Stolen Songbird

Page 18

Tristan unlatched one of the stall doors and hung off the edge, swinging slowly back and forth. “Wishful thinking, I suppose. Now what is it you want?”
“Make it so no one can hear us.”
“It’s considered rude to tell a troll what to do with his magic.”
I jammed the toe of my shoe against the stall door to stop the swinging. “Well, I can’t very well do it myself. Besides, it’s your secret I’m trying to protect.”
Magic brushed my skin, wrapping silence around us like a cloak. “What secret would that be?”
A drop of sweat trickled down my spine. “That you’re a sympathizer.”
He laughed, but the flash of unease gave him away. “You can quit trying to hide the way you feel,” I added. “You can’t fool me the way you do everyone else.”
The smile slid from his face. “Works both ways, Cécile.”
I held my ground. “I’ll ask the questions. Do you hate humans?”
He snorted softly. “I thought you had all the answers.”
“I want to hear it from your lips.”
“What difference does it make to you? Knowing won’t change anything.”
His anxiety fed mine and my breath came in short little gasps. “Yes or no.”
“That’s awfully limiting,” he said, licking his lips. “I prefer to qualify my answers.”
“Yes or no, Tristan.”
Silence.
He didn’t trust me. I didn’t blame him. But I had to know. There had to be a way to convince him without resorting to blackmail. I was good at persuading people – all it took was a bit of concentration and the right words. I focused. “We both have a vested interest in each other’s survival,” I said. “No one else in this cursed city needs you alive more than I do. But in order for me to help, I need to know the truth. Please tell me the truth.” I leaned into the words, putting every ounce of willpower I had into them.
The sound of my heart was loud in my ears, the rocks solid beneath my feet. One of the unlatched stall doors swung against the wall. Tristan’s attention jerked in the direction of the sound. He frowned and looked back at me. Worried. Curious. But unconvinced and unmoved by my force of will, which was something that had never happened to me before. There was only one way to get him to cave.
“I believe you have recently been deprived of certain documents,” I said softly. “Documents that certain individuals are eager to possess.”
Fury burned through the back of my skull. Tristan became unearthly still, unblinking. “Where are they?”
I fought the urge to step back. “Safe. Hidden.”
“You surprise me, Cécile,” he said, voice frigid. “I didn’t figure you for the backstabbing type.”
I scowled at him. “I only want the truth – you are the one who is so damnably secretive. And besides, I didn’t take them to use against you. I took them to protect you.”
His eyes widened fractionally, but I felt his surprise.
“I think you had better explain yourself,” he said.
In short, terse sentences, I explained how I had wandered into the cellar and what had happened afterwards. “If I hadn’t taken them, Angoulême would have,” I said. “And I had them hidden in my skirts when he made his offer. I could have given them to him then, but I didn’t.”
“To protect yourself.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know about… that until after. Marc told me what happens if one of us…”
“Dies.” He finished my sentence. “You didn’t know?”
“How could I know?” I scuffed the toe of my shoe against the floor. “You trolls have taken away everything that matters to me. There is no way for me to escape on my own – I need help. Angoulême offered that to me, but I know he doesn’t mean it. He hates me and means to see me dead, I can feel it.” My hand balled into a fist and I hesitated. “But I think you would help me, if you could.”
He didn’t react. I closed my eyes and tried to read his emotions, but they were tumultuous and confusing.
“Is that your bargain, then?” he asked. “My promise to help you escape Trollus in exchange for my papers?”
“No,” I said. “I want something else.”
Silence. I didn’t bother opening my eyes to look for clues on his face. They wouldn’t be there – he had been at this game for far too long. All the clues I needed resided in my own head. Tristan was nervous. He had thought he could predict me, control me, but I’d just demonstrated otherwise.
“What?”
“I want you to tell me what those papers contain. I want to know why they are so important to you. Why they are so important to Angoulême.”
He laughed. “Of all the things in the world you could ask for, that is what you want?”
I nodded, not fooled by his flippancy. I had taken a chance and struck gold. Of all the things I could have asked for, this was the one he wanted to give up the least, which meant it was valuable. Within his answer lay the truth, the heart of his politics. Yes, I could have asked for him to help me escape, but I’d seen how easy it would be to get around that promise. A bird in hand was worth two on the fly, and if he gave me what I wanted, I was certain I would have something valuable indeed.
“Just because I can’t kill you doesn’t mean I can’t hurt you,” he said, stepping forward.
I shook my head. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be.” His hand slid around my throat, thumb resting against my fluttering pulse. “I could hurt you in ways that might make you wish for death.”
“You won’t.”
Breath hissed between his teeth. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because if it was in you to torture the information out of me,” I said, “you’d have done it already.” I leaned towards him, and his hand slipped from my throat to cup the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my curls. “You hate the way your father is, how he treats the half-bloods. I heard it in your voice yesterday, but more than that, I felt it.” I pressed a hand against his chest and for the first time ever, he did not recoil at my touch. “You aren’t like him.”
His heart thudded rapidly, the heat of his skin warming my hand through his shirt.
“Life would be much easier if I were,” he said softly. Sighing, he moved back, putting an arm’s length of distance between us. “You drive a hard bargain, but I suppose I have no choice.”
“You do have a choice,” I said. “That’s what makes this difficult.”
A faint smile brushed his lips.
“Tell me,” I urged.
