The Malediction: Hidden Huntress Part 23

We finally made it all the way through the first piece without interruption and were rewarded with grudging praise. Turning to my mother, Monsieur Johnson began to speak in earnest, and I gave off swinging. My back ached fiercely, and I swallowed away the malaise swimming in my stomach.

What linked the dead women? Why had a.n.u.shka chosen them among all the other souls living on the Isle? It was possible they were entirely random, but my gut told me otherwise. If there was a pattern, it was possible I could predict who was next, and that had to be worth something.

Leaning backwards, I cracked my aching back, my eyes drifting over the paintings of women hanging to the left of the stage. Their hairstyles and clothing were old-fas.h.i.+oned and strange to me, but what caught my eye was something all too familiar. My heart lurched, and I jerked upright, twisting on the swing to stare at the painting of a young woman.

Letting go with one hand, I touched the necklace at my throat, twin to the one the artist had rendered. But that paled in comparison to the fire of exhilaration that seared through my veins as I took in the writing on the plaque beneath it.

I'd seen that name before.

Twenty-Eight.

Cecile

"This way," I whispered, trotting toward the foyer's entrance. Chris hurried after me, ladder slung under one arm.

"What happens if we get caught in here?" he asked. "Aren't there guards patrolling?"

"Sabine's distracting him, and besides, we're not doing anything wrong," I said, easing the door shut. "But I'd rather not have to answer any questions about why we're here, so keep your voice down."

In truth, my bigger concern was what my mother would do if she knew I'd sneaked out in the middle of the night. With my luck, she'd probably start chaining me to the bed every evening. But it was worth the risk. There was no other time I could reasonably drag a ladder in here to look at the rest of the paintings, and I needed to confirm whether my suspicions were correct.

While Chris set up the ladder, I circled the room with my lamp, examining all the portraits that were at eye level. I had the map and my neatly written list of names, and I compared the little engraved plaques below each painting as I went. "Estelle Perrot," I murmured, lifting the lamp so I could better see her face. "I found one."

Chris hurried over. "She's wearing your necklace," he said.

"I know. So is Ila Laval. She's in the one to the left of the stage." I gestured in that direction, but of course it was too dark to see. "My mother told me it's a family heirloom."

We were both quiet, the implications of that hanging heavily between us.

"Who are all these women?" Chris finally asked, touching the gilded frame.

"Mostly ballerinas," I said, making a note next to Estelle's name. "But some of them are sopranos."

"Like you."

I nodded, moving on to the next portrait. There were dozens in the room the task was going to take forever.

"Cecile?"

I heard the question in his voice, but I wasn't ready to talk about the realization that was twisting through my stomach. "I know," I said. "Let's finish this, and then... And then we'll discuss what we've discovered."

We circled the room, then went around again with the ladder. But even the effort of clambering up and down the rungs wasn't enough to drive away the chill that p.r.i.c.kled my skin every time we found a portrait matching a name on the list.

Only when I was certain we'd examined the name and face of every one of the two hundred years' worth of paintings did I finally sit cross-legged in the center of the room, my skirts pooled around me and the annotated list on the wooden floor. "Help yourself to a drink from the cart," I said, my eyes fixed on the undeniable truth on the paper. The last ten names on my list were represented by portraits in the foyer, and every last one of them was wearing my necklace.

Which meant all of them were my ancestors.

"Here." Chris handed me a gla.s.s, and with a shaking hand, I took a large swallow. The brandy seared down my throat, but did nothing to steady my nerves.

"She's killing your maternal line," he said, sitting across from me. "But why?"

I set my drink down on the floor, the answer coming to me even as he asked the question. "Blood." I sucked in a breath of air through my teeth, seeing the verity of the trolls' prophesy. "The connection of a blood tie can be important to some spells, because it is a link between people. That's how she's doing it."

"But that means..."

"It means that all these women are her descendants. And," I swallowed down the burn of brandy rising back up in my throat, "That means so am I."

I clenched my fists so hard my pencil snapped. I'd thought the prophesy meant I'd do something, that it would be my and Tristan's actions that would bring an end to a.n.u.shka's life. But that wasn't it at all. What it meant was that I was a future victim. I didn't have to do anything my very existence ensured she'd one day come after me to maintain her immortal life. All the trolls had to do was hold on to me and wait.

