Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(35)
And then she remembers something else: Gilbert gambled his luck away to Binks. The thought falls inside her, heavy as a rock. But surely, surely she would know somehow—she would feel it—if Gil had died. Wouldn’t she?
Her jaw clamps hard, and she runs her hands through her shorn hair, trying to think . . . or to stop thinking. Stop remembering their fierce, fleeting kiss before he vanished. Stop desperately wondering what it meant. She touches her face, feels the harsh but familiar angles of her cheeks and nose. Feels the wetness coming from her eyes. Wipes it away.
She sucks in a shaky breath. She may never know if Gil is alive or dead—just like the injured narwhal, he has entered an unknowable darkness. However, she reminds herself that if Gil is alive, she can do nothing for him right now but wish and hope. And wishing and hoping don’t get results. Action does. She left on a mission, and she’s still far from accomplishing it.
She pushes herself to standing, feeling her way carefully along the rickety pier with one foot in front of the other. She needs to get to the prince.
The stench hits her before she stumbles onto dry land, and it immediately becomes clear why this point of entrance has been left unguarded: sewage. Isbe gags, then tears off part of her sleeve and ties it around her mouth and nose. This must be the narrow waterway that lets Aubin’s royal sewage out to sea. No wonder no ships dock here. She walks a little bit taller. The discovery is disgusting, yet convenient. It means she can follow the little inlet straight into the heart of the castle village.
There have been many times during Isbe’s childhood when she questioned her rightful place at the palace—her rightful place anywhere. But Gil often assured her that these distinctions of class are less important than we’d like to believe. “Rich or poor, noble or peasant, everybody shits,” he’d say with a laugh.
And so, as the day blooms above—doing little to melt the glacier within her—Isbe labors along the muddy, rancid shore toward the Aubinian palace and the unknowing prince within it, covering her mouth and clinging to the memory of Gil’s laughter like the edges of a warm cloak.
Isbe has always enjoyed making her sister laugh. Just days before the report of the princes’ murder, she and Aurora were making snow statues in the palace gardens. The air tasted like watered honey, a sure sign that more snow would come. Isbe was just putting the finishing touches on a sculpture of Pig, a mutt that had become a favorite of the palace guards.
You’re missing something, Aurora tapped, bending down and quickly patting together a mushy lump of snow, which she placed at Snow Pig’s feet.
“What is it?” Isbe asked.
A pastry he stole from the kitchens, of course.
“Let me see yours,” Isbe demanded.
Aurora guided her over to the sculpture she’d been working on all morning and set Isbe’s hand on its shoulder. Isbe gently felt for the chin and face before running her fingers over the rest of him, taking in the details Aurora had added. It was Prince Philip, again. Of course.
“Yours is missing something too,” Isbe announced, grabbing a handful of snow off a nearby hedge and patting it into a flat circle like a medallion. She used her fingernail to carve the Aubinian insignia on it: a hawk perched on a sword.
Showoff, her sister replied.
Aurora had read everything there was to know about the Aubin court, from their favored fashions to their dining customs to the castle layout itself. She’d tapped all of this information to Isbe, sometimes struggling when the details were too complex for their secret language. The spires on the towers of Aubin’s palace, for example, became roof spears.
Now Isbe reached up and, before Aurora could stop her, rearranged Prince Philip’s face so that his tongue was sticking out. Aurora laughed, and then, out of nowhere, pegged her with a snowball. And that spelled the end for Philip and Pig, as Isbe screamed and Aurora laughed and both got covered in snow until Councilman Maximilien spotted them from a window and ordered them inside.
Then, the cold air on her bare hands and cheeks had made Isbe feel alive and happy. Now, though, her legs tremble uncontrollably and she falls to the ground. Unable to shake the chill from her bones, or her mind, she gets onto her hands and knees in the icy mud and sewage, and crawls.
17
Malfleur,
the Last Remaining Faerie Queen
From above, the LaMorte Territories appear to be on fire. Thick smoke from the underground furnaces hovers over the valley villages, obscuring the bustle and toil of thoroughfares, the icily flowing mountain rivers, and the gnarled black trees common to the region, making it seem instead as though the mountain range, white capped and tapering into grays and purples like the belly of a dove, is magically rising out of dark clouds.
Malfleur pulls her lynx cloak tighter around her shoulders. The cold is harshest just before dawn. Ever after all these years, she still hasn’t gotten used to it.
She knows the rumors. That the LaMorte Territories are scattered and disorganized, a patchwork of contentious tribes loosely held together through shared customs—and shared fears. They say that the fiefdoms suffer under her iron-fisted rule, due in particular to a lack of young mothers, since so many girls of a certain age are forced to pay their tithe to the queen, after which their youth and beauty shrivel.
But from her perch atop the bastion tower of Blackthorn, at the very peak of Mount Briar, Malfleur sees a different picture, a fluid series of gasps and pangs: the coy shape-shifting of the clouds, white in the white sky. The suicidal streak of a falcon on the hunt—all silver and light—disappearing into the smoke as though plunging into a shadowed sea. And beneath it all, the hiss of the furnaces.