Grabbing both sides of his head, he howled, the frustration and torment in it making me step back a pace. “Tell me the solution, Cécile. Give me a solution that doesn’t see half my people dead at my hand.”

I licked my dry and split lips, praying it hadn’t been a dream. Praying that it was possible, and that I’d find a way, and that this wasn’t just another false hope. And when I was done with praying, I met Tristan’s desperate gaze, and said, “We send them back where they belong. Back to Arcadia.”

Chapter 43

Tristan

“How?” I demanded, the audacity of Cécile’s suggestion temporarily cooling my temper. “Do you not think if such a thing were possible, someone would have figured it out in the thousands of years we’ve been trapped here?”

Cécile shrugged. “You spent five hundred years searching for Anushka, and I was the one who found her.”

“Technically, she found you,” I pointed out. “And what, pray tell, has motivated this particular notion?”

Cécile paled slightly, and my skin prickled with apprehension. But before she could explain, the twins walked out of the shattered doors of the tombs. Their faces were drawn, Vincent’s hair matted with blood and Victoria’s trousers soaked with it.

“Are you all right?” I asked. I’d felt the pull on my magic while I’d been scrambling around the mountain and suspected what Cécile had done.

“We’re alive,” Victoria responded. “That Angoulême?”

I nodded, more interested in my friend’s demeanor than my prisoner. I opened my mouth to press her further, but she gave me a slight shake of her head. Later.

“He can’t hear us, can he?” Cécile was chewing on the edge of her thumb, then remembered what her hands were coated in, made a face and spit into the dirt.

“No.” But the Duke was very much awake, and there was no way to know what he was ordering my brother to do. Nor any way of stopping him, short of knocking him out again. Which I was sorely tempted to do.

“The Summer King called my debt.”

All thought of the Roland and the Duke fell away, and I rounded on Cécile. “What?”

“I was there, in the in-between-space – Arcadia,” she said. “He told me that Winter has been slowly gaining territory, and he blames it on so many of his people being trapped in this world. A loss of lines he called it.” She shrugged one shoulder, but it made sense to me. A good many powerful fey had been trapped along with my many-times great-grandfather, and the loss would have compounded over the centuries. It also explained Winter’s actions: why she’d believed we were a threat and why she had been so desperate to destroy my people. She’d known exactly what my uncle had been up to.

“He told me he wants his people back, and that I’m the one who is going to make that happen.” She started to chew on her thumb again, and I recognized it as a tick she’d adopted when under my father’s compulsion.