There was more light now, she realized: torches blazed on the walls, as if celebrating the lindenworm’s defeat. But she couldn’t see Armand anywhere, just the vast tangle of the lindenworm’s body, scales gleaming in the torchlight.
“Armand?” she shouted, climbing over the body. “Where are you?” Her heart pounded because if he was dead—if he was dead—
“Here.” His voice was muffled. “I’m a little tied up.”
And then Rachelle saw a foot sticking out from under the lindenworm’s coils.
“Buried, more like,” she said, her voice shaky with relief, and she set about untangling him. He was still gripping the lindenworm’s other head; it jiggled when she started to pull him free, and in an instant she had her sword drawn.
“I think it’s asleep,” said Armand, letting go of the head.
Rachelle sheathed her sword. “I know that,” she said. “But you, what were you thinking?”
“That it was going to bite you and then we’d both be dead?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You are not the first to tell me that.” He smiled, and it felt like ground glass in her chest, because she was sure he had smiled like that at his forestborn, and he would smile like that every other time he tried to do the right thing. And she knew what happened to good people, from the Dayspring right on down to Aunt Léonie.
“You’re going to die an idiot,” she snarled. “You won’t last another week, and I’ll have to watch you die.”
And strangely, that wiped away his smile and left him looking desperately tired and sad.
“True enough,” he said. “So I really have nothing to lose.”
He flung an arm around her shoulders, and kissed her.
It was nothing like Erec’s kisses. It was just Armand’s lips clumsily mashed against hers. But she felt it through her whole body like a bolt of lightning because it was Armand, warm and alive and wanting to touch her—
It seemed like only a heartbeat later that he let go. It took her a moment to remember how to breathe and how to think and by then he was stepping back, smiling again.
“You,” said Rachelle. “You—”
“Really,” he said, “you have to be careful about telling people they’re doomed. It makes them crazy.”
“You were already crazy,” said Rachelle. He couldn’t want her. He was everything that could never want her, but he had kissed her, and now her heart was starting to beat with dreadful hope.
“So that means you need to be extra careful.” Then he was starting to climb down the coils of the lindenworm on the other side.
She caught at his shoulder. “Armand—”
“I know.” He pulled free and didn’t look back. “You’re not here to kiss me, you’re here to make use of me.”
He believed it. His voice was cheerful, but she could tell he believed she had no use for him beyond opening doors, and in that moment nothing mattered except making him see that he was wrong.
Rachelle lunged after him. Her feet hit the stone floor and she seized him by the shoulders. “You are not just useful to me,” she said. “You are . . .”
His eyes met hers, wide and suspicious and unyielding. “What?” he asked. “What am I to you?”
She couldn’t speak. There weren’t words for what he was. He was everything she hated, and in all the world, he was the person with the most right to hate her. But when the Forest blossomed around them in la Fontaine’s salon, he’d looked her in the eyes, denied everything she said, and understood her. He had listened to her in the garden that morning, and denied nothing she said, and still forgiven her. What could you even call that kind of person?
Armand was the one who knew how to speak, anyway. He smiled and turned his words into knives that sliced out answers and distinctions. She was just the girl who plunged blindly ahead and doomed herself doing it.
But she thought he might actually want that girl. So she leaned forward and kissed him. Just a tiny, hesitant kiss, and it was more terrifying than any woodspawn she had ever faced. But then his arms wrapped around her as he started to kiss her back, and she still couldn’t believe that he meant it, that this sweetness was for her—
She pulled away. “This is all I have to give you,” she said. “I’m—I’m still bloodbound. You know what that means.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, I do.”
“But everything I have,” she said, “I want to give you. Because I love you. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
“I don’t have anything else to give you, either,” he said. “But I think I love you too.”
Then he kissed her again. And kissed her and kissed her, until her heartbeat was a song and her veins pulsed with honey and fire, and his arms were around her and he was not letting go. He knew what she was and he was not letting go.
She had never understood, until now, what it would be like to kiss somebody who was not trying to use or master her. Who cleanly and simply delighted in her.
Finally he stopped and whispered, “Rachelle—”
“Don’t say it,” she said. “Whatever you’re going to say. Don’t. You know what I am. What I’m going to be. Not even you can change that.”
“I was going to say, ‘I think the lindenworm might be waking up.’”
In an instant she was out of his arms with her sword drawn. One of the lindenworm’s heads lay near her; its eyes had started to open, though the pale film of the inner eyelids was still drawn shut.
Her first panicked impulse was to hack at it with her sword. Then she remembered the charm. She could just barely see one end of it, hanging off the pile of the lindenworm’s coils.
She let herself panic for one stomach-churning moment. Then she dropped the sword and scaled the lindenworm in two leaps. She fell to her knees, pressed shaking hands to the charm, and thought, Sleep, sleep, sleep.
She thought it wasn’t working, but then it did. The lindenworm shuddered and grew still underneath her. In the silence after, Rachelle could hear her own heartbeat, her ragged breaths.
That had been too close. She should never have let herself get distracted.
After gulping a few more breaths, she slid down off the lindenworm, back to where Armand waited.
“Come on,” she said. “We need Joyeuse. Now.”
“Is that why you dragged me here?”