Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(45)
She takes a deep breath, and begins singing the rose lullaby again. It seems to help. The trees don’t move. No wolves appear. She steps into the woods as confidently as she can.
After only a few repetitions, she sees a parting of the trees, and between them, a steep riverbed. A harsh, rocky cliff juts out, dropping down about thirty or forty feet into a dried-up ravine. Perhaps she can climb to the top for a better vantage point.
As she hurries toward it, she can almost hear the former waterfall in its heavy silence, a dull and constant roar. Sickly moss still clings to some of the stones, indicating the stream that once flowed freely here. Aurora can picture what it must have looked like, water tumbling over the ledge and sparkling in the sun. One of the boulders looks distinctly like a man’s face. Her heart leaps. It looks just like the one she and Isbe named for its odd shape years and years ago, in the stream that runs just past the cattle pastures beyond the palace of Deluce. Nose Rock!
She runs toward the riverbed.
This is no different from climbing the palace towers with Isbe, she tells herself as she reaches the rocks and looks for a foothold. For a moment, she could swear she hears Isbe’s voice calling out to her from far away. Hurry, Aurora! she’s saying. Before they find us! In her memory, she and Isbe are on the roof, searching for a spot to hide from angry council members. Aurora is both nervous about getting in trouble and filled with Isbe’s contagious joy.
But this isn’t a game.
Her heart beats hard in her ribs as she reaches hand over hand, beginning to climb.
20
Belcoeur,
the Night Faerie
“Someone’s coming, Sweet Pea!” The queen bursts into the throne room, her heart full of crows’ wings beating, beating. “Sweet Pea?” Belcoeur nearly trips over the lace of her floor-length gown as she turns a full circle. Her crown weighs heavy on her head. Has her Sweet Pea gone off? Another one vanished? She drops to her knees, searching. She would pray, but the fae don’t believe in such things.
There you are. Relief is a burst of sunshine in her chest. She can breathe again as she retrieves Sweet Pea from beneath the throne, running her fingers along its hand-carved name. The hairbrush—her favorite, for its silver filigree and gentle teeth—must have fallen. But what is this, caught in its furry mouth? The queen extracts a large clump of thin white strands, like frayed threads, or giant cobwebs.
“Sweet Pea,” she whispers, horrified. “What have you eaten?”
She’ll have to have everything cleaned. The castle must be spotless.
“We must be ready. Someone is coming, haven’t I told you?” She calls for the courier, who scurries in. “Have there been no deliveries?” she demands.
“Your Majesty, no . . . ,” he replies helplessly.
She stares at him hard, watching his hairy ears twitch and his tiny hands tremble. Then he tucks his head and scampers away. Belcoeur is certain she sees the tail of a mouse darting through the doorway behind him. She shudders. Things are slipping, slipping between the cracks, like a stream eddying helplessly through moss-damp rocks. She can’t help but fear she has forgotten some important detail.
She hastens to her hall of tapestries and walks up and down its length, studying her creations, looking for an answer. She pauses next to an image of a little riverbed bent over a ledge, where a rock juts out, noselike, over the rest. Why has the river gone dry? That’s not how it should be. That’s not, she’s certain, what her visitor would want. All of her dreams . . . ready to be dashed in an instant if things don’t go precisely as planned.
Her pulse stutters: a broken metronome. It’s wrong. All wrong. She has made some vital mistake! Desperately, she reaches out and claws at the tapestry. Her nails snag.
The ravine becomes an angry gash, revealing a wide flow of loose, unwoven blues and grays.
The miniature silk river pours forth.
It floods.
21
Aurora
One minute she was clambering across the parched ravine. Then all at once the stream came alive, spurting over the ledge above, forming a real waterfall, its current so strong it swept Aurora instantly off her feet and sent her swirling into an ever-deepening, ever-quickening whirlpool, swishing downriver, faster, faster.
She kicks her legs and flaps her arms, trying to keep her head above water, thinking of fair Alcyone, who fell in love with the morning star—and in her grief, drowned. Aurora had adored that story, back when it had only been one of many myths to read and savor. Before she understood what it might really feel like to lose someone.
The river engulfs her; she feels its longing, its loss . . . and the truth about Sommeil flows through her, clear and crisp as the river. Even as Aurora moves with the current, she is buoyed by this new certainty: Belcoeur isn’t trapped here at all, but she retreated to this place, both of solace and loneliness, not unlike Aurora’s own tower room back in Deluce. Aurora remembers the starling, the one that possessed dark faerie magic and could speak . . . the one that taunted her for being a caged bird.
She’s been so blind. To think she was a prisoner of circumstances, that it was her lack of voice, a jealous faerie bargain, that held her back all these years. Really, it has always been her own obedience—her desire to please, to do everything right, to follow instead of lead—that has stopped her from truly living.