Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(32)

“But you’ve been ignoring me—avoiding me, even,” she adds, realizing that it’s true. “We agreed to help each other find a way out of Sommeil. I thought—”

“I made you no promises.”

“But you did,” she insists, feeling baffled and dismayed by the way he won’t even look in her eyes.

“I said I would protect you, and that’s what I’m trying to do right now. As for a way out . . . I had hoped you might have answers, but you don’t. In the meantime, Blackthorn needs me.” His hands clench and unclench.

“But the game dwindles,” she counters. “You can’t just turn back to your life, knowing one day the food may run out completely!” The heat of their argument is warming her cheeks.

“What do you know about hunger? You grew up a sheltered, spoiled princess!”

The accusation stings, even though it shouldn’t. Her royal upbringing shouldn’t be an insult. “I didn’t choose my own parents.”

“No, but they chose everything for you,” he snaps.

“What does that mean?”

“It means now that I’ve thought more about the corruption of your world—the way human senses are bartered out of vanity—I’m less convinced I want anything to do with it.”

Aurora’s jaw drops. He can’t mean that. He is just lashing out because of his disappointment. His disappointment in her.

Shame roils in her gut. She draws in a breath, trying not to stare at Heath’s mouth, trying not to imagine, as she has done every night in her bed, him touching her face tenderly again, the way he did on the first night.

“Fine,” she says. “You can stay here and hunt until there’s not a single deer left in the forest. I’m going to find my own way home.” She marches off, an unfamiliar emotion sparking and raging in her throat: anger.

Back inside the castle, she finds her way to the study where she has seen Heath retire to make his notes. He doesn’t think she knows what it’s really like to be one of them. Well, why should she? No one’s told her; no one’s given her a chance to understand.

Pushing her way into the small space, she sees piles of empty, dirty cups, indicating he has stayed up late many nights, working and thinking. At the desk beneath the window lies a stack of pages. She sits down to rifle through them. Except they aren’t notes, really. They are more like charts and graphs with all sorts of scrawled labels. Depictions, she realizes slowly, of the Borderlands. He’s been keeping track of its patterns, how it changes. He must think that by decoding how their world operates, he will find a secret loophole, and with it, an exit. But how many years has he spent on this project, with no success?

Aurora touches the pages. It strikes her that perhaps Heath is missing the point: what if there simply is no exit? The prick of the spinning wheel’s flying bobbin sent her here, or so she has gathered. It’s possible the spinning wheel has some significance, but does it really represent a pattern, or is it just a disconnected clue? Why, in a world built from the power of dreaming, would anything follow logic?

She drops the vellum and leaves his study. Everyone has warned her repeatedly to stay away from the north turret. It’s dangerous to get too close to the queen’s quarters, they say. But what good has cowering done them—or anyone, for that matter?

She moves through parlor room after parlor room, trying to avoid those peasants who don’t work—the ones who huddle in corners with dark looks. They unsettle her. Hunger seems to have hardened in them like tree sap; she can almost see a bitterness crystalizing in the whites of their eyes, the way frost solidifies over a leaf in winter. She has the sense that if she stares too long, she too will succumb, and freeze.

She clenches her stomach and forges past them.

The must and mildew of the back halls fill her lungs as she makes her way toward the forbidden wing. Finally, after several twists and turns, she reaches the locked door at the end of the long and narrow north hall.

Aurora balls up her fists and bangs on the door.

She bangs and bangs, but nothing happens. The harder she pounds on the echoing wood, the more her frustration mounts. How dare Heath accuse her of being sheltered and spoiled, when she’s done nothing but try to help?

If she’s honest with herself, the insult has wounded her for a deeper reason. She is not only an outsider to him, but someone with qualities he doesn’t admire: wealth, privilege, innocence. Qualities she’d thought made her special. He believes that her father and mother were self-serving, cynical, greedy. That they allowed her to be deprived of touch and voice for their own benefit instead of for hers.

But that’s not true. It can’t be. Can it? Even as she wonders about these things, her past begins to unfold before her in a new light, and it makes her feel sick. Maybe Heath is right. She thinks of the way her mother treated Isbe, as though she was not a family member at all.

Maybe her parents were cruel.

She sinks to the floor beside the locked door and pulls out the necklace she’s been carrying around—the one she found in the hearth on her first night. A bead is missing.

Why is the bead missing, and why does this detail bother her so?

She has the sudden, desperate conviction that if she can fix this necklace, she can still save some final piece of her childhood.

But it’s all so disgustingly obvious, isn’t it? Aurora has been a pawn. She has been used. She has meant nothing to anyone, except as a figurehead.