Page 64 of Truth's Blade

“You find me revolting.” He said it matter-of-factly.

She didn’t even bother to answer.

He suddenly gripped her coat tightly to him, hugging it close. “At least this cloak makes the whole exercise not a complete loss. I will have to find some way to dump you and those soldiers, now that my usual method has been destroyed.”

Whatever had been destroyed she guessed was down to Uncle Theo. Had to be.

Vivi kept her face still, but she was doing a little dance inside.

“Of course, unless most of the glow I saw was from the cloak, one of your little friends might still be magical enough to be interesting to me. Let’s go.” He walked past her and opened the door, and she followed dutifully behind. Her cheek still throbbed from earlier.

Marchant gave a yank of the chain, and she stumbled a little to catch up, keeping her mouth closed in a thin, tight line.

She wanted her mother and her father. She wanted this to end.

If Theo had come after them, then logically Uncle Rafe had gone for help. Her parents would be racing to the rescue, with a full cohort in tow.

She knew that. She knew everything that could be done to find them was being done.

She just wanted it to be done now.

CHAPTER 26

The princess worea spell in her hair. Melodie said nothing about it until Marchant disappeared with her into what she suspected were the holding cells.

She had seen a braiding spell like that before. She had had one woven into her own hair, although hers was for protection. This one was for something else. A dampening spell. Perhaps to hide the princess’s magic.

She rocked back on her heels.

She had been thinking Marchant was like her. That he could see spell work. But when they’d come face to face earlier, he hadn’t known whether the glow he’d seen from her was her own personal magic, or the compliance net. And also, perhaps, the paint set.

She wouldn’t have made that same mistake.

“I see spells,” she said.

Theo looked at her, frowning.

“I can see the glow of spell work, like a layer of light over whatever has been spelled.” She paused. “I think Marchant can see magic. He sees it the same way I see spells, but he can’t know if someone’s magic is because they are using a spell-worked item, or because they themselves are magical.”

“But because you only see spell work, you can’t see magic inside someone. Can’t see if they themselves are magical?” Theo spoke slowly.

“Exactly. I think the princess figured that out, or Marchant straight out told her. She wove a spell into her hair to make her magic seem much less than it is, is my guess, because I saw a dampening spell clearly as he took her back to the cells.”

“You saw a spell in her hair?” Theo’s eyes narrowed. “I just saw that she had clearly been hit in the face.” He paused. “But the spell would make her hair shine with magic, wouldn’t it?”

“It should have, because it was braided in, but the very nature of the spell itself was to hide magic. It might have been a gamble on Viviane’s part on whether he’d see the magic, or whether the spell’s function would work on his magical sight, but she had nothing to lose. And it looks like it might have worked.” She remembered gentle fingers braiding her own hair when she was little, on the road trip she had never forgotten, of her lifting her plait to see the protection against knives and other weapons clearly.

“That was definitely the princess?” she asked. Because the princess was the right age to be a daughter of the woman who’d saved her all those years ago, but that would make her . . .

“I’ve known her since she was born,” Theo said. “That is Viviane Franck.”

“And her mother is Queen Ava of Kassia and Cervantes?”

He nodded.

It was a long time ago, but she had always thought the woman who was clearly being held against her will by one of the travelers in their caravan, and who saved Melodie before she escaped, was called Sue. And she hadn’t been a queen. She had been from Grimwalt. She had apparently offered her father a place to stay in Grimwalt when they crossed the border, and every now and then, when times had gotten hard, her fatherwould wonder out loud if he shouldn’t have taken her up on her offer.

“Why do you ask?” Theo had turned away from her, looking over at the building Marchant used as a prison.

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