It was the worst thing he could have said. His jaw bulged as Tristan jammed magic between his teeth to shut him up before encasing him in a black box, probably as much to protect him as to closet him away. Then he twisted away from me and strode over to one of the broken statues. He took one deep breath, then another. Then in a blur of motion, he punched the stone, a piece breaking off even as he swore and doubled over.

I watched in silence, knowing what it felt like to prefer the rush of physical pain to the relentless and inescapable press of emotional anguish.

“This is why, Cécile,” he shouted, rounding on me. “This is why I didn’t want the curse broken. Because this is my life now – running up and down this blasted Isle trying to keep my people from harming yours. Roland will be the first I have to put down, but not the last. He probably won’t even be the last child I have to kill. How long until it drives me mad; or worse, how long until I start to like it?”

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 Forty-Three

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.