Rachelle hadn’t been able to die for love of her aunt. She didn’t intend to die for a snake, even a lindenworm.
As the nearer head lunged toward her, Rachelle leaped up, sword swinging. With bloodbound strength behind the thrust, her sword sliced through the neck and vertebrae as if they were no more than celery coated in butter. Blood gushed. The remaining head spasmed and shrieked—
As another head grew out of its severed neck.
A coil slammed into her chest and sent her flying. She hoped Armand had run.
But there was no time for disappointment or fear, because now both heads were lunging for her. All she could do was dodge and slash, and Rachelle was fighting better than she ever had in her life, but this time it wasn’t enough. Every wound healed in moments.
Teeth sank into her right shoulder. For a moment it just felt like a burn too hot to hurt. Then the lindenworm shook her, and she screamed. She could feel its venom seeping into the bite, and it was like molten iron.
Then it started lifting her up, coiling a lower section of its body around her legs. Darkness speckled her vision, but with her free hand she managed to pull out another knife. She stabbed blindly at its head, once, twice, and then felt the knife slide into the jelly of the eye. Thick, hot ooze seeped across her hand.
The lindenworm dropped her. Rachelle’s stomach lurched as she fell through the air, and then for a few moments, she didn’t feel anything. Then she realized that she was on her feet—barely—and Armand had an arm around her waist as he dragged her toward the windows. They were not glazed, like the windows in the real Château; they were empty slits looking out into darkness, but they were better than staying with the lindenworm. When Armand shoved her in front of them, she flung herself through.
When she hit the ground, she rolled. White-hot pain seared up her shoulder, and for a few moments, the world went away. After a while, the pain faded into a steady burn that allowed her to breathe and think. She was flat on the ground; she could see nothing, but her shoulder burned with pain.
And then it healed. With each breath she drew of the cold, sweet air, the pain grew less. She knew that the muscles and skin were knitting themselves back together; when she sat up, she knew that her wound was gone. She saw the flicker of a far-off bonfire, she saw the starlight through the weaving net of tree branches overhead. They were in the Great Forest.
A curious peace descended on her. Everything before this moment had been an illusion. There was nothing but the cold darkness around her, the swift, warm pulse of blood inside her. She felt nothing but the empty, echoing darkness in her heart. That was all she was: a shell filled with the same darkness that surrounded her.
“Rachelle?” whispered Armand in his weak human voice, and the name felt useless, irrelevant, almost obscene beside the holy strength flowing into her body with every breath.
She was swiftly adjusting to the dim light; she could see Armand now, could see the pale, resolute set of his face. He was afraid, but he wasn’t going to run.
He should be weeping with fear. He was weak. Prey. Captive. She should kill him, crush him, master him. She thought this quite calmly, with an icy relish as she imagined his blood seeping between her fingers.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The cold in her shattered like glass, and she realized what she had been thinking. She slammed a fist into the nearest tree.
I am not a forestborn, she thought. I will not be a forestborn. Not yet.
The scar on her right hand ached. She was so nearly a forestborn already.
“Rachelle?” Armand sounded truly worried.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m already healed.”
“Good,” said Armand after a moment. “But you have a grudge against that tree?”
“I don’t like this place,” she said.
“I thought it was your home.”
“That’s why I don’t like it.” She drew a breath. “We have to leave. Now.”
“Lead the way.”
But of course, there was no trace left of the stone hall they had fled. They were somewhere in the vast expanse of the Great Forest—though “somewhere” might not even be the right word, not in this ever-shifting, infinitely unmappable maze of trees.