Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(72)

Isbe grimaces. “What else do you see?” she asks, grateful that he’s at least speaking to her again. After a few icy hours, his edges seem to have melted a little.

William breathes slowly beside her. “Vines,” he says. “Giant flowers—purple, lush, like big yawning mouths. Collars of thorns all around them. Vines on the castle walls. Vines on the trees and road. An overturned carriage almost entirely covered in them.”

Vines. Of course they’d heard about them before . . . but she’s reminded of something now. “William,” she says, touching his elbow. “Almandine spoke of vines, when she was talking about Queen Malfleur. She said . . . she said something about the queen’s jealousy of Belcoeur. Because Belcoeur could tame the vines. Pestilent vines, she said. Belcoeur could turn them into beautiful flowers.”

“Belcoeur was killed long ago.”

“That’s another thing. Almandine said Belcoeur was someplace called Sommeil. Something terrible happened between the two sisters, and now Belcoeur would never return. Maybe Malfleur didn’t slay her. What if the stories and lullabies are wrong?”

She remembers too the other version of the rose lullaby—the one she sometimes hears in her mother dreams. The one in which the twin faeries play together until nightfall, and no slaying is mentioned at all.

“What if they are?” William asks. “Does it change our mission at all?”

“I’m just thinking. What if Belcoeur is back, and these terrible, beautiful flowers are her doing?”

“Then we have an even greater foe than we thought,” William concedes. “But I still don’t see how this changes our plans for the alliance.” He says “alliance” like the word is made out of a cold, foreign metal.

“Maybe it doesn’t,” Isbe agrees. She scrunches her brow, thinking. “What was Belcoeur’s tithe? The nature of her magic?” She wishes Aurora were beside her. Her sister has all the faerie histories practically memorized.

“I don’t know much about the fae. There’s another one. . . .”

Moments later, Isbe hears yet another crow fall from the sky. She shudders. “What are you doing?” William has stopped walking, and it sounds like he is squatting down.

“There’s something in its mouth,” he says by way of explanation.

“Be careful. It carries the disease. It could spread . . .” The sickness has become all too real. She keeps thinking any moment she’ll feel a yawn coming on, and it’ll be the first sign of the end. Or worse, that William will drop to the ground beside her.

“There’s something in its beak,” William says, investigating. “Like blood, but it’s black. No, it’s . . . purple.”

“Do you think . . .”

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Let’s keep going.”

They don’t get much farther before she notices something cutting through the smell of death. Saffron. Cloves. Pepper.

“Spices,” Isbe says. “A merchant cart.” Like the one that drove her and Gilbert to the harbor. It’s both shocking and peculiarly comforting—the idea of people going about their trade even during such terrible times.

“I thought the road was cordoned off. We haven’t seen any other travelers for miles,” William points out.

“True. It’s strange. But there can be little other explanation for such a combination of scents.” It is troubling, though. Why would a spice merchant be traveling this way? And why can she not hear the clop of hooves or clatter of his wagon?

“Isabelle,” William says, grabbing her arm and causing her to halt in her tracks right as they are rounding a bend in the road.

“Is it . . . ,” she starts.

“You were right. A spice merchant. He’s . . .” William lets out a sickened moan, and Isbe has her answer—the merchant is dead. She shouldn’t be surprised—they’ve passed bodies frozen, and even carcasses ravaged by animals from the forest—but somehow this injury, among the list of distresses they’ve had, stings. Could this be the very man who Binks sent to help them, not so long ago? She recalls that Gil described the man’s face as hideously malformed, though he hid it behind some sort of mask worn to manage the overpowering scent of all the spices.

“William. Can you describe what he looks like?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I may have met him before.” She feels her voice breaking. She doesn’t even know the man’s name. It makes no sense, not when thousands are suffering and the one person who has ever loved her may be dying. When Gil is gone, possibly for good. And yet it pains her, this minor loss in the grand scheme of things.

She hears William suck in a disgusted breath and then hold it. A moment later, he returns to her side. “His wares are scattered in the road, a rainbow of colored dusts. The man is on his side, no beard, his face sort of . . . swollen. His jowls look like a few clumps of clay that have been mashed together.”

So it is him. It has to be. “Is he wearing a sort of mask?”

“Hmm. It looks like he was wearing one, but it is down around his neck like a fat noose.”

She tenses. There must have been a struggle, or he had trouble breathing—something to have caused the mask to be ripped off in a hurry.