t kill her.” My voice rasped against my dry throat, but I was too tired to reach for a glass of water.
“Yes, he did.”
I opened my mouth to tell her to leave – that I didn’t have the patience to argue with her, but then she said, “But he was also the only one who let her live.”
Taking Marc’s hand, she lifted it to regard his blackened bonding marks. “The rest of us thought that what mattered was keeping her wrapped up in a safe little box, protected from anything and anyone who might hurt her. Marc was the only one who saw that setting her free was what she needed. He made her happy.” Her voice cracked, and she scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “For her sake, we need to fight for him, Tristan.”
“For all our sakes,” I said.
Ana?s nodded once, then stood, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “Don’t let him die.”
She left the room, leaving me alone with Marc.
And I made my decision.
* * *
“Marcanthysurum.”
It had taken all the nerve I had to put voice to his true name, but I was rewarded when, for the first time in weeks, his head lifted, eyes fixing on mine.
“She told you my name.”
Betrayal. For a heartbeat, I wondered if Pénélope giving up his name to me would be the straw that broke him beyond repair, but his chest still rose and fell with steady breaths.
“Marcanthysurum,” I said. “I want you to believe that you gave me your name of your own volition, as a show of loyalty and goodwill, not that Pénélope betrayed your confidence.”
“That’s not the truth.”
“I know,” I said. “But I want you to believe it anyway.”
The hurt painted across his face faded away.
“Our revolution needs you,” I said, then stopped. Because that wasn’t the real reason why I was doing this. “I need you. You’re my cousin and my best friend. The only person in all the world that I trust, and you… you make me want to be better than I am. And I’m afraid of what it will mean for me to carry on without you. I need you to live.”
He stared at me, then shook his head.
Clenching my teeth, I took a deep breath. There could be no other way.
“Marcanthysurum, I want you to give me your word that you’ll live. That you will not undertake any action for the purpose of ending your life.”
His shoulders tensed, the muscles in his face standing out in stark relief as he tried to refuse my command. Seconds passed, then minutes, and terror clawed my insides that somehow – impossibly – his will was greater than the power of his true name. Before my eyes, he waged an internal war, the paper on the walls blackening and catching flame from the intensity of the struggle. But in the end, the name won out.
He gave his promise.
I released my hold on him.
And the madness set in.
Encore
The Songbird’s Overture
* * *
and
* * *
A Character Guide to the World
of the Malediction Trilogy
The Songbird’s Overture
My voice cut off abruptly with a loud sneeze, and I waved away the cloud of dust hanging in front of my face. “Sorry about that,” I said to the old pig watching me from where she lay in the straw. “Shall I try the song again?”
“Please spare us the torture!”
I jumped, then saw my sister’s eyes peering between the wooden slats of the stall. “Josette!”
She oinked like a pig. “Save us from her caterwauling! She sounds worse than an angry tomcat.”
“I do not!”
“Do!” She shrieked with laughter and bolted out of the barn.
“I don’t,” I said to the pig, but she only emitted a world-weary sigh and began chewing absently on a cob of corn. Her brood squirmed around her stomach, each of them fighting for a choice spot. There was one in particular who bullied the rest, knocking his siblings around, and sending the runt toppling until I was sure he didn’t know up from down.
Setting aside my pitchfork, I picked up the big piglet, ignoring his squeals of protest. Turning him round so we were face to face, I fixed him with a dark look. “No one likes a bully.”
He shrieked in indignation, jerking his little form from side to side in an attempt to escape back to his gluttony. I focused intently on his pink face. “Sshhh.”
The pig went silent, dark eyes locked on mine with an almost eerie focus. It gave me the shivers, so I hugged him to my chest and watched as his tiny sibling found a spot and started suckling. My father would say it was wasted effort, but being on the runty side myself, I was sympathetic to the little pig’s plight. I hummed softly to the animals, not quite ready to invite my sister’s mockery with another song.
My ears caught the faint jingle of a harness and the stomp of hooves against dirt, the sounds making my stomach clench with excitement. She was here! With the piglet still in my arms, I ran to the barn door, eyes watering from the brightness as I peered down the lane.
“Cécile, put that pig back in its pen and get to work. Those stalls aren’t going to muck themselves.”
I stiffened, only just catching sight of my father before he led the plow horse around the corner to the fields. The uncharacteristic frown on his face rendered him almost unrecognizable, and he’d been short with everyone since the moment he came down for breakfast. Even though I didn’t entirely understand why, I wasn’t fool enough not to realize what had put a bee in his bonnet. Or, rather, who.
Returning the piglet to his mother, I retrieved my pitchfork and started work on another stall. I was barely halfway through when my fingers began to twitch, finding their way to my pocket to check for the crinkle of paper after each load I dumped into the wheelbarrow. When I couldn’t stand it any more, I leaned out to make sure my father wasn’t lurking around the corner, then pulled out the piece of parchment. The creases where it was folded were starting to become worn and fuzzy, and it was a bit stained from my grimy fingers.