Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(9)

Though she didn’t have a long time to get to know Wren in Sommeil, the girl had been tender and, Aurora thought, trustworthy. Where Heath had welcomed Aurora with a curious fervor—and argued with her with the same heat—Wren had been cautious, careful, and above all, kind. It made Aurora feel even worse about what she’d done . . . that kiss with Heath, raindrops still clinging to her eyelashes and the stubble along his square jaw—both of them panting, angry, yet drawn to each other. Wren had caught them in the moment, and instantly Aurora had sensed how it bothered the girl. She must have been jealous, must have wanted Heath for herself, and Aurora had been ashamed at the idea that she might have come between them.

Now Wren pulls away from her. She curls her legs up onto the bed, tucking the borrowed robe more tightly about her thin frame, then leans against one of the tall, elegant bedposts and stares at the window.

“Our whole world has become dust,” she says.

Aurora follows her gaze, then rushes to close the shutters, noticing how freezing it is in her room, worried the chill will bother Wren, whose washed hair hangs wet around her shoulders, black and sleek as an otter’s back.

“The Borderlands closed in on us,” the girl is saying as Aurora returns to her. Her voice is tremulous. “The wall fell; I couldn’t believe it. The trees, still burning, flickered and traded places until I thought I had become as unhinged as the queen.”

Aurora sits down beside her on the bed again. Wren’s eyes flick toward her and away.

“But then, just as suddenly, they were still. Only they weren’t the same trees—not slender and trimmed like the ones in Sommeil, but big and lush, taller than three men. That’s when I knew we were somewhere else. The fire raged on, and it was so hard to see, to breathe. And there were just so many of them. . . .”

“So many?” Aurora asks, still warming again to the sound of her own voice, like a whisper spoken through a thin wall. She has the bizarre sense that she must stop talking in order to hear herself. It feels wrong somehow—forbidden—to speak here, in her real life, in her home. Deliciously wrong.

“Soldiers,” Wren explains. “All with the same thorny crest on their shields.”

“Malfleur!”

Wren remains staring at the closed window, like it pains her to look at Aurora. She takes a deep breath. “I saw so many die. So many of us.” She stops and wipes away a streak of tears. “Those who tried to escape were rounded up on carts. Heath—”

Aurora’s own breath hitches. “Is he . . .”

Wren finally faces Aurora. “He went with the white-faced queen. Malfleur. She took him, and cartfuls of others too—mostly men. Back to her own kingdom.”

“LaMorte. Recruits for her army, no doubt,” Aurora says, remembering Isabelle’s account of the evil faerie queen terrorizing peasants throughout the land, her mercenaries demanding they either join her cause or die.

“Heath and some of the others seemed to think she was heroic, that she had saved us from Sommeil, freed us—they were chanting, rallying, but . . .” Wren’s eyes search Aurora’s face. “You told us Malfleur and Belcoeur were sisters.”

“Yes.”

Wren shakes her head. “No matter how evil we may have once thought Belcoeur, I can’t see myself trusting another faerie queen who’s willing to murder her own blood.”

“No,” Aurora agrees. “Queen Malfleur is not to be trusted. She . . .” Aurora takes a breath. “She propagates lies, tithes the youth of all the women in her territories, performs strange experiments with animals—I used to think it was all just rumors, but I’ve seen evidence of her dark magic.”

The words “dark magic” rush across her lips as she remembers the talking starling at her window, and a new idea tickles across her mind like a spring wind stirring through trees. “Now,” Aurora adds, “Malfleur is preparing to march against Deluce, and we will be at war.”

Wren’s eyes blacken. “But Heath . . . we can’t leave him in her clutches.”

Her memory of Heath, her longing to see him again—his grin, his mussed wild hair, his enthusiasms and despairs—leaps and gutters like a candle in wind.

Aurora shakes her head. “I am supposed to marry the prince of Aubin. Tomorrow.”

Wren recoils. “Marry? You can think of marrying a prince at a time like this?”

“I have no choice!” Aurora says, surprised to find she is shouting, shaking.

“But you were the one who opened the floodgates, you were the one who showed up and spoke of another world, who stoked the flames in Heath’s heart and made him want this, want freedom, and now look what’s happened. All our best men gone. We have no place to go. We have nothing.” Wren is staring at her with a presence so powerful Aurora feels something tightly wound inside herself come loose.

“I didn’t know, Wren. I was only trying to help. You couldn’t have survived much longer there anyway, you know that.”

Wren lays her hands on Aurora’s shoulders. Aurora draws in a quick breath, the rush of touch like a flock of swallows startled into flight.

“I will hear no further argument from a spoiled, clueless princess who cares more about her wedding garments,” Wren says, with a nod to the wreaths and garlands stacked on a chair, “than the well-being of her people—or ours.”