Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(38)

The door swings open, and she falls forward into the smoke and heat.

“’Ee’s not dead!” a young boy exclaims sometime later. For a moment, Isbe is sure it’s Piers, Gil’s nephew. But as she comes to, she realizes the voice bears a distinctly Aubinian accent. That’s right. She found the blacksmith’s hut. This must be the smith’s son. “But ’ee canna see me!” the boy adds.

Another boy comes over. “’Ee’s got a demon a’ some kine. Let’s get Da.”

“Wait, no,” Isbe says, sitting up dizzily on the dirt floor. It’s not the first time someone has seen the way her eyes wander, sightless, and believed her to be possessed by an evil spirit. “Don’t go to your father. I’m . . . I . . .” Think, Isbe. She recalls the stories Gil and Roul used to love to scare her with when they were kids. “I’m a messenger from across the sea. I have news of . . .” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “The murder of the princes. I have . . . I got business with the palace. But a, er, a pirate, ’ee took my ship. Now I need you boys’ help.”

“You seen pirates!” one of them hollers.

“How ca’ we help?” asks the other.

“Was dem princes killed by the pirates too?” asks the first.

“Shhh,” Isbe says, doing her best to seem conspiratorial. “The . . . dem pirates could come back for us.”

“For us?” One of the boys—he can hardly be older than five or six—begins to whimper.

She turns to face the older-sounding one. “I jus’ need two things. First is a cloak. ’Ave you got a clean cloak for me?”

He darts away and returns, placing a heavy woolen blanket into her palms.

“This will do,” Isbe says, wrapping it around her shoulders.

“What’s t’ other thing?” the younger boy asks.

“Hand me a stick or a fork—anything like that—and I’ll show you,” Isbe says.

One of the boys places a rustic tool into her hands. She’s not sure what it is. She bends over and tries to draw in the hard dirt of the floor, carving the image from memory. The castle’s main gates are at the eastern wall. The tallest tower is the northeast one, which overlooks the sea in the distance. And the servants’ quarters are clustered along the northernmost wing, which gets the harshest winds and is thus less coveted by the royal family and its guests.

She points to a notch she has just drawn in that wall. “I need you to take me here. In secret.”

She lets the boys study the messy drawing in the dirt for a full minute or two before rubbing it away with her sleeve.

“Will you tell us more about da pirate?”

“Yessir,” Isbe promises. “I’ll tell ya all about ’im . . . on the way.”

Shimmying through the peasants’ pantry window is not the hard part. Though the main gates to the palace are well protected, the peasants’ pantry is easily accessible from the outside. It would not be fitting for farmers to have to deliver grain from the granary to the kitchens via the front entrance, which is reserved for militia, merchants, and visiting nobility.

And of course, there’s no way she’d pass for any of the above. She has to hide behind a sack of wheat for the better part of the day, knowing the palace is heavily guarded and that sneaking about in full light is a bad idea. She remains curled in the blacksmith’s wool blanket, trying to warm up. Weary as her body feels, she’s far too nervous to sleep.

But navigating the northern wing and finding passage to the palace wall walks along the roof that evening is not the hard part either. By testing, listening, and pausing, she is able to make her way to the turret she recalls from her snow-sculpting sessions with her sister. This is far safer than wandering the halls themselves, where she’s bound to knock over something fragile, creating a distraction, or walk straight into a servant who might report her to the guards.

No, the hard part is guessing which of the chambers belongs to the youngest prince. At the news of his elder two brothers’ deaths, would William have moved up into their likely more plush and comfortable rooms, or remained in his own? She knows that royals are always considering such advantages and what they signify. Then again, Aubin is not as enamored of luxuries as Deluce is. The Aubinians are known for being a more austere people.

How she wishes she were with Gil, and that they were entering the castle the way they’d initially planned—as merchants offering goods to the master of trade.

How she wishes, for that matter, that Aurora had never fallen sick with sleep.

How she wishes, above all, that the faeries were not such a vengeful and self-serving breed, because it is Binks’s fault that Gil and Isbe have been separated, she’s certain. It’s Violette’s fault she lost her sight at the age of two. And it’s Malfleur’s fault that a curse was put on Aurora in the first place.

But wishing, she reminds herself, does not produce results.

Her arms shaking from exhaustion, she scampers down over the edge of the parapet and finds footing. Quickly, before she can think how foolishly dangerous this is, she inches along the wall until her foot hits an oriel. The window doesn’t open easily. It takes several kicks before she is able to enter with a loud, shattering crack. She almost loses her grip, and gasps. The wool blanket falls from her shoulders, into the open wind. Then she swings herself the rest of the way through the broken glass and into the room.