Humiliated, she fled.
9
For the next week, Rachelle kept looking.
There was a fountain in the east gardens that had a mosaic of the sun in its basin. She sat by it for an hour while the moon shone high overhead. She trailed her fingers through the water and closed her eyes and tried, but she could not find any hidden charm in it.
There was a moon-shaped clock set into the ceiling in a room whose carpet was covered in little sunbursts. The King held audiences there, and at night it was locked, the windows barred; Rachelle tried to find where the keys were kept, gave up, and broke in one night. There was nothing inside, and the next day she had to help Erec hunt for the nonexistent thief.
It was maddening. Hunting woodspawn was simple: she heard where they had been glimpsed, then sat on a roof in the neighborhood until she saw them, or felt the swelling power of the Forest. Then she chased and then she killed.
But this door wasn’t something that could be hunted or chased; it had to be searched out and found, and she had nothing to guide her but a cryptic riddle that every day seemed more useless. And yet she couldn’t stop trying, so night after night she roamed the Château. By the time she crawled into her bed, she was nearly ready to weep from frustration as well as exhaustion.
The days were just as bad. Hour after wasted hour standing next to Armand in party after audience after court function. It was deadly boring. At first she ignored what the people around her were saying, but then she realized that while anything was better than the return of Endless Night, she didn’t want to save Gévaudan from the Devourer only to have it be ruled by the Bishop. So she watched the people who approached Armand. They bowed to him, and kissed his sliver hands, and begged to have his blessing. But if there was any plotting being done amid the glittering chatter, she couldn’t hear it.
Armand hardly said a word to her. He smiled and nodded and babbled an ocean of pleasantries to the rest of the court. But when they were alone, he stared at the wall and said nothing.
Amélie was always trying to persuade Rachelle to let her start applying cosmetics. “You said I could practice on you,” she said. “We had a bargain.”
“I know,” said Rachelle. “You will. Just not yet.”
She knew that if she sat down and let Amélie start painting on her face, she would relax. The awful, drumming pressure inside her chest would cease. And she couldn’t bear that. She couldn’t bear to let that agonized tension go when all that stood between her and defeating the Devourer was a single door and she couldn’t find it.
Rachelle started to wonder if Armand had been lying when he told her the story about Prince Hugo.
Then one night, after hours wandering the Château, she sat staring into the darkness and rubbing at the phantom string tied to her finger.
Once she had wound yarn around her fingers every day, and it hadn’t been a curse.
The memory clutched her suddenly, like hands around her throat: Aunt Léonie sitting beside her, gently untangling the snarl she had made when she tried a new pattern.
It had been a charm for revealing hidden things. The pattern itself was very simple, but once woven, it had to be awakened with careful concentration, or the power contained in it would go terribly wrong. Rachelle had given herself headaches trying, but she had never managed it, and Aunt Léonie had kept snatching the charm away from her before it went too wrong.
She’d been angry at that. She’d wanted to master the charm so she could use it against the forestborn she was meeting in the woods.
Now she wondered, What if I used it to find Joyeuse?
She had seen woodwife charms a few times since becoming a bloodbound, and she had been able to sense the power woven into them. She had guessed that meant she would be able to awaken a charm. But making one . . . that was different. In three years, Rachelle had never once tried; she’d simply assumed it was impossible, now that she was one of the things those charms repelled.
But she had nothing to lose by trying.
Amélie was puzzled, but she gave Rachelle a length of yarn from her knitting basket easily enough. That night Rachelle didn’t go out wandering but sat up in her bed, twisting the yarn around and around in her fingers.
Even after three years, her hands still remembered how to move, but they were clumsy, as if they weren’t quite attached to her.
Slowly, she began to form the charm: three loops twining around each other, with a knot in the center. She thought it was right. She was almost certain that it was the right shape, and as she stared at it, she thought she felt a slight flicker of power.
If it is not awakened properly, it can be very destructive, Aunt Léonie had said.
Rachelle slipped out of the bedroom. She went nearly all the way back to the Hall of Mirrors, but she stopped in a darkened corridor just short of it, because she didn’t want to unleash anything very destructive around so much glass.
She looked down at the charm in her hand: three little loops, and two tails drooping down toward the floor.
Her pulse quickened. This could be the night that she found Joyeuse. She wouldn’t have to stand in attendance on a fake saint anymore; she wouldn’t have to help him deceive people into making him king. She could be free.
Or this could be the night that she finally did something stupid enough to kill herself. And then she would still be free.
She let out a short, quick breath and sat down cross-legged on the floor. She cupped her hands around the charm. She tried to clear her mind of distractions, the way Aunt Léonie had taught her.
She thought, I need Joyeuse. I need it.
I need it.
There was a curious sensation, like weight shifting and finding its balance. The air went still in her lungs.
The charm was warm in her hands.
Without meaning to, Rachelle’s eyes snapped open and she stood in a single smooth motion. It felt like there was a string tied along the length of her spine, drawing her up, and now it was pulling her forward.
She walked toward the doorway. She felt like she was floating. She thought, Joyeuse.
But the sense of weight continued rolling, shifting, growing—
And as she stepped through the doorway into the Hall of Mirrors, her control broke. The charm seared her hands like fire, and her vision flashed white.
She knew she was falling.
Then she knew nothing.
She woke up in the Great Forest. There were flowers and vines sprouting all around her, and the sweet Forest wind caressed her face.
Then she blinked, and realized she was still in the Hall of Mirrors—but overshadowed by the Forest.