Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(50)
“Well, I look forward to seeing her, then.”
“Aurora is more than just sweetness of face and temperament,” Isbe says, growing frustrated with the way William’s remarks seem removed, formal, as though they’re discussing a prize horse to be traded. “You don’t know her like I do, but one day you will. She sees into the heart of things. She always knew what I needed, even before I did.”
“And what is it you need?” he asks, his voice again reminding her of a tree in wind, shaking leaves loose inside her.
His question feels somehow too personal. “What I need is to save my sister.”
“So you’ve said.”
So they are understood. Good.
Silence comes again, but this time it’s a little less awkward, and she begins to relax into the jostling ride, the scent of velvet and wood and lime soap that wraps around them, the faint thud of the prince’s heart in her ears. . . .
Isbe always liked the erratic rhythm of Freckles’s hooves, and now their sound fills her mind, bringing her back to the summer day three years ago when she snuck out on the unruly mare, only to get thrown in the mud. She remembers rinsing herself off in the little country stream, and once again, the memory washes over her: Gilbert teasing her, the two of them pushing each other playfully. Falling on top of him. His hand in her hair. His lips finding hers. Tingles running through her body, the water rushing all around them, crisp and cold, as they kissed and kissed and—
“That,” she hears William say, pulling Isbe back into the present, “is the sound of the river.”
A warm blush spreads through her neck and face, and she’s overcome with the humiliation of having relived those intimate memories in such close quarters with someone else. What if William can somehow sense the nature of her thoughts?
But just as quickly, her embarrassment falls away, replaced by a tension in her chest. Gil. She doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know if he’s even alive. She’s supposed to be saving the person closest to her—her sister—and yet she’s lost the only other person she has ever loved.
Loved.
She did love him. Does love him. It’s a love that’s both romantic and familial at the same time, friendship mixed with trust mixed with knowing. All that, and the desire to feel his hard, calloused hands on her skin again—or even just to have him near, his soft scent of horses and hay, his calmness. That worn-river-stone smoothness of familiarity . . .
Is this what it feels like for a heart to break? She’s not sure. She doesn’t feel broken, only heavy—aching and sad and a little bit sick. He might be dead.
He might have died without knowing that this was how she felt.
“Isabelle?” William’s voice is a rough whisper.
She nods against his chest. “Yes,” she whispers back. “We’ve reached the river.”
23
Violette,
a Faerie Duchess of Remarkable Bearing
According to Her Selves
One is never really alone with a mirror. Add a second mirror facing the first, and one’s company multiplies infinitely. So many versions of oneself, seen from so many angles. This is truth. This is happiness. Violette pities anyone with fewer than forty-two mirrors in her bedroom, two hundred and forty-seven in her grand hall, and sixty-three in her water closet. She even has five of them on her ceiling over the bed so that when she wakes in the night with the candles still burning, as she has done just now, the million and one insects of loneliness lurking in the shadows can’t touch her.
Violette has memorized every inch of herself, from the wavy hair as glossy as a ruby in sunlight, to the eyelashes as long and elegant as spiders’ legs, to the lips as perfectly pursed as a taut bow just before the kill. And yet . . .
Violette marvels at the new and wonderful things she is still learning about herself, qualities she never knew were there, never even thought possible. Like the curse or, rather, its amendment. Proof that her power is indeed enough to counter Malfleur’s. The spindle. The girl’s birthday. A princess asleep. It has all occurred as it was outlined sixteen years ago.
The only catch is the sleeping sickness. It was never meant to infect others.
For a fleeting moment, Violette fears she has done something wrong. Hadn’t Belcoeur, before she vanished, brought the golden spinning wheel to Violette and asked that she keep it safe? She should never have agreed in the first place. It had given her a bad feeling all along, even before the princess was born. It had been important to Belcoeur, obviously, or she wouldn’t have asked, and Violette had felt the burden and the sadness of its presence. It had become a symbol of loss.
Decades later, after the child’s christening, she didn’t like the object of a curse being so close to her all the time, staring at her like a big dumb animal, majestic and silent and hungry. She resented being asked to keep so many secrets for others, when she had so many of her own to tend to. That was why she’d finally decided to get rid of it. But it couldn’t be burned or melted or destroyed. So eventually she’d simply stowed the cumbersome thing away in one of those abandoned cottages in the royal forest. At the time, it hadn’t seemed particularly foolish; what had seemed foolish would have been to believe that a faerie curse could still come true. Everyone knew how far the fae had fallen, even then.
Or maybe they hadn’t. And maybe Violette hadn’t—hasn’t—either.