The dead women were connected to how Anushka was managing immortality, I was sure of it. But how? Killing them would certainly give her a glut of power, but it wouldn’t last more than a few days, and nothing I’d read suggested that such behavior would prolong life. If that were the case, other witches would have discovered it and capitalized upon it. She had to be doing something with the power, but no matter how far I stretched my mind, I couldn’t think what. A witch couldn’t heal herself, and what was immortality if not a cure for old age? It didn’t make sense. She had to be doing it another way.

I picked up the grimoire Chris had stolen and began going through the pages. Flip, flip, flip. The pages rasped against my blanket as I turned them, and then I stopped.

The grimoire was full of spells combining regular magic and blood magic to manage certain afflictions of the body, but only now was I noticing a theme among many of them. Potions to keep hair dark, creams to wipe away wrinkles, and tonics to keep skin firm. While the spells would do nothing for the subject’s longevity, a combination of them would certainly replicate the appearance of immortality – the individual using them might well drop dead of old age, while appearing to all who looked on as though they were in the bloom of youth.

I rested my chin on my wrists. Catherine had been Lady Marie’s maid. I suspected Marie was helping Anushka, so wasn’t it possible she had enlisted Catherine, and maybe others before her, to help maintain her immortality? If one could use magic to combat the exterior signs of age, couldn’t one do the same for the interior degeneration? It would be complicated, and the spells would need continual renewal, but it might be possible. The only certain thing was that she’d need the help of other witches to do it.

My heart started to beat a little faster. Maybe that had been the reason for Catherine’s fall from grace – that she’d refused to help Anushka with her foul magic any longer.

I wondered how much Catherine knew. Whether Marie and Anushka had entrusted her with their secrets, or whether they’d only used her for her skills. Catherine had said Marie dismissed her for meddling in business she shouldn’t have, which could well be Anushka’s relationship with the trolls.

Snapping the book shut, I rolled onto my back. One question remained, itching and nagging at me, demanding to be scratched. If Anushka knew who I was, who I was working with, and that I was on her trail, why hadn’t she tried to kill me yet?

The canopy of my bed seemed to swim above me, and I shut my eyes, trying desperately to think objectively about why she was keeping me alive. Was she toying with me, like a cat does with a mouse? Was she garnering some perverse sort of amusement watching me chase after her like an ignorant fool, waiting for the entertainment to play out before she ended my life? It seemed a reckless way to behave, but maybe after five hundred years of life one developed a different perspective on risk? Or was there something about me she thought was of use?

The door handle rattled. “Cécile? It’s Sabine.”

Tumbling out of bed, I hurried to the door and pulled the chair out from under the handle. “What are you doing here?”

“Helping you.” Backing me into the room, she shut the door and put the chair back under the handle. “I crossed paths with your maid on her way to the market, and she told me Genevieve has clamped down on your ‘midnight gallivanting’ and ‘scandalous behavior,’ whatever that means.” Kicking off her boots, she climbed onto my bed. “So I’m here to help you with whatever you need.”

I perched on the covers next to her, not sure what to make of what she’d said. “Sabine…”

“I know,” she said. “What’s changed?” Her fingers plucked at my bedspread, her expression contemplative. “I suppose I thought time would change things back to the way they used to be. To the way you used to be. That you’d forget about them, and… Tristan. That the trolls would cease to exist if we stopped paying them any attention. Or at the very least, that we could go back to a life where they didn’t affect us.” She winced. “Now that I’m saying it, it seems so childish.”

I pulled the covers over my feet. “Maybe. But sometimes when you want something badly enough, it doesn’t matter if it’s realistic. Or right.” She’d never been to Trollus – until I’d told Sabine the truth, the trolls were nothing more than children’s stories to her, so I could imagine how she would think shutting the book and putting it away would mean they’d cease to exist.

She nodded. “The thing was, once you told me about them, I started to see signs of them, or at least their influence, everywhere. I began to remember things that happened in the past that I found strange in the moment, but then forgot about. The way Chris’s father would buy all the excess from the farms around the Hollow to sell in the Courville markets, but never seem to know what was going on in the city. The way merchants would stop in at my parents’ inn for lunch on their way to Trianon, but then pass back through in less time than it would take to make the whole journey, wagons empty.”

She blew a breath of air through her teeth. “And since we’ve been in Trianon, it’s even more noticeable. I’ve watched merchants from the continent unload their ships’ holds into wagons, bypass the Trianon markets, and head south, but there is no market between here and Courville for a hundred bolts of silk, and if their destination was Courville, why wouldn’t they sail there directly? Obviously because it’s intended for Trollus.”