Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(34)
“I was just—” Aurora turns around, but Belcoeur has vanished.
She blinks rapidly. Not only is the queen gone, but there is no other exit to the room. She looks around. Despite the dust hanging in the air and the dimness, diminished only a little by the lantern, Aurora sees that the walls are completely bare. All of the tapestries have disappeared. She swallows hard, her head swimming through the murk of the room and the conversation she just had. Could she have imagined it all?
No. No. Belcoeur was here.
“There you are. You shouldn’t be near the north turret; it’s not safe,” Wren says, taking Aurora by the elbow. “The queen’s enchantments are particularly strong here. Many have gone in search of her and never returned. I’ve told you already, the rooms become a maze with no end and no center.”
“I . . . I saw her. I saw the queen,” Aurora says. “A pearl rolled under the door and unlocked it somehow, and . . .” She trails off, no longer trusting her own impression of what happened.
Wren wrinkles her pretty brow as she leads her out of the empty hall. “Heath was so worried when you were missing at dinner, and we realized no one had seen you all day,” she says quietly as they wind their way back through the castle. Through the large windows in the east parlor, Aurora sees that night has fallen. But it felt like she’d been in the tapestry room for minutes, not hours.
“Heath said . . . he said you two had an argument earlier,” Wren goes on. “His moods can sometimes be stormy,” Wren says apologetically. “We’ve never had an outsider before. None of us knows quite what to believe. Many of the others fear—”
“What do they fear?”
“That you are not real. If not an Impression, then some other creation of the queen’s. A trick, an illusion, an enchantment.”
“That I’m not real,” Aurora marvels.
Wren squeezes Aurora’s hand. The quick pulse reminds Aurora of Isbe and sends a lump straight to her throat. “But don’t worry. Heath believes you, and I believe you too.”
She delivers Aurora to her room.
“Thank you, Wren,” Aurora says, still clutching her hand. But despite the young woman’s kindness, Aurora has never felt more alone.
16
Isabelle
“Far’s I can take ya, lad.” The stranger who saved Isbe from drowning now pats her shoulder with a rough hand as their boat bobs, quietly knocking against a pier.
She nods, her mouth dry from salt and vomit. “Honor be w’ you,” she says, trying to keep her voice masculine and devoid of the polish of nobility. It seems an inadequate phrase, but she’s at a loss for words. The man rescued her for no good reason. He asked for nothing in return, only stated with a half laugh, “A’ thought you’d were the ghost a the Balladeer hisself out there, I did,” as he pulled her aboard.
Isbe’s entire body now screams in stiffness and pain as she wobbles out of the small boat, pulling herself onto the abandoned pier. The immense cold had ceased to bother her for the last hour, but moving has reawakened the bone chill, and she shivers uncontrollably as she sits on the dock listening to the man row away.
She inhales, taking a moment to consider this new depth of aloneness, cool and echoey as a wine cave. She has never been this alone—never without Gilbert’s or Aurora’s hand to guide her through unknown territory. Or when they weren’t there, she always knew they’d be close by, looking for her. Now the world yawns open around her, a giant blank. A terrifying mystery full of mixed sounds and smells and unpredictable dangers.
The air here is fresh and bright, though. A marbled fog constantly stifles the Delucian palace—the maids always complained of the challenge of drying laundry, and Isbe grew accustomed to the smell of damp sheets and mildewed braies—but here she finds herself squinting in the sun. There must be a glare off the water. She listens to the wood licked by the gentle Aubinian waves: glog glog ricket-glog. Nothing like the ravenous kush-kash of the Delucian surf against the cliffs. Deluce is a peace-loving nation surrounded by violent breakers, while Aubin, it seems, is a militaristic state hugged by friendly seas.
But the friendliness ends at the shore. Isbe and her anonymous, gruff-voiced sailor savior had been turned away from three ports already, told that Aubin’s borders were closed off to prevent the spread of disease. The country has not only heard of the sleeping sickness but believes it to be the next in a rash of plagues that have decimated the population over the last few decades, and they aren’t taking any chances, especially not on bedraggled riffraff like them.
After the third refusal, the sailor decided it was wise to split up and find their own ways past the harbor guards. Isbe knows Gil would never even consider leaving her in such a situation. But he has left her, however unwillingly. They never found each other after getting separated during the hunt. She doesn’t know if he managed to scramble back aboard the merchant vessel or if he made it safely to Aubin in one of the smaller dinghies like she has, or . . .
She can’t bring herself to think of the third possibility. The screams of the many men who were dislodged from their positions—lost their footing and found their way into the sea—echo in her memory. And Gil was never a particularly good swimmer.
If he did make it back onto the larger vessel, they would likely have been turned away at the harbor too. Which means they probably would’ve returned to Deluce to recover. She can only hope that in another day’s time, Gilbert will have found his way back to Roul’s house. But knowing Gil, he’d make every effort to set out again to find her.