Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(74)

Yes, he cares about her. There is no questioning it.

Suddenly she is very, very warm.

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” she says, trying to keep the smile off her face. For the first time since she heard Binks’s tale, she feels driven by something other than a wild, stubborn determination. She is startled to name that thing. Hope.

Not more than an hour later, Isbe steps cautiously into the suffocating quiet of the palace courtyard with William right beside her, thick swaths of brocaded fabric from his cloak tied in layers around their mouths and noses.

The formerly bustling courtyard is now as still and cold as a tomb. Without her sense of smell, Isbe is doubly alert to the stillness—a fuzzy silence like the pause between snores. Even though she can’t detect the signature briny odor of the strait, she can sense its proximity by the salty dampness on her skin.

And then, all at once, a powerful feeling of homecoming floods through her. She lets go of William’s arm and begins to run.

Isbe pushes her way through closed doors and down eerily abandoned corridors. She nearly tumbles over the bodies of courtiers, some sleeping and some, she fears, already dead. She can’t think about that just yet. She is home. She is home. She is home.

She bounds up the stairs, twenty to the landing and then four more, to the door of her sister’s bower. She hears William following a few paces behind.

And then she is inside Aurora’s room, and then, in an instant, beside her bed, feeling along the neatly made bedspread until she gasps, her hands coming upon her sister’s, which are cold. Too cold. She leans forward, her heart racing, and touches Aurora’s forehead. Her hair is strewn over the pillows. Someone must have carried her up here. She moves her hands to Aurora’s chest and can only make out the slightest rise and fall. She gasps hard in relief, nearly choking on the heavy fabric around her face. It seems as though the sleeping sickness has somehow preserved Aurora in this state. She’s alive, though deathly thin. She’s alive and—

“We’ve made it!” she bursts out. “William? William, come here. This is her. This is her. Aurora.” Tears sting her eyes. She finds she is shaking, torn between breaking into hysterical laughter and falling to the floor exhausted. It is hard to breathe. Hard to think. She’s back. And Aurora is alive. Everything is going to be all right. They’re together again.

William comes over to her, kneeling down by the bed and wrapping one arm around Isbe. Without thinking, she gives in to his slight pull, leaning against his side, trying to slow her breath, wishing she could rip off her mask and laugh, shout, kiss him.

No.

Quickly she banishes the last idea from her mind.

For several moments, both of them just sit there like that, facing Aurora’s sleeping form, saying nothing.

And then she feels him take a deep breath, and when he lets it out, he says, “My future wife.”

The words echo through the room like marbles scattered from a jar.

Isbe says nothing. She says nothing, and says nothing, and then says more nothing. Minutes tick by until she’s convinced that they too have caught the sickness and that it is gradually numbing their throats and minds.

Finally she steels herself, stepping back into the role she has always played, the invisible armor she has had to wear every day of her life, just before entering the dining hall to meet the critical gaze of her stepmother, or undergoing another lecture by the council, or hunching beneath the blow of an angry kitchen wench’s metal pot. And then, invisible armor in place, she takes that cumbersome, weighty, ever-expanding nothing and turns it into something.

“Kiss her,” she commands, her chest made of iron. “It’s time.”

William doesn’t respond. He doesn’t, to her relief—or dismay, or incomprehensible regret—resist.

She holds her breath. She holds everything back, every single feeling and thought shoved into a dark cove at the very heart of her—other than one: wake up.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

William leans over the bed. He lifts his mask almost silently. He hesitates one more moment and then—

“Isabelle,” he whispers. She realizes she’s been frozen—she’s not sure for how long.

“Yes?” she whispers back.

“It’s not working.”

“What do you mean it’s not working?”

“I kissed her. She hasn’t stirred. Did you . . . did you really think she would?”

Fury flies up Isbe’s spine. “You aren’t doing it right. You must love her. It’s the kiss of true love. It’s . . . she believed in it. It’s—it can’t be any other way.” Her throat burns. Her lungs are on fire. She is going to be sick. “You are her destined husband,” Isbe insists desperately. “And it’s Aurora. She’s so beautiful. She’s so perfect!” Isbe shudders, her voice breaking like shattered glass.

Anger sparks and then gutters into shame, dismay, confusion. How can it not work? It has to work. Not for any logical reason, but by sheer dint of her needing it to. Of wishing it so.

But wishing never got anyone anywhere.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and his now-familiar, rustling-leaves voice blows through her with chilly certainty.

It didn’t work.

Aurora is still asleep.





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