All this time, I'd thought there was something special about me, something making me uniquely capable of ending the curse. And what a fool I was to have thought so. Any of a.n.u.shka's line would have been sufficient. Only chance had made it me.

Chris had picked up the end of my broken pencil and was counting on his fingers, then writing down numbers between names. "There's something of a pattern," he said. "There's a few times she breaks with it, but for the most part, the deaths are usually nineteen or thirty-eight years apart. Can't say what the significance of that is, but it does look as though she's picking one off almost every generation."

"My grandmother's name isn't on our list."

Chris picked up the map and unrolled it, pointing to the burn mark we hadn't investigated. The one on the road to the Hollow.

Taking the pencil, I carefully wrote my grandmother's name and the year of her death. It was nineteen years after the last name on my list. By the odds, the soonest a.n.u.shka could be expected to kill again was nineteen years later. I did the math. "We have six years before she's likely to strike."

"It could be less," Chris warned.

"Or longer." I wondered how Thibault would take it when I told him he could have another twenty-five years to wait before a.n.u.shka came after me. I did not think it would sit well with him to know that he'd be a doddering old man when he finally won his freedom.

Except it wouldn't be me she came after.

Leaping to my feet, I s.n.a.t.c.hed up the lamp and went over to where my mother's portrait hung. It was many years old, from the prime of her youth, and before she'd given me the necklace. With a shaking hand, I reached up to touch the gold paint on the canvas. I wasn't the next target, my mother was.

"Are you going to tell the trolls it's Genevieve she'll go after?"

"N... N..." I tried to force the word no out, but it kept sticking on my lips, the desire to do what was needed to fulfill my promise feeling almost as necessary as breathing. "If I tell them, they'll kill her in the hopes of ending a.n.u.shka's immortality, and with it, the curse. If it were me, it would be different. Being bonded to Tristan keeps me safe from the King. He might well drag me back to Trollus to keep me out of the witch's reach, but he won't kill me."

Chris looked unconvinced, but I knew that despite how horribly Tristan's father treated him, he'd never risk killing him. Thibault did the things he did because he believed Tristan needed to be a certain kind of man to rule the trolls. And while I'd never condone or truly understand his abuse of his son, I was certain that the King would do everything in his power to keep Tristan alive.

The sound of Sabine's laugh trickled through the walls, echoed by the deeper sound of the guard. We both hurried behind the curtain at the far end of the room.

Just as I dimmed the lantern, the door opened, and two sets of footsteps came inside. "I told you that you were imagining those voices," Sabine said. "There's no one here unless the opera house has ghosts."

"What's this ladder doing in here?"

"They're probably making s.p.a.ce for Cecile de Troyes' portrait. You did hear that she's to star in next season's production?" It was only because I knew her so well that I heard the nervous edge to her voice. "Now didn't you say you'd show me the salons out front? I've been dying to see them."

"For a pretty girl like you, I can show you anything you like."

Sabine giggled, and I rolled my eyes on her behalf, but a sigh of relief still escaped my chest when the door opened and shut again. "Let's get out of here."

Leaving the ladder where it was in case the guard came back, we moved silently through the dark corridors of the theatre and out the crew entrance.

"Sabine will meet us here," I said, extracting a pair of warmer gloves from the pocket of my cloak. "We need to think of a plan of some way to protect my mother."

"Cecile?"

I jumped, colliding with Chris as I spun around. "Fred?"

My brother stepped out of the shadows, his black horse trailing along behind. "What are you doing here at this hour?"

What was he doing here? "I don't see how it's any of your business," I said, my voice sharper than I intended it to be. "You made it clear you wanted nothing more to do with my delusions."

He grimaced. "I didn't mean it. I was angry, and... You're my little sister, Cecile. There isn't anything I wouldn't do to keep you safe."

Tension I hadn't even realized I was carrying slipped out of my shoulders, relief filling me. Losing my brother's goodwill and trust had bothered me, and having him back on my side meant a great deal. A spark of light in the darkness. "I'm glad to hear it."