He rested his head against the bars above my head and I felt the great burden of his misery press down on my shoulders, words bursting out of him in a wild torrent: “I didn’t want you brought here. I fought my father’s decision at every turn, but he wouldn’t listen. All he cares about is breaking the curse. He will stop at nothing to get free.”
“I could help you,” I said, watching the rapid rise and fall of his chest. “If I broke the curse, your father would have no reason not to let me go.” I knew his feelings about the curse were complex, and it was high time I got to the bottom of them.
“No!” Tristan jerked away from me, eyes wide. “I mean…” He held up one hand. “Breaking the curse has consequences.”
“You don’t say.” I crossed my arms.
Tristan grimaced. “Do you want my father released on the world?”
“Hardly,” I snapped. “I’d like to see him dead, but fat as he is, I don’t suspect he intends on keeling over for a long time.”
“What he intends may not matter,” he replied softly. “If everything goes according to plan. My plan.”
An odd sense of relief went through me at his admission. “You’re a sympathizer. You’re their leader, aren’t you?”
He nodded and took hold of my shoulders, giving me a gentle shake. “If you betray me to Angoulême, he’ll tell my father. And my father won’t just kill me. He’ll kill Zoé and Élise, and countless others you haven’t even met. And even if by some miracle you survive my death, he’ll make sure it isn’t for long.”
“I understand,” I said. “You have my word that I won’t say anything.”
Still gripping my shoulders, he said, “In a year, I’ll be eighteen, which is when troll magic matures and reaches its full strength. I’m…” He hesitated. “I’m already a match for him now. By then, I’ll be stronger. Stronger than any troll alive; and in Trollus, power is king.”
I gasped. “You intend to depose your own father?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and let go of me. “In a manner of speaking.”
Coldness swept over me. “You plan to kill him.”
“Sometimes,” he said, so quietly I could barely hear him, “one must do the unthinkable.”
“It’s treason.” Worse than treason, what he was contemplating was patricide. The murder of his own father.
“Yes.”
“What about your mother? If you kill your father, won’t she die too?” I thought about it for a minute. “And your aunt?”
Tristan looked sick and felt worse. “It’s a possibility, but my aunt believes she can keep my mother alive.”
“She knows then? What about your mother?”
He gave a slight nod. “Only my aunt – it is easy enough to muffle our conversations with magic. My mother isn’t the suspicious sort.” He rolled his shoulders, the movement reflecting his discomfort. “It was my aunt’s plan from the beginning. She despises him and how he rules Trollus.”
There had to be more to it than that. “Why?”
“She had a… a friend. He was a half-blood and they were very close.” Tristan grimaced in discomfort. “Because of the conjoined nature of my mother and aunt, my father has a tendency to consider them both his. When he found out about my aunt’s… friendship, he had the man flayed in public. Twice.” He closed his eyes. “Even a half-blood can survive a great deal of torture. I believe the executioner deliberately sliced the artery in the man’s leg for fear that if he survived, my father would order him flayed a third time. And a fourth.”
My knees wobbled at thought of enduring so much torture – if there was a downside to the troll’s near-invincibility, this was surely it.
Tristan continued. “He’s never ordered the execution of a full-blooded troll – there are too few of us left – but he orders the deaths of half-bloods for the slightest offence. And they are never clean deaths.”
Gruesome, horrible deeds, but such is the nature of kings – human or troll. I could understand the Duchesse wanting to see him dead because of what had been done to her friend, but what had pushed Tristan over the edge so that he would consider killing his own father?
As though anticipating the question, Tristan said, “I had a human friend, once. He was old and wore funny clothes. He always brought me candy and told me stories. He never treated me like I was a prince or even like I was a troll – he treated me like I was just a boy. My father killed him to punish me.” He lowered his head. “I couldn’t do anything to stop him. I was young and helpless against him. But I’m not anymore.”
Closing my eyes, I shuffled through his emotions. Fear. Shame. Doubt. And how did I feel about becoming an accomplice in a murder plot? I hated his father – he’d arranged for my kidnapping, ruined my life. To him, I was a tool here to serve a purpose, and ultimately, disposable. But could I stand by and see a man killed? I didn’t need to think long or hard. In this case, not only would I willingly stand by, I’d stick the knife in myself. If that made me a bad person, then so be it. But even with the King dead, one fundamental problem remained.
“The sympathizers,” I said. “They don’t just want to be rid of your father – they want to be rid of all the troll nobility so that there’s no one powerful enough left to lord over them. What’s to stop them from killing all your friends, all your family, other than the fact they need you to keep Forsaken Mountain off their heads?” Then the realization dawned on me: he was waiting until he was in power before breaking the curse. Not only would he be king, he’d be a hero to his people. I opened my mouth to say as much, but then snapped it shut again. Withholding freedom from a city full of people was certainly a dangerous secret, but knowing he was doing so did nothing to explain the purpose of his diagrams. “Well?” I finally asked.
He took a deep breath. “Are we in agreement then? You will tell me the location of all my papers in exchange for me explaining their contents?”
“Yes,” I said. What could be more important than the knowledge he was purposefully keeping the curse in place? “I agree.”
“You must understand: Marc, Anaïs, and the twins are the only ones who know. And I only trust them because I have their true…” He broke off. “Why I trust them is irrelevant. My point is, I have no such assurance from you.”
I said nothing. Telling him he could trust me wouldn’t make a difference. I could lie.
Tristan took a deep breath. “The documents contain the plans for building a structure that would support the rock.”
“No magic required,” I whispered.
“Not after I finish building it.”