Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(44)
Aurora looks at the wolf’s eyes. And then she turns and runs.
Sprinting through the forest, she hears the wolf tracking her, gaining on her. Her pulse is nearly deafening; her breath burns in her chest. The forest is too dense—she can’t dodge the low-hanging branches quickly enough. She swears she can feel the heat of the animal’s breath at her heels now. It’s too late, she’ll never outrun—
She trips over a tree’s roots and flies forward onto her hands and knees, a startled sob of pain bursting from her throat. Quickly she rolls to her side, ready to greet death face-to-face, when a blur of brown dives across the corner of her vision.
A young male deer in its prime.
The hart bounds high through the trees—the most graceful thing she’s ever witnessed.
And then the wolf lunges—
And the deer is struck down.
Aurora scrambles up even as the wolf bends over its writhing prey, so close to her she could almost touch it, can even feel the steam leaking from the deer’s wound.
The beautiful hart struggles, whimpering, kicking its legs as the wolf leans in to the animal, tearing at its belly. There is blood streaking its body, covering the wolf’s mouth messily, reminding her of the vivid lip color the Night Faerie wore. Tears sting Aurora’s face. She runs.
She can’t be sure how long she has been running when, out of nowhere, she reaches the cottage. She bursts inside, panting, then slams the door and falls to the floor to catch her breath.
She made it. She lost the necklace, has no idea how to get back to Blackthorn, and is still deeply shaken from watching the wolf attack the deer, moments before it would have attacked her. But somehow she made it here, to the place where Belcoeur left out tea in anticipation of someone coming—though Aurora, apparently, was not the person the queen had been expecting.
She pushes herself back to her feet again, and finds the room with the table set for tea. She touches the fluffy-looking sugar; an insect scuttles out of the bowl. She shudders and pulls away, knocking over the teacup. Scalding water flies at her, and she sucks in a breath, stumbling backward. She understands now why the palace cooks at home always forbade her from coming near their boiling pots.
Aurora’s also certain, now, that Belcoeur’s tapestries somehow depict—or even control—Sommeil. The way the image of the steam over the teacup had seemed to waver . . . it must have been the queen’s way of making sure the actual tea would remain hot.
But still, who was the tea left for—and why?
Aurora continues to wander through the cottage. Though much seems to change—the location of doors and windows—the little chair she’d noticed the first time is still in the parlor room, facing the wall as it had before. It looks like a spot someone would send a child in trouble to sit for hours as punishment, she realizes.
Curious, she approaches the chair, noticing grooves in the wall just above it. She bends down to look closer. Someone has etched words into the wood. Much of it is barely legible, caked in dust. A scattering of initials, perhaps, and code words. One entire phrase she’s able to piece together, a limerick. The secret boy—we almost kissed—he won my jewel—in a game of whist!
The words seem to ooze in and out of the wood, sometimes more prominent, then fading again. It gives Aurora a horrible feeling of uncertainty.
The secret boy? This was a childhood crush.
Her mind reels with the simplicity of it. Could the queen have been waiting all these years for a lover to come rescue her?
And the reference to the jewel: this reminds her of the necklace, and the pearl that somehow unlocked one of the enchantments on the forbidden wing at Blackthorn. Why would a piece of jewelry have been so important to the queen that it would, effectively, cut through her magic? If Belcoeur had created this whole world and everything in it, why would she have created a necklace that could do such a thing?
But Belcoeur didn’t create everything. She didn’t create Heath, or Wren, or any of the other living peasants. They were all descended from the original servants who worked for the queen. They are just as real as Aurora.
Something tingles in her chest. It’s the feeling of discovery, of things slotting together like the strands of warp and weft on a loom. Her heart races. The tingling sparks into flame. Maybe the necklace came from the real world. Maybe in that sense, the object itself is immune to the power of the queen’s dreams. The rose lullaby too comes from her world. And when she sang its lyrics, the wall opened for her.
She’s not sure what it means, but she has become certain of one thing: the key to getting out of Sommeil is not going to lie in any pattern, or any place you could mark on a map. It is going to lie in a story. A true story about Belcoeur and her secret love.
The one to whom she lost her jewel . . .
The missing bead on the necklace, Aurora guesses.
No one knows romances better than Aurora does.
Energized by this revelation, she moves back through the room toward the door with little difficulty . . . until she steps outside.
The forest is still, but Aurora has the oddest sensation that everything has rearranged itself. She thinks of her discovery: items from the real world can shatter the spell of Sommeil, can see their way through the illusions. Shouldn’t Aurora herself then be able to see clearly, to shake the cloudiness from her mind, to navigate the changing landscape? She tries to concentrate, but the velvety strangeness of the air itself continues to ebb and flow within her, infecting her thoughts. Of course it makes a peculiar sort of sense that objects might be impervious to illusions in a way that people are not. People are susceptible. She is susceptible.