Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(2)
There can only be one answer to her question, she realizes.
The faerie curse has been lifted.
Princess Aurora has awakened.
“Happiness is like starlight, my Marigold,” Malfleur’s father told her one summer evening when she was very little. King Verglas had always enjoyed the sound of his own voice. But Malfleur thought he was right, in a way: we do what is necessary, for our joy in this world is scarce and must be wrestled down from the black vault of all that is random and meaningless.
And so, less than a week after Aurora’s awakening and the panther’s attack, the queen and a small retinue of soldiers—using information she gleaned from her squeamish and simpering cousin, Violette—push their way into the royal forest of Deluce, dense with the heady coniferous scent of pine needles and sap. Even in the dead of night, the abandoned cottage isn’t hard to find. The breath of memories comes to her, soft and stirring, but she does not let it touch her.
Now Malfleur stands in the doorway of the nursery she once shared with her sister, Belcoeur. There sits the spinning wheel, its gold contours flickering in the light of her torch. The instrument had been a gift to her beloved sister . . . and, later, a symbol of all that had splintered between them. She gazes at the rare, beautiful spindle. She takes her time; imagines threading her desire through the eye of the flyer, then carefully pedaling and pulling, pedaling and pulling, until the cord of revenge grows strong and taut and fine.
Until it shines.
2
Isabelle
Isbe shudders in the cold as she and several royal attendants pick their way across a field at dawn in the unpleasant business of scouring for survivors—and taking account of the lost. She is thankful, just now, for being blind. But then again, she doesn’t need to be able to see the sun push up through the fog hanging over the strait in order to know the unflinching cruelty it brings, doesn’t have to see the bones of the dead blanching in the grass, either—bodies forever fallen among thorny, shriveled vines, forming miniature castles for sparrows and mice.
It has been a week since the sleeping sickness officially ended, but it has left Deluce in shambles. The moment Aurora shifted, gasped, and grasped her sister’s hand, everything changed: the purple flowers along the crenelated palace walls began to wither. Scattered servants and nobles throughout the palace startled into consciousness, though the vast majority remained still, their lungs frozen from the chill of winter, or their throats slit by pillagers. The list of the dead within the castle village has grown by eighty-three since yesterday. That number does not even include the eleven council members who died. The only one who lived is the chief of military, Maximilien.
“Another courtier, Miss Isabelle,” says one of the servants in her party. A woman takes her arm and guides her to a body.
Isbe kneels down and feels a sunken rib cage, covered in a surcoat of ermine and velvet. She scrambles for the buttons—something light, like fine gold, and something glossy, perhaps pearl—removing each one expertly with her bare hands. “Add them to our store.”
When William first told Isbe that they must scour and save, she scoffed. “Deluce has more gold than any nation in the known world,” she told him. “Surely you know that.”
“In war, every single jeweled ring in the land may be melted into a metal that could save a man’s life. Or a woman’s.” His comment made her think of the nasty Lord Barnabé—Binks—an ostentatious noblefaerie who wears ten ruby rings at once, one for each of his fat fingers.
“My lady.” A servant tugs on her sleeve, and Isbe recognizes the kitchen maid’s voice, the buttery scent of her hair and clothes.
“Yes, Matilda?” At least it isn’t Gertrude, who used to beat Isbe when she stole biscuits. Gertrude, like so many of the others, perished during the sickness. There’d been a rolling pin trapped in her clenched fist when her body was found.
“The prince is asking for you. May I lead you to him?” She sounds a little out of breath.
Isbe hesitates before answering. “Of course.” She places her hand on the older woman’s weathered wrist and allows Matilda to lead her back across the castle yards.
Early spring has a bite to it. The wind stings and cools Isbe’s flushed face as she thinks of the prince. How there had been a miracle, a yes, on the tip of her tongue, a gift of a word. A yes that would have allowed her to skip right over a lifetime of no, over the impossibility of being born a bastard and not a princess. A yes that would have made her a queen, that would have made her William’s.
The Aubinian prince has left an imprint on Isbe: she keeps replaying the way his words and hands tindered her, how she burned and was left shaking. But then Aurora awoke, and that alive thing—that inner self, that yes—withered on Isbe’s tongue, dissolved into dust. She feels overcome now with a bashful shame, stunned by the sickening glare of the obvious: Prince William of Aubin was never hers except in that brief instant, in the wine caves, when they felt they were truly at the end of all hope. He is not hers anymore, and she is certainly not his.
But she has her sister back, and that is all that matters.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” William announces quite accurately, as soon as she’s deposited in the king’s tower meeting room.
“I’ve been doing exactly what you’ve asked of me,” Isbe replies, keeping her voice calm. She reaches out to steady herself, touching the back of an elaborately carved chair.