Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(42)
This bath is going to make her smell like William.
She clutches her wounded palm and thinks of the prince’s premonition about Malfleur. Thinks of how readily he said it: war.
The word moves through Isbe with a tremor. She spent much of her youth spying on military drills and has always fantasized about fighting for a cause.
Maybe even dying for one.
Gilbert always said she was crazy to want that.
The heat seeps into her, thawing and unlocking feelings she doesn’t want unlocked. She can’t think about Gil. Not now.
She holds her breath and goes under. Beneath the surface, her ears ring, and she is back on the ship, crossing the sea, listening to the high whine of the harpoon’s taut rope just before it snapped, remembering the hope that flew into her even as she was tossed into the frothing waves. She thinks of the clamor of the men as they grabbed for spears, as they flung their weapons wildly at the majestic, crying beast, wanting the giant body for its blubbery, pungent oil and the high value they could charge for its tusk. It pierces her chest, sharp as the tusk itself: the unfairness that one life must sometimes be sacrificed to save another.
She comes up gasping, her hair dripping warm, soapy water down her shoulders.
If this is what it means to be a true princess—making difficult decisions that could risk uncountable lives—she’s gladder than ever that she isn’t one.
19
Aurora
I don’t remember, Queen Belcoeur had said in a whisper that wormed into Aurora’s chest and made it ache with cold. It was real. It had to have been. It means something, she’s sure.
Aurora slips out the Blackthorn gate, closing it with a quiet creak behind her. She doesn’t want to wake anyone. But especially not Heath. He looked so young when she’d stared down at his sleeping form a few minutes ago, lying on the rug beside the smoking orange embers that had been the small fire in his study. And faraway too, like she was looking not at him, but at a reflection of him in a body of water—wavering, rippling. She didn’t want to lie to him. Somehow this—taking his maps and notes and sneaking out while he sleeps—seemed better.
So, she thinks as she makes her way across the dewy fields, the queen is too mad to have any answers. Madness is not uncommon among the fae. Two hundred years ago, the North Faerie had been an expert chess player and a brilliant scholar of astronomy and philosophy, before her mind began to play chess with itself and left her frail, blithering, and wild-eyed. A great tragedy, considering her tithe had been logic. By the time she was murdered, she had long since lost her powers and her ability to rule, except in name.
But maybe Aurora can help Belcoeur remember why she made this place, and for whom she has been waiting all these years. For someone to free her?
Aurora has laid awake night after night thinking about the profound sadness—even fear—she heard in the queen’s voice. The way out of here is not, she senses, a logical one at all, but an emotional one.
The clue she keeps clinging to is the image of the hand-woven cottage, with the steaming teacup in the window—that, and the distinct sense Aurora had when viewing the tapestries that every scene was in some way a representation of a piece of the real world. There must be some reason behind Belcoeur’s choices. If Sommeil is a warped version of her world, then perhaps, Aurora thinks, the answer to how to get out lies in understanding the differences between the two.
For the first time, Aurora realizes that being an outsider could mean she, unlike the others here, can unravel this mystery. And besides, she knows she won’t be able to look Heath in the eyes again until she has proven herself to him.
Though the night fell rapidly, dawn now approaches with an agonizing slowness, the white lip of the horizon quivering. Aurora focuses on that pale line in the distance. Even though it’s risky, even though it means heading back alone into the Borderlands, she has decided to look for the cottage again. If Belcoeur was expecting someone to arrive there, it must be important.
If she were home, she knows, Isbe would scold her for going so far without her.
She misses arguing with Isbe.
She misses everything about Isbe.
She can hardly think, she misses her so much.
The land is barren, everything parched, trees reaching naked branches up into the sky, where one by one the stars sacrifice themselves to the coming day. Abandoned farmhouses dot her peripheral vision, rotten wood silvered in the faint glow of dawn. Aurora can’t shake the feeling that everything here shifts or blinks or wanes, just slightly, when she’s not looking directly at it.
And then she’s entering the forest, which still contains the last sigh of night, musky and chill. Aurora pulls her hood back over her head. She does not like nighttime in Sommeil. It reminds her too much of childhood, when darkness meant the end of playtime and the beginning of dreams—haunting, changeable. When she’d sometimes hear the coughing of plague victims even from her high tower room, and wake the next morning to find more of the palace staff had been carted off with the dawn. The night here is thick as a wool cloak that once belonged to her mother—it almost smells like the cloak too, and the floral perfume the queen loved to wear. It is the smell of sadness and smallness and fear.
She finds the wall—or rather, it finds her. One moment mist seems to knit the trees together; then it’s as if the fog has solidified to stone in all directions. She takes a deep breath and begins to move along the wall, wondering how she’ll find the rift, especially if the rift is always in a different place. The challenge seems nearly impossible.