“I suppose that’s one less troll for us to kill,” Victoria said, but when I turned her direction, she was staring at the snow, and I found I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to be ruthless, to pretend that I didn’t care that I’d caused the death of the troll on the ground in front of us. But I did. Just because he was caught up in the Duke’s schemes didn’t mean he’d deserved this fate.

“This is why we need to find Angoulême and stop him,” I said. “He doesn’t even care about the lives of his own followers.”

They all made sounds of agreement, but I could feel their judgment. And I deserved it. With one swift motion, I reached down to close the lids of the troll’s unseeing eyes. “Where is our next target?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tristan

The only thing I cared about, the only thing I thought about, was discovering what Winter wanted and how to thwart her.

Nothing else mattered.

I surrounded myself with the pieces of the puzzle. What I could accomplish for Winter that she couldn’t do herself. How Cécile’s powers might be manipulated. What I knew of the fey and what I knew of the conflict between courts, because that would be the heart of her motivation. All the foretellings given my aunt over the years, their phrasing, and how we’d benefited. How Summer had benefited. The moves Winter had made since her return; the words she’d said. All these things turned and twisted around me as I contemplated how they fit together.

I spoke to no one but Souris, who was the ideal companion, as he listened well and said nothing at all, his only demand the scraps from the plates of food Sabine brought at regular intervals.

They all came and went, talking at me or to each other, and I stored the things they said in the back of my mind in case I required them later.

Marc returned to Trianon.

“All he does is play with his imaginary games and jabber at the dog,” Sabine said, slamming my dinner down on the table in front of me. “We don’t even know what he’s doing other than abandoning us.”

“He’s thinking,” Marc said, wandering through my puzzle while I picked at the roast chicken, setting the greens on the floor for the dog. He didn’t want them either. “And he hasn’t abandoned us – he’s merely focused on the most central problem.”