"Can I walk you home?" he asked. "There's something I need to talk to you about."

I didn't want to go home. Sneaking out had been hard enough, and I needed to talk to my friends about what we'd learned tonight. But I also didn't want to turn down my brother's tenuous peace offering, so I nodded.

We started to the main street, and Chris made to follow, but Fred rounded on him. "Can't I talk to my sister alone without you listening to every word we say?"

Chris stopped and held up his hands in defense. "Sorry, I just..."

"It's fine," I said, catching my friend's eye. "Wait for Sabine. Make sure she gets home safe. I'll meet both of you at dawn for that ride we were talking about."

Chris retreated back to the crew entrance without argument, but there was no missing the hurt in his eyes. I waited until Fred and I were out of earshot before saying, "If it wasn't for the fact I knew you two used to be best friends, I'd never guess it for how you treat him."

"I've been in Trianon for almost five years," he replied in a low voice. "Things change. People change."

"And that gives you the right to treat him worse than you would a stranger?"

"I don't trust him."

I nearly stopped in my tracks. "Whyever not?" There was no one more trustworthy than Christophe Girard. He didn't have a dishonest bone in his body.

"Because I don't understand his motives." Fred pulled the hood of his cloak up. "Why's he helping you with this mad plan of yours to free those monsters? What's in it for him?"

"He's helping me because he's my friend," I said, trying to shove down my rising temper. "And they aren't monsters."

"Right. It couldn't possibly be because they've provided him some sort of incentive of the golden variety."

"No." I shook my head sharply, refusing to even consider the notion.

"Cecile..." He broke off as though his frustration with me were too great a thing to articulate. "It's what the trolls do. It's how they control the Isle by buying everyone off and paying a.s.sa.s.sins to kill those who interfere with their schemes."

"Because you know so much about them now?"

"More than you might think." He stopped, pulling his horse around so it blocked the wind. "Cecile, I spoke to Lord Aiden..."

"You what?" Fury chased away the chill of the air. "Fred, you promised to keep quiet."

"Would you listen?" He bent down so that we were eye to eye. "He approached me. He already knew everything about them and about you. Told me that the Regency has always known about them, but they can't move against them for fear of what the trolls' agents will do. Whole families have been a.s.sa.s.sinated in the worst sort of ways for even the smallest of slights."

I swallowed, looking away from him.

"They know that none of this is your fault," Fred continued. "They want to help you. Lord Aiden says there's a way to get you free of the promise you made to find the witch. You could be done with all of this, and you could go home. If you'll only speak to him..."

"No." My voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar, the malignant power of my oath taking control of my mind, turning my thoughts dark and violent. "You will not interfere. And neither will they."

Fred took a step back, b.u.mping into his horse. "Cecile?"

I looked down, realizing with horror that my little knife was in my hand, blade extended. "I'm sorry," I whispered, letting it slip from my fingers and into the snow. "I'm so sorry, Frederic. You need to stay away from me."

Spinning around, I hurried in the opposite direction, my breathing ragged. I was not in control of myself that I'd been willing to harm my own beloved brother was proof. And it made me doubt every decision I'd made and action I'd taken since that fateful night on the beach. How much of this was what I wanted? How much was what the troll king wanted? Fear careened through my heart, because I was no longer certain of what I was capable of. Because I was starting to wonder if there was no line I couldn't be driven across.

An arm wrapped around my head, and a damp cloth reeking of herbs and magic clamped across my face.

"I'm sorry, Cecile. I'm so sorry for this," my brother whispered into my ear. "But it's the only way I can help you."

Then there was nothing.

Twenty-Nine.

Cecile

I awoke, not with a start, but in a slow and arduous climb to consciousness. Footsteps thudded over my head but it took a few moments of blinking at the gapped floorboards to realize I was lying on the dirt floor of a cellar, my feet and wrists bound and a rag stuffed in my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but the effort made me gag, which made my eyes water. My nose started running, and breathing became a challenge, little bubbles of snot forming, breaking, then dripping down my cheek. It was horrible, but so very fitting.

My brother had betrayed me.